Between Film,

Video, and
the Digital
 International Texts in Critical
Media Aesthetics

Volume 10

Founding Editor:
Francisco J. Ricardo

Series Editors:
Francisco J. Ricardo and Jörgen Schäfer

Editorial Board:
John Cayley, George Fifield, Rita Raley, Tony Richards, Teri Rueb

Volumes in the series:

New Directions in Digital Poetry, C.T. Funkhouser
Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary
Theory, Markku Eskelinen
Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and
Marketplace, Martha Buskirk
The Engagement Aesthetic: Experiencing New Media Art through
Critique, Francisco J. Ricardo
Software Takes Command, Lev Manovich
3D: History, Theory and Aesthetics of the Transplane Image,
Jens Schröter
Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the
Popularizing of American Art, Doris Berger
When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art,
Grant D. Taylor
The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature,
Sandy Baldwin
Between Film,
Video, and
the Digital
Hybrid Moving Images in the
Post-Media Age

Jihoon Kim
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
 Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2016

Paperback edition first published 2018

© Jihoon Kim, 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including ­photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior ­permission in writing from
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­refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be ­accepted by
Bloomsbury or the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kim, Jihoon author.
Title: Between film, video, and the digital: hybrid moving images in the
post-media age / Jihoon Kim.
Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: International
texts in critical media aesthetics; v. 10 | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049419 (print) | LCCN 2016008629 (ebook) | ISBN
9781628922936 (hardback) | ISBN 9781628922912 (epdf) | ISBN 9781628922929
(epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures–Philosophy. | Digital media–Philosophy. |
Image processing–Digital techniques. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media
Studies. | ART / Digital.
Classification: LCC PN1995 .K485 2016 (print) | LCC PN1995 (ebook) | DDC
791.43/01–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049419

ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2293-6

PB: 978-1-5013-3955-4
epub: 978-1-6289-2292-9
epdf: 978-1-6289-2291-2

Series: International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics

Cover design by Clare Turner and Eleanor Rose
Cover image: Double/Psycho by Andrew Neumann [email protected]

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of

Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A5A8018764)
 For Sun Joo Lee,
my dearest intellectual colleague
and emotional companion
 Contents

Editor’s Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xv
List of Illustrations xix

Introduction: Hybrid moving images and the

post-media conditions 1

1 Videographic moving pictures: Remediating

the “film stilled” and the “still film” 47

2 Digital glitch video and mixed-media

abstraction: Materialism and
hybrid abstraction in the digital age 99

3 Transitional found footage practices:

Video in and out of the cinematic fragments 145

4 Intermedial essay films: “Memories-in-between” 197

5 Cinematic video installations:

Hybridized apparatuses inside the black box 241

Afterword 295

Notes 301
Index 355
Editor’s Foreword

There was a time, dating back several centuries, when the principal
scientific question, in microscopy as much as in astronomical inquiry,
was, “What is vision?” It was important enough to be readable as
an epistemological question, principally, “What is knowledge?”
because for the empirical tradition, to know something implied
the critical criterion of being able to see it. As such, vision was a
philosophical problem; Goethe himself devoted serious study to the
question, with particular emphasis on color perception.
But in the last century, vision became mediated; it was no
longer the special something that nourished the products of human
creation and interpretation—painting, drawing, etching—but rather
was now modulated by instruments of dynamic optical capture
and modulation—photography, film and video, television, and
computers, for example. Through our physical world we experience
direct vision, but no less today, through these instruments we have
arrived at mediated vision—vision that sees not actual objects, but
the representation of objects captured through machinery. After
image-making was no longer done by hand, as it had been in the
age of painting, interpretation ceased being an active task; for, when
images are created by optical systems, interpretation is rendered
decidedly passive and contingent on the mechanism that recreates
images, and therefore vision itself.
Since the end of the twentieth century, the unrelenting trend
toward mediated vision has continued toward a totalizing level of
expansion. A worker who sits at a computer for ten hours a day,
processing processed images, fails to spend ten hours experiencing
objects and images directly. In this new kind of workflow, vision
takes place through the virtual tunnel of a digital scope. And so,
if historically, when vision was a form of direct experience of the
world, it made sense to orient one’s inquiry toward the question of
x Editor’s Foreword

“What is vision?” but it now makes sense to ask the central question
of today, with its turn toward visuality of optical modulation:
“What is a medium?” That is to say, since the medium is now what
performs the preponderance of image-gathering and construction,
that medium, too, comprises, composes, and contributes the active
work of vision.
This shift seems to have occurred with little, if any, significant
notice. It is as if to claim that, as the notion of medium grew in
sophistication and variety, the process of vision, to which it
obviously connects, had never changed, or needed to. Instead,
philosophers and critics of art and media should have pounced
on this development, and announced that vision as a dimension
of experience has undergone an ontological transformation. Vision
no longer makes the world out of direct engagement; it derives the
world in ready-made form out of an array of devices that construct,
alter, and interpret that world. Organic vision’s inner coils of process
have been imperceptibly displaced, for the processing of images has
already happened before our eyes ever acquire any media-based
image.
That is what makes Kim’s book crucial. It brings back, at a time
when mediated vision is still conflated with pre-mediated vision,
the ontology of vision through measurable questions, the kinds
that philosophers can approach and work with—questions, for
example, regarding the identification of an artistic medium, which
in turn (thankfully) brings back McLuhan’s questions about what
constitutes a medium and is a question I also have written about
many times, as it's central to the critique of all new media art. But
while not so long ago, McLuhan’s time is, nevertheless, not our
time. His perspective on vision was still unitary and Romantic; he
did not yet live in a world of total immersion to the mediated image,
as we do today.
And again, this is why Kim’s work is required reading for critical
thinking about what vision means, beyond what its destination
object—the image—has become in contemporary times. For
example, he understands the importance of probing the concept
of hybridization, which someone finally writes about with due
rigor. We come to understand in Kim’s text that a hybrid image
is a hybrid form of vision; and so, even the seemingly simple idea
of a “moving image” is unpacked and shown to be—in today’s
new reality—rather more complex than was initially apparent. Is a
 Editor’s Foreword xi

moving image an image that moves, or is it a temporally determined

fluctuation of visual changes? The first idea comes from the terrain
of photographic thinking, where experimental works like those
of Michael Snow or Hollis Frampton are rooted; the second from
that of film, whose phenomenal world-in-action was exactly the
focus of Dziga Vertov in the early and intense history of cinematic
evolution, an aim to capture reality in motion, not in images alone.
The Kino-Eye collective wanted to dissolve our bias between image
and world, capturing direct reality—“life caught unawares,” as
they liked to say. Thus the question of the image as representative
either of a static world or of a kinetic world is not one that can
harbor two answers. In any case, Kim’s analysis of hybridization is
the finest I have ever read, and is further subdivided into types like
synchronic and diachronic, offering us all of the systematicity in the
dimension of media analysis that Ferdinand de Saussure gave us in
his still-valid linguistic analysis framework as documented by his
students a century earlier.
Noël Carroll’s discussions of the moving image here are
important to Kim’s clarifications, along the lines I’ve just paved.
Carroll’s insights, that, for example, “Film is not one medium but
many media, including ones invented long after 1895, and even
some of which have yet to be invented” are interpretable not merely
through the optic of mediation, as modern history of science likes
to trace, but through the mediation of the optical, which is the
deeper ground in which the truer sense of this distinction is rooted,
and beyond which, by new analysis in Kim’s exploration, it now
necessarily goes. For then, Kim clarifies the sense of “hybrid” in
greater specificity, through operations like “nesting” of media within
media—which is, again, what vision does when it is immersed in the
collusion of mediated instrumentation. Thus, for Kim, it is necessary
to go much further, starting from the brilliant distinction he has
uncovered, but which he nonetheless still finds incomplete: that “the
phenomena of nesting in the digital age has become so complex
that it is insufficient merely to acknowledge that a medium contains
several media. Rather, what is required is to examine the relations
between the media constituting the medium of the moving image.”
And off we go, past the demise of modernist medium specificity,
into an exploratory journey fresh with deep and yet very immediate
insight. The idea that vision itself (without even mentioning the
word, but rather the alterations of process denoted by that term)
xii Editor’s Foreword

has undergone changes in contact with the interrelationship of

media—a term which itself is rigorously unpacked for the filmic
dimension—is radically enlightening precisely because Kim starts
with, and remains, at the site where the image is rooted.
Reading the text, one feels the undeniable fact that the act of
mediation is itself always visual, and so, the comparative senses of
that mediation are revealed as a kind of deep structure of image-
making, where Kim drills down and into the magma of the essence
underlying visual media.
Though it may not sound original, one need only contrast
this approach with extra-visual analyses, which take the work of
imagery away from the senses that constitute it and claim it to be
distributed throughout the entire body itself—a rather inexplicably
remote and distant kind of analysis seen in implausible attempts to
retrofit new media into primordially Romantic, single-sided notions
of image-making—vision from before the age of total immersion—
as we see in Mark B.N. Hansen’s “bodily basis of vision” arguments
in “New Philosophy for New Media.” Rather, Kim embraces much
newer critiques, ranging across Rancière, Bourriaud, Manovich,
Weibel, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, and Rosalind
Krauss, in properly rigorous conversation with each other, through
artists like William Kentridge and James Coleman, for whom the
image is the way, through a medium, back into the image itself,
and without excessive extrapolation to extraneous factors. And
even if these were to be considered, Kim turns not to abstractions
elsewhere on the body, for example, or to politics of media, as
others have done, but, again, with characteristic focus, down to the
physical composition of the medium—in the immediate case, that
of celluloid film itself, where distinctions between a “cut” and one
of its electronic counterparts, the digital morph, clearly come into
view, as it were. Other distinctions, like that between “analogue
transformation” and “digital manipulation,” or between film and
video (“inherently marked,” notes Kim, “by its engagement with
the ‘present tense’”) yield equally rewarding understandings and
move forward many arguments and conversations that have for too
long lingered in logical stagnation, often trapped by fashionable
terminology and topical concerns, but amounting to ultimately
unproductive rhetorics.
As with vision, media analysis is also possessed of a certain
something that seduces instantaneous judgment and which, when
 Editor’s Foreword xiii

not subjected to protracted analysis and discriminating Gedanken,

can amount to thinly veiled circular reasoning. That Wittgenstein
would not be impressed by the hype and punditry of much media
analysis is almost too self-evident today, but in Kim’s unique
unpacking of the language and assumptions of considerable bodies
of new media writing, we can see how far the horizon lies in the
moving image’s continual renewal as creative possibility and
epistemic capacity.
Francisco J. Ricardo
Acknowledgments

This book was developed from my research in the Department of

Cinema Studies at New York University, with the addition of two
new chapters and much revision to its original chapters. My work in
this book owes a tremendous deal to the scholarship and guidance
of Richard Allen, who oversaw both my project and my career. His
criticism encouraged me to think harder, read more closely, and make
my theoretical speculation more clear and “specific.” His heartfelt
advice on my work has enabled me to grapple with how to be a
well-rounded scholar who would be devoted to both teaching and
research throughout my life. My book is also enormously indebted
to Alexander R. Galloway, Anna McCarthy, D. N. Rodowick, and
Lev Manovich. They provided me with invaluable feedback and
thoughtful voices so that this research could be an interdisciplinary,
“hybrid” work of cinema studies, media studies, and contemporary
art criticism.
I am also wholeheartedly grateful to several esteemed scholars
to whom I am tremendously indebted. Thomas Elsaesser and
Dudley Andrew, who had encouraged me to pursue my study
outside the still barren land of cinema and media studies in
my home country, have given me sagacious comments and
heartwarming advice on scholarly matters during and after
my days at NYU. Besides these two guiding lights, I should
acknowledge a few more scholars who have inspired the
scholarship on which this book is built: Raymond Bellour’s
works “between” film and its neighboring media and arts have
laid the groundwork for my ideal model of interdisciplinary
research and concepts, with a deep love of cinema at its core;
Francesco Casetti’s lucid insights into the dialectic of the filmic
experience and its relocation in various forms and platforms
xvi Acknowledgments

have stimulated my speculation all the way until I completed

the last page of this book; and finally, Yvonne Spielmann has
not only inspired me with her concept of intermedia but also
guided me toward the complex yet fascinating circuit of video
and the fruitfulness of encountering and delving into its multiple
configurations.
I also wish to thank the members of my NYU cohort, particularly
Gregory Zinman, Martin L. Johnson, Jinying Li, and Paul Douglas
Grant, who underwent the hard yet memorable times during our
coursework at the department together, and who gave me their
brilliant ideas and criticism. They will remain my best colleagues
despite the physical distance between us. My deep-seated gratitude
should be given to two of my closest friends, Sangjoon Lee and
Seung-hoon Jeong, with whom I have shared my intellectual
concerns and human feelings hovering between stasis and motion.
My ex-roommate at Jackson Heights, Sangjoon has generously
helped me to cope with the various problems that I was faced
with during my life in the United States. Seung-hoon and I have
provided mutual intellectual stimulation for each other long before
our own doctoral studies, and he has given me his friendship and
cordial criticism even after we left the States. Although we “three
musketeers” eventually landed in different countries in the goal of
seeking our own careers, I sincerely hope that they will be successful
and that our friendship will continue in the transnational traffic of
our thoughts and concerns.
This book is also indebted to the array of new relations beyond
the academic terrains of cinema and media studies. Francisco J.
Ricardo and Jörgen Schäfer, two editors of the series to which I am
honored that this book pertains, have provided me with their initial
excitement about my book proposal and poignant comments during
the book’s early drafts, challenging my thinking and encouraging me
to think harder through to the last stage of my writing. Katie Gallof
and Mary Al-Sayed from Bloomsbury Academic did a fantastic job
in the design and production of this book, with valuable guidance for
me as a fresh author. This kind of cooperation was also the case with
the filmmakers, artists, and gallery professionals whom I contacted
for or addressed in this book. All of these people expressed great
interest in this book, helped me to gain access to artworks whose
circulation is generally restricted, and kindly allowed me to use the
pictures of the films and artworks that I examine in this book.
 Acknowledgments xvii

My last but not least acknowledgment must go to my mother, my

sister, and my parents-in-law who do not know the details of my
work yet know me best. Thanks to their limitless support, I gladly
dedicate this book to my wife Sun Joo Lee, whose infinite love and
moral guidance has made me who I am now.
Portions of the Introduction, Chapters 1 and 3 reuse material
previously published in “Animating the Photographic Trace,
Intersecting Phantoms with Phantasms: Contemporary Media
Arts, Digital Moving Pictures, and the Documentary’s ‘Expanded
Field,’” in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 6, no. 3
(2011), pp. 371–86, with considerable revision. My discussion on
Bill Viola’s work in Chapter 1 is a truncated and revised version
of “Digital Video and the ‘Film-Video Hybrid’ in Bill Viola’s 21st
Century Work,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 30, no.
2 (2013), pp. 140–58. Chapter 3 incorporates material from “Bruce
Elder’s Film-digital Hybrids and Materialist Historiography,” in
Millennium Film Journal, 56 (Fall 2012), pp. 30–40. I thank the
copyright holders of these previous publications for permitting me
to reuse them for this book.
 List of
Illustrations

Figure 0.1 Jim Campbell, Home Movies 300-1 (2006),

installation view, 60 ´ 50 ´ 3 inches. Video installation:
custom electronics, 300 LEDs, courtesy of the artist 2
Figures 1.1 and 1.2 Stills from Sam Taylor-Johnson, Still Life
(2001), 35mm film/DVD, 3 min 44 seconds, © Sam
Taylor-Johnson, courtesy White Cube 60
Figures 1.3 and 1.4 Stills from Taylor-Johnson, A Little Death
(2002), 35mm film/DVD, 4 min, © Sam Taylor-Johnson,
courtesy White Cube 61
Figure 1.5 Mark Lewis, Algonquin Park, September (2001),
Super 35mm transferred to 2K, 2 min 43 seconds, Film still
courtesy and copyright the artist 63
Figure 1.6 Lewis, Airport (2003), Super 35mm transferred to
DVD, 10 min 59 seconds, Film still courtesy and copyright
the artist 67
Figures 1.7 and 1.8 Bill Viola, The Quintet of the Astonished
(2000), color video rear projection on screen mounted on
wall in dark room, projected image size: 55 ´ 95 in
(140 ´ 240 cm), 15 min 20 seconds, performers:
John Malpede, Weba Garretson, Tom Fitzpatrick,
John Fleck, Dan Gerrity, photos: Kira Perov, courtesy
of Bill Viola Studio 69
Figure 1.9 Fiona Tan, Countenance (2002), installation view,
courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London 81
Figure 1.10 Tan, Correction (2004), installation view,
courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London 82
Figure 1.11 Still from Adad Hannah, Tribute (2002), SD
Video, 5 min, Courtesy of Pierre-François Ouellette art
contemporain, Montreal, and Equinox Gallery, Vancouver 83
xx List of Illustrations

Figure 1.12 Still from Hannah, 4 Chairs (2002), SD

Video, 5 min, Courtesy of Pierre-François Ouellette art
contemporain, Montreal, and Equinox Gallery, Vancouver 84
Figure 1.13 Still from David Claerbout, Kindergarten Antonio
Sant’Elia, 1932 (1998), single-channel video projection,
black and white, silent, 10-min loop © David Claerbout,
Courtesy of the Artist and Sean Kelley, New York 89
Figure 1.14 Still from Claerbout, Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho
(reconstruction after Hiromishi Mine) (2001), single-channel
video projection, color, silent, 3-min loop © David Claerbout,
Courtesy of the Artist and Sean Kelley, New York 92
Figures 1.15 and 1.16 Stills from Claerbout, Retrospection
(2000), single-channel video projection, black and white,
stereo sound, 16 minutes © David Claerbout, Courtesy of
the Artist and Sean Kelley, New York 93
Figure 2.1 Still from Paul B. Davis and Jacob Ciocci,
Compression Study # 1 (Untitled data mashup) (2007),
courtesy of the artists 100
Figure 2.2 Film still from Thorsten Fleisch, Wound Footage
(2003/2009), courtesy Thorsten Fleisch 101
Figure 2.3 Still from Evan Meaney, Shannon’s Entropy (2008)
from The Ceibas Cycle (2007–11), courtesy of the artist 111
Figure 2.4 Still from Rosa Menkman, The Collapse of PAL
(2010), courtesy of the artist 114
Figure 2.5 Still from Menkman, Compress Process
(Revisited) (2010), courtesy of the artist 115
Figure 2.6 Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin,
Lossless #2 (2008), courtesy of the artists 120
Figure 2.7 Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin,
Lossless #3 (2008), courtesy of the artists 121
Figure 2.8 Still from Takeshi Murata, Untitled (Silver)
(2006), courtesy of the artist and Salon 94 122
Figure 2.9 Still from Murata, Monster Movie (2005),
courtesy of the artist and Salon 94 123
Figure 2.10 Film still from Lynn Marie Kirby, Karate Class
Exposure: Three Variations (2004) from Latent Light
Excavations series (2003–07), courtesy Lynn
Marie Kirby 129
Figure 2.11 Film still from Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Structural
Filmwaste: Dissolution 1 (2003), courtesy Sixpack Film 131
 List of Illustrations xxi

Figure 2.12 Film still from Johanna Vaude, Totalité Remix

(2005), courtesy Johanna Vaude 135
Figure 2.13 Film still from Dietmar Brehm, Akt (1996/2008)
from Praxis 5-8 (2005–08), courtesy Sixpack Film 136
Figure 2.14 Film still from Jürgen Reble, Materia Obscura
(2009), courtesy Jürgen Reble 138
Figure 2.15 Film still from Jennifer West, Spiral of Time
Documentary Film (2013), 9 min 1 second, 16mm negative
transferred to high-definition, Commissioned by Utah
Museum of Contemporary Art, courtesy of the artist 141
Figure 3.1 Film still from Gregg Biermann, Labyrinthine
(2010), courtesy Gregg Biermann 160
Figures 3.2 and 3.3 Film stills from Christoph Girardet and
Matthias Müller, The Phoenix Tapes (1999), courtesy of
the artists 162
Figures 3.4 and 3.5 Film stills from Girardet and Müller,
Kristall (2006), courtesy of the artists 166
Figures 3.6 and 3.7 Film stills from R. Bruce Elder, Crack,
Brutal Grief (2001), courtesy R. Bruce Elder 174
Figures 3.8 and 3.9 Film stills from Elder, The Young Prince
(2007), courtesy R. Bruce Elder 178
Figures 3.10 and 3.11 Film stills from Ken Jacobs, Return to
the Scene of the Crime (2008), courtesy Ken Jacobs 185
Figure 3.12 and 3.13 Film still from Jacobs, Anaglyph
Tom (Tom with the Puffy Cheeks) (2008),
courtesy Ken Jacobs 186
Figure 3.14 Film still from Jacobs, Return to the Scene of
the Crime, courtesy Ken Jacobs 189
Figures 3.15 and 3.16 Film stills from Jacobs, Capitalism:
Child Labor (2007), courtesy Ken Jacobs 191
Figure 4.1 A screen capture from Jean-Luc Godard,
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) 205
Figure 4.2 Harun Farocki, Schnittstelle (Section/Interface)
(1995), film still, courtesy Harun Farocki Filmproduktion 206
Figure 4.3 A screen capture from Chris Marker, Level 5
(1997)207
Figure 4.4 Film stills from Hito Steyerl, November (2004),
courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin 213
Figures 4.5, and 4.6 Film stills from Hito Steyerl, November
(2004), courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin 214
xxii List of Illustrations

Figures 4.7 and 4.8 Film stills from Steyerl, In Free Fall
(2010), courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin 219
Figure 4.9 Film stills from Lynne Sachs, States of
Unbelonging (2005), courtesy Lynne Sachs 222
Figure 4.10 Film stills from Lynne Sachs, States of
Unbelonging (2005), courtesy Lynne Sachs 224
Figures 4.11 and 4.12 Film stills from Sachs, The Last
Happy Day (2009), courtesy Lynne Sachs 226
Figure 4.13 Film still from Clive Holden, 18,000 Dead in
Gordon’s Head (A Found Film) (2002),
courtesy Clive Holden 231
Figure 4.14 Film still from Holden, Hitler! (Revisited)
(2004), courtesy Clive Holden 233
Figure 4.15 A screen capture from Jonathan Caouette,
Tarnation (2003) 235
Figure 4.16 A screen capture from Jonathan Caouette,
Tarnation (2003) 236
Figure 4.17 A screen capture from Jonathan Caouette,
Tarnation (2003) 237
Figure 5.1 Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine I, II, III (2001,
2002, 2003), double-channel video installation, installation
view, Kunsthaus Bregenz, photograph: Markus Tretter,
courtesy Harun Farocki Filmproduktion 264
Figure 5.2 Farocki, Counter-Music (2004), double-channel
video installation, installation view at Kunsthaus Bregenz,
2011, photo by Markus Tretter, courtesy Harun Farocki
Filmproduktion266
Figure 5.3 Kutluğ Ataman, Mesopotamian Dramaturgies:
Column (2009), exhibition photo: Tanas, Berlin, 2008,
courtesy of the artist 268
Figure 5.4 Ataman, Küba (2005), exhibition photo: Lentos
Museum, Linz, 2009, courtesy of the artist 269
Figure 5.5 Doug Aitken, electric earth (1999), installation
view, eight-channel video installation, dimension variable,
photo: Gert Jan van Rooij, courtesy of 303 Gallery,
New York 270
Figure 5.6 Aitken, Sleepwalkers (2007), installation view at
Museum of Modern Art, New York, six-channel video
installation, dimensions variable, courtesy of 303 Gallery,
New York 272
 List of Illustrations xxiii

Figure 5.7 Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where? (2008), installation

view at K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany,
six-channel video installation with eight-channel sound,
courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery 275
Figure 5.8 Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho (1993), video
Installation, dimensions variable, installation view Le Mejan,
Arles, 2011. © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2015, Photo Studio lost but found/Bert Ross, Courtesy
Studio lost but found, Berlin, from Psycho (1960), USA.
Directed and Produced by Alfred Hitchcock. Distributed
by Paramount Pictures © Universal City Studios 280
Figure 5.9 Candice Breitz, Soliloquy (Sharon) [1992–2000],
from the Soliloquy Trilogy (2000), a short film on DVD,
installation view, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Photograph:
Paolo Pellion, courtesy of the artist and White Cube,
London287
Figure 5.10 Breitz, Him (1968–2008), seven-channel
video installation. Installation view, Kunsthalle Berlin,
Photograph: Jens Ziehe, Berlin, Courtesy of the artist
and White Cube, London 288
Figure 5.11 Stan Douglas, Win, Place, or Show (1998),
two-channel video projection, DVDs, computer, color,
sound, approximately twenty thousand hours for 204,023
variations, with an average duration of 6 minutes each.
Installation view, Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia,
Canada, Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner NY/London
and Victoria Miro, London 292
Figure 6.1 Still from Andrew Neumann, Double/Psycho
(2011), single-channel video, 20–40 min, courtesy of
the artist 296
 INTRODUCTION

Hybrid moving images and

the post-media conditions

Hybrid moving images

and medium specificity
Media artist Jim Campbell has produced a number of pieces
consisting of images made with LED displays of photographic
and filmic materials. In these pieces, the low-resolution electronic
displays, combined with digital image processing, transform
the photochemical material into a series of pixels. Accordingly,
the images waver between the discreteness of the digital and the
continuity of the analogue, taking on multiple levels of hybridization
derived from material and technical aspects of the pieces. This is
illustrated in Home Movies 300-1 (2006, Figure 0.1), a work which
projects the 16-mm moving portrait of an anonymous family onto a
double Plexiglas screen while its 300 LEDs diffuse the footage into
a series of noises as the minimal units of digital visual information.
At the same time, the viewer is also able to see the discreteness of the
minimized units when watching the display from a distance. What
captures the viewer’s attention, then, is the ghostly registration
of family members, such as a smiling mom, a child on a swing, a
toddling child, etc., which is perceived as continuous. As Richard
Shiff notes, Home Movies 300-1 positions the viewer “at the single
door that opens to both classes of image, to representation and
to abstraction.”1 Yet it could also be added that the ambivalence
2 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 0.1 Jim Campbell, Home Movies 300-1 (2006), installation view,
60 ¥ 50 ¥ 3 inches. Video installation: custom electronics, 300 LEDs,
courtesy of the artist.

caused by the digital processing of the analogue image leads to other

layers of hybridization: of still and moving images, of recorded and
simulated images, and of luminous and pixelated images.
Campbell’s work exemplifies the ways in which contemporary
media art pieces across various platforms and genres, ranging
from avant-garde cinema to video installation, provide a fresh
look at the photographic inscription of reality either by bringing
the still photograph to life or by unearthing the photographic
stillness embedded in the moving image, both achieved with the
help of digital technologies. This new breed of practices fosters
hybrid visual forms that make porous the boundaries between
live-action and animated images, as well as between the recorded
and the manipulated. On an even more complex level, Campbell’s
images are based on the combinatory employment of photography,
film (both with digitized data), and digital video (as replaced by
the LEDs) that results in the dynamic coexistence of stasis and
motion. Thus, they are structurally either both photographic and
filmic or of these. The co-presence of the two media amounts to
a form of moving image that reveals both the differences and the
similarities between them through an array of technical processes
allowing the coexistence of, and the exchange between, their
properties.
Digital technologies play a pivotal role in formulating the aesthet­
ics of co-presence that Campbell’s images present to their viewer.
 INTRODUCTION 3

While grounded in the combination of custom LEDs and

computational algorithms, his self-devised digital imaging system
alludes to this double nature of digital video, to the extent that its
resulting visual expression integrates photographic representations
and at the same time radically transforms them according to the
ways in which the series of discrete elements (pixels) comprising
them are manipulated. In this sense, Campbell’s ambiguous visual
expressions reflect the situation that the ongoing proliferation of
digital technologies in the terrain of art practice during the last
two decades has unsettled the status of the moving image. From
the 1990s onward, digitization has subsequently precipitated the
flexibility of media images because they are grounded in numerical
codes subject to putatively unlimited manipulations. Since then,
numerous art practitioners across different fields have responded
to the volatility of image by creating new works of art that could
obscure established distinctions between different media arts,
including cinema, video art, and digital art. These artworks have
presented certain types of moving images in which the different
forms of media coexist and influence each other, such as the images
emblematized by Campbell’s works. The fact that these images are
based on the merger of the properties of these media and articulate
the phenomena of border crossings between their corresponding
arts raises the following three questions. First, if these images remain
highly ambiguous, what can we identify as an artistic medium in
this combinatory system (i.e., what is its key medium: found film,
photography, computer algorithm, or, an array of LEDs)? Second,
if these images disallow the belief in a single medium’s directive
role in shaping a particular sensible form, how can we reconfigure
the notion of a medium vis-à-vis the variety of practices producing
them? And finally, what theoretical framework can we use to
describe the growing exchange between previously distinct media
and the emergence of the art forms based on this exchange?
In response to these three questions, this book characterizes
these images as “hybrid moving images,” an array of impure image
forms characterized by the interrelation of the material, technical,
and aesthetic components of existing moving image media—namely,
film, video, and the digital. The term “hybrid” denotes its two
etymological underpinnings, firstly, “a mixed form of two concepts
from two language systems, the Latin hibrida (mixed blood),” and
secondly, “the Greek hubris—excess,”2 which suggests that the
4 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

form transgresses the boundaries of each system. Various literary

and cultural studies based on poststructural, postmodern, and
postcolonial theories have elaborated upon these two meanings of the
term in association with the concepts of multiplicity, heterogeneity,
fusion, diversity, and difference, using them to describe conditions in
which different linguistic or cultural systems meet and interact so as
to blur the previously maintained distinctions between themselves
and others, including an array of conceptual dichotomies such as
the global and the local.3 More specifically, hybridization refers to
“the two-way process of borrowing and blending between cultures,
where new, incoherent and heterogeneous forms of cultural practice
emerge in . . . [the] third spaces.”4 Seen in this light, hybrid moving
images point to the in-between spaces of existing audiovisual media,
as well as to certain forms produced by an array of interrelations that
drive the mutual influences between the media. These images, then,
enable us to redefine each medium’s identity not as self-determined,
but as constructed through its transfer to, and appropriation of,
other media and forms.
The term “moving image” refers to a category of images in
motion broader than the images that have traditionally been
discussed in a discourse grounded in a sharp distinction between
one art form and another. In this sense, the uses of the term have
often been associated with a rejection of medium-essentialist
thinking in the context of changing and emerging relationships
between different artistic forms and means. Noël Carroll develops
his concept of the “moving image” by way of his attack on the
doctrine of modernist medium-specificity thesis, which consist of
the three arguments that (1) a medium is defined by a physical
substance (2) it maintains its unique essence derived from its
intrinsic material qualities, and (3) the unique nature of the
medium indicates or dictates each art’s own domain of expression
and exploration. Carroll draws upon various counterexamples,
including the nonfigurative films of the avant-garde practices,
image processing in video, and the cinema based upon digitally
composite images, in order to demonstrate that the forms and
styles of film are not necessarily determined by a limited set of
techniques such as the cinematographic representation of reality
through the film camera and certain methods of montage.
Carroll’s use of the term “moving image” is related to his
definition of a medium as being irreducible to a single material
 INTRODUCTION 5

entity. For him, a medium is “generally composite in terms of its

basic constituents”5; and “an art form then is composed of multiple
media.”6 Here film serves as a telling example for validating these
two arguments. As to the first argument, even though film is defined
as a medium on the basis of a filmstrip, its resulting image is not
necessarily derived from a camera’s recording of profilmic reality,
but includes “flicker films,” which can be made by the alternation
of blank and opaque leader without photographic emulsion. Also,
as to the second argument, even though film is defined as an art
form of a moving image that bears a photographic impression of
reality, this does not necessarily include a filmstrip but embraces
video, to the extent that video “may be developed . . . to the point
where most of us would have little trouble calling a commercial
narrative made from fully high-definition video a film.”7 Based
on these two arguments, Carroll paves the way for reconfiguring
a technological medium as constitutively hybrid: that is, there is
no single element of a medium that ahistorically ordains a single
set of forms and styles; instead, it is differentiated into multiple
components, which supports the idea that “a single art form may
sustain different, nonconverging potentials and possibilities”8
for diverse and aesthetic approaches and formal developments.
Carroll’s discussion of a filmstrip could be such a case, given
that it is associated not simply with realist cinema but also with
flicker films and handmade films. For both forms are distinct from
each other in terms of their different aesthetic approaches to the
materiality of the filmstrip, as well as in terms of the differences in
the techniques and other materials that intersect with the filmstrip.
This differentiation of forms leads him to denounce the idea that
a medium’s identifiable “pure” domain immediately determines
a particular set of forms whose aesthetic effects are indicative of
its most genuine essence. Instead, it allows Carroll to take on a
pragmatic view on the relation between a medium and its forms
or styles: “It is the use we have for the medium that determines
which aspects of the medium are relevant, and not the medium that
determines the use.”9 More significantly, this pragmatism indicates
that Carroll’s concept of a medium embraces the historical
variability or reinvention of its components as well as its possible
border crossing with other media. As to the impact of digital video
and computer-based special effects on the production of feature
films, he suggests that these testify to the increasing intersections
6 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

between film and other moving image media that were anchored
in their distinct art forms (video art and computer art), as well as
to the innovation of film’s mediality and aesthetics vis-à-vis the
development of these media: “Film is not one medium but many
media, including ones invented long after 1895, and even some
of which have yet to be invented. Video and computer-generated
imaging, for example, are film media . . . in the sense that they may
be components of what we now call films.”10
D. N. Rodowick tellingly demonstrates that Carroll conflates
an objection to the medium-specificity argument with an exclusion
of anything that is regarded as materially or technically specific to
a given medium. Carroll convincingly testifies to the constitutive
multiplicity of a moving image medium and the extent to which its
components are open to stylistic variation and historical invention,
both of which demystify the belief in a medium’s univocality
and in its power to dictate forms of an art as manifestations of
its predetermined essence. But there is no reason that dismissing
these two lines of the medium-specificity argument prevents us
from abandoning any observation of what components a medium
is composed of and what effects they produce. Rather, Carroll’s
suggestion of a medium’s internal and external hybridities is based
on his identification of a medium’s components and of their relation
to aesthetic effects, all of which he excludes from his concept of
the moving image. Thus what Carroll ironically validates, for
Rodowick, is that “nothing . . . would disallow specifying media
with a strong kinship (film, video, and digital imaging) as having a
variable distinctiveness containing overlapping as well as divergent
elements or qualities.”11 The media’s characteristics associated
with their hybridity, such as historical variability and openness to
different materials, forms, and practices, then become compatible
with the concept of medium specificity—one which is not reducible
to the medium-specificity arguments of a medium’s teleological
essence and of the absolute distinctiveness of its forms, but
nonetheless requires us to observe a medium’s composite properties
and discern differences and similarities between them and those of
other media. Ultimately, what Rodowick proposes is a dialectic of
medium specificity and hybridity with regard to a medium’s internal
differentiation and its possibilities for being aligned with what is
outside it: “I am happy to admit as many hybridizations of media as
artists can invent in their actual practice. But what makes a hybrid
 INTRODUCTION 7

cannot be understood if the individual properties being combined

cannot be distinguished.”12
Taking Rodowick’s discussion above as a point of departure, this
book characterizes hybrid moving images as being grounded in and
indicative of the dialectic of medium specificity and hybridity, or as
being produced by a set of artistic practices that aspire to reconfigure
the concepts of a medium and its specificity vis-à-vis hybridization.
To be sure, these images cannot be fully contained within Carroll’s
concept of the moving image, in which any observation on the
differences of media in their material and technical components,
as well as the notion of a medium as such, is eliminated. Rather,
these images ask us to keep our eye on the material, technical, and
aesthetic dimensions of the media involved. For they are based
on the changes in a medium’s internal components or in the ways
that they are combined differently with other media elements that
have hitherto not been regarded as contained within its art form.
Seen in this light, what I call hybrid moving images are inseparable
from the images that each of the three media has produced on its
own (filmic, videographic, and digital images), and much more
from the differences and similarities between these images. At
the same time, central to these images is the fact that they result
from the different relations between media that frequently cross
the generic and disciplinary borders between their corresponding
arts. To summarize, the hybrid moving images demonstrate that it
is more productive to identify different moving images grounded
in the variability of a single medium or the differing combinations
of more than two media, rather than insisting upon the “moving
image” as a general category.
These two aspects of hybrid moving images, the constitutive
compositeness and variability of a medium, as well as the possibility
for its alliance with other media, echo Berys Gaut’s discussion of a
medium. In a way similar to Carroll and Rodowick, Gaut asks us
to distinguish two ways of conceiving a medium: a medium as “the
kind of stuff out of which artworks are made” and a medium as
that which is “constituted by a set of practices that govern the use
of the material.”13 For Gaut, the latter notion demonstrates that the
material alone cannot invariably determine the medium of an art
form: as with painting, for instance, it includes not only oil pigment
and a canvas, but also chalk, charcoal, tempera, woodcut, etc.,
and it is up to a set of practices and their underlying conventions
8 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

what material is adopted and how the material realizes an artwork

that constitutes a painting. But this functionalist view alone
is not sufficient because the materials “also play a role in finely
individuating the media of painting—as instanced by oil painting, as
opposed to watercolors or frescos.”14 The reciprocal complimentary
relationship between the materials and a set of practices can be
applied to the media of the moving image. For instance, celluloid
may be used both for the record of profilmic reality and for the
graphic rendering of nonphotographic imagery with handmade
techniques, but the latter use is limited in comparison to computer
graphics in terms of the degree of flexibility by which an image can
be manipulated. Considered this way, I define an artistic medium as
a set of material and technical components, which not only allows
for but also is constituted by formal variations of artistic expression.
The idea of a medium being determined by an array of technical
and aesthetic conventions suggests that an art form can be seen
as involving more than the components of one medium when it
is realized. This is certainly suggested by Carroll and Rodowick,
but Gaut elaborates upon this in his notion of “nesting,” referring
to the phenomena by which “media can contain other media.”15
The medium of the moving image serves as a telling example of
this phenomenon of “nesting,” since it encompasses different types
of images, each of which can be discerned by the specific medium
producing that image, such as celluloid, analogue video, digital
video, computer graphics, etc. To push this point further, the hybrid
moving images are seen to testify to more different aspects of
nesting than Gaut’s original concept proposes. While Gaut speaks
of only the plurality of the media that are incorporated in a given
art form, for example, the moving image, hybrid moving images
based on the intersection of film, video, and the digital demonstrate
that there are other levels of incorporation at play: first, the
incorporation of more than two distinct media components—for
instance, the mixture of film’s components and those of video—
into the form of a moving image, which is made by a set of artistic
practices that throw these media in a new relation; and second, the
incorporation of old moving image media into the digital as the
digital adopts and reworks the old media’s formal components by
converting their material and technical elements into digital codes.
These two levels of incorporation suggest that the phenomena
of nesting in the digital age have become so complex that it is
 INTRODUCTION 9

insufficient merely to acknowledge that a medium contains several

media. Rather, what is required is to examine the relations between
the media constituting the medium of the moving image. The
notion of hybridization, then, serves as a framework for theorizing
the two levels of incorporation as more complex types of nesting
than those discussed by Gaut.
Finally, like Rodowick’s claim, Gaut’s idea of nesting suggests
that it is still indispensable for us to identify the properties of a
medium that constitutes an art form and to differentiate them from
those of other media that engage in shaping the form. In this view,
it is meaningful to ask, for instance, what features are specific to
digital images in contrast to traditional photochemical images, even
when the former perceptually resembles the latter. Here the notion
of specificity is not necessarily defined in terms of uniqueness as it
is asserted by the traditional medium-specificity argument. For in
this case, the representation of photographic imagery as such is not
unique to photochemical media such as photography and film, but
shared by the digital. This suggests that the specificity of a digital
image can be identified only in comparison to photochemical
images, that is, according to what conventions of photochemical
media the digital adopts and what new properties it adds to those
conventions in order to allow for new expressive possibilities in the
resulting image. Gaut’s concept of “differential properties,” that is,
“properties that distinguish one group of media from another group,
but that are not necessarily unique to any particular medium,”16
provides us with a useful analytic framework for discussing the
media of the moving image and the relation between them. The live-
action imagery based on the bond between the lens and profilmic
reality, for instance, is specific to film, video, and the digital in
contrast to other media (for instance, literature and music), but
is not unique to any of them. This notion of specificity, which is
comparative and relational, is particularly helpful in examining
hybrid moving images, since their impurity can be illuminated by
identifying what properties are shared by the media constituting the
images and what features pertain to each of them individually. To
be sure, careful attention to the formal dimension of the artwork is
particularly crucial to this conception of medium specificity. For it
is on the level of form that the structural similarities and differences
between diverse media images are negotiated and interrelated while
simultaneously being made visible.
10 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Post-media conditions
This book contextualizes the emergence of hybrid moving images
across different genres and platforms within the larger contexts
of the “post-media” age. In doing so, it argues that the images’
material, technical, and aesthetic hybridities derive from and at the
same time are expressive of “post-media conditions,” which I define
as an array of conditions that have posed fundamental challenges
to the traditional definition of artistic media—namely, that a
media’s material and technical components immediately determine
its forms and expressive possibilities, which are exclusively distinct
from the forms and expressive possibilities of other media. It was
both the discourses on contemporary art criticism and the studies
on new media and media art that coined the term, and these have
developed the debates about those conditions since the late 1990s. In
contemporary art criticism, Rosalind E. Krauss played a determining
role as she proposed and elaborated upon the term “post-medium
condition” in a series of her writings, and the discourses on
contemporary art by Jacques Rancière and Nicolas Bourriaud,
among others, are more or less in alliance with Krauss’s argument
on that condition. Meanwhile, such thinkers as Lev Manovich and
Peter Weibel, whom I consider as pertaining to the “new media
camp,” have introduced the term “post-media condition” as a
response to the discourses mainly circulated in the contemporary
art criticism bloc. Although the difference of a keyword in the two
discursive domains—“medium” in the domain of contemporary
art criticism and “media” in that of new media camp—implies a
conspicuous front line that has persisted in regard to how to evaluate
the impacts of electronic and digital technologies on the forms and
practices of art, the discourses in both domains have reached three
common points of post-media conditions that lay the groundwork
for this book: (1) the demise of the modernist medium specificity,
that is, the proliferation of electronic and digital technologies
that has led to the dissolution of the boundaries between one art
form and another, which were previously sustained by a media’s
unique properties; (2) as a response to the demise of the modernist
medium specificity, a renewed awareness of what media’s material,
technical, and aesthetic components are and what artists can do with
those components; and, (3) as a result of this renewed awareness,
 INTRODUCTION 11

the emergence of artistic practices by which the media’s components

have new, previously uncharted relationships with those of other
media in ways that go beyond its formal boundaries. The last two
conditions, I shall argue, suggest not the total abandonment or
loss of medium specificity per se, but a reconfiguration of medium
specificity in tandem with media hybridity.
Krauss’s concept of the post-medium condition means that the
pervasive power of electronic and digital media challenges Clement
Greenberg’s idea of medium specificity so profoundly that it
transcends the traditional definition of artistic medium in general.
Television and video cannot be contained within the purview of
modernist medium specificity, according to which a medium’s
distinct identity is derived from its unique material properties, and
this identity exclusively delineates the medium’s formal and generic
boundaries as distinctive from other mediums. This is because the
material and technical components of television and video are
constitutively heterogeneous, allowing them to exist in putatively
diverse forms, spaces, and temporalities. Krauss writes, “Even if
video had a distinct technical support—its own apparatus, so to
speak—it occupied a kind of discursive chaos, a heterogeneity of
activities that could not be theorized as coherent or conceived as
having something like an essence or unifying core. . . . It proclaimed
the end of medium specificity. In the age of television, so it broadcast,
we inhabit a post-medium condition.”17 Similarly, the “new media
camp” has coined such terms as “post-media aesthetics” (Manovich)
and “post-media condition” (Weibel) in order to describe the ways
in which the idea of Greenbergian medium specificity became
fundamentally dismantled under the growing influence of electronic
and digital technologies. Manovich points out that the emergence
of television and video precipitated the “rapid development of new
artistic forms” (assemblage, happening, performance, installation,
time-based art, process art, etc.) that encouraged “the use of
different materials in arbitrary combinations (installation) . . .
[and] . . . aimed to dematerialize the art object (conceptual art).”18
For Manovich, the digital revolution of the 1980s and 1990s marks
the most consequential development of the dissolution of modernist
medium specificity, in that the shift to digital representation, along
with the introduction of new editing tools that could be applied
to most media and substitute traditional distinct artistic means,
has led to the dissolution of the “differences between photography
12 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

and painting (in the realm of still image) and between film and
animation (in the realm of a moving image)”19 on the material
levels of perception, storage, and distribution. In a similar vein,
Weibel outlines a historical trajectory of cinematic experiments
beyond filmic imaginary into three phases: the expanded cinema
movement in the 1960s extending the cinematographic code with
“analogous means”; the video revolution in the 1970s harnessing
“intensive manipulation and artificial construction of the image”;
and the digital apparatus in the 1980s and 1990s with “an
explosion of the algorithmic image and new features like observer
dependency, interactivity, virtuality, [and] programmed behavior.”20
Consequently, the loss of modernist medium specificity recognized
by both Krauss and the “new media camp” theorists (Manovich and
Weibel) asks them to revisit the traditional definition of a medium,
as well as paying attention to the array of artistic practices by which
that medium’s components interact with those of other media in
ways that challenge the previous distinctions between one art form
and another.
Krauss’s response is to redefine a medium as “a set of conventions
derived from (but not identical with) the material conditions of
a given technical support.”21 The medium in question here is not
reducible to its physical properties alone, but instead is reconceived
as a multiplicity of its material and technical components which
lend themselves to the development of artistic conventions, but
none of which have a directive power in determining the medium’s
expressive possibilities. Krauss draws upon the idea of the filmic
apparatus as exemplary of her definition of medium, considering
the medium as being characterized by its “aggregative” condition
in which medium specificity is still maintained and at the same
time internally differentiated according to the heterogeneity and
interdependence of its components. “Film consists of the celluloid
strip, the camera that registers light on the strip, the projector
which sets the recorded image into motion, and the screen,” she
writes, “as an artistic medium, it cannot be reduced to any of the
elements as objects, but all of them are united to constitute its
apparatus.”22 In so doing, Krauss avoids any direct association
between the medium and its physical substance as is the case of the
Greenbergian medium-specificity argument, and instead highlights
the significance of certain artistic expressions that call into question
the effect of a medium’s constraints and thereby reconfigure it as
 INTRODUCTION 13

an open field for the interplay of “conventions” and “possibilities.”

Hence her notion of the medium reconciles the requirement for
the material and technical specificity of a distinct medium with the
formal and conceptual diversity of artistic creation.
Krauss’s redefinitions of the medium as a “set of conventions”
derived from a “technical support,” and of medium specificity
as being occupied by the intersection of the medium’s internally
heterogeneous components and a range of expressive possibilities
given by the medium’s conventions, imply that a traditional medium
is capable of going beyond its previous formal boundaries and has
new alliances with other mediums. Calling this artistic operation
“reinventing the medium,” Krauss has praised several artists who
reexamine the inner complexity of older material supports and
techniques that are now perceived as outdated under the pervasive
influences of new media. Along with Marcel Broodthaers’s films,
which aim to investigate the nature of film in relation to cinema’s
primitive technique derived from the flip book (for instance, his
A Voyage on the North Sea [1973–1974]),23 these artists’ practices
include James Coleman’s “projected images” that waver between
photographic stillness and cinematic motion due to his idiosyncratic
blending of slide projection and the filmstrip’s photograms;24 Jeff
Wall’s conceptual photo-panel teeming with cinematic allusions;
and William Kentridge’s “drawings for projection” built on the
transformative amalgamation of outmoded technical remnants,
such as pre-cinematic optical toys, cartoon animation, and
handmade film.25 For Krauss, those artists’ works concern the
idea of a medium as “conventions out of which to develop a form
of expressiveness that can be both projective and mnemonic,”26
insofar as they interrogate the range of expressive possibilities
given by the material and technical properties of the old mediums
(painting, photography, and film) and their interrelationships in a
redemptive manner. It is significant to underline that those artists’
practices, as well as Krauss’s concept of the medium as technical
support, seem to reconcile the legitimacy of medium specificity
with the hybridization of the art forms based upon that medium.
Those artists are commonly grounded in their own recognition of
a medium’s specific features, but the medium used by the artists
lends itself to a variety of conceptual practices that seek out the
medium’s nature beyond the essentialist assertion that the medium’s
physical domains immediately guarantee its proper art forms. This
14 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

practice, then, promotes the combination of a medium with the

materials, techniques, and conventions of other mediums that had
been considered outside that medium’s standardized forms: for
instance, Coleman’s imagery transcends the standardized projection
of cinema and alludes to the photographic stillness embedded in
the filmstrip, and Kentridge’s drawings for projection transgress the
boundaries of charcoal drawing and excavate its historical relation
to hand-drawn animation and cartoon animation.
Jacques Rancière has extensively problematized the Greenbergian
conception of the medium whose material specificity alone defines
the medium’s essence and therefore buttresses the separation
of different art forms. In a similar manner as Krauss’s medium
as technical support, Rancière offers his own redefinition of a
medium as “milieu” in two ways: both as “the milieu in which
the performances of a determined artistic arrangement come to be
inscribed, [and as] the milieu that these performances themselves
contribute to configuring.”27 In doing so, he has paid attention
to a wide range of artistic practices that promote hybridizations
of mediums, or, mixtures and clashes between the art forms’
heterogeneous elements: that is, practices ranging from film and
video installation pieces to multi-platform projects that invite the
blurring of the boundaries between art and nonart, or between
the artistic object and the life-world.28 In an interview, Rancière
clarifies that all these practices are defined by “the erasure of
medium specificity, indeed by the erasure of the visibility of art as
a distinct practice.”29 Rancière finds in Jean-Luc Godard’s magnum
opus video work Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998) a telling
example of how his video-based montage emerges as the montage
of a “metamorphic operativeness, crossing the boundaries between
the arts and denying the specificity of materials.”30 Godard’s various
ways of fragmentation and juxtaposition by virtue of video’s
technical effects make possible a series of unexpected encounters
between particular cinematic images, paintings, and literary or
philosophical texts. Rancière’s emphasis upon the medium as
promoting hybridizations of previously separated arts echoes a
series of criticism by Nicolas Bourriaud, who coined a now well-
known term “relational aesthetics.” By this term, he singles out
the various open-ended works of art since the 1990s as a set of
artistic practices “which take as their theoretical and practical
point of departure the whole of human relations and their social
 INTRODUCTION 15

context.”31 A closer inspection of Bourriaud’s line of arguments

illustrates that his relational aesthetics are not solely concerned
with the renewal of the bond between art and life, but also between
art and its audience. For Bourriaud, relational aesthetics as the
principle of reestablishing art in this manner is built upon “random
materialism,” a particular materialism that “takes its point of
departure the world contingency, which has no pre-existing origin
or sense.”32 This materialism suggests that an individual material
adopted by an artist neither imposes its essence on his/her conception
of the artwork nor predetermines the form of the artwork. Rather,
it is the form that takes precedence over the material in the artwork.
Bourriaud defines a form as a “structure” which comes into being
in the “dynamic relationship enjoyed by an artistic proposition with
other formations, artistic or otherwise.”33
Manovich and Weibel also consider the emblem “post-media”
as opening up a situation in which digital technologies serve as an
environment in which techniques and aesthetic features of a media
are dislocated from its medium-specific boundaries and become
increasingly hybridized with those of other media. It is in these
two senses that the two theorists’ arguments on the post-media
conditions are not unlike Krauss’s “technical support” or Rancière’s
“milieu.” Manovich claims that the “post-media” aesthetics are
indebted to the developments of various software applications in
the areas of moving image production since the mid-1990s, such
as Adobe After Effects, Maya, Inferno, and so forth, through
which “previously separated media—live action cinematography,
graphics, still photography, animation, 3D computer animation,
and typography—started to be combined in numerous ways.”34 In
Weibel’s words, Manovich’s argument on this situation is rendered
as the “total availability of specific media” under the computer,
which results in two phases of contemporary art practice: the
“equivalence of media” and the “mixing of the media.” While the
first phase refers to the computer’s recognition of each art form
and its respective medium, the second means that its hardware and
software lead to the innovation of each form and the mixture of
its media-specific features: “Video and computer installations can
be a piece of literature, architecture or a sculpture. Photography
and video art, originally confined to two dimensions, receive
spatial and sculptural dimensions in installations. Painting refers
to photography or digital graphics programs and uses both. The
16 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

graphics programs are called paint programs because they refer

to painting. Film is proving to be increasingly dominant in a
documentary realism which takes its critique of the mass media
from video.”35
For the theorists of post-media conditions, the equivalence
and availability of all media under computer-based imaging and
interfaces does not necessarily lead to the elimination of previous
art forms. For Weibel, “it does not render the idiosyncratic worlds
in the world of devices or the intrinsic properties of the media
world superfluous. On the contrary, the specificity and idiosyncratic
worlds of the media are becoming increasingly differentiated.”36
For Manovich, the developments of various software applications
to simulate the aesthetics and working methods of previous media
amount to what he calls a “hybrid revolution” in the culture of the
moving image since the 1990s: a revolution characterized by the
reigning of the moving image sequences that use “juxtapositions
of media and hybrids of different media techniques as their basic
aesthetic principle.”37 This may not support the idiosyncrasy of
previous media as it is defined by the traditional medium-specificity
argument, insofar as computerization extracts their techniques from
their physical support and turns them into algorithmic operations.
But in other senses, this hybridity draws our attention to the extent
to which various technical procedures available from the software
applications are traced back to the moving image forms grounded
in previous media (film, photography, painting, video), such as
stop-motion animation, 2D and 3D computer graphics, optical
printing, analogue “effects” video, etc. Again, this availability of the
techniques of the previous media opens up possibilities for their
various fusion, including a peculiar technique’s migration into other
media aesthetics and forms: “While particular media techniques
continue to be used in relation to their original media, they can
also be applied to other media . . . motion blur is applied to 3D
computer graphics, [and] computer generated fields of particles are
blended with live action footage to give it an enhanced look.”38
It should be noted that Krauss’s argument on the post-medium
and the post-media discourses of the “new media camp” have an
antagonistic relationship with each other in terms of their opposing
views on the impacts of electronic and digital technologies.
Following Walter Benjamin, Krauss limits her ideas of the medium
as technical support and of reinventing the medium to the outdated
 INTRODUCTION 17

technological means (analogue photograph or film) that are

increasingly recognized as obsolete in the context of the proliferation
of electronic and digital technologies, assuming that they threaten
to eliminate the medium’s material and technical specificities and
assimilate artistic creativity and autonomy into their imperative
to mass communication.39 In so doing, her renewed theorization
of medium specificity turns out to be circumscribed within the
definitional polarity between the “medium” as the resource for
artistic expression (and the projector of artistic autonomy) and the
“media” as technological means of communication and culture. This
dichotomy validates the idea that Krauss’s idea of reinventing the
medium is possible only when the medium is regarded as obsolete,
therefore bracketing out any consideration of an array of artistic
practices that explore the expressive possibilities of the medium by
relating the medium’s material and technical components and its
conventions to those of new “media.” Thus, it becomes clear that her
thesis of the post-medium condition is still anchored in a belief in the
uniqueness and singularity of the means of artistic expression that
is part of the same Greenbergian modernist argument on medium
specificity that she originally intends to renew or overcome. This
problem becomes more conspicuous when we see that what Krauss
sees as the technical support for reinventing the medium, such as
analogue photography and film, is not totally dissociated from the
machine-based technologies implied by the term “media.” 40 The
fact that in Krauss’s theorization there is no space for considering
the technological components and their operations of old artistic
means enables me to choose the term “media” instead of “medium”
in my characterizations of the conditions connoted by the prefix
“post.”
On the other hand, it should also be worth noting that the
discourses on post-media are in some senses as reductive as Krauss’s
theorization of post-medium, in terms of their assumption that
electronic and digital technologies annihilate the idea of medium
specificity per se and assimilate any artistic practices into their new
technical principles. For Manovich, “transcoding,” translating all
existing media into numerical data and formats through simulation,
stands out as the most fundamental principle of new media, as it
suggests a process by which the computer negotiates with any of
media objects as well as their respective forms and techniques.
“Because new media is created on computers, distributed via
18 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

computers, and stored and archived on computers,” Manovich

contends, “the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly
influence the traditional cultural logic of media . . . [and] the computer
will affect the cultural layer.”41 His emphasis upon the processes of
simulation and transcoding, however, adds up to a celebration of the
possibilities for various combinations of any visual expressions and
techniques in moving image production within the same software
environment. This is linked to the following conclusion: “Whether
these media are openly juxtaposed or almost seamlessly blended
together is less important than the fact of this co-presence itself.”42
But there is no reason for postulating that the representations
and techniques of traditional media disappear, or, are “seamlessly
blended together,” just because some of their key definitional
prerequisites—for instance, a medium as it is defined by its stable
materiality that has a directive impact on the formation of an art—
become untenable under the influence of digital media. Considering
this, I argue that the formal, technical, and aesthetic components of
non-digital media are still at play in the operation of new media even
though the processes of simulation and transcoding replace their
materiality. Art critic Sven Lütticken supports my argument as he
astutely points out that the post-media theorists such as Manovich
do not consider the “role played by memory in guiding the use of
media.” For Lütticken, the reason that we still maintain the concept
of media even though digitization appears to absorb and introduce
notable changes in them is that the “media are not just tools or
machines,” but also “layerings of [their] conventions, and memories
[that] haunt us.”43 Consequently, electronic and digital technologies
might disallow the idea of medium specificity if it means an array
of boundaries that distinguish one art form from another, but this
does not necessarily mean the total annihilation of all the material,
technical, and aesthetic components in the traditional technologies
for artistic practices.
In sum, my comparative reading of the post-medium and the
post-media discourses demonstrates that despite the duality of
“medium” and “media,” both share with one another the demise
of the modernist medium-specificity argument that insists upon
the boundaries between one art form and another, and the
reconfiguration of media as internally divided and non-reductive
rather than the traditional idea of the medium as primarily defined
 INTRODUCTION 19

by its unique material properties. Besides these two commonalities,

Krauss’s observations on the artists whom she considers as
reinventing the medium in response to the post-medium condition
touch on the larger domains of the growing interactions between the
art forms (for instance, film and photography) that were previously
separated under the traditional logic of medium specificity, as
well as between the material and techniques that constitute each
of them. The post-media discourses also see those interactions as
being activated by the computational processes of simulation and
transcoding, by which different objects and techniques that were
hitherto demarcated become available and opened to a variety of
combinations. All the three correspondences are in line with critic
J. Sage Elwell’s understanding of the post-medium condition as
closely related to the post-media condition, in that both are premised
upon the deep hybridization of historically existing media in the age
of the digital: “The ability to document performance-based concept
pieces, the capacity to transform video into a medium itself, the
birth of digital technology and the ongoing realization of digital
convergence have all combined to yield a media fluidity. . . . In this
post-medium condition everything is a potential medium for artistic
creation, including digitization itself.” 44
While concurring with Elwell’s view, I would stress two more
implications of the three correspondences between the two
lines of the discourses. First, both discourses’ perspectives on
the hybridizations of different art forms and their components
commonly suggest that the idea of media hybridity does not
necessarily contradict—and thus can be compatible—with that of
medium specificity, which demands identifying a media’s material,
technical, and aesthetic components and the components’ differences
from those of other media: as in Krauss, her identification of the
filmic apparatus as aggregative, and as in Manovich, his view of
simulation and transcoding as intrinsic to digital technologies.
Second, both discourses’ privileged examples of the hybridized
artistic expressions—for Krauss, Coleman’s “projected images” and
Kentridge’s “drawings for projection” and, for Manovich, a variety
of moving images based upon the combination of the techniques
and aesthetics that were separated in different mediums (film,
photography, hand-drawn animation)—implicitly point to the
hybrid moving images that this book defines and classifies.
20 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Film’s post-media conditions

Since the 1990s, it has not simply been film as a celluloid-based
medium for the art of the moving image that the post-media conditions
outlined thus far have profoundly impacted, but also cinema as an
apparatus comprising film’s systems of production and reception,
its previously designated social site (movie theater), its experience
(collective viewing), its cultural status, and its history.45 Considering
these changes, this book characterizes these two consequences as
“post-filmic” and “post-cinematic” conditions, under which the
previous medium-specific boundaries of film or cinema become
fundamentally dissolved. The decline of the celluloid-based image
by the dominance of electronic and digital media arouses several
changes heralded by the “death of cinema” discourses on multiple
levels: dispensing with reality, the computer-generated imagery does
not entice us with any object of contemplation anchored in film’s
engagement with physical space and time;46 the changing value
of a cinematic system from the authenticity of going to the movie
theater to the interchangeability of viewing practices throughout
various platforms (DVD, digital projection, and the internet) in the
name of multimedia impoverishes cinema as a prominent form of
cultural experience;47 from the standpoint of avant-garde cinema,
the reigning of digital tools is regarded as thwarting the value of
artisanal cinema based on a filmmaker’s physical relation to the
materiality of film;48 and finally, the photochemical image as
indicative of a past to the viewer of a present is overshadowed by
the electronic and digital images that seem to collapse temporal
differences into real-time instantaneity.49 All these different yet
overlapping responses commonly point to the shrinking of film as
an art grounded in the primacy of the photographic moving image
whose celluloid-based materiality was believed to maintain the
image’s connection to the profilmic event, or of cinema as a cultural
institution that had long maintained its own setting, equipment, and
experience. Viewed together, these discourses of the death of cinema
are consolidated into what Anne Friedberg sees as a consequence
of media convergence, an end of filmic medium specificity in its
traditional sense. “The differences between the media of movies,
television, and computers are rapidly diminishing,” she writes, “the
movie screen, the home television screen, and the computer screen
 INTRODUCTION 21

retain their separate locations, but the types of images you see on
each of them are losing their medium-based specificity.”50 While all
these discourses on the death of cinema suggest the fluctuation of
cinema studies as a distinct discipline grounded in its previously
stable object of inquiry and concepts, it is also worthwhile to single
out two key post-media conditions of film that have been more
frequently raised in the discipline and thus deserve more focused
attention.
The first and foremost post-filmic condition is undoubtedly the
loss of film’s celluloid-based materiality and its subsequent erosion of
the value of the filmic image as causally linked to the passage of time
in reality. Theorists who highlight this condition tend to emphasize
an array of material, technical, and aesthetic discontinuities
between celluloid and digital production. For Mary Ann Doane, the
indexicality of cinema associated with the analogical relationship
of its image to the referent does more than differentiate it from
other art forms; the indexical in cinema bears the inextricability
of the medium—film’s chemical and photographic base—as well
as the possibility for “a transgression of what are given as material
limitations.”51 In this respect, digital technologies are viewed as
an increasing threat to the restraints and possibilities that were
previously guaranteed by the properties of celluloid medium insofar
as they “exude a fantasy of immateriality.”52 Doane’s point dovetails
an argument from the film preservationist Paolo Cherchi Usai, for
whom the immateriality of the digital image marks a fundamental
diversion from the historicity of filmic image, an image whose
history is derived from celluloid’s material and chemical features
subject to entropy and decay.53 Experimental filmmaker Barbette
Mangolte links this material difference to the difference of temporal
aesthetics between celluloid-based and digital cinema, asking why
it is difficult for digital cinema to express duration. For Mangolte,
the technical base of the image in digital cinema is fundamentally
distinct from the materiality of celluloid and the physicality of its
filmstrips, both of which enable the analogue filmic image to have a
unique relationship to the duration of the past. “In film, two seconds
is three feet and twenty seconds is thirty feet,” she writes. “There is
no way to ignore duration when you physically manipulate the piece
of film. Nothing like this exists in digital editing.”54 Rodowick takes
up and furthers Mangolte’s position, claiming that digital capture,
transcoding, and synthesis serve to express a different temporality
22 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

in digital cinema than the presentation of past duration because

they introduce a temporal discontinuity into the processes of
recording, editing, and display, unlike the continuities of analogical
transcription in the celluloid-based cinema. For Rodowick, digital
technologies transform the expression of duration in film, allowing
digital cinema to construct what he calls the “digital event,” one
that corresponds less to the duration of the world and lived time
than to the control and variation of numerical elements internal
in the computer’s algorithmic operations.55 Rodowick’s view on
the fundamental replacement of the inscription of lived duration
in the filmstrip with the algorithmic temporality of digital imaging
echoes Vivian Sobchack’s contrast between the cinematic cut and
the digital morph. Unlike the cut or dissolve in the celluloid-based
cinema that is used to effect a temporal change inscribed in the
series of filmstrips, in the digital morph “difference is accumulated
not as a whole constituted from discrete elements but rather as a
subsumption to the sameness of self-identity.”56
The theorists’ voices that herald the dissolution of filmic
materiality and the indexical value that it was supposed to
guarantee are associated with the second overarching post-media
condition of film, namely, the loss of the identity of film as a stable
object. This identity crisis has been suggested in two ways. First,
as for digital cinema, its images are defined not by the primacy of
lens-based imagery as in the case of celluloid-based cinema but by
their constitutive heterogeneity thanks to the computer’s capacity
to transcode any media object and its accompanying techniques.
In a similar way as Carroll’s use of the term “moving image” as a
broad category, Manovich argues that digital cinema consists of the
sum of live-action material (and extensively, analogue photograph),
painting, image processing, compositing, 2D and 3D computer
animation, and is defined as “a particular case of animation that
uses live-action footage as one of its many elements,” because “live
action footage is now only raw material to be manipulated by
hand—animated, combined with 3D-computer generated scenes,
and painted over.”57 Second, in accordance with the hybridity of
the images in digital cinema, the components of traditional cinema
have become assimilated into the language and operations of
the computer. For Manovich, cinema as a major art form of the
twentieth century has found new life, as its key elements—its ways
of viewing (framing, camera movements), of structuring time and
 INTRODUCTION 23

space (montage between different shots), of making narrative

space (a transparent, single-perspective space viewed through
the rectangular screen), etc.—are simulated and extended to the
basic principles of the user’s accessing, organizing, and interacting
with data and objects in the computer software.58 The avant-
garde film and modernist art in the 1920s, notably Bauhaus and
Russian constructivism, each represented by László Moholy-Nagy
and Dziga Vertov, lie at the heart of the translation of cinematic
elements into digital software and user interaction—that is, cinema’s
afterlife as a “cultural interface.”59 Here cinema is considered not
so much a definable object or stable medium, but instead a set of
representational, perceptual, and expressive conventions which
have been developed since its inception and have been borrowed
by new media.
At first sight, Manovich’s view on the cinema’s transition into the
cultural interfaces of the computer might cause discomfort for the
theorists (Rodowick, Doane, etc.) who have stressed the post-filmic
conditions of digital cinema, including the crisis of celluloid-based
cinema. The theorists rightly point out the technical differences
between celluloid-based cinema and digital imaging, as well as the
ways in which the latter unsettles both the image of the former and
its relation to reality. As we have seen in my reading of the discourses
of the “new media camp,” it is true that the post-media conditions
proposed by those discourses might run the risk of declaring both
the abolition of medium specificity per se (and of the concept of
the medium in general) and the computer’s triumphant absorption
of all the technical and aesthetic possibilities of previous media in
its transcoding and algorithmic operations. However, if we assume
that the technical, aesthetic components of previous media are not
entirely annihilated but that they persist in the representations and
operations of new media to varying degrees, Manovich’s overall
arguments in The Language of New Media (2001) and its related
writings can be read as entailing a range of hybridities inherent
in the images that digital technologies configure in their varying
relationships to cinema. That is, just as Manovich’s emphasis
upon numerical representation, by which any media element is
represented as a discrete sample dissociated from its material origin,
is read as highlighting the digital image’s discontinuity with the
image of celluloid-based cinema, his explanations of transcoding
and cultural interfaces appear to suggest an ineluctable reliance of
24 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the digital image upon the aesthetic and technical components of

celluloid-based cinema. Seen in this light, Manovich’s two ways of
redefining cinema can be read as less teleological than they seem
to be, even though some of his arguments are not totally free of
techno-deterministic utopianism.
If we consider the ontology of the digital image or digital cinema as
grounded in the negotiations between digital technologies’ technical
differences from celluloid-based cinema and their dependence upon
its technical and representational conventions, we can arrive at
another instance of the reconciliation between medium specificity
and media hybridity, or between the newness of digital technologies
and the continuities between celluloid-based cinema and digital
imaging. I would call these continuities between the old and the
new systems “diachronic hybridization.” This type of hybridization
echoes a media-archaeological perspective that has demonstrated
how digital technologies are situated in the forms and techniques of
past media, including Thomas Elsaesser’s framework on observing
how digital technologies could serve as a “time machine” through
which cinema’s variability and heterogeneity from its outset can be
exposed and reevaluated,60 as well as André Gaudreault and Philippe
Marion’s argument that digital cinema’s alliances with other media
platforms (such as theme parks, television, and the DVD) testify
to cinema’s recurring intermediality, namely, cinema’s adoption of
existing cultural forms (such as magic trick shows, park attractions,
stage performances, etc.) in its early stage.61 Philip Rosen’s brilliant
idea of “digital mimicry” turns this media-archaeological point of
diachronic hybridizations into a media-ontological concept. Rosen
coins this term to indicate the extent to which the manipulability
of the image afforded by digital equipments and graphic algorithms
possesses “the capacity to mime any kind of non-digital image,”
particularly, in his context, the indexical image produced by
photochemical media.62 This signals that digital manipulation,
unlike the rhetoric on the novelties of digital imaging in contrast
to the historically preceding media, is compelled to rely on and
incorporate their forms of imagery. In this way, regardless of the
increased flexibility and rapidity with which any alteration and
configuration of the image can be implemented, which Rosen
calls “practically infinite manipulability,” digital manipulation
must be seen as the mixture of the purely digital and its impure—
originally non-digital—elements. Thus, while the manipulative
 INTRODUCTION 25

capability of the digital might be regarded as idiosyncratic due to its

specificities such as numerical representation and transcoding, its
transformation of old media forms does not necessarily obliterate
their specificities on a formal and conventional level but instead
demands “a hybridity of old and new.”63
In fact, this scholarship’s sensitivity toward the hybridity of digital
cinema and imaging in relation to their historical precedents drives
my interpretation of film’s post-media conditions as well. However,
there is a key point of caution to be taken in adapting this diachronic
perspective, namely that the arguments of Doane, Rodowick, and
others on the digital’s differences from photochemical media are
still useful in keeping an eye on the technical structures of the
digital that inscribe their specific qualities and on the features of
the photochemical media that are eroded or displaced by the digital.
Thus, I would argue that in developing the perspective on diachronic
hybridization, we need to see both continuities and discontinuities,
or, to put it in another way, to see the digital’s media-specific
features that coexist with its hybrid aspects. For experimental
filmmaker and theorist Malcolm Le Grice, an awareness of digital
technologies’ fundamental media-specific differences from other
mechanical media systems, such as nonlinearity, programmability,
and interactivity, can be supplemented by the technologies’ reliance
upon those mechanical media: “Some of the more prominent current
technological developments in digital media are driven by a desire
to produce a time-based auditory and visual capacity which is more
or less continuous with the forms and language developed from
the history of cinema.”64 In this way, it is possible to understand the
post-filmic and post-cinematic conditions as being marked by the
dialectical correlation of medium specificity and hybridity, and to
conceptualize the images produced by digital technologies’ adoption
and processing of the photographic and filmic representations as
expressing different hybrid configurations of the old and the new. In
the words of Markos Hadjioannou, examining the ontology of the
images in terms of their hybridity is a “matter of dealing with the
new as not new or old but new and old, as simultaneously distinct
and interactively interrelated, so that each medium acquires a space
of its own but where boundaries are in fact always shifting.”65
As a supplement to the diachronic hybridization that has been
raised in the existing scholarship that positions digital techniques
and aesthetics within their incorporation of (or reliance upon)
26 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the techniques and aesthetics of film as old media, I propose

“synchronic hybridization,” a kind of hybridization derived from
the encounters between historically existing media technologies
in a given time. What I am calling synchronic hybridization in the
context of the post-media conditions points to the transformation
of cinematic components (cinematography, mise-en-scène, and the
experience of time and space) and their migration into other art
forms and platforms that were largely regarded as distinct from
the normative formation of the cinematic apparatus. Or, to put
it in another way, the conditions refer to the situations in which
those components have been thrown into the double movement of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization created by the growing
influence of post-filmic technologies and of the arts and media
that have been excluded from the traditional medium-specific
ideas of cinema. I develop this type of hybridization from another
discursive thread of cinema’s post-media conditions. In fact, it
was an array of “paracinematic” experiments in the 1970s that
prefigured a key moment of synchronic hybridization. Jonathan
Walley’s excellent study of the projects, emblematized by the works
of Anthony McCall, Paul Sharits, and Tony Conrad, demonstrates
that they are cross-disciplinary cinematic practices that aimed to
seek the properties and effects of cinema in relation to the domains
of performance, post-minimalism, conceptual art, and site-specific
art—that is to say, outside the material parameters of film.66 The
synchronic hybridization prefigured in the work of paracinema
has become quite popular since the 1990s, with the dramatic
rise of media installations based on the interplay of previously
distinct artistic expressions—film and video art, for instance—and
straddling between the gallery space and the film theater. Addressing
those diverse practices of installation which exploit and transform
cinematic elements through other art forms and technical means
(video and digital media), Raymond Bellour succinctly touches
on the idea of synchronic hybridization as follows: “All we have
is incertitudes—slip-sliding, straddling, flickering, hybridization,
metamorphosing, transition and passages between what is still
called cinema and the thousand and one ways to show moving
images in the vague and misnomered domain known as Art.”67 In
accordance with Bellour’s notion of the “passages” between cinema
and contemporary art, Francesco Casetti proposes the concept of
the “relocation of cinema” to indicate the post-cinematic situations
 INTRODUCTION 27

enabled by the influences of electronic and digital technologies,

under which cinema maintains some elements of the traditional
filmic experience while simultaneously involving a variety of
forms, platforms (DVDs, mobile phones, the internet, etc.), and
activities that it did not previously embrace.68 Pushing this idea
further, Casetti goes on to assert that the idea of the cinematic
apparatus under post-media conditions “no longer appears to be
a predetermined, closed, and binding structure, but rather an open
and flexible set of elements . . . an assemblage.”69 Bearing in mind
and developing the ideas of Walley, Bellour, and Casetti, I argue that
synchronic hybridization serves as a useful conceptual framework
for identifying an array of hybrid moving images produced when
the technical and aesthetic components of film go beyond the
standardized formation of the cinematic apparatus and are fused
with other art forms or media technologies, as well as for examining
the images’ complex and border-crossing ontological features.70
Consequently, this book argues that film’s post-media conditions
can be fully illuminated when we consider both types—diachronic and
synchronic—of hybridizations in regard to film’s growing impurity
and its persistence in other art forms and media technologies. As
for diachronic hybridization, digital technologies appropriate a set
of components that have previously defined the identity of film
(the photographic image, camera movements, styles of montage,
etc.), producing a variety of moving images by maintaining some of
its components’ properties (for instance, an image’s photorealistic
expression and the image’s reference to profilmic reality) and
transforming others with their specific features, such as simulation
and algorithmic manipulations. At the same time, synchronic
hybridization is useful in identifying and examining the diversified
connections between cinema and other existing or emergent
technologies, which are emblematized by, for instance, cinema’s
multiform distribution via DVDs, mobile media, digital projection,
Web-based platforms, etc. In either case, the moving images manifest
themselves in the varying coexistence and interrelation of the
features derived from the specificity of digital technologies, and those
derived from their hybridized reliance upon the material, technical,
and aesthetic elements of film. This is the case not only with digital
video (DV) cinema and spectacular narrative cinema (two major
categories of mainstream cinema), but also with avant-garde cinema,
with moving image installations marked by video’s deliberate
28 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

merger with cinema (contemporary art), and with various types of

digital media art that transform and relocate the components of
cinema through computer algorithms (new media art). Thus, it is a
key aim of this book to investigate the dynamic negotiations between
medium specificity and media hybridity in the moving images
produced in those practical territories of nonmainstream cinema.

