ARTFORUM DOSSIER: CELLULOID 

Regina Cornwell, “Paul Sharits: Illusion and Object,” September 1971

“An acquaintance told me that after showing Piece Mandala/End War to his students, they went immediately to the projector to examine the strip of film. Sharits’ films elicit this kind of reaction, underlining one of his concerns—the dualism of the film as projected and experienced image and the film as a strip of frames. In Piece Mandala this dualism becomes experientially hypertrophied. The fast animated montage of flickering color frames and alternating figures, cause the figures in instances to seem superimposed, at other times, to arc out from the screen into space and then circle back. Straight lines, diagonals, crisscrossed formations resuIt.”

Annette Michelson and P. Adams Sitney, “A Conversation on Knokke and the Independent Filmmaker,” May 1975

“We can speak, then, of a growing politicization, or a growingly explicit concern, as filmmakers, with political and social issues on the part of European filmmakers. There is another factor at work in that attitude toward filmmaking as something other than the production of master works. Many of them, though not all, have come to cinema, like the Americans, from painting or sculpture, rather than from literature and the theater. They were the immediate witnesses to the restructuring and domination of the international art market by American artists and their dealers. The growing crisis of European art and its market has been traumatic, and that trauma is linked to the development of two or three generations—the first to attain international status—of American masters. European filmmakers are wary of the structures and ideology which might create the conditions for cultural imperialism in the area of filmmaking. They are, therefore, involved in a redefinition of the nature and function of filmmaking that differs considerably from those of the Americans who are, of course, making their way gradually toward the center of our own culture.”

Annette Michelson and P. Adams Sitney, “A Conversation on Knokke and the Independent Filmmaker,” May 1975

Barry Schwabsky, “CinÉ Qua Non: The Art of Tacita Dean,” March 1999

“We speak of video artists but of film makers. Why? Video emerged within the milieu of art and is accorded unrestricted privileges there; whereas the origins of cinema lie in the theater of popular spectacle. So when I first saw a group of Tacita Dean’s chalkboard drawings at the Drawing Room in New York in 1997 and was told they were the work of a young English filmmaker, I just assumed her real work was narrative features—‘art films,’ perhaps, but not artworks. Bad assumption. Trained as a painter, Dean operates within the art world rather than the film industry, yet her use of film as a primary medium puts her at an equal remove from the conventions of art and film—a distance that allows her to reflect critically and nostalgically, but above all curiously, on both.”

Barry Schwabsky, “Ciné Qua Non: The Art of Tacita Dean,” March 1999

Elizabeth Schambelan, “Bill Morrison,” May 2004

“There’s no narrative here and not much intercutting or other editing-room legerdemain—just a stately procession of decontextualized clips, many in slow motion. A woman in a kimono emerges from a nebula of lava-lamp blobs; a man at a spinning wheel looks as if he were lit from within by phosphor; a Jazz Age couple dance behind a metastasizing colony of black dots. Toward the end, parachutes descend through murky ether for an impossibly long time. But to describe these sequences at all necessarily ossifies them, since language can’t account for their jittery kineticism (which is heightened by the momentum of Gordon’s atonal, minimalist score). The images’ constant flux defeats the viewer’s attempts to fix and comprehend them, creating a sense of anxiety and suspense that, perhaps, qualifies Decasia as a peculiar kind of psychological thriller. Here, the bogey is not a sociopathic villain but the unstable nature of cultural memory embodied in its own physical support, which mutates and molders before our eyes.”

Elizabeth Schambelan, “Bill Morrison,” May 2004

Ed Halter, “Footage Fetish” (on Gustav Deutsch), February 19, 2009

“Working exclusively with appropriated footage for over a decade, Deutsch has become one of the major living practitioners of a tradition in avant-garde cinema stretching back to the works of Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell. A major retrospective at the Austrian Film Museum properly situates Deutsch in the materialist vein of fellow Viennese filmmakers like Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren, and Peter Tscherkassky. What distinguishes Deutsch from his forebears is his historical place at the tail end of celluloid’s reign: His practice thereby intersects with the increased role of archives in greater film culture, both conceptually and practically. This investigative aspect is most overtly allegorized in World Mirror Cinema (2005), which analyzes actualities shot outside of movie houses in early twentieth-century Austria, Indonesia, and Portugal, digitally zooming in on faces in each crowd, then linking them with fanciful doppelgängers discovered elsewhere in the archives. The cinema, Deutsch suggests, constitutes an uncannily preserved looking glass of the past, resiliently tangible yet inevitably slipping into the unreal.”

