Conclusion

The conclusion argues that while expanded cinema might seem radically opposed to conventional, popular, and mainstream cinema, it nonetheless attempts to articulate and specify the aesthetic qualities that define all cinema. This parallels a trait of conventionally made avant-garde/experimental films; the assertion of cinema’s nature and essences, which constitute all forms of cinema regardless of how different one kind of film appears from another. The conclusion also draws upon the notions of the “essentially cinematic” explored across the book to counter theoretical arguments against such specificity positions (e.g. medium specificity) that have been advanced by critics and scholars in the worlds of cinema and art. The conclusion argues that these anti-specificity positions are overly simplistic, and that expanded cinema represents a more nuanced and sophisticated notion of what a medium specific theory—or work of cinema—can be.

The Two Expanded Cinemas

This chapter, one of two that make up Part I of the book, provides a revised history of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It divides this period into two phases or waves of expanded cinema. During the first phase, the term was more or less synonymous with “intermedia,” connoting hybridity, the dissolution of artistic boundaries, and the questioning of traditional art forms. But the liberatory rhetoric of this phase was countered by concerns that the expansion of cinema threatened to dilute and destabilize the art form that generations of filmmakers and film critics had worked to establish. It was within avant-garde film that the perceived threat to cinema’s identity caused the most anxiety, as that mode of film practice had always been the most preoccupied with the nature of cinema. Within a few years, the term “expanded cinema” was reclaimed by filmmakers whose work extended avant-garde cinema’s longstanding tradition of specifying the cinematic into a wide range of new, “expanded” forms. This phase of expanded cinema lasted through the 1970s into the first few years of the 1980s. Chapter 1 also introduces two other major themes: a historical process of negotiation between cinema’s specificity and its connections to the other arts, which works of expanded cinema enact, and the interplay between two conceptions of cinema—as a physical material and an ephemeral experience. This reciprocal movement between the material and ephemeral is a key factor in expanded cinema’s formal mutability.

Cinema as Idea

Chapter 6 considers works of expanded cinema that could be called “conceptual cinema.” “Conceptual,” here, refers to the belief that cinema among many avant-garde/experimental filmmakers and critics that cinema was ultimately a conceptual phenomenon, even when it took forms that seemed decidedly material. The term, or variants of it, was used in the 1960s and 1970s, often to refer to “imaginary” films, films planned or written but purposely never executed, and unprojected or unprojectable films. There are parallels between such conceptual cinematic works and conceptual art. In both cases, concepts, intentions, imagination, and discourse are taken to be as constitutive as art works as materials and physical processes. The objects of the film medium were, and continue to be, de-centered in favor of these less tangible, conceptual, or discursive dimensions of cinematic practice. While conceptual art will be a point of reference, chapter 6 will also show that a concept-based ontology of cinema emerged organically from within the history of avant-garde/experimental film. That is, it should not be thought of simply as a delayed response by filmmakers to prior art world developments, as if playing catch-up with their fellow artists.

Cinema as Object I

Chapter 4 looks at works of expanded cinema that emphasize what could be called a “sculptural” property—the physicality and tactility of a moving image medium (e.g. film, projectors, screens). These works isolate one material element of the film medium, such as the filmstrip, screen, or projector, removing it from its place in a system of machines and displaying it as an object in its own right. In doing so, such works break apart the unified machine of the cinematic apparatus, pulling the objects that constitute that apparatus out of the obscurity and endowing them with aesthetic qualities. In normal cinematic exhibition, these objects disappear, replaced by the ephemeral experience of watching the illusory images of light and shadow that they invisibly produce. Object-based works of expanded cinema reverse this process, returning the sense of mass, weight, and gravity to the materials of the medium, thereby forcing a new consideration of the possibilities film offers for direct, sensuous physical experiences. Such expanded cinema works include direct displays of filmstrips (e.g. woven forms made from celluloid), projectors, and other physical materials, objects, and technologies.