Video’s post-media conditions

In the modernist age, analogue video was considered to be sharply
distinct from film because of two aesthetic features that were
expressive of its material and technical specificities. The first feature
is that, unlike the filmic image, the forms of video image hinge upon
an array of technical processes that directly deal with the continuous
flow of electronic signals as a constitutive factor of its material. That
is, any manipulation of the signal on all levels of the apparatus—
from the camera to the synthesizer or processor to the monitor—
leads to a shift in the end result of the image, ranging from a change
in its surface quality to a change in the relationship between two
image units (such as the frame and the shot). This ontological aspect
of the video image is what Yvonne Spielmann calls “transformation
imagery,” an array of “flexible, unstable, nonfixed forms of the
image” characterized by their “fluid pictoriality.”71 Spielmann’s
two features of the video image—“transformative imagery” and
“fluid pictoriality”—seem to establish a direct association between
the medium’s material and technical properties and the aesthetic
forms that they produce. This association alludes to a canonical
tendency of early video art which created a variety of video
imagery as part of an investigation into the new machine’s inherent
nature. Categorizing this tendency as “image-processing video,”
as exemplified by Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka,
Stephen Beck, Peter Donebauer, and Eric Siegel, to name just a few,
curator Lucinda Furlong describes it as evocative of Spielmann’s
two features. “The image-processing encompasses the synthesis and
manipulation of the video signal in a way that often changes the
image quite drastically,” Furlong writes. “it conjures up a number
of very specific stereotypes: densely layered ‘psychedelic’ images
composed of soft, undulating forms in which highly saturated colors
give a painterly effect, or geometric abstractions that undergo a
 INTRODUCTION 29

series of visual permutations.”72 Numerous accounts of video art

have largely defined the stereotypes of the “image-processing” as a
direct manifestation of video’s underlying substance, of its states of
change, and even of the processes or devices as such, most of which
were devised and modified by the artists themselves.
The second feature of video concerns the temporality of the
image. The medium-specific discourses on the time of video
consider simultaneity and instantaneity as the two most prevalent
and intertwining features, both of which are presupposed to be
unavailable to film. Early commentators such as David Antin,
Stanley Cavell, Bruce Kurtz, Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and others
glean both features from the technological formation of early
video—live feedback and the existence of the monitor, both
inherited from television.73 In contrast to film as a medium, defined
by the delay between the inscription of the past event and the time
of viewing, video is inherently marked by its engagement with the
“present tense.” The continuous flow of the electronic signal in
video is described as shaping the simultaneity of event recording
and transmission. Under this technological implementation,
instantaneity refers to the fact that video’s temporal dimension
is hardly stable, inasmuch as the continuum of the flow can be
interrupted in the processes of editing and transmission for the sake
of making its record of time ephemeral, multiplied, or dubious.
This is also deemed to be differentiated from film, a medium which,
during projection, structures time built upon the immutability of
the recorded past. Regardless of the differences between those
discourses, the emphasis on “simultaneity” and “instantaneity” is
predicated upon the direct association between the construction of
the video apparatus and the aesthetic determination of an artistic
medium.
The material, technical, and aesthetic boundaries of analogue
video have been weakened when it yielded to digitization, which
resulted in two changes that contributed to repositioning video as
“post-media.” The first conspicuous change is that digital video
is incorporated into an element of the computer that consists of
numerous software algorithms to simulate existing media, with its
hardware becoming invisible. The second—and more significant—
change is the shift from “transformation imagery” to “digital
manipulation” in terms of the material and technical dimensions of
video imagery. For examining this shift, it is meaningful to consider
30 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Timothy Binkley’s argument on digitization as the passage from

“transcription” to “conversion.” The term “transcription” indicates
that analogue media, including film and analogue video, transfer
an image from one physical medium to another for storage and
display it as materially homogeneous. As with analogue video, a
light wave captured by an electronic signal is first transcribed to
the processing instruments, then to the magnetic tape combined
with display and playback devices. Those two transcriptions ensure
the identity of the electronic current as the material source of the
image. This material homogeneity of the image is not maintained in
the digital “conversion,” by which an image is turned into abstract
numerical data. As with digital video, the electronic signal of
varying voltages is not transcribed, but converted into a pattern
of abstract relationships made by software-driven mathematical
algorithms. “Digital media do not make analogue ones obsolete,
since interfaces are needed to make numerical abstractions tangible,
and these converters usually connect digital numbers with analogue
events,” writes Binkley.74 A key difference between analogue
video’s transcription and digital video’s conversion, then, is that
in the latter’s case the shift on the surface of visual information
can occur through means other than transforming the electronic
waveform as a material component, the means to which the former
was restricted. This entails an array of procedures in digital video
post-production, which can be called digital manipulations. They
enable one to exert a wider range of control over the source image
than allowed by the processes of analogue video. In this way,
while deepening the instability and fluidity of the video image,
digital manipulation makes discontinuous the circuit of recording,
transmission, processing, and display—a continuity presupposed in
the transformation of analogue video.
This discontinuity of digital video has two remarkable
consequences for the ontology of digital video image in comparison
to its analogue counterpart. First, the visual information coming
from the electronic transcription of an event in front of the lens
does not become a prerequisite for the specificity of the video
image in the digital era. To put it differently, in digital video,
any sort of image taken from different material sources can be
converted into a series of information that is easily translated into
a flow of electronic signals. The now-popularized video software
applications are able to deal not merely with images captured by
 INTRODUCTION 31

the digital camera, but with image objects encoded from originally
different material formats (transferred film, scanned photography
and painting, 2D or 3D graphics). In this sense, it is tempting to
say that digital video echoes the way in which Manovich defines
digital cinema as the sum of previously disparate images, including
live-action imagery. Second, in tandem with the extendedness of the
source image of digital video, the manipulation paradigm includes
a resulting image which does not need to be directly concerned with
the intrinsic qualities of video as a distinctive medium. Since the
mid-1990s, video art has witnessed the increasing erosion of the
“pure” electronic moving image. A number of renowned video art
critics attribute this change to the digital revolution, an innovation
that causes changes in video technologies and, at the same time,
the merger of different media in generating imagery. For instance,
Chris Meigh-Andrews states: “The convergence of computer
manipulated imagery from a diverse range of sources, together with
the development of image display technologies . . . has rendered the
distinction between previously distinct media increasingly obsolete
and largely irrelevant.”75 Michael Rush also agrees with Meigh-
Andrews’s declaration of the weakened medium specificity of video.
“Video technology is now in a hybrid stage, combining all manner
of digital technologies in the creation of what is likely to be a new
medium,” Rush claims. “It is time for video to assume its place as
simply a ‘filmic’ medium, now that the word ‘filming’ refers to the
many ways in which the moving or animated image is created.”76
Since the 1990s, the transition from analogue transformation to
digital manipulation has also enabled the ontological distinction
between film and video in the light of temporality to be diminished.
As the projection of the prerecorded image increasingly replaced
the feedback system combined with the monitor, it promoted film’s
incursion into the exhibition space. Accordingly, the simultaneity
between recording and viewing did not become a prerequisite for
the temporality of video. Yet the dominance of projection is not a
single factor in this change. As to the possibility of converting film
into digitized files for projection, numerous artists came to cross
the boundaries between video and cinema in various ways, each
pursuing their own inquiry into the time of the moving image. Not
simply did the artists adopt a cinematic language and production
system for shooting with a video camera, but they often used
digital-based video technologies to deal with any format of footage
32 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

in editing and installation, whether shot on film or video. In this

way, the disintegration of the easily identifiable video apparatus has
triggered the interchangeability of cinema and video. Fueled by this
technological reformation, a number of exhibitions have brought
together a variety of works coming from different materials (16 mm
and 35 mm film, digital video, HD video) and installation formats
(film projection, video projection, or plasma-screen display) in the
name of examining notions of time which do not precisely conform
with the concepts of simultaneity and instantaneity. This suggests
that the ways of using video to explore the time of the moving image
became diversified. Organizing an exhibition devoted to works
derived from video projection, Marc Mayer already anticipated this
tendency in the mid-1990s, which he characterized as a “reflection
on time.” “Through real time or extreme slow motion, through
repetition, or rapid pictorial variation and recombination, through
editing,” he notes, “video projection resembles nontemporal art
without actually compromising the temporal dimension.”77
In sum, the paradigm shift to digital manipulation entails that the
video image has become uncoupled from the particular technologies
of video’s early years, and that it has merged with the material,
technical, formal, and aesthetic constituents of other media images
in terms of its aesthetic dimensions of surface and temporality. It is
from these two consequences that we can identify video’s post-media
conditions in its digital phase. Despite these conditions, however,
the affinity between early video’s transformative capacities and the
manipulation of digital video has not drawn specific attention in the
still-modernist criticism on contemporary video art. What should be
underlined in this context is that the property of video that makes
their source image temporally fluid and figuratively flexible is still
maintained in its digital version. For illustrating this point, it is of
great help to refer to Manovich’s remark on the relationship between
the electronic and the digital in terms of the instability of the image:

To a significant extent, an electronic signal is already characterized

by similar variability because it can exist in numerous states. For
example, in the case of a sine wave, we can modify its amplitude
or frequency; each modification produces a new version of the
original signal without affecting its structure. . . . All that happens
when we move from analogue electronics to digital computers is
that the range of variations is greatly expanded.78
 INTRODUCTION 33

To expand on Manovich’s view on the transition of video from

electronic media to the digital, it could be argued that the analogue
video image is relatively “hard” in comparison to the “softness” of
digital video imagery, the latter of which is able to encompass images
derived from both electronic and non-electronic signals (pixel), or
from both signal-based images and the encoded versions of object-
based images (picture, photography, film). While this ontological
heterogeneity of the image based on the computer’s processes of
abstraction and transcoding can be seen as specific to digital video,
the capability of video to alter the figurative and temporal qualities
of the source image remains continuous from analogue video. It
is here that the digital video image involving elements of visual
media previously distinct from purely electronic imagery—namely,
photography, painting, and film—is also conceptualized as both
medium-specific and hybrid. Spielmann indeed suggests this point
in her discussion on the importance of the intersection of analogue
video with the digital. “Due to its open apparatus—the processing
and transformative characteristics of the electronic image—video,
despite its status as an analogue medium, shares significant features
of the digital,” she notes, “both the electronic and the digital
media forms of video have the potential to produce imagery in any
direction and dimension in an open structure.”79
With this dialectical juncture of medium specificity and hybridity
in mind, I would claim that what matters in the video’s post-media
conditions is the persistence of the transformative techniques of
analogue video in the manipulation paradigm of digital video.
Those who engage in the debate on the status of video in the digital
era nonetheless tend to emphasize the weakened link between those
techniques and the formal and aesthetic imperatives that video is
directed to pursue; as Spielmann further argues: “The point I want
to stress is that such contemporary ‘video installations’ are less
concerned with video than with other media forms.”80 Her argument
suggests that the importance of video may be neglected when the
manipulative features of video do not deal with the processes of
video as such, but instead with the forms or conventions of film
and photography. However, Spielmann’s downplaying of the hybrid
forms of moving image in digital video contradicts her observation
on the correspondence between electronic transformation and
digital manipulation for two reasons: first, in terms of materiality,
the image encoded from the celluloid-based media exists under the
34 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

condition of the interchangeability between electronic signal and

digital pixels; and second, for this reason, the image lends itself to
certain changes made by the manipulative techniques of video such
that it acquires different qualities in its final state. For these two
reasons, the exploration of other media forms via the manipulation
of digital video does not necessarily mean the elimination of
video’s material and technical specificities (the amalgamation of
electronic signals and digital pixels) in the light of its transformative
characteristics. Hence, what is at the heart of evaluating digital
manipulation is tracking how these specificities of digital video
are linked to the set of corresponding representational practices
that testify to video’s post-media conditions in the two types of
hybridization, as is the case with the ontology of the digital image
in relation to film. As to diachronic hybridization, digital video
maintains a range of continuities with its analogue predecessor
while inscribing its own material and technical specificities in the
resulting image; and as to synchronic hybridization, its expressive
possibilities have expanded beyond video’s previously established
medium-specific boundaries that demarcated video art from other
visual arts, therein giving it an unprecedented relationship with the
components of painting, photography, and film.

Intermedial approaches to hybrid

moving images
The post-media conditions of film and video examined thus
far eventually aim at identifying the two key conditions for the
emergence of hybrid moving images across different media of art:
first, diachronic hybridization as a type of hybridization caused by
the transition from old media (photography, film, and analogue
video) to digital media technologies, which activates the awareness
of the old media’s internal aggregative characteristics and entails a
broad system of interactions between the old and the new media;
and second, synchronic hybridization as the sum of conceptual and
technical operations that reposition the components of all these
existing media and call into question, traverse, and redraw their
formal and generic boundaries. Against the backdrop of these two
hybridizations, this book defines the ontology of hybrid moving
 INTRODUCTION 35

images as that of “coexistence and interrelation.” This suggests

that the images include an array of new production processes by
which the material, technical, aesthetic properties of more than
two media engage in creating the images thanks to digitization.
As a result, the hybrid moving images are marked either by the
simultaneous existence of different media elements (for instance,
the coexistence of stillness and movement) or by the transformation
of one media’s elements through those of the other (for instance,
the layering of different temporal traces in a single picture frame).
Although previous studies on the digital image have occasionally
addressed these two features, they have tended either to exaggerate
its difference from the images of old media or to generalize its
constitutive hybridity as the seamless absorption of the traces of
non-digital media. It is my ambition in this book to overcome these
two shortcomings and establish the hybrid moving image as a
conceptual field for thinking how the previous ontological accounts
of the similarities and differences between old and new media are
contested and reconfigured in a variety of ways.
In the following I shall tease out these two definitions of
hybridization under post-media conditions by discussing how they
appear in the domain of the moving image. This is to propose the idea
of intermediality not simply as a methodological tool for approaching
and analyzing the hybridity of the moving image, but also as a type
of configuration based on the mixture of the components from more
than two media and thus on their co-presence and interrelation (For
this reason, I prefer using the term “configuration” to “figuration”).
In this sense, the two ontological hybridizations demand a formalist
view on media technologies and their role in shaping visual
expressions, because it is on the level of their forms that the aspects
of these hybridizations, including the simultaneous occurrences of
their media components, become discernible.
As a methodological concept, intermediality is an umbrella-term
that refers to the border crossings between different media and
the mixture of them in art forms and practices. Irina O. Rajewsky
and Werner Wolf provide broader definitions of this term, such
as “a generic term for all those phenomena that . . . in some way
take place between media,”81 and one that is “applied to any
transgression of boundaries between conventionally distinct media
of communication.”82 Despite the extreme variety of the subjects and
the approaches to intermediality, it is commonly acknowledged that
36 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

intermediality suggests a methodological tool for paying attention

to the interactions between different art forms or disciplines and
analyzing their types such as dialogue, cohabitation, exchange,
transformation, collision, appropriation, and repurposing. What
is at issue, then, is how to distinguish which particular kind of
intermediality fits into the types of moving image based upon the
interactions between different art forms or media components.
Rajewsky’s concept of “media combination” is particularly useful
for defining and analyzing hybrid moving images in question. This
refers to an array of media artifacts whose intermedial quality
is determined by “the media constellation constituting a given
media product, which is to say the result or the very process of
combining at least two conventionally distinct media or medial
forms of articulation.”83 Unlike other kinds of intermediality,
including the transformation of a given media product into another
medium (as in the case of the adaptation of a novel by film), or a
self-reflexive inquiry into the extent to which an art form (such as
film) is comprised of conventions and styles from other media,84
the category of media combination is able to deal with a more
particular case in which previously distinct technological media
intimately merge with each other in a newly constituted form on the
material, technical, and aesthetic levels, while also maintaining the
focus on the other aspects of intermediality. Rajewsky’s category
of media combination inspires me to consider the concept of
intermediality as indicating an array of particular moving images
based on the varying combinations of components from film, video,
and the digital. The notion of combination can be interchangeable
with the term “configuration,” a concept coined by Joachim Paech
to characterize intermediality as particular image forms in which
relations between different media technologies are made visible:
“The trace of the medium would become describable as a figured
process or a configuration in the film and in the dispositive situation
of observing the film (at the cinema, on television or video, etc.).”85
Here, Paech’s concept of configuration does not simply emphasize
the combinatory nature of an image form that results from the
encounter between the material, technical, and aesthetic elements
of more than two media. More significantly, intermediality in
this sense is understood as a constitutive process by which those
elements negotiate with each other in their engagement with the
formulation of a new image.
 INTRODUCTION 37

The concept of intermediality as a range of media combinations

or configurations helps to distinguish hybrid moving images from
the objects of investigation that previous cinema studies have
adopted regarding the comparative analyses of the relationships
between cinema and other arts, such as literature and painting.
As Ágnes Pethő succinctly summarizes, these studies cover a wide
area of researches, encompassing (1) the mutual influences of
cinema and the arts, (2) the embedded representation of painting
or literature in cinema, and (3) common phenomena that can be
viewed comparatively in cinema and the arts.86 Given Rajewsky’s
definition of media combination, it becomes obvious that all the
comparative studies on the three subjects of intermediality have
ultimately resulted in confirming either film’s reliance upon other
art forms (literature, painting, and theater) as constitutive of its
established specificity or cinema’s integration of their languages and
conventions in its particular organization of images and narratives,
such as first-person narration and the composition of tableau vivant.
These two lines of the cinema studies on intermediality, which are
still confined to the purviews of self-reflexivity and intertextuality,
suggest that less attention has been paid to the moving image
artworks that are marked by their combinatory implementations
of more than two media, as well as to the changes in the material
and technical dimensions of the media as that which make possible
such implementations.
Despite this paucity, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s
now-famous concept named “remediation,” which is defined
as “the representation of one medium in another,”87 is perhaps
one of the most pivotal theories for conceiving intermediality
as a configuration of hybrid moving images from a diachronic
perspective. In this view, a new medium is always differentiated
into multiple material, technical, and formal elements derived from
its repurposing of older media, (e.g., the user interfaces of video
game space are based on their algorithms’ repurposing of filmic
techniques). At the same time, this view supposes that a new medium
cannot be isolated as a transcendental entity inasmuch as it can be
repurposed as a constitutive element of other emerging media. “A
medium is that which remediates,” Bolter and Grusin thus write,
“It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social
significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them
in the name of the real.”88 Bolter and Grusin’s two additional terms,
38 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

“immediacy” and “hypermediacy,” emerge as two representational

strategies of remediation that are applicable to historically existing
media. While immediacy refers to a range of processes by which
the presence of the medium is denied and effaced, so hypermediacy
is typified by a fascination with the medium itself as it brings its
styles and conventions into relief. Digital technologies, for Bolter
and Grusin, are also governed by immediacy and hypermediacy
as the double logic of remediation: for instance, just as the World
Wide Web encapsulates the logic of hypermediacy as expressive of
the desire for multiplicity, so do digital photography and computer
graphics for animated films and computer games imitate and adopt
the criteria of Cartesian geometry and linear perspective in order to
achieve the illusion of transparency. Bolter and Grusin view cinema
as a telling example of an art form characterized by the processes
of “mutual appropriation” of film and digital media in the double
logic of immediacy and hypermediacy. Just as numerous video
games borrow the representational strategies of film, from camera
positions to the language of editing, so do contemporary films adopt
digital viewing interfaces (small-screen viewing devices, interactive
interfaces, etc.) and computer graphics, thereby multiplying their
media references. To be sure, there are two shortcomings in Bolter
and Grusin’s theory of remediation as it is applied to a variety
of hybrid moving images in question. First, their examples of
remediation tend to privilege the digital artifacts of mainstream
cinema and its related entertainment, therefore bypassing various
hybridizations that occur in the domains of experimental film and
video and media installations.89 Second, and more significantly, it
is not difficult to see that their conceptual pair of immediacy and
hypermediacy reminds us of the aesthetic dichotomy of realism
and modernism, which leads to obscure the ways in which digital
technologies transform the material, technical, and aesthetic
components of an old media to construct a new, hybridized
configuration of the image. My classification and analysis of hybrid
moving images accordingly aim at overcoming these two limitations
of the concept of remediation while acknowledging its effectiveness.
Raymond Bellour’s concept of the “entre-images [between-
the-images]” can be seen as a prominent concept for considering
intermediality as a type of image configuration based on synchronic
hybridization, namely, a hybridization by which properties of more
than two media representations are set in motion and made visible
 INTRODUCTION 39

under post-media conditions. By this process, the resulting image

adds up to the complex exchange between more than two media
technologies, as it reveals the differences and similarities between
them yet does not strictly pertain to any of them. This is the reason
that Bellour sees the entre-images as occupying the “space of all
these passages” [l’espace de tous ces passages]. For Bellour, video
is a medium that particularly opens up and configures this liminal
space, since

video is above all a go-between. Passages . . . between mobile and

immobile, between the photographic analogy and that which
transforms it. Passages, corollaries, that traverse without exactly
encompassing these "universals" of the image: thus, between
photography, film, and video, a multiplicity of superimpositions,
of highly unpredictable configurations, is produced.90

For Bellour, video plays a particular role in the intersections of

different media such as painting, photography, film, and the computer
image, as its multidimensional or heterogeneous characteristics
generate certain image forms in which a medium undergoes
reflexive processes in relation to the other media. Initially, video
goes hand in hand with film as a medium that produces the moving
image based on the bond between the camera and profilmic reality
because it emulates film’s lens-based mechanism. At the same time,
however, video’s particular electronic specificities allow us to create
an image that takes on both pictorial qualities and spatiotemporal
qualities different than those of film—the latter aspect refers to the
effects of multidimensionality and omnidirectionality within the
video image’s picture frame, which becomes distinct from the linear
ordering of visual elements and the clear demarcation between the
on-screen and the off-screen spaces in the cinematographic image.
Also, these two aspects, which derive from the technical processes of
the electronic apparatus, can also be applied to the computer-based
imaging system, through which one can access and manipulate
any type of visual data, but without necessary reliance upon the
recording process of the cinematographic and the videographic
images.91 Considered this way, video is a medium whose specific
features are identified, yet at the same time open to the intermedial
relations of its historical predecessors and descendants. The entre-
images, then, opens up the space for a hybrid image form in
40 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

which these relations are inscribed and through which the viewer
encounters both the convergence of elements of those media and
their divergent transformations.92
Bellour rightly places the entre-images within the two axes
of hybridization. On the horizontal axis (which corresponds to
synchronic hybridization) lie new images produced by the exchange
and collision between different media images—film, photography,
video, and the digital—that were hitherto presupposed to be
distinct mediums (what he calls “passages of the image”). On the
vertical axis (which corresponds to diachronic hybridization) lies
a twofold historical change in the cinematic apparatus, mobilized
by electronic and digital technologies (what he calls the “double
helix”): the technologies make the cinematic apparatus go beyond
its traditional formations while assimilating those formations into
their capacities for converting, storing, and transmitting data.93 For
Bellour, electronic and digital artifacts cause cinema to be dissolved,
while simultaneously emerging as the resources for the evolution
of new cinematic forms by which the relationship between old and
new media is variably reexamined.
Like Bellour’s entre-images, Yvonne Spielmann’s conception of
“intermedia” most extensively encapsulates the framework for
considering intermediality as a particular type of configuration
based on the hybrid relations between different media components
from a synchronic perspective: “The characteristic of intermedia
may be identified in certain forms of the image, when elements of
the static and the moving image are interrelated to create a third
form of the image.”94 Spielmann draws upon Peter Greenaway’s
Prospero’s Books (1991) in order to identify the two characteristics
of the intermedial image. In this high-definition video film, Greenway
uses electronic and digital processing to rework and transform both
photographic and filmic images. This processing enables a series of
static images, reminiscent of the serial photography of Eadweard
Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, to be animated in a manner
similar to the generation of cinematic illusion. The resulting visual
expressions include the dynamic insertion of the digitally animated
animals or human figures (i.e., still images, whether painterly
rendered or photographed) into the live-action film frame, or point
to the “cluster,” a particular type of image that is made through
the “multiple layerings of different images or image elements”
and results in a “spatial density.”95 The cluster serves as a media
 INTRODUCTION 41

object that requires an intermedial approach as a methodological

tool for analyzing the array of processes by which different media
elements are merged into a hybrid type of image. Spielmann singles
out these processes of interrelation as “collision” and “exchange.”
First, collision points to the simultaneous existence of elements from
different media, for instance, elements of filmic images and static
(painterly or photographic) images, in the form of another media
technology, for instance, the computer-generated or videographic
image. Second, exchange means that the media-specific types of
images are “reworked in other media at the level of form.”96 For
instance, the interval between successive frames in film is processed
by electronic and digital imaging system. Thus, the intermedia image
calls upon us to see that its hybrid modality hinges upon how these
components are maintained or transformed in the structure of
synchronic hybridization. Seen in this light, Spielmann’s concept of
intermedia allows us to see both the forms and conventions of the
traditional media image and the new ontological features introduced
by electronic and digital technologies. That is, the intermedia paradigm
affirms the material and technical differences of digital media from
their analogue predecessors while also turning the viewer’s attention
to the ways in which these two are interrelated in a new image form.
Spielmann’s concept of intermediality leads us to recognize
the two ways in which the post-media conditions of film and
video, marked by a media’s differentiation into its set of material,
technical, and formal elements, add up to different types of hybrid
moving image. First, it functions as a methodological framework
for identifying the image as the configuration of elements coming
from different media, which is marked by different patterns of co-
presence and interrelation. Second, it suggests that intermediality in
the hybrid moving image is grounded in the interrelated ontological
conditions of media technologies, namely, the diachronic and
synchronic hybridizations of historically existing media. Despite
these two advantages, however, Spielmann’s privileging of the
cluster as a prominent form of intermedia image overlooks other
possible forms of intermediality that are not contained within
the aesthetics of sheer juxtaposition as the hallmark of modernist
visual art. The types of media artifacts I classify and examine in this
book’s chapters suggest that there is a wide range of possibilities for
various correlations of film, video, and the digital on their material,
technical, and aesthetic levels, which results in different coexistences
42 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

of, and exchanges between, the components of those media in the

artworks of the moving image.
Addressing the question of how new media technologies
simultaneously depend upon and differ from conventional media for
creative expression, Between Film, Video, and the Digital theorizes
the reconfiguration of an artistic medium and its specificity in the
context of post-media conditions that enable hybridizations of film,
video, and the digital. This wide range of scope is intended to suggest
that post-media conditions are not limited to a particular genre or
mode of practice. That is, post-media conditions are marked by the
attempts of the artists and filmmakers who have aspired to redraw
the boundaries between different media and their corresponding art
forms or genres, and thereby render them constantly shifting, and
by the hybrid images through which their conceptual and technical
devices are inscribed and made visible. In this sense, this book is a
critical intervention in the topology of the contemporary art and
culture of the moving image, correlating an extensive overview
of their tendencies with a series of in-depth analyses in the light
of a theorization of media hybridization in accordance with the
reconfiguration of medium specificity.
In tracing the complex breeds of hybrid moving images and
examining their formal and technical aspects, the book offers five
categories as conceptual tools: “videographic moving picture,”
“hybrid abstraction,” “transitional found footage practice,”
“intermedial essay film,” and “cinematic video installation.” I
propose these categories to highlight that which happens to the
media that would remain as distinct if they had remained under
the doctrine of modernist medium specificity, and the changes that
post-media conditions bring to the media’s material, technical,
and aesthetic layers. These conceptual constructs are not mutually
exclusive in terms of the logic of differentiation applicable to the
traditional concept of classification: rather, I intend to leave intact
the overlaps between the categories in order to underline the extent
to which the images’ ontology of coexistence and interrelation is
dispersed across different platforms and genres, constructing a
range of aesthetic constellations that a seemingly disparate group
of artworks commonly realize. That is, these overlaps are a key
aspect of the post-media age.
The aesthetic constellations, then, are concerned with a host
of concepts that the rich traditions of cinema and media studies
 INTRODUCTION 43

have pursued in theorizing: indexicality, movement, duration,

materiality, archive, historicity, memory, and apparatus. I introduce
and elaborate on the five categories of hybrid moving images as
artifacts that offer a renewed understanding of those concepts:
videographic moving pictures in relation to indexicality, movement,
and instantaneity; hybrid abstraction in relation to abstraction and
materiality; transitional found footage practices in relation to the
historicity of cinema and the concept of archive; intermedial essay
films in relation to the memory of cinema; and finally, cinematic
video installations in relation to the compound idea of the cinematic
or video apparatus. In this way, Between Film, Video, and the
Digital does not simply establish itself as a monograph dedicated to
post-media and the hybrid moving image as new theoretical arenas
for media transition and the ontology of the moving image, but
also offers updated accounts of how traditional cinema and media
studies can be revivified in its encounter with its neighboring media
technologies and art forms.
The first and second chapters position and track down
two aesthetic tendencies of hybrid moving images, namely,
photorealistic and abstract aesthetics, in the light of video’s post-
media conditions. Chapter 1 discusses an array of artworks by Sam
Taylor-Johnson, Mark Lewis, Bill Viola, Fiona Tan, Adad Hannah,
and David Claerbout, all of which make porous the categorical
distinctions between film, photography, and painting by creating
an ambiguous correlation between stillness and movement enabled
by digital video. It classifies their images as “videographic moving
pictures”—a combination of “moving” as pertaining to film and
video with “picture” as implying the mode of stillness common to
painting and photography. The importance of examining this type
of the hybrid moving images lies in its challenge of a few traditional
conceptions of traditional art forms: photography as privileged
by the material stability of its chemical basis and defined by its
capacity to freeze the moment in time; photography demarcated
from painting and cinema; and video art whose images are clearly
distinct from the filmic image. This chapter stresses a crucial role
of digital video in engendering the interaction of three properties
derived from film, video, and the digital: film’s inscription of
photographic reality, analogue video’s ability to alter the surface
and temporality of the source image, and digital manipulation’s
blending and mediation of the two. Considering digital video this
44 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

way, it is possible to conceptualize videographic moving pictures

as remediating and refashioning two historically existing image
forms that experimental cinema has long developed in the light of
cinema’s ineluctable link to photographic stillness, which I call the
“film stilled” and the “still film.” This chapter closely examines the
works of the artists who have elaborated upon these two image
forms with the aid of digital video. In doing so, I argue that the
layering of photographic and cinematic properties common to
the practitioners’ videographic moving pictures enables a set of
concepts grounded in the analogue photographic media to have
unprecedented relations to their previously assumed opposites:
indexicality connected to manipulability, and photographic pastness
to cinematic presentness.
Chapter 2 provides a classification of hybrid moving images that
opposes videographic moving pictures due to their abstractionist
aesthetics and materialist energy, while also setting up the historical
genealogy of the images. By creating this type of hybrid moving
images, artists and filmmakers such as Evan Meaney, Rosa Menk­
man, Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, Takeshi Murata, Lynn
Marie Kirby, Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Johanna Vaude, Jürgen Reble,
and Jennifer West have led to a notable tendency of contemporary
digital experimental film and video that has brought into relief
and explored the materiality of media. This chapter singles out a
­dynamic correlation of representational and abstract components
in the practitioners’ images as a key character of the practitioners’
hybrid images. In so doing, it claims that this correlation testifies
either to the transition of the aesthetic of abstraction in structural
film and analogue video to the material substrates and algorithms
of digital imaging, or to the continual interaction between the
material traces of film and video. In either case, digital video can be
seen as both inheriting its aesthetic of abstraction from its analogue
predecessors and inscribing its code-based material and technical
specificities in the resulting abstract imagery. Encompassing the
two, I offer “hybrid abstraction” as a second category of the hybrid
moving image driven by materialist energies, with “digital glitch
video” and “mixed-media abstraction” as its subcategories.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus upon how the transformative or
manipulative elements of analogue and digital video are used to deal
with an array of problems raised by film’s post-media conditions,
including how the post-filmic technologies shift the ontological state
 INTRODUCTION 45

of the historically existing images, how the post-filmic technologies

can serve to continue and update filmmakers’ celluloid-based
techniques in reworking those images, and how those technologies
construct both the memory of those images and that of the
filmmakers who reflect upon or investigate those images. Chapter
3 tracks several experimental filmmakers (Vicki Bennett, Gregg
Biermann, Christoph Girardet-Matthias Müller, R. Bruce Elder, and
Ken Jacobs) who elaborate their found footage practices with the
help of digital video. I define their different uses of digital video
as “transitional found footage practices,” given that their resulting
images reflect two ideas of transition regarding the ontology of
cinema in the digital age: a transition of film-based techniques for
traditional found footage filmmaking such as montage and special
effects, and a transition of found footage itself from celluloid to the
stream of digital video on the levels of spectatorship and of the film
image itself. My interest in the implication of transitional found
footage practices, particularly what the hybridity of their images and
techniques suggests for found footage filmmaking’s major objective
of attempting to reconstruct the archive of the past, is extended
into Chapter 4. Here, I focus upon a particular group of essay films
marked by their uses of video technologies (analogue video, digital
video, and internet-based video platforms) to process and retrieve
film-based imagery (images made with 8 mm, Super-8mm, 16 mm)
that shapes the landscapes of their filmmakers’ personal memory
and reflection. Such filmmakers as Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Clive
Holden, and Jonathan Caouette employ these multiple formats in
their essayistic projects in order to investigate how the memory
trace inscribed in film is transformed and reconfigured as it passes
through the filters and textures of post-filmic media. Accordingly,
these filmmakers’ works are replete with images in which the traces
of celluloid dynamically interact with the properties of video,
images that result in the complex configuration of the two media
as testifying to the construction of their memory and subjectivity
as open and dialogical. In this sense, I call this type of essay film
“intermedial essay films.” In these two chapters, the dialectic of
convergence and divergence, or medium specificity and hybridity,
extend into another dialectical dimension of these practices: that
is, the filmmakers’ embrace of new technologies stands between
past and present in that they aspire to renew their technical and
historical exploration of film’s past with the present media systems
46 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

while also acknowledging the extent to which these systems mutate

the celluloid-based image.
The last chapter extends the dialectic of medium specificity and
media hybridity from the level of the image to that of the apparatus
as it addresses a particular group of media installations that have
been popular due to the mutual fascination between cinema and
contemporary art since the 1990s. Numerous artists, as well as
established filmmakers including Chris Marker, Harun Farocki,
Abbas Kiarostami, to name just a few, have extensively used video
technologies to draw on and manipulate cinematic image and
narrative, such that their works explore the sensorial and mnemonic
power of cinema as an art of spectacle and how influential and global
cinema was in shaping their memories and artistic ideas. As a result,
the works’ resulting constitution appears to be the amalgamation of
cinema and video on the levels of their image and apparatus. In this
chapter, I characterize these works as “cinematic video installations,”
analyzing the ways in which the medial components of cinema and
video are correlated. Providing a critical remapping of how cinematic
video installations have been discussed in both the discourses of
post-cinema and those of contemporary art, I argue that cinematic
video installations must be viewed as a complex hybridization of
cinematic and video-based technologies. This argument entails
viewing video not as anchored in a limited set of material and
technical devices, but as an electronic and digital dispositif that
offers the artist a wider range of conceptual and technical methods
for the aesthetics of hybridity, impurity, and confusion. Bearing this
in mind, I identify in this chapter spatialization (materializing the
spectatorial experience of the film image, montage, and narrative in
the theatrical or architectural forms of screen-related apparatuses)
and temporalization (manipulating the time of the image by means
of digital video’s capacities) as two key operations that video
technologies execute in adopting and altering the components and
historical traces of cinema. By performing formal analysis of the
installation pieces by several artists or filmmakers such as Farocki,
Kutluğ Ataman, Doug Aitken, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Douglas Gordon,
Candice Breitz, and Stan Douglas, I demonstrate that the ambiguous
cohabitation of cinematic and video-based specificities occurs not
only in the domain of the image space but also in the formation of
the apparatus that frames the image and determines the viewer’s
relation to the image.
 chapter one

Videographic moving
pictures: Remediating
the “film stilled” and
the “still film”

Introduction: “moving pictures”

in the post-photographic era
In fall 1977, art critic Douglas Crimp organized an exhibition that
showcased the work of Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, and others. He
then placed these works under the umbrella of “pictures”—also the
title of the essay dedicated to the show—in the sense that they were
“not confined to any particular medium.”1 By the term “pictures,”
Crimp meant the various ways in which artists appropriate
and interweave the technical components and representational
conventions of different media (not simply photography, film,
video, and performance, but also painting and drawing) to compose
particular images, which are difficult for viewers to locate within
a particular physical substance: “We are not in search of sources
or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each
picture there is always another picture.”2 More interesting than this
postmodern account is Crimp’s use as example “pictures” two films
allied and resonant with photography: Goldstein’s The Jump (1979),
48 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

in which the shimmering figure of a diver continually appears

and disappears on the screen via rotoscoping, and Longo’s Sound
Distance of a Good Man (1978), a film that blends a fixed frame as its
only formal element with the “literal time of the performed events.”3
These two films defy the tenet of modernist medium specificity that
demands stable, formal boundaries drawn by the medium’s material
substrate, either by foregrounding a transition of the human figure
from a still image to a moving one (Goldstein’s film) or by endowing
the motionless subject, which appears to be a frozen image, with a
lived duration to generate a subtle juxtaposition between past and
present (Longo’s film).
Both forms can be called “moving pictures” in a sense; but in this
case, the word “picture” must be understood not simply to assist
“movement” denoted by the word “moving” but also to imply the
mode of stillness, given that one of its primary meanings denotes
a “representation made by various means (as painting, drawing,
or photography).”4 Faced with this confusion, Arthur Danto has
defined “moving pictures” as “pictures which move, not just (or
necessarily at all) pictures of moving things.”5 Even so, he did not
fully overcome the difficulty in finding the “difference between
pictures and moving pictures,” insofar as there are cases “in which
nothing except knowledge of their causes and of the categories
which differentiate [one from the other] makes the difference
between the two.”6 Seen in this light, the films of Goldstein and
Longo deepen the difficulty, questioning the “knowledge” of the
causes of their movement by revealing their reliance on photography
and making porous the “categorical” distinctions between cinema
and photography. Although made and showcased in the arena of
contemporary art, the two filmic works also echoed the thread of
experimental films at that time that highlighted and interrogated
troubling yet intriguing relations between the two media by virtue
of their specific “moving picture” forms.
We now see both artists and filmmakers turning their attention
to these forms by way of different platforms and media expressions,
from theatrical projection to moving image installation in a gallery,
to CD-ROM and the World Wide Web.7 Notable in this crossbred
trend is the growing use of digital video to rework the “moving
pictures” inherited from or alluding to films that manifest their
kinship with photography. Given that digital video is harnessed both
for recording (as in the adoption of the camera for photography
 Videographic moving pictures 49

and cinematography) and for postproduction (as in the process

for graphically manipulating the image based on the camera’s
relation to profilmic reality), in this chapter I shall characterize
these hybrid image forms, in which photographic, filmic, and
digital attributes reside in conjunction with the correlation of
the static and the animated, as “videographic moving pictures.”
My concept exists in dialogue with several scholarly works in the
fields of cinema studies and art history since the 2000s, which
examine the hybridity and interconnection of photography and
cinema in the spirit of challenging and dismantling the reductive
medium-specific distinctions between the two, in response to the
ubiquity of films, videos, and installations that confront viewers
with the ambiguous exchange between stillness and movement.8 In
particular, my terminology echoes some concepts recently devised in
the field of photography studies that refer to the movement/stillness
tension activated by contemporary works of photography and
moving image: for instance, in describing Jeff Wall’s photographs,
in which he employs the conventions of painting, photography,
and film, Hilde Van Gelder and Helen Westgeest have used the
term “multi-mediating pictures” to indicate that they activate the
viewer’s “layered perception . . . of the multiplication of mediums.”9
Similarly, Ingrid Hölzl has coined the term “moving stills” to argue
that the convergence of moving and unmoving images in digital
media “is already laid out in the media history of photographic and
filmic images and their hybrid forms.”10 While my own concept of
“videographic moving pictures” shares the attention given by these
two terms to the dissolution and intermingling of photography and
film, it is distinct from them in that it stresses the vital role of digital
video in shaping the aesthetic complexity of the particular images
that present the cohabitation of stillness and movement.
From the standpoint of contemporary photography, the burgeoning
of videographic moving pictures is placed within the sphere of “post-
photography,” a term that represents both the growing replacement of
the analogue camera and photochemical materials by electronic and
digital technologies in the production and circulation of photographic
imagery, and the ontological and aesthetic changes of photography
that are introduced by the replacement of the machinery. Since the
early 1990s, numerous writings have addressed the multidimensional
impacts of these technologies on the traditional concepts and practices
of photography. Regardless of their detailed differences in argument
50 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

and position, critics and scholars who have engaged in this discursive
field have largely singled out two important developments over
art born of chemical photography. First, these newer technologies
have displaced photography’s material and technical properties, and
thereby undermined some of its fundamental characteristics, such
as the ability to serve as the “indexical” image, an image that bears
a physical connection to the real of the past due to the camera’s
transcription of the trace of the real on the photochemical plate.11
The “post-photography” discourses both in photography and in
film studies have largely asserted that the digital image weakens the
traditional photography’s indexical link to physical reality because it
can be produced without the physical presence of the object that it
represents (in the case of the computer-generated imagery based on
simulation), and because in digital capture, light must be converted
into abstract codes discontinuous with physical space and time
(in the case of digital photography).12 Second, the forms of image
produced by post-photochemical technologies fundamentally ask
whether photography is a definable medium generating a range of
visual images distinguishable from those based on other media or
technological means.13 Viewed together, these two lines of argument
share the position that digitization erodes the boundaries between
the lens-based and the graphically manipulated images, and
thereby revive the question of whether the distinctiveness of the
photographic image holds.14 The videographic moving picture is seen
to substantiate both arguments: its movements, both the movement
of an object or event in the image and the movement of the image
itself, spring not simply from the inscription of the object or event
in the electronic sensor of the recording apparatus, but also from
partial and global transformation of the visual record on its material
and technical levels. As a few critics in “post-photography” discourse
have remarked, the rapid advance of the new media technologies
sometimes undermines a distinction between photography and video.
For these technologies enable any photographic image, an electronic
and digital image on the material level, to be easily extracted from
the flow of information from which the video image is derived.15 In
these aspects, the videographic moving picture is an aspect of what
Timothy Druckrey calls the “equivocal image” as the “consequence
of the unsettled state of electronic representation.”16
Within the context of photographic art, the equivocal nature of the
videographic moving picture aligns it with the photographic works
 Videographic moving pictures 51

of Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand, and Andreas Gursky,

to name just a few, who have employed digital technologies to call
into question the authenticity of the photographic image and to
initiate a complex dialogue with the other systems of representation
to which the broadest definition of the term “picture” can refer.
Wall, arguably the most prominent practitioner, has, for instance,
emblematized the resonance between the videographic moving
picture and digital photography by bringing to the foreground an
array of different media (painting, photography, and film) evoked
by the term “picture.” His photographic work draws together the
conventions of film within the frame, composed in a manner similar
to painting so as to invite its viewer to see that “there is almost a single
set of criteria for the three art forms.”17 Wall utilizes cinematographic
methods (the performance of figures in a staged situation depicted
by his camera, the use of the techniques and equipment devised or
developed by cinematographers, etc.) as a key building block in
arranging those conventions, while also strengthening the presence
of the figures’ implied motion. He has also embraced electronic
and digital technologies to delicately manipulate the surface of his
photographs and thereby to make painting, photography, and film
coexist in an ambiguous manner. Wall’s creation of these hybrid
expressions is predicated upon his awareness of photography’s
post-medium conditions: that is, electronic and digital technologies
enable him to change his awareness of photography from a medium
grounded in a static photochemical basis to one that shares
the fluidity of representation present in painting and film. He
writes that the photographic image within these conditions “will
disappear from the immediate production-process, vanishing to the
more distant horizon of the generation of electricity, and in that
movement, the historical consciousness of the medium is altered.”18
And yet, it should be noted that the two challenges raised by
contemporary photographic practices (a challenge to the notion of
indexicality as a truthful record of the past, and to the notion of
photography as a clearly demarcated form of art in opposition to
others) do not necessarily lead to an absolute rupture with analogue
photography; rather, they underscore a telling moment in which
artists revisit and reconfigure, with the help of electronic and digital
technologies, photography’s techniques, forms, and aesthetics in
ways that go beyond its traditional medium-specific boundaries,
including the photochemical materials that were known to guarantee
52 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

photography’s value as indexical image, the privileging of the

lens-based imagery over the graphically manipulated imagery,
and, as I shall discuss in detail, photography’s stillness in contrast
to the movement of the images in film and video. In this sense,
the artists’ exploration of the boundaries of photography echoes
a revisionist understanding of the “post-photographic” age,
one distinct from the pervasive voices of anxiety about its dead
end. David Tomas argues that post-photographic practices are
simultaneously “historical (postphotography)” and “unhistorical
(postphotography)” insofar as they operate under a tension between
what has defined the photographic modes of production and what
transcends them.19 Similarly, Abigail Solomon-Godeau claims that
the work of Wall and Gursky, often rejected by a critical view that
insists on the intertwined concepts of indexicality and medium
specificity in modernist discourse, asks us to reconceptualize
photography by considering “a more complex notion of an
apparatus,” namely, by considering all elements of photography
“that exceed the camera, the individual picture, and the individual
photographer.”20 Peter Osborne arguably provides the most radical
version of these revisionist discourses, asserting that photography
must be understood as the “historical totality of photographic
forms, or types of images produced in one way or another by the
inscription of light.”21 In this view, photography is a historical
concept not privileged by the chemical basis of traditional
photography, but subject to the interacting development of all
technologies (film, video, and digital) directly concerned with or
affecting the production of photographic forms. Osborne’s non-
essentialist redefinition of photography helps us to understand that
contemporary photographic practices do not exhaust but instead
exploit the forms of traditional photography, thus reconfiguring
its ontological underpinnings even when they distance themselves
from its traditional material basis.
In this revisionist view of the “post-photographic” era, the
“cinematic”—the “historical totality” of cinematic forms and
techniques, to use Osborne’s concept—is not simply a prominent
object of appropriation, but a gateway through which the
contemporary practices have recently reconstituted the photographic
object. Tracing the historical lineage of these practices’ obsession with
the cinematic, George Baker argues that they question and redraw
the traditional boundaries of photography by embracing cinematic
 Videographic moving pictures 53

movement, which was regarded as the antithesis of photography’s

frozenness. It was with the emergence of the artists categorized by
Crimp as creators of “pictures” that photography’s kinship with
cinema triggered formal innovations. Baker then maps out three
paradigmatic cases of innovation: Cindy Sherman’s “film stills,”
Wall’s appropriation of the conventions of cinematography and
historical painting for the sake of implying a suspended moment of
a narrative in progress (Baker calls Wall’s work the “talking picture”
in this sense), and James Coleman’s reconstruction of films into
projection of continuous still images. The contemporary generation
of artists, whether photographers (Wall, Gursky, Gregory Crewdson,
etc.) or those who have produced both photographs and moving
image artworks (whether film or digital video) in mutual dialogue
(Demand, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Nancy Davenport, Tacita Dean,
Sharon Lockhart, etc.), have varied and refined these three formal
innovations, hovering between stasis and motion. Baker places
these diverse experiments within (borrowing Rosalind Krauss’s
term) the “expanded field” of photography, where that medium
is reinterpreted and remade in ways that exceed the traditional
concept of photographic objects and practices. He writes, “If the
photographic object seems in crisis today, it might now mean that
we are entering a period not when the medium has come to an end,
nor where the expanded field has simply collapsed under its own
dispersal, but rather that the terms involved only now become more
complex.”22
Certainly, videographic moving pictures can be placed within
“photography’s expanded field,” to use Baker’s term, in a few
senses. Their movement makes them distinct from the photographic
object as a pure still picture and they are made with the electronic
and digital technologies different from the photochemical basis of
traditional photography. However, even if driven by the imperative
to transcend the confines of traditional photography, videographic
moving pictures simultaneously draw on and newly illuminate its
formal and ontological properties, including stillness and freezing
the past that endured in front of the camera. The “cinematic”
referred to by videographic moving pictures can be seen as a point
of reference by which these properties are reread and repositioned:
the modality of photography as stillness and its temporal ontology
as a record of past are not eliminated, but given new attention in
relation to cinema. Despite the usefulness of the term “photography’s
54 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

expanded field,” however, it is impossible to ignore that videographic

moving pictures pose a few crucial questions unanswered by Baker’s
account of the growing exchange between film and photography.
First, if “photography’s expanded field” includes artists’ moving
image artworks based both on film and on digital video, what
distinctions do the latter have from the former? That is to say,
what influences does digital video have on image forms—namely,
videographic moving pictures—characterized by the cohabitation
and intersection of the photographic and the cinematic? Second,
isn’t it possible for us to theoretically conceive of videographic
moving pictures as emerging not simply from “photography’s
expanded field,” but also from “cinema’s expanded field,” in which
specific forms of the cinematic image do not eliminate but rather
activate cinema’s vexed relationship with photography? Finally, if
this is the case, in what ways do these forms disclose photographic
characteristics embedded in cinema?
To answer the first question, I shall now argue that digital
video plays a crucial role in configuring the hybrid moving images
marked by the interrelation of painterly and photographic stillness
with cinematic motion as it delicately manipulates the surface and
temporality of the source image. In doing so, I take up the works of
Sam Taylor-Johnson, Mark Lewis, and Bill Viola, who shoot using
a film camera and transfer the celluloid footage to digital video
for editing and display. All three artists’ works illustrate what I
term videographic moving pictures. As Christine Ross has recently
pointed out in her detailed analysis of Lewis’s works, he employs
the extended long take as an intermedia form that “combines film,
photography, and painting,” along with electronic and digital
technologies “as enactment of different temporalities” of the
media.23 Indeed, the same procedures apply to the works of Taylor-
Johnson and Viola, whom Ross does not discuss. Accordingly, the
images in the works of the three artists initially resemble lens-
based—photographic and filmic—imagery, while simultaneously
invoking embedded painterly figuration and composition. This
ambiguity is made possible by the gradual transformation from
stillness to movement, or by the coexistence of static and moving
objects within a single shot. Those two characteristics—visual
abundance and ambiguity—are in contrast to the imagery of early
video art, which is easily distinguishable from film imagery due to
its lower image quality, densely layered or undulating forms, or the
 Videographic moving pictures 55

appearance of electronic noise on its surface. Seen in this light, the

artists’ combined uses of film and digital video contradict two key
modernist assumptions about video: that video has stable substance
as a medium defined by its physical, technical, and functional
boundaries—that is, by the integrity of video camera, synthesizer,
and monitor—and that the resulting image is a direct manifestation
of video’s proper qualities. If we abide by these two modernist
assumptions, then Lewis’s, Taylor-Johnson’s, and Viola’s technical
and aesthetic choices emblematize the status of digital video as
post-media: that is, digital video signals the change of status of
video from a definable medium directly leading to the generation
of particular aesthetic forms to a technology for enabling the
moving image to engender the negotiation between different media
expressions—painting, photography, film, and video art.
However, although any stable definition of video’s modernist
medium specificity seems more and more obscured, one must
investigate the role of digital video in making this hybrid formation
of the moving image,24 as it demonstrates some characteristics that
cannot be acquired via celluloid-based image production. First, even
if filmic at first sight, the three artists’ videographic moving pictures
exhibit painterly qualities on photorealistic surfaces, traces produced
by the video-based transformation of the source image after the
encoding process; and second, although based on the recording of
a profilmic event with a single take, the duration and speed of the
event is compressed or elongated through digital intervention in the
course of editing and display. These two characteristics demonstrate
that digital video does not totally jettison the material and technical
specificities of analogue video even when it engages with cinematic
figuration and duration, unlike analogue video in the early phase
of video art; and when its imagery does not explicitly take on the
stereotypical forms of early video art, such as psychedelic images
composed of undulating forms in highly saturated colors, images
of dense collage, abstract imagery marked by varying geometric
forms, and real time distinct from a filmic image’s recording of past
events, all of which were considered expressive of video’s unique
properties. In the section devoted to analysis of the three artists,
I shall examine the extent to which these specificities of video are
inscribed in the two aesthetic dimensions—surface and temporal—
of hybrid moving images based on the intersection of painting,
photography, and film.
56 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

To answer the second question, I shall demonstrate that

videographic moving pictures remediate and refashion two image
forms developed in the practical and theoretical terrains of cinema,
namely, the “film stilled” (a type of film marked by the moment
in which its linear movement is interrupted by the eruption of the
image, which appears to stand still) and the “still film” (characterized
by insistence on the fixed camera that captures its object or event
changing in time). A thread of film theories on the photographic in
the cinema has proposed (the “film stilled” by Raymond Bellour) or
suggested (the “still film”) both categories in relation to the tradition
of postwar arthouse and experimental films. Encompassing both
types of films—for instance, Andy Warhol’s foregrounding of stasis
in an extended duration of static camera in Empire (1964), and
the evolution from a motion picture to a static film in Ernie Gehr’s
Serene Velocity (1970)—Justin Remes has recently proposed the
idea of the “cinema of stasis,” films “in which there is little to no
movement, films in which stasis—not motion—is the default.”25 The
films that Remes calls “cinema of stasis” are not unrelated to the
experiments with cinematic movement in “photography’s expanded
field.” The videographic moving pictures follow these two directions
simultaneously in their amalgamation of stillness and movement
as they appropriate and rework both the “film stilled” and the
“still film.” Then, the two properties of digital video—namely,
“surface manipulation” and “temporal manipulation”—constitute
the processes by which the two intermedial forms are remediated.
As an extended discussion of Taylor-Johnson, Lewis, and Viola, I
shall examine the video works of Fiona Tan and Adad Hannah as
additional cases of videographic moving pictures that refashion the
“still film.” I shall focus on the ways in which the mode of reworking
the “still film,” which I will call the “single-shot tableau mode,”
functions as a fulcrum for the two artists’ aspirations to create
intermedial combinations of painting, photography, and film. Yet
digital video is able to transform the “film stilled” in more complex
ways, because the key procedure for rendering it, the interruption
and reactivation of movement, can be deployed on any level of
the source image, from its overall duration to its minimal unit as
a pixel; and because in digital video, the stilled frame is materially
and structurally continuous with the motion of video’s electronic
flow. An analysis of the corpus of Belgian artist David Claerbout,
which springs from his creative reinterpretation of the techniques
 Videographic moving pictures 57

for producing the “film stilled” (freeze-frame and serialized static

images), will demonstrate this point.
To answer the final question, I argue that despite the obvious
change in the material ontology of traditional photochemical
images, electronic and digital technologies do not totally eliminate
their temporal ontology: rather, insofar as videographic moving
pictures are derived from the adoption of the “film stilled” and the
“still film,” artworks based upon them provide opportunities to
reread the canonical ontological distinctions between photography
and film, which André Bazin and Christian Metz posed in regard
to the dichotomy of stillness and movement. Bazin, for example,
posed a distinction between photography as “mold,” a medium
containing only a “piecemeal” impression of time, and cinema as
“molding,” which offers its spectator the “images of duration”
produced by movement.26 Metz, too, drew a similar distinction
between photography as a “fetish” that can only provide a trace
of past motion,27 and cinema, whose impression of reality is the
“real presence of motion.”28 Photography scholar David Green
claims that this distinction is an “orthodoxy that is open to being
challenged,” given that “for all of its illusion of ‘here and now’ the
filmic image is equally prey to the passage of time and the slow
but inevitable recession from now to then.”29 Seen in this light,
both the “film stilled” and the “still film” categories use an illusion
of stasis, either by employing the static camera or by repeating a
series of identical frames, to evoke the “pastness” of photography
concealed in the illusion of movement in the cinema. As Tom
Gunning succinctly writes, these films testify to the “dialectical
relation between stillness and movement,” which provides
“one of the richest uses of motion in film.”30 I argue, then, that
videographic moving pictures are preoccupied with activating this
“dialectical relation,” demonstrating that particular uses of motion
in the image of duration are capable of expressing the temporal
complexity of the photograph in relation to cinema. Unlike Bazin’s
and Metz’s distinction between the “pastness” of photography and
the “presence” of cinematic movement, the works of Tan, Hannah,
and Claerbout create forms of movement that do not suppress the
frozenness of a photographic past, but take it into the viewer’s
present. In so doing, the artists suggest that the temporality of
both photography and film is marked by the mutual imbrication
of pastness and presence. To be sure, this common temporality is
58 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

differently experienced, on account of photography’s assertion of

frozenness in contrast to cinema’s celebration of the illusion of
motion. However, by producing these two aesthetic experiences
simultaneously, videographic moving pictures, like the “film stilled”
and the “still film,” make us rethink the traditional medium-specific
boundaries with regard to temporality.