Ed Halter, “Footage Fetish” (on Gustav Deutsch), February 19, 2009

Ed Halter, “Powers of Projection: The Art of Bruce McClure,” January 2010

“Later in the decade, McClure’s filmmaking included work in both Super 8 and 16 mm. On Super 8, he shot notebooklike travelogues such as 3600 Frames (2000), a four-city trip recounted in thousands of single-frame images. His 16-mm works he created without a camera, through handpainting or otherwise altering blank film or appropriated footage. In 1996, he made the first of what he would later dub ‘ink sneezes,’ fully unfurling four-hundred-foot rolls of clear single-perforation 16-mm film in a long hallway, then spraying them with black or colored dyes from an airbrush. The projector reads one edge of ink dots as an optical sound track, producing an oceanic flurry that rises and falls in waves, in relation to the image’s shifting densities. For Dithercumber (1998), McClure began with a length of 16-mm slug (discarded film cut up for use as filler by editors and designated as such by a thick line scraped down the middle) originally part of a print of a jungle caper—The Southern Star (1969)—featuring Ursula Andress and Orson Welles. Further distressing the stock with a variety of sandpapers and rotary tools, McClure obscured not only the image but the sound track as well, producing a softened noise whose fluctuations serve as a muted echo of the film’s now-lost dialogue.”

Ed Halter, “Powers of Projection: The Art of Bruce McClure,” January 2010

J. Hoberman, “Close-Up: Direct Cinema” (on Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight), September 2012

“Brakhage was neither the first filmmaker to eschew the camera nor the first to scratch patterns into, or glue objects to, the film emulsion. He does, however, seem to have been the first to fashion a movie entirely from actual flora and fauna. If cinema is primarily the art of animation—restoring or creating movement, conjuring ghosts, and bringing inert matter to life—then little Mothlight is pure cinema: life transmuted into light and motion. The great Polish animator Władysław Starewicz had amazed his pre–World War I audience with movies that, like his 1912 Cameraman’s Revenge, were populated by artfully reconstituted insects; Brakhage did not film his insects but, rather, fashioned his film out of their remains.”

J. Hoberman, “Close-Up: Direct Cinema” (on Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight), September 2012

Rosalind E. Krauss, “Close-Up: Frame by Frame” (on Tacita Dean’s Film), September 2012

“Dean has identified her decision to turn the Turbine Hall into a giant film as her acceptance of the ‘spectacular’ that the space requires. The surface onto which FILM was projected was a freestanding, vinyl-clad column, set just forward from the wall that was itself featured in much of the film. The result was the illusion that we were looking through the celluloid itself, as if through a two-way mirror. This made for a perfect mise en abyme, as though the Turbine Hall had folded itself over the strip of film to imprint its image upon the film’s face. (In one scene in the film, the effect was redoubled as we saw an enormous escalator descending between the sprocket holes, evoking the passage of the filmstrip through a camera or a projector as it winds itself onto the take-up spool.) It is hard to grasp the brilliance of Dean’s representation of the filmstrip folding back onto a figuring forth of the very act of shooting—and thus onto the production of the work we were viewing.”

Rosalind E. Krauss, “Close-Up: Frame by Frame” (on Tacita Dean’s Film), September 2012

Frank ExpÓsito, “Interviews: Anthony McCall,” December 16, 2013

“Seeing this work again in Berlin, I was suddenly struck by how important and how noticeable two things have become since the piece’s debut in 1975. The machinery of the projector appears so unfamiliar now, almost exotic. Moreover, all day long, for six weeks, and every fifteen minutes, a projectionist will change and rearrange the reels of film. The presence of the human projectionist is thus felt much more; this person becomes a central performer in the piece. In 1975, neither the projector nor the projectionist was particularly noticeable. Even the slightly shaky image produced by the 16-mm projector wasn’t so obvious then. But in the digital age, the imperfect mechanisms of the piece, including its human agency, come through. The work is perhaps more akin to a long duration performance rather than what would now be called an installation. Back in the ’70s, as a friend remarked recently, the audience probably went off, spoke to some of their friends, and had a cigarette in between reel changes. Now the reel changes are a special event—something to be watched carefully.”

