Disassembling Vision Through Dimensional In-Betweens

This chapter examines films that suspend the spectator between dimensional poles (flat and deep, left and right, up and down, still and moving, animate and inanimate). Denying the spectator dimensional certainty, films by Marie Menken, Pat O’Neill, Ray and Charles Eames, Ernie Gehr, Maya Deren, and Sara Kathryn Arledge emphasize presentation and the contingencies of reception over the continuities and fidelities of representation. The chapter argues that these filmmakers privilege the contingencies of individual vision by creating and occupying a space in-between the perception and the apprehension of an image. Leaving the image’s dimensional status uncertain and unresolved interrupts the usually transparent means of cinematic representation and charts a preference for autonomy and diversity over universalizing or totalizing vision. Pat O’Neill, for example, uses the optical printer to suspend the spectator between two and three-dimensional images simultaneously, performing Wittgenstein’s aspect theory. The contingency of this mode of reception simultaneously borrows from Surrealism’s elevation of an individual’s subconsciousness over reason and Transcendentalism’s interest in the “intuition” of experience over the “tuition” of institutional learning.