Digital video’s manipulation of

surface and time in Taylor-Johnson,
Lewis, and Viola
Digital video’s capacity to subtly change the surface of the
photographic source image during creation of videographic moving
pictures is analogous to the manipulative processes in digital
filmmaking’s postproduction, which involve painterly alteration of
the details of the image such as color, shading, and contrast elements
traditionally treated within the terrain of cinematography. One such
process is known as “Digital Intermediate (DI),” which originally
referred to a stage of postproduction between the initial conversion
of celluloid footage to digital files and their transfer back to celluloid
strip for projection. In the terrain of postproduction, DI involves
manipulating the minute details of live-action footage shot with
a film or high-definition camera in order to render it either more
photorealistic (as in O Brother, Where Art Thou? [Joel Coen 2002]
and The Aviator [Martin Scorsese 2005]) or more expressive (for
instance, the kaleidoscopic backgrounds and figures in radiant and
shimmering colors in Speed Racer [2008, the Wachowskis]). As
John Belton points out, “What’s new about the DI process is that
it involves the digitization of all or nearly all of the film’s images,
rather than the partial digitization involved in these earlier features
of the post-production workflow.”31 DI’s capacity to convert
all the components of the filmic image into pixels and electronic
frames during the postproduction process has been viewed as the
hallmark of filmmakers’ ability to gain higher accessibility to the
image for their own expressive aims. Aylish Wood observes that
this greater control is possible because DI enables filmmakers “to
isolate and alter a single element embedded within an array of other
elements.”32 In this sense, she argues that the popularization of DI
 Videographic moving pictures 59

signals a change in emphasis from the manipulation of the image’s

macro-elements during shooting (set, actor, costume, lighting) to the
“micromanipulation” of its frames and pixels after shooting.
The importance of micromanipulation as an array of techniques
for altering the minute details of live-action imagery is particularly
relevant to the working method of Taylor-Johnson and Lewis,
who have produced hybrid images engendering an aesthetic
coexistence of film, photography, and painting. The two artists
adopt several techniques of digital video postproduction, including
color correction, change of brightness, adding and subtracting
of frames, creation of slow dissolves, frame rate changes, and so
on to micromanipulate the surface and temporality of the filmed
footage.33 A key technique central to both artists’ work, and the
most popular of all DI processes, is color grading, which replaces
the traditional process of photochemical color timing with an
increasingly complex level of intervention into the picture’s
piecemeal units—even single pixels. Through this process, color
correction affects the whole frame of the image, from a broad
range of color changes (for instance, the interpolation of three-
color scenes into black and white, or vice versa) to alterations in
saturation, hue, and luminance.34 Developments since the 1990s
in hardware (such as Da Vinci Systems) and software and plug-in
programs (such as Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse) alike have
advanced this technique so tremendously as to allow for isolation
and dynamic manipulation of various elements in the color field
of a single frame.35 This impact of color grading recalls William
J. Mitchell’s observation of image-processing software applications
in the production of digital photography. These applications allow
today’s artists and photographers not only to alter the overall look
of an image, but also to select certain areas and delicately shift
color balances in ways that traditional painters and photographers
did. Mitchell writes, “The artists can separately adjust lightness
and contrast to establish desired tonal relationships and achieve
an overall tonal unity, manipulate saturation to produce an
appropriately brilliant or subdued effect, and shift hue values to
give a satisfactory overall color cast.”36
Per Mitchell’s insight, the color correction adopted by Taylor-
Johnson and Lewis contributes to blending both moving (film and
video) and still (photography and painting) images, forging a circuit
of interrelation between them. This also aligns with Stephen Prince’s
60 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

observation of the profound impacts of DI on the relationship

between cinematography and postproduction. He writes that
microelements such as color, light, and resolution, which were
hitherto regarded as changeable principally in the shooting process,
can be altered or even created so deeply that “cinematography is
becoming a post-production process in ways it has never been.”37
Further, Prince continues, beyond changing the whole workflow
of film production, this new alignment between cinematography
and postproduction brings cinema closer to “the kind of fine-
grain aesthetic control that painters have long enjoyed.”38 The two
implications of DI proposed by Prince are well suited to the works
of Taylor-Johnson and Lewis. These artists run their entire film-
based image through video-editing software and introduce pictorial
effects on the surface of photorealistic footage to create subtle
interpenetrations of painting, photography, and film.
Shot by a fixed 35-mm camera, Taylor-Johnson’s Still Life (2001,
Figures 1.1 and 1.2) and A Little Death (2002, Figures 1.3 and 1.4)

Figures 1.1 and 1.2 Stills from Sam Taylor-Johnson, Still Life (2001),
35mm film/DVD, 3min 44 seconds, © Sam Taylor-Johnson, courtesy White
Cube.
 Videographic moving pictures 61

Figures 1.3 and 1.4 Stills from Taylor-Johnson, A Little Death (2002),
35mm film/DVD, 4 min, © Sam Taylor-Johnson, courtesy White Cube.

update a type of still-life painting developed in the Netherlands

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both show worldly
objects—a dozen fruits on a plate and a ballpoint pen in the former,
and a dead hare and a peach on a table in the latter. The objects
begin to lose their beauty or abundance, and are eventually subject
to mortality and decay with the irreversible course of time. The
two works take the single frame structure as a vantage point for
evoking both picturesque and photographic imagery, along with
a composition that centralizes their own subject matter. With no
delay, this atmosphere of stillness is dismantled, as the two pieces
compel the viewer to witness common decomposition of the framed
objects, a nine-week natural event compressed into about four
minutes of running time, culminating in their deformed remnants.
Besides the dramatic speeding up of the event, the transposition of
fine-tuned surface details that satisfy and simultaneously transgress
the assumed naturalness of the objects is crucial to the disconcerting
effect of the works. Evoking DI processes, the color and shading
62 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

of details are remarkably enhanced by the interplay between film

and its digitized data. In terms of color grading, the compression of
time of the decay process concomitantly requires Taylor-Johnson
to condense into a single shot a broad spectrum of colors different
in hue and brightness, while also subtly dismantling the figurative
integrity of the event’s photochemical record. This is particularly
true in Still Life, where the red and yellow of the fruits’ surfaces
transform into the white and gray scale of mold, finally reaching
the black and gray tones of the totally rotten lump. This vast range
of colors includes intricate changes in shading—not merely on the
fruits’ surfaces, but also around the plate, on the surface of the table,
and on the slightly washed out gray wall. Orchestration of colors
and shading continues in A Little Death, this time with different
details. The process of putrefaction involves not the fungus and
smooth transition of fruits to their softened remains, but a radical
decomposition of the hare’s flesh and skin, and the countless clouds
of flies that swarm around the hare. It initially appears that sand is
streaming from the hare’s left rear leg to the bulk of its body; this is
revealed to be the degeneration process of the hare’s body and the
barrage of flies, accompanied by a growing clot of putrid acid on
the wall. The flies’ numbers decrease as the hare’s body is reduced
to its skeletal residue, colored in shades of black and gray due to
putrefaction, leaving its hair on the table. All these extreme details
are made visible by the chromatic gradation of colors from black
to brown. In accordance with this gradation, the subtle, continuous
change in brightness and tone of the shadow on the wall draws the
viewer’s attention to the temporal compression and the time-lapse
technique that generates it.
The abundance and oversaturation of color in Taylor-Johnson’s
“still life” works is also apparent in Lewis’s Algonquin Park,
September (2001, Figure 1.5) and Algonquin Park, Early March
(2002), two pieces that exhibit the painterly influences of the Hudson
River School, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, and Casper David
Friedrich, portraying landscapes in extremely great detail. Algonquin
Park, September consists of a static shot that contemplates a small
island on a lake shrouded in a broad band of dense mist, with a small
boat entering from the right. The majestic and mystic atmosphere
of the landscape is composed primarily of two delicate movements:
while the mist moves slowly from right to left, the surface of the
lake ripples gently. The sensations of movement make the island
 Videographic moving pictures 63

Figure 1.5 Mark Lewis, Algonquin Park, September (2001), Super 35mm
transferred to 2K, 2 min 43 seconds, Film still courtesy and copyright the
artist.

fascinating and phantom-like, in opposition to the sense of stability

provided by the panoramic horizontal frame. As Philippe-Alain
Michaud perceptively notes, they bring the viewer’s gaze to loss and
confusion as they “blur all outlines, making it impossible to focus
and obliterating spatial reference points.”39 This destabilizing effect
stems from the excess of two colors accentuated by the movements:
the blue of the water and the white of the fog. In particular, as the
latter shades from darkness to light, the rest of the picture (the water
and the island) gradually shows its original coloring. Algonquin
Park, Early March, on the other hand, abandons the fixation of the
camera but nevertheless builds the same structure of revelation and
hypnotic effect, using a slow backward zoom to exhibit a gradual
transformation of its picture from vacant white to a frozen lake
surrounded by coniferous trees with a group of children playing on
a distant ice rink.40 The pure white of the plane at the beginning of
the work is revealed to be a close-up of the lake as the reverse zoom
unfolds. Thus Lewis applies the same method used in September to
Early March in reverse: movement is assigned to the basic element of
cinematography, and it serves to develop the static landscape while
maintaining its sense of instability and decentralization. The color
correction of the original location’s footage induces a picturesque
tone in parallel with the dialectic of stasis and motion guided by
the camera, in a different manner than that used in September.
64 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

The surface of the lake is so flattened in terms of volume that it

looks like a huge, monochrome abstract painting. It is not revealed
as a landscape until the zoom gradually enforces the sense of
perspective, with shimmering ambient light giving the surface a
sense of concreteness marked by contours and forms.
A more significant impact of digital video on the creation of
hybrid moving images that engender the coexistence of painting,
photography, and film is temporal manipulation, in that it contributes
to oscillation between stasis and motion. Indeed, the dissolution
of stillness/movement boundaries dates back to analogue video.
Raymond Bellour and Trond Lundemo demonstrate that analogue
video was a medium that could analyze the “passage between
different media images”41 or function “like a wedge that opens up
the distances between movement and the photogram”42 thanks to
its capacities to decompose the moving image—for example, slow
motion and freeze-frame—and thereby to make visible the transition
between frames. In addition to these capacities inherited from its
analogue predecessor, digital video has widened the spectrum of its
visual expression through technological developments made since
the 1990s, both in hardware (digital cameras supplying both a low-
tech vintage look and a state-of-the-art high-definition look) and
in software (release of various editing tools such as Adobe After
Effects, Maya, etc.). Maureen Turim has recognized that these
developments in digital video enable video images to emulate both
photographic stillness and cinematic temporality. “Time-based
correction and frame buffing provide the means by which the video
image succeeds in simulating cinema, permitting video to manifest
the discrete temporal frame,” she writes. “We need to recognize
how digital video has tended to render the electronic as if it were
a still photography and cinematic temporality.”43 Similarly, Holly
Willis notes that digital video obviates the issues of generational
loss and poor image quality in analogue video by offering “greatly
increased fidelity and malleability.”44 Turim’s and Willis’s views
suggest that video’s digitization furthers the capacity of analogue
video to manipulate the temporality of the electronic image, through
techniques such as freezing, compressing, and dilating the time of
its record, while also reconfiguring the image in ways that resemble
the surface and temporality of photorealistic moving imagery, not
traditionally considered expressive of video’s material and technical
properties unavailable from photography and film.
 Videographic moving pictures 65

Despite being liberated from the demand for self-reflexive inquiry

into video’s medium-specific qualities, digital video still maintains
analogue video’s capacity of manipulating the temporality of the
image in ways that are distinct from film. In this case, this temporal
manipulation is not used to explore real-time signal processing and
feedback as video’s unique characteristics, demonstrated by the
works of William Anastasi, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Nam
June Paik, to name just a few.45 Rather, it serves to activate different
temporalities of painting, photography, and film by creating an
image of duration that foregrounds a subtle transition from pictorial
or photographic stasis to cinematic motion, or a paradoxical
cohabitation of the two. In either case, film is investigated as, in
the words of Ross, “a media situated between the photographic
and the videographic, between the pictorial and the digital.”46
However, the uses of digital video to create these hybrid images
also suggest that it is not totally dislodged from the flexibility
of the image as derived from analogue video’s transformative
processes. Rodowick aptly observes the ontological continuity of
the analogue electronic and the digital. He writes that both media
images are “never fully present in space or in time,” inasmuch
as they are constantly scanned in the midst of transmission, and
changed by the operation of display technologies.47 This means that
although differing from the electronic image in coding (signal vs.
pixel) and machinery (synthesizer or processor vs. computer and
software), the digital video image is capable of amplifying both
the formal variability of its surface and its temporal complexity.
Both Taylor-Johnson’s and Lewis’s works demonstrate that subtle
digital transformations of color simultaneously engender the visual
qualities of painting, photography, and film in the images. This
is also the case with the ways in which the artists manipulate the
images in a single shot to render their temporality complicated.
Taylor-Johnson’s Still Life and A Little Death inscribe extreme
changes of state—decay and death—in a single take, but the
temporal dimension of those changes does not rest solely upon
the filmstrip’s registration of rotting and molding. It is enhanced
by the dissolution of the footage into a seamless transition between
different periods of exposure of the camera during the event;
Taylor-Johnson’s camera was set in exactly the same place (a closed
room), the lighting of the object was carefully controlled (artificial
illumination), and the event was documented at regular intervals
66 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

daily over the course of about nine weeks.48 After encoding, the
footage was imported via acceleration into the desired duration for
the work (three to four minutes). The intervals between individual
frames are extremely condensed to suit this manipulation, thus
producing the smooth temporal flow of the event. In this sense,
neither piece is interested in capturing the whole moment of the
event in time; rather, they underline the impact of digital technologies
on our temporal experience of the moving image. Taylor-Johnson’s
video-based condensation of time reframes the recorded image so
profoundly that the temporality of the resulting image is perceived
as either beyond or beneath the threshold of human perception.
This suggests that digital technologies are capable of presenting
time independently of either natural progression or human
consciousness, and that their temporality radically transforms the
celluloid-based inscription of time.
Lewis does not utilize the same dramatic compression of time as
Taylor-Johnson, but he has made a few noticeable works in which
digital video makes a filmed registration of the event contingent,
creating an ambiguous exchange between stasis and motion. These
works are characterized by a technique that delicately disrupts the
temporal continuity of a shot. Windfarm (2001) depicts a dozen
rotating wind turbines against the backdrop of a mountain, built
on a sandy soil field with bushes spread in the foreground. On
closer inspection, the movement of each turbine, save one in the
background whose rotor is not turning, is actually intermittent: the
rotating speeds change at irregular intervals. This is made apparent
by the motion of the rotating shadows thrown by the three biggest
turbines in the middle of the scene. The stop-motion effect in this
scene, which Lewis orchestrates through digitally assisted removal
and reframing of filmed footage, makes the illusion of movement
slightly discontinuous.49 This temporal ellipsis, brought about
by frame-by-frame manipulation, is also seen in Airport (2003,
Figure 1.6), where nothing particular seems to happen other than the
comings and goings of vehicles on an airstrip seen from a terminal
window. Eventually, the overarching sense of an unencumbered
duration based on the seemingly immediate record of this event is
broken. After eight minutes have passed, an unexpected dissolve
without any notable seam guides us toward a plane that slowly
approaches from the middle of the airstrip to the window after
landing. As it is revealed that this single take is in fact a synthesis of
 Videographic moving pictures 67

Figure 1.6 Lewis, Airport (2003), Super 35mm transferred to DVD,

10 min 59 seconds, Film still courtesy and copyright the artist.

two temporally disparate durations, the timing of the overall event

is, in turn, called into question: is it drawn directly from the change
delivered by the camera, or from duplication and replay of the same
record? Here, digital manipulation taints the stability of the filmic
image with the temporal indeterminacy attributable to video.
Lewis’s Downtown Tilt, Zoom, and Pan (2005) is the most
sophisticated work of his oeuvre in the light of the temporal
complexity of a single take. The first and second sections (tilt and
zoom) were shot at dusk, while the final section was set in the
clearer morning light. Thus a single shot is actually constructed
from two temporally separate takes conjoined seamlessly during
postproduction. This is confirmed by the fact that the two red cars
in the second and third sections are indeed the same. Additionally,
playback during the course of editing complicates this temporal
disparity, namely, the coexistence of multiple temporal slices in the
duration of a shot.50 As such, the backward movement of the two
black and red cars results from reverse replay of the second section,
not from the spinning of their own wheels. This phenomenon is also
at work in the last section, in which the train running backward
turns out to be shown in reverse.
Bill Viola’s works since the 2000s emblematize surface and
temporal manipulations of digital video as two techniques for
configuring the images that blend painting, photography, and
film and present a delicate transition from stillness to movement.
The Passions, consisting of a series of video pieces made from
68 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

2000 to 2002, explores ways in which human face and body can
give expression to an intense amount of inner states. The human
figures portrayed in this work are informed by the devotional
painting of the Middle Age and Renaissance, an artistic tradition
Viola studied at the Getty Research Institute in 1998. There he
examined how painters of that time depicted emotional extremes
such as pain, anger, fear, and sorrow, and developed his thematic
and formal categories that would later be incorporated into this
work, encompassing “facial expression, emotions in extreme time,
external display of emotional states . . . change of heart, change of
mind, the turbulent surface.”51 The key categories of The Passions
series, such as the “external display of emotional states,” required
video’s capacity to transform the facial and gestural expressions
of the human body into the moving image, a form that provides
the viewer with an extended time frame for experiencing them in
her perceptual threshold. These expressions additionally had to
be exaggerated enough to be immediately observed on the surface
dimension of the image, so that the viewer sees through it the
emotional change of the inner self.
The resulting video image in this series has two remarkable
characteristics that attract the viewer’s attention—the delicate
distortion of the image surface and the extreme slow motion.
The initial two pieces of this work, Quintet of the Astonished (2000,
Figures 1.7 and 1.8) and Quintet of the Silent (2001), both based
on a painting Christ Mocked (1490–1500) by Hieronymus Bosch,
display the two features very well. Commonly beginning with five
life-sized figures (four men and a woman in the former, and five
men in the latter) that appear to take still postures, both works
proceed to a highly prolonged animation that spends about fifteen
minutes, encompassing a transition from neutral facial expressions
and gestures to a wide spectrum of changes in them that may evoke
various, yet eventually unidentifiable, emotional responses. What is
also astonishing in these works is the vitality of the lines and colors
value that the bodily detail of the actors brings to the forefront
of the screen. Because the figures are shot at extreme high speed
(approximately fifteen times faster than normal speed, 24 frame-
per-second), the fifteen-minute video pieces actually exhibit events
that have transpired in about one minute in extremely great detail.
Thus, they expose the viewer “to the imperceptible—to incredibly
minute shifts in affective tonality well beyond what is observable
 Videographic moving pictures 69

Figures 1.7 and 1.8 Bill Viola, The Quintet of the Astonished (2000),
color video rear projection on screen mounted on wall in dark room,
projected image size: 55  95 in (140  240 cm), 15 min 20 seconds,
performers: John Malpede, Weba Garretson, Tom Fitzpatrick, John Fleck,
Dan Gerrity, photos: Kira Perov, courtesy of Bill Viola Studio.

by (nontechnically supplemented) natural perception.”52 These

“minute shifts” of the figures, too, originate from the surface quality
of the image, given that they are oversaturated in color and sharp in
light and shade. Due to these spatial features that are disclosed on
the surface, the figures acquire pictorial, or even graphic, semblance
with the referent (in this case, the five actors). In the conversation
with Viola, Hans Belting astutely remarks that in this suite, the
extremely visceral nature of expressions—such as facial grimace
and muscular tension—are experienced “not only as a performance
70 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

of a figure within the image, but also as a transformation of the

image itself.”53 Viola’s uses of digital video validate Belting’s point,
for he rested on an array of digital postproduction processes such
as reframing, rendering, color correction, and so forth in order to
obtain such painterly transformations of the image, which lead
to the hybridization of painting and video. Viola has once stated
that his subtle manipulation of the recorded image with digital
tools provided by the editing software (Adobe After Effects and
Photoshop)54 brought him back to his “early experimentation with
electronic image processing in the 1970,” while simultaneously
encouraging him to compare his work to painting: “This is exactly
what painters do—manipulate and shape the fluid surface of the
paint so it becomes the emotion.”55
Besides those surface manipulations of the image for engendering
the coexistence and interrelation of painting and video, Viola
applied to The Passions a complex process of material and technical
mediations between film and video in order to create the extreme
slow-motion effect. For bringing the figures in Quintet of the
Astonished and Quintet of the Silent into life, Viola recorded their
45-second performances with 35-mm Wilcam at high speed (300
frames per second) and encoded the film footage with video for
editing, playing it at normal speed, and thus providing the viewer
with 10-minute extreme slow motion rife with the movement
of the figures’ details. Viola’s choice of celluloid instead of high-
definition video is predicated upon the difference in the amount
of increments per second between the two media. He thought that
the resolution of the image is determined not simply by its surface
quality but by its frame rates. Thus, the more increments of the
recorded image he owned, the more subtleties of movements and
changes he would cull from it. He felt that the maximum 30 frames
per second obtained with the HD camera of the time (around the
late 1990s) were not sufficient for his postproduction stage in
which he would work with slowing the source image down. As he
confessed, “I also knew that the medium of video, master of the
long take, was only capable of shooting the action at thirty frames
per second, and I need more visual increments of time to capture the
subtlety of the transitions and transformations.”56 Despite Viola’s
choice of celluloid as the shooting material, however, it is worth
stressing that this is grounded in his observation on the material
difference between film and video. While video signal is in constant
 Videographic moving pictures 71

motion unfolding in space, the art of cinema, Viola asserts, lies in

“the combination of image sequences in time (montage)”57 insofar
as “film is a succession of discrete photographs.”58 It is based on
his keen awareness of the difference that he adopts film in The
Passions. He firstly shot the human figures’ states of emotion
without any cut, as if treating film stock as the videotape. Then he
digitally encoded the filmed image and transferred it to the storage
media, which would be played back in his editing room. All these
processes involved the manipulation and change of an individual
frame and of the in-between space of two frames. This suggests
that Viola considers a film frame as an element equivalent to video
signal. “I come out of electronic music practice, where frequency
is one of your main elements, and it is infinite,” he remarks. “I see
frame rate in video as the same thing. It’s a frequency.”59
While digital video’s surface manipulation in the works of Taylor-
Johnson, Lewis, and Viola is applied to the image shot on celluloid, the
images’ final color and shading, which facilitate oscillation between
the photographic and the painterly, and between the photorealistic
and the graphic, originate from the properties of digital video distinct
from film. This point is made clearer when one takes a closer look
at two material differences between film and digital video: focus
and grain. Prince and Rodowick have observed that digital video
records the profilmic object too sharply and clearly, and thus lacks
the varying degrees of focus available from celluloid. Also, digital
video’s lack of grain, an indicator of film’s vibrancy and luminosity,
leads to the extreme clarity of its image, distinct from the look of
the filmic image.60 In these respects, the three artists’ uses of digital
video fulfill their own formal and aesthetic goal—creating the subtle
coexistence and interrelation of painting, photography, and film—at
the expense of sacrificing some material attributes of celluloid. The
artists run the risk of removing filmic focus and grain from the image
shot on film as it is encoded. Thus, the cleanness and sharpness
common to all their works’ imagery, made by coupling film-based
recording with digital video postproduction, is the backdrop against
which the oversaturated and extremely vivid colors are at play.61 To
summarize, all these visual characteristics demonstrate the extent
to which digital video extends its capacities to transform the source
image into the image of film, which the medium-specific view of video
would consider to be sharply distinct from the proper video image,
while simultaneously obscuring some of its properties. However
72 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

similar to film the images produced by the artists may be, thanks
to their overall high-definition quality, their look implicitly disturbs
both the naturalness of the filmic image with their unavoidable
subtleties, and by extension our belief in the authenticity of the filmic
image. In this way, the artists’ surface manipulations do not entirely
disregard video’s material and technical specificities, although the
multifaceted relationships to painting, photography, and film signal
video’s post-media conditions, including the dissolution of the video
image’s formal boundaries.
These ambivalent aspects of digital video, hybridizing the
video image in relation to video’s neighboring media while also
maintaining its technical and material specificities, also apply to
the artists’ temporal manipulations of the image. Taylor-Johnson’s
extreme condensation of recorded time, Lewis’s addition and
subtraction of frames, and Viola’s extreme slow motion all
demonstrate that, in terms of producing the illusion of motion,
digital video does not totally abandon an electronic frame structure
inherited from analogue video and distinct from film, whether
rendering its image painterly, photographic, or cinematic. As Sean
Cubitt summarizes, “The unit of video is not the single frame but
the movement from frame to frame, the disappearing of one and
the appearing of another, so that no single frame is ever complete
enough for it to be recognized as the particular moment of origin.”62
While the film-based cinematic image consists of the sum of discrete
and stable frames using a mechanical means (projector) to generate
the impression of movement, the flexible and unfixed forms of the
video image spring from its unstable frame structure, a constant
flow of signal that can be modulated in any phase from recording
to display. Digital video’s capacities, such as progressive scanning,
time-based corrections, and frame buffing, make the video image
resemble a succession of discrete frame units, so that its movement
looks smooth and seamless in contrast to the ceaseless vibration
of the analogue electronic image. Even in this case, however, the
incompleteness of an individual frame is not totally effaced. As
Laura U. Marks astutely remarks, “An electronic image, whether it
is analog or digital, is implicate, or enfolded, in the interconnected
mass of electrons that transmit it along common waves.”63 Marks’s
observation suggests that digital video inherits from its analogue
predecessor the fluidity of electronic signals, which allows a video
image to render its temporal dimension unstable and ambiguous.
 Videographic moving pictures 73

Seen from this perspective, the temporal ellipsis that coexists

paradoxically with the sense of continuity in Lewis’s works, the
extreme condensation of recorded time in Taylor-Johnson’s, and
the extreme slow motion in Viola’s all express the malleability of the
electronic signal, which assimilates the discrete film frames of the
source image into a continuous flow subject to an array of temporal
manipulations in the postproduction processes. This transformation
of temporality points to Garrett Stewart’s observation on the ways
in which electronic and digital media express the temporality of the
image in a different way than filmic temporal rendering marked
by the progression from the photogram to projection. He writes,
“Our eyes held by the instantaneously rescanned frame of electronic
mediation, we often see time itself imaged . . . as a process malleable,
even reversible, rather than an incremental procession.”64 Central to
his argument is that the temporality of non-filmic moving images,
from analogue and digital video to digital cinema, is determined
largely by the change in their material base, which ranges from
transformation of the electronic signal to permutation of binary
code. That those images are not predicated upon the cumulative
succession of individual still frames leads Stewart to argue for a
transition from filmic “frame time” to post-filmic “framed time,”
in that time is “captured within a single pictorial field.”65 All the
temporal manipulations used by the three artists, then, suit Stewart’s
concept of “framed time,” inasmuch as their resulting images are
perceived as smooth and fluid transition of figures in a “single
pictorial field.” This demonstrates that changes in the flow of the
electronic signal play a key role in transforming the temporality
of film, either dramatically or delicately, by allowing for the
flexible exchange between stillness and motion, and between the
photographic and the graphically figured layers in the image frame.

Remediating the “still film”

and the “film stilled” in Tan,
Hannah, and Claerbout
In the cases of Taylor-Johnson, Lewis, and Viola, videographic
moving pictures ask us to reassess the medium-specific distinctions
between different media—painting and film, photography and
74 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

painting, and film and photography—by making their formal

properties (such as surface features and temporality) coexist
and enabling ambiguous exchanges between them. In particular,
the subtle transition between stasis and motion in this type of
hybrid moving images highlights the fault line between film
and photography. This reassessment does not totally negate the
distinction between the two media—that photography is a medium
of the still image, whereas film is of the moving image—but rather
validates the extent to which the distinction is grounded in the
ambiguous cross-referencing of each medium with the other. David
Green and Joanna Lowry have provided a valuable framework for
conceptualizing this relationship through writings that address some
artists who have produced videographic moving pictures, as well as
others who have explored conceptual and expressive possibilities
for “cinematic photographs,” which encourage viewers to observe
the temporal changes in their actions and events. Green argues
that vacillation between stillness and movement in the former—
particularly in the works of Claerbout, which I shall investigate
later—demonstrates “not the conflation of photography and film
but a conjuncture of the two mediums . . . in which they co-exist
and seem to simultaneously occupy the same object.”66 Similarly,
Green and Lowry claim that the practices of the latter group of
photographers (Wall and Crewdson, for example) “draw attention
to the manner in which notions of the medium and of medium
specificity have always depended on a process of differentiation
from, and contrast to, other mediums in which they stand in
relationship.”67
Green and Lowry’s argument does not necessarily deny the
technical and aesthetic differences between photography and film—
for instance, the absence of positive movement in photography and
of total stillness in film, or photography’s lack of the apparatus to
produce the illusion of continuous motion. Rather, a key point of
their argument is that those differences are not premised on the sheer
separation between film and photography, but are inseparable from
one medium’s dependence upon and evocation of the other. Just as
the photographic stillness embedded in the individual photogram
of the filmstrip is manifested in certain films whose representation
of movement (whether of the image itself, or of the moving objects
in the image) is slowed or arrested, so too does movement and
duration in time function as a fundamental photographic referent.
 Videographic moving pictures 75

As Victor Burgin succinctly remarks, “A film may depict an

immobile object even while the filmstrip itself is moving at 24
frames per second: a photograph may depict a moving object even
though the photograph does not move.”68 This intimacy between
movement and stillness in film and photography underscores that
the specificities and limitations of each medium are made visible in
film’s boundaries with photography or photography’s boundaries
with film. Green’s idea of the “conjuncture” of photography and
film points not merely to the boundaries themselves but also to
particular images that are shaped on those boundaries, making
them visible. The images, then, reveal both differences and
similarities between photography and film through an array of
technical processes allowing coexistence of and exchange between
their aesthetic properties. Similarly, Baker uses the concept of “dual
articulation” to single out this type of image, in which film and
photography interpenetrate in their “radical sharing of forms”—for
instance, James Coleman’s slide projection of celluloid filmstrips, in
which photography takes on movement while cinema is frozen.69
From Green’s and Baker’s perspectives, the videographic moving
pictures of Taylor-Johnson, Lewis, and Viola clearly achieve the
“conjuncture” or “dual articulation” of film and photography
through their transitions between stasis and motion. Considering
the history of cinema and the theories of the vexed relationship
between film and photography, the hybrid moving images marked
by the coexistence of and exchange between photography and film
can be classified as the “film stilled” and the “still film.”
Bellour coins the term “film stilled” in his discussion of Gilles
Deleuze’s concept of the “movement-image.” According to Bellour,
Deleuze overlooks the importance of the photography embedded
in the photogram, what Deleuze himself labels the “immobile
section of movement,” when he attempts to redeem cinema from
Henri Bergson’s condemnation. Bergson dismissed the cinematic
apparatus of his time as adding the illusion of continuous movement
to a succession of “immobile sections.” To confirm that Bergson’s
concept of the movement-image anticipated the cinema, Deleuze
claimed that insofar as the projector adjusts the illusion from the
outset through regulated reanimation, it gives us “a section which
is mobile, not an immobile section + abstract movement.”70 Bellour
makes an important revision to Deleuze’s idea of the photographic
in the cinema. Instead of embracing Deleuze’s assumption that
76 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

cinematic movement is given immediately, Bellour argues that

the “immobile section of movement” manifests its photographic
temporality—its freezing of a past moment—as it “sets itself apart
through an interruption of movement,” which includes freeze-
frame, rephotographing of still photos, presence of still images,
and slow motion.71 The instant thus becomes both the “pose,” a
snapshot associated with the frozen movement and past time in
photography, and the “pause of film,” derived from repetition of a
single photogram to produce the illusion of cinematic time. In this
way, the techniques for suspension of movement and the search for
the instant add up to the cinema that includes the form of image
marked by intermedial exchange between film and photography.
For Mary Ann Doane, cinema refuses to accept the petrifaction
of movement in the instantaneous photography of Étienne-Jules
Marey and Eadweard Muybridge by concealing its own dependency
upon the photogram in favor of its celebration of movement and
true-to-life effects.72 Similar to Bellour’s discussion of the “films
stilled,” Doane addresses how the avant-garde procedures of two
experimental films made since the modernist era, Chris Marker’s
La Jetée (1962) and Martin Arnold’s Pièce Touchée (1989), enact
the still image and its aspiration to photographic instantaneity. If
the former has remained a paradigmatic film that pays homage to
photographic stasis, the latter is marked by the use of an optical
printer to impose the intermittent interruption of flicker effects
on the existing filmstrip. Viewed together, each film evokes the
snapshot embedded in the photogram, but they render figuration
and temporality differently: through slow dissolves and fades of
its snapshots, La Jetée brings to the forefront the presence of the
photograph thereby appealing to its association with the past
and death, whereas Pièce Touchée treats the instant as that which
disappears and yet recurs in the unfolding of cinematic motion. “In
dislocating the frame from its normalized linear trajectory,” Doane
writes, “[the latter] reasserts the explosive instantaneity at the heart
of cinematic continuity.”73
Meanwhile, the “still film” refers to the film form based entirely
on the alliance of the fixed camera, the recording of which endures
for a given period, with the object in motion, particularly slow, nearly
invisible motion. Peter Wollen prefigured the idea of the “still film”
in his discussion on the relationship between photography and film.
For him, the films of Andy Warhol and Jean-Marie Straub–Danièle
 Videographic moving pictures 77

Huillet illustrate a possible combination of photography and film in

that they display the “moving picture of the motionless subject.”74 The
coupling of the static camera with the subject creates an impression
of stasis, although the image is not actually frozen. This leads Wollen
to claim that there is no sharp contrast between the photographic
“past” and the cinematic “present,” and that each medium is able to
render different aspects of temporality in relation to the event that it
portrays: “The fact that images may themselves appear as punctual,
virtually without duration, does not mean that the situations that
they represent lack any quality of duration or other qualities related
to time.”75 This view of the photograph that arrests the event in
duration, and thus appears “punctual,” can be applied to the “still
film”: the fixed camera’s portrayal of the change in duration does
not necessarily mean annihilation of the static quality related to
photography.
If the “film stilled” invokes photography’s act of arresting a
moment in time as a slice of life through abnormal movements,
including slow motion, apparent stillness of the photos (seen in La
Jetée) and stuttering caused by repetition of film frames (seen in pièce
touchée), then the “still film,” in contrast, aligns with long-exposure
photography, signifying the camera’s extended recording time with
an immobile long take. Deleuze confirms the dual articulation of
photography and film in this form through his discussion of the
“still-life” shots in the films of Yasujiro Ozu: “There is becoming,
change, passage. But this form of what changes does not itself
change, does not pass on . . . at the point where the cinematographic
image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes radically
distinct from it.”76 A key strain of recent art cinema, represented
by the films of Tsai Ming-Liang (Goodbye, Dragon Inn [2003]),
Bruno Dumont (L’Humanité [1999]), Gus Van Sant (Gerry [2002]),
and others, has revamped Ozu’s tradition in the name of “slow
cinema,” a term recently coined in film criticism to refer to a
group of arthouse films that insist upon the aesthetic of extended
duration imbued with minimalist, observational deployment of
the camera, including static framing.77 However, it has primarily
been in the domain of experimental cinema that the aesthetic of
the long take pushes the film image to its limit—to the moment at
which its duration appears to stand still. P. Adams Sitney’s seminal,
if controversial, classification of the structural film demonstrates
that various formal and material experiments with the film medium
78 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

allude to the two intermedial forms of film and photography.

Despite the absence in his discussion of the relationship between
photography and film, Sitney singles out the “fixed camera position”
and the “flicker effect” as two technical strategies characterizing
the structural film, which correspond to the “still film” and the
“film stilled,” respectively. Thus, by Sitney’s definition, the films
of Warhol (Eat [1963], Sleep [1963], Empire [1964]) represent the
minimalist use of the fixed camera in comparison to the flicker film,
which isolates the frame unit (the photogram) as film’s material
property.78 Catherine Russell compellingly associates the fixed frame
(as shape) with the content ignored by Sitney, discussing several
avant-garde filmmakers including Chantal Akerman (D’Est [1993])
and James Benning (Landscape Suicide [1987]). She categorizes the
filmmakers’ bodies of work as associating structural film’s formal
experimentation with documentary’s claiming of the real, in the
sense that they use the static camera as a device to document human
bodies or natural or artificial objects in space, yet critically question
how the bodies or objects are constructed within the sphere of visual
representation. In these films, extended duration is combined with
the static frame to offer “a fake impression of depth, the excess of
detail resulting from the fixed state.”79 Russell further notes that the
fixed camera and its methods of framing and arranging its object
exceed the self-reflexive imperative of structural film to reassure
the intrinsic nature of film: “Cinema shares its apparatus of vision
and techniques of representation with many other media, and the
‘structure’ of structural film extends far beyond cinema.” 80
The remapping of the “film stilled” and the “still film” in
conjunction with rereading of the theories thus far suggests that
the history of cinema has taken various forms to reflect on its
ambiguous relationship to photography as much as photography
has (for instance, in the cases of Goldstein, Longo, Sherman, etc.).
While the two traditions—experimental film on the one hand,
and artists’ film on the other—in a sense may have had their own
historical trajectories in the 1960s and 1970s, it is of little doubt
that they ran parallel to each other in terms of the “film stilled”
and the “still film” investigating points of differentiation and
connectedness between photography and film. In this sense, the films
of Goldstein and Longo, which Crimp characterized as examples of
the “picture” generation, correspond to the “film stilled” and the
“still film,” respectively. This is also the case in Baker’s discussion
 Videographic moving pictures 79

of the artworks that explore photography’s alliance with film by

creating hybrid exchange of stasis and motion. Coleman’s slide
projection, which Baker regards as achieving the “dual articulation”
of photography and film, has a compelling affinity with the flicker
effects of the “film stilled.” Also, the films of Dean (Disappearance
at Sea [1996], Fernsehturm [2001], Palast [2004]) and Lockhart
(Goshogaoka [1997], Teatro Amazonas [1999], Pine Flat [2006]),
which Baker briefly outlines in his conception of “photography’s
expanded field” rejuvenate the tradition of the “still film” inasmuch
as their static camera portrays deserted or forgotten objects and
landscapes (Dean’s films) or the quiet moments and details of
everyday life (Lockhart’s films) at a glacial tempo evocative of
photographic fixture.
Consequently, the traditions of the “film stilled” and the “still
film,” both in cinema and in contemporary art, suggest that
renewed attention to the ambiguous relationship between film
and photography demonstrates an increasingly mutual influence
between the two institutional fields. Within this context, electronic
and digital technologies have recently been implemented to
remediate these two forms. The types of remediation thus waver
between the most primitive techniques, those based on the camera
recording for an extended duration, and the most complex technical
implementations, which intervene in the most minimal units of the
moving image (i.e., the single picture frame and the interval between
two adjacent frames). The works of Taylor-Johnson, Lewis, and
Viola emblematize the ways in which the combinatory uses of these
two techniques lead to hybrid moving images seen as variations
on the “film stilled” (specifically, Taylor-Johnson’s time-lapse and
Viola’s slow motion) and the “still film” (the three artists’ common
employment of the fixed frame). Similarly, Tan’s and Hannah’s video
portraits rely on a combination of the static video camera with a
pictorial and photographic system of composition, and Claerbout
employs an array of digital manipulations to apply the freeze-frame
technique in reverse, animating found or filmed photographs to
create a paradoxical cohabitation of stillness and movement. The
three artists’ remediation of the two forms thus sheds new light on
photographic stillness and its temporal complexities embedded in
the cinema.
As discussed in the section regarding the works of Taylor-
Johnson, Lewis, and Viola, the single-take moving picture invites
80 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

technical, figurative, and compositional strategies drawn from

film, photography, and painting. For this reason, this type of
moving picture is referred to as the “single-shot tableau mode.”
Drawing on Denis Diderot’s remark on the similarities between
the painted tableau and the staged scene, and linking it to both
Bertolt Brecht’s use of the tableau for his conception of epic theater
and Sergei Eisenstein’s figuration of the shot as tableau, Roland
Barthes identifies the “cut-out rectangle” as the very “condition
that allows us to conceive all those arts.”81 Barthes later extends this
comparative view of the static composition into his contemplation
of the ontology of photography, arguing that photography is
indebted both to the painter’s camera obscura and to the tradition
of primitive theater as “a kind of tableau vivant, a figuration of the
motionless.”82 In underlining some key characteristics revealed by
the deployment of the tableau vivant scene in film, its translation
of painting’s two-dimensionality and its foregrounding of arrested
motion, Brigitte Peucker notes that because the tableau vivant exists
as “the nodal point that joins painting, sculpture, and theater, its
evocation in film is a moment of intensified intermediality.”83 Noël
Burch reads the tableau, which is grounded in the horizontal and
frontal placement of the fixed camera, as a key principle in the
spatial composition of early cinema, which he calls the primitive
mode of representation. The tableau was bequeathed to the early
filmmakers, “whose historical task was to adapt to the cinema the
essential gestures of classical theatrical, novelistic, and painterly
representation,” and their historical efforts to integrate the tableau
into cinema have been nearly “forgotten today, to the point that
any return to certain primitive practices in this respect will seem
avant-garde.”84
Burch mentions Akerman and Jean-Luc Godard as two filmmakers
who have attempted to return to those “primitive practices” in
some of their films, for instance, the former’s Jeanne Dielman, 23
Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and the latter’s Passion
(1982), but they are not alone; a number of contemporary moving
image artists outside the terrain of institutionalized cinema have
revisited and refashioned the historical and formal connections
between film and the tableau. The difference is that the artists’
moving image works are, due in part to their corresponding
production of painting and photography, more inclined to evoke
the conventions of these media than are the film directors’. For this
 Videographic moving pictures 81

reason, the single-shot tableau mode that these artists employ with
the video camera tends largely to invite either the photographic
portrait or the tableau vivant, on the condition that the camera’s
objects are human figures that initially appear frozen. Seen from
this perspective, the artists who adopt the single-shot tableau mode
use video’s capacity of recording profilmic reality in an extended
duration to make moving image artworks comparable to the “still
film.” The artworks, then, aim to foreground the representational
systems of painting, photography, and film in a reflexive manner.
The still video portrait has been a remarkable phenomenon in
contemporary art over the past two decades. In this form, a subject
is posed in front of a fixed camera and filmed by it during the whole
time of its operation. Along with Thomas Struth, Rineke Dijkstra,
and Beat Streuli, Tan has been prominent in this genre in her efforts
to extend interest in photographic representation of human subjects
into the moving image. Taking as her starting point Citizens of the
Twentieth Century, August Sander’s photographic survey of the
German population in the early twentieth century according to
occupation, gender, family type, age, and social class, Tan’s four-
channel video installation Countenance (2002, Figure 1.9) creates
an archive of contemporary individuals and groups in Berlin that she
investigated and captured in 2002. Her six-channel video installation
Correction (2004, Figure 1.10) extends this approach, presenting

Figure 1.9 Fiona Tan, Countenance (2002), installation view, courtesy

the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.
82 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 1.10 Tan, Correction (2004), installation view, courtesy the artist
and Frith Street Gallery, London.

more than three hundred video portraits of male and female

prisoners and guards filmed at four American penitentiaries. These
two installations share Tan’s reflexive reference to the codes and
conventions of the still photograph, which activate its theatricality:
because the subjects were conscious of the fact that they were
being filmed, their poses become decisive acts of constituting their
portraits in agreement with the artist and her camera. Tan calls into
question the camera’s framing and composition of subjects (full-
shot or medium-shot, horizontal angle, and frontality of position),
as well as its gaze at the subjects, thereby revealing them as devices
that determine the representation of the subjects’ identity. The two
pieces’ images diverge from that of the still portrait, however, in
that the camera records the subject’s pose but does not freeze it as
in photography. The individuals or groups are presumably engaged
in Tan’s filming with the intent of self-representation, but spectators
can witness the counterbalance of this intent in the bodily changes
that slightly break the subjects’ postures: twitching hands, fidgeting
fingers, blinking eyes. As Mark Godfrey observes, Tan’s capturing
of the movement emphasizes “the anxiety of self-representation”
that each pose reveals.85
The cohabitation of film, photography, and painting within a
single fixed frame and the tension between recording and pose are
also evident in the video pieces of Canadian artist Hannah. Unlike
 Videographic moving pictures 83

Tan’s propensity for photographic portraits, however, Hannah’s

corpus of work spans various traditions of the visual arts, the
tableau vivant being the most salient. Several of Hannah’s videos
since 2008 are the most explicit references to this tradition that
can be found; they present a group of performers holding a pose in
order to stage paintings such as Théodore Géricault’s monumental
work The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), Diego Velázquez’s Las
Meninas (1656), and illustrator Charles Allan Gilbert’s All Is Vanity
(1892). But more interesting, from the standpoint of Hannah’s
creative reworking of the tableau vivant, is Museum Stills (2002), a
series of five single-channel videos that investigate the relationship
between the museum space (the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts),
its artworks (Renaissance and Baroque paintings), and its visitors.
All the pieces start with a frozen moment in which beholders
are placed in various situations expected of a museum: moments
of absorption, in which visitors engage in full appreciation of a
religious painting in the mid-seventeenth century, observing it
and even imitating its depiction of a character’s gesture (Tribute,
Figure 1.11), a portrayal of a man kneeling with clasped hands
against the backdrop of other religious paintings, as if moved by

Figure 1.11 Still from Adad Hannah, Tribute (2002), SD Video, 5 min,
Courtesy of Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal, and
Equinox Gallery, Vancouver.
84 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

them (Crying); and at the other spectrum, moments of distraction

and boredom, in which visitors sit languidly in four chairs arranged
in a cruciform shape, appearing disinterested in the paintings that
surround them (4 Chairs, Figure 1.12). The impression of frozenness
is broken as each moment becomes an extended duration of time
wherein the individuals largely stand still, yet their body parts
(eyes, hands, heads, etc.) subtly move. In this way, the scenes are
revealed to be staged reenactments of our experiences as viewers.
The movements thus mirror either the individuals’ efforts to
maintain their uncomfortable positions and poses, or their bodies’
involuntary, contingent aspects that eschew control of those efforts.
The individuals’ absorptive manner of staging the particular scenes
is thus exposed to the viewer and denaturalized.
If Tan’s and Hannah’s single-shot tableaux are grounded in the
mechanical inscription of profilmic time, a time isomorphic with
“what is generally thought to be our everyday lived experience of
time,”86 then the duration of the shot as a trace of the past takes on
its own presence at the time of our viewing. What is notable in this
mode is less confirming of the camera’s transparent reproduction
of an antecedent reality, as the standard realist argument might

Figure 1.12 Still from Hannah, 4 Chairs (2002), SD Video, 5 min,

Courtesy of Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal, and
Equinox Gallery, Vancouver.
 Videographic moving pictures 85

point out, than bringing to the viewer the technical operations that
endow its record with a sense of presence. In doing this, single-
shot tableaux echo a revisionist understanding of the photographic
image as index, a consideration of the index not as a direct reference
to a past reality but as an indication of a temporal ambiguity
aroused by the image, an interpenetration of past and present.
Daniel Morgan underlines this ambiguity in his brilliant rereading
of Bazin’s theory: “The objects a photograph presents may not
exist in the present, but they are not exactly in the past, nor are
they in any other time. They are real but outside (historical) time
altogether.”87 Doane also points to this temporal ambiguity in her
reflection on C. S. Peirce’s concept of the index characterized by
his two overlapping definitions: the index as trace, exemplified by
the footprint, and the index as deixis, represented by the pointing
finger or the “this” of language, which is “ineluctably linked
to presence.”88 She applies the concept of index as deixis to the
tradition of avant-garde cinema, considering the 45-minute zoom
effect in Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) “the embodiment of
the pointing finger or the imperative ‘Look at this!’”89 Considered
this way, the single-shot tableau functions as deixis in much the
same way as the zoom in Wavelength: both direct the spectator to
the event or a gesture that they frame (the index as trace) while at
the same time stressing its temporal duration as identical to the time
that passes during viewing of the film. Marin Walberg’s comment
on Warhol’s extended fixed shot duration points out how it acts as
deixis: “Warhol’s play with filmic representation and the unfolding
of an event in real time posits the materiality of a static camera
view.”90 In this case, when the single-shot tableau exposes itself as
an object with its material and plastic value, it becomes as much a
primary focus of film experience as its imprint of the past.
The temporal paradox of past (index as trace) and present (index
as deixis) presented by the single-shot tableau as a “still film” can
indeed be found not simply in film theory but also in discourse on
photography. Krauss’s seminal account of the index is characterized
by her consistent use of the term “presence,” as she addresses how
it operates in many artists’ adoption of the photograph as a means
of representation and documentation in American art of the 1970s.
Such phrases as the “pure installation of presence by means of the
index” and the “overwhelming physical presence of the original
object”91 suggest that her concept of the index does not rely simply
86 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

upon the pastness of the photographic record. Green and Lowry,

too, ascribe the excessive presence of a photographed event to the
camera that “operates as the deictic agent.”92 For the two theorists,
the work of conceptual photographers foregrounds the operation of
their camera so that the viewer recognizes how it shapes the concept
of photographic indexicality as “performative”—that is, as invoking
the real “through ‘pointing to’ the event.”93 Here the ambiguous
intermingling of past and present relates to the inseparability of
a photographic act from the way in which it is presented to the
viewer: the intervention of a camera that records an event or object
refers to the reality of a past, but the camera’s performative gesture
of pointing toward the reality functions as a mediator that brings
the past to the present viewer. Returning to Tan’s video portraits
and Hannah’s Museum Stills, it is obvious that their video cameras
act as performative agents, which they foreground in relation to the
poses of their subjects. The subjects’ involuntary bodily movements,
then, are seen to underline this aspect of the camera, since they occur
at the moment in which their pose as a performative engagement
with the camera’s recording process is broken. Seen in this light, the
camera in Tan’s and Hannah’s works serves to render the pose as
overwhelming the time of the viewer.
Yet another aspect of the camera’s performative role in “pointing
to” the pose exists as well. Because Tan’s and Hannah’s method
of filming subjects dispenses with other cinematic devices such
as montage and camera movement, their installations are viewed
as a collection of the primitive form of the moving image, whose
motion originates only from the contact between the camera’s
continued operation and the subjects’ physical changes of state.
This is particularly the case in Tan’s works; her foregrounding
of the still camera in Countenance and Correction relates to her
interest in how the codes and conventions of the photographic
portrait influenced early cinema’s frontality, and the relationship
between the camera’s filming and the filmed subject.94 At the same
time, the movement of the subjects in Tan’s and Hannah’s works
must be understood in relation to the extended duration provided
by video. As Lowry observes, the notion of duration introduced by
Tan’s video camera renders the pose “something that takes place
over time—a time that . . . is also marked out and delimited by
the operations of the technology.”95 The suspension of the pose
originates from the fact that its subject endures the process of video
 Videographic moving pictures 87

recording. This is also applicable to Museum Stills: the visitors’

acts of looking at or being distracted from the paintings take place
during the time of recording in which their bodily movement is
suspended. Thus, Tan’s and Hannah’s works bring to the viewer
not just the camera’s framing, but the time that it imposes on the
subject, or the inseparability of time from the subject’s pose. The
tension between the act of a filmed subject and the time that he
or she must endure during the act undoubtedly dates back to the
work of film and video performances in the 1960s and 1970s by
Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and Joan Jonas, to name just a few.96
Seen in this light, Tan’s works, as well as those of other “video
portrait” artists, are indebted to the capacity of video to render its
profilmic subject as pure presence in its duration. Unlike the video
performances of the 1960s and 1970s, however, which examined
video’s duration of real time as its unique property, this videographic
mode in the single-shot tableau aims either to activate the temporal
complexity of the indexical image common to photography and
film (in Tan’s works) or to expose and denaturalize the tableau
vivant tradition long developed and varied across different media
(in Hannah’s works).
The video installation works of Claerbout explore the “pensive
image” since they confront the viewer with photographs, whose
mode of stillness guides her toward the contemplation of them.
According to Jacque Rancière, the word “pensive” primarily refers
to “someone who is . . . ‘full of thoughts’,” but this mental state is
interlocked with a specific mode of the image that arouses them,
an image characterized by “a certain passivity.”97 The concept of
“pensiveness” that Rancière discusses primarily relates to Barthes’s
reflection on the temporal ontology of the photographic image
and on the viewer’s perceptual sensitiveness to it, which leads to
his affective contemplation of its pastness. Barthes’s concept of
pensiveness is based on photography’s capturing of a past in the fixed
form—namely, its “stasis of arrest”98 that allows the photograph’s
unexpected detail to emerge. For Barthes, film’s irreversible flow of
linear time, which asserts film narrative and its temporality, absorbs
the photographic motionlessness that guarantees a contemplative
consciousness.99 Thus Barthes considers the stilled image, including
film stills, as opening up the space for scrutinizing the photographic
index’s complex relation to time, in which an oscillation between
past and present is not assimilated into the illusion of movement in
88 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the cinema: filmic time is not free insofar as its image “cannot go
faster or slower without losing its perceptual figure.”100
Bellour expands on Barthes’s concept of pensiveness but gives
a fresh twist to it by reflecting on the moment in which the
filmic image “goes slower without losing its perceptual figure.”
By decelerating or interrupting the flow of film, such techniques
as the freeze-frame, the suspension of movement, and the
rephotographing and enlargement of the still photo in a sequence
serve not simply to reveal the hidden presence of the photogram
in the cinema, but also to offer the film viewer an opportunity to
resist the “unfolding of images in time, a time the spectator cannot
control.”101 Bellour then argues that the moment of stillness offered
by those techniques creates a “pensive spectator,” a spectator who
is capable of distancing himself from the irreversible flow of the
filmic image. At the moment of stillness in the cinema the “pensive
spectator” is confronted with a merger of two temporalities, the
time of the photographic referent and the time of the moving image:
“In the frozen film (or photogram), the presence of the photograph
bursts out . . . between it and the film from which it emerges, two
kinds of time blend together,”102 continues Bellour. In this way, the
frozen or slowed image in the cinema underscores a moment in
which its time is coupled with the same temporality as Barthes sees
in photography—the ambivalence of “having-been-there” (the past)
and “being-there” (the presence of the past).
Laura Mulvey places Bellour’s concept of the “pensive spectator”
within the context of today’s viewing devices (such as VHS and the
DVD) to pause, decelerate, and rewind the film image, arguing that
they “bring to the cinema the resonance of the still photograph, the
association with death usually concealed by the film’s movement,
its particularly strong inscription of the index.”103 The “aesthetics
of delay” enabled by the new technologies, Mulvey continues, can
yield a form of moving image in which the relation between “film
time” (the time when an image was inscribed onto the filmstrip) and
“cinema time” (the time shaped by cinema’s illusion of movement)
becomes more uncertain than before: the electronic or digital
freeze-frame, for instance, is not the actual film frame as found in
celluloid, but it restores to the moving image the uncanny presence
of a past—and, by extension, the past’s evocation of mortality and
death, which Barthes and Bellour associate with the still photograph.
In my view, Mulvey’s observation of this freeze-frame testifies to the
 Videographic moving pictures 89

extent to which the post-filmic adoption of the techniques for the

delay of film is double-edged: the digitally rendered freeze-frame
or slow motion makes it clear that the temporal conundrum of
analogue media, the ambiguous coupling of past and present, does
not exhaust itself in the post-filmic technologies; at the same time,
this revivification and repositioning of filmic and photographic
temporalities with respect to stillness and movement via the
technologies entails the inscription of their properties unavailable
in the two media. Claerbout’s corpus of digital video stands out in
terms of the tension between the two edges, as its images present
varying degrees of the dual articulation of photography and film.
A number of Claerbout’s video pieces take as a point of departure
a found single photograph. When the photograph is projected during
a particular span of running time, it initially looks like a freeze-
frame in a film, which Bellour might consider as the “film stilled.”
Now that Claerbout edits the photo in a minimal but significant
way by means of digital manipulation, however, the resulting image
takes on a coexistence of stillness and movement in the same photo
frame: while most of the picture’s objects and grounds remain
frozen in the past, a small part of its details are set in light motion
in the present. First, this movement is focused on the foliage of
the tree (Boom [1996], Ruurlo, Bocurloscheweg, 1910 [1997],
Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia, 1932 [1998] [Figure 1.13]), so that

Figure 1.13 Still from David Claerbout, Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia,

1932 (1998), single-channel video projection, black and white, silent,
10-min loop © David Claerbout, Courtesy of the Artist and Sean Kelley,
New York.
90 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

it reminds the viewer of the passage of time as a natural progression

of the physical world. Yet in his later works the movement gets
more minute as they bring to life the faces of boys and a priest
(as their teacher) coming from an anonymous photograph taken
at a Catholic boys’ school (Retrospection [2000]), or the sun and
clouds surrounding an aircraft shot down by friendly fire in the
Vietnam War (Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho (reconstruction after
Hiromishi Mine) [2001]). As Green observes, all these pieces are
characterized by the “undecidability” of whether Claerbout’s image
is film or photography: “[Claerbout’s work] faces us with . . . the
possibility of a photograph that unfolds in time (but is not a film)
and a film that is stilled in time (but is not a photograph).”104
Claerbout’s technique of “unfreezing a photograph” plays a crucial
role in this undecidability because it is in a sense an inverted
application of freezing the linear progression of cinematic time,
which Bellour and Mulvey have seen as the condition of “pensive”
spectator. As he acknowledges, “When the one-directional language
of film is suspended then the spectator himself must seek a new
position.”105 Considering this way, it might be possible to regard his
found material not simply as photography per se, but as part of an
imagined film, a freeze-frame of a film whose unfolding of images
was not achieved but eternally delayed, underlining their details as
the inscription of the irrevocable past.
Digital video lies at the heart of the intermixture between the
two media, while simultaneously infusing the original image with
its own temporal figuration. It reconstitutes on the same picture
plane the different levels of time each coming from photography
and from film, that is, the living trace of the past and the flow of
time as the present, by combining the manipulation of the electronic
signal with the retouching of the plane pixel by pixel.106 As seen
in the trembling of the leaves on the tree, for instance, the surface
micromanipulation of the encoded picture is embedded within the
temporal manipulation of the interlaced scan line, made visible by
its continual vibration.107 With the advent of digital technologies,
this temporal simultaneity is elevated to the configuration of what
Timothy Murray has called, to draw on Deleuze’s reinterpretation of
Bergson and Leibniz, “digital incompossibility,” in which different
modalities of the world, for instance, its actual and virtual faces,
are folded and unfolded in a temporal continuum of becoming,
affecting each other while maintaining their own singularity.108
 Videographic moving pictures 91

“Rather than either converging or remaining impossible for each

other, rather than being either included or excluded, they stand in
paradoxical relation to one another as divergent and coexistent.”109
It is the in-between of the actual and the virtual, of representation
and simulation, and of past and present, that makes Claerbout’s
works confusing yet poignant. And if this concept implies, as
Murray states, a challenge to “prior modernist assumptions about
art, aesthetics, and identity,”110 Claerbout’s dual articulation of
cinematic and photographic forms encapsulates the ways in which
digital technologies cause the two to confront one another within
their limits yet liberate them from their material substrate. In this
way, his strategy of partial animation gives rise to the threshold
between the verification and the dissolution of each medium’s
specificities. What lies at the threshold is an artificial temporality,
a temporality whose length of duration and direction are up to the
material and technical determination of the electronic flow rather
than to the measurement of humanized time. This is obvious in the
fact that the duration of the animated objects, the wind over the
trees, the spectrum of shadow and light, cannot solely be grasped
in terms of their natural changes. For in the works there is nothing
that would function as the chronological marker of those changes.
For instance, the intermittent reflection of sunlight on a window
(Reflecting Sunset [2003]) or a jungle of concrete pillars at a
construction site (The Stack [2002]) occurs during 38 minutes or
36 minutes, respectively, but neither of these time spans guarantee
that the path of the setting sun matches its natural progression:
that is, they might be derived from the dilation or compression of
the electronic signal in which the physical traces of the phenomena
are inscribed.
At stake for Claerbout is, then, how this electronic and digital
temporality serves for the “visible intersection of filmic and
photographic temporalities,” undoing any “simple dichotomies
between past and present, between movement and stasis.”111 In
Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho (reconstruction after Hiromishi
Mine) (Figure 1.14), the photograph is placed within the screen as
an identifiable object, which is severed between the unperformed
movement of the aircraft at the moment of the camera’s fixture and
its unavoidable destiny to fall on the ground in the continuing flow
of life. The movements of the natural phenomena, the shadows of
clouds on the hillside, and the changes in the brightness of sunlight
92 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 1.14 Still from Claerbout, Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho
(reconstruction after Hiromishi Mine) (2001), single-channel video
projection, color, silent, 3-min loop © David Claerbout, Courtesy of the
Artist and Sean Kelley, New York.

on the plain mirror this split. At the phenomenal level, the image
is one that acquires filmic duration and slowly moves. Because the
actual transition from one state to another in those movements is
extremely subtle, however, the slow motion at first sight appears
to be the freeze-frame image or the projected slide of the snapshot.
The arrested aircraft, then, functions as a fulcrum to maintain
this seemingly contradictory visual impression. In this way, the
digital reanimation effect indistinguishable from the changes in
the natural phenomena, as Mulvey supposes, brings the cinematic
image back to the time it was filmed. Then the changes marked
by the micromovement are contrasted with the aircraft, thereby
highlighting that the snapshot’s attempt to portray the aircraft’s
movement results in its fossilization. In this sense, this contrast
attenuates what Thierry de Duve has called the “traumatic effect”
of the snapshot, an effect less due to its visual content (scenes of
violence or obscenity, for example) than its structural limit—due
to its splitting between “too-late” (“too late to witness [an event’s]
happening in reality”) and “too-soon” (“too early to see the event
occur”).112 What this splitting arouses to the viewer of the snapshot
is that its event or object takes on the irrevocable past due to its
 Videographic moving pictures 93

failure to convey movement in time, which causes the “sudden

vanishing of the present tense.”113 The micromovement, then, is also
seen as a key device to dramatize how the traumatic past caught in
the snapshot returns to the viewer’s present.114 It is in this way that
the moving image challenges the ontology of the photographic—
because the micromovement dissolves the complete fixation of a
moment—yet simultaneously affirms it.
For Retrospection (Figures 1.15 and 1.16), Claerbout deals with
the class photograph in such a way that every person in the group
can be recognized as an individual whose expression functions as

Figures 1.15 and 1.16 Stills from Claerbout, Retrospection (2000),

single-channel video projection, black and white, stereo sound, 16 minutes
© David Claerbout, Courtesy of the Artist and Sean Kelley, New York.
94 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

though the punctum, a detail or “partial object” as an “accident

which pricks”115 the viewer. A series of zoom-ins isolate and reframe
certain members of the group one by one, thereby magnifying each
of their faces. Therein occurs a minimal, barely perceptible passage
from stasis to motion, bringing to the picture’s surface an array of
minute changes on the face, such as the mouth’s twitching, the eye’s
quivering, and the lip’s small smiling. For generating these subtle
animation effects, Claerbout brushes the picture’s pixels and turns
their changes into the oscillation of video signal. While directly
related to the painterly manipulation in digital photography, for
Claerbout this treatment fits into his conception of photography
as “a skin that can be touched.”116 In the first place, it is of little
doubt that his technique, namely, the combination of magnification
and retouching, is at odds with a couple of key arguments for the
concept of Barthesian punctum: the chemical fixation of the referent
on a photosensitive material, which is assumed to guarantee the
irrefutable indexicality of the analogue photograph,117 is eroded;
more significantly, Claerbout’s manipulative attitude toward the
found photograph contradicts the pervasive idea of the punctum
as being shown outside the intention of the photographer.118
Nevertheless, it is too undeniable that Claerbout drags out from
the original photograph what is equivalent to the punctum, the
details—in this case, the facial expressions of the students: for they
are not subjugated to the control of the unknown photographer
who took the picture, and thus viewed as “accidentally” inscribed
in it. How can, then, we explain this contradictory coincidence of
the intentional and the accidental?
The movement of the faces in Retrospection, however tranquilized,
dismantles the pose and makes their expression ephemeral: that is,
the pose becomes something that will disappear as the moment of
magnification ends. At the same time, however, it should be noted
that this movement is not purely cinematic since it does not deliver
the continuous series of images that would lead to efface the faces
on the screen. Rather, it functions to amplify the spectral force of
the punctum as it draws the viewer’s attention to the paradoxical
coincidence of absence and presence, of life and death, lingering on
the faces. That is, the coming-to-life of their expressions attenuates,
in Barthesian sense, that the students are already dead, that is, they
are those who were there and then and were destined to die, perhaps
at a war. Here the movement, rather than the sheer manifestation
 Videographic moving pictures 95

of cinematic medium specificity, is a way of giving a visible form to

the uncanny presence of the expressions in the viewer’s present in
exchange of their inherent immobility. Claerbout makes this point
as follows: “My behavior became that of a nurse: it would bring
these images back to life and let them float in an environment that
would not treat them as passé.”119 In this sense, the changes in the
expressions are seen as the result of animating what animates the
viewer in the photograph. This also suggests that the movement
stresses the sense of loss inherent in the photograph (in the case of
the class photo, the loss of the students’ souls) and simultaneously
incorporates the viewer’s perceptual and affective engagement with
that which arouses the loss by “pricking” him—the punctum.
Consequently, Claerbout’s videographic moving pictures,
which are based upon his creative reworking of the “film stilled”
with digital reanimation of found photographs, stand in the
space between photography and film while also pointing out a
liminal point in which both converge and differentiate from each
other. Claerbout’s digital editing opens up this space, thereby
substantiating that the new technologies have possibilities for
drawing on and metamorphosing the photographic image (or the
filmic moving image that discloses its photographic past) which
stimulates the viewer’s careful and time-consuming reflection. The
resulting hybrid moving image is, to Rancière’s words once again,
“not about to stop being pensive.”120

Conclusion
I have attempted in this chapter to reposition the theory of the
photographic in cinema within the influence of electronic and digital
technologies and, in so doing, to categorize and examine the forms of
image, which I named videographic moving pictures, that facilitate
exchange between film and photography through unprecedented,
intense collapse of the boundaries between stillness and movement.
In producing these videographic moving pictures, digital video
appropriates and transforms the two privileged filmic forms, the
“film stilled” and the “still film,” haunted by and returning to the
temporal complexity of photography. Thus, while videographic
moving pictures present hybrid aesthetics of photography and
film as in the cases of Tan and Hannah, the technologies often
96 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

result in its spatiotemporal configurations not attributable to the

analogue version of the two media, such as the delicate transition
from stillness to motion in the works of Taylor-Johnson, Lewis,
and Viola, and the paradoxical cohabitation of stasis and motion
in Claerbout’s pensive images. The latter two cases in particular
mirror the material and structural shifts in both photographic and
filmic images while simultaneously refashioning the intermediality
of the two. In all cases mentioned, videographic moving pictures
bear witness to a profound paradox that has circumscribed the two
analogue media in the digitized production of art during the past
two decades: while distanced from their common material basis,
both film and photography, hitherto recognized as distinct, find
their less-acknowledged resonances in the hybrid forms of image
that revivify their complex temporal aesthetics. The simultaneous
articulation of stasis and motion in videographic moving pictures
suggests that while dismantling their respective boundaries,
electronic and digital technologies allow the artists not to disregard
the specificities of film and photography, but to revisit them by
placing the two media in negotiation with one another. In this sense,
what Baker sees as a key lesson of “photography’s expanded field”
is also applicable to artists of videographic moving pictures: “Not
that modernist medium-specificity would simply dissipate into the
pluralist state of anything goes, but rather that such mediums would
quite precisely expand, marking out a strategic movement whereby
both art and world, or art and the larger cultural field, would stand
in new, formerly unimaginable relations to one another.”121
This chapter further suggests that any attempt to reassure the
stable identity of video under the aegis of the modernist belief
in medium specificity may short-circuit the extent to which its
material and technical features are maintained, galvanized, or
redeployed, as its technological conditions have shifted. Rather than
insisting on the limited parameters of video’s formal and aesthetic
outcomes, such as noisy and abstract images distinct from cinema’s
photorealistic imagery and the expression of real time as distinct
from cinema’s recording of past events, it is more meaningful to
examine the intermedial flow of video’s key specificities—surface
and temporal manipulations—that both converse with and
influence other media components. In so doing, digital video can be
placed at the juncture of analogue video, filmic and digital cinema,
and the computer. Only then can we bridge a chasm that tends to
 Videographic moving pictures 97

be taken for granted in discussing the issues of media exchange

after the demise of medium specificity. Video’s increasing alliance
with cinema, and by extension with painting and photography, in
videographic moving pictures is symptomatic of its expanded field
at the cost of some of its enfeebled distinctiveness; but even so,
identifying and scrutinizing video’s specificities in the digital era
is of great value for examining how many contemporary artists
make use of it conceptually and aesthetically to produce moving
images characterized by media hybridity. Indeed, the aesthetic of
media hybridity engendered by the manipulative capabilities of
digital video is also relevant to a number of contemporary artists
and filmmakers, who use it to maintain and deepen the traditions
of abstract film and video, the imagery of which are contrasted with
videographic moving pictures. My investigation of those artists in
the next chapter will demonstrate how the aesthetic of abstraction,
which was traditionally considered a self-reflexive inquiry into the
material properties of film and analogue video, continues in the
digital age—with an emphasis upon how it can be read as pursuing
not simply purity, but also aesthetic, technical, and even material
hybridity.
 chapter two

Digital glitch video and

mixed-media abstraction:
Materialism and hybrid
abstraction in the
digital age

Introduction: Digital abstract moving

images and hybridity
In Compression Study # 1 (Untitled data mashup) (2007, Figure
2.1), a mix of the music videos for Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and The
Cranberries’ “Zombie,” the viewer is able to witness a moment in
which the close-ups of Rihanna and Dolores O’Riordan (lead singer
of The Cranberries) become unrecognizable. The face of O’Riordan,
coated in gold costume and clothes, is overlapped with Rihanna’s
face in black and white, and vice versa, but this transition does not
lead to a clean image in which both figures and their gestures would
be seamlessly represented. Instead, a whirlwind of broken pixels and
irregular shapes in black, white, and yellow overwhelm the figures
of both pop stars while leaving only small parts of them in which
the viewer is still capable of recognizing the identity of the stars.
100 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 2.1 Still from Paul B. Davis and Jacob Ciocci, Compression Study
# 1 (Untitled data mashup) (2007), courtesy of the artists.

