Bill Viola and the Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience

This chapter examines ghostly gestures that we cannot consciously experience, but only perceive through digital technologies. Internationally recognized as a leading video artist, Viola’s work focuses on the intersections of new media and experiences like death, consciousness, spirituality, and emotion. Many of his recent installations manipulate our sense of time by using a special high-speed camera. Uncanny gestures (those that are embodied but unreadable) emerge as the film is transferred to digital video and slowed down. The emergence of gestures that we can recognize once visualized through digital media as our own, but we cannot recall – that is, we cannot reenact or remember – points to something uncanny about gesture and its relation to affect. Rather than offering us a new understanding of human interiority or an opportunity to make sense of the uncanny, Viola’s work leaves us only with uncertainty as a visceral affect.

Flicker and Shutter: Exploring Cinema’s Shuddering Shadow

A rotating shutter interrupts the light of a projection device, breaking up the succession of image movement and creating the appearance of motion. This technology, essential to cinematic and even some pre-cinematic devices, creates an effect of flicker. In the early era of cinema, the flickering of cinematic images was claimed to damage viewers’ eyesight and even to produce psychological problems. In the 1960s, however, filmmakers such as Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad and Ken Jacobs explored the flicker as an aesthetic device. This chapter traces the effects of flicker, focusing on the invention of the moving image in the latter part of the 19th century, its initial reception, and the use of flicker in experimental films and projections from the 1960s on.

Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image

Exploring the deliberate ‘glitching’ of digital moving images across a range of contexts (from gifs to video art to horror cinema), this chapter demonstrates how such practices produce a virtual disfiguring of the image. Focusing on the trope of glitched faces, it examines their peculiar dynamic of unmasking and effacement, in which the image is rendered both transparent (revealing its structural logic) and opaque (obscuring its object of vision). Such works perform an ambiguous ‘de-facing’ of the human, remaking the face as blocky abstract shapes or, conversely, as an uncanny bodily extrusion. If digital errors, as Mark Nunes asserts, are often regarded as ‘abject’ in relation to the systemic operations they disrupt, then these works provide a visual index for this abjection, excavating the workings of digital code to produce a moment of uncanny recognition. Examples discussed include video works by Takeshi Murata and Nicolas Provost, as well as the horror film Unfriended (Leo Gabriadze, 2014).

The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision

The six Paranormal Activity movies (2007–15) explore a variety of methods for creating ‘found-footage’ horror. Produced on extremely low budgets, they devise a number of ways to generate scares and thrills without resorting to complicated, high-end special effects. They make use of sound, of temporal delay, and of the limitations and affordances of consumer video products that are both used to create the films, and actually used within the films. This self-reflexivity points up the ways that our actual world is permeated with recording and surveillance devices. The Paranormal Activity films eschew most formal principles of commercial filmmaking; their low-budget, unconventional technologies present us with a new sort of post-cinematic – and post-phenomenological – media apparatus. The last film in the series, in particular, uses glitches and breakdowns of the image in order to convey how the demonic realm it is ostensibly concerned with corresponds with new technical devices that extend outside the actual human sensorium

Slow Looking: Confronting Moving Images with Georges Didi-Huberman

A recent flurry of scholarship around slow cinema’s use of long takes signals a renewed interest in looking. Adding to this work, this chapter considers contemporary artists’ moving images shown in galleries, focusing in particular on a work by Sharon Lockhart. Lockhart’s film installations have much in common with slow cinema, including an emphasis on minimal movements, minor elements and the apparently undramatic. However, because it is conceived for contemporary art spaces, this work commonly adopts the short form or operates through a looped format. As a consequence of these differences, a new critical trajectory is opened up in which it is less duration that is of interest – or how seeing is produced by a sustained look – and more visuality itself, or how ‘really looking’ can produce a different kind of engagement with the visual. By applying ideas from Georges Didi-Huberman to Lockhart’s installation Double Tide (2009) we find that the work calls for a kind of slow looking. Through slow looking we are more able to ‘imagine for ourselves’ and more open to the experience of not knowing.

The Black Screen

This chapter explores the various roles played by the black screen in contemporary moving images. Almost all screens at some point display full frame blackness, but this visual universality masks the many different technologies, techniques, and purposes that underpin black screens, as well as the many different meanings that can be gleaned from them. The black screen can be many things; as its context changes, the blackness slips between different significations and evocations. This chapter suggests in particular that the black screen owes much of its universality and affective power to the fact that it encompasses both surface and space.

The Veiled Image: The Luminous Formless

Cinema was invented, praised and sold as the most perfect reproduction of the real world. In its automatism however, such perfection is prone to mistakes and lapses. This text addresses one of these mistakes: the ‘veiled’ (or overexposed) image. The veil may result from a luminous or a chemical accident. Light may enter the camera in a devious or excessive way, creating all sorts of figures that seem to float in the image, or blurring it entirely. In the case of analogue cinema, a reaction may occur that will affect the film stock in its very materiality. In such cases – and in a few others that are here mentioned – the question is to determine what we see in these forms which undermine the reproduction of appearances. Is it a glimpse of the ‘realness’ of reality – a fantastic world in itself – or just a meaningless accident? The answer depends on the idea one has of cinema in general.

Introduction

Film’s mechanical eye has the ability to capture everything, the multitude and dispersion of movements recorded in its simultaneity and in duration, as it unfolds in time. For all its photographic objectivity, cinematographic vision thus allows for the indefinite to surface: it is a unique means of recording as well as expressing the world’s natural state of confusion. Crucially, cinema as a medium and as an art form also has the means to explore, alter and intensify our experience of the world’s constant transformation, its constitutive indeterminacy. This introduction to the volume explores the ways in which, even as the dominant discourses place the immediately legible and perfectly defined image at the top of the visual hierarchy, the recognition that film is in fact, and in essential ways, ill-suited to the expression of the fixed, complete and clear-cut, continues nonetheless to inflect the medium’s evolution, practices and theorisations

The Force of Small Gestures

In The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze describes sensation as a domain that lies beneath, over, or inside quotidian vision as if in another dimension of intensive qualitative experience masked by habitual perception. Sensation is also a way of grasping the immanence of philosophy to works of art. The logic of sensation is part and parcel of our world as lived; one might say that sensation is immanent to perceptual experience as force is immanent to matter. In Deleuze’s account of sensation, the plastic arts are less concerned with matter and figuration than they are with force and becoming. Perhaps the problem for both painting and cinema is how to see time and force differently, and to release the figural force of sensation in the image. The chapter continues by investigating the logic of sensation in recent experimental video, primarily Ernie Gehr’s Glider (2001), but also two of the author’s own recent artworks, Waterloo and Plato’s Phaedrus. The chapter concludes with an account of Henri Bergson’s lecture on philosophical intuition to argue that there is a continuous dynamic line that runs between intuition and philosophy, Image and Concept

Cinematographic Indeterminacy According to Peter Tscherkassky: Coming Attractions

Avant-gardes have been interested, ever since the 1920s, in the leftovers – that which is usually kept out of representation because it is considered too blurry, lacking in focus, ‘faulty’. Starting from an analysis of Peter Tscherkassky’s Coming Attractions (2010), this essay assesses the value of that which is, in the cinema, deemed too blurry, while also pointing to the import that certain aesthetic theories (from Jean-François Lyotard to Tom Gunning) have granted it. How and why does Tscherkassky, in his use of found footage, seek to reveal the formless as well the photographic code (the black and the white)? In doing so, he draws near to what John Cage called ‘silencing’: not silence, but the withdrawal of some of the sounds attributed to the musical event