Page 72 - Studio International - November December 1975

producers of the image, camera projector and screen 'cinema' in as much as it demands the perception of the
themselves become the object of the image ....' 7 'movement' of light through extended duration.
On the most basic level, Tony Hill deals with the The paradox is only apparent, of course. Within the
creation of images by the projection of light on surface aesthetics of process it is perfectly logical. In describing
through the simple strategy of shadowplay. In his very the sculpture of Robert Morris, Annette Michelson
effective shadowplay Point Source (1973), Hill kneels in pointed out that 'sustaining a focus upon the
front of the screen (at a distance of two or three feet) and irreducibly concrete qualities of sensory experience
holds a single high-intensity light bulb between himself [renews] the terms in which we understand and reflect
and the screen and then places objects (such as a tea- upon the modalities of making and perceiving.' 9 And,
strainer, wicker basket, etc) over and around the light of course, the modality is ineluctable.
source, creating shadows on walls, floor, ceiling and
spectators, giving the audience a sense of inclusion and For the cinema, the ramifications of an aesthetics of
movement, literally implicating it in the illusion. (See process— the confrontation of modality as the result of a
p. 221). consistent interpolative effort—are indeed complex. By
One important strategy radically alters the spatial dwelling on the techniques of cinematic presentation to
discreteness of the audience vis-à-vis the screen and the an extent unparalleled in film history, expanded cinema
projector by manipulating the projection facilities in a has suggested a concomitant change in cinematic
manner which elevates their role to that of the perception. The crucial intervention is the opening up of
performance itself, subordinating or eliminating the role new areas of cinematic perception, of challenging the
of the artist as performer. The films of Anthony McCall are hegemony of the two-dimensional screen creating the
the best illustration of this tendency. In Line Describing a illusion of a three-dimensional space. Instead, the three
Cone (1973), the conventional primacy of the screen is literal dimensions of the occupied space are invoked. The
spectator becomes inscribed within the process thus
described, and the audience becomes engaged in
formulating the limits of cinematic perception.
Apperception becomes the only relevant perception.
In English expanded cinema, however, this insight is
complicated by another aesthetic thrust which subtends
all of the best recent avant-garde film-making here. It
dictates that the specific strategies chosen — elaboration
of the screen, of the theatre space, of the projection
equipment, etc — are not entirely subordinated to this
fundamental intervention (ie recruiting the spectator into
active participation in the aesthetic discourse), but
retain a certain inherent value of their own. For the
avant-garde here aspires to something of a 'pure' cinema —
that is, one which purifies the irrevocable linearity of the
material of film from the historical methods of organizing
that linearity through poetic (or 'vertical') and/or
narrative ('horizontal') construction. Literal duration
Anthony McCall Line Describing a Cone 1973 has become the direct manifestation of literal
linearity.'" Expanded cinema's contribution to that
completely abandoned in favour of the primacy of the project, then, is to insist on the interdependence of the
projection event. According to McCall, a screen is not experience of space and time in the cinema, and to
even mandatory. He succinctly describes the film : 'The literalize the space and process of presentation as a
viewer watches the film, by standing with his, or her, back necessary condition to literalizing duration.
towards what would normally be the screen, and looking The sympathy English film-makers have for expanded
along the beam towards the projector itself. The film cinema is therefore due to its emphasis on the
begins as a coherent line of light, like a laser beam, and physically and perceptually present elements of the
develops through the 30 minute durations, into a medium. It is, almost by nature, discursive rather than
complete, hollow cone of light.'8 terse ; by privileging these materials it extends the
The audience is expected to move up and down, in and material potential of the medium and resists the pull
out of the beam —this film cannot be fully experienced by toward conceptual reductivism. (And in its
a stationary spectator. This means that the film demands a discursiveness it has produced much unilluminating
multi-perspectival viewing situation, as opposed to the work). The triumph of expanded cinema is in conjoining
single image/single perspective format of conventional the modalities of making and perceiving in the interface
films or the multi-image/single perspective format of of material and image.
much expanded cinema. The shift of image as a function
of shift of perspective is the operative principle of the
film. External content is eliminated, and the entire film
consists of the controlled line of light emanating from the
projector; the act of appreciating the film — ie 'the
process of its realization' — is the content.
It had been devoutly wished, at this point, to have
arrived at the centre of the area of activity with which this
essay deals. But a paradox emerges, one which limits
the project to that of circumscription. For the apparent
* From 'Light', All the Collected Short Poems, 1956-64, London, 1967.
centre of activity becomes indistinguishable from what Nicolson, 'Artist as Filmmaker', Art and Artists, December 1972, p. 26.
had previously been described as the edge. The very 2 Jerome Burne, 'International Underground Film Festival', Friends,
emphasis on the material nature of the cinema and of no. 16, 16 October 1970.
3 Gordon Gow, 'The Keen Experience', Films and Filming, November
cinematic representation leads to immateriality. McCall's 1970, p. 76.
most recent piece, Long Film For Ambient Light, Curtis, Experimental Cinema, London, 1971, p. 149.
completely dispenses with cinematic apparatus, simply 5 Le Grice, notes to Castle I in the London Film-makers' Co-operative
utilizing natural light and one light bulb in a bare room Catalogue.
6 Haselden, notes to Railway Trolley, distributed at performance.
which had half of its windows masked in opaque black
'David Dye, as quoted in 'Artist as Filmmaker', op. cit.
and the others masked in translucent white. While it is not 8 Notes to Line Describing a Cone, in catalogue of EXPRMNTL 5 held in
specifically cinematic, and abandons the physicality of Knokke-Heist, December 1974, entry no. 46.
film and film-presenting equipment (a physicality 9 Michelson, Robert Morris—An Aesthetics of Transgression, catalogue
crucial to the main thrust of the other expanded cinema of show at Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C., 1969.
10 This complex argument is more thoroughly discussed in my article on
works already described), one suspects that McCall the new English cinema which appears in Afterimage, no. 6, Autumn
would assert that Long Film For Ambient Light is 1975.
224