Artists Paul B. Davis and Jacob Ciocci, the latter a primary member
of artistic collective Paper Rad, extend the appropriated digital files
of the two music videos and manipulate their underlying frames to
create this dynamic tension between the figurative remainders of
the pop stars and the abstract play of the kaleidoscopic colors and
liquid forms.
The continual clash between the figurative and the abstract can
also be observed in Thorsten Fleisch’s Wound Footage (2003/2009,
Figure 2.2). Fleisch took the Super 8-mm footage of a car running
across a deserted landscape and scratched and burned the emulsion
on its reels before passing the reels through a projector. These
hands-on and chemical manipulations create an array of holes,
deterioration of colors, an oscillating horizontal white stripe, and a
series of black lines on the surface of the footage, all of which refer
to film’s medium-specific components. While these techniques of
crafting celluloid manually and chemically are certainly indebted
to the materialist tradition of experimental cinema exemplified
by the films of Stan Brakhage, such as Mothlight (1963), Fleisch
added two non-filmic processes to his reels. He digitized the reels
and dislocated some of the pixels with a software application.
Accordingly, a random array of fleeting specks appears like boiling
noises on the figure of the landscape. Fleisch then reshot the
footage from his monitor with a video camera while intervening
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 101

Figure 2.2 Film still from Thorsten Fleisch, Wound Footage (2003/2009),
courtesy Thorsten Fleisch.

with the cables that connected the monitor to his computer. This
physical manipulation allows a series of scan lines and intermittent
electronic flickers to overlap with the traces of celluloid and the
specks of pixels. Consequently, the viewer is able to observe the
dynamic intersection of the materiality of film and that of digital
video. As Fleisch himself remarks, his attempt to blur the boundaries
of celluloid-based and digital manipulations in Wound Footage
“demonstrates the different aspects and aesthetics of each approach
but at the same time it shows that it’s all just moving images.”1
This chapter discusses two types of the hybrid moving
images characterized by the coexistence and interrelation of the
representational and abstract components in the single picture
frame, one type demonstrated by Compression Study #1 (Untitled
data mashup) and the other by Wound Footage. Contrasted with the
photographic imagery of videographic moving pictures, these types
of the moving images belong to and update the larger traditions of
experimental film and video that have explored the materiality of
media and brought it into relief. These materialist traditions have
developed their own visual expressions of abstraction, which are
extended into a variety of contemporary artworks based either on
the manipulation of codes and frames in a digital video file (as in
102 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the work of Davis and Ciocci) or on a combinatory use of celluloid-

based and digital video-based techniques (as in the work of Fleisch).
This chapter then argues that the abstract shapes visible in the
artworks testify to either the transition of abstractionist aesthetics
in film and analogue video to the material substrates and algorithms
of digital imaging, or to the continuous interaction between the
material traces of film and video. Encompassing the two, I offer
“hybrid abstraction” as a second category of hybrid moving images
driven by materialist energies.
My attempt at correlating hybridity with the aesthetics of abstract
moving images might at first sound strange, given that abstract film
and video has mainly been linked to the discourses of modernist
art that consider abstraction to be associated with the essence of
the medium. As is well known, the Greenbergian idea of modernist
art supports abstract painting as the art form that devotes itself to
the medium-specific qualities of painting in a self-reflexive manner,
arguing that abstraction expunges figurative and narrational
elements from painting and reduces it to its basic elements, such as
the canvas as the foundation of the painting’s two-dimensionality,
the pigment as its material, and the colors, lines, and geometric
patterns (horizontal and vertical lines, diagonals, rectangles, circles,
etc.) as its essential forms. This Greenbergian association of the
abstract forms with the idea of medium specificity has played a
vital role in defining abstract painting as manifesting the “purity”
of painting, while also greatly influencing the modernist idea and
practice of abstract film.2 To be sure, the development of the early
abstract film in the 1910s and 1920s was indebted to the interests
of Cubist, Futurist, and Dadaist painters, including Hans Richter,
Fernand Léger, Viking Eggeling, and Walter Ruttmann, who aspired
to extend painting into film, which was then a new medium.3 Thus,
the artists (as well as filmmakers) used “the movie screen as a
direct substitute for the painter’s canvas, as a framed rectangular
space on which a kinetic organization of purely plastic forms was
composed.”4 The artists’ filmic exploration of abstract forms as
essential to painting was also an endeavor to seek the essence of
film, given that the geometric patterns changing over time were
seen to express visual forms in movement as intrinsic to film while
excluding representational elements.
The link between abstract cinema and the essential purity of film
was further tightened by the practices of US structural film and UK
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 103

structural/materialist film and their corresponding discourses in the

1960s and 1970s. Here, the palette of the abstract forms developed
by those practices included not only the change of geometric
patterns over time, but also a range of informal shapes derived
from scratches and grains on the surface of celluloid, from the edges
of filmstrip and perforations, and from chemical transformations
of colors. Malcolm Le Grice and David E. James, for instance,
regard all these forms as expressing the material components and
technical processes of film in purist and self-reflexive ways. For Le
Grice, the abstract cinema in the 1960s and 1970s “seeks to be
‘realist’ in the material sense,” insofar as it “does not imitate or
represent reality, nor create spurious illusions of times, places and
lives.”5 Similarly, James characterizes US structural film as “pure
film,” in the sense that its orientation “took the form of a general
subordination of interest in representation, especially of narrative,
and a corresponding emphasis on the materials and recourses of
the medium, on the conditions of production and display, and on
the specific kinds of signification of which film is capable.”6 Here,
it is worth noting that Le Grice’s and James’ definitions of the
abstract forms in the structural or structural/materialist film as
nonrepresentational, antinarrative, and expressive of the materials
and processes of the medium in self-reflexive manner are equally
applied to the works of the “image-processing” video in the
1970s. That is, both artists and critics have made and reinforced a
connection between the works’ abstract forms and the modernist
imperative to explore the basic properties of the electronic medium,
evaluating the forms as electronic visual expressions distinct from
the photorealistic imagery of film and television.7 To summarize,
the materialist discourses on the abstract moving imagery in
experimental film and video have framed it as a direct manifestation
of the “pure” material and technical properties of film and video.
While these modernist discourses undoubtedly serve as a key
factor in characterizing these abstract forms, this direct association
between materialism and purity, I argue, risks overlooking certain
aspects of hybridity and impurity that are at play in certain types
of abstract moving images in film and video. Building upon this
assumption, this chapter argues that the contemporary artworks of
hybrid abstraction enable us to consider abstract moving imagery
produced by the imperative to investigate the properties of film and
digital video in its previously less-acknowledged relationships to
104 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the aesthetic, technical, and material ideas of hybridity. The first

idea, namely aesthetic hybridity, starts with the following question:
can we truly say that a moving image that involves and displays
abstract forms directly leads to its characterization as a “pure”
image? This question implies that certain moving images falling
under the umbrella of abstract film and video have included in
their abstract images the figurative elements (whether lens-based
imagery or painterly images) that the aesthetic of abstraction
has largely been regarded as having abandoned for the sake
of “nonrepresentational” or “nonfigurative” art. In his essay
dedicated to “Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since
1900 (2005),” an exhibition which traces an alternative history
of abstract art encompassing paintings, photographs, light shows,
films, and videos in the twentieth century, curator Kerry Brougher
makes the following point while discussing the abstract films and
direct animations of Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, Len Lye and
Hy Hirsch; he writes:

Rather than eliminating representational imagery, by photo-

graphing abstract shapes these filmmakers were in fact turning
abstraction into something that could itself be represented—an
image of abstraction rather than abstraction itself. Thus, when
Lye and Hirsch began to combine abstraction and documentary
footage, they were harnessing the power of film to fuse abstrac-
tion and representation together.8

Several other examples will sufficiently validate Brougher’s point

on the combination of abstract and representational forms in the
history of abstract film and video. The Lettrist films of Isidore
Isou and Maurice Lemaître, for instance, employed hands-on
manipulations of found footage, including bleaching, painting, and
scratching into the footage’s emulsion, to deform and destroy the
footage’s film representation with noisy abstract forms. The direct
animations of Harry Smith and Robert Breer, too, are marked by the
complex interplay of abstract forms (lines and colors) and figurative
elements. In Bill Morrison’s films, including Decasia: The State of
Decay (2002), the traces of naturally decomposing celluloid take on
informal abstract forms that bear the materiality of film. The melting
forms marked by an array of holes and burned particles appear
to swallow and destroy the representational components inscribed
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 105

in the celluloid. The intersection of abstract and representational

components that characterizes the aesthetic hybridity of abstraction
in these experimental films is also present in video works. A number
of contemporary video works that digitally adopt the slit-scan
technique, a photographic and cinematographic process in which
a camera uses a mounted movable slide with a slit in it to create
static images of time-based phenomena, present a transformation
of a two-dimensional photorealistic imagery into a distorted image
space in which multiple times and perspectives coexist in a single
picture frame.9 As in Camille Utterback’s Liquid Time Series (2000–
02), the cars and pedestrians in the video footage of the streets of
Tokyo and New York are fragmented into vertical sections marked
by blurring lines. The resulting image appears as a dense collage of
photorealistic components and abstract liquid shapes (sections and
lines), which Utterback describes as “video cubism.”10
What I am calling the aesthetic hybridity of abstraction, or
the dynamic relation of abstract forms and representational
components, is indebted to what Gregory Zinman recently called
“messy” abstraction, in contrast to “clean” abstraction. He is
arguably the only scholar who proposes a helpful distinction
between two types of abstraction in abstract film and video in
terms of their differing aesthetic features. While “clean” abstraction
involves blocks of color and hard-edged geometric forms, “ ‘messy’
abstraction may appear as a seemingly random array of fleeting
flecks and sprawling lines skipping across the screen.”11 Zinman
further writes that the aesthetic of “messy” abstraction can be made
not only with physical and chemical manipulations of celluloid,
including staining a filmstrip with natural or chemical elements and
scratching the strip’s emulsion, but also with a “strategic disruption
of a video codec’s ability to decode a data stream.”12 In my view,
Zinman’s insight suggests that “messy” abstraction does not simply
result in the aesthetic hybridity of abstract and representational
components, but can also be produced by the hybridization of
newer and older media forms in technical and material ways.
This chapter singles out two types of hybridization, a technical
hybridization and a material one, in a number of contemporary
artworks that demonstrate the aesthetic of hybrid abstraction,
to each of which Compression Study # 1 (Untitled data mashup)
and Wound Film correspond, respectively. What I call technical
hybridity means that the dynamic coexistence and interrelation
106 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

of abstract and representational elements is predicated upon a

correspondence between the techniques of image-processing video
and the manipulation of codes and frames in contemporary video
pieces that explore the underlying materiality of the digital image
in the form of noise aesthetic, that is, works that fall under the
category of “digital glitch video.” Le Grice has once pointed out
this correspondence when he observed that most of the abstracting
techniques in film, except for hand coloring, are available to
video with much greater ease and immediacy. He further sees that
digital systems lead to the flexible application of the aesthetic of
abstraction to contemporary practices, thanks to their capacity
to incorporate the forms and techniques of older media (film and
analogue video) and mix them in various ways: “If there is aesthetic
value in applying the concepts of abstraction to time-based media,
and the abstraction of color remains fundamental to this direction,
then video and certainly its current hybridization with digital
systems provides a more flexible technology for this than film.”13
Gene Youngblood is perhaps the only critic who envisioned in the
mid-1980s that once digital systems would be developed enough
to appropriate both the techniques of hand-drawn animation and
electronic imaging, it would be possible to transform photorealistic
imagery into abstract forms or vice versa. He writes: “It is possible
digitally because the code allows us to combine the subjectivity
of painting, the objectivity of photography and the gravity-free
motion of hand-drawn animation.”14 Building upon Le Grice’s
and Youngblood’s insights, the first section of this chapter will
demonstrate that the technical transition of structural film and
image-processing video plays a key role in forming the aesthetic
hybridity of digital glitch videos, as these aim at investigating and
unveiling the material properties of the digital image.
The second section of this chapter addresses what I call “mixed-
media abstraction” as a more radical hybridization of previously
distinct media in the context of the avant-garde cinema of the last
decade, namely a material hybridization of film and video. To be
sure, the simultaneous employment of film and video, or film and
computer, were prefigured in the works of John Whitney Sr., Scott
Bartlett, Jud Yalkut, and Stan VanDerBeek in the late 1960s, the
artists who sought to explore the capacities of a video synthesizer
or an analogue computer to produce complex painterly effects,
including abstract shapes moving in time and color hues, which
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 107

had been developed in the traditions of abstract film and direct

animation.15 But it is arguably only since the 2000s that a number
of filmmakers and video artists have rigorously combined film and
digital video not merely to create abstract forms but also to achieve
a material hybridization of both media. Filmmakers such as Lynn
Marie Kirby, Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Johanna Vaude, Dietmar Brehm,
Jürgen Reble, and Jennifer West, all physically manipulate film
stocks (Super-8, 16 mm, 35 mm) in various ways, including painting,
etching, and chemical treatments, and then digitize the stocks in
order to further reorganize and transform them, or vice versa (i.e.,
to take on video footage as their source images and transfer them
to film for hand-processed, frame-by-frame manipulation).16 These
combinatory techniques largely result in the ever-changing flux of
highly complex, abstract shapes that testify to the coexistence of
the material traces of both media: emulsions, tints, and grains as
markers of celluloid on the one hand, and pixilated colors, geometric
forms, and the unreal surface textures derived from different (high
or low) definitions of digital video on the other. I suggest that more
than taking their inspiration from the traditions of abstract imagery
in the history of avant-garde film and video, these filmmakers push
the boundaries between the filmic and the digital to the limit and
thereby resist a couple of dichotomies that have been and still are
looming over the current climate of avant-garde practices and
criticism: first, the opposition between film’s recalcitrant materiality
and the immateriality of the digital that has been known to erode
this materiality; and second, the contrast between the filmmaker’s
artisanal treatment of celluloid and digital software’s automated,
algorithmic procedures whose simulation of hitherto meticulous
and time-consuming techniques to alter images has been deemed as
threatening to the filmmaker’s physical intervention.

Digital glitch videos: Digital materialism

and aesthetic-technical hybridity
Digital glitch videos refer to a variety of moving image artworks
that create and investigate a “glitch” which, according to artist
and writer Rosa Menkman, is a perceived error or accident that
“appears as a (actual and/or simulated) break from an expected
108 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

or conventional flow of information or meaning”17 within digital

communication systems. While the glitch as error is mostly derived
from an accidental or intentional malfunction of the mechanical,
programmatic, or networked components (such as the hardware or
software dimensions of the computer, the encoding and decoding
procedures of data files, etc.) that constitute the digital media
system, the artifacts that might be perceived as a glitch can also
be produced in the system’s normal functioning. As digital media
artists Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin note, the glitch artifacts
“might originate from technical limitations, such as low image-
processing speed or low bandwidth when displaying video,”18
inherent in a digital system that works normally. Such artists as
JODI (a collective of Dutch artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk
Paesmans), Cory Arcangel, Gijs Gieskes, and Daniel Temkin, just
to name a few, represent the art of glitch as they have produced
various digital artifacts, including videos, graphic images,
modified websites, and hacked games, by modifying now-outdated
technological objects, codes, and algorithms (for instance, arcade
video games), exploiting computer crashes, or creating corrupted
codes. Their artifacts accordingly present an array of numbers,
lines, eerie colors, and broken blocks of pixels as expressive of
degradation and noise. Some of the artifacts challenge the myth of
technological progress propelled by digitization as these aesthetic
features bring to the foreground the materiality of the technological
objects, codes, and algorithms that prefigured contemporary
media culture but which are now perceived as obsolete: as in the
case of Arcangel’s The Super Mario Cloud (2002), in which the
clouds floating against a blue background (while the architectural
elements of the game are intentionally eliminated) give clue to the
foundation of the pictorial space in today’s video games. Others,
as in the cases of JODI’s modified websites and games, represent
the desire to “bring about specificity [of the digital] as an artistic
medium.”19 As for visual artifacts, the videos or still images that
include glitches could spring from an intentional modification of
the codes that constitutes their files, or from a bug or inherent
technical limitation found in the software or network mechanism
that works for the compression and display of the files. The two
procedures for exploring the material and technical specificities of
the digital image and thereby creating glitch videos are known as
databending and datamoshing.
 DIGITAL GLITCH VIDEO AND MIXED-MEDIA ABSTRACTION 109

Databending refers to the techniques of changing the codes

of an image or video file (JPEG, GIF, PNG, and TIFF for the still
image and AVI, MPEG, and WMV for the video image) in ways
that do not display its desired digitized values. The raw image
file contains minimally processed data (for instance, pixels) from
the image sensor of a digital camera, image scanner, or motion
picture file scanner. These data contain an array of key information
needed to display the image properly, including format, size,
color, chrominance, brightness, resolution, dimension, and etc.
Databending, then, means ways of incorrectly manipulating
the image, such as adding, deleting, and randomly copying and
pasting the data, by means of software applications (for instance,
Hex Editor) designed to visualize and edit the file’s codes. These
manipulations bring about certain significant changes in the values
of the original still or moving image, which lead to corrupted files
of the still or moving image. The files’ resulting artifacts appear
erroneous or broken images marked by abrupt discolorations,
bleeding colors, pixelated blocks, and swirling or displaced scan
lines in various sizes, all of which are seen as abstract aesthetic
forms. Some artifacts are called ghosting, which appear when a part
of the image is doubled by wave-like oscillations like one might see
recorded by a seismograph or heart monitor. All of these artifacts
suggest that there are various technical procedures, including
encoding, decoding, and compression, in the process through which
an analogue image is converted into a set of digital data and is later
displayed on various interfaces and platforms. The techniques of
databending, then, are read as intervening in these procedures that
might remain unnoticeable were the image displayed in its normal
condition.20
Evan Meaney’s The Ceibas Cycle, a series of ten videos which
he produced from 2007 to 2011, demonstrates the capacity of
databending to create a variety of messy abstract forms out of video
artifacts. Meaney used Hex Editor and other software applications
to extract codes underlying various video clips, such as home movies
shot in analogue and digital video cameras (Prologue: How Mayan
Lovers Might Find the Next Life [2007], Shannon’s Entropy [2008],
and Ceibas: Sigma Fugue [2009]), video documents of the monitors at
an airport’s departure hall (Beneath the Pressure of the Sky [2008]),
excerpts from a television talk show (Ceibas: We things at play
[2010]), and video game footage (Ceibas: Epilogue—The Well of
110 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Representation [2011]), changing their values in various incorrect

ways, including adding, deleting, and copying and pasting data
randomly. The resulting artifacts accordingly present an assault of
various noisy forms, including bleeding color bars, broken pixels,
and boiling color dots, to the extent that they render the original
figures of the clips almost illegible while overwhelming most of
their details. Meaney developed the techniques of databending
not simply to unveil the functions of digital codes that lie beneath
the digital image, but also to investigate how the aesthetics of the
“noisy” forms give expression to several broader issues of digital
culture. For instance, Beneath the Pressure of Sky presents the
glitches of the airport imagery in ways that suggest how the attempt
of the US antiterrorist surveillance system to catalogue all travelers
is fundamentally imperfect and destined to failure.
More significantly, Meaney’s glitches engage with the issue of
digital archiving as their aesthetic of failure aims to make us aware
that the operation of digital systems to encode, compress, and
store the video clips are subjugated to the loss and deterioration
of their information. In addition to bringing the fragility of digital
archiving inherent in its codes and algorithms to the foreground,
Meaney’s purposeful manipulation of the codes in the video clips
is also grounded in his belief that digital files are as much subject
to temporal decay as celluloid. He has once compared the glitches
of his videos to the chemical and physical deteriorations in hand-
processed films. “The scratches from a hand-processed piece
may have shown up there over time due to wear and repeated
viewings,” Meaney writes. “Glitching, not surprisingly, has a
similar chronologic approximation. Everything on our hard drives
is slowly forgetting itself. Information is lost through compression
and manipulation, but also through a file’s own forgetfulness.”21
Meaney’s interest in digital glitches as indicative of digital memory’s
subjugation to loss and forgetfulness is linked to his expression of
the figures as ghosts that counter the dream of the digital system
to store and communicate information without noise or delay.
As he remarks in an interview, “What we call noise is, in fact, an
entropic, even ghostly, communication.”22 In Shannon’s Entropy,
the ghosts of communication have different abstract forms, ranging
from shadow-like figures in black and colors to melting shapes
marked by flickering lines and dots. Here, Meaney connects these
glitches to a text on Alzheimer’s disease, specifically in relation to
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 111

the information theorist Claude Shannon, who suffered from the

disease at the end of his life. In this context, the ghostly figures and
shapes produced by databending express Shannon’s awareness of
entropy as a noise inherent to the natural and technological system
of communication,23 while also suggesting that both human memory
and digital archiving are structurally inseparable from the loss and
oblivion of information. Ceibas: We things at play also repeats
Meaney’s insight into digital archiving’s subjugation to the decay
of information, as its images of the television talk show about the
development of the computer as an ideal processor of transmitting
and storing information are decomposed into broken pixels and
bleeding colors, which are perceived as noises that inherently block
the transparent communication of the images (Figure 2.3).
Along with databending as a method of manipulating the codes
of image files for creating erratic visual expressions, datamoshing
refers to a technique for the production of the moving image that
contains unique, eerie visual expressions caused by a technical
limitation inherent in the data compression of digital video. This
limitation is immanent in the processes by which an original moving
image, whether analogue or digital, undergoes the inevitable loss of
its data as the computer encodes it into a file of various formats.
When the data that form the moving image are compressed for

Figure 2.3 Still from Evan Meaney, Shannon’s Entropy (2008) from The
Ceibas Cycle (2007–11), courtesy of the artist.
112 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

digital storage or transmission, such as when 20-gigabytes of

data of a single feature-length film are compressed to fit onto a
4.4-gigabyte disk, enormous amounts of those data are discarded.
A normative compression process for displaying the image in its
original state while discarding those data involves keeping the
key information (such as luminance [brightness] and chrominance
[color]) of keyframes, which are also referred to as i-frames. In
between the keyframes that contain the key information of the
original image, there are p-frames (predictive frames) and b-frames
(bi-predictive frames) that exist in the proper compression artifact
of the original image. While the p-frames contain information
predicting the changes in the image (for instance, pixels whose color
value has shifted) between the current frame and the previous one,
the b-frames include information predicting the image differences
between the previous, current, and subsequent frames. Datamoshing,
then, refers to the manipulations of removing keyframes while
leaving only p-frames and b-frames via software packages such as
After Effects and the DivX codec. Because the latter two frames
spring from data from previous and forward frames, they are more
compressed than keyframes to the point of losing key information
required to display the original moving image properly. While the
loss of data via compression leads to a corrupted file, an array of
other manipulations can be added to it. As William Brown and
Meetali Kutty explain, for instance, p-frames that arise from a
moving image can be connected to i-frames from different moving
images, “with the result that the i-frame of one image, typically
paused momentarily on screen, suddenly seems to dematerialize as
the moving aspects of the p-frames from another moving image
begin to manifest themselves on, within or from behind it.”24 The
resulting glitch videos based on this technique produce “bleeding
pixels,” in which one image continually overlaps and melts into
another while motion turns into a blur of colors. Along with this
liquidation of colors and shapes, there are other ways of manipulating
the material components of the digital file, such as displacing
scan lines, pixelating (viz. the reorganization of chrominance
structures within keyframes by turning their chrominance value
off), and changing color values, all of which lead to the uncanny
and chaotic transformations of the original image, marked by an
array of mosaic-like shapes, undulating lines, and fluid contours
that overlay abstract forms on the photorealistic elements of the
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 113

original image. These various visual effects based on datamoshing

have become popular since the 2000s not only in the works of
such artists as Sven König, David O’Reilly, and Paper Rad, but also
in some commercial music videos, including the video for Kanye
West’s “Welcome to Heartbreak” (2009) as the most well-known
example.
In their Lossless series (2008), Rebecca Baron and Douglas
Goodwin take the materiality of the digital as the starting point
for their experimentation, applying datamoshing that is capable of
revealing which material and technical processes are applied during
the transfer of a group of existing films to their digital files. In
Lossless 2#, the two artists interrupted the download of compressed
MPEG-2 files of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
through the open-source P2P protocols of BitTorrent, such that
the files were randomly downloaded with many of their keyframes
missing. The artists’ software algorithms anticipate the keyframes’
color signals of pixels in an attempt to assimilate p-frames and
b-frames into seamless images, but the resulting images of the
film continue to dissolve and reappear. In Lossless 3#, Baron and
Goodwin removed keyframes from a sequence set in Monument
Valley of an MPEG-2 of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956),
thereby blocking the significant changes that would happen when
the keyframes updated the whole scene. The same procedure was
applied to the famous circular choreographic sequence from Busby
Berkeley’s 42nd Street (1933) in Lossless #5. The resulting images of
the two pieces take on bleeding pixel effects, in which the figures of
the original movies are constantly mutated into melted shapes and
swirling colors. Baron and Goodwin consider these abstract forms
to be expressive of glitches, of the technical limitations inherent in
the digital compression processes, as they note: “Lossless captures
and embraces the slippage that occurs in the performance of media,
revealing how its flaws and other artifacts lend a materiality to digital
video.”25 Baron and Goodwin were also aware that the melting and
undulating forms and the bleeding colors that overwhelm the figures
in the original films are indicative of the material flexibility of
electronic frames and digital pixels, distinct from the discreteness of
photograms in celluloid-based cinema. They continue, “Unlike film
where every frame is a complete and autonomous picture, digital
video saves space by recycling pixels in areas where there is little
change between frames.”26
114 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

As a theorist and artist who has rigorously studied the technical

and aesthetic dimensions of glitch, Menkman has produced videos
to which either databending or datamoshing is applied in various
ways. Her mimicking lo-fi aesthetics (2011), for instance, takes a
PNG file of a picture depicting a female figure and changes its codes
incorrectly, therefore leading to a ghostly image characterized by
desaturated black and white, numerous small dots, and irregularly
appearing scan lines. By overlaying these abstract forms on the
woman’s figure, Menkman evokes the digital image’s link to the
noisy and low-resolution aesthetics of the imagery in the analogue
video. Before making this video, she coupled similar databending
techniques with analogue video feedback in The Collapse of PAL
(2010, Figure 2.4) in order to investigate the deteriorations of the
PAL signal as a historical form that is now regarded as obsolete
but was a precursor to upgraded digital technologies. Meanwhile,
in Dear Mr. Compression (2009), Menkman used a video file of a
female figure similar to the one in mimicking lo-fi aesthetics and
removes its keyframes, thereby rendering the image to be cut by
irregular lines and broken rectangles in bleeding red and blue. For
her Compress Process (Revisited) (2010, Figure 2.5), Menkman
applied three technical manipulations to a compressed video clip,

Figure 2.4 Still from Rosa Menkman, The Collapse of PAL (2010),
courtesy of the artist.
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 115

Figure 2.5 Still from Menkman, Compress Process (Revisited) (2010),

courtesy of the artist.

making its colors unstable and pixelated, bleeding, and layering

frames on top of each other, with the result that the image presents
eruptions of black and white, undulating curves, and dense collage-
like scan lines over a nearly illegible ghost-like figure.
These examples of Meaney, Baron-Goodwin, and Menkman
demonstrate that digital glitch videos are part of a range of
practices that pursue a materialist approach to digital media, one
that aims to investigate and make visible “the raw matter that
resides both beneath and at the very surface of digital imagery.”27 A
variety of grotesque visual elements, such as blurs, noises, irregular
lines, decolorization, broken pixels, bleeding colors, unveil the
traces of computational malfunctioning that reveal the underlying
material dimensions of the digital image. They are created when
one disrupts the data behind the digital image in such a way that
undermines its desired function or communicability, such as the
full presentation of an analogue movie or photograph in the form
of digital files processed by the software algorithms for encoding
and display. By problematizing the belief in the seamlessness
and transparency of digital representations, the noisy and messy
expressions of digital glitch videos, along with other artworks (such
as hacked or dysfunctional websites that unveil the operation of
HTML), are also seen to critique the “myth of immateriality” that
pervades contemporary digital culture, insofar as they demonstrate
116 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

that software “cannot exist by itself but is intrinsically embedded in

physical data carriers.”28 While elaborating upon the prevailing idea
that glitch videos are manifestations of digital materialism in ways
that provide a glance to the inner structure and functionality of
digital media, I shall also demonstrate that the digital materialism in
the videos coincides with the aesthetic and technical hybridities that
are noticeable when they are viewed in relation to their analogue
predecessors.
The history of the artistic experiments with errors and failures
inherent in the mechanical system of media dates back to the pre-
digital age. Carolyn L. Kane positions digital glitch videos within
the disruptive editing techniques developed in structural film and
early video art in the 1960s and 1970s. Developing a formalist
and materialist form of cinema, structural filmmakers such as Paul
Sharits, George Landow, and Tony Conrad brought noisy visual
aspects of the cinematic apparatus to the foreground, including
stereoscopic effects, blank frames, deliberately filming out-of-focus,
and scratches. In so doing, they aspired to break from and undermine
the transparent representation of the cinematic image while also
exposing and scrutinizing film’s inherent structure, its material
properties and technical processes. These filmic glitches were in
parallel to a variety of electric glitches produced in the artworks
labeled as “image-processing” videos, including videotapes of Nam
June Paik, Joan Jonas, and Steina and Woody Vasulka, in which
the optical effects of the distorted signal, produced by such various
techniques as manipulating the magnet on the TV set (Paik), setting
the image drifting across the monitor screen (Jonas in Vertical Roll
[1973]),29 and employing the Rutt-Etra synthesizer for real-time
signal manipulation (Vasulkas), deform the standardized broadcast
or video image to reveal the materiality of the electronic media.
Considering this historical genealogy of structural film and image-
processing video, Kane argues that there is a paradox at the heart
of the filmic and electronic glitches: “The more one attempts to
control, to functionalize culture through new technologies, the
more does one also proliferate glitches and errors, making these
undesirable and unwanted phenomena all the more available to
the mechanisms of critique.”30 Similarly, filmmaker Clint Enns
argues that the tradition of structural film and image-processing
video has gone digital, labeling contemporary digital glitch artifacts
as “structural digital videos.” The manipulation of computer files
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 117

through niche software and algorithm exploration leads to non-

illusionist digital works comparable to those of structural film and
image-processing video, which are driven by the investigation into
the chemical and electronic noises embedded in the movement of
the filmic or video image. “It is exactly this connection that reveals
depth in our perception of and interaction with a technology,” Enns
writes, “that ties a generation of new media artists to the films of
Frampton and Sharits.”31 Referring to the same lineage of non-
illusionist works in the 1960s and 1970s as Kane and Enns, critic
Ed Halter also claims that thinking about materialist film and video
“provides a workable parallel for a digital materialism, a means to
appreciate new media’s corporeality.”32
While those discourses on the genealogy are undeniably helpful
to historicizing digital glitch videos, it should be further noted
that those materialist precursors of film and analogue video can
be examined not merely in terms of their intentions to disrupt the
transparency of the filmic or video image and unveil the material
substrates of the medium, but also in terms of their aesthetics,
namely, how the elements of glitches are employed and perceived.
The major works that constitute the predecessors of digital glitch
videos do more than express the abstract visuals produced by
the material and mechanical dimensions of film and analogue
video. More significantly, the abstract visuals tend to infiltrate
and overwhelm the representational figures of the filmic and
video images in order to deconstruct their supposed imperative
to transparency and immediacy. As a result, the filmic and video
images appear as an array of fleeting flecks and sprawling lines
that manifest complex and chaotic forms in their representational
contents. Several examples drawn from structural film and early
video art would be sufficient to demonstrate this point. Landow’s
Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt
Particles, Etc. (1966) exposes the material components explicitly
expressed in its title, as well as their dirty and imperfect traces, in
ways that cover and encircle the figures of a girl imprinted in the
filmstrip made from a color test. While unveiling these components,
Sharits orchestrates the rhythms of explosive, disturbing flicker
effects with such representational figures as a man who cuts his
tongue (T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G [1968]) and patients who undergo a
medical film study of brainwave activity during seizure (Epileptic
Seizure Comparison [1976]). In Little Dog for Roger (1967) and
118 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Berlin Horse (1970), Le Grice used an optical printer to expose

the full shape of the frame as well as the material traces inscribed
in its surface, which are considered as filmic noises that would be
removed for transparent representation of the figures (the dog and
the horse). Accordingly, the flickering white scratches and black
lines consistently overlap with the figure of a dog in the film frames
of Little Dog for Roger. Or, in Berlin Horse, Le Grice printed the
original black-and-white footage of a running horse in a negative
positive superimposition through color filters, which brings about
a rich and dense admixture of the representational and the abstract
images with a changing spectrum of blurring white, black, yellow,
and red. As in the cases of Landow and Sharits, these two films by
Le Grice invite viewers to examine the original footage as a physical
substrate embedded in its photographic contents. While disrupting
the standardized production of the film medium and revealing
its material and technical origin in the forms of imperfection and
disintegration, these materialist films offer viewers, in the words of
Halter, “an experience of tension between perceiving the form and
the content, the graphic and the photographic.” 33
The aesthetic coexistence of noisy abstract forms and
representational imagery is more evident in many image-processing
videos in the 1960s and 1970s. Picture noises, such as grotesque scan
lines, loss of colors, and hard-edged or oscillating geometric forms,
were caused by a variety of errors and intentional interferences
occurring throughout the multiple procedures of video imaging.34
In Videotape Study #3 (1967–69), for instance, Paik distorted and
manipulated footage from TV programs, including news conferences
by US president Lyndon Johnson, to transform the image of the
political figure into a riot of fluctuating scan lines and boiling dots,
which signal the malfunction of television networks. Likewise,
Electronic Opera # 1 (1969) presents scan lines bent with magnets
such that the images of Richard Nixon and John Mitchell swirl. As
art historian David Joselit summarizes, these works were predicated
upon Paik’s strategy to “develop malignant procedures by which
a video signal was distorted and degraded into mere ‘noise.’”35
Investigating the material and processual dimensions of electronic
visuality by engaging with the evolution of the video apparatus
from analogue video synthesizer to computer, Steina and Woody
Vasulka have produced a variety of images characterized not only
by pure abstract forms but also by the metamorphosis, deformation,
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 119

and omnidirectionality of video signals, all of which are expressive

of the essential characteristics of the electronic medium. To be
sure, some videos by the Vasulkas present nonrepresentational
geometric shapes and electronic noises. However, in such works as
C-Trend (Woody Vasulka 1974) and Violin Power (Steina 1978),
the Vasulkas dramatically bend a representational figure (the
documentary footage of street traffic in C-Trend and Steina herself
who is playing violin in Violin Power) by interfering with video
signal (Steina) or through raster manipulation (Woody). While in
Violin Power, Steina’s figure appears to be mixed with oscillating
abstract lines, C-Trend produces a constant tension between the
live-action imagery of cars and the freely traveling shapes and
modulated lines.36 Le Grice applied the complex coexistence of
representational and abstract images in his materialist films to his
venture into video and computer technologies in his Digital Still
Life (1984–86) and Chronos Fragmented (1995), exploiting a great
variety of color combinations and superimpositions afforded by
his self-written programming algorithms.37 In summary, the works
of Paik, the Vasulkas, and Le Grice are seen as presenting hybrid
images of representational and abstract aesthetics. While the artists’
image-processing videos have mainly been considered as expressing
the medium-specific qualities of analogue video, such as the fluidity
of electronic signal, the flexibility of the picture frame in contrast to
the discreteness of photograms in film, and unstable pictorial forms,
it is rarely acknowledged that their wide-ranging images exhibit
these qualities in conjunction with figurative images, whether lens
based or simulated, investigating how the two coexist in various
ways. Thus, these material specificities of analogue video are made
visible not simply in the form of pure image, but also in the form of
impure image in which the abstract and representational dimensions
interact with one another.
Digital glitch videos push the aesthetic of hybrid materialism in
structural film and image-processing video further as they lead to
the dynamic intersection of representational imagery and abstract
form as the result of digital processing. The colored bars and broken
pixels in Meaney’s databending videos, more than manifesting the
fragile materiality of their underlying digital codes, correspond to
the structural films of Sharits, Frampton, and Le Grice in that their
abstract, graphic forms collide with home video imagery. The tension
between the photographic and the graphic forms is also present in
120 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Menkman’s databending videos, in which the dots and scan lines

evoke the lo-fi aesthetic of electronic noise in image-processing
videos as they transform human faces into ghostly figures. The
impure, messy aesthetic derived from the collision of the abstract
form of digital code and the image’s representational figures is most
noticeable in datamoshing videos, particularly those based on the
manipulation of compressed files of existing films. In those videos,
the digital noises on the surface, encompassing broken pixels,
bleeding colors, and interlaced scan lines, appear not as isolated
visual traces of the materiality of the digital, but as interpenetrating
and dissolving the representational components of the filmic
imagery. For instance, in Baron and Goodwin’s Lossless #2, the
female protagonist of Meshes of the Afternoon is decomposed into
an array of amorphous black-and-white pixels while maintaining
some portions of her figure (Figure 2.6). The result is an array of
flowing images marked by swirling pixels that melt down the figure
and landscape of the original film. While still recalling the surrealist
overtone of the original film and its theme of the split self, the ghostly
abstract forms signal that the film is dislocated from its celluloid
origin and now experienced in the post-filmic algorithm and storage
media. In Lossless #3, the horses and humans of different races

Figure 2.6 Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, Lossless #2
(2008), courtesy of the artists.
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 121

(cowboys and Indians) in The Searchers become indistinguishable

as all of them are decomposed into a blur of graphic blocks and
streaks of color (Figure 2.7). In these forms, the figures of people
and horses are still recognizable, but they are immediately turned
into a digital abstraction that gives access to the fragile materiality
of codes and the absence of keyframes in the film’s compressed file.
As Jaimie Baron writes, Baron and Goodwin’s datamoshing in the
Lossless series, by bringing the transition between the figurative
and the abstract to the foreground, explores the transformation
“from [the figures’] identity as indexical traces of light on silver
and celluloid to bits of compressed digital information.”38
Takeshi Murata pushes the hybrid aesthetic of the representational
and the abstract, of the continuity of the cinematic image and the
discreteness of its digital codes, to its limit. Taking up the encoded
files of footage from action and B-movies, he transforms the figures
of the original footage, including a beast-like monster from the
B-movie comedy Cavemen (Carl Gottlieb 1981) in Monster Movie
(2005), Barbara Steele from Mario Bava’s vintage horror Mask of
Satan (1960) in Untitled (Silver) [2006, Figure 2.8], and Sylvester
Stallone from Rambo: First Blood (1982) in Untitled (Pink Dot)
[2007], into a whirling, fragmented mass of pixels that continue to
be decomposed and reformed thirty times per second. The images
produced by Murata’s datamoshing present a dynamic transition
from the movement of figures to the perpetual kinesis of psychedelic

Figure 2.7 Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, Lossless #3
(2008), courtesy of the artists.
122 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 2.8 Still from Takeshi Murata, Untitled (Silver) (2006), courtesy
of the artist and Salon 94.

colors and informal shapes (blurred lines, pixelated dots, and

oscillating waveforms), and vice versa. This transition brings about
a couple of tensions that stimulate the viewer’s perception: first,
a tension between the disorder of violently exploding colors and
shapes and the perpetually frustrated effort to reorder the figures
inscribed in the original cinematic footage, and second, one
between the illegibility of the abstract forms and the persistence
of the figures’ bodily parts that await the viewer’s recognition. For
instance, in Monster Movie the figure of the monster becomes barely
distinguishable from the body of water from which it emerges, as
both the monster’s gestures (lurching and writhing) and the flow of
water are decomposed into a rich maelstrom of twisting pixels in
shimmering colors (Figure 2.9). The uncanny transformation of the
monstrous figure into unstable shapes and colors is repeated in the
work’s ensuing sequence, in which the monster runs through a forest
and frantically twists its arms. The figure of the monster in that
sequence takes full shape momentarily, but it immediately becomes
indistinguishable from the whirlpool of pixels that surrounds it.
This transformation also allows the monster to waver between the
cinematic representation of violence and its digital abstraction,
insofar as it leaves a minimal trace of the monster’s movement and
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 123

Figure 2.9 Still from Murata, Monster Movie (2005), courtesy of the
artist and Salon 94.

gestures that stimulates viewers’ recognition. As Zinman observes,

the viewers of Monster Movie “first see the beast emerging from a
dark pool, mirroring the almost immediate eruption of digital chaos
that ensues, transforming the image from one of representation to
one of abstraction.”39 Murata’s hybridization of representation and
abstraction via datamoshing is more sophisticated in Untitled (Pink
Dot), where a hypnotically pulsating pink dot is overlapped with a
digital decomposition of Rambo’s action scenes, which displaces the
spectacular violence of explosion and gun shooting into a mushy
maelstrom of fragmented pixels.
The continual rupture between the figures of the movies and
the radical exposure of their underlying material substrates in
the form of abstract shapes and colors, I argue, situates Murata’s
works, and by extension glitch videos based on the techniques of
databending and datamoshing, within the complex hybridization
of film, analogue video, and the digital. At first sight, the interplay
between the photographic and the graphic elements suggests that
glitch videos are predicated upon, and enable viewers to engage
with, the complex intersections of the aesthetic features of film
and digital video, respectively. As Manovich writes on Murata’s
124 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

works, “Now the real change that matters is the one between
different media aesthetics, between the texture of a film and the
pulsating abstract patterns of flowing patches of colors, between
the original ‘liveness’ of human figures in action as captured on film
and the highly exaggerated artificial liveness they generate when
processed by machine.”40 Similarly, Brown and Kutty view what
Manovich sees as the exchange between “the original ‘liveness’ of
human figures” in film and the “artificial liveness” generated by the
algorithmic procedures of digital display, claiming “we are seeing
humans interact with/assemble with, or from, pixels; that is, within
the frame of the datamosh, the humans and monstrous figures
have an ecological relationship/form an ecology/form a network
with computers.”41 Both views are right when they highlight
the dissolution of the distinction between figure and ground in
Murata’s work as originating from the hybridization of film’s
representational components and the materiality of digital video.
What is missing in both views, however, is that the explosive colors
and distorted abstract shapes in Murata’s work strongly allude
to several aesthetic features of image-processing video, including
“densely layered ‘psychedelic’ images” and “highly saturated colors
[that] give a painterly effect,”42 as well as to the works of the early
computer animation artists who experimented with the analogue
computer at Bell Laboratories by translating its codes into abstract
and organic forms in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As to the latter
allusion, Murata, in a conversation with Ciocci and scholar Melissa
Ragona, cites Lillian Schwartz and Kenneth Knowlton as the artists
who inspired him, evaluating Schwartz’s Pixillation (1970) as the
creation of “super organic forms” by combining “old techniques,
like back-lit ink [with] computer generated pixels.”43
Murata’s references to image-processing video and early
computer animation are not limited to entailing the aesthetic
hybridity of digital glitch videos in relation to its analogue
predecessors (analogue video and computer). More significantly,
Baron-Goodwin’s and Murata’s works demonstrate that the
dynamic exchange between representational and abstract images
in digital glitch videos are predicated upon the technical hybridity
of digital video, namely the combination of properties inherited
from analogue video and those intrinsic to digital imaging.
Although analogue video is distinct from digital video in terms
of its material (electronic signal vs. digital pixel) and apparatus
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 125

(a synthesizer or other electronic imaging tools vs. programming

algorithms), its frames’ fluid and unstable aspects anticipate, as
Rodowick aptly remarks, “the computer’s separation of inputs
and outputs.”44 That is, unlike film in which the trace of light
transcribed in the celluloid is isomorphic with the projected
image on the screen, both the image of analogue video and that of
digital video are subject to the various manipulations of electronic
signal or digital information anywhere from the camera to editing
technologies to the display device.
This common ground of analogue video and its digital successor
suggests that both media are similar in terms of the techniques for
transforming the input image into the output of abstract forms:
just as the image-processing artists distort the electronic signal with
various imaging tools, digital glitch video artists directly manipulate
the codes that underlie the frames of digitized imagery. Spielmann
rightly points out this technical affinity between the procedures of
imaging tools in image-processing video and those of digital imaging
systems as follows: “The major task of media tools seems to be to
control the function and appearance of video: to manipulate, repeat
and reposition the effects and build machines to systematize and
maximize the possibilities of interconnection and modification—
not unlike digital systems.”45 The artists who utilize the techniques
of databending and datamoshing in this sense appear to “control
the function and appearance of video” in a manner similar to
that of the pioneers of image-processing video. It is based upon
this technical affinity that the artists’ manipulation of codes aims
at exploring and revealing a key property unique to digital video
in the spirit of digital materialism: that is, unlike analogue video,
the image of digital video is grounded in its encoding of image
values into individual pixels that contain the information for color,
brightness, and dimension. From this perspective, the software
applications available to digital glitch videos are seen to combine,
as Manovich notes, the aesthetics and techniques of previous media,
such as the image-processing aesthetics and techniques of analogue
video (and by extension those of structural film and hand-drawn
animation), with “new capabilities specific to the computer—for
instance—the ability to automatically calculate the intermediate
values between a number of keyframes.”46 It is precisely of this
ability that datamoshing artists, including Baron-Goodwin and
Murata, take advantage.
126 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Consequently, digital glitch videos do more than manifest digital

materialism. The dynamic coexistence and interrelation of abstract
and representational components in those videos demonstrate that
digital video is a technology of aesthetic and technical hybridities
through its relationship to previous media, including analogue
video. Menkman suggests that the reflexive approach to digital
technologies in glitch art does not necessarily lead to the sheer
manifestation of their material substrates, drawing upon N.
Katherine Hayles’s conceptualization of materiality as the interplay
between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies.
Hayles writes, “In this view of materiality, it is not merely an
inert collection of physical properties but a dynamic quality that
emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact,
its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers
and writers.”47 Hayles’s idea of materialism as the correspondence
between a text and its “conceptual content” implies that the video
artworks aimed at investigating the materiality of digital imaging
do not necessarily lead to the aesthetic of clean abstraction, which is
characterized by interplay of pure colors and geometric forms. That
is to say, the messy, impure aesthetic of digital glitch videos, which
I call hybrid abstraction, is just as capable of expressing digital
materialism as the artworks of clean abstraction. If the coexistence
and interrelation of representational and abstract components is a
key feature of digital glitch videos, then the materiality of digital
imaging is expressed in the feature’s allusion to video’s technical
and conceptual contents, including references to the techniques
and aesthetics of image-processing video. This is the reason that
digital glitch video’s materialism does not necessarily contradict its
aesthetic (the coexistence and intersection of representational and
abstract images) or technical (their allusions to structural film and
analogue video) hybridities.

Mixed-media abstraction
The aesthetic of hybrid abstraction is also conspicuous in the
works of “mixed-media abstraction,” in which filmmakers combine
the materials and techniques of film and digital video to produce
a variety of abstract expressions dynamically interacted with
representational or figurative components. There are parallels
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 127

between these filmmakers and the digital materialism pursued by

digital glitch videos in two ways. First, they often make visible the
physical materials and supports (pixels, codes, etc.) of the digital
through mutation, accident, and malfunction. Accordingly, the
images produced by the works of mixed-media abstraction often
present noises and glitches—in the forms of aberrant pixels, ghostly
distorted figures, and degraded lines—as a means of demonstrating
and symbolizing the “constantly mutating materiality”48 of the
digital as a medium. Second, much like digital glitch videos, the
filmmakers’ simultaneous employment of film and digital video
to produce these noisy abstract expressions is indebted to the self-
reflexive investigation into the material components of film or
video technology in structural film and image-processing video.
The filmmakers’ embrace of digital materialism also challenges the
general assumption of the digital as totally automated and non-
human tools, inasmuch as their uses of it are made in close dialogue
with their hand-processed techniques of treating film and a range
of aesthetic effects that these techniques make. In this sense, the
filmmakers’ hybrid deployment of film and digital video in the
light of materiality reflects a broader trend in avant-garde cinema
since the mid-1990s which Federico Windhausen observes as being
“toward the incorporation into video of concerns and pursuits first
explored and undertaken with photochemical film,”49 in contrast
to the sharp borderline between the two media that dominated the
experimental practices of moving image up until the early 1990s.
Le Grice, one of the key veteran filmmakers who practiced
the incorporation of his film-based concerns and techniques into
video, argues that the developments of digital systems in the
context of avant-garde film and video are driven by “a desire to
produce a time-based auditory and visual capacity which is more
or less continuous with the forms and language developed from
the history of cinema.”50 In this sense, Le Grice coins the term
“hydra-media” in order to suggest a possibility for deploying
film and the digital in combinatory ways and thereby redefining
the limits of both.51 Considered this way, the filmmakers’ hybrid
uses of film and digital video suit Le Grice’s concept of “hydra-
media,” in the sense that the viewer can see the two “heads” of both
media simultaneously: namely, the components of the original film
that can be dissected, assessed, halted, and reassembled in various
ways on the one hand, and the inscription of visual effects, such
128 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

as signal-based transformation or pixel-based compositing which

confer upon the original film a range of spatiotemporal plasticity
and multidimensionality not acquirable from that original on the
other. In this way, the works of mixed-media abstraction evoke
both the digital in the filmic apparatus and the filmic in the digital
algorithms or operations on their material and technical levels.
The practices of Californian filmmaker Lynn Marie Kirby
have associated the software-based, automated editing with the
rehabilitation of experimental filmmaking. Her works are regrouped
into two phases: while her Time Dilation series (2000–03) employ
the computer to manipulate live-action video footage which she
filmed—about her domestic life with her child, and about her family
vacation and leisure time, her later Latent Light Excavations series
(2003–07) take on the approach of cameraless film, appropriating
the raw film stock that was exposed to the changing sunlight
available at several different locations in and around San Francisco
and then loaded into video editing software applications. The formal
procedures of the films in Latent Light Excavations, including
exposing the materiality of celluloid, isolating its components, and
relying upon the flicker effect, all validate Kirby’s alliance with
the materialist tradition of structural film, particularly the films
of Sharits, Frampton, Le Grice, etc. As René Thoreau Bruckner
notes, the flicker effect as a major tenet of structural film “presents
itself as a model for modern temporality, in which the present
proceeds by successive instants, bursts of barely perceptible light
intersected by ‘empty’ intervals, all passing at a blinding pace.”52
Kirby employs the computational postproduction system in order
to add several video-based effects to the traces of the light exposed
on the original footage, such as interlaced scan lines, geometric
grids and rectangles, clean color fields, and stuttering rhythms.
Bearing in mind that which is manifested through the effects and
other material components of celluloid, Kirby technically promotes
a mutual dialogue between film and digital video, enabling each to
produce its own abstract shapes.
The resulting films of this series, including Golden Gate Bridge
Exposure: Poised for Parabolas (2004), St. Ignatius Church
Exposure: Lenten Light Conversions (2004), and Karate Class
Exposure: Three Variations (2004, Figure 2.10), present dynamic
hybridizations of the analogue abstract shapes (created by the
material components of celluloid and its exposure to the light) and
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 129

their video counterparts. An array of vibrant black-and-white and

colored (red, blue, yellow) fields in the video format contains grains
and scratches in motion. There are, too, blurred shapes in changing
colors, which are the spectra of the light exposed on celluloid. As critic
Michael Sicinski writes, Kirby’s minimalist isolation of the material
components of celluloid recalls Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Reiner
(1960) and Sharits’s Ray Gun Virus (1966).53 Kirby’s achievement,
however, lies in the fact that her precision in computer-based editing
succeeds in preserving those material components based upon the
methods of cameraless filmmaking within the expressive realm of
digital video. As Zinman rightly notes, “The indexical trace that
putatively inhere in the photochemical process—the record of
the place captured, the dust and light that leave an impression on
Kirby’s film—is transferred into and persists throughout the digital
field.”54 Additionally, intermittent flicker effects, perforations, and
vertical and horizontal stripes, all of which underscore the material
specificities of the filmstrip, are intersected by rectangular sections
and grids, as well as by interlaced scan lines that directly refer to
the materiality of video. Thus, the picture frames in the Latent
Light Excavation series are filled with the forms grounded in the
configurations of film-based and video-based material specificities.

Figure 2.10 Film still from Lynn Marie Kirby, Karate Class Exposure:
Three Variations (2004) from Latent Light Excavations series (2003–07),
courtesy Lynn Marie Kirby.
130 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Austrian filmmaker Siegfried A. Fruhauf has also updated the

traditions of structural filmmaking by traversing between the
techniques of celluloid-based filmmaking and those of digital video.
His embrace of digital aesthetics, combined with the handcrafted
methods of structural filmmaking, was evinced in Exposed (2001),
a 16-mm film based on the appropriation of a short scene from
an existing feature film, where a man observes a dancing woman
through a keyhole. As suggested in the film’s title, Fruhauf passes
the perforations of the original film’s strip in front of the projector
such that portions of the scene resemble a group of rectangular
holes moving around the whole screen. In so doing, he successfully
extends structural filmmaking’s interest in the aesthetic possibility
of film’s material substrate into a well-established trope in the
psychoanalytic approach to cinema, one that considers the
camera’s gaze to mobilize the viewer’s voyeuristic pleasure. This
film undoubtedly evokes a couple of traditions in the rich histories
of structural film. The exposure of perforations reminds us of
Landow’s Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket
Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc., and Fruhauf’s association between
the abstract aesthetics of film’s materiality and its psychic effects
is indebted to the films of Peter Tscherkassky. More than update
these two traditions, Fruhauf anticipates his sensibility of digital
aesthetics by fragmenting the screen into a number of rectangular
holes and transforming the screen into multiple layers. The
intersection between film’s materiality and the digitally informed
aesthetics of layer became more evident in his Structural Filmwaste:
Dissolution 1 (2003, Figure 2.11) in different ways.
The film shows material components of leftover 16-mm footage
in a split screen, with one panel delayed slightly. Fruhauf stacked
and exposed the footage in the darkroom in such a way that the
edges of the frame, the splices, scratches, frame lines, and sprocket
holes are clearly visible. As the components of the filmstrip are
superimposed at the speed of the fractions of a second in a rhythmic
sequence of black-and-white frames, the resulting images are seen
as inheriting the materialist traditions of structural film, including
Peter Kubelka’s paradigmatic flicker films that represent Austrian
avant-garde cinema. While investigating the operation of the filmic
apparatus and the materiality of celluloid, however, Fruhauf rapidly
alternates the assaultive eruption of the material components of the
filmstrip with clean and sharp black-and-white frames derived from
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 131

Figure 2.11 Film still from Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Structural Filmwaste:

­Dissolution 1 (2003), courtesy Sixpack Film.

high-definition video. Later, the scratches and grains in the strip’s

emulsion are gradually replaced with the fast-paced vertical and
horizontal scan lines coupled with electronic flicker effects. The
transition from the materiality of celluloid to that of digital video
ends with a two-dimensional white field generated by a computer,
which signifies a purely optical image of abstraction. In this way,
Fruhauf succeeds in hybridizing the two material dimensions of
film and digital video, while also demonstrating how this mixed-
media approach gives rise to the formal variety of abstract imagery.
He further explores the transition of structural filmmaking from
celluloid to digital technologies in Exterior Extended (2013), in
which he worked 36 photo frames printed in 35-mm film with
digital image-processing methods. The film creates the impression of
quickly moving forward and backward in a dilapidated house in the
countryside wildly overgrown with plants. This alternation of static
shots to create the stroboscopic impression of movement is clearly
indebted to Gehr’s Serene Velocity. While inheriting this materialist
tradition of investigating the dialectic of motion and stasis, Fruhauf
transforms some frames pictorially while also layering them
using both the positives and the negatives. The resulting images
present a continual clash between black and white, negative and
positive, pictorial and photographic, abstract and representational,
132 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

freeze-frame and motion picture, and two-dimensionality and three-

dimensionality.
More than maintaining the traditions of structural film, the
mixed-media abstraction activated by the hybrid employment of
film and digital video allows its materialist impulse to be aligned
with expressive possibilities other than reflexively calling the
viewer’s attention to the materiality of the media. That is, some
contemporary directors who have developed the hybrid techniques
of film and digital video to create abstract imagery tend to associate
the materiality of both media with a variety of metaphoric or
symbolic meanings. This tendency is not a radical break from the
materialism that has been developed in the structural traditions of
experimental film since the 1960s, where film’s unique properties
and expressive possibilities have become its central subjects. Rather,
it is a return to the aesthetic of materiality and medium specificity
with a new twist. This revised or updated materialism in the mixed-
media abstraction can be compared to a notable tendency in recent
film projection performances by Bradley Eros, Sandra Gibson and
Luis Recorder, Bruce McClure, to name just a few. In his brilliant
recent study, Jonathan Walley makes a compelling comparison
between these performances and their precursors in the 1960s
and 1970s. Projection performances in the 1960s and 1970s, as
part of the expanded cinema practices in North America and the
United Kingdom, resisted representation, referentiality, illusion, and
metaphor in favor of asserting film’s medium specificity—that is,
its physical components, basic processes, exhibition space, and the
viewer’s embodied perception within that space. Conversely, the
projects of Eros, Gibson and Recorder, and McClure conceive
the specificity of film in rich and subtle ways and evoke various
meanings through the film’s material and technical qualities (e.g.,
Eros incorporates mysticism; Gibson and Recorder pursue poetics;
and McClure utilizes the projector as an audiovisual performer).
Walley argues that these contemporary projection performances do
not represent complete departures from the filmmakers’ interests in
medium specificity that defined expanded cinema of the 1960s and
1970s. What their embrace of meaning and metaphor demonstrates
is rather that they have reassessed the aesthetic possibilities of
medium specificity in film, in the sense that “medium specificity has
never simply celebrated the material base of an art form for its own
sake nor simply for the sole purpose of generating an aesthetic.”55
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 133

In fact, the filmmakers’ interest in the symbolic overtones of the

materiality of celluloid echoes the lyrical traditions of Deren and
Brakhage, in which the representational image transformed by film’s
unique materiality and techniques elicits the worlds of dream and
unconsciousness. More than evoking those lyrical traditions, the
performances of Eros, Gibson and Recorder, and McClure signal
that today’s experimental film, as Walley further argues, “does not
see ‘representational content,’ ‘abstract associations,’ ‘significatory’
imagery, or ‘the repertoire of meaning’ as anathema to the emphasis
on filmic materiality.”56 Directors such as Johanna Vaude, Dietmar
Brehm, Jürgen Reble, and Jennifer West are seen to be in line with
this revised approach to medium specificity by simultaneously
employing film and digital video and associating the mixture of
their abstract material effects with various symbolic meanings and
representational elements.
French filmmaker Johanna Vaude has produced several films
based on the dynamic employment of various film formats (Super
8 mm, 16 mm, and 35 mm) and digital video since the 2000s. Before
venturing into filmmaking, she studied painting, photography, and
poetry, and her practice of the moving image gave the opportunity
to unite all the arts. Above and beyond her position of filmmaking
an integration of art forms, Vaude’s rigorous mixture of the different
media has involved hybridizing their corresponding techniques to
create impure images marked by the dynamic exchange between
heterogeneous visual expressions, encompassing the lens-based
imagery drawn from various existing films and videos, as well as the
abstract forms produced by the direct manipulation of the media’s
material components. What Vaude calls “plastic hybridization”
includes the interaction not only of formal and aesthetic features
endemic to the different media, but also of their material and
technical dimensions, as she notes:

Plastic hybridization means a priori the natural or artificial

crossing of two species or different varieties. If we have two
different mediums, such 16 mm and the digital, hybridization is
not, for example, a film made with and mounted on 16 mm and
projected via video. Hybridization refers more to a plastic mixing,
cohabitation of various elements within the film itself. This is
the transposition of images filmed on mediums such as Super
8, 16 mm, 35 mm or digital video, and reworked from different
134 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

techniques working on film (painting, collage, scratching) or

digital image editing (Photoshop, After Effects). . . . The “body”
of the cinema is changing.57

In a video interview included as a supplement to her DVD, Hybride,

Vaude remarks that her techniques of plastic hybridization, which
include painting directly on celluloid, creating chemical reactions on
its surface, reshooting the film footage with DV, and manipulating
it with the palettes of digital editing, are meant to explore the
“vision of an eye that’s open and watches the world and which
allows us to enter the interior world.” Vaude’s interest in exploring
the “vision of the interior world” recalls Brakhage’s obsession with
a vision unbound from conventional ways of seeing, one that he
describes as “an eye unruled by manmade laws of perspective, an
eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not
respond to the name of everything but which must know each
object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.”58
This enables Vaude to pursue a range of different symbolic and
metaphoric meanings evoked by the complex interplay between
abstraction and figuration. The meanings are the human being’s will
to overcome and transcend the violent images of the world in Notre
Icare (Our Icarus [2001]), the beauty of the choreography of sword
warriors in Samouraï (Samurai [2002]), the ideal representations of
human beings throughout different ages in Totalité Remix (2005,
Figure 2.12), and the images of death in De l’Amort (Love &
Death) (2005).
Totalité Remix is comprised of iconic and photographic
images that depict the ideal figure of a human being based on the
intersection of art, science, and philosophy throughout different
periods of history, including André Vésale’s écorchés (painted
figures that show the muscles of the human body without skin),
drawings by Agrippa de Nettesheim and Leonardo da Vinci,
and chronophotographs of human bodies in motion by Marey
and Muybridge. Vaude initially shot these images in Super
8 mm, painted them manually to add a kaleidoscopic effect of
blurry colors to them and to give them a variety of movements
and rhythms. She then reshot the images in digital video and
edited them with a variety of digital effects, including double
and multiple exposures of their figures and complicating their
tones and colors. The resulting images of these hybrid techniques
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 135

Figure 2.12 Film still from Johanna Vaude, Totalité Remix (2005),
courtesy Johanna Vaude.

during both shooting and editing allow viewers to appreciate

two aesthetic hybridizations that appear on their surfaces: first,
hybridization of stillness (painterly and photographic) and motion,
and second, hybridization of figurative and abstract imagery. The
latter hybridization also enables the viewer to see the connections
between the contents and the symbols of all of the figures. The
abstract forms and colors explode all the frames of the film, to
the extent that they overwhelm and simultaneously highlight the
human figures in movement. Vaude’s experimentation with the
material and technical intermixture of media to create plastic
hybridization of the photographic and abstract images takes
another thematic variation in De l’Amort (Love & Death). The
film adopts familiar icons of horror and terror drawn from various
horror and fantasy movies, including the vampire in F. W. Murnau’s
Nosferatu (1922), the zombies in George A. Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead (1968), a wolf, a naked woman, a man grappling with
his fantasies and obsessions and who fights monsters to rejoin
the woman he desires. Their figures are dramatically distorted,
such that they seem to lose their contours but appear passionately
and fiercely. As in the case of Totalité Remix, this distortion in
De l’Amort (Love & Death) was made with Vaude’s method of
plastic hybridization, through which the 35-mm footage of horror
136 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

film trailers was reshot in video, edited in digital video via special
effects, double exposures, and changes in colors and tones. In both
films, the hybrid abstraction of film and digital video demonstrates
the metaphoric meanings of the inner world that Vaude considers
to be visualized through the eye untutored by conventional ways
of seeing, ranging from the chaos from which human beings and
civilization are born (Totalité Remix) to the horror that resides in
human beings’ inner state of mind (De l’Amort [Love & Death]).
Vaude’s endeavors to link the competing materialities of celluloid
and digital video to the metaphoric expressions of abstract forms
go hand in hand with the hybrid techniques of Austrian filmmaker
Dietmar Brehm. By digitally reworking the footage that he shot from
the 1970s to the early 2000s in Hi 8 mm and 16 mm, he produced
93 short videos from 2006 to 2011, labeling them as the Praxis
series. Of all the short films compiled in this series, those included
in Praxis 5-8 (2008–09) demonstrate the most hallucinatory effects
of enigmatic, blurry images based on the processing of Super 8-mm
or 16-mm footage with digital effects. The films present various
figures that recall several surrealistic motifs, including a silhouetted
man standing in front of a window (Sonntag [1995/2008] in Praxis
5), a naked, dancing woman in an unidentified porn movie (Akt
[1996/2008, Figure 2.13] in Praxis 5), a naked man who lies on the

Figure 2.13 Film still from Dietmar Brehm, Akt (1996/2008) from
Praxis 5-8 (2005–08), courtesy Sixpack Film.
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 137

ground like a corpse (Berlin [1985/2009] in Praxis 7), a couple in

the middle of sexual intercourse (Paris [2002/2009] in Praxis 8t),
bodily details of a naked woman intercut with cryptic objects (a
light bulb, a cigarette box, etc., in Personal [1976/2009] in Praxis 8),
and the face of the filmmaker driving a car, shadowed by dark
glasses (Chesterfield [1986/2009] in Praxis 8). In treating these
figures, Brehm employs the sharpness of the high-definition format
and digital transformations in ways that maintain and even amplify
the grainy materiality of the outdated filmstrips. As a result, the
figures take on both abstract and representational qualities, insofar
as they appear to oscillate between transparency and obscurity and
between legibility and illegibility. Sometimes the human figures are
almost decomposed into ghostly abstract shapes of different colors,
as is the case with yellow in Rodox-1 (2002/2008, in Praxis 6) and
red in Rodox-2 (2002/2008, in Praxis 6). These ambiguous aspects
mark the multiple material stages through which the figures passed,
from celluloid to the digital, while also strengthening the series of
desires and drives evoked by the figures: the desires for violence
and obscenity and the death drive which are repressed in reality but
embedded in the unconscious.
German filmmaker Jürgen Reble and Los Angeles-based artist
Jennifer West use digital technologies to amplify the aesthetic of
abstraction generated by the chemical and physical transformations
of celluloid. Since the mid-1980s, Reble has experimented with
various ways of manipulating Super 8-mm and 16-mm filmstrips,
such as bacterial decomposition, burning, bunching, carving,
chiseling, scraping, and atmospheric corrosion (exposing film reels
to sunlight and other natural substances including wind, rain,
airborne dust, pollen, and dirt for varying number of months),
in order to transform the emulsion of celluloid. These chemical,
hands-on, and biological processes contribute to the disintegration
of the original colors in the emulsion of the filmstrips, in which
the layers of colors are broken down and dynamically mixed. The
resulting images then present various liquid forms of multilayered
colors, with dynamic cracks and crevices continually appearing and
disappearing. In addition to investigating the ways in which the
perpetual transformations of images signify the materiality of the
celluloid subjugated to its own chemical and natural decay, Reble
himself was aware that the interplay of the colors and abstract
shapes is capable of bearing various metaphors in that the images
138 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

resemble religious icons, biological entities, and cosmic dimensions.