Frank Expósito, “Interviews: Anthony McCall,” December 16, 2013

Jon Raymond, “1000 Words: Jennifer West,” January 2015

“I was driving from Los Angeles to Seattle, and I e-mailed Kristan Kennedy, a curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and said I wanted to do a project with the celluloid film strip, and she got back to me right away to say yes. So this is something completely new. I’ve made a few film quilts where I’ve saved the cutouts of my films over the years and stitched them together with a sewing machine. But in general I have always digitized the film, so you never saw the strip. For this project, I proposed creating windows lined with film strips and hanging them throughout the cavernous space, and then allowing viewers to walk around and create projections with flashlights. I chose flashlights because they already have a projection lens built into them, and I liked the idea of using the Maglite, this utilitarian object, as the device, so that the viewer could confront the actual film strip in space and have an experience with the art of projection. In a way, I was just going back to something very basic: a kind of giant magic lantern, with the film-strip panels as oversize slides through which one could project.”

Jon Raymond, “1000 Words: Jennifer West,” January 2015

Nick Pinkerton, “Medium Rare” (on “This is Celluloid” at AFA and “Glorious Technicolor” at MoMA), May 28, 2015

“Let’s take for granted the received wisdom which says that the ‘average moviegoer’ can’t tell the difference between a 35-mm print and a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) projection. The conclusion we should draw from this isn’t that there is no difference between these formats, but that the arbiters of film culture, including critics, curators, and absolutely everyone else, have failed entirely to educate a wider public as to what this difference is, and how to talk about it. Cinema is usually a narrative art, but it is always a visual art. Nevertheless, the discussion of the former aspect has traditionally eclipsed the latter, save for within specialized circles, and when visuals are mentioned at all, it’s usually so that they can be dispensed with in a hat-tip namecheck of the cinematographer and a few shopworn, well-tested adjectives (‘crisp,’ ‘brilliant,’ and other usual suspects).”

Nick Pinkerton, “Medium Rare” (on “This is Celluloid” at AFA and “Glorious Technicolor” at MoMA), May 28, 2015

Nicola Mazzanti, Tacita Dean, and Amy Taubin, “The Last Picture Show? The Survival of Film in the Digital Age,” October 2015

“In 1999, scarcely a century after cinema’s birth, a feature film was projected digitally before an audience for the first time: George Lucas’s Phantom Menace. But the menace to film was no phantom. By the beginning of 2015, more than 90 percent of the world’s cinemas had gone digital, including nearly 98 percent of American movie theaters. And film production—from image capture and the creation of effects to editing and color correction—had, too, all but surrendered to digital technologies. Last year, Paramount became the first major Hollywood studio to announce that it would no longer distribute 35-mm prints—that it would no longer distribute its films on film—and, in any case, the manufacture of 35-mm motion-picture cameras and projectors had already come to an end. Kodak, which had recently emerged from bankruptcy, was the only manufacturer of film stock left. Technicolor no longer processed film. The entire infrastructure of photochemical film had collapsed.

Can the medium be saved? Will the great majority of the world’s moving-image heritage be forever lost? What is the cost of digitization? In the pages that follow, NICOLA MAZZANTI, director of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels, artist TACITA DEAN, and critic AMY TAUBIN confront these urgent questions.”

Nicola Mazzanti, Tacita Dean, and Amy Taubin, “The Last Picture Show? The Survival of Film in the Digital Age,” October 2015

Jeffrey Weiss, “Revisions—Zen for Film,” March 2016

“What is Zen for Film? If it is primarily said to consist of the projection of transparent leader, do these pieces of film—which accumulate traces of use but then, growing brittle, become unprojectable over time—possess aesthetic value as conserved relics? If so, according to what institutional authority is such value ascribed? As Hölling observes, the very transience of the work ‘generates the urge to preserve and collect, which, in turn, expands the accumulating archive.’ Conversely, is preservation anathema to the work’s event status? If so, does the work as event even permit migration to digital media—a mode of presentation seemingly inimical to the work’s intent—or must Zen for Film remain filmic, materially true to its original medium? Given the slow demise of film technology in general, if the work cannot be perpetuated without migration, does it face inevitable death?”

