A.L. REES has been a tireless advocate of artists’ film and video in the UK for the past forty years as an academic, writer and curator, and is currently Research Tutor in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art. We spoke with him on the eve of the release of a newly revised edition of his book A History of Experimental Film and Video which since its original publication in 1999 has become one of the most widely cited books for study of this area.
LUX: A quick question first about the title of the book, specifically the term ‘experimental film and video’. I am very conscious myself of slipping between different terms depending on the context I’m in from ‘avant-garde film’ to ‘video art’, all of which feel too historically specific to me. Inevitably I feel most comfortable with the rather neutral and bland term ‘artists’ moving image’ but I wondered what your thoughts are about this?
AR: Yes, all the terms are historically loaded. My book tries to put the different phrases in their changing contexts, more as names than as descriptions. However, even the most maligned terms can come back from the dead: I have seen ‘avant-garde’ and ‘video art’ in recent festival and journalistic writing. But actually I am glad I chose ‘experimental’, as it turns out. The category of ‘artists’ film’ has expanded massively in the last decade, far wider than the kinds of work I am really concerned with. Many films and video projections made by artists don’t come from or identify with the experimental tradition, whatever else they are doing. From my point of view, ‘experimental’ usefully narrows the field, so I don’t feel I have to deal with all the many varieties of screen and projection art on offer at the moment. More positively, it lets me include innovative film and digital work that isn’t classed as ‘art’ in the gallery or fine art sense; stings, ads, promos, music videos, title sequences. Historically, this is also where many experimentalists made their living, as some still do. I also don’t really go for ‘moving image’ either, while we are on the topic! Motion seems to me a secondary and/or illusionistic aspect of screen art, and not central to time based media (unlike duration, for instance). And ‘Moving Image’ is a step too close to ‘Motion Pictures’ for my taste.
LUX: I really have a sense that A History of Experimental Film has become one of the key texts for studying artists’ moving image in the past decade and wondered why you thought that was?
AR: I suppose there are so many courses now that refer to or include artists’ and experimental film, and also the spread of gallery and other kinds of projection make the area much more attractive to younger makers, so there is a need for a primer among students and others. The book is fairly short, and – despite what I just said about demarcations – it covers a wide territory, and I don’t think there is another general book in print that looks at both past and contemporary work in that way. I’m glad if it is useful for film and video students, it was partly written with them in mind, but I also hope that younger makers and other readers without that kind of background might also come across it too. There’s also a lot of follow-up material in the Notes that might assist people to find more specialist books and essays, as well as help them access the films and videos themselves
LUX: I guess its been about fifteen years since you originally wrote the book, what do you feel has changed in artists’ moving image during this time and is there anything that has made you rethink the thesis of the book?
AR: Yes, that’s pretty accurate timing, I started writing it in 1996 and it came out three years later. It got reprinted every year for a decade, with a few corrections of the worst howlers every now and then, but this is my first chance to update and expand it since 1999. To take your first point, about changes, the most obvious thing is the huge expansion of video projection and installation in galleries and museums. That was well on the way when the book first came out, and I duly wrote about it in the final section, but it truly exploded after 2000. In some very clear ways, though, this was a different phenomenon from the experimental/avant-garde stance and remains so. That’s backed up by the way many makers referred to themselves as ‘artists who make films’ rather than as ‘filmmakers’ – a canny move that kept the galleries happy for a long time, though I think we are in a period of change yet again about this issue of whether film is or is not a ‘fine art’ like all the others. A more minor and paradoxical change is that, from the mid-1990s,‘Film’ came to include tape and digital video formats that had nothing to do with sprocket holes and celluloid. And then, just as film in the classic or technical sense had been written off, back it came into the gallery world in the form of 16mm projection – with a vengeance!
But these conflicts – and occasional alliances too – have always been part of the avant-garde or experimental cinema arts. It is never a unified field. In the 1920s, for example, the French new-narrative cinema of Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Dmitri Kirsanov and Marcel L’Herbier warred with the surrealists, and both groups were sceptical of their German contemporaries in the abstract or ‘absolute film’ movement. Thirty years on, in the 1950s, the New American Cinema brought together the cinema-verité documentary and the rising avant-garde, which itself had abstract film, psychodrama and expanded cinema under its wing. Another twenty years on, in the 1970s, radical politics connected documentary cinema with the structural film. Structural film, on the other hand, in the UK, continental Europe and Japan, was distinct from films and videos made by conceptual artists. And so it goes on. Today’s mixtures and oppositions of themes, trends, styles and groupings are in the same vein. Contradiction is its core, and there is no avant-garde or artists’ cinema which is’nt defined by its other, which often enough means another group of people a few streets or a mouse-click away.
