Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 5, Issue 1-2, 2016

From the mid-1950s to the early-1970s, the several phases of the rock ‘n’ roll film differently negotiated the various kinds of delinquency attributed to the new music. At its inception, critics associated what was thought to be its musical delinquency with social delinquencies: working-class and African American’s insubordination, and sexual promiscuity. The 1950s’ jukebox musicals, the first rock ‘n’ roll film genre, disputed these associations and narrated the music as innocuous teenage entertainment, fully compatible with and assimilable to the culture industries. Documentary films about late-1960s’ ‘rock’, most notably Monterey Pop (D. A. Pennebaker, 1968) and Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970), transvalued the terms of the earlier critiques and celebrated their role in a biracial folk community based on peace and love. Films about the Rolling Stones, however, re-asserted the delinquencies, affirming instead the band’s associations with violence, misogyny and insurrection. The most crucial of them, Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, 1970), portrayed the collapse of the utopian countercultural community earlier films had proposed.

Non-fiction filming involving death and dying has taboo status in terms of what western society can and cannot sanction – the image of dying is not something we should see, or even want to see. As a consequence, there is very little film-making done with the consent and collaboration of the dying person and there are few moving images of natural or good deaths. The documentary film-makers and artists who have navigated this difficult ethical territory, engendering a space where dying and death can be given images, have done so by adopting a way of seeing, and being with, the terminally ill person that has some confederacy with the practices of the palliative care professional. Drawing upon the writing of Vivian Sobchack and Ernest Becker, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s theory of bare life, and particularly Emmanuel Levinas and his concept of alterity, the article concentrates on art and film that turns to face death and dying. Moving through narrative cinema, observational documentary and artists’ film, and examining specific film works by Stan Brakhage, Sophie Calle, Kirby Dick, Allan King and Bill Viola, among others, the complex area between ethics and aesthetics is explored, suggesting that in the context of film and death there can be an ethics of aesthetics.

Early American video history is often characterized as difficult and heterogeneous, and this is in part due to the conflicting theoretical approaches to the notion of ‘medium’. In early 1970s New York, there were two major strands of discourse on video: one saw and described video through a techno-utopian lens based on Marshall McLuhan’s media theories, and the other, still steeped in the legacies of Clement Greenberg, treated video as though it was a static, flat and plastic medium. Neither was able to adequately articulate video’s unique aesthetics, but they nonetheless dominated the American language of video during the early 1970s. These opposing views on video eventually came to a head in 1974 at the Open Circuits conference at the Museum of Modern Art, where practitioners of early video, such as Frank Gillette and Douglas Davis, faced hostility from other artists and critics such as John Baldessari and Robert Pincus-Witten. They clashed around the concept of ‘medium’, with each side accusing the other of being formalist, and these dialogues spill out onto various publications throughout the same year. The article will argue that this conflict lies at the root of American video art’s difficulty with articulating its own history.

This article examines the discursive and aesthetic functions of the abstract material artefacts that emerge from Ben Rivers’s hand processing of his 16mm films, focusing on the various ways these abstract forms interact with photographic images to produce a compound and plastic textuality. Drawing upon Jean-François Lyotard’s theorization of the figural, which seeks to explain the relationship between a text and its own material image, it examines the oscillation between two registers of filmic discourse in Two Years At Sea (2011) and its short predecessor, This Is My Land (2006). In these films, images of people and landscape merge with textures and shapes that arise from hand processing to create newly thickened worlds upon a chemical landscape.

This article on 1970s British experimental film-making challenges the problematic ‘return to image’ thesis evident in diverse historical accounts of the decade, arguing that image-rich, expressive, personal and representational films were in evidence throughout the decade and not just at its close. The article reviews examples of the ‘return to image’ thesis, demonstrating how it has perpetuated a flawed account of the decade. It also outlines some of the countercultural, psychoanalytic and mystical influences on film-making and discusses American critic P. Adams Sitney’s taxonomical distinctions – ‘psychodramatic trance’, ‘lyrical’, ‘mythopoeia’ and ‘diary’ – which provide illuminating characteristics useful for examining some of the personal, expressive forms of 1970s British film-making. It gives an understanding of how experimental film-making grew from a small handful of films and film-makers at the start of the 1970s to a veritable explosion of film-making by the end of the decade.

This article will suggest that the conceptual framework of expanded cinema in the mid-twentieth century, particularly the radical performances of the UK-based Filmaktion group, has parallels in the scientific formulations of the time. The argument will be made that the intellectual breadth of the movement extends beyond the limitations of the art world and that the work produced made an important contribution to the history of ideas and, as such, belongs to the larger body of twentieth-century thought. The era was marked by unprecedented technological change, from mechanical innovation when cinema was in its infancy, through the advent of electronic communication systems to the proliferation of accessible computer technology and the de-militarization of the Internet. In both the arts and sciences the changes that accompanied these developments can be characterized as a shift away from the static representations of nature during the nineteenth century towards a more dynamic, process-based description of the world made possible by the introduction of high-speed computer technology. Reference will be made to sociologist/philosopher of science Andrew Pickering’s observation of a transition in the sciences from the ‘representational’ models of the late nineteenth century to the ‘performative’ models of the present day, which will be shown to run parallel to a similar shift in twentieth century art practice. Drawing on Norbert Weiner’s theory of cybernetics, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, the ideas of Gregory Bateson and the ‘embodied’ sciences, which began to evolve at this time, the discussion will link these scientific developments to the expanded cinematic works of artists such as Annabel Nicolson, Malcolm le Grice, William Raban, Anthony McCall and Lis Rhodes, and to new media artists such as David Rokeby, Lise Autogena, Thomson & Craighead and Susan Collins. The article will seek to demonstrate that expanded cinema helped turn the moving image into a truly twentieth century art form, establishing a strong conceptual foundation for the process-based practices of the 1980s and 1990s and anticipating the embodied science and new media works of the contemporary period.