Characterizing his physical, chemical, and biological manipulations
of film emulsion as “film alchemy,” Reble writes, “The colors
remained very pure and intense, but had departed from their
previous form. Indeed, they were laying themselves down upon the
old action film to form veritable mosaics of color, remarkably like
the stained glass of church windows.”59
In his nine-part work Materia Obscura (2009, Figure 2.14), Reble
revisited his Instabile Materie (1995), a film for which he covered
hand-processed 16-mm filmstrips with chemical substances, mostly
salts, to create various color transformations and mold shapes in
the emulsion of the strips. Years later, Reble digitized parts of the
film frame by frame in high-definition format and transferred them
to a computer to reorganize them into nine new sequences and slow
down the passage of the film’s imagery. Both the HD format and
the slow motion enable viewers to take a closer look at the natural
and chemical transformations that occurred during the emulsion
of the filmstrips. By employing both celluloid-based processes and
digital technologies simultaneously, Reble intended not merely to
assert film’s materiality as its medium-specific qualities but also to
dramatize the ways in which the interplay of chemical substances
and the emulsion of film reveals “a bizarre, strange world full of
magic.”60 Part 1 of Materia Obscura starts with the image of boiling
brown and white specks, which are later gradually transformed
into black holes against the backdrop of a dense brown surface.

Figure 2.14 Film still from Jürgen Reble, Materia Obscura (2009),
courtesy Jürgen Reble.
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 139

This scene, reminiscent of craters on the ground of the planets in the

solar system, is replaced by a group of red cracks and crevices that
emerge on a black surface. Here, the image marks a transition from
the planetary to the cosmic dimensions, as it later presents changing
clouds in yellow and gold, which are turned into blue concentric
circles and a nebula-like shape in indigo blue. As this sequence
ends by repeating the boiling brown and white specks from the
beginning, they can be seen as symbolizing the Paleozoic era of the
earth. In the rest of the sequences from Materia Obscura, Reble
varies his association of abstract shapes produced by chemical
transformations with other metaphoric—cosmic, geological,
biological, and religious—meanings, rather than expressing the
shapes as indicative of celluloid’s materiality in a self-reflexive
manner. In Part 2, for instance, blue shapes dynamically move while
continuing to be transformed into dynamic shapes that resemble
living organism’s cells, nebulas, clouds, and mists. Part 3 presents
red shapes against a brown background, thereby evoking the
murals of primitive man. In Part 4, an array of yellow lines appears
like broken crystal glasses on blue and black backgrounds, which
are overlapped by a black circle that reminds the viewer of a ring
in total eclipse.
Another alchemist working in film, Jennifer West has employed
a wide variety of hands-on and chemical manipulations in order
to investigate the expressive possibilities of abstract colors and
shapes created by the transformation of celluloid. In a short piece
published in Artforum, West clarifies that her handmade techniques
of scratching, rubbing, corroding, and painting film emulsions, as
well as her uses of various ingredients including spray paint, nail
polish, air freshener, flowers and foliage, etc., are influenced by
the tradition of cameraless films of Man Ray, Lye, and particularly
Brakhage who “transferred the angst-laden gestural abstraction
of the action painters to celluloid.”61 West’s remark demonstrates
not only a key motivation of abstract cinema to translate the color,
vision, and motion of painting into the moving image but also her
desire to bridge cameraless film with Abstract Expressionism as
an art-historical reference. Her Lavender Mist Film/Pollock Film
1 (70mm film leader rubbed with Jimson Weed Trumpet flowers,
spraypainted, dipped and splattered with nail polish, sprayed with
lavender mist air freshener) (2009), for instance, presents splatters
and drips in various colors (black, pink, yellow) in a similar way as
140 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Jackson Pollock’s action paintings. As described in the film’s title,

West uses a 70-mm film leader rubbed with flowers like a canvas, on
which she painted the dynamic play of rounded shapes of varying
sizes and colors with spray paint, nail polish, and air freshener.
Besides this art-historical reference, West’s abstract imagery, based
on her manual processing and her mixture of solid and liquid
materials with the materiality of celluloid, gives a nod to various
metaphoric expressions and emotions, including her references to
rock bands (grunge bands and riot grrrls), drugstore culture, and
youth culture. For this reason, some of West’s films present rich and
complex admixtures of lens-based imagery and a variety of abstract
forms produced by the chemical and physical manipulation of
celluloid. Nirvana Alchemy Film (16mm black & white film soaked
in lithium mineral hot springs, pennyroyal tea, doused in mud,
sopped in bleach, cherry antacid and laxatives—jumping by Finn
West & Jwest) (2007) combines the footage of West and her son
jumping on a trampoline with relentlessly moving abstract figures,
blood-red swathes and neon green lines produced by soaking and
sopping the footage in several ingredients and chemicals. The
interplay of the representational elements (the jumping of West and
her son) and the abstract shapes (including the scratches on the
filmstrip created by their footsteps) renders the film’s movement
free and agitating, therefore recalling the atmosphere of Nirvana’s
songs to which the film pays homage. West’s strategy of combining
the chance effects of participants’ activities on filmstrips with
her chemical transformations of celluloid was also applied to her
Skate the Sky Film (2009),62 for which she used the Tate Modern’s
Turbine Hall as a temporary skate park and asked her riders to
skate directly on filmstrips.
When she presents her films based on the tradition of cameraless
films on celluloid, West chooses to project the films’ footage using
a digital format. In an interview with Quinn Latimer, she remarks
that her choice to use the digital format is because the whirring
sound of an analogue film projector is “too nostalgic,” and because
the digital format ensures that her films’ subjects, including rock
bands and skateboarders, “are considered in the medium of their
time.”63 As Zinman writes, her insistence on digital projection for
these two reasons is “in keeping with cinema’s increased reliance
on modes of digital production, dissemination, and projection and
maintains certain qualities ascribed to the cinematic experience.”64
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 141

While most of her works use digital technologies to enhance the

material and chemical effects of abstract compositions and relocate
the celluloid-based imagery in the post-filmic projection of art
galleries, Spiral of Time Documentary Film (2013, Figure 2.15)65
provides a complex dialogue between digital and filmic images.
This time, West takes Chris Marker’s travelogue essay film Sans
Soleil (1982) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), a poetic
film that documents the process of his site-specific project of
the same title, as two art-historical references for her attempt to
extend the materialist aesthetic of celluloid to other metaphoric
meanings. 16-mm filmstrips were dripped, splattered, and sprayed
with several salted liquids, including balsamic and red wine
vinegar, lemon and lime juice, and hair dyes. West’s inclusion of
salt as a key ingredient signals Spiral of Time Documentary Film
as a materialist remake of Spiral Jetty, insofar as the salt alludes
to Utah’s Great Salt Lake as the site for Smithson’s project. The
celluloid emulsion transformed by the chemical substances is

Figure 2.15 Film still from Jennifer West, Spiral of Time Documentary
Film (16mm negative strobe-light double and triple exposed—painted with
brine shrimp—dripped, splattered and sprayed with salted liquids: balsamic
and red wine vinegar, lemon and lime juice, temporary fluorescent hair
dyes—photos from friends Mark Titchner, Karen Russo, Aaron Moulton
and Ignacio Uriarte and some google maps—texts by Jwest and Chris
Markers’ Sans Soleil script—shot by Peter West, strobed by Jwest, hands
by Ariel West, telecine by Tom Sartori) (2013), 9 min 1 second, 16mm
negative transferred to high-definition, Commissioned by Utah Museum of
Contemporary Art, courtesy of the artist.
142 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

overlapped with several subtitles gleaned from Marker’s script for

Sans Soleil, as well as with the landscapes of the Dead Sea in the
Middle East and of Spiral Jetty on Google Maps, whose footage
West shot on her computer screen. By exposing all the elements two
or three times, West places both the analogue and the digital inside
the same frame while also establishing the film’s resulting visual
expressions as hybrid images that straddle the boundaries between
abstraction and figuration. The landscapes of the two locations
are presented as computer-generated imagery framed within the
computer screen. The images of the landscapes, however, vacillate
between legibility and illegibility as magenta sunspots and blue
lines, two abstract shapes produced by the chemical transformation
of celluloid, continue to unfurl across the landscapes. The explosion
of abstract figures that make the images of the locations barely
recognizable fits into West’s aesthetic scheme applied to other films
that include representational images, as she explains: “Even in my
films with recognizable images, the viewer is shifting back and forth
between an occasional glimpse of imagery and all types of markings,
splatters, shred marks, drips, and holes.”66 In the case of Spiral of
Time Documentary Film, the viewer’s experience of “shifting back
and forth” between the representational and the abstract images
echoes Meaney’s materialist exploration of archive and memory in
the digital age by means of digital glitches. If the images of the two
locations on Google Maps represent a digital reconstruction of the
memory of Spiral Jetty in Smithson’s past, then the abstract figures
that overwhelm the images suggest that this digital memory is as
much subject to material decay and oblivion as the memory trace
inscribed in celluloid.

Conclusion
The two categories of artwork grounded in aesthetic hybrid
abstraction, namely digital glitch video and mixed-media
abstraction, testify to what Manovich sees as two changes in the art
of abstraction occurring since the mid-1990s. First, the opposition
between abstraction and figuration, established by the Greenbergian
medium-specific discourse on modernist art, dissolved as a variety
of software applications became able to appropriate and simulate
the aesthetics and techniques of abstract painting, film, and video
 Digital glitch video and mixed-media abstraction 143

and fuse them with photorealistic or figurative imagery in various

ways. Other than the proliferation of hybrid images derived from
the applications’ capacities, the second change in the domain of
“pure” abstraction is the shift from the principle of reduction to one
of complexity: that is, if the abstract forms in the modernist abstract
painting of the early and mid-twentieth century are grounded in
reducing painting itself to its basic material properties and technical
elements, then the constantly changing patterns of lines and geometric
shapes observable in the software-based abstract artworks of the
contemporary age follow the aesthetics of complexity, influenced
by software engineering and complexity science.67 While consenting
to the first change proposed by Manovich, I would stress that his
second change—namely, the paradigm shift from the principle of
reduction to that of complexity—is not limited to artworks that take
a direction of pure abstraction. The three aspects of hybridity that
I have discussed in this chapter—the technical hybridity of digital
glitch videos, the material hybridity of mixed-media abstraction,
and the aesthetic hybridity common to both—demonstrate that the
principle of complexity governs not only the art of pure abstraction
but also the intersection of abstract forms with photographic or
figurative imagery. Again, this intersection allows us to reread a
couple of tendencies in contemporary abstract film and video beyond
the purview of the modernist idea of abstraction, repositioning
abstraction itself within the contexts of media hybridizations.
I further argue that the three aspects of hybridity in the works
of hybrid abstraction also derive from and attest to several post-
media conditions of film and video. Digital glitch videos testify to
the dissolution of film’s celluloid-based materiality that previously
contributed to the distinction of its image’s form from that of video
imagery, as well as to the fact that digital technologies transform
the filmic image into a data object subject to the manipulation of
codes and algorithmic procedures of postproduction and display.
At the same time, the works’ allusions to image-processing video
illustrate that the techniques and aesthetics of analogue video
are also dislocated from its medium-specific boundaries as they
are remediated by, and relocated into, digital video’s software
environments. Finally, the works of mixed-media abstraction
propel us to see the ways in which film and video, once regarded as
sharply distinct, enter into a new, previously uncharted relationship
in the persistence of the materialist energy that had led to the
144 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

developments of abstract forms. It is in these three ways that the

aesthetic of abstraction, which at first glance opposes to that of
photorealism in videographic moving pictures, also engages in
configuring an array of hybrid moving images as indicative of the
post-media conditions.
 chapter three

Transitional found footage

practices: Video in and out
of the cinematic fragments

Introduction: Defining transitional

found footage practices
In a roundtable discussion on obsolescence and American avant-
garde cinema, critic Paul Arthur proclaimed: “The much-vaunted
war between digital or video, and film, is in certain ways much like
media hype before a heavyweight prizefight.” Arthur’s statement
asks us to rethink medium-specific distinctions between film and
its neighbors, which still shape the fault line between the “old” and
the “new,” or the “pure” and the “impure.” This notion is grounded
in Arthur’s attention to two types of filmmakers: first, the pedigree
of veteran filmmakers—Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr,
and Jonas Mekas, to name just a few—previously regarded as
“film purists,” who are now “all working in video”; and second,
“younger-generation filmmakers like Peggy Ahwesh and Scott Stark
who move back and forth between digital and film.”1 It is worth
mentioning that directors in Arthur’s list such as Jacobs, Gehr, and
Ahwesh have been concerned with found footage filmmaking, a type
of film practice characterized by the “extensive use, transformation
and re-interpretation of other filmmakers’ images.”2
146 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

The definition of found footage film in the rich history of

experimental cinema is predicated on its aspiration to investigate
the material and technical components of the borrowed image,
as well as its underlying historical and cultural implications; and
on its aesthetic and technical approaches to the image, which
alter the image’s qualities or place it in a new chain of meanings.
Some of the works in Arthur’s list, which recycle film images but
are made with video technologies or a combination of celluloid-
based filmmaking and electronic and digital methods, introduce
profound instability to these two defining factors of found footage
film—namely, the historical and ontological factor of the existing
film images functioning as objects of investigation, and the aesthetic
and technical factor of the filmmaker’s approach to them. In this
chapter, I shall categorize these works as “transitional found
footage practices,” and investigate how the technological passage
from film to electronic and digital media affects the two factors
defining found footage film.
The term “transitional” bears an array of overlapping
implications. First and foremost, it signifies that cinema is in a state
of technological change, through which film’s key components
(the camera, the filmstrip, the editing table, the projector, and
the screen, all of which establish film as a medium grounded in
the photochemical process) are gradually replaced by electronic
and digital technologies. These changes demonstrate the new
technologies’ profound impact not simply on the production,
distribution, and exhibition of cinema, but also on the collection,
restoration, and conservation of film as a reservoir of history and
memory. From the perspective of experimental filmmaking, the
term “transition” involves the question of authorship, in that these
changes are viewed pragmatically as a threat to the artisanal mode
based on the intimate relation—both physically and manually—of
the filmmaker to the medium. The question gains a deeper relevance
given that found footage filmmaking has been developed in close
dialogue with the artisanal mode. Seen in this light, the found
footage practices in question are quintessentially relevant objects
of inquiry, because they illustrate and are derived from a reaction
to many of the transitional characteristics of cinema above. The
original image, appropriated and reworked by the practitioners,
exists not strictly on celluloid, but as the film (the whole body of a
film or its fragments) encoded with analogue or digital video. For
 Transitional found footage practices 147

this reason, the practitioners’ modes of production are increasingly

influenced by a variety of new technological artifacts, ranging
from storage media to devices for film-to-video conversion or vice
versa (for instance, telecine scanners) to software for editing and
special effects. Accordingly, the filmmakers’ outputs are hard to pin
down in the light of the assumed purity of film, an assumption that
lies at the heart of the argument on cinematic medium specificity,
upon which the ideology of experimental filmmaking still depends
considerably.
However, all those changes do not necessarily indicate ineluctable
historical ruptures between film and electronic and digital media.
Rather, the idea of transition suggests that a medium for production
and circulation of an art form undergoes technological hybridization.
For David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, comprehending the
aesthetics of transition means to “resist notions of media purity”
and to recognize that “each medium is touched by and in turn
touches its neighbors and rivals.”3 From this perspective, each
medium’s constitution is plural inasmuch as it is open to different
formal, aesthetic, stylistic, and institutional practices that invite
the influence of other media. Similarly, Rodowick remarks, “The
self-identity of a medium may accord less with a homogeneous
substance than with a set of component properties or conceptual
options.”4 Rodowick’s view encourages us to associate Thorburn
and Jenkins’s idea on the transition of a medium via external
influences with its internal, dynamic heterogeneity: simply put,
the identity or essence of a medium may be understood more
palpably through the ways through which its own characteristics
and qualities interact with those of other media than from the
identification of a single, all-defining formal quality. Taken together,
the idea of transition as external and internal hybridizations each
suggested by Thorburn and Jenkins and by Rodowick eventually
leads us to consider film and video alike as two media that exist
both separately and relationally. On the one hand, each has both
similarities with and differences from the other, shaping its own
distinguishable art forms or cultural products; and on the other
hand, each potentially allows for the influx of the other in the
course of shaping a sensible form—for instance, a film involving
video-based methods of production, or a video used in combination
with film-based images or techniques. Thus, the idea of transition
places emphasis on the multiplicity of the relationships between
148 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the two media both historically and synchronically. Archivist and

theoretician Giovanna Fossati provides a fresh take on the idea
of transition in her rigorous conceptualization of the hybridity of
cinema. She notes,

Films today are hybrid, being produced at the same time analog
and digital. Although new films may perhaps become all digital
soon, film-born and hybrid-born films (i.e., films from the
analog past and films made during the transition) are destined to
a perpetually liminal status. As material artifacts they are both
analog and digital (e.g., the nitrate film stored in the archive’s
vault and its digitization stored on a server and available on-
line); as conceptual artifacts they are both the historical artifact
and the historicized one (e.g., the nitrate film and its reenactment
via a digital projection).5

Fossati’s argument here is not to deny the indisputable differences

between film’s photochemical properties and those of the digital, but
to understand the uncertain ontological status of film as a “dynamic
object where the material and conceptual artifacts are bound
together.”6 Fossati is correct in that film has arguably never been
linked to a uniquely distinct artifact. In terms of film preservation,
with which Fossati is primarily concerned, some practices are more
inclined to restoring a film’s conceptual dimensions (its profilmic
objects, styles, mise-en-scène, etc.) through digital manipulations
(color correction, dust removal, digital compositing of its
deteriorated parts, etc.), although film’s material dimensions are
not purely derived from celluloid. This hybridity can be equally
applied to the cases of transitional found footage practitioners.
They validate the assumption that the transition of existing images
from film to electronic and digital media does not affect their
conceptual dimensions, namely, film as “historical artifacts” and
film as the artifacts “historicized” by the practitioners’ work. To
add to Fossati’s argument on film’s hybridization, the liminal status
of the images used by transitional found footage practitioners
partly stems from electronic and digital technologies, which leave
their material trace on the surface and temporality of the images.
The transitional character of the images can be true of the technical
apparatus available to those practitioners, as well as of the aesthetic
choices that it provides. As filmmaker Yann Beauvais points out,
 Transitional found footage practices 149

today’s avant-garde filmmaking is “not any longer limited to [the

silver-based medium], but it is realized by means of a combination
of media, from video to film passing through the digital in many
different forms.”7
Based on the idea of the transition and hybridity of one medium
in relationship to the other, I present the following two arguments
on transitional found footage practices: first, considering the level
of technologies necessary for access to and conversion of the extant
images into a finished object, transitional found footage practices
are based on the combination of media, in which the multiple layers
of film as a medium are also confirmed and transformed; and
second, on the level of the resulting image’s aesthetics, the forms
of transitional found footage practices must be considered neither
the direct manifestation of film nor its absorption into non-filmic
media, but instead as the intermedial configuration of the two.
I develop these two arguments through my examinations of the key
filmmakers who deepened this relational mode of practice in the
arenas of contemporary experimental filmmaking—the Christoph
Girardet-Matthias Müller duo, R. Bruce Elder, and Ken Jacobs.
These three cases will additionally yield several theoretical and
discursive reflections on found footage filmmaking, each of which
alludes to two ideas of transition.
The first idea of transition is suggested by several previous
studies on found footage filmmaking. Catherine Russell sees the use
of television and film archives by experimental filmmakers since the
1950s as “apocalyptic,” associating it with the advent of the postwar
consumer culture, marked by its indiscriminate bombardment and
wasting of images: “It is the collage style of the age of television
that renders history and memory unstable and fragmentary.”8 For
Russell, fragmentation and juxtaposition adopted by avant-garde
found footage filmmakers underscore this condition, rendering a
progressive and coherent history impossible while also bringing
“past, present, and future into a new nonlinear temporality.”9
Russell’s voice echoes Adrian Mackenzie, who sees the increased
engagement with recycled images since the 1990s as “an attempt to
retrieve, analyze, [and] deconstruct cinematic styles that have shaped
the collective memory of consumer, capitalist society.”10 Both Russell
and Mackenzie suggest a correspondence between the postmodern
imagescape and the technical and aesthetic aspects of found
footage filmmaking: that is, the televisual modes of representation,
150 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

such as fragmentation, quotation, and pastiche, are reflected in

the techniques and textuality of found footage films aiming to
analyze and subvert past images. While concurring with this idea of
correspondence, I stress that the two theorists rely on tropes of the
modernist avant-garde, such as montage, collage, and readymade,
to discuss the aesthetics and techniques of found footage film.
For this reason, their arguments tend to be conflated with discourse
on the strategies of appropriation in modern and contemporary art,
though some of these filmmakers are modern artists influenced by
modern art.11 Russell and Mackenzie thus run the risk of obscuring
the specific status of found footage film and the ontology of the
image that it recycles. Considering this, I shall elaborate upon the
technical and aesthetic impacts that technological shifts, triggered
by the post-filmic media, have had on the traditional methods of
found footage filmmaking, whether revitalizing the methods or
introducing new, previously unattainable possibilities.
The second idea of transition relates to a historical consciousness
of found footage filmmaking with regard to how its images exist.
Arthur notes that this mode of practice reflects a distance between
the material, technical, and industrial conditions of filmmaking
engraved in the past image and those available to the filmmaker of
the present. Because the temporality of recycled films in this mode
is unavoidably split “between a present context and the shadow of
prior production circumstances,” they speak “not only of a distant
past and/or a ‘repressed’ quotient of meaning but of manufacturing
resources and protocols.”12 Arthur also provides a more detailed
description of what he means by “manufacturing resources and
protocols”: “Recontextualization will inevitably, indeed should,
undercut the integrity of original footage since fidelity to technical
standards (e.g., gage, camera speed, aspect ratio) of extant images is
virtually impossible.”13 Although not explicitly proceeding further,
Arthur points to the changes both in the ontological dimension
of the found images (“the integrity of original footage”) and in
their material and technical dimensions (“technical standards”)
as they are reworked by found footage filmmaking. Willem de
Greef writes, too, that in found footage filmmaking “reproducing
an image always involves transferring it onto a different material.
The consequences are alterations of color, contrasts that differ from
the original.”14 In comparison to Arthur’s perspective, however, de
Greef’s places more emphasis on the potential for found footage
 Transitional found footage practices 151

film to create new meaning from the original image, and to forge
a new filmmaking mode from the image: “What we refer to as
‘citing’ actually is copying, a new production. . . . The original is
paraphrased, annexed, [and] re-formulated.”15 Viewed together,
Arthur’s and de Greef’s thoughts can be reformulated on the one
hand as the dialectic of deconstruction and reconstruction, and
on the other as the exchange between some visual qualities from
the original image and others from its copy. Given that the copy
is not simply a duplication of the image but a transformation and
reformulation, the resulting image in the transitional found footage
practice is marked by the distance between past and present, as well
as by the interplay between the original film’s specific qualities and
the varying degrees of videographic and digital promiscuity.
How then do the practitioners of transitional found footage
filmmaking extend their celluloid-based techniques of reworking
and investigating the original film into the technical properties
of video and digital technologies? And how does the dialectic of
deconstruction and reconstruction in the hybridity of the image and
its techniques contribute to the task of found footage filmmaking to
engage with the cinematic past and reconfigure its history? I answer
these questions by drawing on Walter Benjamin’s ideas of the
“dialectical image” and the “loss of aura.” These two ideas help us
to understand the technical and aesthetic hybridities of the image in
transitional found footage practices as an ambivalent consequence
of cinema’s post-media conditions—that is, the destruction of its
celluloid-based properties and the reconstruction of possibilities to
explore its material and cultural past in the present.

The technical transition of found footage

practices: Montage and special effects
Montage and special effects are the two key technical strategies of
found footage filmmaking on which the transition from film to video
has an effect. In his landmark study on the traditions of avant-garde
found footage films, William C.Wees singles out these two strategies
for transforming original images. Along with his classification of the
three methods of montage—namely, “compilation,” “collage,” and
“appropriation”—for creating various juxtapositions that redefine
152 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

borrowed images,16 he considers as another thread of found footage

practice in experimental filmmaking a variety of films in which
footage “has been scratched, scraped, perforated, painted, dyed,
bleached, chemically-altered, or subjected to various techniques
of optical printing that radically change its appearance.”17 To
draw upon Michele Pierson’s words, the techniques for radically
transforming and displaying the material surface of celluloid
footage are seen as “special effects,” which include frame-by-frame
manipulation, recombination of the filmstrip, and “any technique
or class of techniques for manipulating images within the film
frame.”18 A number of contemporary American found footage
filmmakers including Craig Baldwin, Abigail Child, Leslie Thornton,
and Jay Rosenblatt, as well as European practitioners including
Johan Grimonprez (Belgium), Péter Forgács (Hungary), Yervant
Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucci (Italy), and many others, have
deepened the tradition of montage-based found footage filmmaking
with radical juxtapositions of disparate images creating unexpected
associations. Dispersed across a wide variety of subcategories from
compilation documentary to the construction of alternative history,
the artists or filmmakers use the tropes of montage to explore, in
the words of Michael Zyrd, “the metaphoric qualities of found
footage, finding ambiguity and revelation in both the recognizable
iconic image, resonant with cultural and historical connotation, and
detritus, the seemingly inconsequential footage whose very banality
and ubiquity is made resonant of mass media.”19 On the other hand,
Pierson illustrates her concept of special effects by citing the films of
Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold, two notable contemporary
filmmakers who probe and unmask the institutional codes and
conventions governing mainstream narrative cinema by expanding
the methods of structural film, a number of radical alterations to
the material and processual dimensions of the found film image
to the extent that it barely retains its original state.
The proliferation of digital files (ripped data from VHS videos
or television programs) on storage media and networked platforms
(websites or user communities for uploading and downloading
of video files, such as YouTube, Google Video, and Vimeo), the
development of software for editing and file sharing, and the
emergence of new means for storage and distribution of visual data,
have all recently refashioned the traditions of found footage films
based on montage and special effects techniques. Adrian Danks notes
 Transitional found footage practices 153

that the recent flourishing of found footage cinema across the globe
has become increasingly linked to “non-cinematic” practices that
emerged during the last twenty-five years, “as a greater emphasis
on the recycling of materials and sources, sampling, turntable
scratching, [and] digital vision-mixing.”20 The non-cinematic
practices indicated by Danks, which originated in the arena of
popular music in the 1980s, are now seen as expanding across a
variety of contexts, ranging from contemporary art to Web-based
or software-based cultures.21 The influence of these techniques on
contemporary art is encapsulated by Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of
“postproduction,” a term that refers to a vast, albeit heterogeneous,
array of artistic practices in use since the 1990s, which commonly
rely on preexisting works or their formal structures to respond to
the overpopulation of images and information and to extract new
modes of production from them. For Bourriaud, the development of
digital technologies and the vocabulary of the new cultural modes
that they introduce—programming, sampling, copying, pasting,
and sharing; and the eradication of traditional distinctions between
production and consumption or readymade and original work—
play a key part in the emergence of the art of postproduction, that
is, an array of artistic practices that aim to make something new
from something already produced: be it an artwork, an artist’s
method or scheme for making that artwork, or a readymade object.
While arguing that postproduction is another kind of production
rather than a mere appropriation of the original artwork or
object, Bourriaud considers the DJ, whose task is to select cultural
objects and insert them into new contexts, an influencing figure of
postproduction, and explains that the growing number of artists
influenced by the DJ culture demonstrates that “the art of the
twentieth century is an art of montage (the succession of images)
and detournage (the superimposition of images).”22 Similarly, Eli
Horwatt argues that the practice of moving image appropriation
enabled by those conditions—what he calls “digital remixing”—
“represents a continuation in the development of the strategies
and techniques of found footage filmmaking but possesses its own
unique aesthetic and rhetorical contributions.”23 For Horwatt,
the internet, an archive of found images open for limitless access,
surfing, and accumulation, recycles the montage aesthetics of found
footage filmmaking as it is linked to digital software, a toolbox for
creating new juxtapositions of those images.
154 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

It should be noted, however, that the emphasis on electronic and

digital technologies shared by Danks, Bourriaud, and Horwatt is
still too limited to pinpoint the ways in which those technologies
influence the technical and aesthetic dimensions of found footage
practices in avant-garde cinema. Terms such as “sampling,”
“remix,” and “postproduction” are primarily concerned less with
the historical context of found footage film and its montage-based
and process-based techniques than with the broader cultural logic of
contemporary audiovisual formation spurred by new technologies.
A few scholars have recently suggested potential for shaping the
hybrid discourse on the transition of montage that results from
changes in the technological basis of film production and reception.
Martin Lefebvre and Marc Furstenau argue for an affinity between
viewing a film on the editing table and watching it on video
technology: “VCRs don’t so much reproduce film projection as they
partially mimic the way an editor may access a film that has been
threaded onto a Steinbeck—including even viewing the film on a
reduced-size screen.”24 VCRs allow the viewer to see the transferred
film footage in ways that disrupt the temporally linear, forward
movement operated by the projector, including freeze-frame
(pause), slow motion (including “frame-by-frame” advance), fast
forward, and rewind functions. Lefebvre and Furstenau extend the
correspondence between the editing technology and the domestic
viewing system to a comparison of nonlinear digital editing systems
using the DVD. The characteristics of viewing of a film through
a DVD player, such as random access to the film’s transferred
footage, nonsequential viewing, and playing segments (chapters) in
any order, even random, grant the editor “the ability to produce—
quickly and at little cost—multiple versions of any given sequence
(or section) of a film, and provides several on-screen (analog)
display possibilities for the digitized data.”25 This is grounded in the
DVD’s reproduction of the technical repertoire of nonlinear digital
editing. For Lefebvre and Furstenau, this technological transition
of the apparatuses used by the film editor bears a more crucial
consequence regarding the ontology of cinema. Nonlinear editing
structured by digital video testifies to “an increasing tendency to see
a film as an object that may legitimately undergo perhaps constant
revision and rearticulation.”26
Seen in this light, the new technical possibilities for transitional
found footage practices, such as remix and sampling, do not simply
 Transitional found footage practices 155

validate the influence of electronic and digital technologies; rather,

I argue that these possibilities testify to the technical and aesthetic
hybridization of transitional found footage practices, inasmuch as they
demonstrate both similarities and differences in the transformation
of cinema vis-à-vis its hitherto celluloid-based constitution. That is,
such techniques as remix and sampling in those practices can be used
for their practitioners to extend their celluloid-based montage and
special effects in the realm of digital editing on the one hand. In this
case, there might be a range of correspondences between these two
techniques, and these correspondences enable the resulting image
of transitional found footage practices to occupy both the aesthetic
qualities of the film-based original image and those produced by
digital manipulation. On the other hand, digital sampling and
remix in those practices, too, inscribe their own videographic
qualities in the surface and temporal dimensions of the original
filmic image, thus manifesting themselves as more or less distinct
from the celluloid-based montage and special effects. For instance,
similarities are seen in transitional found footage practice’s adoption
of nonlinear digital editing, a continuation of the montage methods
used in celluloid-based found footage filmmaking, which were
themselves grounded in the procedures of editing on the Steenbeck
machine. This nonlinear editing might be called digital sampling or
digital remix, but only when it reflects the extent to which today’s
cinema does not solely consist of the celluloid medium’s specific
characteristics. Susanne Østby Saether’s three characterizations of
sampling concisely make this point: first, digital sampling engages
in “questions of materiality, in the face of the ephemeral nature of
current screen culture”; second, it implies “a fragmentation of the
original material, giving priority to a non-linear representation”;
and finally, it focuses on the “technological investment involved
in the reproduction and subsequent repetition of pre-existing
material.”27 I argue that, in the context of transitional found footage
practices, these three aspects are related to three questions raised by
the post-media situation (i.e., that digital production and storage
technologies have fundamentally altered the aesthetic and technical
conditions of celluloid-based cinema): first, how do the filmic images
originally produced and experienced in celluloid bear witness to
the coexistence and interrelation of celluloid-based and digitized
qualities? Second, in what ways are fragmentation and nonlinearity
seen to result from the transformation of images from celluloid to
156 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

digital files and pixels? And finally, which properties of digital tools
for appropriating, juxtaposing, and transforming images are capable
of translating celluloid-based montage and special effects into
the domain of digital editing, while also providing new technical
possibilities that were previously unattainable from celluloid-based
found footage filmmaking?
Lefebvre and Furstenau’s points concerning the changing status
of editing can be applied not merely to the realm of traditional
montage, but also to that of special effects—freeze-frame, slow
motion, etc. Given that digital video endows the encoded version
of a filmic image with manipulations of its surface and temporality,
however, the influence of new technologies on the special effects of
found footage filmmaking should be discussed more extensively
than by Lefebvre and Furstenau. Here, the range of techniques
that can be applied to found films extends into the domain of
“digital compositing.” In a narrow sense, the term refers to general
operation in the computer culture that aims at “assembling
together a number of elements to create a single seamless object.”28
In a broader sense, the term is understood to include a variety
of techniques allowing for the coalition of different layers into a
single image frame. The term’s broad definition implies aesthetic
possibilities beyond simply a synthesis of objects, blending separate
layers in a coherent manner to strive for the ideal of photorealism;
for instance, a juxtaposed, multilayered visual field is possible, akin
to the collage and photomontage of the 1920s. If this modernist
aesthetic is just an option, then it could be argued that digital
compositing in its broad sense is characterized in two ways: on the
one hand, by coexistence of different media components in a single
frame through various methods, and on the other by the ability of
any element in the frame to interact with another. Lev Manovich
summarizes those two points as follows: “Digital compositing now
allowed the designers to easily mix any number of visual elements
regardless of the media in which they originated and to control
each element in the process.”29 He also sees digital compositing
as facilitating a number of special effects developed in the field
of experimental cinema (including found footage filmmaking),
such as the use of an optical printer to superimpose different
visual elements on a single space, and the practice of painting
or scratching the surface of celluloid. Given the importance of
those two techniques as special effects in avant-garde found
 Transitional found footage practices 157

footage filmmaking, digital compositing in transitional found

footage practice (a different set of techniques for juxtaposing
and manipulating of different media elements) corresponds to the
found footage films based on digital special effects. To be sure,
there is one crucial difference: if the films made using optical
printing or scratching/painting aim to investigate film’s medium-
specific dimensions (the materiality of celluloid, the relationships
between photograms, the operation of the projector, the illusion of
filmic movement, etc.), then transitional found footage practices
are concerned with the simultaneous appearance of multiple media
characteristics—the filmic on the one hand, and the electronic and
digital on the other—or the dialogue between them.
From another perspective, the inclusion of digital compositing as
a technique in transitional found footage practice is viewed as the
collapse of the boundary between montage and special effects. The
distinctions between the two kinds of found footage film, made by
Wees and Pierson, namely, films based on montage and those based
on special effects, respectively, suggest that they were regarded as
separate, both conceptually and practically. Whereas those two forms
ran largely parallel to the differences between the Steenbeck editor
and the optical printer or other manual and chemical treatment of
celluloid, the interface of video-based and computer-based editing
fully repositioned the linear arrangement of discrete images and a
variety of compositing functions within the same working table.
As Manovich further notes, “Re-ordering sequences of images in
time, compositing them together in space, modifying parts of an
individual image, and changing individual pixels become the same
operation.”30 In line with Manovich, Tilly Wanes observes that “time
and space are no longer separate modes but are fully imbricated in
the editing process, engendering a new multi-dimensional form of
montage.”31 This process also makes possible what curator Stefano
Basilico calls “gestural” uses of editing, for example “stretching,”
“removing,” “arranging,” “erasing,” “cutting,” and “repairing”;
these gestural processes allow artists and filmmakers to manipulate
film fragments by virtue of video technologies and treat them as
objects subject to temporal and figural changes of state.32 Full
integration of montage and special effects into the expanded editing
field governed by digital video software accordingly yields two
technical and aesthetic consequences in transitional found footage
practice. First is a free insertion of temporal manipulation and
158 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

composition-based techniques—for instance, keying, multilayering,

juxtaposition, etc.—in the sequential assemblage that leads to
a compilation or collage film. Second is an expansion of special
effects into not a limited number of scenes but the whole part of a
film, or a number of different films that will later be recombined
using montage methods.
The recent digital found footage films by Vicki Bennett (aka
“People Like Us”) and Gregg Biermann vividly demonstrate the
technical exchange between montage and special effects, as well
as the dynamic aesthetic hybridization of borrowed filmic images
and digital visual expressions. Initially, these two filmmakers seem
distinct in terms of their technical traditions of experimental found
footage filmmaking: that is, montage-based and special effects-based
found footage films. Bennett uses the montage—more precisely,
collage—method to create radical juxtapositions of various filmic
images (including B-movies, educational films, etc.) available in
the form of digital files from online archives and websites, while
Biermann adopts a variety of software features as digital special
effects to transform canonical classic films, including Vertigo (Alfred
Hitchcock, 1958), The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), and
so on. This distinction, however, becomes blurred when comparing
their films’ techniques and resulting images. In Bennett’s films, such
as We Edit Life (2002), The Remote Controller (2002), and Work,
Rest, and Play (2007), viewers see that the images connected by
sequential editing evolve into a variety of superimpositions based
on digital compositing. A key technique of digital compositing is
“matte extraction,” which allows Bennett to select and cut out
defined parts of a digitally encoded filmic image according to their
values (color, luminance, etc.).33 By interweaving these parts with
fragments from other borrowed films, Bennett’s films present a
dense spatial collage in which people, objects, and backgrounds
from different sources appear to coexist and interact within a single
frame, with no clear boundaries between them: a man in color who
operates a machine controller is shown beneath black-and-white
dancing marionettes inside the machine’s monitors in The Remoter
Controller, and children from a 1950s educational film dance
around an animated robot in We Edit Life. The scratches on the
surfaces of the borrowed images in Bennett’s films testify to their
celluloid origin, but the interactions of the black-and-white footage
with the colored and animated material, and of still images with
 Transitional found footage practices 159

moving images, result in spatial density as an aesthetic characteristic

of electronic and digital imagery.
Biermann’s films, too, emblematize the dynamic exchange
between montage and special effects in software-based editing,
as well as radical transformation of the celluloid-based image.
In Utopian Variations (2008), the “Over the Rainbow” sequence
from The Wizard of Oz moves forward from the beginning and
backward from the end in half-second intercuts. This repetition,
a variation of sequential editing, overlaps with what Manovich
calls “spatial montage,” a new dimension of video and digital
editing derived from digital compositing that allows for various
juxtapositions of different elements in a single picture frame.34
The sequence in Utopian Variations gradually builds from one
screen to a twenty-five-voice split-screen canon in which each voice
is slightly out of sync. In fact, Biermann’s use of split screen as a
spatial montage strategy relates to some of his other films, which
rework Hitchcock’s films to offer the viewer a refreshed aesthetic
experience of their mesmerizing and kaleidoscopic aspects. In his
Spherical Coordinates (2005), Biermann takes Janet Leigh’s driving
scene from Psycho (1960) and transforms it into a dizzying array
of concentric circles, using the capacity of digital software to twist,
bend, fold, and flip the image. Similarly, Labyrinthine (2010)
transforms the iconographic shots from Vertigo into composite
sequences of infinitely increasing superimpositions. As a result, a
default frame of the shots gives birth to a multiplicity of images
within frames of different sizes, each frame producing a new smaller
one according to a rhythmical scheme whereby each shot is repeated
four or five times (Figure 3.1). As Eivind Røssaak rightly remarks,
these two films demonstrate that in digital software, “continuity
editing is replaced by a discontinuous and labyrinthine editing
process, and the screen no longer displays one image at a time, but
several.”35 This algorithmic dimension of Biermann’s editing, in
which the image is given in the form of mutable codes that lead to
a variety of juxtapositions and transformations, is deeply rooted in
digital technologies, and cannot be achieved using only celluloid-
based editing and special effects. In a broader sense, however, these
juxtapositions and transformations could not have been conceived
without the two techniques of celluloid-based found footage
filmmaking or the original films’ visual and cultural dimensions,
which are still recognizable in the resulting images of Biermann’s
160 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 3.1 Film still from Gregg Biermann, Labyrinthine (2010),

courtesy Gregg Biermann.

films. These two aspects allow us to consider transitional found

footage practices as technical and aesthetic hybrids of film and
digital video.

Deconstructive compilation: Montage

and special effects in Girardet-Müller
German experimental filmmaker Matthias Müller and video
artist Christoph Girardet, in addition to their solo work, have
collaborated to produce a number of video pieces and installations.
Extracting specific scenes from various feature films, educational
films, and TV commercials, the two practitioners recontextualize
them using montage-style compiling akin to digital sampling and
remixing. This encyclopedic approach demonstrates the aesthetics
of compilation according to Wees’s classification of found footage
films. However, unlike Wees’s characterization of compilation films
as those following “a clear, linear development” of borrowed images
and not questioning their “representational nature,”36 Girardet
and Müller structure their compilation projects according to the
method of collage. They bring into relief the common characters,
motifs, codes, conventions (such as continuity editing, master shot,
eye line match, and graphic match), and emotional effects of their
 Transitional found footage practices 161

appropriated images. In this sense, their method can be described

as “deconstructive compilation” driven by the aesthetic of collage.
This enables the two practitioners’ found footage works to oscillate
between continuity and discontinuity, between the footage’s
fragmentary status and the artists’ conceptual organization. Since
their collaboration, video technologies for viewing and editing have
strengthened this method. These technologies facilitate Girardet
and Müller’s collection, analysis, and rearrangement of their archive
of found images. A range of special effects, including video-based
slow motion and compositing of elements within a single picture
frame, transform the original filmic images into transitory media
objects open to electronic and digital manipulation of surface
and temporality, while at the same time allowing the two artists
to augment their deconstructive approach to the representation of
narrative cinema and television genres as developed in the traditions
of avant-garde found footage films.
The Phoenix Tapes (1999, Figures 3.2 and 3.3), Girardet
and Müller’s first collaborative work, is a six-part compilation
of excerpts from Hitchcock’s forty movies; it reveals a study
of Hitchcock’s recurring themes and “universal language of
gesture that encompasses both cinematic and everyday modes
of communication.”37 While the two artists depend upon their
method of compilation, their undertaking of the psychosexual
meanings implicit in Hitchcock’s body of work aligns with
the deconstructive approach of Arnold and Tscherkassky, who
deploy special effects driven by the optical printer to interrogate
the fears and desires activated or repressed by the mechanics of
Hollywood cinema.38 A notable feature of the work is the relation
of its compilation-based montage to the material and technical
conditions of video technologies under which Girardet and
Müller study Hitchcock’s films. Thus, the films’ images are seen
as ontologically “transitional”: they conceptually maintain the
films’ original components (figures and objects) while also being
subject to video’s electronic flows and technical procedures. As a
result, Hitchcock’s filmic images in the work intersect three levels
of video technologies: video’s material level, which determines the
surface quality of the images from the extracted films; the level of
spectatorship, which structures Girardet and Müller’s study and
archiving of films; and finally, the editing level, which determines
the available montage and special effects.
162 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figures 3.2 and 3.3 Film stills from Christoph Girardet and Matthias
Müller, The Phoenix Tapes (1999), courtesy of the artists.

Considering video’s materiality, Christa Blümlinger notes that

the work’s inferior “visual quality” evokes watching classical films
via a video apparatus: “[Girardet and Müller] opted for their
personal collection and apparently started from VHS material
through which the reference to a zone of experience—television
and video recorder—is equally inscribed as a material alienation
effect.”39 The poor quality of the images, which Blümlinger refers
to as the “alienation effect,” illustrates some of the technical
differences distinguishing a videotaped copy from its original film,
summarized by Charles Shino Tashiro as “insufficient brightness,”
“low resolution,” and the “loss of vivid color.”40 This preservation
of video’s inferiority on the surface of the compiled films links to
 Transitional found footage practices 163

Müller’s approach in his previous Super 8 mm or 16 mm films,

such as Home Stories (1990), for which he filmed Hollywood
melodramas of the 1950s directly from the television set in
order to reassemble them into a collage of their recurring motifs
and clichés. This approach, Müller states, aimed to highlight the
contrast between the cinema as the most influential and supreme
larger-than-life event shaping the memories of its audience in
the twentieth century, and the cinema as it was later shown on
the small screen: “The film [Home Stories] uses shots that were
elaborately produced for the big screen. However, I’m only familiar
with them from television: that is, incredibly shrunken. The shabby
aesthetics of my film, which are far from the original glamour,
are supposed to say something about the path that brought these
images to me.”41 The borrowed films’ alteration, caused by their
passage from celluloid to electronic signal in Home Stories, makes
a double-sided statement regarding their presence among today’s
audiences, including Müller himself. On the one hand, it marks the
extent to which Hollywood cinema’s universal and powerful styles
and narratives entered the archives of film history, and can now
be recovered by the personal act of fascination- and admiration-
charged memory; on the other hand, the deterioration in size and
quality suggests that an encounter between past and present is
premised on the irreducible distance between them. Hollywood
films, essentially a series of codes and conventions (lighting,
acting, gestures, movements, etc.) that make their protagonists
beautiful and memorable, become at once the remnants of film
history—forced into profanation, obscurity, and oblivion—and
the ambiguous objects of desire that are no longer attainable in the
electronic and digital era. In this sense, the alienation effect of the
video-based inferiorities of Hitchcock films in The Phoenix Tapes
presents Hitchcock’s remarkable objects, techniques, and effects
as simultaneously forgotten and remembered: video technologies
deprive them of some material qualities that only celluloid-based
cinematic viewing can maintain, but also encourage appreciation of
their vitality and complexity.
The reciprocation of remembering and demystification extends
into the level of video spectatorship that laid the groundwork for
Girardet-Müller’s work with Hitchcock’s films. While the visual
inferiorities outlined above mark the VCR as an unsatisfactory
medium for reproducing a celluloid image, Tashiro states that its
164 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

other functions, such as freezing and playback, pave the way for
“a connoisseurship of form that theatrical viewing discourages.”42
Anne Friedberg, too, notes that the VCR’s time-shifting functions
treat films “as objects of knowledge to be explored, investigated,
deconstructed as if they were events of the past to be studied.”43
More recently, Caetlin Benson-Allott argues that VCR-based
spectatorship, marked by the viewer’s physical and affective labor
of controlling the tape, has a “unique relationship to fetishism” that
cannot be grasped by such “apparatus” theorists as Christian Metz,
who presupposes the theatrical condition as the all-encompassing
grounds for theorization of the viewer’s identification with the
film image.44 Similarly, Laura Mulvey sees the DVD’s capabilities
of halting, reversing, and delaying cinematic time as resurrecting
the viewer’s fetishistic control of the film image.45 All arguments
concerning video’s post-filmic spectatorship echo Girardet and
Müller’s procedures of compiling and editing for The Phoenix
Tapes. Their study of Hitchcock’s films, which must have involved
freezing, playback, and extraction,46 is reflected in their wide-ranging
collection of scenes—whether established shots (“Rutland”), close-
ups (“Burden of Proof”), or private moments (“Bedroom”), as well
as in their cumulative, repetitive patterning by which they match
scenes thematically, graphically, and kinesthetically. The two artists’
montage method, too, takes on the two aspects of the fetish as
defined by Metz and Mulvey: the extraction of shots (to use the
psychoanalytical term, “partial objects”) from a complete body,
based on the operation of “isolation”; and the representation of a
whole by its parts. These aspects of the fetish have a double-sided
effect on perception of the fragments of Hitchcock’s films. While
presenting themselves as key memorable moments, indicative of
Hitchcock’s well-known aesthetics and affective powers, they are
decontextualized so deeply that the viewer is not entirely able to
keep up with what films they come from. In this regard, the two
artists’ collage is not so much intended as a chronological ordering
of shots, which would concede Hitchcock’s canonical status;
rather, the shots are treated as images that persist, and thus are
occasionally replayed, in the memory of individual or collective
viewers as “fragmentary carriers of emotion that flow into new
constellations.”47
Derailed (Figure 3.3), the third episode of The Phoenix Tapes,
illustrates a deliberate combination of video-based special effects
 Transitional found footage practices 165

and the deconstructive compilation of Hitchcock’s disparate

fragments. It juxtaposes a brief scene from Spellbound (1945), in
which Gregory Peck is shown sleeping, with a variety of nightmarish
leitmotifs, among which the train is most central. The viewer is placed
in a dreamlike position by patterns of collage more complex than
sequential rearrangement of shots similar in thematic and graphic
elements. This is amplified by the “jerking effect” of the shot of
Peck sleeping, which makes his neck move forward and backward
continuously during a short period of time. Using this video-based
pulsation as a fulcrum, the section interweaves several shots of the
running train with a number of scenes that elicit hallucination (a
kaleidoscopic superimposition of two women who see someone off
at the station platform), anxiety and paranoia (shots of a group
of people glaring at a protagonist, who remains unidentified), and
terror (several female characters who faint, and male characters who
fall off a cliff [North by Northwest (1959)] or building [Vertigo]).
While keeping the black-and-white scenes intact, Girardet and
Müller remove colors from some colorized scenes to “generate a
condensed, homogenous impression of the merciless mechanism of
a monstrous dream machine.”48 This de-colorization effect serves to
decontextualize all the shots so deeply that they trigger the viewer’s
mnemonic play with Hitchcock’s original films. At the same time,
their common partial characteristics (the gaze without an object,
or characters falling with no visible cause), attenuated by the two
artists’ repetitive, cumulative editing, render the whole section a
mixture of the familiar and the overlooked, of the memorable and
the banal. Seen in this light, the replay of Peck sleeping alludes to
the mechanism of video spectatorship in which shots of a single
film or of different films are extracted, fragmented, and redeployed
while granted specific values or meanings.
Girardet-Müller’s Kristall (2006, Figures 3.4 and 3.5) compiles
bedroom scenes in which men and women see themselves or each
other through a mirror; these scenes are drawn from a variety of
films—mostly Hollywood melodrama, horror, and film noir, with
the occasional European art cinema classic—from 1931 to 1987.
The scenes incorporate Girardet and Müller’s research on the
mirror’s roles in shaping the narrative of the overall films. More
than simply complicating mise-en-scène, the mirror displays wide-
ranging affective registers such as intimacy, pensiveness, anxiety, fear,
and other ambiguous emotional states. The filmmakers carefully
166 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figures 3.4 and 3.5 Film stills from Girardet and Müller, Kristall (2006),
courtesy of the artists.

put the bedroom scenes together according to the criteria of their

formal and compositional elements, such as the figures’ directions
of gaze, poses, gestures, costumes, hair, and so forth. All those
elements commonly serve to imbue the scenes with the fantasies
of bourgeois families or couples, marked by narcissistic pleasures,
mutual intimacy, and luxurious lifestyles. In their extraction and
rearrangement of the scenes, the filmmakers aim primarily to reveal
the fragility of those fantasies. The faces of the women, each of
whom is waiting for her partner, are clouded by suspicion, emptiness,
loneliness, and boredom. At the same time, the male characters’
scenes steadily accumulate moments of narcissism, obsession, and
frustration. Additionally, along with these single-person shots, the
work aims to disintegrate the fantasy of heterosexual romance. Its
climax begins with the first series, thirty shots of women adjusting
 TRANSITIONAL FOUND FOOTAGE PRACTICES 167

their makeup or getting their hair done; they are followed by the
second series, of forty-three shots with a quick rhythm of women
turning away from the mirror as though their attention has been
captured by something unexpected. After a few shots of men
reflecting pensively on themselves in the mirror, the third series of
five shots present the men behind the women. Here, each is viewed
through the mirror in his partner’s bedroom as he enters. The final
series, a dozen shattered mirrors punched in anger by the men or the
women, signify the violent breakup of their mutual relationships.
Girardet and Müller utilize analogue-based special effects to create
cracks in the borrowed shots of mirrors: they projected the shots
onto pieces of broken mirrors and then re-filmed them. As a result,
the characters’ faces in the shots are so deliberately fragmented that
they look as though distorted and assembled with digital compositing
(Figures 3.4 and 3.5). This distortion deliberately deconstructs
the spatial integrity of a single shot, while also imbuing the faces
with dreamy or hallucinatory overtones. In this way, Girardet and
Müller’s use of special effects suits what Wees calls “deconstruction
with reconstruction,”49 a dialectical strategy that avant-garde
found footage filmmakers use to call upon the viewer to recognize
their ambivalent attitude toward mainstream cinema. In Kristall,
stars from the Hollywood and European film industries, including
Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Jeanne Moreau, Kirk Douglas,
Marcello Mastroianni, and Anthony Perkins, are portrayed in
multiple frames shaped by mirrors and windows, decorated with
soft-focus cinematography that endows them with an atmosphere
of eternity and transcendence. When accumulated, they look so
amorous and elusive as to live permanently in the fictional world
created by the language of mainstream cinema. But this glamour
and allure proves to be a fragile, stereotyped construct of the film
industry, as special effects violate the appearance of the stars so
radically as to denaturalize the whole in-frame space surrounding
each of them. Viewed together, the two characteristics confer upon
those stars the “ambiguous aura” as a “perpetual reminder that
their images have lives of their own, which anyone with the means
to reproduce them can manipulate at will.”50
In her take on Kristall, Russell pays attention to the suspension
of action characterized by the “empty, waiting, mirrored image,”
arguing that the moment of fragmentation in its climax brings the
viewer back to the dimension of “gesture” as that which exhibits, to
168 BETWEEN FILM, VIDEO, AND THE DIGITAL

use Giorgio Agamben’s words, the “pure mediality” of the human

being: a fundamental form of human life before human action is
codified to serve particular ends.51 Russell’s argument, albeit largely
agreeable, would be more compelling if she pointed out that this
revelation of “pure mediality” could not be fully achieved without
special effects. The gestural dimension of the stars’ bodies is
made visible not simply by excavation and reassessment of their
images, but by undoing the images that subject the bodies to the
determination of clichés and formulas themselves. To be sure, digital
compositing in Kristall exerts the second kind of deconstruction by
breaking down the aura of the stars. But this destruction is premised
upon another destruction of aura—the aura of the filmic image. The
destabilization of the surface—that is, the distorted multilayering
of the same single frame—testifies to the assimilation of the filmic
image into video’s fluidity and pictoriality on a material basis,
without eliminating the image’s cinematic richness of meaning. In
this regard, abstraction of the stars’ “pure mediality” in Kristall
hinges upon the intermedial exchange between cinema and video,
namely, upon the transformation of cinema into an image object
accessible to manipulation by post-filmic technologies.

Transitional found footage practices

as dialectical and archival
The concepts of Walter Benjamin pervade the critical discourse
on found footage film. First, his notion of allegory implies
understanding cultural objects of the past as discarded, forgotten,
fragmented, and deteriorated.52 In this sense, Jeffrey Skoller
compares some key found footage filmmakers (Jacobs, Gehr,
etc.) to “brooders and cine-ragpickers,” declaring that their
engagement with lost cinematic objects from the early twentieth
century sets up “new possibilities for a re-membering of the past in
the present.”53 Similarly, Russell conceives of found footage films
as producing a “counternarrative of the memory trace” insofar
as their appropriated material “belongs to a contingent order of
time,”54 one that resists the assumption of history as progressive
and coherent. This idea of found footage filmmaking as allegorical
is also linked to Benjamin’s concept of the “dialectical image,” a
 Transitional found footage practices 169

specific image of the past that attains “legibility only at a particular

time”55 in the present. Indeed, it is the concept of the dialectical
image that legitimizes a great variety of found footage films in the
Benjaminian sense. By defining fragments of the past as constantly
marked by the present, Benjamin likens the dialectical image to
a broader methodology of historiography as antithetical to the
notion of history as the progression of linear time: “The destructive
or critical momentum of materialist historiography is registered
in that blasting of historical continuity with which the historical
object first constitutes itself.”56 Seen from this perspective, found
footage filmmaking is a means to access “history in the form of
an unordered archive populated by historical subjects that pressure
representation ‘from below,’”57 or the practice of “re-writing
history in order to gain a fresh perspective on both the past and the
current situation.”58
Benjamin’s demand for “materialist historiography,” as well as his
assumption that it appropriates fragments of the past “in a moment
of danger,”59 has resurfaced in some recent critical reevaluations
of found footage filmmaking. This sort of discourse presupposes
a binary opposition between the materiality of celluloid and the
immateriality of electronic and digital media, asserting the need to
reclaim the former, as the “past,” against the threatening impact
of the latter, as the “present.” Curator Jane Connarty, for instance,
explicitly underlines “a heightened awareness of the medium and
a fascination with its material qualities” 60 as a key motivation in
found footage practices. Lucy Reynolds, too, supports Connarty’s
argument in her consideration of the innovative ways in which a
number of paradigmatic experimental filmmakers (Bruce Conner,
Jacobs, Tscherkassky, and Child, to name just a few) have interpreted
the film frame as an archival document: “Found footage film is
the most extreme and visceral manifestation of cinema’s essential
material nature; its fragments not only reasserting cinema’s primal
celluloid state but also revealing the fault-lines beneath its seductive
surfaces, through which a multitude of histories seep.”61 Gerda
Cammaer claims that found footage filmmaking is a desirable
starting point for redefining cinema as a medium against the
“accelerating pace of digital film convergence” that renders all
distinctions between film and video arbitrary: “Found footage films
expose and explore the very same physical qualities of analogue
film that pushed the industry to seek digital ‘perfection’ in the first
170 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

place, and they celebrate all the perceptual pleasures that only
analogue film can offer.”62
I do not deny that the “materialist” arguments above are compel­
ling as an explanation of the historical and ontological underpinnings
of found footage films based on the material and technical attributes
of celluloid-based cinema in terms of Benjaminian concepts. The
underlying binarism of those materialist voices should be noted,
however, which runs the risk of obscuring the dialectical aspects
of the found footage practices derived from the intersection of film
and the new technologies. That is, Benjamin’s dialectical method
of constructing an alternative historiography, and his awareness of
past objects as allegorical, can also be explored in transitional found
footage practices inasmuch as they are seen to respond to the critical
situation of traditional celluloid-based cinema being increasingly
thwarted by the overriding power of new digital technologies. This
situation deeply echoes Benjamin’s own dialectical thought on the
impacts of new technologies on human sensorium and the ways in
which the artwork or material of the past is perceived. It is important
to emphasize that Benjamin understands the present not simply as a
moment of crisis but as the “now of a particular recognizability.”63
Throughout The Arcades Project, as well as his other studies on
the mid-nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin demonstrates that
an array of technological changes—for instance, the invention of
photography, panorama, and film—restructured the ways in which
humans could unpack and grasp traditions, cultures, and objects of
the past: “The perceptual worlds break up more rapidly; what they
contain of the mythic comes more quickly and more brutally to the
fore. . . . This is how the accelerated tempo of technology appears in
light of the primal history of the present—awakening.”64 From this
perspective, new technology threatens to destroy an old regime of
human perception, while also sparking a renewed awareness of the
“primal history” that might otherwise remain hidden by the logic
of historical progress. Benjamin’s dialectical view on technology is
also maintained in his famous thesis of the “destruction of aura.”
Technological development of artistic production and reproduction,
including the invention of photography and film, collapses a
spatiotemporal distance that once endowed works of art with an
atmosphere of uniqueness and inapproachability; this “destruction
of aura” brings about both a new form of art and a structural
change in the way that all previous artworks are perceived.65 In this
 Transitional found footage practices 171

sense, Benjamin’s underlying idea of the “loss of aura” anticipates

the dialectical aspect of cinema’s post-media conditions—namely,
electronic and digital technologies do not merely destroy the
celluloid-based properties of the cinematic past, but also present
potentials for a renewed perception of the past in the present—as it
counters the teleological voices declaring the “death” of cinema, as
well as their underlying binary view of celluloid and digital.
Given Benjamin’s dialectical view on the impact of new technology
on preexisting art forms and objects, transitional found footage
practice can be seen as a particular mode of filmmaking that emerges
in the moment of the “destruction of aura,” and thus founds itself on
the technological, aesthetic, and ontological conditions of the “now
of recognizability.” These practices testify to the destabilization of
film on all levels—that is, film’s post-media conditions—inasmuch
as their images take on the quality of film copies. As discussed in the
case of Girardet and Müller, the transition of a film from celluloid
to electronic signal or digital pixel, occurring in conjunction with
the development of playback technologies from the VHS to the
DVD, undoubtedly matches the concept of “destruction of aura,”
since it eliminates components of film such as screen size, aspect
ratio, vividness of color, chemical texture, and so on. For this reason,
transitional found footage practices bear witness to the fact that
cinema as a celluloid medium is inevitably superseded by rapid,
dramatic improvements in electronic and digital technologies, which
tend to obliterate the material specificity of any medium. But this
auratic demise, too, provides multiple opportunities for revitalizing
cinema with respect to the displacement of the filmic image from
its traditional material and experiential conditions (celluloid,
mechanical projector, theatrical viewing, etc.; i.e., all that guarantee
the uniqueness of the filmic image as defined by the photochemical
inscription of the real in the past, as well as that of the filmic
experience, in which the viewer sees the moving image of the world
in the past projected on the screen).
In one of her recent writings, Russell ponders how the development
of digital reproduction technologies contributes to the Benjaminian
“awakening” of film history: “New media has not reinvented cinema
as an auratic object but as a complex and multifaceted form of
experience. . . . We may finally come to understand its significance
to our own ongoing historical catastrophe.”66 This argument
is applied not simply to the viewing experience dimension, as
172 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Russell envisions, but to that of production and creativity as well.

Sven Lütticken claims that viewing copies of a film or an artwork,
produced by virtue of new reproduction technologies, provide a
great capacity for transforming it—re-editing it or slowing it down—
not simply for viewers but also for today’s practitioners. Lütticken
sees those practitioners primarily as video installation artists, who
celebrate “the power of images to survive (and indeed thrive on)
decontextualization and degradation,”67 but his observation can be
applied widely to include transitional found footage filmmakers, who
aspire to extend their celluloid-based techniques of recombining and
reconfiguring filmic images and to seek a renewed investigation of
their forms and meanings. As I have discussed, Girardet and Müller
transpose the technical, aesthetic, and instrumental ideas developed
in their celluloid-based filmmaking to all levels of electronic and
digital technologies, from their material substrate to their operational
interface. Considering Russell’s and Lütticken’s perspectives, I argue
that transitional found footage practices are as “dialectical” in
Benjamin’s sense as purely celluloid-based found footage filmmaking.
Despite their respective differences in the emphasis of Benjaminian
concepts—the latter’s “materialist” undertaking versus the former’s
foregrounding of the “now of recognizability”—both practices are
concerned with holding, to borrow Skoller’s words once again, “the
opportunity of creating counterhistories, not only of the cinematic
canon but also of revisionist cultural histories using the accumulation
of artifacts from the mass culture of the twentieth century.”68
Which dialectical aspect of transitional found footage practices,
then, contributes to the “counterhistories” of cinema? Or, from the
viewer’s standpoint, how can the dialectical aspect of the images in
the original film be seen in the works derived from those practices?
In her recent work on found footage filmmaking, Jaimie Baron
coins the term “archive effect” to underline that the meaning and
definition of the archival footage in found footage filmmaking
should be seen less as a stable object than in terms of the viewer’s
experience: the effect of recognizing various documents as coming
from a distant past. The archive effect is thus the product of
“temporal disparity” between the documents’ past and the viewers’
present, “the perception by the viewer of an appropriation film or a
‘then’ and a ‘now’ generated within a single text.” 69 From Baron’s
perspective, digital technologies are capable of producing the
archive effect by strengthening temporal disparity. They destabilize
 Transitional found footage practices 173

the form of the original film in the past and the viewer’s experience
of the film: “Digital technologies make the difference between the
cinematic original and the digital ‘replica’ much greater: or, to put
it differently, the digital inscribes itself into the history of the film
image as that image is converted into code.”70
The amplified difference between the original film and its digitally
transformed image undoubtedly suits the viewer’s understanding of
transitional footage practices as dialectical: some components of the
original film are still recognizable, but others (its material and technical
components) are lost or transformed. The practitioners of transitional
found footage practices, then, do not consider the latter a simple
loss: rather, I argue that they exploit digital technologies’ capacity to
amplify temporal disparity between the original and its copy, or to
widen the difference between them, to extend their celluloid-based
techniques of reworking and investigating the cinematic past into its
post-media conditions, and thereby to construct its counterhistories.
The digital found footage films of R. Bruce Elder and Ken Jacobs
emblematize these three intentions most vividly.

