Over a long weekend in April 2009, Tate Modern hosted a series of events dedicated to expanded cinema. Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception featured a three-day conference with an international line-up of scholars and artists, rare live performances, screenings and installations. The event stemmed from a research project conducted by Duncan White and David Curtis at the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection at Central St Martins College of Art and Design. Set up by the late Jackie Hatfield with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project will deliver an extensive appraisal of the phenomenon of expanded cinema, including, for instance, an exploration of its relation to questions of ‘narrative’. Given the cinematic turn of contemporary art and, more generally and perhaps more crucially, the unprecedented spread of the moving image to a multiplicity of spaces, screens and devices in the wake of the ‘digital revolution’, such endeavour is important and timely. The project and the conference are part of a number of initiatives – notably the 2001 exhibition ‘Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-77’ at the Whitney Museum in New York, and LUX’s retrospective of British avant-garde film ‘Shoot Shoot Shoot ‘ presented at Tate Modern in 2002 – that have in recent times contributed to put expanded cinema back onto the critical landscape and in the public eye. The turnout for Expanded Cinema,which sold out weeks in advance, demonstrates that the times are certainly ripe for an in-depth re-evaluation. Something about ‘expanded cinema’ resonates with our present…
But…what is ‘expanded cinema’? The heterogeneity – indeed, the expandability – of the term itself was one of the premises of the conference. Indeed, even in its narrower, historical definition as a category comprising a body of works roughly spanning from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, expanded cinema is already an ‘open’ term, meaning different things to different people. For Stan Vanderbeek, who coined the expression in 1965, and Gene Youngblood, who contributed to diffusing it with his seminal 1970 book Expanded Cinema, the expression had a utopian cultural valence, and envisaged an intermedial expansion of cinema into television, video, and the computer. On the other hand, for contemporaneous filmmakers on the other side of the Atlantic, such as Malcolm Le Grice, William Raban and Chris Welsby expanded cinema aimed to carry out a critique of the cinematic apparatus through medium-reflexivity. Such reflection onto the medium might often be pursued by transgressing the constraints of traditional projection, including elements of live performance that enfolded into one the usually separate moments of filmic production and reception.
The conference explored the heterogeneity of this more circumscribed understanding of expanded cinema as a historical category through a number of papers (Mark Bartlett’s on Stan Vanderbeek’s ‘4th Avant-Garde’, Lucy Reynolds on the use of shadow play in British expanded cinema, Liz Kotz on the dance and film work of Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, Anja Gossens on Experiments in Art and Technology’s projects, to name a few) as well as interventions by practitioners (such as, indeed, LeGrice, Raban, and Welsby). But the conference also extended its exploration to the past and the future of this narrower category, and beyond its more-often explored boundaries of the Anglophone world. Papers on László Moholy-Nagy’s projects to turn museum and gallery spaces into ‘cinema’ in the late 1920s (Noam Elcott); on the ‘visual music’ multi-projections of Oskar Fischinger in 1920s Germany and Jordan Belson in 1950s San Francisco (Cindy Keefer); on the manipulated projectors and concave screens of eccentric Spanish filmmaker José Val del Omar (Eugeni Bonet); on the multi-media installations of Paris-based duo Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki and of Polish ‘collective’ Kwiekulik from the 1970s onwards (Cecile Chich and Maxa Zoller respectively) contributed to map a temporally and spatially expanded genealogy of expanded cinema. This mapping was brought forward from the 1970s and into the present by a consideration of contemporary fascination with filmic cinema and its alleged obsolescence (Jonathan Walley), as well as with the possibilities of digital media for transforming cinema (Ji-Hoon Kim).
‘Expansion’ was certainly a recurrent trope of the conference. In fact, on occasions, this insistent pursuit of the expansion of ‘expanded cinema’ somewhat diluted the strength of the discussion. In the panel and open discussions in particular, it seemed that the category was being expanded so much as to lose critical usefulness: if anything can be expanded cinema, then the category itself is full and empty at the same time. The term, that is, does need to retain some form of specificity – be this medium or historical specificity – in order to be usable as a ‘tool’. In this context of ‘expansion’, then, it was interesting that a few papers dealt with an apparently contrary movement. Chrissie Iles suggested that cinema’s history is best understood as an alternation, and sometimes a superimposition, of moments of expansion and contraction. Indeed, Iles argued, a film such as Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965), presents a collapse of these two movements, a paradoxical point where cinema is expanded precisely through its contraction. On the one hand, the image-less reflexivity of The Flicker stands for a ‘contracted’, highly modernist cinema folded onto itself; on the other, Conrad’s work’s ‘expands’ beyond itself, as the projector’s pulsing light spills over onto the auditorium and the audience. This apparently contrary movement of contraction as a form of expanded cinema was also pursued by Liz Kotz, who noted that Yvonne Rainer went from working with film and other media to bringing mixed media back into film (as in her film The Lives of Performers [1972], which includes stills, writing, etc.). A different, yet related, juxtaposition of expansion and contraction was also broached by Yvonne Spielmann. In the work of artists such as Paul Sharits, according to Spielmann, cinema is expanded by being used to perform some of the properties of the electronic medium. Sharits, in other words, takes cinema beyond itself from within, by making it behave like a medium other than itself.
One of the strengths of the conference was its mix of scholarly presentations on expanded cinema and performances of expanded cinema itself in action. Indeed, the conference provided the precious opportunity of experiencing a number of rarely seen works. One such work is Steve Farrer’s The Machine (1978-88), a complex 360-degree camera-cum-projector that took Farrer several years to build. Installed in the dark and damp oil tanks (the industrial ‘catacombs’ of Tate Modern, soon to be refurbished as part of the gallery’s programme of expansion), the piece was magnificent. Imposing yet fragile, mechanical yet strangely ‘human’, The Machine – operated by Farrer himself – cranked up speed unsteadily, almost fatigued. It then started to spin at incredible pace, like a madly revolving beacon, throwing images onto the circular screen surrounding it, a modern idiosyncratic version of 19th-century panoramas. Also in the oil tanks were Tamara Krikorian’s video installation Time Revealing Truth (1982-83) and Lis Rhodes’s seminal two-screen projection Light Music (1975), its articulations of sound and light flooding the space with evanescent ‘sculptural’ structures that the audience at once contemplates and completes. In addition to these installations, the concluding afternoon of the conference was given over to screenings and performances in the auditorium, from Oskar Fischinger’s early experiments with colour and sound, such as Komposition in Blau (1935), to Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder’s Untitled (2008), via a number of gems from 1970s British expanded cinema by the likes of David Dye, Annabel Nicolson and Ron Haselden. One of the highlights here was Tony Hill’s Point Source (1973). Point Source is a shadow play that Hill performs by moving a small torch in and around a number of ordinary household items – a wicker basket, a tea strainer, etc. But their ordinariness turns into something else as their magnified, moving shadows are projected onto the walls and ceiling of the auditorium, filling it with a ‘nothing’ that looms large over the audience. Cinema, here, expands quite literally around a point, contracted back to what are its most essential elements – light and movement. Powerful in its simplicity, Point Source reminded us that sometimes less is more, and that even the most expensive state-of-the-art multi-media, multi-screen installations may fail as expanded cinema if they don’t also expand (in) the mind.
Matilde Nardelli is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College London, working on a project entitled: ‘Screens, Projections and Projectors: Cinema between Sculpture and Monumentality’.
Useful links
British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection: http://www.studycollection.org.uk/
Expanded Cinema Study Collection, Dortmund: http://www.hmkv.de
Expanded Cinema Study Collection, Stuttgart: http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de