This article seeks to define a phenomenon in video installations that emerged during the 1990s. It is a type of audio-visual architecture that I call deictic transformer. Deictic transformers are not representations, they are events that trigger a specific type of effect, namely, a shift in time-consciousness, which is characterized as total engagement with the present moment in its impermanence, non-substantiality and self-differentiation. The article unfolds in the form of experiment. As a first step, phenomenological accounts of Christian icons are compared to phenomenological readings of Bill Viola’s ultra slow-motion video art installations. The reader is guided to experience how different media (religious paintings, video) generate different engagements with the present moment. The main subject of this article is ‘the now’. The article suggests that there are various ways of engaging with ‘the now’ and these ways trigger specific shifts in present-time consciousness. These shifts are closely related to the formation of subjectivity and thus demonstrate that temporality is not a given, but could be seen as a technology of the self. Christian icons are representative of a metaphysical approach to the present moment, predominant in the arts and philosophy of the western tradition before the twentieth century. Bill Viola’s video installations The Greeting (1995) and The Passions series (2000–2001) represent a new sensitivity towards time brought by electronic media. The dualist experience of time that is deeply embedded in the Christian tradition is recomposed via video and digital manipulation into a dynamically holistic temporality. The second step addresses other video-based examples of deictic transformers such as Gary Hill’s Viewer (1996) and David Claerbout’s Rocking Chair (2003). The third step examines the aesthetic strategies of these video installations and formulates a definition of their modus operandi. This article does not claim that deictic transformers represent the mainstream of video art installations. Deictic transformers, however, are seen as a growing tendency in new media art praxis that demands intensive engagement with the emerging dynamic of embodied presencing; a tendency that is relatively unprecedented in western culture, and that could be considered an (in)direct result of the technological capacities of video and digital media. In other words, the analyses of Viola, Hill, and Claerbout’s audiovisual experiments demonstrate that video and digital technologies of late twentieth century shift our perception of time from attempts to escape everyday impermanence and the search for permanent metaphysical presence towards an entanglement with the non-substantiality of presencing.

Michael Fried’s unexpected contribution to defining the ontological status of video art includes an intriguing claim that projective art is particularly suited to the ‘staging’ of empathic projection. Fried applies Stanley Cavell’s notion of empathic projection, developed in relation to skepticism of ‘other minds’, to moving image installations that not only exploit the beholder’s capacity for empathically projecting, but do so in such a way as to reveal the mechanism at play. In developing this claim, I compare Fried’s key example of Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (2003) with Bill Viola and Kira Perov’s Martyrs (2014), a work that likewise elicits an emotional response but without a compensatory (and hence critical) foregrounding of the underlying structuring mechanism. However, the comparison suggests that the staging of empathic projection should not be interpreted as an anti-theatrical strategy (as Fried contends), but rather as an exemplary manifestation of what I am calling the configurational encounter – a revealing of the artwork’s conditions of existence. I reference Paul Sharits’s Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976), an important (and unacknowledged) precursor to Gordon’s staging of empathic projection. Finally, I consider Chris Welsby’s landscape films in the light of the capacity of technology to reveal psychological mechanisms of projection, tracing such processes of projection to early childhood experiences of differentiating the human from the non-human.

This article reflects on the relationship between the dancer and the camera. It identifies a divide that commonly exists between the performing dancer and the camera operator/director in screendance-making and suggests that this divide is narrower in production works where links to the dance community exist on both sides of the lens and where production environments do not involve large teams behind the camera. This divide is examined in a historical context and changes in the dancer/camera relationship are charted with examples from the advent of film, such as Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio productions through the choreography of Busby Berkeley in the 1930s, Maya Deren’s screen dance experiments in the 1950s, Merce Cunningham in the 1970s and concluding in the present day with works by practitioners such as Katrina McPherson and Margaret Williams. Drawing on the testaments of historical observers, contemporary theorists and first-hand accounts by dancers such as Alice Barker, Gene Kelly and Cathy Nicoli, the research undertaken here suggests that the dancer/camera/director divide still persists, even in the more closely aligned groups working in smaller production environments today. However, the article identifies a number of film-makers who, with the advent of new technologies, have developed an alternative approach to filming dance that challenges those structural and hierarchical divisions.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 276 pp., ISBN: 9789089646767, p/bk, €39.95

Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 145 pp., ISBN: 978-1-925003-79-6, p/bk, A$49.95

New York and London: Wallflower Press and Columbia University Press, 304 pp., ISBN: 978 0 231 17451 0, p/bk, £19.00