R. Bruce Elder: The ruin of images

between chemical and digital
transformations
Since the 2000s, Elder has made a series of found footage works in
which film and digital video are thrown into a dynamic circuit of
intersections—not just an interpenetration between each medium’s
material properties, but also a combination of the two media’s
technical processes: film’s chemical-mechanical process and a
process derived from the pictoriality and transformativity of digital
video. For Elder, the algorithmic automation of the computer-
based image processing does not obliterate two key aspects of
experimental filmmaking: the filmmaker’s direct contact with film,
grounded in his creative intent and technical virtuosity; and the
medium’s chemical change of state marked by its surface qualities
(colors, tints, grains, glitches, emulsion, and even damages). Rather,
he revamps his material and technical concepts of celluloid-based
practice by incorporating them into image processing and database
methods given by the computer. To this end, he devised his own
174 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

computer program that could operate a database containing a set

of reference images classified according to a number of criteria
(form, texture, figure, etc.), as well as information about various
methods of image processing appropriate to those images. The
program’s applications then “choose which image processing
methods to apply to the images by measuring the similarity between
the target images (the images to be processed) and the reference
images—target images that closely resembled the reference images
were treated with processing methods.”71 In this way, he succeeds
in making analogue and digital technologies coexist, in such a way
that one does not negate but affects the other.
A found footage film grounded in extremely sophisticated
montage, Crack, Brutal Grief (2001, Figures 3.6 and 3.7) pushes the

Figures 3.6 and 3.7 Film stills from R. Bruce Elder, Crack, Brutal Grief
(2001), courtesy R. Bruce Elder.
 Transitional found footage practices 175

viewer into a complex barrage of the scenes of violence culled from

still images and audiovisual clips found on the World Wide Web—
the imagery existing as digital data. Angered by the banalization of
suffering provoked and diffused by the culture of the internet, Elder
navigated through the Web for searching the data that matched
such keywords as “suicide” and “power saw,”72 and amassed a wide
variety of abject images, including hardcore pornography footage
since the birth of cinema, pictures of torture, bodily mutilation,
and deformed babies, screaming figures coming out of B-horror
movies (Figure 3.6), images of war such as fighter-bombers,
explosions, ruins, and the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb,
etc. Encompassing sensational early cinema, documentary footage
from the First and the Second World War (mostly from German
newsreels), and the detritus of the postwar American media culture
(the fragments of science fiction films, television news, and pop
videos), the image data are processed with the computer first, then
transferred to film, and made to undergo manual and chemical
processes. Those overabundant images neither are organized into
a coherent narrative of the history of violence nor document the
political and cultural forces that motivate the historical events
inscribed in them. Rather, they are viewed as allegorical in
Benjamin’s sense, in that they take on the extremely fragmentary,
fleeting form that reveals the debris of the human civilization in
the twentieth century—while maintaining ambiguity. In this sense,
Crack, Brutal Grief also recalls the films of Baldwin (Tribulation
99: Alien Anomalies under America [1991] and Spectres of the
Spectrum [1999]) and Grimonprez (Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y [1998])
in a few ways: the images’ source is assumed as the garbage
bins of the popular culture; the film privileges the iconic and
metaphoric power of the images over the historical factuality of
the record; and finally, Crack, Brutal Grief updates Baldwin’s and
Grimonprez’s critique of the arbitrary manner in which televisual
media appropriate, link, and discard the records of the past, by
taking as its subject and its starting point of montage the internet’s
accelerated and disastrous system of circulating information.
Through the combination of optical printing and video-based
effects, Elder transforms a multiplicity of human figures into
something like liquid entities, depriving them of their solidity,
stability, and even beauty. Those figures come from both lesser-
known sources (for instance, an acrobat in a vaudeville-like
176 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

primitive film, naked dancers, a training boxer, screaming people

at the attack of a monster in a science fiction film of the 1950s,
torturers who abuse a female victim in an exploitation movie,
etc.) and familiar scenes drawn from classical films (such as the
climactic conflict between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in What
Ever Happened to Baby Jane [1962] and the murder scene of Janet
Leigh in Psycho). Along with the film’s fragmentary, disjointed
trope of montage, the total meltdown, which surfaces the screen
with blurs, blotches, and dissolves, renders all the images extremely
dense and degraded while also forcing their ironic details to be
hardly discernable. In this way, Elder channels the viewer not
simply into the moments of terror, fear, death, and loss which
return from the forgotten past ceaselessly, but into a correlation
of film and video in the material dimension of the images. The
continuous fluidity and pixilation of video signal merges with film’s
emulsion effects in such a way as to intensify its inherent process
of decomposition (Figure 3.7). For this reason, the image’s visual
texture in some sense evokes film’s physical and chemical factors
that determine its decay, such as faded colors, washed-out tints,
blots, stains, flickers, and dusts, all that lead film archivist Paolo
Cherchi Usai to proclaim that “cinema is the art of destroying
moving images.”73 For Usai, it is film’s material mortality—that
film cannot prevent both destruction from external causes and its
internal degradation—that makes the ontology and historicity of
cinema possible. For if there is an image that is immune to decay,
it “can have no history.”74 All the elements shaping the materiality
of celluloid demonstrate that each film possesses an individual life
span, or an organic life from birth—from the moment it is first
printed and projected—to death.
Due to its foregrounding of decomposition on the material level
of the images, Crack, Brutal Grief is in parallel to a series of recent
found footage films that dramatize Usai’s idea of “the death of
film,” films made of the gradual disintegration of celluloid by virtue
of the excavation of the archive and the use of the optical printer:
for instance, Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) and several films
by Bill Morrison, such as The Film of Her (1997), Decasia: The
State of Decay (2002), and Light is Calling (2003). André Habib
classifies those films in terms of Benjaminian “aesthetics of ruin,”
which is made up of the “impression of a rediscovered aura at the
intersection of its disappearance.”75 For Habib, what the aesthetics
 Transitional found footage practices 177

of ruin invokes to the viewer is a multiplicity of temporalities at

work: “To the first layers of historical time (the profilmic time, the
time of the image’s construction, the time of the image’s projection)
has been added another time: time’s passage. This time, eroding the
film material, does away with the interval between the (man-made)
filming process and the (natural) chemical process that subverts
and transforms the initial imprint.”76 Habib’s insight can easily tap
into Elder’s “aesthetics of ruin,” insofar as his images suggest the
material traces of decay as the reminder of the process from their
initial inscription on celluloid to its inevitable deterioration.
But what makes Elder distinct from Delpeut and Morrison
in terms of the “aesthetics of ruin” is the complexity of the
temporalities that operate in the images of decay. Given that the
images of disaster and violence circulate in the form of digital files,
they may maintain the “profilmic time” as a layer of “historical
time” but lack the “time’s passage” that only the celluloid’s material
mortality is expected to contain. Then Elder brings the images
dispersed throughout the dataspace to their possible origins, origins
that had been stripped of the images since they were placed into
digital formats, by transferring them to film and subjecting their
figural changes to its chemical life and death. It is only by allowing
for the chemical decomposition that the reflection on and the
redemption of those forgotten or wasted images are fulfilled. Here
the fluid transformation and pixilation of digital video functions to
generate two senses of degradedness simultaneously: it pushes the
images into the ruin of the celluloid while at the same time rendering
them to be images that lost their original visual abundance in the
course of their countless circulation, compression, ripping, and
repurposing in the digital realm. Elder’s achievement, then, is to
attest to the exploitative operation of capitalist media assembly and
thereby to appropriate its images in such a manner as to disrupt
it. Then the images become what digital materialism strives to
produce and manifest, glitch that serves as a “persistent reminder
that the perfection-oriented goal and desires of mainstream media
are all too easily fucked up.”77 It is in this way that Elder succeeds
in making the materiality of digitized images reveal their own time
and simultaneously amplify the materiality and time of celluloid
that their original source suggests.
The Young Prince (2007, Figures 3.8 and 3.9) provides a
complicated interpenetration of life and death, of Eros and
178 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figures 3.8 and 3.9 Film stills from Elder, The Young Prince (2007),
courtesy R. Bruce Elder.

Thanatos. This time, Elder elaborates on his amalgamation

of film and digital video by simultaneously utilizing two sorts
of transformations: “electrical transformations” produced by
the latter and “chemical transformations” brought about by
the manual and mechanical processing of the former. All the
transformations take place in the images of bodily postures and
movements, varying from the sacred to the profane, from Greek
and Roman statues as consummations of the idea of human beauty
to grotesque portrayals of human bodies in Cubist and Fauvist
painting, and from Muybridge’s chronophotography to still and
moving pictures of eroticism drawn from vintage pornography
 Transitional found footage practices 179

and pinup pictures. In this sense, Elder follows what Arthur

has called the “the conceit of film apparatus as human body,” a
tendency of North American avant-garde film to mobilize sensory
impressions through an artisanal endeavor to foreground and
transform film material.78 At the same time, those transformations,
in tandem with the arbitrary and fragmentary trope of montage,
present the erotic, sensual images as Benjaminian allegories of the
human being’s beauty that discloses itself only through a process
of breaking their corporeal boundaries.
Elder’s “chemical transformation” embodies the idea of
materialism as it is concerned with the pornographic film
footage as the ruin of film (Figure 3.8). The footage allegorizes
the representation of sexuality that lost its erotic weight, and,
more significantly, the impending disappearance of film medium
that has been alerted by the growing decay of celluloid. Yet Elder
confirms this historicity not by redeeming the pornographic
footage as it was, but by subjugating it to the various processes of
disintegration. Not only are the bodily fragments decolorized (the
evidence of chromatic decay), but they are also covered with the
densely granular patterns and scratches. These effects of emulsion
recall the passage of time, and Elder’s attachment to the film’s
material texture validates his love of the disappearing image as,
in the words of Laura U. Marks, “finding a way to allow the
figure to past while embracing the tracks of its presence, in the
physical fragility of the medium.”79 Elder, however, appears not
to be satisfied with resting on melancholia that Marks assumes as
a dominant mode of the filmmaker’s emotional engagement with
the dissolution of film: for the fragments of the pornographic
footage run past the viewer’s eye so quickly that he is immediately
taken to the onslaught of other complex transformations, both
chemical and electronic-digital. The melancholic attachment is
replaced by the sense of ephemerality, which substantiates the
status of the footage as a lost object and at the same time helps
the viewer to separate himself from the loss. Thus, unlike the
cases of the films (Lyrical Nitrate, Decasia, Light is Calling)
that historicized cinema through directly exhibiting the fatal
destruction of celluloid, Elder’s melancholic recycling of the
decaying image is dialectically balanced by mourning as a
psychical gesture to embrace its disappearance and invest himself
in new chains of found images.80 The dialectics of these two
180 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

psychic states is inseparable from the collision between the two

transformations, as Elder states:

Some of the transformations leave the image in a state close

to the original; some change it so radically that the image is
an image which cannot be discerned. Our response to this
is curious: sometimes we long to hold onto what the image
represents, and when it is lost, when it recedes behind those
transformations, we are sad; but equally, we long to hold onto
the abstract forms that the transformations produce, and when
the representation comes to the fore, we mourn the loss of the
abstraction.81

The dialectics of “loss” and “mourning” is in parallel to the

way in which the “electrical transformation” and the “chemical
transformation” interpenetrate each other. While complicating
its own figural changes, each transformation goes beyond its
material limit by pervading the other. The changing patterns of
film’s decomposition such as blotches and fibrillations spill over
the digital visual field, making its texture more dynamic and
opaque. At the same time, Elder’s “digital transformations” have
a sweeping impact on any kinds of the found images, whether
painterly, photographic, or filmic, to the extent that their figures
are left to the varying degrees of dissolution and morphogenesis
both formally and materially. The video signal’s extreme plasticity
is manifested when male and female bodies are almost reduced
to the shimmering and flickering wave of electrons, on which
different colors are conferred (Figure 3.9). It obliterates some key
constituents of optical visuality, such as the depth of field and
the boundaries between figure and ground, with such extreme
complexity and subtlety that the viewer is forced to pay attention
to the surface of those bodies. In this respect, Elder capitalizes on
what Marks has identified as video’s medium-specific characteristics
that transform the image’s surface and its texture into the field of
multisensory visuality (in her own words, “haptic visuality”), such
as “the constitution of the image from a signal, video’s low contrast
ratio, the possibilities of electronic and digital manipulation, and
video decay.”82 Besides this visuality of video, digital visual effects
multiply each of the bodies (particularly female bodies) or slice
it into different sections, while also liquefying the bodies. These
 Transitional found footage practices 181

manipulations bestow on the bodies new forms (curves and cubes,

for instance) and dimensions, therefore suggesting that the beauty
of the figures consents to the infinite possibilities for the violent
corruption of their iconic forms and for the reconfiguration of
them into the corporeal forms that exceed and renew the viewer’s
perception. It is in this way that Elder’s project of The Young
Prince echoes Benjaminian dialectics of the “destruction of aura.”
Unleashing its transformative force, the digital assault activates the
sensational forces of the old figures, ranging from the Greek era
to the modern period in which both nonfigurative paintings and
cinema flourished, through infusing into them its own material
dynamism. This is also grounded in Elder’s idea of what cinema is:
“The cinema has the ability to show process . . . by emphasizing
speed which liquefies, by stressing dynamism’s ability to dissolve
boundaries and lay form to ruin, by animating light’s searing
destructive power . . . which is the domain of mutability, instability,
and ambiguity.”83
Due to the chemical transformation’s dialectical relation to its
electrical and digital counterparts, The Young Prince is in line with
the films of Delpeut and Morrison and yet, more significantly, is
distinct from them. Like Delpeut and Morrison, Elder dramatizes
how the deterioration and fragmentation of film’s chemical base
bears witness to its historical trajectory, from as a new audiovisual
technology at its inception to its status as an obsolete medium
as of now. In this sense, his film mirrors what Mary Ann Doane
has praised Morrison’s Decasia for: “What is indexed here is the
historicity of a medium, a history inextricable from the materiality
of its base. In the face of the digital, the image is rematerialized in its
vulnerability to destruction.”84 At the same time, The Young Prince
radicalizes Morrison’s achievement by considering digital video as
material as much as filmstrip, and by opening up the dialectical
interpenetration between the two. For this intermedial exchange
challenges digital media’s “fantasy of immateriality,”85 the utopian
fantasy that Doane’s insight sees as annihilating the material
historicity of celluloid. Instead of satisfying the demand for the
perfect storage of the found images and for the systematic ordering
of them, Elder’s hybrid materialism propels the viewer’s embodied
contact with the heterogeneous temporalities of the images through
revealing and transforming their material textures. In so doing,
it encourages the viewer to make new associations between the
182 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

images as a way of transcending their historical origins and thereby

rewriting the memory of the past in the alternative fashion of the
“archival impulse.”

Film frames’ infinite lives in the digital

realm: Ken Jacobs’s recent digital videos
Jacobs became widely known as a key practitioner of “recycled
cinema, a tradition of using earlier films as the raw material for new
works of film art”86 after his landmark found footage film Tom,
Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969, hereafter abbreviated Tom, Tom), which
reworks a 1905 silent comedy of the same name by G. W. “Billy”
Bitzer (hereafter referred to as Bitzer’s Tom, Tom). Since 1999,
Jacobs has produced more than twenty short and feature-length
pieces grounded in the intermedial relation of digital video software
and the avant-garde filmmaking method, resulting in the technical
and aesthetic hybridities of their images. These two characteristics
of Jacobs’s digital films are inseparable from the two idiosyncratic
aspects of his prior cinematic practices in the history of found
footage filmmaking. First, in his projection performances since the
late 1960s, Jacobs uses two analytical 16-mm projectors to generate
a wide variety of stereoscopic three-dimensional effects from various
two-dimensional media images—a series of still pictures or a
segment of 16-mm film reels. He also constantly associates film with
Hans Hofmann’s tradition of Cubist and Abstract Impressionist
painting, concerned with rendering movements and rhythms
two-dimensionally. Jacobs’s films and performances accordingly
have been influenced by Hofmann’s theory of “push and pull,” a
technique that creates optical effects producing “tensions” between
contrasting elements (color contrasts, lines, and geometrical shapes
with different orientations, etc.) to render a sensation of motion
and depth “without destroying other forces functioning two-
dimensionally.”87
Some recent studies have examined the cross-disciplinary
aspects of Jacobs’s cinema. Røssaak sees the co-presence of
different arts and media in Tom, Tom as a “complex intermedia
phenomenon where what is usually called a film or cinema
renegotiates its relationship to other more or less closely-related
 Transitional found footage practices 183

systems of representation.”88 Additionally, in his research on the

trajectory of Jacobs’s “Nervous System” performances with regard
to the influences of shadow play and modernist painting, Jonathan
Walley characterizes the practices as “paracinematic”—they seek
the essence of cinema outside the standardized concept of the
cinematic apparatus, in ways not relegated to the modernist notion
of seeking film’s medium specificity in the materiality of celluloid,
a dominant tenet of avant-garde film in the 1960s and 1970s.89
Jacobs’s embrace of digital video for reworking existing films
(and sometimes still photographic images) relates considerably
to his intermedial translation of one art to another—for instance,
from painting to cinema, or from projection performance to single-
channel moving image. This intermedial transition results in the
hybrid aesthetic of the moving images in Jacobs’s digital pieces.
I demonstrate in the following examples that the hybrid moving
images in Jacobs’s works spring from the dialogue between his
extension of the technical approaches to the digital editing that he
developed for Tom, Tom and his Nervous System performances,
and new aesthetic features afforded by digital video; and that
this dialogue attests to the same dialectical-archival aspect of
transitional found footage practices seen in Elder’s digital films.
In his feature-length revisits to Bitzer’s Tom, Tom, namely,
Return to the Scene of the Crime (2008) and Anaglyph Tom (Tom
with the Puffy Cheeks) (2008), Jacobs uses computer software to
extend his deconstructive and analytical approaches. Techniques
such as single-frame advance, extreme close-up, slowing down,
and freeze-frame, which he applied to Tom, Tom, are deployed
to unearth photographic qualities embedded in the filmstrip of
Bitzer’s movie. The first quality, revealed by single-frame advance
and slowing down, is the constitution of the filmstrip as a total
sum of individual photograms, suggesting that the birth of cinema
harks back to Muybridge’s segmentation of objects in continuous
motion into a sequence of discrete units instantaneously captured at
a regular given interval.90 The second quality, revealed by extreme
close-up, is the inscription of details in the filmstrip—for instance,
the surface of painted backdrops, the little boy’s crotch and pants,
the gesture of the female acrobat, the hand of the man who picks
pockets, and so on. Given that they were filmed without the form
of editing that could articulate which were more significant, these
details exist as pure excess within the picture frame. In this sense, they
184 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

emblematize the temporal indeterminacy of images in early cinema,

its fascination with contingency, which Doane has conceptualized
as “a vast reservoir of freedom and free play, irreducible to the
systematic structuring” of the rationalized representation of time
in modernity.91 Jacobs presents the two photographic qualities by
channeling digital video’s signal-based and pixel-based temporal
manipulation into the frame-based decomposition and delay of
cinematic movement. Rather than relying on fluid transition of the
figures in the picture frame, Jacobs continuously introduces wide-
ranging interruptions into the succession of frames in Bitzer’s film,
including the highly decelerated chase sequence (less than ten frames
per second) accompanying intermittent freeze-frames in Anaglyph
Tom. In so doing, he uses the dilation of the electronic signal to
increase the intervals between two successive frames. This process
results in continual exchange between stillness and movement. It
is here that video’s temporal flux unveils the individual frames
differing in duration and the intervals between the frames, which
Jacobs also attempted to make visible in his Tom, Tom: “There’s
much more time in that time than we ever imagined, in two frames.
16 or 18 or 24 frames per second, that’s infinite time, and infinite
motion is taking place, infinite numbers of events are taking place
and this begins to explore that. I’ve never exhausted the time
bounded by two frames.”92 Thanks to those durations, Jacobs’s two
remake videos provide a more “complex transaction between the
immediate present moment of watching and the distanced past of
the film image itself”93 than did Tom, Tom.
The uncovering of the photographic qualities of celluloid cinema
leads Malcolm Turvey to argue that Jacobs’s use of digital editing
updates the “revelationism” he initially applied in Tom, Tom, the
idea of presenting cinema’s ability to make visible truths invisible
to the human eye: “Digital software is emulating these celluloid-
based techniques. Yet their function is the same—to make the easily
overlooked details in the original evident by indexing and enlarging
them.”94 Despite the relevance of Turvey’s insight, however, it is
important to stress that Jacobs also utilizes digital effects of spatial
manipulation other than those that emulate his celluloid-based
techniques, not simply to repeat the revelation of details in Tom,
Tom but also to extend on his idea of the “infinity” of film frames.
He treats the frames of Return to the Scene of the Crime and
Anaglyph Tom in various graphical and pictorial ways: monochrome
 Transitional found footage practices 185

colorization that strips the frames of their abundant details, turning

them into informal, abstract patterns (Figure 3.10); superimposition
of contiguous frames within a single plane, resulting in a trembling
motion (Figure 3.11); cutouts of scenes or details that function as
two-dimensional visual objects combined into possible forms of
collage (Figure 3.12); reframing and rotation of details within a
picture plane, or multiplication of a single frame or figure into plural
segments with separate, individual scale, movement (contraction or
dilation), direction, and form (rectangular or frame-within-a-frame,

Figures 3.10 and 3.11 Film stills from Ken Jacobs, Return to the Scene of
the Crime (2008), courtesy Ken Jacobs.
186 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

curved, or circular) (Figure 3.13), etc. The effects can be grouped into
three main categories: (1) transformation of the filmic moving image
from the figurative to the abstract; (2) dynamism of the on-screen
space, characterized by confusion between two-dimensionality
and three-dimensionality and by instability of the figure/ground
or surface/depth relationship; and (3) reconfiguration of the film
frame as omnidirectional, omnidimensional, and polymorphic. All
are initially predicated upon Jacobs’s endeavors to inscribe in the
film medium some key aesthetic traditions of modernist painting

FigureS 3.12 and 3.13 Film still from Jacobs, Anaglyph Tom (Tom with
the Puffy Cheeks) (2008), courtesy Ken Jacobs.
 Transitional found footage practices 187

following Hofmann, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism—for

instance, the rendering of time and motion by means of plastic
elements (points, lines, planes, and colors) and the exploration
of depth effects on a flat surface by virtue of multiple viewpoints
and planes. If this interpenetration touches on Walley’s definition
of “paracinema,” a mode of heterogeneous artistic practices that
expand the boundaries of cinematic effects and qualities while also
seeking cinema’s essence, then Jacobs’s digital video facilitate his
“paracinematic” encounters between film and painting.95
Jacobs’s paracinematic use of video techniques, too, aims to
materialize electronic and digital technologies through which the
shape and movement of photochemical images are transformed. All
three categories of Jacobs’s special effects pertain to the repertoire of
videographic procedures since the age of analogue video—keying,
layering, superimposition, etc.—to render the source image pictorial,
multidimensional, and malleable. Jacobs’s variation of swirling
monochrome colors and distorted geometric patterns resembles
the materialist works of “image-processing” video artists in that his
resulting images are marked by an extreme degree of saturation and
formal abstraction. At the same time, the footage of Bitzer’s Tom,
Tom takes on types of electronic and digital images identified by a
group of theorist such as Yvonne Spielmann and Philippe Dubois,
ranging from “clusters” (“a type of image . . . through the multiple
layerings of different images or image elements, resulting in a
spatial density”96) to juxtaposed images that show both a “relative
transparency [transparence relative]” and a “stratified thickness
[épaisseur stratifiée].”97 In accordance with the contradictory
coexistence of two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces—
which dismantles the transparent, perspectival representation of the
visual field, and is thus far removed from the photorealistic ideal of
digital compositing—those patterns underscore the materiality of
electronic and digital media images.
Given the wide variety of special effects that he uses to articulate
the transition from pictorially conceived cinema to videographic
imagery, Jacobs’s two feature-length remakes of Bitzer’s Tom, Tom
recall Woody Vasulka’s Art of Memory (1987), a videotape work
that locates a multiplicity of newsreel and documentary clips and
still photos concerning the traumatic histories of the twentieth
century in the electronic and digital memoryscape. In this work,
the photochemical images undergo constant transmutations via
188 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the operation of special effects (keying, superimposition, wipe,

etc.), taking on dense, malleable, sculptural forms that cut across
the frame space in various directions. In his meticulous analysis
of this piece, Raymond Bellour illustrates that Vasulka’s variation
of different techniques invites the viewer into a “circular dialogue
that is set up between cinema and video, as well as between analog
and digital representation.”98 In fact, the collision of moving and
still images, the juxtaposition of two- and three-dimensionality,
and the layering of geometrically distorted photochemical image
and digitally processed image in this work are all features of
hybridization that can also be found in Jacobs’s video pieces. They
demonstrate the processes of electronic transformation and digital
manipulation that lead to forms of the moving image comprising
the correlation of different media.
However, Jacobs is crucially distinct from Vasulka in the way
that he treats found images. Marita Sturken notes that Art of
Memory demonstrates the operation of video memory not “as a
depository of images to be excavated, but rather as an amorphous,
ever-changing field of images.”99 Sturken’s observation points to
the capacity of video technologies to reconfigure the memory of
cinema through their specific properties, and is equally applicable
to Jacobs. But if transformed, Jacobs’s film frames are not
“consumed” or “swallowed”100 up by those technologies as in Art
of Memory; rather, they proliferate relentlessly in various forms
and colors, wavering between temporary stasis and varying degrees
of mobility. This is another reason that for Jacobs the notion of
infinity gains a particular importance. The memory of cinema that
Jacobs envisions is open to endless repetition and propagation,
where electronic transformation and digital manipulation work.
As a result, Jacobs appears to configure the memory of cinema as
the eternal lives of its frames through their electronic and digital
mutations, unlike the tension between inscription and erasure
in Vasulka’s case. Those lives take on two broad metaphoric
meanings. First is a playful celebration of the vitality of the frames
and of the characters and objects occupying them. For instance, the
most hilarious and extravagant moment of Jacobs’s digital image
processing is a scene in Return to the Scene of Crime in which
the balls juggled by a clown in Bitzer’s Tom, Tom are replaced
by several small duplicates of the scene (Figure 3.14). Second is a
“magical raising of the dead,”101 their ghostly presence arousing in
 Transitional found footage practices 189

Figure 3.14 Film still from Jacobs, Return to the Scene of the Crime,
courtesy Ken Jacobs.

the viewer a sense of the uncanny. Whether multiplied—the female

acrobat’s faces filling the frame, for instance—or floating on the
screen, the dead demonstrate that Jacobs’s reworking of the footage
from early cinema is “anamnesis . . . [as] the recovery of anxiety-
provoking incidents.”102 In either case, the viewer is able to find
various types of collision and correlation between photochemical
qualities and digital pictoriality, acceleration and deceleration, and
two- and three-dimensionality.
In a series of short videos that he began in the 2000s, Jacobs
applied “Eternalism” to his video editing, a method developed
through his experiments with the Nervous System performances.
It refers to the technique by which two or more image pictures,
similar but slightly different, “are repetitively presented together
with a bridging interval (a bridging picture),”103 which due to the
viewer’s binocular vision results in perception of stereoscopic three-
dimensional imagery. The key to this method is Jacobs’s ability to
achieve both sequential arrangement of the pictures and insertion
of the “bridging interval” in a way that does not necessarily insist
upon the material and technical limits of the celluloid-based
apparatus. That is, he can blend two adjacent pictures with the self-
invented projection system that he applied to his Nervous System
190 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

performances, or with algorithmic automation of image-processing

software such as Adobe Photoshop or After Effects. In this sense, it
is possible to consider Jacobs’s application of Eternalism to digital
software not simply, in the words of Brooke Belisle, as a “hybrid
of stereoscopic and cinematic representation,”104 but also as a
hybrid exchange of avant-garde film technique and digital editing.
David I. Tafler identifies two points of interrelation in this regard
between Jacobs’s Nervous System performances and digital media.
First, Jacobs’s reinvention of the cinematic apparatus by way of
reciprocation between two- and three-dimensionality anticipates
digital media’s dissolution of the boundaries between the viewer
and the screen, and between perception and representation. Second,
Jacobs’s treatment of film frames is similar to the ways in which
artists working with digital media break down and rearrange the
flow of information.105 As in his videos remaking Tom, Tom, Jacobs’s
Eternalism has recently produced new knowledge about the history
of the moving image since the invention of mechanical visual media,
including photography and cinema, with regard to how these media
have produced specific modes of perceiving space and time. His
digital video pieces based on Eternalism revivify all kinds of still
and moving images regardless of their mediality—whether film,
video, or pictures that fit neither of the two media. In this sense,
Jacobs’s Eternalism is seen as a project of “media archaeology,”
an approach based on “an emerging attitude and cluster of tactics
in contemporary media theory that is characterized by a desire to
uncover and circulate repressed or neglected media approaches and
technologies.”106
Capitalism: Child Labor (2007) unravels a profound aesthetic
investigation of the photograph as an archive of history. The piece’s
source image—a Victorian stereoscopic photograph of a nineteenth-
century factory floor—shows the faces of a handful of young boys
working on cotton thread spinning machines, their seemingly
flat expressions suggesting pain or fear caused by the factory’s
exploitive labor conditions. The boys are in sharp contrast to a
couple of foremen, whose resolute visages symbolize the authority
and power of industrial capitalism. Using a variety of animation
effects, Jacobs highlights to the viewer the unequal relationship
between the boys as slaves and the foremen as the incarnation of the
complicity between capitalism and patriarchy. Initially, alternation
of two slightly different frames produces a flicker effect, in which
 Transitional found footage practices 191

afterimages repeat, emerging and disappearing instantaneously.

Continuing this oscillation, Jacobs exploits digital superimpositions
to insert a series of smaller frames of various sizes into the picture
plane (equivalent to the frame-within-a-frame), which contain
magnified details from the picture, such as close-ups of one child’s
gloomy expression and skinny legs and another’s hands attached to
the machine (Figures 3.15 and 3.16). All small frames acquire partial
rotations, each different in interval and intensity, during vibration

Figures 3.15 and 3.16 Film stills from Jacobs, Capitalism: Child Labor
(2007), courtesy Ken Jacobs.
192 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

of the two original frames. As a result, the details appear to fold

inward against the picture’s larger background, thereby generating
a hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic sense of volume marked by multiple
viewpoints and different focuses that rapidly change positions and
reside only in the moment of viewing. By varying the combination
of larger frame and smaller frames, as well as the positioning of the
latter within the former, Jacobs strengthens the confusion of the
relationship between figure and ground, flatness and volume, and
solidity and fluidity. Consequently, Jacobs’s employment of digital
superimposition together with the Eternalism effect blends multiple
traces of the past with the viewer’s perceptual experience of the
present, which Skoller refers to as “digital temporal composite.”
This coexistence of multiple temporal planes demonstrates that in
this work, “analog/digital [and] photographic/digital are already
present within each other.”107
Given that the stereoscopic photograph positioned itself as an
archetype of three-dimensional cinema in the nineteenth century,
Capitalism: Child Labor provides the knowledge of how its
material effects relate to the mechanism of cinema to generate a
lifelike illusion of reality. To this end, Jacobs directly engages with
the dialectics of stillness and mobility that informed photography
and cinema of the period. By rendering vibrating and pulsating
movement alike, Jacobs’s Eternalism invites the viewer to see
the ambivalent relation of photographic stillness to the cinema,
which Doane and Mulvey have revisited to reconfigure cinematic
medium specificity: on the one hand, the movement itself reasserts
the numerous photograms in the filmstrip, on which the cinematic
impression of reality necessarily depends. On the other hand,
however, its vibrating character dismantles the continuity of
cinematic motion, which emerges only through repression of the
photograms’ existence.
Moreover, Jacobs’s digital Eternalism testifies to the role of digital
techniques in documenting “what could be, would be, or might
have been,”108 by making flexible the record of the event or object
in the photographic image. Jacobs’s use of digital video effects with
respect to still stereoscopic photographs provides the viewer with
knowledge of what could have happened to the boys and foremen
in the factory. The figures linger in the viewer’s perceptual world
like haunting ghosts. Their spectral presence is strengthened as
the piece’s last frames fill with the close-ups of the figures, ending
 Transitional found footage practices 193

with the close-up of the leg. The figures might be considered not
simply the persistence of vision, but also the persistence of the
past, given the indexical function of the stereoscopic picture as the
photochemical record of what existed in the history of industrial
capitalism. The omnidirectional vibrations of the picture render the
viewing of the piece analogous to Benjamin’s “shock experience”
in modernity, an experience of the enormously heightened stimuli
that modern technologies impose on human subjects. Benjamin saw
the factory, along with the metropolis marked by heavy traffic, as
locations where technologies have “subjected the human sensorium
to a complex kind of training,” and film, due to its fragmentary and
dynamic movements, as the medium by which this training could
occur: “What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor
belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in the
film.”109 It is the knowledge about this affinity between cinema
and modernity that the hallucinatory illusion of Capitalism: Child
Labor takes the viewer to, in which digital imaging systems play a
crucial role.
The continual blending of this knowledge with the photographic
record suggests a notable ontological feature of Jacobs’s intermedial
configuration. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has noted
that a variety of electronic and digital special effects, including
interpolation, embedding, and so on, can engender the ghostly
effect of the analogue image’s material trace by making “phantoms
and phantasms indistinct.”110 If “phantoms” refers to what the
image represents in relation to its material, technical, and formal
components, then “phantasms” are part of what the spectator
understands, imagines, and expects from the image. Seen in this light,
Jacobs’s digital effects generate varying degrees of “phantasms” and
merge them with the “phantoms” inscribed in the original image, as
a way of questioning the original photo’s status as document and
investigating what lies underneath or beyond its trace.

Conclusion
The transitional found footage practices that I have attempted to
define and investigate thus far encapsulate the extent to which
the film image takes on a new ontological life when transferred to
new media technologies for production and viewing, such as video,
194 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

DVD, and the computer. Dislodged from the image’s key support,
celluloid, its effects (illusion of movement, preservation of the past,
generation of psychological and affective impact, formation of
narrative as an object of personal and collective memory, etc.), and
the codes, techniques, and conventions that produce them are now
appropriated and dissected. The material, technical, and formal
properties of electronic and digital media accordingly impact the
film image, thereby obscuring belief in purity as an essential part
of film’s medium specificity. At the same time, however, the image,
its effects, and its components refer back to their original state even
when filtered and altered by those technologies: they are not purely
filmic, but still cinematic, pulled by the gravity of the celluloid that
contained them. For this reason, they are also not purely electronic
or digital, even when they acquire characteristics of electronic and
digital media. Thus, the resulting images in the post-media conditions
of cinema waver between remainders of film in the past and new
technical and aesthetic properties afforded by new technologies.
Seen in this light, I argue that transitional found footage practices
draw our attention to these conditions by providing us with the
aesthetic forms of hybrid moving images; their practitioners enable
filmic and post-filmic properties to interrelate with each other in
various ways, ranging from Girardet-Müller’s subtle videographic
changes in the surface and temporality of classic Hollywood films
to Elder’s and Jacobs’s complex material or formal interpenetration
of film and video.
These practices, too, demonstrate how a specific mode of
experimental cinema, found footage filmmaking, renews and
expands on its traditional assets—its key aesthetics and techniques,
its analytical and deconstructive approaches to the existing film,
and its commitment to the historiography of cinema—through its
encounter with new technologies. Video-based editing systems and
computer interfaces serve to remediate the methods of montage and
special effects developed by found footage filmmaking, while also
bestowing upon them a range of new possible transformations and
manipulations. Transitional found footage practitioners, including
Girardet-Müller, Elder, and Jacobs, benefit from these two aspects,
but also attempt to protect the territory of avant-garde filmmaking
by seeking possible correspondence between their previous
artisanal relation to the filmic and the opportunities allowed by the
new tools and techniques. In so doing, they establish themselves as
 Transitional found footage practices 195

what Hollis Frampton has called “metahistorians,” filmmakers who

interrogate how material components (the filmstrip, the projector,
the screen) constitute film as a machine that produces cinematic
effects. For Frampton, the task of the metahistorian is motivated by
“the notion that there was some exact instant at which the tables
turned, and cinema passed into obsolescence and thereby into art,”
and found footage filmmaking is viewed as the desirable mode for
accomplishing this task: “For the history of cinema consists precisely
of every film that has ever been made.”111 While transitional found
footage practitioners share Frampton’s view of the technological
change from film to electronic and digital media as a moment of
crisis, their choice to use the latter to seize upon and transform the
former implies that perpetuating the materiality of celluloid is not
the only way to pursue the task of Frampton’s metahistorians.112
Considered this way, their various efforts to extend their celluloid-
based techniques of decontextualizing and recontexualizing the
cinematic past establish their films as illustrations of the Benjaminian
“dialectical image,” in which film’s past image is continually
dismantled, yet simultaneously appreciated and revivified by the
post-filmic technologies in the present.
Consequently, the transitional found footage practices that I have
examined in this chapter illustrate various technical and aesthetic
responses to cinema’s post-media conditions, presenting the spirit
of the metahistorian in the domain of avant-garde cinema. How
then can these responses be applied to methods of filmmaking in
the digital age other than avant-garde cinema? If the task of the
filmmaker as metahistorian is grounded in his consciousness of
“cinema’s passing into obsolescence,” or of its transformation by
post-filmic apparatuses, how do these other filmmaking methods
form and explore it? And how does this transformation affect the
memory of both the image and the filmmaker? These questions will
be answered in my definition and discussion of “intermedial essay
films” in the next chapter.
 chapter four

Intermedial essay films:

“Memories-in-between”

Introduction: Essay films between the

filmic and the post-filmic
The essay film, which emerged in postwar Europe and has been
increasingly significant in contemporary film culture, is viewed as a
nebulous method of filmmaking that crosses the boundaries between
fiction and nonfiction cinema; documentary and experimental film;
the personal and the public; and the intellectual and the poetic.
Scholars who have attempted to define the essay film—Phillip
Lopate, Timothy Corrigan, Laura Rascaroli, Paul Arthur, Nora M.
Alter, to name just a few—commonly regard these transgressive and
protean dynamics of the essay film as analogous with the literary
essay.1 This analogy is grounded not simply in the transgressive
nature of the literary essay, which tends to challenge the traditional
borders of literary genres, but also in its anti-systematic, digressive,
fragmentary, and dispersed attributes, all of which arguably
correspond to the formal and rhetorical strategies of the essay film.
The transgressive, hybrid, and complicated characteristics of the
essay film undoubtedly make its definition extremely divergent,
suggesting that it is arguably a mode of film practices that reveals,
tests, and goes beyond the structural and generic limits of cinema.
Nevertheless, “reflectivity” and “subjectivity” stand out as two
features that are most frequently identified in the essay form; as
198 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Rascaroli puts it, “an essay is the expression of a personal, critical

reflection on a problem or set of problems. Such reflection does
not propose itself as anonymous or collective, but as originating
from a single authorial voice.”2 Although these two features
situate the filmmaker’s authorial presence as central to the
essay film, additional textual characteristics, such as digression,
quotation, nonlinearity, and multiple modes of address, construct
the filmmaker’s subjectivity as, in the words of Michael Renov,
“a site of instability—flux, drift, perpetual revision rather than
coherence.”3 Corrigan also points out that this decentralized and
fluid subjectivity of the essay film is developed through its reflective
processes; he identifies a testing of expressive subjectivity as one of its
formulating features. The essay film foregrounds, he writes, “a real
or fictional persona whose quests and questioning shape and direct
the film in lieu of a traditional narrative and frequently complicate
the documentary look of the film with the presence of a pronounced
subjectivity or enunciation position.”4 Here, the filmmaker’s quests
and questioning point both to the formation of his/her subjectivity
as processual and destabilized, and to his/her self-reflexivity as a
key condition through which he/she develops personal experiences
of memory, argument, or desire. The imbrication of reflectivity and
subjectivity involves an array of textual and extra-textual devices to
inscribe the filmmaker’s shifting reflections on a particular subject
matter. Whereas Rascaroli stresses voice-over, intertitles, and the
director’s diegetic presence as primary to the essay film,5 Corrigan,
Lopate, and Arthur regard the montage, camera movement, use of
interviews, and other representational manipulations of the image
as expressive of subjectivity that is multilayered, fragmentary, and
unstable.6 Again, this variety of formal devices and materials attests
to the textual richness of the essay film, which contributes to the
transgressive aspects of its genre, enunciation, and media.
Taking subjectivity and reflectivity as two primary features
of the essay film, in this chapter I want to investigate a group of
recent essayistic projects that respond to the transition of films
from celluloid to post-filmic media. The films investigated by the
projects’ filmmakers encompass various archival fragments that
were originally made and stored in celluloid but later displaced
into videotapes, DVDs, and the internet, including movie clips,
home movies, amateur films, and their own personal records. The
filmmakers, then, employ the two media simultaneously when
 Intermedial essay films 199

they reflect upon the films’ images, and the resulting images are
characterized by the hybrid interactions of both. For these two
reasons, I define these films as “intermedial essay films,” examining
how the filmmakers’ simultaneous employment of the two media
and the hybrid aesthetic of the resulting images engender and
elaborate upon their essayistic strategies.
In terms of subjectivity and reflectivity, intermedial essay
films foreground the filmmaker’s consciousness as traversing
and negotiating between two different media or as investigating
particular visual images derived from the intersections between them.
In this way, the characteristics of the filmmaker’s subjectivity in the
essay film in general, such as fragmentation, fluidity, and instability,
are seen to be in line with the shifting register of the media and the
complexity of images. To be more specific, the images in question
are those produced by one medium and transferred to another—for
instance, a filmic image based on celluloid-based film culture and
displaced, transformed, and probed by the post-filmic apparatuses
such as analogue and digital video. For this reason, the resulting
image takes on a hybrid aesthetic marked by the coexistence and
interrelation of the material and technical properties derived from
film and video, respectively. It is the relationship between the two
media (filmic and post-filmic) that compels me to call this type of
essay film intermedial. Some intermedial essay films employ a variety
of video effects to investigate how the memory trace of the image
is transformed as the image is displaced from its original medium
(i.e., film) and contexts, or to seek the possibility of expressing
the memory associated with the filmic technology and culture. An
example is the filmmaker’s memory of the image that he/she shot
in celluloid—by virtue of post-filmic apparatuses. Further, others
develop the filmmaker’s reflections regarding a particular image by
presenting it as a filmic image grounded in celluloid-based cinema
and later reframing it within post-filmic apparatuses (e.g., VCR or
DVD), often comparing it with the imagery of analogue or digital
video. In either case, intermedial essay films engender reflectivity
and subjectivity, two defining aspects of the essay film in general.
In these films, questioning the filmmaker’s self also extends to the
image that she/he filmed or found, and this process necessarily
involves his/her self-reflexive inquiry into the media associated with
production and circulation of the image. The centrality of the image
in this type of essay film, either shot or found by the filmmaker,
200 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

validates Arthur’s characterization of essay films since the 2000s

as the prevailing uses of found footage: “It is tempting to cite the
deployment of found footage and collage as endemic to the essay,
given the multitude of films that rely on juxtapositions of archival
images and present-tense commentary.”7 In this sense, intermedial
essay films are in close dialogue with the transitional found footage
practices that I have examined in Chapter 3.
Maintaining and extending the methodological framework of
looking at the ontology of coexistence and interrelation in hybrid
moving images, I wish to explore four practitioners of intermedial
essay film since the 2000s: Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Clive
Holden, and Jonathan Caouette. I position their films within the
broader post-media conditions of cinema, in which the previously
established boundaries of images are fundamentally blurred in
tandem with their transition from the filmic to the post-filmic.
The four directors’ intermedial essay films, then, incorporate a
range of self-reflexive devices in style and technique to deal with
cinema’s post-media conditions. As in the cases of transitional
found footage practices that rework the original filmic image with
digital video’s montage and special effects, these devices give rise to
an array of hybrid moving images marked by the coexistence and
interrelation of the material and technical properties derived from
the two technologies. By examining the hybridity of these images,
I shall demonstrate that the four directors’ intermedial essay films
respond to the instability of the memory trace inscribed in the
filmic image, which is caused by the image’s dislocation from its
celluloid base to the post-filmic apparatus. Given the prominent
role of video technologies in transforming and complicating
the image originating from film, it is necessary to elucidate how
they allow directors to activate certain essayistic features and
formulate the memory of the filmic image differently than in filmic
technology. By analyzing these two dimensions, I argue that the
hybrid moving images in the directors’ intermedial essay films
render each filmmaker’s subjectivity and his/her reflections on the
filmic image as memories that dynamically traverse between film
and post-filmic apparatuses, which I am calling “memories-in-
between.” My examination of the ways in which these memories-in-
between unfold relate to different modes of the essay film, ranging
from the intellectual experimental documentary (Steyerl and Sachs)
to the diary film and autobiographical documentary (Holden
 Intermedial essay films 201

and Caouette). Before proceeding to the four case studies, I shall

discuss video’s roles in facilitating and renewing the expression of
reflectivity and subjectivity in the celluloid-based essay film and
define memories-in-between in terms of the intersection between
filmic and post-filmic technologies.

Video, memories-in-between, and

intermedial essay films
In the broadest sense, intermedial essay films date back to the
traditions of cinematic responses to the impacts of new technologies
on the development and variation of essayistic moving-image
practices before the advent of the digital age. Since Alexandre Astruc
envisaged the increasing role of 16 mm and television in enlarging
the possibilities for the filmmaker’s personal expressions in cinema,8
proliferations of lightweight camera devices (both the Super 8 mm
and analogue video cameras) for shooting since the 1960s across
different modes of production (documentaries, experimental films,
video art, and alternative television) have significantly underpinned
“the active subjectivity and public mobility of the essay film.”9
Starting from the 1960s, celluloid formats (Super 8 mm and 16 mm)
were used in making amateur and more personal films, but video
technologies have played a more crucial role in the evolution of the
essay film, ranging from its modes of production and distribution
to its rhetorical strategies. Associating video’s capacities with the
metaphor of writing,10 Raymond Bellour explains why it lends itself
more particularly to the pursuit of the self-portrait as an essayistic
expression of the moving image: the continuous instability of the
video image as corresponding to the formation of subjectivity via
a chain of sentences and the ease of inscribing the artist’s body
directly in the image.11 Bellour’s emphasis on video’s immediacy
and intimacy as activating the essayistic modes of production
concurs with Renov’s observation. Addressing Jean-Luc Godard’s
Scénario du film “Passion” (1982) to demonstrate video’s capability
of mobilizing multiple modes of self-presentation, Renov writes:
“Durable, lightweight, mobile, producing instantaneous results,
the video apparatus supplies a dual capability well suited to the
essayistic project: it is both screen and mirror, as well as a reflective
surface on which to register the self.”12
202 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Bellour’s and Renov’s views on video underpin current

speculations on the connections between digital technologies and
essayistic modes of moving-image practices. Corrigan notes that
through the capacities of the digital, including interactivity and the
multiplication of viewing interfaces such as the DVD and the internet,
“the essayistic can now fully embrace its love affair with experiential
contingencies of all sorts.”13 Similarly, Bjørn Sørenssen argues
that the economic availability and miniaturization of production
equipment and Web-based forms of distribution (YouTube, for
instance) are able to achieve Astruc’s vision of caméra-stylo, as they
“open up alternative ways and means of audio-visual expression.”14
Ohad Landesman stresses the enhanced intimacy and immediacy
of DV as fundamental to inheriting and updating strategies of self-
reflexivity in the essay film of the pre-digital age. Examining the
films of Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I [2000]), Peter Mettler
(Gambling, Gods & LSD [2002]), Chris Marker (The Case of the
Grinning Cat [2004]) and others, he claims that DV “accommodates
an improvement (or perfection) of the capabilities of older mobile
cameras, entering an already explored terrain of essayistic strategies
afforded by previous film equipment such as 16 mm and video.”15
Although previous studies regarding the impacts of digital
technologies on the flourishing of the essay film have pointed out
their various capacities and breakthroughs in both production
and distribution, more fundamental to intermedial essay films is
video’s technical ability to transform images that their filmmakers
produce, appropriate, or investigate in ways that the images are
perceived as fragmented, fluid, pictorial, or unstable. Returning
to Bellour and Renov helps us to elaborate on this point. In his
discussion on video self-portraits, Bellour notes that the video
image is more “adept at translating . . . the processes of thought”
insofar as it is subject to various transformations both in recording
and postproduction, which ultimately render it “precarious, more
unstable, and more artificial.”16 Renov, too, argues that video’s
capacities of configuring the image as fluid and fragmentary, as well
as of “shuttling between or keying in diverse image sources” serve
the “essay’s discursive goals.”17 In these contexts, video’s digitization
does not simply represent an inheritance of the technical properties
of analogue video (which Bellour and Renov address) to stimulate
the nonlinear and fluid movement of thought in the essayistic mode.
It also enlarges the expressive possibility of essayistic filmmaking
 Intermedial essay films 203

by expanding the range of images—both videographic and filmic

images—and offering a variety of effects to mix and process them.
As video artist Ursula Biemann puts it:

New image and editing technologies have made it easy to stack

an almost unlimited number of audio and video tracks one on
top of another, with multiple images, titles, running texts and a
complex sound mix competing for the attention of the audience.18

Biemann’s observation suggests that the scope of essayistic

projects made with digital video is not necessarily limited to those
exclusively composed of electronic and digital images. Rather, its
capacity for stacking and dissecting “multiple images” also serves
to investigate the transition of a media image (e.g., a filmic image)
to another media (analogue or digital video) as the key motivation
behind intermedial essay films. By updating several capacities
of destabilizing the input image (keying, compositing, layering,
modulating, and graphical manipulations), which are inherited
from its analogue predecessor, digital video is able to transform
the image originating from celluloid-based cinema in ways
that inscribe its material and technical properties (for instance,
pixelated noise, scan lines, pictorial fluidity, and the signal-based
temporal manipulation distinct from the filmic expression of
time) in the surface and temporal dimensions of the image. The
resulting image, then, can bring into play the tensions caused by the
differences between film and post-filmic technologies as it makes
their respective material, technical, and aesthetic properties coexist
and interact. Moreover, certain essay films can invite comparison
between the two technologies by presenting an original filmic
image and playing it with post-filmic apparatuses and formats, or
by juxtaposing the filmic image with other images produced and
circulated by electronic and digital media. In any case, intermedial
essay films enable varying degrees of the dialogue between filmic
and post-filmic images or apparatuses, and foreground images
characterized by varying degrees of intermediality (i.e., a mediality
by which multiple formats and apparatuses are fused while also
maintaining the properties of each format or apparatus). Ágnes
Pethő suggests that the images can be seen as places in which
these “intermedial processes take place, and where figurations
of intermedial differences are played out.”19 In intermedial essay
204 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

films, directors consciously utilize these processes and express

differences as they explore the transition of filmic images to post-
filmic apparatuses. In this sense, such images demonstrate the
emphasis on self-reflexivity as a key component of essay films in
general. Given that the aesthetic complexity of the hybrid images
is indebted to the directors’ simultaneous employment of the two
technologies and their traversal between them, they, too, serve to
express the directors’ subjectivities as, in the words of Renov, “a site
of instability—flux, drift, perpetual revision.”
Intermedial essay films since the 2000s certainly have predecessors
in works by Godard, Marker, and Harun Farocki, who paved the
way for the textual and rhetorical developments of the celluloid-
based essayistic cinema and later extended their approaches to
post-filmic apparatuses including analogue video, CD-ROM, and
multichannel video installations since the 1980s. What is crucial
to all these films is that their images are marked by intermedial
configurations of film and video at the level of their respective
forms when they convey the filmmakers’ personal reflections
on the changing status of cinema. For instance, in Histoire(s) du
cinéma, the viewer is overwhelmed by a variety of images extracted
from numerous films and transformed by Godard’s video effects,
including slow motion, wipes, superimpositions, and keying
(Figure 4.1). Though they bear traces of dirt and scratches owing
to their celluloid origins, the filmic images are intercut by means
of video’s technical procedures, which in turn allow them to have
rich dialogues with a variety of photographic and painterly images
that are deployed to express Godard’s reflections on cinema’s
multiplied relationships with art and history of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Pethő advises that Histoire(s) du cinéma
can be considered “not only an intermedial palimpsest reflecting
on images from the history of cinema but first and foremost as a
meditation upon the complex mediality of cinema, discovering in it
layers of mediality and culture specific to an archaeology of cinema
as a medium.”20 Even when agreeing on Pethő’s characterization of
Histoire(s) du cinéma as the “intermedia palimpsest,” it is worth
stressing that video plays a key role in realizing the passages between
painting, photography, and cinema. The different images that might
previously have been regarded as separate within the medium-
specific boundaries—namely, film image, textual image, sound-
image, painting, and photography—are juxtaposed sequentially or
 Intermedial essay films 205

Figure 4.1 A screen capture from Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du

cinéma (1988–98).

superimposed within a single picture frame in a variety of ways.

The flow of the video signal assimilates all of these images while
simultaneously maintaining equivalence between them. Just as the
filmic images appropriated and investigated by Godard are subject
to various electronic transformations while also maintaining their
photographic capacity of bearing witness to the history of the
twentieth century, so do the videographic techniques contribute
to animating still images (such as film stills, photographs, and
pictures) and thereby creating various associations of them with
the filmic images. Consequently, video in Histoire(s) should be seen
not simply as a single medium, but as a “variable of the photo-
cinema-video apparatus”21 through which any single-frame image
is capable of obtaining its multiplicities and manipulability. 22
Godard’s baroque approach to video’s transformative power
in his reflections on cinema is contrasted with Farocki’s analytical
approach. Farocki’s two-channel video installation, Schnittstelle
(Section/Interface) (1995, Figure 4.2), investigates how the aesthetic
status of montage moves from film cutting to electronic video
editing. It presents the process of his work on preexisting images—
video footage for Videogram of a Revolution (1992, codirected
with Andrei Ujica), film footage as the raw material of Workers
206 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 4.2 Harun Farocki, Schnittstelle (Section/Interface) (1995), film

still, courtesy Harun Farocki Filmproduktion.

Leaving the Factory (1995), and footage from some of his early
films such as Inextinguishable Fire (1969)—on an editing table.
Given the status of the original footage, the installation signifies
a transition from the film-based montage based on the sequential
ordering of the filmstrip to other nonlinear relationships between
image tracks, such as compositing, simultaneity, and juxtaposition,
based on video-based editing.23 Marker explores how the properties
of digital technologies, such as the user’s nonlinear, multidirectional
navigation of data, simulation, and layering, restructure human
memory and the memory of cinema in his trans-medial essayistic
projects. In his CD-ROM project Immemory (1997), a variety of
film fragments—for instance, Hitchcock’s films—are transformed
into data objects that are open to the user’s nonlinear and
fragmentary navigation, although they are still perceived as filmic
images that pertain to the history of cinema.24 In Marker’s feather-
length film Level 5 (1997), the virtual data world named OWL
(Optional World Link), accessed by the protagonist named Laura,
functions as an interface to deconstruct, reconfigure, and retrieve
fragments of media objects, including filmic images. It also enables
Laura to traverse between the world of cinema (as a human player)
and that of new media (as the game’s avatar). In OWL, nonlinear
collage and layering create a dense cluster of digitally encoded
filmic and photographic images and graphic and simulated ones,
 Intermedial essay films 207

thereby rendering the resulting image as expressive of intermedial

relations between the two (Figure 4.3).25 These intermedial relations
acknowledge that digital technologies, with their capacities of
simulation and interactivity, introduce a fundamental fragility of
remembrance by making traces of the past unstable. At the same
time, some intermedial images in OWL, including the digitally altered
film footage of Okinawa’s mass suicide victims during the Second
World War, demonstrate Marker’s belief in using the technologies’
transformative and nonlinear capacities to reconstruct forgotten
memories of the past in the form of a virtual museum. As Rascaroli
summarizes, they “work as a commentary on the transitory nature
of our technologies of memory, including each embodiment of the
museum, of the archive, and of the cinema.”26
The intermedial essay projects of Godard, Farocki, and Marker
suggest that they configure the memory of cinema, including
directors’ memories of it, as transformed and restructured by new
media. As in transitional found footage practices, the memory of
the filmic image in these projects is structured by the intersection
between the trace of the past inscribed in the image and the
capacities of new media to destabilize the image’s aesthetic qualities
or to reframe the image within new screens and interfaces different
from the film screen and the projector. Thus, the resulting images

Figure 4.3 A screen capture from Chris Marker, Level 5 (1997).

208 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

in works by Godard, Farocki, and Marker as memory objects of

cinema take on the co-presence and interrelations of technical and
aesthetic properties from both film and post-filmic technologies,
articulating the directors’ personal reflections as continually
oscillating between the two. Developing Pethő’s discussion on
cinema and intermediality, I propose the concept of “memory-
in-between” to describe this hybrid and oscillating aspect of an
image as the trace of memory and of a director’s memory of the
image in intermedial essay films. For Pethő, films that explore
cinema’s intermedial relationships with other art forms and with
electronic and digital media create the “space of ‘in-between’ that
is continually constructed and deconstructed by the ebb and flow
of images, by their appearance and disappearance.”27 In other
words, Pethő suggests that, as in the cases of transitional found
footage practices, intermedial essay films use electronic and digital
technologies to construct the memory of cinema and the director’s
corresponding subjectivity in a dialectic manner in response to the
double consequences of post-media conditions. That is, post-filmic
technologies are capable of shedding new light on the image of
film, even though some of its material and technical specificities
may be destroyed or altered. This dialectical operation suggests
that post-filmic apparatuses may be used strategically to deploy
and investigate found footage of celluloid-based essay films and
to express a director’s reflectivity and subjectivity. Arthur notes
that essay films’ textual elements (e.g., voice-over commentaries
and intertitles) attached to found footage complicate the viewer’s
perception of time, thereby “superimposing past and present to
emphasize historical gaps or tonal clashes inherent in the visual-
linguistic interface.”28 Seen in this light, the post-filmic apparatuses
deployed in intermedial essay films widen the historical gaps
between the pastness of a filmic image and the presentness of
the director who accesses and investigates it by transforming the
image with montage and special effects. At the same time, however,
this gap is also the point of departure from which the director’s
reconstruction of memories takes place. The director considers this
gap imposed by post-filmic technologies as a condition inherent in
his/her access to the cinematic image and traces of the past inscribed
in it. Therefore, the director’s investigation of both, with the help of
their technical and aesthetic properties, necessarily takes the form
of a journey between the past and present. It is during this journey
 Intermedial essay films 209

that the director’s consciousness of the filmic image is seen as the

memory-in-between, and the resulting visual expression based on
this image takes on the aesthetic of hybridity marked by the co-
presence and interrelation of the filmic and post-filmic.
This dialectical aspect of the memory-in-between in intermedial
essay films suggests that we do not necessarily delimit the roles of
new media in framing the memory of cinema as totally destructive.
In his wide-ranging analysis of new media artworks—some of which
are concerned with remapping and remaking cinema (including the
works of Godard and Marker)—Timothy Murray argues that the
memory of cinema “haunts the interface of digital multimedia,”
even as its narrative and images are transformed and reformulated
simultaneously by its effects and interactive procedures.29 Similarly,
Domietta Torlasco writes that digital works “not only expand but
also confront, disturb, and ultimately reconstitute the memory of
cinema we have inherited from the twentieth century.”30 Murray’s
and Torlasco’s views on the dialectics of electronic and digital
media suggest that intermedial essay films, like other new media
artworks based on algorithmic and interactive capabilities, are
capable of investigating memories inscribed in or revolving around
the cinematic image with their techniques that allow for analysis,
deconstruction, and reconfiguration of it, including video-based
montage and special effects. The uses of these techniques to
transform and examine fragments of old media, then, relate to two
modes of expressing a filmmaker’s self-reflexivity in the essay film.
The first mode, exemplified by Steyerl and Sachs, is the intellectual,
experimental documentary, in which post-filmic apparatuses serve
as the analytical tool for investigating the transition of the filmic
image or expressing the director’s intellectual thought on the distance
between its pastness and his/her present. The second is personal or
autobiographical filmmaking (e.g., films of Holden and Caouette), in
which the capacities of apparatuses to transform the filmic image as
a personal record of his/her memory paradoxically serve to retrieve it
and express his/her subjectivity as fragmented and unstable.

