Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012

This article examines the place of experimental cinema within the contemporary museum in order to challenge the commonly held assumption that it is somehow opposed to, or at least outside, the art world. Despite possessing a degree of material truth, the perceived separation between experimental cinema and the art world has led to an unfortunate lack of interrogation into the alliances and antagonisms that exist between them, particularly as they have shifted over time. This article insists on the historicity of such relationships and traces how they have changed from the 1970s to a contemporary moment that sees experimental cinema in a closer relationship to the art world than ever before. The integration of experimental fi lm into the museum is a key feature of the preoccupation with all things cinematic that has marked the art of the past two decades, prompting new questions as to the place of experimental fi lm amongst the mediums of art practice. This article assesses not the distance so often thought to exist, but rather the proximity between experimental cinema and the art world in our moment.

Reflexive considerations on the historiography of artists' films can be usefully augmented by consideration of the nature of the institutions that organize and fund fi lm retrospectives and conferences. This essay considers two such events that took place in Los Angeles in fall 2010: 'Counter Culture/Counter Cinema', a celebration of the heritage of the New York Film-Makers' Cooperative, sponsored by the museum-real estate complex; and 'Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945–1980', Los Angeles's celebration of its own history, sponsored by the museum-academic complex.

Drawing on discussions at a symposium held in Melbourne in 2011, this article describes the reactions of artists, curators and software engineers to the varied transitions between analogue and digital media. The authors argue that both the 'post-medium condition' mooted by Krauss and the 'Death of Cinema' theses of film scholars like Rodowick and Mulvey miss critical issues in these transitions and over-emphasize others. We make the case that there are more continuities than often recognized between analogue and digital; that transitional forms like video have not been analysed sufficiently; that software studies needs to be backed up with hardware studies; and that there is a new role for mediumspecific criticism. We argue that, in the current state of digital resources for production, distribution and display, each work needs to be analysed in its specificity, rather than ascribing universal qualities to imaginary abstractions such as 'digital media'.