Jeffrey Weiss, “Revisions—Zen for Film,” March 2016

Nick Pinkerton, “Silver Age” (on the 2nd Nitrate Film Festival), May 18, 2016

“I drove myself to distraction at my first Nitrate Picture Show outing trying to pinpoint what, if anything, defined the ‘nitrate difference.’ Was it something about the particular shimmer in the high-contrast black-and-white, accountable to the high concentration of silver in the stock? The fine-filigreed detail? The illusion of depth in the image without benefit of 3-D technology—which, perhaps not coincidentally, appeared shortly after nitrate film had been phased out? Well, all of the above are present in a well-preserved nitrate print, but to solely credit these qualities to some magic alchemy in the nitrocellulose base is to ignore a number of other extenuating factors: These are relics from an era when film lab techs were highly skilled artisans with every resource at their command, struck from sources much closer to the original negative than we are used to seeing. (The less said the better of dead-tech bullshit DCP, beloved by viewers whose eyes have started to go and programmers on a budget.) It is perhaps impossible to pinpoint, then, the contribution of the nitrate film to the extraordinary beauty of the films shown at the Dryden, but the important point is that they are extraordinarily beautiful films—and the clock is ticking.”

Nick Pinkerton, “Silver Age” (on the 2nd Nitrate Film Festival), May 18, 2016

Jennifer West, “Passages: Tony Conrad,” September 2016

“Pickling, hammering, electrocuting, cooking—Tony Conrad’s impish assault on the physical substrate and ideological underpinnings of the ‘seventh art’ has been a key influence on me ever since I started making cameraless and direct films in 2003. Conrad embodied the prankster, the comic, the do-it-yourself ethos. His work was messy, it was funny, it was organic; it embraced the everyday and flaunted its economy of means. At times, it was violent. In live performances, he hammered or electrocuted film onstage, then processed it and played it back. If the movies endlessly depict violence, Conrad’s cinema—his ‘action films’—makes that violence literal.”

Jennifer West, “Passages: Tony Conrad,” September 2016

Erika Balsom, “Historical Projections: The Art of Rosa Barba,” September 2017

“Although Barba activates our current nostalgia for old media, she seems acutely aware of the irony inherent within it. Vinyl, printed books, and film began life as products of industry, after all—soulless technological copies, perched on the bleeding edge of innovation. It is only now, when the digital has become allied with speed, circulation, and reproduction, that artifacts of the mechanical era are left to bask in the glow of that quality they once menaced: authenticity. The recasting of film as artisanal thus risks eliding its historical position within a broad spectrum of modern industrial production where it constituted but one of a myriad of technologies for the transformation of the natural world. Barba turns to the medium precisely as part of a larger excavation of twentieth-century encounters between nature and technology—an undertaking she also pursues at the level of content, through images of blighted land and toxic waste. In the many works she has produced over the past decade, film is nothing quaint or fragile. It is a sturdy survivor of one machine age that we encounter from deep within another.”

Erika Balsom, “Historical Projections: The Art of Rosa Barba,” September 2017

Ann McCoy, “Katherine Bauer,” August 9, 2018

“This environment addresses the dissolution of film. Bauer makes us think of Méliès once more, whose works were destroyed to reclaim their silver nitrate. Silver is a metal connected to Artemis, the Greek goddess of wilderness—a nature spirit not too unlike the artist. Her exhibition is a commentary on the depletion of the earth’s chemicals since the Industrial Revolution and the inception of cinema. The artist enters the territory of Goethe’s naturalism and the philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s writing on plant energetics. Bauer’s installation is an enchanting meditation on death and resurrection.”

Ann McCoy, “Katherine Bauer,” August 9, 2018

Thomas Beard, “COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS: Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema,” March 2020

“‘When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness,’ the author declares at the book’s outset. ‘Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes.’”

Thomas Beard, “Cosmic Consciousness: Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema,” March 2020

Olivier Zahm, “Openings: Pierre Huyghe,” March 1997

“In film-based projects, real-time ‘remakes,’ and site-specific billboards, Pierre Huyghe adopts both the procedures of commercial filmmaking (casting calls, voice-overs) and avant-garde strategies (the use of nonprofessional actors, the incorporation of process into the narrative) to create artworks that unfold in real time and space.”

Olivier Zahm, “Openings: Pierre Huyghe,” March 1997