Hito Steyerl: Politics of the “poor image”

Steyerl’s films fit many tropes of essay films, including the stylistic
admixture of the documentary and experimental film, extensive
210 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

uses of found footage gleaned from various sources (e.g., political

films, blockbuster and B-movies, commercials, and promotional or
educational films), and deployment of different modes of address
that articulate her speculations on subjects related to the impacts
of images on history and culture. They are predicated upon a kind
of essayistic filmmaking as a way of developing and intervening in
the politics of the image, blurring the boundaries of filmmaking
and foregrounding Steyerl’s thoughts as formulated through her
encounter with the image and its material and cultural undersides.
Specifically, Steyerl’s major works are viewed as prime examples
of intermedial essay films insofar as they examine what happens
to the image when transferred from one medium to another. In
most of Steyerl’s films, a group of particular images are dissociated
from their original material support and signifying contexts and are
reframed within a different medium that endows the image with
new materiality, figuration, and interpretations.
Steyerl’s engagement with the cultural and material transformation
of the image in its transition through multiple media allowed her
to mark the found footage in her essay films as the “poor image,”
a copy of an original image whose status becomes unstable in
the processes of uploading, downloading, compression, and
deterioration. What she refers to as the poor image includes copies
of films and TV programs available in VHS or DVD format or from
the internet, as well as unauthorized viewing copies of artworks
(products of piracy). Though liberated from the custody of official
institutions, they form the detritus of audiovisual production and
consumption. As Steyerl writes, “Poor images are poor because
they are not assigned any value within the class society of images—
their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its
criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and
displacement.”31 Here, Steyerl makes it clear that poor images are
keys to understanding the multiple impacts of digital technologies
on how the image exists and what relationship it has with society.
More than simply altering the form of the image, the technologies
determine people’s uses and perceptions of it, simultaneously
inscribing in it material traces of such processes as copying, ripping,
cutting and pasting, etc. It is in this sense that Steyerl defines the
assemblage of digital apparatuses as “a form of life (and death) that
contains, sublates and archives all previous forms of media, and
the fluid media space in which images and sounds morph across
 Intermedial essay films 211

different bodies and carriers, acquiring more and more glitches and
bruises along the way.”32 In summary, the poor image that Steyerl
examines and simultaneously expresses in her artistic practices is the
product of the post-media processes by which the image undergoes
destabilization, relocation, and transformation. Thus, Steyerl’s
examination of the poor image necessarily involves the intermedial
reconfiguration of one media image (e.g., a filmic image) by another
medium (such as VHS or DVD). This intermedial approach delves
into an image’s original technical condition and cultural context to
reflexively unveil the roles of post-filmic technologies in shaping its
meaning and materiality.
This peculiar status of the poor image as the product of post-
filmic technologies leads Steyerl to develop two strategies for
dealing with the archives of memory as memory objects, more than
as the material for her appropriation. First, she employs various
juxtapositions of her found footage, ranging from the analytical
reading of its meanings to the creation of fragmentary and
nonlinear assemblages, as responses to the post-media condition of
cinema under which both the unprecedented availability of images
and the possibilities for combining, simulating, and manipulating
them fundamentally organize reality and representation. Extending
Bourriaud’s idea of postproduction, Steyerl sees such digital
processes not simply as key techniques of imaging but also as
integral to the “main capitalist modes of production today.”33
Cutting and pasting afforded by video and digital technologies,
Steyerl argues, allows one to reflect on conditions embedded in the
fragments of images and thereby recompose them into “incoherent,
artificial, and alternative political bodies.”34 Second, in applying the
strategy of recombination to her essayistic filmmaking, Steyerl also
highlights the materiality of her recycled images in various ways,
including exposure of the images as degraded copies, the use of
low-fidelity postproduction technologies to analyze and recompose
them, and her performative presences of dealing with technologies.
These devices are grounded in her idea that the unstable attributes
of poor images—their subjection to permanent circulation, ripping,
copying, and degradation, as well as possibilities for the addition
of new meanings—are inscribed in their materiality. Considering
these attributes, Steyerl aspires to validate in her filmic practices
that “to participate in an image . . . would mean participating in
the material of the image as well as in the desires and forces it
212 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

accumulates.”35 These two essayistic strategies, creating nonlinear

montages of poor images and foregrounding their materiality and
mediation, are extended into the formal organization of November
(2004) and In Free Fall (2010).
November has as its subject the images of Steyerl’s friend Andrea
Wolf. They include Wolf’s figure as a tough female warrior in an
amateur movie that Steyerl made with her in Germany, Wolf’s
appearance in television coverage as Sehît Ronahî (a Kurdish
freedom fighter), and her reappearance on placards as an icon of
a revolutionary female warrior for the Kurdish resistance after her
death. Characterizing all of these as “travelling images,”36 Steyerl
investigates how they bear different yet interrelated meanings and
how those meanings are influenced by the pervasive networks
of different media that dislocate and circulate them, as well as
by the political and cultural contexts that mobilize operations
of the networks. This extensive investigation of the traveling
images, coupled with Steyerl’s voice-over commentaries, recalls
Godard’s collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin in Letter to Jane:
An Investigation About a Still (1972), in which a still image
of Jane Fonda in Vietnam is analyzed from various angles in
terms of how it is constructed and how its meanings are linked
to the political and material conditions of its production and
circulation.37 Like Letter to Jane, November illustrates how an
image’s meaning and status are uncertain in relation to specific
political, cultural, and discursive practices, and Steyerl sees that the
globalized media circuit of contemporary society precipitates this
situation. At the same time, however, the film demonstrates that
this fundamental instability of the image, which Steyerl refers to as
shaping “documentary uncertainty,” constitutes “the core quality
of contemporary documentary modes as such,”38 by exposing
Wolf’s traveling images as the mutual determination of truth and
fiction, the battleground of contested meanings, and the place for
alternative political constellations.
In November, Steyerl associates the fluid meaning of Wolf,
determined by the imbrication of fact and fiction, with the
technological and aesthetic transition from filmic to post-filmic
media. The film starts with footage from the feminist martial
arts movie that portrays Wolf as a tough and glamorous heroine
(Figure 4.4). This footage accompanies a frontal close-up of a
film projector emitting glaring light, which corresponds to the
 Intermedial essay films 213

Figure 4.4 Film stills from Hito Steyerl, November (2004), courtesy the
artist and KOW, Berlin.

original Super 8-mm format of Steyerl’s movie. Steyerl also adds

the sound effect of the projector’s running to the original silent clip,
thereby suggesting that her act of remembering Andrea is initially
bound up with the movie’s celluloid materiality. The film’s ensuing
parts, however, focus on how Andrea’s image was given an array
of unexpected meanings as it was dissociated from its celluloid
materiality and subjugated to the network of post-filmic apparatuses,
encompassing video and the internet. Steyerl’s investigation of these
processes involves her analytical uses of video technology, which
render the images of Wolf/Ronahî as materially intermedial. She
plays the footage of Ronahî in the Kurdish resistance army, which
was shot in Super 8 mm and transferred to video. Here, Steyerl
presents a close-up of Ronahî’s profile in the form of oscillating
scan lines coupled with electronic noises and magnifies it to the
extent that it is decomposed into an array of pixelated dots, thus
becoming illegible (Figures 4.5 and 4.6). Given that the image comes
from the videotape that Steyerl received after Wolf’s death, this
suggests that it is a kind of poor image with a circulation predicated
on degradation caused by multiple copying and transmitting; her
voice-over confirms, “Images of armed struggle spread around the
globe by satellite channels.” T. J. Demos neatly observes that the
214 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figures 4.5 and 4.6 Film stills from Hito Steyerl, November (2004),
courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin.

exposure of video’s intrinsic malleability in this scene suggests the

unstable status of the Wolf/Ronahî image. “The poor quality of the
video,” he writes, “owing to multiple generations of copies and to
the recording of imagery directly off a TV screen, tends to derealize
the video’s referents.”39 Although I agree with Demos here, I would
add that this derealized image seems to render Wolf’s figure as the
interpenetration of Steyerl’s private memories of her and public
 Intermedial essay films 215

memories of her as Ronahî. This interpenetration structurally

corresponds to the transition from filmic to post-filmic media and
the intersection between the two.
At the same time, November suggests that Steyerl’s interest
in the materiality of video does more than foreground the post-
filmic conditions for producing and circulating poor images, as she
offers a self-reflexive demonstration of how to use it for analytical
purposes. In the footage of Ronahî in Iraq, shown on a TV screen
with a number of pixelated grids, Steyerl moves her video camera
as if touching its surface, pulling back to present the close-up of
Ronahî, who was responding to an interviewer’s question regarding
her comrades’ activities. The camera’s movement continues until
it frames the TV screen and the video player with which Steyerl
reviewed the video of Ronahî’s footage. In this way, Steyerl’s camera
performs an investigation of the ways in which video technologies
associated with the televisual and internet apparatuses are used
both for the unpredictable flow of images and for the critical
scrutiny of them. The dissolves from Ronahî’s video imagery to her
icon on the flag card, repeated several times throughout the film,
suggest that the capacities of video technologies to extract and edit
footage allude to the contemporary digital networks of circulation
and appropriation.40 Steyerl’s narration summarizes this point as
follows, referring to the protagonist not by her political persona
of Ronahî, but as Andrea, the filmmaker’s close friend: “Andrea
becomes herself a traveling image, wandering over the globe, an
image passed on from hand to hand, copied and reproduced by
printing presses, video recorders, and the Internet.”
Steyerl’s use of video in November to recombine images also
applies to her investigation into the underlying political meaning
of her amateur martial arts movie and the recontextualization of
it within the tradition of alternative filmmaking. The film brings
together excerpts from Russ Meyer’s film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(1965), as well as clips from Bruce Lee’s last movie Game of Death
(1978) that portrays him as a resurrected hero fighting against
Western domination. These fragments of popular movies do not
simply illustrate the subtexts that inspired Steyerl’s production of the
amateur movie; they also are given subversive political meanings.
Meyer’s female warriors and Lee as icons of global proletarian and
postcolonial revolutions are juxtaposed with footage from Sergei
Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928),
216 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), and, most importantly, René Viénet’s

Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973), a Situationist film based on
the appropriation of a Hong Kong martial arts film to describe
the conflict between proletarians and bureaucrats in a capitalist
state. Steyerl’s incorporation of all these films stresses that video
technologies can be used to recontextualize images—even poor
images—as a way of developing the alternative essay film based
on the methods of appropriation of the filmmaker, who considers
them to be effective tools reflecting his/her engagement with
political and cultural issues. Pablo Lafuente remarks concerning
the use of images from popular movies in November, “Because of
their availability and appeal within a popular culture realm, they
must be approached as tools within an ideological struggle.”41
It is also worth noting that Steyerl’s juxtaposition of borrowed
images traverses between the formats of film and video. Although
most of the movies appear as original filmic images, images of
Viénet’s Situationist masterpiece are populated with several scan
lines, underlining the fact that Steyerl watched the film with her
VHS player. The particular status of Viénet’s film echoes Steyerl’s
method of working with found footage in November. It hints at her
dependence on the Situationists’ strategy of appropriation, by which
an original image is decontextualized and given new meanings as it
is linked to particular political and discursive contexts. Considered
this way, the material distinction of the images from Viénet’s film
suggests that Steyerl adopted video technologies as an effective
tool for updating this Situationist strategy as a formal technique of
avant-garde filmmaking developed in the celluloid age of cinema.
In Free Fall deepens Steyerl’s speculation on poor images in the
post-filmic apparatuses and their underlying material and cultural
dimensions. Taking as its starting point the debris of a Boeing 707
aircraft in California’s Mojave Desert, this video essay explores
the history of the airplane in terms of two intellectual discourses:
first, how the airplane in general has been imagined and depicted
in popular media, and second, how it can be regarded as a mass-
produced object that has its own life cycle according to industrial
or cultural use. As for the first discourse, images of plane crashes
and hijackings culled from various Hollywood blockbuster films,
TV trailers, and music videos allegorize the precarious political
and economic conditions of the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, including the most recent financial crisis in 2008.42
 Intermedial essay films 217

Incorporating the Boeing 707 in this manner is extended into

Steyerl’s second discourse that considers it as an object marked
by its own history. After being used for an Israeli hostage rescue
operation in the Entebbe International Airport in 1976 (known
as Operation Entebbe), the Boeing 707 was adapted in several
Hollywood movies about terrorist hijackings and, eventually, to
the famous explosion scene in Jan DeBont’s blockbuster film Speed
(1994). The concluding part of this discourse tells of the unexpected
recycling of the aircraft’s remnants after the explosion; they were
sold to Chinese companies that recycled the aluminum in them to
manufacture DVDs. Inspired by Sergei Tretyakov’s “The Biography
of the Object” (1929), in which he argues that any produced object
includes the traces of social relationships, Steyerl interweaves the
tangled, seemingly unrelated, narrative threads about the Boeing
airliner into her thesis that the cultural and economic conditions
that determined its uses are revealed when we focus on its multiple
aspects as both object and material.
In In Free Fall, Steyerl deploys a range of post-filmic technologies
to assemble and analyze images of the aircraft, which are
consolidated into the two intellectual discourses on its traveling life
cycles. As Sven Lütticken observes, Steyerl juxtaposes the images of
the airplane’s disastrous descent with a “post-cinematic montage
indebted to MTV: new footage and appropriated footage generate a
dizzying, fragmented map unfolding in nonlinear and multifaceted
time.”43 The repetition of these images throughout the video essay
suggests the catastrophic sense of history that resists the modern
idea of its ongoing progression toward the future. These nonlinear,
rapid, and fragmentary aspects of Steyerl’s montage do not merely
serve to allegorize the recurring crisis of contemporary capitalism
but also to evoke Fredric Jameson’s characterization of video’s
postmodern aesthetics (emblematized by MTV and television since
the 1980s) as expressive of the schizophrenic conditions of late-
capitalist media culture.44 What is more important, however, is
that Steyerl's fragmentary juxtaposition of the imagery is derived
from her awareness of the images circulated by the network of
post-filmic technologies as poor images. In the film’s opening
sequence, Steyerl presents images of disasters from Hollywood
blockbuster movies in low quality (low definition and the lack of
vividness in colors), thereby stressing that they were downloaded
and recut from an array of digital files available from the DVD
218 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

and internet (Figure 4.7). Though her fast-paced montage of images

creates a visually hallucinatory and schizophrenic experience in
which the boundaries between the reality of disasters and fiction
are fundamentally blurred, their overall low quality mitigates the
original spectacular power grounded in the theatrical screening of
the blockbuster movies from which they are extracted. Accordingly,
the images create an intermedial relationship between the movies’
filmic origins and the post-filmic apparatuses (e.g., DVD and
internet) that liberate them and throw them into the circuit of
purportedly endless circulation. In this intermedial relationship, the
images of disaster are perceived as poor images that have undergone
relocation, transformation, and deterioration. Steyerl highlights
the images’ status as poor images by contrasting them with high-
definition imagery documenting the landscape of the destroyed
Boeing 707 and interviews with specialists who tell of its life cycle.
In doing so, she not only stresses the material conditions of the
poor images but also suggests their implication in relation to the
contemporary capitalist culture. In other words, the deteriorated
aspect of the images in the form of low-quality files serves as a
metaphor for the catastrophic situation of contemporary visual
culture—the overabundance of degraded images across the digital
network.
As for her second discourse developed in In Free Fall, Steyerl
uses the DVD and low-cost digital compositing to emphasize
the double status of poor images as object and material—filmic
fragments that travel across and exist in different post-filmic
mediations. In the middle of the film, images of crashed airliners
from the opening sequence—including the explosion scene from
Speed—are resurrected in a portable DVD player (Figure 4.8).
As she complicates the status of poor images derived from the
intermedial relationship between the filmic image and post-filmic
apparatuses, Steyerl exposes in a self-reflexive manner the device
in which her post-filmic montage is grounded—the DVD, which
allows for nonlinear editing, ripping, and looping. Additionally,
she strengthens her association between the poor images and their
materiality by inserting a CGI animation in which the airliner is
metamorphosed into a DVD disc spinning around the earth. As
David Riff rightly notes, this vignette suggests that the aluminum
of the Boeing 707 “can be used again and again, like the ‘poor
images’ of the crash itself.”45 Steyerl’s own comment validates this
 Intermedial essay films 219

Figures 4.7 and 4.8 Film stills from Steyerl, In Free Fall (2010), courtesy
the artist and KOW, Berlin.

point: “A VOB file on a DVD is pretty real, as it is tied to different

networks and markets of raw materials, in this case, for example,
metals and plastic, both of which are often recycled.”46 Although
this CGI sequence of the DVD demonstrates Steyerl’s idea of poor
images as a compelling opposition to the assumption that the
digital marks a shift from materiality to immateriality, her use of
the digital chromatic effect—a compositing technique developed
from analogue video and television—leads to another argument
regarding her materialism. That is, the materiality of digitized poor
images is linked to the fact that they are crystallized into different
configurations in tandem with the different techniques and interfaces
that circulate and transform them. In the ensuing sequence, Steyerl
recites her reflections on Tretyakov’s “The Biography of the Object”
220 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

against the backdrop of rear projection, in which some excerpts

of previously recycled images, including images of disasters, are
played again. Her multiplication of (originally filmic) poor images
in different post-filmic techniques and interfaces—first, in her
post-filmic montage; second, via DVD; and finally, in digital rear
projection—leads to her thesis on the relevance of Tretyakov’s
argument that “matter continues to exist in different forms.” Here,
it becomes clear that Steyerl does more than consider post-filmic
digital apparatuses responsible for the mere proliferation of poor
images. She recognizes their availability to anyone who aspires
to unveil traces of appropriation and manipulation and thereby
recomposes them into “incoherent, artificial, and alternative
political bodies.”47

Intermedial Palimpsests in Lynne Sachs’s

experimental documentary films
Sachs has produced a number of short and feature-length
experimental documentary films that explore the intricate
relationship between broader historical experiences and her personal
reflections on them. Based on this intersection of the personal
and the public, Sachs’s films present several formal attributes of
the essay film, including her shifting presence as author via voice-
over, intertitled commentaries and camera movement, the mixture
of multiple time frames, deployment of multiple (poetic, reflexive,
and participatory) documentary modes, and the use of collages
to highlight the heterogeneity of found materials or the density
of the sound-image continuum. These attributes enable Sachs’s
films to fit into the category of the “experimental documentary,”
a term which, according to Lucas Hilderbrand, refers to the wide-
ranging intersections of documentaries and experimental practices
aimed at breaking “from a certain realist, objective, authentic
tradition of non-fiction filmmaking.”48 Though works pertaining
to experimental documentaries are so various as to encompass
several subgenres of documentaries (e.g., essay film, animated
documentary, and documentary installation) that are distinct in
technique or experiential platform, they expose a concern with
form and mediation by drawing from the traditions of experimental
 Intermedial essay films 221

film a range of aesthetic elements. These include nonstandard

cinematography, layered or painterly images, fragmented narrative
structures, dissonance of sound and image, and celluloid-based
or digital visual effects. Such aesthetic elements of visuality and
temporality, Hilderbrand notes, “are the means through which
historical revision, contemporary politics, and alternative futures
are explored.”49 Sachs acknowledged that she has utilized a variety
of visual manipulations of her records and materials to introduce
the elements of uncertainty and imagination. She explains that
these manipulations are designed to transcend the belief in the
transparent representation of history and memory and promote an
understanding of them as derived from a complex mediation of past
and present:

My films . . . expose what I see as the limits of conventional

documentary representations of both the past and the present.
Infusions of colored “brush strokes” catapult a view into
contemporary Vietnam. Floating drinking glasses moving across
a Muslim cemetery in Sarajevo evoke wartime without water.
Pulsing, geometric mattes suspended in cinematic space block
news footage of a bombing in Tel Aviv. With each project, I have
had to search for a visual approach to looking at trauma and
conflict.50

Sachs’s deployment of her subjectivities in images marked by multiple

relationships between shifting registers of media can be found in
States of Unbelonging (2005), a film that offers a multilayered
reflection on the violence in the Middle East by creating a dynamic
exchange between the public and the private—between the public
portrait of Revital Ohayon (an Israeli filmmaker killed in Kibbutz
Metzer on the West Bank) and Sachs’s letters to an Israeli friend
named Nir. The film starts with Sachs’s voice-over narration of
her letter to Nir regarding a news report that describes the murder
of Ohayon. This incident triggered Sachs to contemplate how her
historical consciousness had been shaped and thereby fragmented
through her personal experiences of violent events, which were
seemingly repeated over time throughout the world. She writes
to Nir: “Did you ever have the feeling that the history you are
experiencing has no shape? Even as a teenager I was obsessed
with history’s shifts and ruptures.” Sachs’s personal understanding
222 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

of history through “shifts and ruptures” is synchronized with a

dense constellation of images on violence mediated by different
apparatuses. The first series of images includes footage of an Israeli
soldier walking the streets, which Sachs shot with digital video and
edited with a blurry slow-motion effect (Figure 4.9). In the next
series, we see a group of Palestinian women getting away from a
terrorist attack, whose found images shot in 16 mm are out of focus
and transformed into an abstract, blurred image by video effects.
Despite the differences in media used to capture the images, the
blurry, dense visuality common to the two series of images suggests
that Sachs’s historical consciousness is founded upon blurring the
edges between her personal recollection of the violence and the
public documentation of it. This interpenetration of the personal
and public resonates with a key aspect of essay film. The sense of
obscurity in these two series, too, makes paradoxically visible the
ruptures and gaps between the ruins of a past and the fragments
of the present as forming a history of violence. It is amplified in
the ensuing footage of news reports that cover terror in Israel, in
which the oscillating scan lines and pixelated shapes signal that
the fragmentary and multilayered aspects of the televisual flow
structure Sachs’s own understanding of global violence. Viewed
together, Sachs’s deliberate transformation of the images and her
dense collages in three series appear to follow what Catherine

Figure 4.9 Film stills from Lynne Sachs, States of Unbelonging (2005),
courtesy Lynne Sachs.
 Intermedial essay films 223

Russell characterizes as the “apocalyptic” imagination of found

footage filmmaking in the postmodern age. Accordingly, an
imagination renders the archival record of the past excessive and
discontinuous as a way of challenging the linear and transparent
narrative of history.51 Seen from this perspective, the opening
sequence in States of Unbelonging posits as its formal principle the
intermedial exchange of different media images (16 mm, television,
and digital video), which serves as an allegory of the fragmented
understanding of history in the contemporary global media age as
ruins of the past that are transmitted in the present with multi-
technical and multi-geographical flows.
Corrigan has written about the pivotal role of various found
materials in configuring Sachs’s historical consciousness in States of
Unbelonging as follows: “Materialized as found footage, old home
movies, and rebroadcast television news, history surfaces in the
course of the film as the shifting and superimposed constellations
of different geographies, textualities, time zones, and imagistic
fabrics.”52 What should be added to the formation of “shifting
and superimposed constellations” is Sachs’s intermedial approach
to these various medial images. In another sequence, for example,
she deliberately transforms the archival filmic records related
to Revital’s past life with an array of video effects and her self-
reflexive evocation of the filmic and post-filmic apparatuses. This
sequence starts with a young girl (Sachs’s daughter) playing in front
of a picture frame; simultaneously, a television set plays a series of
clips from Revital’s own films. The next series of images presents
a superimposition of multiple frames in varying sizes that contain
Revital’s home movies shot in Super 8 mm during different periods
of his life (Figure 4.10). The collage effect of video technology is
responsible for this multiplication of frames, but the overall imagery
in this series is predicated on the complicated interrelations of film
and video as they create a fractured montage of different pasts. The
larger frame located in each image’s background is marked by the
half-bleached look of Super 8 mm, which alludes to the passage of
time, whereas the rest of the frames contain images characterized by
video’s refined look. Moreover, the two series contrast according to
delivery of the image. That is, the larger frame preserves the quality
of film projection (coupled with the sound effect of a projector’s
operation at the end of the series), and the rest of the frames are
presented three-dimensionally as though they were part of a multi-
224 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 4.10 Film stills from Lynne Sachs, States of Unbelonging (2005),
courtesy Lynne Sachs.

screen piece installed in a gallery. Viewed together, the two series

create a dynamic exchange between the original record of film
and its new aesthetic state mediated by post-filmic technologies.
In this sense, this sequence forms a palimpsest not simply of past
and present or different pasts, but also of different media. Sachs’s
own consciousness and memory, as well as Revital’s subjectivity,
are articulated in this palimpsest as thrown into a permanent state
of “unbelonging.” The intermedial encounter of film and video is
seen to play a crucial role in shaping this state as it results in the
obscured, drifting, and fragmented aspects of past images.
The Last Happy Day (2009) also offers viewers a dense
palimpsest of competing categories related to essay films—the
personal and public, past and present—in the form of intermedial
encounters between filmic and post-filmic technologies. Sachs
presents an experimental portrait of her distant cousin Sandor
Lenard, a Jewish-Hungarian medical doctor who lived in a
permanent state of exile: Lenard’s nomadic life consisted of a series
of journeys. He left Germany before the Second World War broke
out, stayed in Rome under the Fascist regime, and worked for the
US government as a forensic anthropologist who reconstructed
skeletons out of the bones of dead American soldiers after the war’s
end. During his idyllic life in Brazil, he authored Winnie Ille Pu, a
 Intermedial essay films 225

Latin translation of Winnie-the-Pooh. To reconstruct Lenard’s life

across geographical borders and traumatic encounters with violence
of the twentieth century, as well as his attempts to distance himself
from the violence and find peace and meditation, Sachs deploys a
variety of formal devices and materials in ways that fit into her idea
of the experimental, essayistic documentary. Her filmed interviews
with Lenard’s son and his second wife as documentary records
are intercut with the shots of her children playacting Pooh stories.
She also uses heterogeneous materials that differ in format (Super
8 mm video, film stock footage, and still photos) related to Lenard’s
memory. By interweaving these materials, Sachs attempts to create
a constellation of different memory objects as her understanding of
the past.
As in the case of States of Unbelonging, Sachs uses a range of
digital video effects in her recombination of archival documents
about Lenard’s life to reactivate past events as complex and
obscured encounters with personal memories and history and to
highlight the “shifts and ruptures” as marking and simultaneously
bridging the distance between the past and her present. In the
extended sequence of footage that encompasses Lenard’s life in
Germany, Rome, and Brazil, Sachs not only assembles its images in
chronological order but also superimposes some of them digitally
to configure the palimpsest of Leonard’s memory as fractured and
multilayered (Figure 4.11). The digital frame-within-a-frame effect
applied to the scenes in which Lenard’s second wife and his son are
interviewed as they hold his photos creates a fundamental disparity
between the past and the present—that is, between Lenard’s own
account and their limited memories of his life.
Sachs’s intermedial approach to the archival images related to
Lenard’s life stands out most clearly in the sequence that depicts
his traumatic experience during the Second World War. Here,
the archival images of violence in 16-mm film are colored with
a digitally desaturated brown, and the Super 8-mm film footage
of a street in Rome is presented as digitally transformed negative
imagery, at the center of which an oscillating gray line signals the
footage’s chemical decay as the marker of the passage of time
(Figure 4.12). The coexistence of the filmic records and the digital
effects complicates the ways in which Lenard’s memory of the
war and his life in exile are articulated. The material properties of
16-mm and Super 8-mm film give rise to the viewer’s recognition
226 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figures 4.11 and 4.12 Film stills from Sachs, The Last Happy Day
(2009), courtesy Lynne Sachs.

of the records as archival documents from the distant past, and the
digital effects added to them amplify Lenard’s horror and confusion
described in his letter to his relative (William Goodman). Still, these
added effects spring from Sachs’s imaginary approach to Lenard’s
troubled psyche vis-à-vis his traumatic experiences of war and exile.
Sachs confesses, “Through an evolving, highly saturated visual
language, I contrast the haunting confinement and violence Sandor
experienced in Rome during the Nazi occupation with the verdant
emptiness of his later life in remotest Brazil.”53 Seen in this light,
 Intermedial essay films 227

digital video’s desaturation and negative effects mark the distance

between Lenard’s remembrances of the past (during his lifetime)
and Sachs’s effort to retrieve these memories in the present. The
deliberate intermingling of various effects with archival documents,
then, suggests that both Lenard’s recollection and Sachs’s recreation
of it inevitably are predicated on the interpenetration of fact and
imagination, resulting in the dynamic coexistence of visibility and
obscurity on the image surfaces.

Intermedial processing of home movies:

Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems and
Tarnation
Uses of prerecorded, personal, and moving images in the works
of Sachs examined above represent a tendency of essay-related
films to rely heavily on footage of home movies from the 1990s
and beyond.54 The growing employment of the footage about
the personal life of a subject—both the subject filmed and the
filmmaker who films about him/herself—in the contexts of
documentaries, experimental films, and essay films certainly
compels us to examine how it affects modes of filmmaking and the
nature of resulting films. Thus, we must speculate upon the true
status of home movies. The primary reason that home movies have
drawn the sustained interest of film scholars is that they are viewed
as providing access to personal memories as well as marginalized
histories. More importantly, the home movie is seen as existing
differently from commercial or professional films, because it often
remains unfinished, and because it is devoid of the technical and
aesthetic devices required for the commercial or professional films.
As Patricia R. Zimmermann succinctly remarks, “Home movies
constitute an imaginary archive that is never completed, always
fragmentary, vast, infinite.”55 These features of home movies—
incompleteness, fragmentation and vastness—form the basis for
certain innovative methods and aesthetics of documentary or
experimental filmmaking. Zimmermann argues that amateur
filmmaking is an example, inasmuch as it is capable of providing
a vital access to “the more variegated and multiple practices of
popular memory, a concretization of memory into artifacts that
228 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

can be remobilized, recontextualized, and reanimated.”56 Since this

thematic shift implies the application of more rigorous methods of
utilizing home movie footage (besides adopting it for narrational
and illustrative purposes), it also signals that the filmmaker’s role
as editor has as much weight as his/her role as director of the
film. As Marsha and Devin Orgeron suggest, “The documentary
filmmaker working with extant biographical or autobiographical
video material performs, then, a kind of secondary editorial role in
which relevant video footage is assembled.”57
The heightened importance of the filmmaker’s editorial role in
“remobilizing and recontexualizing” home movie footage in the
contexts of personal and autobiographical documentaries, I argue,
has much to do with the transition from celluloid to video in the
production and circulation of home movies. James M. Moran
highlights as a key factor of distinguishing home video from home
movie analogue video’s several capacities unavailable from celluloid:
first, the ability to close the gap between production and reception,
illustrated by the simultaneity of recording an event and viewing
it, second, the everydayness of a VCR and domestic monitor, and
finally, the VCR’s controls to “manipulate the flow of images . . .
[and] . . . allow for intervention, analysis, and play.”58 Even though
Moran cites material differences between film and analogue video,
his insight into the latter’s capacities points to the pivotal role of
digital video in the pervasive uses of home movies in personal and
autobiographical documentaries as well as in the developments of
technical and aesthetic strategies to transform their footage. Such
scholars as Jane Simon and Susan Aasman have argued recently
that digital technologies allow for the rehabilitation of recycling
home movies in the context of amateur or small-gage film practices,
as they engender the unprecedented proliferation of materials in
old media and make them unstable, fluid, and dynamic.59 This view
on the impact of digital technologies on the shifting status of the
private archive is compelling, but it also awaits further elaboration
in terms of how digital video is used to appropriate and transform
the images of home movies in old media. The digital editing system
can be applied to footage shot with a digital video camera as well as
images shot in a variety of formats (e.g., Super 8 mm, 16 mm, VHS)
in encoded forms. The latter partially maintain their material and
technical traces, signifying the pastness of their records; examples
include shaky camera movements, light flares, and scratches
 Intermedial essay films 229

inscribed in home movie footage shot in celluloid. The digital

editing system may leave these traces in the home movie scenes
intact to stress their pastness, or it may endow the scenes with a
variety of visual effects to render the filmmaker’s present memory
of them to be fractured, multilayered, and unstable. These two
approaches suggest that digital technologies situate the filmmaker
working with home movies for the personal, autobiographic
documentary as the editor who identifies him/herself with both old
and new media. Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems (Holden, 2004,
hereafter abbreviated Trains of Winnipeg) and Tarnation (Caouette
2003) demonstrate that a filmmaker’s traversing between, and
intermixing, the two media contribute to a fragmented and hybrid
representation of his/her memory.
As part of Holden’s cross-media project that includes a book of
poems, a CD of their voice recordings, and a multimedia website,
Trains of Winnipeg combines 14 individual short films that are
consolidated into a narrative of his personal memories associated
with his travels across Canada from childhood. As suggested by the
project’s title, Holden takes a poetic approach to the short films,
not simply by adapting his self-written poems but also by creating
a dense collage of the metaphoric and lyrical images that he filmed
throughout his life. At the same time, Trains of Winnipeg is a diary
film (a subgenre of the essay film) in that all of its shorts were filmed
at different times during Holden’s life as expressions of his personal
emotions and thoughts derived from everyday observations and
remembrances. As Corrigan notes, diary films “map the expressions
of an individual according to different chronologies and rhythms . . .
and invariably according to various rhythms usually associated
with daily life and experience.”60 What is notable in Trains of
Winnipeg is that its temporal multiplicity as a characteristic of diary
film is inscribed in its formal and material layers. Holden’s dense
juxtaposition of images from his personal footage expresses his
subjectivity as drifting and fractured, thus configuring his memories
as marked by overlapping temporal experiences. More significantly,
these unstable dimensions of his subjectivity and memories are
materially linked to the heterogeneity of the media that he employed
for shooting his personal movies. Holden employed 8 mm and Super
8 mm as well as several formats of video (VHS, Pixelvision, DVCam,
Digital Betacam, etc.) for filming, mixed them via digital video
editing—sometimes coupled with hand processing of celluloid—
230 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

and transferred the edited footage to 35 mm. This hybrid approach

to both film and video aims to associate the formal and material
differences of the formats with those of Holden’s memories of the
past and present (or different periods of the past) and bridge the
gap between experimental film and video art. Holden himself has
confessed, “I’ve done a lot of exploring of the differences between
using film and video cameras, which offer different experiences. . . .
The mixing is now very interesting to watch and be a part of.
It’s about much more than technology; it’s two cultures blending
together.”61
18,000 Dead in Gordon’s Head (A Found Film) (2002), the
fifth short film in Trains of Winnipeg, guides viewers toward an
intermedial traveling of film footage as a fragment of Holden’s
memory through the use of various media. This section consists
of Holden’s subjective imagery of rediscovering a lost personal
movie—one that he shot in 1983—inspired by the tragic murder of
a teenage girl in his hometown. Holden’s poetic voice-over narrates
the impact of the event on his younger self, as well as the material
processes by which the film’s footage was shot and later found. The
footage had initially been shot in Super 8-mm film, but it remained
lost for twenty years until he found the crude VHS copy—a video
recording of the projection of it onto a wall. Upon his rediscovery,
Holden realized that this copy provided him with evidence of his
earlier attempt to visually document the place where the girl had
been shot to death (in front of the Gordon Head Store). He also
recognized that the history of the production and rediscovery of
the copy could allude to the imbrication of memory and forgetting.
Thus, he refilmed the video images in ways that highlighted the
material traces of the original Super 8-mm film, with grains and
glitches on its surface. Then, he edited them digitally, enhancing
some of the frames and reassembling them with superimposition
and looping. As Scott MacDonald explains, the resulting section
“materializes the distance between now and then.”62 Holden’s
original footage shot in Super 8-mm film gives testimony to his
effort to capture the absent traces of the crime in the ordinary
atmosphere of his hometown. We see Holden revisiting the location
of the murder, cars moving along its streets, and the town’s residents
walking into and out of the store. All of these images invoke not
simply the distant past of the murder and Holden’s original filming,
but also the structural affinity between his memory of the past and
 Intermedial essay films 231

his material record of it. The images’ colors and shapes are blurred
to various degrees, and some frames are overexposed. Along with
these elements of obscurity and invisibility, the glitches on the
surface underline the material decay of the original 8-mm footage
(Figure 4.13). In this way, the material aspects suggest the process
of forgetting inherent in Holden’s memory.
The images in the footage, too, testify to a profound relationship
between media and the formation of human memory, one between
the traveling of Holden’s record through the different media (Super
8 mm, VHS, and digital video) and the distance of time that makes
his memory of it obscured. Along with the oblique, degraded
images of the town, Holden inserts the Super 8-mm white leader
marked by a red stripe in a pulsating rhythm. The white, abstract
portions repetitively presented throughout this short film suggest
the processes by which the footage—representative of Holden’s
original object of memory—underwent erasure through its multiple
mediations. They present the blank screen as the wall onto which
the original Super 8-mm film was projected, as well as several
scan lines derived from the VHS quality of the film’s copy. In these
intermedial processes, Holden foregrounds the clashes between film
and video, signaling the temporal gap between the time of original
filming in Super 8 mm and that of editing the celluloid footage.
Digital procedures adapted to Holden’s editing, then, amplify

Figure 4.13 Film still from Clive Holden, 18,000 Dead in Gordon’s
Head (A Found Film) (2002), courtesy Clive Holden.
232 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the material intersection of film and VHS while also producing a

couple of effects on his memories of the murder. The digital looping
propels Holden’s intermediated images to move in and out of sync
with his reading of the poem. Since its repetitive presentation of the
images also suggests Holden’s obsession with returning to both the
moment of the murder (which he had not witnessed) and that of
his visit to the place, it ultimately expresses his memories as based
on the continual negotiation between recollection and forgetting.
Likewise, the digital superimposition of the store and cars
passing along on the street highlights the extent to which digital
technologies help to render Holden’s memories fragmentary and
nonlinear. Although these two features are derived from templates
of digital video editing, they also suggest that Holden’s memories
are constructed in ways that traverse between the different past
moments (distinct in film and via VHS), and between the moments
and the present.
In Hitler! (Revisited) [2004], Holden reworks a home movie
from 1994 about his older brother Niall, who had suffered with
mental health problems since his mid-teens. In the lingering close-
up of Niall’s face, the viewer is able to see the dynamic coexistence
of different media properties, as in 18,000 Dead in Gordon’s Head.
The close-up was initially made in Hi-8 video and superimposed
with grains, stains, scratches, and lines varying in color (yellow,
blue, green, pink, etc.) derived from the texture of Super 8 mm
(Figure 4.14). Holden edited the mixed-media footage in DigiBeta,
slowing it and emphasizing its oscillating yellow or blue lines with
electronic flicker effects. The reedited footage was later transferred
to 16 mm, which allow the resulting images to maintain the material
and figurative differences between all the involved media. Holden
calls this process “a crude version of what is now called a ‘digital
intermediate’ process.”63 Holden’s “intermediate process” created
the discrepancy between media on the surface, suggesting not
simply his shifting understanding of his relation to Niall, but also
the temporal gaps between shooting and editing. In its concluding
parts, Holden himself is present in front of a smaller screen onto
which the figure of Niall is projected (Figure 4.14). The small screen
signals the originality of the 8-mm format encompassing both film
and video; Holden’s action of stretching his arm onto the surface of
the screen (indeed, onto the surface of his 8-mm records) represents
his effort to retrieve his complicated and elusive memories of Niall.
 Intermedial essay films 233

Figure 4.14 Film still from Holden, Hitler! (Revisited) (2004), courtesy
Clive Holden.

In sum, Trains of Winnipeg is an intermedial essay film that

features hybrid images of Holden’s memories as expressive of
“a collector’s instinct and passion for images of ‘life’ and images
mediated by all possible media.”64 The hypermediation of the
various media involved in the production and processing of the
home movies is presented by dense collages, superimposition,
and juxtaposition of images that differ in format and materiality.
These forms suggest the fragmented, decentered essayistic subject
as obsessed with collecting and archiving in his/her shooting and
editing. In terms of shooting, the different cameras incorporating
Super 8 mm, 8 mm, video, and DV testify to Holden’s unstable
temporal and spatial journey that involves the continual encounter
between remembering and forgetting. Similarly, the deliberate
combination of celluloid-based processing and digital editing leads
to a virtually endless flow of texts, images, voices, and sound effects
as Holden’s nonchronological stream of consciousness.
Tarnation, an experimental, autobiographical documentary
about the story of Caouette’s mother Renee, her mental illness,
and his troubled relationship with her during his youth, presents a
rich and complex collage of disparate materials. The film combines
footage of home movies and amateur films that Caouette produced
in different media (both film and analogue video) since age 11:
family photos, answering machine tapes, sound recordings, and
contemporary footage from digital video. These various personal
domestic documents are intercut with a multitude of movie and TV
234 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

excerpts related to his fantasies and nightmares since childhood.

Caouette’s expansive, whirlwind incorporation of these disparate
materials, as well as his admixture of different stylistic approaches,
including the video diary and experimental film, testifies to his
identity as, in the words of Russell, a “collagist and editor” who
inscribes his self-identity in his autobiographic text as diverse,
fragmented, and hybrid.65 Although the identity as “collagist and
editor” is applied broadly to autobiographical filmmakers who
blend forms of documentaries with those of experimental films,
it is noteworthy that Caouette’s strategies for incorporating the
vast amount of diverse materials and using them to reconfigure his
memories as fragmented and unstable are undoubtedly indebted
to his use of iMovie software.66 Accordingly, Tarnation, as Anna
Poletti neatly summarizes, “depicts with rare artistry and force the
extent to which popular culture and autobiographical acts form a
network of representational practices, which, in conjunction with
the technologies of moving-image recording and editing, can result
in densely collaged, relational representations of identity.”67
In Tarnation, Caouette adopts what Efrén Cuevas sees as
two different ways of recycling home movies and other personal
documents in the autobiographical documentary: “naturalization”
and “contradiction.” Naturalization refers to the most primary and
standardized uses of personal documents, keeping their original
values and qualities intact in ways that guarantee their authenticity
as archival materials of personal lives from the past. Contradiction,
by contrast, is relevant when the filmmaker destabilizes the meaning
of original documents by questioning their truth-value or adding to
them new supplementary meanings. Autobiographical filmmakers,
Cuevas notes, depend upon this strategy when they narrate
“traumatic events in their family past, forcing the contrast between
their standard happy portraits of domestic footage and the harsh
events of their family past.”68 Considering these two strategies helps
us to illuminate the ways in which various audiovisual materials
in Tarnation are perceived and signified. The footage shot with
old media appears to retain its material and technical qualities as
the hallmarks of home movies and videos. Such technical flaws
of Super 8 mm as underexposure, flickers, scratches, and shaky
camera movements are clearly noticeable throughout the footage
that covers periods of Caouette’s growth. Similarly, Caouette’s self-
documentation of his childhood is characterized by footage in low
 Intermedial essay films 235

resolution and scan lines on image surfaces, explicating the traces

of VHS and Betamax. In addition to these various moving images,
Caouette deals with still images related to Renee in a similar way
as he does with Super 8 mm. The still images of Renee’s early life
cycles, which depict her childhood injury, shock treatment, and
her marriage and divorce, are clearly seen to spring from analogue
photographs. Those images of Renee’s troubled life after the birth
of Jonathan are wedded to the scratched lines, grains, and flickers—
all observable in the old filmstrip of celluloid (Figure 4.15).
Even though these material signs offer viewers an archival
effect so that the analogue documents are perceived as fragments
of personal memories from the distant pasts of Jonathan and
his mother, Caouette, too, employs a variety of digital editing
techniques to create contradictory visual elements that block the
viewer’s transparent understanding of the documents and thereby
suggests the unstable and fractured aspects of his memory. The
digitally multiplied photographic images of Renee and Jonathan
contribute to configuring both as split and traumatized (Figure
4.16). In addition, Caouette uses blurring and colorization effects
to transform certain photos of Renee, therefore signaling that his
memory of her has receded since his childhood; further, it has
been distorted. These digital effects, in mirroring, decomposing,

Figure 4.15 A screen capture from Jonathan Caouette, Tarnation (2003).

236 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 4.16 A screen capture from Jonathan Caouette, Tarnation (2003).

fracturing, and multiplying the analogue materials, eventually

are consolidated into the kaleidoscopic excess that frustrates any
linear understanding of Caouette’s memory. Instead, they render
it contradictory, unstable, and subject to a process of ongoing
construction. As Rascaroli relevantly summarizes, Caouette’s
dense surrealist collage of multiple media images via his digital
effects enables Tarnation to be a film in which “the tendencies
to narcissism, hybridism, fragmentation and instability typical of
digital self-representation meet with the autoethnographer’s self-
inscription in his or her film as avant-garde collagist and editor.”69
Caouette’s predilection for incorporating multiple images
different in source and format and rendering them discordant
and shattered via the technical palettes of digital editing software
can be compared to Daniel Reeves’s Obsessive Becoming (1995),
an experimental documentary based on Reeves’s extensive
incorporation and transformation of multiple media images related
to the history of his family with the help of analogue and digital
video processing. As Zimmermann notes, Reeves’s autobiographic
video testifies to “a virtuoso manipulation of a wide range of
technologies (including video, film, computers, analogue and digital
editing, original and archival footage, installation and photography,
single channel and multiple channels) to shred, layer and decompose
 Intermedial essay films 237

images (even archival war images) and excavate the psychic traumas
entangled within their formal designs.”70 Tarnation exemplifies
Caouette’s “virtuoso manipulation” of a wealth of images and their
corresponding media in ways that invoke Reeves’s deconstructive
shattering of his personal photographic and filmic documents.
More significantly, however, his intermedial fusion of images also
aims less at competing a director’s private memory with the official
representation of history, as in the case of Obsessive Becoming,
than at configuring his personal self and memory themselves as
complicated. His employment of these techniques suggests that
the excavated images form the rich and multiple layers of himself
that are derived from the dynamic exchange between traumas and
recoveries, as well as from the folded circuit of the real and the
imaginary. As the film progresses, the viewer is able to witness that
Caouette’s excessive manipulation of his past, recorded in different
media, serves to articulate his troubled self as the construction
of his fantasies. In the middle of the film, there is a split screen
sequence in which the past Super 8-mm documents of Renee and
Jonathan are juxtaposed with the videographic self-inscription of
his singing a song that expresses the fantasy of overcoming his
confusion. This technique is later extended into his kaleidoscopic
digital processing of not only his photographs and home movies,

Figure 4.17 A screen capture from Jonathan Caouette, Tarnation (2003).

238 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

but also a range of popular movies and music video clips that
stimulated his fantasies, including the fantasy of becoming a rock
star (Figure 4.17). Consequently, Caouette’s intermedial approach
leads to an in-between space in which photography, film, and
analogue video—or, personal documents and the fragments of
popular culture—are thrown into a perpetual interaction without
any hierarchy to establish hybridism and instability as typical of the
construction of the contemporary self and his/her memory aided by
digital technologies.

Conclusion
The intermedial essay films that I have discussed and examined
thus far suggest that, as in the cases of transitional found footage
practices, hybrid moving images based on the technical and aesthetic
intersection of film and post-filmic technologies should be read to
offer various responses to the post-media conditions of celluloid-
based cinema—namely, cinema’s dislocation from its celluloid
origins. Steyerl’s self-reflexive reframing of filmic images within
the video apparatus and her rigorous video-based juxtaposition of
them draw the viewer’s attention to their transformation into poor
images as a key material condition that underlies the production
and circulation of an image in the televisual and digital culture.
Sachs’s uses of video’s special effects to transform the filmic image
demonstrate her keen awareness of the enlarged distance between
its past and her present as an inherent condition of the experimental
documentary that reconfigures the memory and reality of the past
in the post-filmic era. Holden’s avant-garde poems and Caouette’s
autobiographical documentary, too, establish this distance as a
working condition, using video’s special effects to express the
fundamental instability of the directors’ personal filmic records and
to reconstruct their memory traces as intensified dialogue between
the past and present. In all cases, the four directors seek to express
the technical and aesthetic hybridity of their images. Marked by
the co-presence and interrelation of filmic and electronic/digital
properties, these images serve not simply to deepen their reflexive
approaches toward the essay film, but also to express their
subjectivity as negotiating between the filmic past and the post-
filmic present. Thus, their approach is as much dialectical as that
 Intermedial essay films 239

of transitional found footage practices: the technological transition

of the cinema from celluloid to electronic and digital technologies
makes its memory contingent and unstable, yet it is also from this
contingency and instability that the technologies are able to work
toward the reconstruction of memories with their transformative
capacities. Building on this dialectical consequence of post-media
conditions, intermedial essay films present their hybrid moving
images as commentaries on the transition of cinema to electronic
and digital media, as in the cases of transitional found footage
practices, and on the transitory nature of our technologically
mediated memories.
 chapter five

Cinematic video
installations: Hybridized
apparatuses inside the
black box

The gallery is not a repository for the splinters and debris

of cinema, which has not so much “expanded” . . . as
exploded. And video is clearly the agent that has
enabled the overlap of film and gallery.1
—Chris Darke

We might not be witnessing a long death of cinema

so much as a fragmented history of moments when
cinema is revivified at times of crisis.2
—George Baker

Introduction
“Between filmmakers drawn to installation art and ‘artists’ for
whom movies are raw material, there pulsates an enormous and
242 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

protean mass of all kinds of installations.”3 Raymond Bellour’s

remark above indicates the extent to which the mutual fascination
of cinema and contemporary art has led to a vast number of
experimentations with moving-image installations inside the gallery
wall since the 1990s. In these experimentations, cinema is moved to
museums by arthouse or experimental filmmakers such as Jean-Luc
Godard, Chantal Akerman, Harun Farocki, Atom Egoyan, Isaac
Julien, Abbas Kiarostami, etc., as well as by a number of visual artists
and the museums and galleries that have legitimatized the art of the
moving image. Dominique Païni has identified the artists’ divergent
practices by classifying the different generations of video artists. The
artists of the first and the second generations, encompassing Paik,
Vasulkas, Acconci (who Païni terms as “pioneers”) as well as Viola,
Gary Hill, and Tony Oursler (termed “painters and sculptors”),
explored the material and technical properties of video to establish
video art as a collection of figurative, temporal, sculptural, and
performative forms distinguished from film. Meanwhile, two
further recent generations are distinguished from the two previous
precursors in their overt use of cinematic references. These include
the “third generation” artists such as Douglas Gordon, Pierre
Huyghe, and Philippe Parreno, who are characterized as “recyclers”
since their installations appropriate and examine the cinema as an
art form and as a social institution, emphasizing cinema’s significant
and global influence in shaping their memories and artistic ideas.
The “fourth generation” artists, including Sam Taylor-Johnson,
Doug Aitken, and Eija-Liisa Ahtila, consider cinema as “an art
to be explored outside the sensorial captivity of the traditional
movie show.”4 In contrast to the modernist imperative common
to the first two generations, the artists pertaining to the third and
fourth generations channel video technologies into purposes other
than the self-reflexive investigation of their properties. As a result,
the technologies draw on the cinematic image and narrative, but
manipulate them in various ways, so that their elements are broken
down and the resulting structure and image of the installations
appear to be the amalgamation of cinema and video. In this
chapter, these installations will be characterized as “cinematic video
installations,” in order to analyze the ways in which the medial
components of cinema and video are correlated.
The burgeoning of cinematic video installations has initially
gained critical attention from art critics in terms of how and why
 Cinematic video installations 243

the artists have paid attention to cinema. In this view, cinema

reminds the artists not only of particular parts of certain films,
but also of the filmmaking process and the creativity and deftness
of the twentieth century’s greatest cineastes who triumphantly
controlled the collective audience. The artists’ reworking of
cinematic components is thus an attempt to speak retrospectively
about the extent to which the cineastes’ masterpieces and dexterity
were influential, thereby referring indirectly to their own artistic
conditions and desires. As Chris Dercon remarks, “The artists can
also compensate for the lack of audience for visual art by inventing
their own sympathetic and participatory audience, and making it
physically present. Four chairs imitate a movie theatre in order to
reinvent the presence of a sympathetic public. Here also, secondary
mimesis plays a part.”5 Considered in this way, the artists’ moving-
image installations are viewed as taking on a certain impurity caused
by their appropriation and reinterpretation of cinema, insofar as
they refer to cinema both as a form derived from film’s material
and technical components and as a discourse illustrating cinema’s
cultural and institutional influence on the visual arts.
This ambiguity, occupied simultaneously by cinema and the visual
arts, raises a crucial ontological question not simply of “what is
cinema,” but also of “where is cinema,”6 insofar as cinematic video
installations underscore the dispersal of cinematic components
across institutional boundaries—that is, inside the museum—other
than the movie theater, and across other forms of art (painting,
sculpture, architecture, etc.) than the standardized cinematic
formation rooted in the theater. The cinematic video installation
works are in this sense “post-cinematic” according to the double
meanings of the prefix “post”; while implying that cinematic video
installations emerge “after” the heyday of the cinema as the most
prominent and popular form of art in the twentieth century, the
term “post-cinematic” also indicates that they are derived from
and incorporate the desire to go “beyond” certain institutional
boundaries that define the cinema’s possibilities of forms, aesthetics,
and spectatorship. However, the second implication of the term
“post”—going “beyond” the cinema—must be read as more
nuanced, inasmuch as the works are neither totally separated from
the established mode of the cinematic apparatus nor the result of its
simple migration to the space of exhibition. Despite their extreme
diversity in form and content, the works guarantee an ability to
244 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

dismantle or critique the conventional model of cinematic space,

time, narrative, and spectatorship or to forge an alternative model
while also having an intimate relation to it. In other words, they
either reside in and out of the cinema as we have known or they
are grounded in an in-between space of the gallery and other media
environments in which watching film occurs—the movie theater,
the home theater, the personal computer, etc.
Besides this transformation of the cinematic image and apparatus,
another aspect of cinematic video installations under scrutiny in
this chapter is to view them in contrast to the video art of Païni’s
two previous generations. Chrissie Iles uses the term “cinematic
phase” to differentiate the spatial nature of cinematic video
installations from that of the video installations in the 1960s and
1970s, which she identifies as pertaining to the “phenomenological
phase” and the “sculptural phase,” respectively. According to Iles,
the installations of the two phases, emblematized by the pieces of
Dan Graham, Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman, etc., “transformed
the exhibition space into a three-dimensional image”7 occupied by
the viewer’s physical presence. Capitalizing on the real-time closed-
circuit video as a central spatiotemporal strategy, the early video
artists assumed that the monitor in the gallery could furnish the
viewer with the opportunity to contemplate a perceptual process
of domesticated spectatorship triggered by the televisual devices
within various physical positions and settings. Here, the space of
exhibition was transformed into a media space that could evoke
the temporality of viewing, once termed the “durational space” by
Campus.8 For Iles, the “cinematic phase” emerged in the 1990s as
video projection allowed the image to be “contained within flat
screens inserted as planes into a partially lit three-dimensional
space.”9 While this technical change enabled Païni’s third and fourth
generation artists to mimic the spatial qualities of cinema in this
way, it underscored the shift in the relationship of the video image
to its surrounding space and viewer, as well as the “collapse . . . of
the physical boundaries between the once opposite media of film
and video.”10
While taking the two discursive views on cinematic video
installations—renamed here as the “remaking cinema” discourse
and the “degenerated video art” discourse respectively—as a
point of departure, both views will be critically examined in this
chapter, each represented by Dercon and Iles, in order to argue
 Cinematic video installations 245

that cinematic video installations must be viewed as a complex

hybridization of cinematic and video-based technologies. This
means that each of the two views runs the risk of downplaying
the role of video technologies in shaping this hybrid media
formation. Dercon’s view must be supplemented by considering
how video serves as a key device to deterritorialize cinematic image
and narrative from their institutionalized settings and transform
them in ways that are not available by the material and technical
features of film. In terms of Iles’s view, it should be noted that the
video’s specific operations are still at play in this hybrid form of
moving-image installations even as video merges with the same
components as those of cinema. These two shortcomings suggest
that a rigorous formal analysis of these installations in terms of
video’s embeddedness within the cinema is particularly necessary
when both discursive views expose the difficulty of assessing these
installations from the standpoint of either the normative cinema or
modernist video art. This analysis entails viewing video not as being
anchored in a limited set of its own material and technical devices
(as is the case with the modernist view on video art), but as an
electronic (and digital) dispositif which, according to Anne-Marie
Duguet, affords artists “a wider range of dissemination methods
(video projectors that reproduce the conditions of cinema but also
monitors whose image is independent of light environment).”11
Duguet’s definition of dispositif helps us to observe video in media
installations as a technology of which specificities are defined by
its historical conditions as well as by its shifting relation to other
media technologies and art forms.
This chapter will propose spatialization and temporalization as
two key operations that video technologies carry out in adopting
and altering the components and historical traces of cinema. By
performing formal and technical analyses of the installation pieces
by several artists or filmmakers, including Farocki, Aitken, Ahtila,
Gordon, Kutluğ Ataman, Candice Breitz, and Stan Douglas, I argue
that the hybridization of film and video occurs not simply in the
image but also in the apparatus that frames the spatial and temporal
qualities of the image and determines the viewer’s relation to the
image. The film and video installation works of these practitioners are
founded on the aesthetic strategies of spatializing and temporalizing
cinematic image, technique, and narrative. By demonstrating these
strategies, this chapter suggests that cinematic video installations
246 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

should be seen as demonstrating not an assimilation of video by

cinema or vice versa, but a complex negotiation between the two in
the post-media age.

Between “remaking cinema” and

“degenerated video art”:
Reframing cinematic video installations
The first type of discourse on cinematic video installations
considers them as primarily derived from the term, “cinematic.”
Here “cinematic” refers not simply to the material and technical
components of the cinematic apparatus (camerawork, language of
editing, dialogue, rules of organizing narrative space, the setup of
the traditional movie theater, etc.), but also to its cultural, social, and
institutional elements that have formed our traditional assumption,
memory, and experience of cinema: individual films, their modes of
practice such as the classical Hollywood cinema and the European
art cinema, the director’s oeuvre, particular genres, forms of
moviegoing, pleasures of viewing films, people’s shared memories of
the films, etc. These key elements relate to the two views of cinematic
video installations as primarily derived, and also dissociated, from
the cinema. For the cinema as an institutionalized art form that
dominated the last century, cinematic video installations are seen as
appealing to a type of nostalgic cinephilia that summons up cinema
as an increasingly outdated yet persisting object of individual and
collective memories. For the cinema as the sum of heterogeneous
materials and techniques, and conventions for shaping particular
types of audiovisual narrative, the installations are viewed as the
expansion of cinema beyond the conventional formation of the
cinematic apparatus.
The term “remake,” which is originally referred to a motion
picture based upon a film produced earlier in the contexts of
Hollywood cinema and arthouse cinema,12 serves as a conceptual
device to link these two views on cinematic video installation. As
Erika Balsom neatly summarizes, in its narrower sense the term
refers to a wide range of artworks based on several aesthetic
operations for reworking the elements of cinema: (1) recycling
 Cinematic video installations 247

existing footage (the works by Gordon, Breitz, Jennifer and

Kevin McCoy, etc.), (2) reenacting a scenario from a film (such
as Huyghe’s L’Ellipse [1998, a juxtaposition of an excerpt from
Wim Wenders’ American Friend (1977) with the newly shot video
footage of the film’s leading actor Bruno Ganz, now older, acting
out a scene that is not included in the original film] and The Third
Memory [1999, an investigation of the impact of an existing film,
in this case, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), on the real
person (John Wojtowicz) who embodies the event (bank robbery)
on which the film was based)], and (3) interviewing a person
whose life involved film production [Omer Fast’s Spielberg’s
List (2003) and Deimantras Narkevicius’ Revisiting Solaris
(2007)].13 In its broader sense, the term “remake” can be applied
to a number of artists (Taylor-Johnson, Aitken, Douglas, Parreno,
Steve McQueen, Anri Sala, Ataman, Julien, Dominique Gonzalez-
Foerster, etc.) or to the arthouse/experimental filmmakers who
construct a wide variety of narrative artifacts—whether they are
fiction, documentary, or the blending of the two—by transposing
the conventions of building the cinematic moving image to the
gallery walls with video technologies.14 Viewed together, the two
definitions of remake suggest a great diversity of practices that are
not reducible to a limited set of material, technical, and conceptual
elements, insofar as the technologies are deeply intertwined with
the cinematic in all of their dimensions.
The idea of “remaking cinema” is also reflected in two other
terms coined by influential French critics who addressed the
transposition and transformation of the “cinematic” in film and
video installations that rework the various components of cinema.
Jean-Christophe Royoux has termed these installations the “cinema
of exhibition” [“cinéma d’exposition”], whereby exhibition itself
should be seen not merely as a place that contains these installations,
but as a medium that enables their existence and operation. From
this perspective, the cinema becomes a specific form of “syntax of
the exhibition, envisaged (as it all too rarely is) as a specific form
of representation.”15 Here, the exhibition as a medium involves
a heterogeneous set of the installations’ material and technical
supports. For this reason, the installations are characterized by
the variability of their operations. The “cinema of exhibition” is
then viewed as a negotiation between the multiplication of artistic
practices and the sustained desire to examine the components and
248 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

conventions of cinema both as a particular system of images and

narrative and as a social institution. As Royoux comments, “There
are numerous ways of achieving this, but the principle is always the
same: to produce a kind of intensity by separating, say, the elements
that usually constitute a film.”16
Bellour’s critical work since the 1980s represents the discourses
on the overlap of cinema and visual arts and on the inextricable
connection between film, video, and the gallery. Besides the well-
known term “between-the-images” [“l’entre-images”] as outlined in
the introduction, Bellour also coined the term “other cinema” [“autre
cinéma”] in order to describe film and video installations in the light
of their post-cinematic ambiguity—leaving behind film’s medium,
apparatus, and production system but being preoccupied with and
evoking the history of cinema. He writes, “These installations more
or less rework the figures from which films have drawn their forms
of expression. By both duplicating cinema and differentiating itself
from it, the installations thus also make cinema enter into a history
that exceeds it.”17 The introduction of video projection to the art of
installation indicates, for Bellour, that celluloid cinema as well as the
movie theater for film projection is “destroyed and redistributed,”
so that what is being exhibited is “not exactly a film . . . but the
equivalent of a film.”18 Here, video’s technological confluence with
film makes it possible to dissociate the projection of film from its
traditional setup of the cinematic apparatus while also providing
new conceptual and expressive opportunities for its reconstruction
outside the theater. This confluence results in a mutable and
multifaceted moving image, due to the new linkage between the
different images that were previously demarcated by the medium
specificities of their corresponding art form—for instance, between
cinema and photography, cinema and painting, or cinema and video
art. Considering this promiscuity, Bellour characterizes the works
of other cinema as expressing the “aesthetic of confusion,” that is,
“grasping all the arts as part of one single ensemble and analyzing
each work in terms of its mix of different art forms, particularly in
terms of media, or the artist’s choice of confining themselves to one
mechanism alone.”19
Despite this diversity of strategies for “remaking cinema” and the
“aesthetic of confusion” presented by the resulting “other cinema”
works, it is possible to identify a common underlying motivation for
cinematic video installations. If “remaking” is seen as a cinephiliac
 Cinematic video installations 249

gesture, then the variety of its strategies and components indicates

that cinema has passed into its second stage after its heyday, the
first stage being that where cinema stood out as a powerful cultural
artifact operating within the theater. For Royoux, the cinema is that
which has entailed “the beginning of a second history” characterized
by “a dis-intensification of its effect of surprise and novelty” as it
entered “early maturity.” The appearance of cinema on television
in the late 1950s and early 1960s signaled a moment of the second
stage, and a variety of techniques for practicing “remakes” since the
1990s has marked an “inevitable post-cinematic era” which implies
“a transferal and a necessary transformation of [film’s] modes of
representation.”20 From this point of view, the art of remake is seen
as a revival of the historical remnants of cinema and a vision of its
possible futures. Païni concurs with Royoux’s insight that remaking
evokes and responds to the post-cinematic moment, when he suggests
that the growing entrance of cinema into gallery space signals the
“patrimony [patrimoine]” of the century. The term “patrimony”
refers to how cinema has gained value as a cultural heritage that
should be preserved, as it has shifted from the “industrial object” to
the “art object” since the latter half of the twentieth century. Along
with the construction of the cinémathèque and the film museum,
the film and video installations of remaking cinema are seen as a
patrimonial act, treating the cinema as something to be recreated
and commemorated.21 For Païni, the popularization of new
technologies encompassing video and the DVD has an ambivalent
effect of endowing the cinema with a patrimonial value. The post-
filmic technologies liberate the cinema from its “original terms of
birth and finality: projection [in the movie theatre].” At the same
time, they allow for the “passage of projection” from the traditional
setup of the cinematic apparatus to the gallery space, as they are
used to make certain types of installations that consist of one or
more channels of the moving image. The work of remaking cinema
based on the technologies’ capability to relocate projection, which
is called “cinematic video installation” in this chapter, then marks
both the historical products of the cinema and the results of its
transformation.22
At the other spectrum of the “remaking cinema” discourses
examined thus far, a number of critics or practitioners share a
modernist view on cinematic video installations. Here, this view is
termed “degenerated video art” because they see cinematic video
250 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

installations since the 1990s as sharply differentiated from the

film and video installations in the late 1960s and 1970s, which are
exemplified by the works of Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Anthony
McCall, Graham, Campus, Nauman, and Joan Jonas, among many.
All these artists and filmmakers have been revisited in several
renowned exhibitions in the 2000s in light of their endeavors to
investigate the material and sculptural dimensions of film and
video as a medium and to promote the active and embodied viewer
as an alternative to the passive, disembodied spectators of the
standardized cinematic apparatus.23 As Iles comments, building
on Minimalism’s phenomenological approach or on the aim of
structural/materialist filmmaking to critique the cinema’s illusory
mechanism, the practitioners’ film and video installations invited
“participation, movement, the sharing of multiple viewpoints, the
dismantling of the single frontal screen, and an analytical, distanced
form of viewing.”24 Accordingly, they deployed multiple film
projectors or video screens on and inside the gallery walls to draw
the viewer’s attention to the physical attributes of the moving image
(camera, screen, the sculptural dimension of the projector beam, the
implementation of video monitors as extensions of the televisual
apparatus, and the exhibition space) and to call into question the
“boundaries between public and private space, between the artist’s
studio and the gallery, and between artist, artwork, and viewer.”25
The switch to the cinematic video installation in the 1990s in
Iles’s periodization was congruent with the transition from smaller-
scale, black-and-white video images to large-scale high-definition
video images. As expressed by Catherine Elwes, “The video
monitor . . . with the three-dimensionality of the box was lost and
replaced by the spectacular, immersive experience of the cinema,
sometimes enhanced by comfortable seating.”26 From this point of
view, the use of a darkened room with diverse screen formats and
various ways to transfer and transform the moving image since the
1990s has allowed artists and filmmakers to dislodge cinematic
projection from its conventional theatrical settings. Moreover, just
as cinematic video installations have recycled existing fragments of
film or exploited a panoply of film forms, so their images could
satisfy the visual abundance of pictures and the realist appeal of
narrative cinema in contrast to the low-quality electronic image
that characterized early video art. Neither a radical experimentation
with the filmic apparatus and viewing process in the structural/
 Cinematic video installations 251

materialist film nor a deconstructive critique on the television

medium in the early video art, this type of installation, according to
Iles, “envelops the viewer in a more inclusive sensory experience . . .
away from the object and towards a more internal, psychological
experience, in which space is no longer tangible and theatrical but
illusory and filmic.”27
In my view, this observation of the differences between the film
and video installations in the 1960s and 1970s and the cinematic
video installation since the 1990s is problematic as it tends to
establish a set of binary oppositions: three-dimensionality (of
the media apparatus) versus two-dimensionality (of the image
space), sculptural versus pictorial, materiality versus immateriality,
interactive versus passive, low-fi technology versus high-definition
(state-of-the art) technology, conventional cinematic viewing versus
perambulatory viewing through the exhibition space, physical space
versus illusory (narrative) space, time as the viewer’s durational
experience of the work (real time) versus time as rendered fictionally
in the work’s image (imaginary time), critical distance versus
immersion, etc. Art critics such as Liz Kotz and David Joselit, as well
as avant-garde film historian A. L. Rees have acknowledged these
dichotomies. For Kotz, the growing popularity of video projection,
and concomitantly the repression of the TV monitor, warns us that
video has lost its material, physical, and procedural characteristics
and has “been assimilated back into older filmic conventions.”28
Joselit echoes Kotz’s negative view on video projection as follows:
“Projection undermines one of the most progressive effects of the
closed-circuit apparatus: its conceptualization of spectatorship
as interactive. . . . Projection reintroduces a more conventionally
theatrical mode of spectatorship in which the audience remains
outside the media feedback loop rather than participating as actors
within it.”29 Kotz’s and Joselit’s references to Graham, Campus,
Acconci, Jonas, Sharits, Snow, etc., concur with Rees’s evaluation of
British expanded cinema and video art in the 1970s as “experiential,”
“process-driven,” “material,” and “situational.” Upholding the
aspirations of the UK Structural/Materialist filmmakers (such as
Peter Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice) to disrupt the standardized
cinematic apparatus and thereby elicit the viewer’s critical awareness
of it, Rees sees the present-day video installation derived from
cinema as narrative driven, immersive, and spectacular, in that “the
film viewer is less a spectator than a passing visitor, whose freedom
252 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

to come and go is gained at the cost of a durational and overall

experience, or one that calls for concentration.”30
These dichotomies suggested by the critics are linked to an
opposition between the “phenomenological” and the “virtual”
framing in current discussions of moving-image installations and
their spectatorship in contemporary art criticism. The panelists
who participated in October’s round table discussion in 2003 on
the burgeoning of film and video installations in contemporary
art galleries contributed to reinforcing this opposition. The term
“virtual” refers to a tendency by contemporary installation pieces
to create “an aesthetic of emotional and psychic intensities”31
by relying on the illusory power of painterly, photographic, and
cinematic representations. Hal Foster, a participant of the round
table, calls this aesthetic tendency a “rampant pictorialism or
virtualism” in contrast to the “phenomenological” works that
aimed at “treating film reflexively, thinking about process,
working with the apparatus.”32 Thus, this tension between the
“phenomenological” and the “virtual” underscores a particular
assumption shared by Foster and other panelists in their view on
the migration of the cinematic into the gallery space: they repeat the
conventional view of the “apparatus theory” that considers cinema
as a set of technical and ideological operations that impose on
spectators an immobile, sedentary viewing position in which they
identify with the images detached from their body. Seen in this light,
cinematic video installation, characterized by the viewer’s frontal
positioning in front of its screens and its two-dimensional projected
images within darkened rooms, is no more than the transposition
of the normative cinematic settings and viewing conditions into
the museum.33
Admittedly, the contrast between the phenomenological (material
and sculptural) and the virtual (pictorial and narrative-centered)
provides a valuable framework to observe how moving-image
installations since the 1990s have been aligned with cinema and
how they could be compared to their predecessors in the 1960s and
1970s. However, it should be noted that the critics and theorists who
set up this oppositional model are not liberated from the reductive
understanding of the relation between viewer, media technologies,
and space in regard to moving-image installations. As Kate Mondloch
notes, their direct association of the viewer’s mobility with embodied,
active, critical viewing experiences, which goes hand in hand with
 Cinematic video installations 253

their accusation of the standardized cinematic viewing situation

of being disembodied, passive, and uncritical, “fails to account for
the curious doubleness structural to screen-reliant media installation
spectatorships, a spectatorship characterized by a wavering between
‘the virtual’ and ‘the real.’”34 That is, just as the viewers’ physical
mobility in the gallery space does not necessarily guarantee their
critical reflection on the material, sculptural, and processual aspects
of installation work, so their sedentary positioning vis-à-vis a
standardized single-channel rectangular screen, albeit evoking the
conventional cinematic viewing situation, does not always lead
to their total immersion in the work’s image space, let alone turn
their attention from the structure and operation of the work’s
apparatus. Against this dualism in which virtuality is anchored
to film in contrast to video as a medium peculiar to embodied
viewing, Mondloch proposes to understand media installation
art and its spectatorship as simultaneously “material (the viewer’s
phenomenological engagement with actual objects in real time and
space) and immaterial (the viewer’s metaphorical projection into
virtual times and spaces).”35 Seen in this light, while cinematic video
installations primarily explore the impact of the cinema’s image and
narrative on the viewer’s subjectivity by drawing his/her attention
to the action and event in the screen space, this does not necessarily
mean that there is no phenomenological—perceptual, physical,
durational—dimension in the viewer’s relationship to the work.
Thus, the opposition between the “phenomenological” and
the “virtual” could essentialize the modernist formation of video
technologies as canonical video art, which consists of the low-fi
monitor, the closed-circuit device, and the awkward electronic
image space. To draw on Yvonne Spielmann’s view once again,
the practitioners who support this dualism refer to the difference
between video as a medium defined by a set of artistic practices based
on the self-reflexive investigation of its properties, and video as a
technology concerned “with other media forms” including cinema.36
This position gives video only limited significance while dismissing
its increased integration with cinematic forms and techniques,
influenced by digital convergence, as being promiscuous. The
dominance of projection is then frequently viewed as degenerating
video from a medium to a tool for incorporating multiscreen
cinemas, arguing that in this stage, the “differential specificity of
video vis-à-vis film (and vice versa) all but disappears.”37As I argued
254 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

in Chapter 1 regarding videographic moving pictures, however,

the material and technical specificities of video do not entirely
disappear but are displaced due to video’s technological changes
and new uses. Considering this, it is obvious that the critics and
theorists of the phenomenological/virtual dichotomy overlook two
points concerning the issue of defining video as an artistic medium:
first, there has been no successful attempt to relegate video to a
limited set of artistic forms, and second, the forms of video art have
been expanding and are flexible due not simply to its intersections
with other arts, but also to its technological innovations. This
dichotomy becomes weaker considering that cinematic video
installations adopt and explore several key features that the critics
and theorists regard as essential to video as a medium, such as three-
dimensionality, physical space, and the viewer’s mobility. It is argued
here that these critics and theorists neglect to further speculate
how the artists of cinematic video installation are consciously or
unconsciously indebted to their precursors, as well as how they
adopt the technological changes of video (such as its spatial and
temporal attributes) and have increasingly converged them into the
components of cinema in the digital age.
Taken together, both “remaking cinema” discourses (except
Bellour’s accounts of the “other cinema”) and the views on cinematic
video installation as “degenerated video art” overemphasize
the cinema in their respective understanding of cinematic video
installation, as they obscure video’s implicit operations within its
temporal and spatial structures: just as the former sometimes evades
discussing video by regarding this type of installation as an immediate
expansion of cinema, so the latter ignores video by denouncing it as
a contaminated technology infected with and catering to cinema. In
order to overcome these two shortcomings, we need to consider the
relation between cinema and video in this installation as an interplay,
rather than the total appropriation of the latter by the former. This
means that it is not possible to assign an absolute prioritization of one
medium over the other in this hybrid formation of media installation.
Seen in this light, video in this formation serves as a nodal point in
which cinema’s digitization and the historical change of video art
converge, or in which the transformation of cinema negotiates the
mutation of film and video installation in the gallery. Balsom argues
that the existence of the cinematic in the gallery, encompassing not
just film and video installations but also exhibitions dedicated to
 Cinematic video installations 255

histories of cinema,38 can be seen as “both a part of and a reaction

to the increased mobility of images stemming from convergence.”39
From this viewpoint, it is possible for us to discern the ambivalent
ways in which video technologies serve to transform cinema and
transfer it to the platform of exhibitions. Given the crucial role of
the high-definition projector and other computer-based projection
systems in shaping and spreading cinematic video installations,
video technologies become part of digital convergence. In so doing,
they are fused with cinema and take it to other cultural arenas
beyond the movie theater. On the other hand, video technologies
are also adopted to react to these phenomena, marking cinema as a
lost or obsolete object to be commemorated. Taken together, these
two directions suggest that we need to “relinquish the old fiction
of the purity of media to interrogate the new aggregates cinema
enters into today,”40 concludes Balsom. To add to her argument,
the purity of video art must also be demystified when we take a
closer look at how video enters the “new aggregates” of which
cinematic components is a considerable part. Understanding this
aggregative condition involves an investigation of the material and
technical specificities of video that have been channeled not into
the modernist self-reflexive inquiry of video, but into the few major
forms of “remake,” including the use of found footage, reenactment,
and new narrative artifacts of engendering a perambulatory and
fractured spectatorship in multiple times and screen spaces. These
specificities, as shall be demonstrated in the following section, are
concerned with how video technologies have served to organize and
transform the spatiotemporal dimensions of the moving image and
the viewer’s relation to these dimensions in ways that differ from the
standardized cinematic apparatus.
Concerning the form and spectatorial mode of cinematic video
installations, the most prevailing view is to see them as spatializing
time in two ways. The first spatialization indicates that installing the
moving image in the gallery endows the viewer with the freedom
to determine, to use Mondloch’s term, “exploratory duration,” a
length of time spent on viewing the work in ways “unburdened by
externally imposed timetables” as in the cases of institutionalized
cinema and television.41 Maria Walsh also uses the term “peripatetic
mobility” to describe the “mobile trajectory of the gallery spectator
who enters the space at an arbitrary point in the film, leaves at any
time or stays and watches the replay of the loop.”42 The second
256 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

spatialization refers to a range of strategies for presenting the times

of images in ways unavailable with the standardized cinematic
apparatus, including multiplication, fragmentation, parallelism,
looping, etc., by adding spatial parameters to the temporal features
of cinematic image and narrative. Art critic Daniel Birnbaum
comments on Ahtila’s narrative experiments via multiscreen video
projection as “an attempt to ‘install time’ in space.”43 Royoux also
identifies a few technical and aesthetic strategies to provide the
“immobile duration,” ranging from Gordon’s landmark slowing-
down of Hitchcock’s Psycho (24 Hour Psycho) to Gonzalez-
Foerster’s eight-minute tracking shot of Kyoto transferred to video in
Riyo (1999), whereby the viewer enters and inhabits the exhibition
structure.44 All these accounts derived from the “remaking cinema”
discourses tend to celebrate the two methods of spatializing time—
that is, translating the time of viewing the moving image into
sculptural, physical, and architectural terms, and foregrounding
and transforming the time of the image—as radically liberating the
formation of cinematic narrative and subjectivity from the confines
of the normative filmic apparatus. Birnbaum encapsulates this view
by arguing that the simultaneity of several flows of moving imagery
in the multi-projection installations of the “other cinema” artists
(Ahtila, Aitken, etc.) grants “the possibility not only of dense and
temporally multi-layered imagery, but also of intricate constellations
and juxtapositions.”45
However, it is argued here that the possibility for rendering the
cinematic moving image to be multiplied and nonlinear in spatial
terms is indebted to the conventions of video installation in general
as a quintessentially spatial and temporal art form. John Conomos
succinctly refers to this point: “Irrespective of the different material
objects, video installations underscore the spatio-temporal passage
which the body of the museum visitor has to traverse in order to
negotiate them as complex, hybrid art forms.”46 In fact, Conomos’s
argument is mainly indebted to Margaret Morse, who claimed that
video installations since the 1970s have been representative of the
“presentational arts” rather than the more traditional “proscenium
arts,” in that they allow their visitor to occupy and experience a
“spatial here-and-now enclosed within a construction that is
grounded in actual space.”47 This here-and-now serves as the ground
on which the visitor is asked to physically and psychologically
interact with the installation’s different—pictorial, performative,
 Cinematic video installations 257

sculptural, etc.—modes of presentation, while also laying the

groundwork for a couple of temporal operations associated with
two key categories of video installation art: first, “closed-circuit
video” that plays with “presence,” and second, “the recorded-video
art installation that can be compared to the spectator wandering
about on a stage, in a bodily experience of conceptual propositions
and imaginary world, of memory and anticipation.”48 In either case,
video installation works favor the here-and-now as where the viewer
visually and kinesthetically experiences the interplay between the
three-dimensionality of the apparatus and the two-dimensionality
of the image. Conomos’s and Morse’s views help us to overcome
the dichotomies of the “degenerated video art” discourses and to
see the extent to which the material and technical dimensions of
video are implicitly at play in the projection of cinematic video
installations in the gallery.
Païni’s assessment of the multichannel cinematic video
installations by Aitken, Ahtila, and Taylor-Johnson supports the need
to consider the spatiality of cinematic video installation as the fusion
of the film spectatorship based on the viewer’s physical immobility
(including the need to overcome it) and the implementation of
media apparatuses in the gallery that has promoted the visitor’s
physical mobility since the early development of film and video
installation. In contrast to the other critics’ oversimplified optimism
about the mobile viewing of installations as being liberated from
the temporal and spatial constraints of the standardized cinematic
apparatus, or to their underlying dichotomy between the cinema
spectator as passive and the viewer of the installations as active,
Païni observes how the perambulatory viewer’s spectatorship is
predicated upon the tension between identifying with the illusory
image of the installations and embodying its in-frame space and
surroundings: “This renewed physical freedom is no doubt only an
illusion since in one way it is very much of the correlative of the
emphasis on the individual as consumer of advertising and art.”49 He
is right to suggest that the viewer’s physical mobility alone does not
sharply contrast the immobility of the cinema spectator but rather
resembles window-shopping, namely, the experience of consuming
images on the move that the montage and camera movement of
cinema created and amplified in accordance with the development
of the metropolis and its commodity culture since the late nineteenth
century.50 At the same time, Païni coins the term “visitor-spectator”
258 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

[“visiteur-spectateur”] to describe how the mobile spectator has

a different relation to the image than the immobile viewer with
the standardized cinematic apparatus: “This mobile spectator has
a variable vision of the size of the screen and is inclined, not to
identify with the lives of the fictive characters, or to merge illusorily
into the space of the set, but to enter the image.”51 Seen in this light,
the spatiality and spectatorship of cinematic video installations
are ambivalent: their viewer cannot be firmly described as either
mobile or immobile insofar as he or she is compelled to continually
oscillate between the viewing experience of mainstream cinema (he
or she must remain frontal to the screen) and that of multichannel
video installation (he or she must move from one screen to another,
or find a vantage point from which he or she is able to see the
relationship between the screens, and between them and the gallery
space). Bellour certainly touches on the ambivalent nature of Païni’s
concept of the spectator-visitor: “The works fixates that which
one could call its visitor—but there is no right word with which to
grasp this dissolved, fragmented, shaken, intermittent spectator.”52
Consequently, both Païni and Bellour suggest that video projection,
albeit modeled after the cinematic apparatus, plays a particular
role in the ambiguity of the spectatorial mode, intersecting the
“spatial-here-and-now” (Morse) offered by video technologies with
the illusory power of the cinematic image enhanced by them. This
intersection can be observed in a number of contemporary artworks
that present video’s spatialization of the cinematic components,
including those by Farocki, Ataman, Aitken, and Ahtila.
The hybrid spatiality of cinematic video installations also relates
to the ways in which video complicates the temporalities of the image,
although the image resembles the filmic image at first sight. Païni has
also seen how the projection of the cinematic moving image in the
gallery, including the work of cinematic video installation, activates
the collision of two temporalities that the “visitor-spectator”
experiences simultaneously: a collision between the temporality of his
perambulation and the manifestation of the temporality developed
by its image.53 Morse similarly identifies the two temporalities that
ensure that video installation remains a form that unfolds over time:
“the time a visitor requires to complete a trajectory inspecting object
and monitors, [and] the time a video track or a poetic juxtaposition
of tracks requires to play out, or the time for a track to wander
across a field of monitors.”54 While inheriting this overlapping of
 Cinematic video installations 259

the two temporalities from early video installations in the 1960s

and 1970s, cinematic video installations undermine what Boris
Groys proposes as two traditional models that allow for the viewer’s
control over time: the “immobilization of the image in the museum”
and the “immobilization of the audience in the movie theater.”55
In the traditional museum that displays static artworks such as
paintings and sculptures, the viewer is able to determine the amount
of time spent on observing the artwork. Because the duration of
moving-image installations is ultimately out of viewers’ control,
such installations rob viewers of their freedom to make an aesthetic
judgment in an undetermined time of contemplation. Viewers
then realize that they cannot decide where these works begin or
end, thus “either to stay put or to keep moving . . . [their] choice
will always amount to a poor compromise—which will later need
to be repeatedly revised.”56 From the standpoint of cinema, video
technologies facilitate the incorporation of the moving image into the
gallery space, but they dismantle the movie theater’s temporal setup
that forces the viewer to stay during the entire film’s running time.
Seen in this light, cinematic video installations often presuppose the
“viewer’s lack of control over the duration of [the] attention”57 spent
on the moving image. This lack of control is particularly obvious in
a group of pieces in which digital video temporalizes film fragments
in ways that introduce to them a sense of uncertainty, inaccessibility,
and interminability.