As for re-thinking the thesis of the book, yes again, all the changes of the last decade impel that to some degree, if only to see what it can accommodate and what it can’t. Two major developments need mentioning, and both have helped enormously. The first is the growth of new writing about avant-gardes and their histories, much of it from the USA but also worldwide. There are substantial books since 1999 by Scott McDonald, Branden Joseph, Lev Manovich, Yvonne Spielmann, Michael O’Pray, Nicky Hamlyn, David Curtis, Cate Elwes, Chris Meigh-Andrews and many others, all of which attest to serious discussion of experimental film, video and digital media. On the strictly academic front, I’ve examined at least half a dozen PhD dissertations in the last few years that reassess structural film in a far wider frame than its original impact, and I admire the ways in which younger scholars are looking again at these questions. Connected to all this is the new accessibility of experimental work online, often in good and even high quality modes, which means that new viewers can actually find the stuff rather than just read about it or look at stills, which was still largely the case a decade ago – UbuWeb and of course Luxonline are great examples of this. More broadly, digital media have expanded the options for making new kinds of work right across the audio-visual spectrum.
But your question leads to another point, which I can’t claim to have resolved, because it isn’t really answerable by theory alone but only by praxis, by what film and media artists actually do. It is the question with which the book begins: is the experimental movement part of the history of cinema or the history of art? To say it is both is true, but that does not answer the problem of exactly how and where to locate it, and to say how it contributes to the culture. Cinema has entered the gallery, and some artists make feature-length films (also not a new event), but these are strategies, rather than positions. When I wrote the book, especially since it was for the BFI, and therefore aimed in part for a ‘cinema’ readership, I was keen to stress that experimental media were part of the art-world. That was a propaganda move to encourage readers to think outside the cinema frame and to open up to the wider arts, so that experimental work was not seen only as an adjunct to mainstream film, or even defined as a reaction against it. Much of it can’t really be understood without reference to modernism and post-modernity in art, rather than the mainstream cinema. Narrative cinema’s own modernism is a rather different affair, as I tried to explain. But the cinematization of the arts in the last decade have drawn me again to the view best and most clearly and consistently articulated, I think, by William Raban, which is that experimental work is in fact oppositional and alternative to the cinema as a whole. It’s not just another fine art practice that cineastes should know about, in other words, but is deeply embedded in what we consider cinema to be, or might be. Coming from an artist who has worked for so long in all media and contexts, from cinema to TV to gallery, that view is very compelling. It is also relevant to what I think is a shift from the institutionally defined gallery as media art’s prime site, and back again towards the auditorium and the experience of collective viewing. I know opinions differ about this, but personally I’ll be relieved to see an end to films playing to empty rooms in galleries and get them out to shared audiences again, as indeed I’ve seen only this month in LUX events at the South London Gallery and at Café Oto, along with other screenings at no.w.here, the ICA and the many other independent venues that keep the flame burning. The viewing space, as ever, is the key to it all.
LUX: What currency do you think the experimental/ avant-garde tradition has for younger artists working with film today?
AR: I’m a bit nervous of answering that one! Young artists are presented with a huge range of sources and materials and films, including experimental ones. I wouldn’t want to second-guess what sense they make of it all, or what new meanings they develop from it. Some identify with the experimental tradition because that’s the direction in which their own work leads, others find in it a different kind of ‘currency’, i.e. as a resource or image-bank on which they can draw for all kinds of ideas and styles. Also, digital software makes some kinds of experimentalism inescapable, ever since – as Lev Manovich said – “the avant-garde became materialized in a computer”. But also in the last decade there has also been more recognition of avant-garde film and video history in its own right, through conferences, exhibitions, publications, screenings and so on. This comes after a low point in the 1990’s when it was eclipsed by a different kind of projection art in the gallery, promoted as a wholly new phenomenon with no history. That it does have a past is one of the ironies or contradictions of avant-garde experimentation. A curious side-effect of historicism is that some old films start to look younger than they are, when seen in a new context. For instance, you can think of Man Ray’s 1923 abstract film Return to Reason as a part of dada history and the avant-garde canon: as an ancestor of structural film, which revived its fortunes in the 1970s; and as a herald of non-linear digital process art, which is how I like to show it now. Its history in this sense is never closed. But there are no rules about how younger artists relate to the avant-garde tradition, or avoid it, or opt for some of its many tendencies rather than others, or cherry-pick its pedigree or – and this is my preference- creatively identify with the avant-garde project as a live tradition, whatever form it takes.