Cinema as Performance

Chapter 3 is the first of four chapters that make up Part II of Cinema Expanded. This part of the book considers different general modes that expanded cinema has taken, each mode representing aesthetic territory and ideas usually associated with a different art form (e.g. performance or sculpture). Chapter 3 considers a variant of expanded cinema that integrates live performance into projection of moving images, usually called “projection performance” or “projector performance.” In this type of expanded work, the tactility of both filmstrip and projector are on display, as is the performer (typically the filmmaker—the representative of avant-garde cinema’s more intimate relationship between artist and audience). But alongside these markers of cinema’s physicality and presence is the ephemerality of live performance. Non-repeatable, site-specific, aleatory instead of mechanistically automatic, projection performance is centered upon the moment when the material of film is transformed into the far less tactile play of light, shadow, and illusion, and when objects give way to processes and experiences. The integration of performance into cinema was initially understood as a blurring of art forms. But the intermedia film-theater hybrids of the first wave of expanded cinema gave way to subsequent projection performances that claimed a performative dimension for cinema itself, rather than thinking of it as an alien form grafted onto film in a new intermedia format.

Expanded Cinema Revis(it)ed

Chapter 2 addresses a third wave of expanded cinema, running from the mid-1990s to the present. Though in dialogue with art world developments, particularly the prevalence of moving images in that world, this wave again rose out of the theory and practice of avant-garde cinema. Hence, it reflects that film culture’s skepticism about digital technology, media convergence, and the “death” of cinema. Chapter 2 considers two major factors in the resurgence of expanded cinema. The first is the spread of digital technology and the implications of this for filmmaking and the theorization of cinema’s ontology. In the wake of “new media’s” ascendency in the “digital age,” experimental filmmakers and critics took up a renewed investigation of the nature of cinema and the role that specific physical media (e.g., celluloid film) play in our conception it. Prominent theorists of new media have argued against such specificity positions, employing concepts like “remediation” and “media convergence,” which speak to a merging of media and art forms quite contrary to the broadly modernist notions of avant-garde filmmakers—including those who produced expanded cinema during its “second wave.” The second major factor for expanded cinema’s new life is the microcinema, a form of film exhibition specific to experimental cinema that appeared across the United States, Canada, and Europe beginning the mid-1990s. Microcinemas are characterized by a highly participatory social environment, wherein film screenings blend into other kinds of social activity. Microcinemas are thus models for expanded cinema, each showcasing cinema’s adaptability to varying spaces and formal heterogeneity.

Introduction

This chapter defines expanded cinema, traces its history broadly from the 1960s to the present, and reviews previous scholarly and critical literature on the subject. It argues that while expanded cinema has traditionally been seen as a rejection or abandonment of cinema in its conventional form, and as a form of “intermedia” or “new media,” with historical perspective it is better understood as an attempt to define and explore the limits and essences of cinema as an art form. While it takes forms commonly associated with the other arts (including installation, performance, sculptural objects, and even text), it is precisely by exploring this aesthetic territory that avant-garde/experimental filmmakers have tested the boundaries and clarified the specific nature of their art form. The introduction also defines the category of “avant-garde” or “experimental” cinema, defining it as a distinct cinematic culture and historical tradition, which represents a set of aesthetic and social values that can be traced through works of expanded cinema. The title of the introduction indicates the book’s larger argument: that expanded cinema does not represent the end of cinema as we know it, but its persistence, albeit in new and unconventional forms.

Cinema as Object II

Chapter 5 examines works of expanded cinema that emphasize another, somewhat different “sculptural” property—cinema’s spatial dimension. Such works heighten awareness of cinema’s spatial dimension, blurring the line between temporal and spatial arts in a way similar to minimalist sculpture. The major form here is film installation, which, rather than exploding the cinematic apparatus as the object-based works of chapter 4 do, brings that apparatus out of the dark, presenting it for contemplation and analysis in a way that conventional film exhibition intentionally thwarts. The sculptural characteristics of such works often requires that they be exhibited in gallery spaces, which suggests that they are “intermedial” hybrids of cinema and sculpture. But this hybridity is only apparent; in fact, these works were asserted and understood within the context of avant-garde film culture as “cinematic.” In examining these types of expanded work, this chapter considers key historical factors during both the early-to-mid ’70s and the last two decades. During the 1960s and ’70s, the attention given to cinema’s physical properties, including the space of exhibition, was related to the anti-illusionist aims of avant-garde filmmakers for whom “materiality” included the space of cinematic exhibition and the ideological ramifications of that space. More recently, the impending obsolescence of analog film and the presumed ephemerality of digital media have resulted in the former’s physical “object”–properties taking on new meaning and importance.