Strategies of spatialization:
Farocki, Ataman, Aitken, Ahtila
Spatialization refers to a series of formal and conceptual strategies
coupled with specific uses of video technologies in the gallery space
to rework and expand cinema’s spatial parameters that shape and
delimit cinema’s time-based unfolding of image and narrative
as well as its mode of spectatorship. The term is used here to
distinguish myself from the critics who celebrated the mobility of
the gallery viewer as being liberated from the immobility of the
cinema spectator in two ways. First, whereas the critics see video
projection as spatializing only the duration of the film image (as
in the case of Birnbaum’s concept of “spatializing duration”), the
260 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

idea of spatialization here refers to other cinematic components,

including framing, montage, and narrative space, remediated by the
operation of video technologies. Also, the technological elements
of cinematic video installations include not merely a projector of
which the resolution is upgraded such that it meets the definition
of the film image, but also video’s sculptural and architectural
elements, such as multiscreen environments for breaking a single
viewpoint, the sculptural deployment of the projector and the
screen (whether the film screen or the monitor), and the decentered,
participatory, and embodied conditioning of the viewer. Cinematic
video installations inherit these technological elements from the
film and video installations of the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than
manifesting those elements as video’s unique properties in a self-
reflexive manner, however, the artworks use those elements to
promote the visitor’s awareness of the cinematic components that
they relocate into the gallery space. Catherine Fowler views film and
video installation works in the gallery, such as pieces by Ahtila and
McQueen, for instance, as the intersection of “in-frame” (elements
of framing, mise-en-scène, and editing) and “out-of-frame” (“a
connection to the space outside the frame”).58 To disrupt the norms
of mainstream narrative cinema, these works explore some formal
experiments originated from avant-garde film practices, such as
nonlinear and multi-temporal narration, repetition and looping,
and temporal manipulation via slow motion and freeze-frames.
They also extend these strategies to the exhibition space beyond
the illusionist confines of the film theater, wherein the framed space
of the film image is given full attention by the foregrounding of its
ends and edges: “Once the frame is connected to the space outside it
can be read centrifugally,” Fowler writes, “but the extension of the
framed space is, once again, not out into the fictional/real world but
rather into the gallery space.”59
Fowler’s argument is valuable as she pays attention to the
continuum between the cinematic elements and the spatial and
perceptual structure of the exhibition in ways that do not assume the
“cinematic turn” of the film and video installation since the 1990s
as the mere adoption of the theatrical mode and of the spectacular,
narrative-centered form, as in the cases of the modernist critics.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that Fowler does not provide a
concrete technical and aesthetic analysis of the “out-of-frame,”
presupposing its dimension as the exhibition space alone and
 Cinematic video installations 261

bypassing other parameters of media installation that incorporate

and reframe the “in-frame” components of the cinematic image
and narrative, such as material, size, space, placement, the number
of screens, their technological structure and operation, and the
screens’ relation to the architectonics of the exhibition space.
Considering this shortcoming, in the context of cinematic video
installations, it is necessary to identify the material and technical
components of video that construct the “out-of-frame” space and
spatialize the components of the “in-frame” space. With this in
mind, I shall tease out two interrelated strategies of spatializing
the cinematic components with video technologies as follows: the
theatricalization of the image and apparatus, and the architectural
deployment of screens.
The first strategy is indebted to Duguet’s concept of “theatricality,”
which she refers to as the “mise en scène of the moving image.”
She notes that video installations since the 1960s have developed
different methods of theatricality. If the installations of early video
art present monitors and videotapes as the tangible objects of the
moving image, then those of the 1990s allow viewers to experience
their image as screen based. In both cases, Duguet states, the
moving image is “not only a two-dimensional space, but involves
architecture as an extension of the image.”60 She further suggests
that in both methods of theatricalizing the image, video technologies
play a pivotal role in producing a new aesthetic experience of
the image under “the concept of hybridization” by serving as an
interface that allows viewers to “connect, to confront, or to translate
elements of a different nature into one language.”61 Seen in this way,
cinematic video installations are grounded in the alliance between
two types of “theatricality,” each concerned with cinema and video:
a new theatrical staging of cinematic tropes, devices, and effects
that are extended into the viewer’s physical and psychic experience
in space, and video installation’s tradition of staging the electronic
image as a constitutive part of the architectural environment. If we
associate Duguet’s concept of theatricality with Fowler’s terms, then
the extension of “in-frame” space into “out-of-frame” space can also
be seen as theatricalizing cinema, namely, adopting and varying the
parameters of video installation to define the spatial relationships
between the image and the viewer, and between the apparatus
and its environment. In the works by Harun Farocki and Kutluğ
Ataman, this theatricalization of cinema also involves theatricalizing
262 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the apparatus of video in the forms of three-dimensional objects,

thereby leading to a dynamic hybridization of the two media.
The first strategy, theatricalizing the apparatus, necessarily
implies the architectural deployment of screens as the second
strategy of spatialization. Despite her negative view on cinematic
video installations since the 1990s, Kotz acknowledges that video
projection, albeit propelling the migration of cinematic narrative
forms into the gallery space since the 1990s, is in some senses indebted
to the closed-circuit video and video sculpture of the 1970s. She writes
that contemporary video technologies utilize “the televisual capacity
for the profuse diffusion of images” as much as the closed-circuit
video, in response to those images’ “mutating relation to new forms
of architectural space and subjectivity.”62 Focusing on the transition
from close-circuit video to interactive video installation, Kathy Rae
Huffman similarly notes: “A prepared physical environment was
integral to the understanding of the electronic space being created with
video technology.”63 Kotz’s and Huffman’s views suggest that while
incorporating the cinematic image and narrative, video projection
does not entirely jettison other relations that have constituted video
installation as an art form. Video’s privileged link to television has
been weakened by projection, but its propensity for connecting its
image and apparatus to the surrounding architecture is still at play
in the works of Pipilotti Rist, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Ryan
Trecartin, to name just a few.64 This point also relates to the shift in
the technological system that produces the video image: the monitor
in the closed-circuit video installation restricted the scale of its image
to its material boundaries, but the video projector’s capacity to
deploy screens makes the image scalable and dimensionally variable,
to the extent that the viewer cannot observe the entire structure of
video images and screen spaces at a single glance and in a sedentary
position. This is particularly applied to the type of cinematic video
installations exemplified by Doug Aitken and Eija-Liisa Ahtila.
For the two artists’ works foreground multiscreen interfaces as a
way of distributing images in close dialogue with the architectural
space. In this second type of spatialization, it is hereby argued that
video’s material and technical specificities with respect to its three-
dimensional surroundings are not eliminated but maintained. In
Aitken’s and Ahtila’s works, however, these specificities are not
channeled into a self-reflexive inquiry into video for the sake of
reasserting its hitherto sustained expressive boundaries; rather,
 Cinematic video installations 263

the two artists use video’s association with architecture to renew

the images’ montage and narrative space originated from cinema,
whether the narrative is fictional or documentary, and to explore the
images’ psychological and affective impact on the viewer outside the
normative cinematic apparatus.
Farocki’s media installation pieces since the late 1990s are
exemplary of the spatialization of montage by theatricalizing
multiple monitors or projectors. As Thomas Elsaesser clearly
summarizes, the evolution of Farocki’s work from the cinema
based on the principle of montage to media installation art has two
interrelated implications. On the one hand, the implementation
of video screens or monitors allows Farocki to overcome the
sequentiality of filmic montage, which produces only a metonymic
association of two temporally contiguous images, and to achieve “a
mode of simultaneous multi-dimensional thinking.”65 Seen in this
light, the screens or monitors are means to expand on Farocki’s
conceptual arrangements of existing or recorded material in such
metaphoric ways that one image functions as a commentary on,
or supplement to, the other, beyond the limit of the conventional
single frame wherein one shot must appear as the substitution of
the previous shot.66 On the other hand, Farocki’s deployment of the
screens and monitors as the three-dimensional tangible media object
serves as a type of metonym for post-cinematic media. Before his
death, Farocki was preoccupied with investigating how these media
permeate and structure the social, cultural, military, and everyday
lives of our contemporary society, and how the image produced
and circulated by these media “has withdrawn itself from the visual
plane and escapes traditional representation techniques, including
those of cinematic montage.”67 The media, namely the electronic and
digital “vision machines,”68 produce specific images as the scientific,
educational, or administrative instruments that function to set in
motion social workplaces, such as factories, laboratories, prisons,
the military, shopping malls, and entertainment industries. To use
Farocki’s own terms, these images are characterized as “operational
images,” “prosthetic images,” “surveillance images,” “data images,”
etc.69 These images internalize the ways in which the vision machines
collect, display, and circulate the information in society and control
human sensorium with their artificial eyes and spatiotemporal
logic. In this sense, the media objects in Farocki’s installations
present themselves as extensions of the machines, reminiscent of
264 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

multiple monitors in the surveillance room or multiple windows in

the computer-based control panel.
Due to its theatricalization of the image and apparatus, Farocki’s
installation work in some sense recalls the video installation works
by Graham, Nauman, and Campus. His pieces operate within and
configure the larger structure of electronic media to which both
video artists critically responded. In this sense, Farocki asks us to
perceive the video installation in the post-cinematic age as not totally
being distanced from the tradition of modernist video art. Still, he
performs this critique not by using the loop of live transmission
or the closed-circuit system blurring the boundaries between its
gaze and the observer’s look, as in the cases of Graham, Nauman,
and Campus, but by using the montage tropes that stitch together
distant images in order to underline the assimilation of the human
eyes into the automated, artificial field of vision. The viewer of the
pieces, then, is granted the opportunity to aesthetically contemplate
the operation of the post-cinematic apparatuses as though he/she
were in front of them, thereby recognizing that the operation does
not reside solely in the apparatuses’ technological dimension but is
coextensive with that of the workplaces as social institutions.
In his Eye/Machine I, II, and III (2001–03, Figure 5.1), Farocki
provides a detailed analysis of “operational images,” in this case

Figure 5.1 Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine I, II, III (2001, 2002, 2003),
double-channel video installation, installation view, Kunsthaus Bregenz,
photograph: Markus Tretter, courtesy Harun Farocki Filmproduktion.
 Cinematic video installations 265

images produced for different instrumental purposes—military

surveillance, medical operation, and the automation system in a
factory—and given no aesthetic values other than functional and
technical. His side-by-side montage trope is initially intended to
provide a comparison between different types of machines that
produce their own functional images, and thereby to reveal an array
of common technical operations embedded within the images: for
example, the video-tracking system, which allows for the automatic
monitoring of moving targets, was used for aircraft bombs in the
Gulf War, for the robot controller in manufacturing, for military
simulation testing sectors, and for endoscopes in operation
rooms. The images produced by this system are all processed and
altered by the computer’s simulation and algorithm, of which the
perception and gaze resemble but do not involve human hands and
eyes. Farocki’s montage therefore takes a genealogical approach
to these operational images created and processed by the digital
apparatuses, as he juxtaposes the images of an unmanned aircraft
during the Gulf War with the footage of human hands dealing with
a machine’s components on the conveyor belt, and with the images
of a missile targeting system from the newsreel during the Second
World War. The two categories of montage—a comparison between
different digital images, and another between the digital images and
the analogue/manual operational images—become more effective in
his double-screen installation version in two ways. First, for gallery
visitors, the spatialized presence of two images, particularly two
video and digital images, evokes different faces of the post-cinematic
apparatus that form their contemporary viewing situations
and subjectivity, including video monitors constantly replaying
images as information, and surveillance cameras working for the
disciplinary control of society on a microscopic scale. By removing
all the operational images from their original contexts and placing
them in the circuit of technical and functional associations, the
double-channel spatial configuration alludes to the larger structure
of contemporary media in which different instrumental systems
of representation converge.70 Second, within this configuration,
the viewers recognize themselves as a potential operator of these
images, insofar as Farocki’s tropes of montage position them as
though they were on an informational panel of digital interfaces.
For example, in the scene in which military simulation systems are
being tested, the viewers see a sequence of the operator’s work side
266 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

by side with the graphic simulations of weapons and the images

from the footage taken with cameras installed in the weapons.
Seen in this light, the viewers’ activities during their observation
of the installation, including shifting focus from the left monitor
(or projected image) to the right monitor and keeping their eye
on the two monitors and their image tracks, resemble those of the
simulation operator, who must be trained to match his eyes and
hands with his immediate intellectual processing of information.
As Christa Blüminger notes, by placing itself as a “theatre of seeing
and perceiving,” the installation allows its viewer to make “a kind
of performance out of the montage.”71
Deepening his exploration of the transition of image and
montage from the cinematic to the post-cinematic era, Farocki’s
two-channel video installation, Counter-Music (2004, Figure 5.2),
integrates a number of films built on the portrayal of the modern
city—so-called “City Symphony” films, such as Man with a
Movie Camera and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter
Ruttmann 1927), a short extract from a US science fiction movie
Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleisher 1966), and fragments from
industrial films—with the footage on contemporary urban life,
including video-surveillance material (of streets, windows, rooms,
and culverts), computer-generated images (infrared pictures of a

Figure 5.2 Farocki, Counter-Music (2004), double-channel video instal-

lation, installation view at Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2011, photo by Markus
Tretter, courtesy Harun Farocki Filmproduktion.
 Cinematic video installations 267

building’s entries, information graphics showing the data of the

surveillance footage, architectural simulations, etc.), and images he
took in Lille, France. While this selection and distribution of the
two threads thematically corresponds to his War/Machine trilogy,
Farocki’s principle of organizing them differs somewhat from the
trilogy: if War/Machine sets up a historical connection between the
cinematic and the post-cinematic images in terms of the automation
of human vision, then Counter-Music contrasts these two images
according to the role of montage in characterizing their different
states. While Vertov’s and Ruttmann’s “Urban Symphony” films of
the 1920s organize the visible world according to the principles
of montage that require an image to be supplemented by others,
the footage drawn from our postindustrial urban society lacks the
“counter-shot.” As Blüminger notes, this difference is related to one
between the city governed by the collaboration of man and machine
in the industrial age and today’s urban environment controlled
by the automated circulation and calculation of information in
the digital age: “The perspective of the industrial film shows the
working of machines as a result of the physical intervention of
the workers, while the shots from the video-surveillance center
indicate the superiority of a mechanical sight that can increasingly
regulate itself.”72 Seen in this light, Farocki’s deployment of the two
projection surfaces materializes the comparison between the two
regimes of images in the three-dimensional space.
Exemplifying the theatricalization of the image and apparatus,
Ataman’s multichannel video installations since the late 1990s
investigate the lives and histories of various social subjects in
Turkey. Along with his use of projectors and LCD screens, Ataman
often deploys monitors and TV sets to subvert the authentic and
objective assumption of documentary filmmaking, disrupting the
boundaries between actors and interviewees, and between the real
(the camera’s inscription of reality) and the fabricated (screenplay
and editing), staging a tension between individual and collective
identities, and foregrounding the process of deconstructing and
rebuilding the truth of the past.73 Intersecting with an array of
formal strategies derived from the participatory and self-reflexive
modes of documentary (such as a handheld camera, the social
subject’s direct address to the camera, and the disjunction between
sound and image), these various deployments of multichannel
screens create forking and complicated stories that surpass the
268 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

viewer’s easy comprehension. While Ataman’s works represent

a documentary tendency of remaking cinema by theatricalizing
these formal strategies of documentary and creating the multiple
narrative spaces that go beyond the confines of the traditional
cinematic apparatus, some of his works have a notable relation
with video sculpture and video art’s traditional link to television.
Ataman’s Column (2009, Figure 5.3), a work of his Mesopota­
mian Dramaturgies series, is a video sculpture that is comprised
of forty-two used TV monitors, with each one showing the facial
expression of a villager from East Turkey who remains silent. While
maintaining the individual differences in age, sex, occupation, etc.,
the monitors draw the viewer’s attention to how all the villagers
converge in their collective identity as the people who were forced
to be silent in the political and cultural oppressions throughout the
history of the region. This exchange between the individual and
the collective, as well as the sense of intimacy offered by the social
actors’ direct address to the viewers of the TV monitors, dates
back to Ataman’s massive-scale multichannel installation Küba
(2005, Figure 5.4), in which each of the forty used television sets
displays an interview with a resident of Küba, an area of Southern

Figure 5.3 Kutluğ Ataman, Mesopotamian Dramaturgies: Column

(2009), exhibition photo: Tanas, Berlin, 2008, courtesy of the artist.
 Cinematic video installations 269

Figure 5.4 Ataman, Küba (2005), exhibition photo: Lentos Museum,

Linz, 2009, courtesy of the artist.

Istanbul that serves as a shelter for a diverse group of marginalized

people. Ataman placed a single armchair in front of each used set,
allowing the viewer to have an intimate relation to each unique
narrative presented on the screen and drawing his or her attention
to television’s domestic setting as the foundation of its social and
cultural spectatorship. As the viewer moves through the space
from one armchair to the next, he/she interweaves the different
personal stories into a narrative of their unexpected commonalities.
Therefore, the viewer’s perambulatory mapping of the narrative
testifies to the capacity of video technologies to spatialize all the
durations of the individual testimonies while also leading to a
construction of their shared identity. This double process is indebted
to Ataman’s theatricalization of television not simply as a three-
dimensional object, but also as a social apparatus that shapes its
spectatorship as being both atomized and collective.
With their various architectural uses of screens, Aitken’s
cinematic video installations go beyond the sequential ordering of
time in the single-screen cinema and instead explore a heterogeneous
temporality of narrative, one marked by an intricate web of
nonsynchronous durations, each of which develops its own event
in a different place with its own rhythm and pace.74 The stories
presented by Aitken’s pieces reside in a world of constant flux, where
different spaces, bodies, animals, or human beings are presented as
fleeting, disappearing, and recurring. In both electric earth (1999,
270 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 5.5) and blow debris (2000), for example, protagonists

(an African-American youth named Ali Johnson and four people
on their separate journeys, respectively) travel through the urban
wastelands and suburban desert landscapes of Los Angeles, looking
as though in a state of dream, physical disorientation, or mental
disorder. They act as the personification of a human subjectivity
of which consciousness is not self-determined, but always altered
by its decentered encounter with the sites and surroundings of
constantly changing elements.
Aitken’s configuration of the fractured subjectivity and
heterogeneous temporality involves a strategy of distributing
projectors and screens into the architectural environment of the
exhibition space and dividing a single room into multiple projection
surfaces, or requiring multiple rooms. This compositional plan
produces a range of effects on the viewer’s perception of the
cinematic technical elements, including framing and montage,
which Aitken employs to express his characters’ subjectivity and
the multiple temporal planes across which they drift. The individual
images, albeit separated from each other, create a spatial diegetic
continuum in which the characters move through, or appear
simultaneously on, two adjacent projected surfaces or two different
rooms, as when in electric earth the protagonist’s automated and
spasmodic dance, after his aimless walk and encounter with a Coke

Figure 5.5 Doug Aitken, electric earth (1999), installation view, eight-
channel video installation, dimension variable, photo: Gert Jan van Rooij,
courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York.
 Cinematic video installations 271

machine refusing to accept his dollar bill, is seen spread across

different locations ranging from a Laundromat to an empty runway
to a show window. Even a small group of shots that constitute a
short sequence are frequently arranged in a number of different
permutations, making the characters and settings travel from one
screen to another. This spatial and temporal disorientation is in sync
with Aitken’s uses of elliptical editing and sound-image disjunction,
two methods of cinematic montage that aim to destabilize the
spectator’s relationship with the space and time of the narrative.
Seen in this light, Aitken’s plan for deploying the screens inside the
gallery space—including questions about how many projectors
or monitors are needed, on what positions they are put—is less a
backdrop against which the nonconventional editing is made visible,
than an integral part that constitutes its process. That is, it is the
result of the direct spatialization of cinematic montage. In electric
earth, Aitken’ polyphonic, multi-temporal narrative structure
is made possible not just by the transposition of these cinematic
techniques onto eight screens, but by the constitutive role of the
three rooms (with the central one divided in two) in distributing
images. The rooms create a sense of separation between the eight
screens, therefore allowing the viewer no single vantage point from
which he or she would be able to observe their images at the same
time and place. More than spatializing the durations of the images
on the eight screens and amplifying their audiovisual stimuli, this
separation demands the mobile spectatorship, compelling the viewer
to walk amid the images from one room to the other and enabling
him/her to physically and psychically embody the protagonist’s
sense of spatial and temporal disorientation. Aitken has called this
architectural spatialization of his narrative a “narrative corridor,”
by which he means that a narrative “can exist on a physical level—
as much through the flow of electricity as through an image.”75
Eleanor Heartney notes that while today’s video installations
represented by Aitken appear to be “less concerned with machines
or technology than with the often spectacular effects they can
achieve,” they also retain “early video’s concerns with time, space,
and body,” including its “dependence on the location of the viewer
in the surrounding space.”76 From this viewpoint, Aiken’s strategy
of multiplying narrative viewpoints and incorporating them into
the work’s architecture repurposes the idea of associating video
technologies with architectural materials and structures in early
272 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

video art. However, unlike Campus’s and Graham’s self-reflexive

inquiry of the relationship between video and architecture, Aitken
uses video’s architectural dimensions to invent a particular model
of spectatorial activity, a spectator whose physical movement
through the architectural space matches the work’s ambulatory
arrangement of images. As Alexander Alberro notes, Aitken’s large-
scale multiscreen installation situates the viewer as the one who
“decides on the order of the cuts or montage” and thus “functions
as the fourth wall, the final screen completing the narrative.”77
Ursula Frohne echoes Alberro’s view on Aitken’s pieces, stating
that their architectural ensemble, linked to the dizzying, visceral
audiovisual effects of their projected images, “literally ‘frames’ the
mobile spectator within the emotive space of moving images.”78
Both critics’ accounts suggest that Aitken’s cinematic video
installation attempts to connect the film spectator’s psychological
and sensory identification with filmic spectacle and narrative to
the gallery visitor’s phenomenological experience of the projected
image onto the architectural space, an experience prefigured by the
conventions of early film and video installation.
Aitken’s massive work, Sleepwalkers (2007, Figure 5.6), expands
his spatialized narrative created by video projection onto the
surfaces of a museum (the Museum of Modern Art) against the

Figure 5.6 Aitken, Sleepwalkers (2007), installation view at Museum of

Modern Art, New York, six-channel video installation, dimensions variable,
courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York.
 Cinematic video installations 273

backdrop of the complex and transitory cityscape of New York

midtown. Recalling the tradition of “City Symphony” as a vivid
portrayal of modern urban life in the 1920s, the work restores an
affinity between the cinematic gaze and the fluid, kaleidoscopic, and
simultaneous views in the densely layered metropolis.79 It does so by
endowing five inhabitants of twenty-first century New York with a
series of connected rhythms that yield their energies, tempos, desires,
and emotions analogous to the changing landscape of the city, and
by distributing their lives onto eight architectural surfaces—five are
the museum’s façades, and three are the west sides of the museum’s
open lot and entrance. On these eight surfaces, the viewers (the
museum’s visitors and the pedestrians who pass along the street
around the museum) see the five characters beginning and ending
their ordinary urban lives in New York City during a single day,
which consists of a series of synchronous moments from morning
to night. The characters simultaneously wake up in different spaces
that are nevertheless similar in their common modern style of
architecture, go to work in different vehicles (getting into a car,
riding a bus, mounting a bicycle, taking the subway), and are
entangled in the accelerating swirl of urban culture, in which there
occur a series of encounters, delays, and detours at the heart of
New York City. The Museum’s building surfaces then become part
of this dynamic narrative artifact by appearing as though they merge
with skyscrapers, offices, and the inside and outside of apartments.
The surfaces are also a constitutive part of the work’s montage in
which a series of abstract figures and geometric patterns shaped by
an array of objects in the city—coffee cups seen from a birds-eye-
view, and the lines and curves of neon lights—simultaneously appear.
Rather than insisting on the medium-specific divide of media
screen spectatorship, for example, the divide between the film
spectatorship and the spectatorship of the gallery visitor, the large-
scale projection in Sleepwalkers elicits the viewer to have various
body-image relationships applied to different media screens
whose spectatorship and experience are considerably determined
by their locational and environmental properties. Aitken’s public
projection of vertiginous urban imagery that forms a narrative
on the atmosphere and texture of city life displaces the cinematic
and the video screens from their established settings and repositions
them within the open, outdoor situation of the street. Similar to
the experience of watching a film in the theater, viewers are able
274 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

to maintain their frontal position toward the projected image.

At the same time, however, they must shift their position to view
the projected images on the other sides of the building, images that
might remain unnoticed if they insisted on the initially established
single point of view, as in the case of electric earth. In this sense,
Aitken’s use of the building surfaces as projected image spaces are
derived from his previous “narrative corridors,” whose arrangements
of screens originate from the convention of video architecture in
the gallery. Thus, while the frontality of the spectator vis-à-vis the
framed virtual world inside the screen is still effective, the screen
as window meets an embodied, moving spectatorial condition. For
Anne Friedberg, cinema’s shifting framing and camera mobility
offsets its immobile body-screen relation by providing its spectator
with the “bodily, haptic, phenomenological perception of an
itinerant and peripatetic viewer.”80 In Sleepwalkers, the interplay
of the cinematic mobile gaze and the viewer’s physical mobility
supplements the immobile spectatorial relation of the normative
cinematic apparatus. The video technologies for projection, then,
lie at the heart of blending the language of spectacular cinema with
the convention of video installation in the gallery and relocating
both in a new urban context.
Aitken’s architectural deployment of screens across multiple
rooms or surroundings to spatialize the fragmented narrative
space and to create the unstable subjectivity and spectatorship is
also the case with Ahtila’s six-channel video installation Where is
Where? (2008, Figure 5.7). Based on a real event that occurred in
Algeria at the end of the 1950s, where there was a violent clash
between the Algerian resistance movement and the French colonial
government’s hard-line countermeasures, the work intersects a
narrative on two Algerian boys who killed their friend (a French
boy of the same age) with a story about a female poet’s encounter
with the God of Death (as seen in Ingmar Bergman’s film The
Seventh Seal [1957]) who triggers her to investigate the destiny
of the boys and the elusive truth of the murder. While continuing
to interweave different temporal levels of a fictive narrative (not
allowing a single vantage point that would otherwise assimilate
them into a centralized, chronological narrative), Ahtila deploys
six projectors within the gallery space in such a way that no
one can capture them within a single field of vision: two screens
are positioned side by side, and the other two face each other.
 Cinematic video installations 275

Figure 5.7 Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where? (2008), installation view

at K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, six-channel
video installation with eight-channel sound, courtesy of Marian Goodman
Gallery.

Across the four screens, there is a complicated overlap of the

two temporal threads—the story of the murder in the 1950s and
that of the woman who investigates the murder in contemporary
New York City and her dream. The structure of the four screens
resembles a rectangular room, enclosing viewers so that they must
circle around the screens in order to see the extent to which the
poet’s psyche is fractured, hovering between “her personal attempt
to understand the events she wasn’t a witness to and the actual
occurrences of death.”81 On the left side of the contiguous two
screens, a single screen shows two boys interviewed by a number
of people including a couple of psychiatrists who scrutinize their
psychological disturbance. On the right side, the final screen
presents a loop of the archival footage of cadavers, the victims
of the Algerian War as the ghosts of history. These two additional
screens remain not totally visible to the viewer unless they
approach either of them while temporarily giving up watching the
events on the four main screens.
Bringing the bond between video and architecture to her
spatialization of multiple times and locations, Ahtila also uses this
distribution of the screens into separate spaces to spatialize an array
of cinematic techniques and forms. She draws on the strategies of
art cinema, including disjunctive editing and narrative ambiguity,
276 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

enabling them to operate in dialogue with the spatial congruency

and temporal synchronicity of the screens in the three-dimensional
space.82 This interaction between the cinematic elements and the
screen architecture does not simply increase the overall effect of
spatiotemporal heterogeneity but also invites animation and
documentary as other cinematic forms. An animated film appears
on the screen at the entrance to the installation, representing an
imaginary expression of the poet’s psychic turbulence faced with
the postcolonial trauma. This has a complementary relation to
the archival footage of the Algerian War on the last screen, which
serves as the indexical trace of the events that the work recreates.
By associating its spatial shifts and temporal multiplicity with all
the techniques and forms, the installation testifies to the status of
cinematic video installation as a complex hybrid of the conventions
of cinema and video. As Alison Butler neatly summarizes, “implicitly
acknowledging the status of multiscreen projection as a hybrid
form rather than a medium in its own right, Ahtila investigates the
ways in which location and dislocation can be suggested in each of
the mediums that inform the work.”83

Strategies of temporalization:
Gordon, Breitz, Douglas
The concept of temporalization here suggests that electronic and
digital technologies produce a different temporality than that of
photography and film. An array of aesthetic features presented
by those technologies, such as nonlinearity, multidimensionality,
reversibility, and contraction-dilation, demonstrate that the
temporality of electronic and digital technologies operates differently
from the inscription of an event derived from the photochemical
mediation of time, insofar as it springs from their material unit
(electronic signal in video, for instance) and technical procedures.
These aesthetic features also suggest that the technologies configure
our sense of time in ways that go beyond our perception of time
based on the photochemical media. Mark B. N. Hansen argues
that digital technics in the twenty-first century (which refers to the
algorithmic, processual, and interactive dimensions of computational
technology) influences the experience of time in a way that is outside
 Cinematic video installations 277

the frame of the twentieth-century media: “Digital inscription of

time today occurs at an infrastructural level and at temporal scales
that are beneath the threshold of consciousness and perception.”84
While acknowledging that Hansen’s view on the distinctiveness of
the temporality in digital technics is compelling, it should be further
noted that the changes in the inscription of time and temporal scales
are not new with the introduction of computational media in the
twenty-first century, but date back to video’s capabilities of shifting
time, such as its production and interruption of real time, and its
playback function to compress and dilate the time of the recorded
image. In this sense, electronic and digital technologies are seen to
inform a post-filmic temporality as distinct from that grounded in
photography and film.
For Sean Cubitt, two post-filmic temporal manipulations,
“playback time” (manipulation of temporal flows and their speeds)
and “machine time” (a sense of time no longer subject to the natural
progression and the human being’s perception of time), become “a
raw material for the generation of artistic concepts.”85 Seen in this
light, the term “temporalization” is defined as a tendency of cinematic
video installations to take these post-filmic temporal manipulations
as their raw material to investigate cinema’s overlapping relations
to time: cinema as the record of a past passing on to the viewer
in his present, and cinema as a set of techniques for building our
individual and collective memory and perception. The works that
pertain to this tendency adopt cinema’s particular elements and
transform their temporality with the help of video and digital
technologies in order to conceptually examine their particular status
in our idea of time. Yet it could be argued that this is not simply
a restoration of the cinematic time since these works foreground
a transition from cinematic time to the post-filmic time as a key
condition for our reviewing of films and extensively our experiences
of cinema. The artists in question, Douglas Gordon, Candice Breitz,
and Stan Douglas, address the issue that cinema no longer exists in
the same way it once did, by separating the fragments of cinema
from its institutional context and collapsing them into the new—
video-based and computer-based—technological systems that allow
for both repetition and exhaustion. In this regard, their strategies
of temporalization are also used for the re-temporalization of film.
For Gordon and Breitz, video is defined less as a medium
circumscribed by the modernist association between its particular
278 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

techniques and forms of video art than as a technology comprising

a series of electronic and digital devices and platforms—including
the DVD and the internet—associated with a particular pattern of
viewing films in a sociocultural context: a domestic, privatized,
and nonlinear viewing unavailable from the collective cinematic
experience guaranteed by theatrical exhibition.86 In this context, the
artists’ video installations assume the methods of remaking cinema
in order to interrogate both the historical meaning of film and the
transformation of it into non-filmic objects and experiences. The
temporality of the post-cinematic media technologies serves as a
key building block of the artists’ formal and aesthetic strategies.
Before introducing his concept of postproduction discussed in
Chapter 3, Bourriaud writes that Gordon’s work is grounded in
the “new approaches to time brought on by the presence of home
video,” labeling it as the “post-VCR art.”87 He further notes that
the work of the “post-VCR art” presents itself as a “material time
span which every exhibition event has to update and revive,” in
contrast to the artwork of the previous time as the “mark of a past
action.”88 In fact, these two categories of time are not as opposed
to each other in the “post-VCR” installation works as Bourriaud
believes. Rather, their strategies of temporalization amount to
a double exposure of two temporalities: the time of borrowed
film(s) as the “mark of a past action” and the “material time span”
that transforms the time of the films in various ways and thereby
situates itself as a presence to the viewer. Païni also has pointed out
this coexistence of the filmic and the post-filmic temporalities in
his discussion of the DVD. For him, the DVD initially provides the
viewer with the “spectacle of time from the repeated representation
of the same sequence” in a film as an “ideal representation of
the time registered” for a domestic spectator by allowing him
nonlinear access and repeated viewing. It also potentially makes
“exposed time visibly infinite”89 in ways not entirely confined
within the convention of the standardized home viewing. For, as
we have seen in the cases of transitional found footage practices
discussed in Chapter 3, the transition of a film from celluloid to
the DVD impacts the film’s material dimension, which results in
its malleability (subject to different ways of visualization) and
transportability (to different surfaces and experiential platforms).
This reveals possibilities for the disjunction of two temporalities,
namely a temporality of the original film and that of replaying
 Cinematic video installations 279

the film with new technologies. In cinematic video installations,

this disjunction then entails the coexistence of several correlated
categories that might be regarded as dualistic: film as a found object
and as a new, transformed aesthetic object based on film, cinephilia
and iconoclasm, the aspects of cinematic spectatorship (including
the viewer’s immobility) and those of post-cinematic spectatorship
(including the mobile spectatorship of the gallery visitor), celluloid
versus electronic or digitized data, and finally, the movie theater
versus the post-theatrical viewing interfaces spanning from the
customized VCR to the DVD and the computer-based projection or
transmission system that enables the extraction and permutation of
a film’s multiple segments.
Gordon’s video installations, recycling mostly Hollywood films
but sometimes less known archival footage of medical or scientific
research films,90 invite the viewer to see a number of “between”
relations between film and video, a film’s monumentality in the
movie theater and its demystification driven by the popularization
of post-cinematic viewing technologies, stillness and movement,
perception and memory, past and future, the self and its double,
life and death, good and evil, normalcy and madness, sound and
vision, etc. His installations explore the passage between the two
poles of each pair, blurring their boundaries, but nevertheless
refuse to stay in either of them. This is reflected in Gordon’s
conceptual and technical devices that reveal two types of intervals.
The first is the temporal interval between two successive film
frames. Many of Gordon’s installations, such as 24 Hour Psycho
(1993, Figure 5.8), explore and make visible this interval between
the frames with slow motion, repetition, playbacks, and fade-
ins. Gordon’s later works, including Between Darkness and
Light (After William Blake) (1997), Through a Looking Glass
(1999), left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right
is right (1999) and Déjà-vu (2000), use multiple projectors and
screens to vary the temporal conditions of the borrowed films.
In these works, the spatial interstice between two screens or
projection surfaces unveils a temporal interval in different ways.
In left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is
right, for instance, Gordon projects Otto Preminger’s film noir
Whirlpool (1949) in its ninety-seven minutes into two screens that
mirror each other, with one of them reversed. The two images
of the same film eventually become discordant, marked by the
280 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 5.8 Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho (1993), video Installation,

dimensions variable, installation view Le Mejan, Arles, 2011. © Studio lost
but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015, Photo Studio lost but found/Bert
Ross, Courtesy Studio lost but found, Berlin, from Psycho (1960), USA.
Directed and Produced by Alfred Hitchcock. Distributed by Paramount
Pictures © Universal City Studios.

optical flicker effect and the stuttering distortion of its sound,

as each image stems from either the odd- or even-numbered
frames of the film. This sampling would not be possible without
the digitized version of the film on the DVD, which allowed
Gordon to compile all the odd and even frames in two different
tracks.91 Thus, while foregrounding the theme of the double self,
the interval between the two screens reveals the gap between the
film’s most fundamental units (film frames), which would remain
invisible under its standardized projection.
Gordon is undoubtedly a leading figure of “post-VCR art” in a
few ways: he has repeatedly declared himself as from the generation
who grew up with the video player, which allowed him to be
obsessed with seeing films repeatedly and mixing them freely with
other cultural artifacts or media forms.92 In particular, the video
player enabled Gordon to proclaim the “death of cinema” as the
hallmark of his involvement in cinema. However, this expression
does not mean the annihilation of cinema as an art form sustained
by its own traditions and prospects; rather, Gordon’s “death of
cinema” relays his ambivalent attitude toward cinema: nostalgia
and distancing. He considers as now obsolete the idea that cinema
 Cinematic video installations 281

is a “progressive medium”93 that once enjoyed its heyday when it

situated itself in the movie theater as a ritualistic site for collective
experience.94 As Païni has noted in his concept of the “patrimony”
of cinema, home-viewing technologies allow Gordon’s generation
to review the products of film history as a mediator of collective
or personal memory, while also evoking that the idea of cinema as
a powerful collective form of audiovisual experience now becomes
outmoded. The technologies help the generation to recognize the
importance of cinema as a particular art form of the twentieth
century by bringing into relief its particular formal and cultural
attributes. At the same time, it is through these technologies that
cinema was reestablished on the verge of disappearance, regarded
as outdated, and thrown into being recycled and remembered in
different ways.
VCR technologies also play a crucial role in providing a key
technique for making visible the temporal interval between two
adjacent frames of a single film: the extreme slow motion to dilate
the time of the original film and thereby expose the components
of filmic specificity that would otherwise remain unrecognized
under the standardized condition of cinematic screening. Gordon
explicitly remarks this point in one of his most well-known notes
on 24 Hour Psycho as follows:

In 1992 I had gone home to see my family for Christmas and

I was looking at a video of the TV transmission of Psycho.
And in the part where Norman (Anthony Perkins) lifts up the
painting of Suzanna and the Elders and you see the close-up of
his eye looking through the peep-hole at Marion (Janet Leigh)
undressing, I thought I saw her unhooking her bra. I didn’t
remember seeing that in the VCR version and thought it was
strange, in terms of censorship, that more would be shown on
TV than in the video, so I looked at that bit with the freeze-frame
button, to see if it was really there.95

Working with a commercially available Panasonic VCR, Gordon

took advantage of its capabilities to slow the film (Hitchcock’s
Psycho) down at a speed of two frames per second and guide the
viewer toward his desired scenes. In particular, the video-based
slow motion was certainly related to his idea on the temporal
interval: “Every second of a film is made up of 24 images with
282 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

gaps-in-between. But what happens if you slightly stretch these

gaps?”96 The stretched interval made by the VCR’s technical
capabilities corresponds to two aspects of domestic spectatorship
in contrast to theatrical viewing. First, the slow motion reflects
Gordon’s desire to gain control of the film that he watched (in
this case, Psycho), when he regards the viewer’s relation to the
film image via the remote controller as the logical progression of
the desire for his sadistic control of it: “Sadism is possible (maybe
unavoidable) for our generation as we grew up with the VCR.”97
At the same time, he uses the term “post-voyeuristic state” to
distinguish this spectatorial relation from the older generation
for whom the movie theater functioned as a dominant viewing
interface. The term then echoes what Laura Mulvey has called the
“private” or “possessive” spectatorship. For her, 24 Hour Psycho
marks the shift from the voyeuristic spectator grounded in the
apparatus of the movie theater to the emergence of the “fetishistic
spectator,” a spectator who invests himself in “repetition, detail,
and personal obsession”98 with the help of electronic and digital
technologies that make it possible to delay film. The work’s slow
motion presents each image of Psycho as a quasi-still picture
lingering on the screen for about half a second, and this process
signifies the transition from the previously elusive image of the
film to a panoply of still images in which the film’s material and
formal attributes are inscribed. Second, it is equally important to
emphasize that the VCR granted Gordon not simply total control
of the film but also a “chance encounter” with its details that might
otherwise have been left unnoticed. That is, he did not expect all
the effects made by the VCR’s slow motion. This aleatory aspect
became more evident in his works after 24 Hour Psycho. In his
multiscreen works, the post-filmic viewing technologies took
him to different disjunctions between two films or a film’s two
divided sequences, which reveal intriguing thematic, formal, and
rhythmic parallels between them.99 This suggests that the viewer-
image relationship made by the technologies does not simply serve
to empower the viewer, but it has certain aspects that are out of
his/her control: for example, in 24 Hour Psycho, the 24-hour
time within which the work should be viewed cannot be endured
in reality.
This ambivalent aspect, offering and defying the viewer’s control
over the original film, relates to the hybridity of the post-filmic
 Cinematic video installations 283

temporal interval in Gordon’s video installations. The temporally

manipulated images in his works oscillate between film and video
in terms of their material and aesthetic dimensions. As Klaus
Biesenbach notes in regard to 24 Hour Psycho, Gordon’s slow
motion achieves a transition from the movement-image to the time-
image in a Deleuzian sense: “By slowing down the movement of
Hitchcock’s frames, Gordon disrupts the conventional narrative
links between them and transforms Psycho into pure image.”100 As
the linear progression of Hitchcock’s Psycho is elongated, its cuts
and flashbacks are dissolved. Therefore, the causal link between
its series of events and the viewer’s awareness is weakened. This is
because the patterns of editing deployed to imply causal connections
and set up narrative cues are disrupted in the slowed-down version.
This is particularly evident in the original film’s shower scene
where the killing of Marion is shown by means of combining shots
taken from different places and times at an extremely accelerated
pace that contributes to build the viewer’s tension. In contrast,
Gordon’s version maintains neither the temporal contraction nor
the transitions between the different shots, which are constitutive of
the Hitchcockian suspense. This suits what Deleuze would call the
breakdown of the “sensori-motor scheme” as a crucial factor for
disintegration of the movement-image. Gordon himself has indeed
acknowledged that this is the point at which “perception breaks up
or breaks down.”101 For Deleuze, the collapse of the “sensori-motor
scheme” enables the cinematic image to express a “purely optical”
situation that does not extend into action but goes beyond the
confines of habitual perception, one that is a “matter of something
too powerful . . . but sometimes also too beautiful.”102 Seen in
this light, Gordon’s method is to regard the interval between two
adjacent frames as the most fundamental basis for the generation
of cinematic movement and temporality, and based on this, to
manipulate the interval with the customary playback system that
supports such functions as jogging and shuttling.
The issue, then, is whether the resulting time-image is purely film
based. As discussed in Chapter 1 regarding Taylor-Johnson’s and
Viola’s extreme condensation/dilation of a filmed time, central to
the encoding of celluloid into the flow of electronic signal is that
the property of the interval is changed in its material and technical
dimensions. In this sense, a number of paradoxical descriptions
about the temporal progression of the frames in 24 Hour Psycho,
284 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

including “a still in flux,”103 point to the paradoxical coexistence of

a filmic state and a video state, or the continual exchange between
the two. Certainly, the work can be seen as a remediation of the
“film stilled” as a case of videographic moving pictures in Chapter 1,
because each decelerated frame exists as the bearer of the individual
photogram that consists of the entire film. However, it should be
noted that the exposure of these frames is ensured by the non-filmic
mechanism of playback as a technique of temporalizing the fictional
time of the original film, which calculates the frames and endows
the transition between them with the newly extended duration
(twenty-four hours). Philip Monk probably is the only commentator
to pay attention to the way in which temporality changes from
the automated movement of film frames via the projector to the
calculation of them with video’s time-coding: “Calculated, the still
is a factor of number and thus an abstract fragment; experienced,
it has a qualitative duration that is whole. As a single frame held in
time, the still is both an instant and a duration.”104 In fact, Gordon
himself has stated that after 24 Hour Psycho, he used a computer
program to “take the slo-mo a bit further by taking a split-second
of cinema time (real time) and use this to produce a permanent
image.”105
It is thus important to determine how this extremely dilated
temporality is viewed in relation to the complex interplay between
the techno-aesthetic dimensions of the post-filmic apparatus and the
phenomenological and mnemonic dimension of film spectatorship.
The most prevailing view on 24 Hour Psycho sees video’s capacity
of extending the time of the film as a tool for gaining access to,
revealing, and restoring its hidden details. For those who support
this view, video’s freeze-frame and slow motion function to demystify
the film’s suspense and narrativity, and thereby bring viewers to the
interplay between their memory and their experience of the film’s
defamiliarized version in the present of viewing the work. Giuliana
Bruno, for instance, approaches 24 Hour Psycho in terms of the
opportunity to “access the work of the film apparatus itself” and
for the “remapping of the cultural space of cinema.”106 However,
Bruno overlooks that the extended time does not simply pave the
way for inviting the gallery visitor to the “possessive pleasures”
of video-based cinephilia, but is experienced as such. That is, the
viewer’s perceptual encounter with the cinema under this condition
in the gallery must be viewed as more than the precondition for the
 Cinematic video installations 285

exposure of what underlies the Hitchcockian effects. Also important

is that this phenomenological dimension entails the other side of the
post-filmic apparatuses in regard to the temporality of the extended
film. The viewing interface takes the spectators to the dimension
of inhuman temporality that is out of their control yet engenders
their mnemonic activities. In this way, the play of the interface in
triggering and reshaping the viewers’ memory of the original film
demonstrates Vilém Flusser’s view that “our praxis (manipulations)
with electronic memories force us to admit that memory is not a
thing but a process.”107
Thus, it is argued here that the newly given duration produced
by the constant projection of Hitchcock’s Psycho at extreme
slow speed makes the viewer come closer to the film while also
entailing a new post-cinematic aesthetic experience from which it is
distanced. The film’s fictional time made by Hitchcock’s meticulous
editing and experienced as vivid by the viewer in the normative
cinematic situation is thus affirmed and negated simultaneously.
Nancy Spector certainly sees this tension between the filmic time
(on the level of the time in the image) and the post-filmic time (that
of the time of the image) as she paraphrases the extended duration
as a “constantly renewing now.” She writes, “The view is catapulted
back into the past by his recollection of the original, and at the
same time he is drawn into the future by his expectations of an
already familiar narrative . . . A slowly changing present forces itself
in between.”108 This temporal ambivalence echoes the constitutive
duality of the work’s apparatus, which corresponds to both the
original film’s monumental value and the dissolution of the film
into its heterogeneous components, as Balsom aptly notes: “[The
work] combines the large-scale projection and collective reception
of the cinema with newer, home video practices of copying and
altered playback to create a hybrid aggregate that brings into relief
the tension between its constituent parts.”109
Gordon’s method of temporalization by making cinematic and
video-based times operate simultaneously is also played out in
Breitz’s installation pieces, although there are a couple of notable
differences between the two: unlike Gordon’s propensity for the
temporal manipulation derived from playback, Breitz extends it
into the realm of editing while also intermingling it with digital
compositing and sampling. Both artists’ isolation of the found
image and their revelation of its hidden or invisible dimensions
286 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

are akin to some of the practitioners of transitional found footage

such as Girardet and Müller, who combine special effects with
the montage as compiling in order to unveil the underlying
gestural clichés of popular cinema and their mnemonic and
affective influences on the viewer. However, Breitz is more
interested in the domineering influence of entertainment culture
and consumerism on the formation of mass subjectivity than
in Gordon’s demystifying the pantheon of classical Hollywood
cinema. She frequently refers to a “scripted life,” denoting
“our inevitable absorption of language and behavior through
exposure to the media”110 which permeates our daily gestural
and mental activities so deeply. In relation to her strategies of
copying, decontextualizing, disrupting, and reassembling with
the help of digital technologies, Breitz’s investigation of mass
culture and media is as much in line with the contemporary art
of postproduction in Bourriaud’s sense as with the history of
appropriation art since the modernist age: “Breitz’s videos hark
back to Dadaist and Constructivist procedures of montage, as
well as to the more recent appropriation aesthetics of the ‘80s,
such as the videos of Dara Birnbaum . . . and Richard Prince’s
re-photographs of advertisement.”111
Despite their common employment of multiple monitors, Breitz’s
installations are thematically divided into two categories of the
“scripted lives” that circulate in mass culture and its technologies.
The first type of works—Babel Series (1999), Four Duets (2000),
Soliloquy Trilogy (2000, Figure 5.9), Mother + Father (2005), and
Him + Her (2008)—address the icons of popular culture, including
Hollywood stars and top pop music singers, and unveil their
manner of acting, conversation, or singing by sampling and looping
the footage in which they feature. For example, Soliloquy Trilogy
truncates three films—each starring Jack Nicholson (The Witches
of Eastwick), Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct), and Clint Eastwood
(Dirty Harry), and erases every moment in which the actors are not
vocally present to the viewer. The result is the harsh repetition of
the three actors’ vocal performances, which are disconnected from
other eliminated scenes and thus sound disembodied, so that they
are viewed as “a highly stylized self, pre-packaged in Hollywood and
delivered via the silver screen for our immediate consumption.”112
Another category of Breitz’s pieces is video portraits of general
people: their identity is presented as fans or consumers who want
 Cinematic video installations 287

Figure 5.9 Candice Breitz, Soliloquy (Sharon) [1992–2000], from the

Soliloquy Trilogy (2000), a short film on DVD, installation view, Castello
di Rivoli, Turin, Photograph: Paolo Pellion, courtesy of the artist and White
Cube, London.

to imitate the vocal and gestural characteristics of the pop icons

they admire (such as Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna),
as the people are seen performing their songs (Karaoke [2000], King
[2005], Queen [2005], and Working Class Hero [2006]).113
Breitz’s latest installation Him + Her (Figure 5.10) demonstrates
that her exploration of the “scripted lives” is founded in the complex
temporalization of found images. Drawing on the oeuvres of Jack
Nicholson and Meryl Streep, each amounting to 23 and 28 films
respectively, the work transforms their cinematic temporality into
a kaleidoscopic set of recurrences. After studying her collection
of those films, Breitz distributes numerous manifestations of the
characters performed by the same actor, Nicholson or Streep,
across seven plasma screens, so that they look as though they are
exchanging dialogue with one another. The multiple personalities,
their voices speaking to or against each other, are orchestrated
into a complex yet coherent story about their gendered and
psychological identities, including Nicholson’s figures as the
incarnations of castrated or perverse masculinity in Cuckoo’s Nest
(1975), The Shining (1980), and The Departed (2006), to name a
288 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 5.10 Breitz, Him (1968–2008), seven-channel video installation.

Installation view, Kunsthalle Berlin, Photograph: Jens Ziehe, Berlin,
Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London.

few, and Streep’s characters as women—mother, daughter, wife—

who fluctuate between firmness and fragility in Sophie’s Choice
(1982), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Bridges of Madison County
(1995), and The Hours (2004), etc. Breitz calls the common editing
technique used to mobilize all these characters in this manner
“digital twitch,” a technique she applied to Mother + Father, in
which she examines filmic portrayals of parenthood by isolating
emotional moments of six aggressive fathers and six neurotic
mothers and by making “the stuttering, jerking texture of both
image and language.”114 The “digital twitch” undoubtedly evokes
Martin Arnold’s forward-and-backward editing used for Alone.
Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), given that each of the characters
in Him + Her is shown as repeating convulsively the same sort
of gestures—trembling, nodding, shaking, etc.—in a given time
span. On another occasion, Breitz calls this type of temporal
manipulation “re-animation,” stating that “It is more about feeding
on cultural corpses, seizing a piece of inanimate footage and trying
to revive it. . . . The re-animated actors . . . never acquire the fluid
movement and full consciousness that we associate with ‘life.’ Like
Frankenstein’s monster, they jerk and twitch their way through the
narrative.”115 Introducing the disparity between the filmed bodies
and the body of their apparatus, or making the former a type of
 Cinematic video installations 289

disembodied automata by activating the latter in such a way as to

resist its standardized temporal progression, also recalls Arnold’s
replacement of the optical printer by the Avid editing system that
must have helped Breitz to extract the purposed segments from the
digitized DVD copies of the films starring Nicholson and Streep.
Breitz’s idiosyncrasy, then, lies in her additional technique that
complicates the interplay between the “re-animated” characters.
With digital compositing, she removes the backgrounds of the
original films from their segments that she had sampled. As a
result, all the Nicholson and Streep characters wear the same
dresses, as can be seen in the source films, but they are thrown
into a black background as a backdrop for a new narrative about
their similarities and differences, in which they call out and respond
to each other. Thus, the characters’ existence is split between the
original films and the newly constructed, multiplied media space.
This discrepancy is reflected in the work’s temporal structure.
The two stars are double bound by the time of the characters they
played, including that of their psychological conflicts and traumas,
and the digitally produced time that exists outside yet also controls
their characters impersonally. “As the sampled actors perform for
me, their digital twitches and jerks can be read as symptomatic of
their dilemma as hostages, reluctantly dancing to a tune they have
not chosen,” says Breitz.116
Breitz brings the extracts of Hollywood films to the looping
circle of multiple screens, making Nicholson and Streep confront a
series of encounters between their different characters as avatars of
their self as celebrity, and guiding the viewer toward the parallels
between the characters’ roles and stereotypes. Her application of the
multiple-screen format to the imagined psychodrama on the splitting
and multiplication of the star image is indebted to Andy Warhol’s
double-screen film projection, Outer and Inner Space (1965). Breitz
explains: “[It] was at the back of my mind while making Him + Her.
The work is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Edie Sedgwick in which
four competing Sedgwicks appear simultaneously before the viewer,
interacting with each other, challenging each other, drowning out
each other’s words, and eroding the possibility of a single authentic
Sedgwick.”117 Warhol’s influence is illuminating initially because
Sedgwick’s images take on the similar ambivalence of uniqueness
and sameness as those of Nicholson and Streep. In Outer and Inner
Space, Warhol shot his conversation with Sedgwick with a 16-mm
290 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

camera (he remained off-screen) with her constantly confronted

video image that Warhol had previously filmed. She responded
to Warhol’s questions while being conscious of her videotaped
self-image. Her emotional trajectory vis-à-vis the image wavers
between uneasiness and acclimatization, and the viewer is able
to witness the recurrence of the same actress as well as the subtle
differences between her images. A more important contribution
by Warhol to Him + Her lies in his use of the double-screen
projection to make visible the impact of video on film. Maintaining
the differences between film and video in technique and material,
Warhol engenders the confusion between them by placing on each
of the two reels Sedgwick’s filmed image next to her prerecorded
video image played during the filming. This device signifies that
Sedgwick’s technologically mediated self is not just her past self-
image, but also a real-time event that immediately affects her in-
person subjectivity in front of Warhol’s film camera, to the extent
that the two selves become indistinguishable from each other. As
William Kaizen states, with this simultaneous arrangement of the
two images, Warhol creates “a portrait of the emergence of video
caught on film, reflecting the new mode of televisual liveness
erupting into and rupturing the filmic.”118 Seen in this light, the
permeability of the two media images is another key device inherited
by Breitz from Outer and Inner Space, given that the interaction of
the Nicholson-Streep characters, if divided by the monitors, is at
play within the common black background. Thus, the characters,
albeit coming from distinct original films, appear as if living in the
same imaginary space as a stage for the kaleidoscopic display of
their conflicts and contradictions.
What makes Breitz distinct from Warhol is that she underlines
the fluidity of the interaction by making the appearance of the
characters on different screens circular and repetitive: a particular
character of Nicholson or Streep emerges in one screen, next time in
another screen, or occupies more than two screens simultaneously.
On each occasion, his or her dialogue is recontextualized as a
voice addressing other characters on other screens, or as a type of
soliloquy without any on-screen listener. All the characters continue
to appear and disappear in different permutations of the fragments
in which they reside, but they are ultimately confined within the
same type of space, as suggested by the common black background.
Given Breitz’s explicit preoccupation with the consumption and
 Cinematic video installations 291

circulation of the image of celebrity as a chain of signs, the space

of Him + Her, both multiplied and identical, is analogous to the
contemporary media network in which different images of the same
cultural product are replicated and come to life simultaneously. The
multiple screens interconnected via the work’s playback system
thus correspond to the fragmentary yet ubiquitous characteristics
of the network; the looped permutations of the Nicholson-Streep
characters suggest the virtually infinite repeatability of the star
image as the outcome of the contemporary culture industry that
endeavors to perpetuate itself.
In this way, Him + Her extends the temporal manipulation of
the image inherited from Warhol’s experiment with early video
technologies into the post-cinematic mediascape of consuming
filmic images. The common black background initially suggests
that particular segments of films, such as memorable scenes of a
particular star that encapsulates his or her remarkable acting and
lines of dialogue, are easily dissected and extracted from their
original films and repurposed in different contexts. In addition,
the looped multiscreen transmission of the Nicholson and Streep
segments underlines the extent to which the temporality of media
consumption transcends the chronological ordering of the films in
which he or she acted: that is, today’s global media network such
as YouTube is able to play the films in an arbitrary manner, and
allows for the simultaneous consumption of numerous audiences-
users. The two actors’ repetitive gestures and dialogues therefore
refer to more than the audience’s objects of consumption. Rather,
they underscore that our acts of consumption are increasingly more
affected by the psychic and affective patterns of response that the
media network offers us. It is in this way that Breitz’s strategies of
temporalization lead to the complex hybridizations of the time of
the films (and the time of the stars) and the time of consuming them
with post-filmic viewing technologies.
Since the late 1990s, Stan Douglas has been producing what he
has called the “recombinant” works, pieces that combine narrative
units—scenes, dialogues, soundtracks, visual cues, etc.—that
originate from other existing materials such as film, television, and
literary or historical texts. His methodological achievement in doing
so resides in the fact that he introduces a putatively infinite number
of combinations between the elements of which each of the pieces
consists. He first films a series of sequences, then dissects them into
292 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

smaller units—soundtrack and image track or individual scenes, for

instance—and redistributes them into two or more channels that
are connected to different playback devices. The length of each
play version differs from the length of the original film from which
Douglas derives the material, thus the synchronized operations of
the devices produce different combinations of those units from loop
to loop. For instance, in Win, Place, or Show (1998, Figure 5.11), a
double-channel video installation that presents a conflict between
two male protagonists set in a confined modernist apartment after
the Second World War, Douglas examines the long-take and the
shot-by-shot editing as two conventions of filmmaking. He then
transfers his filmed scenes to four DVD players connected to a
synchronous starter and an interval switcher, two technical devices
with which their combination varies each time they are repeated.119
The result is an almost infinite and random expansion of their
montages (to more than 20,000 hours for 204,203 variations),
which subjects the viewer to the varying but repetitive chain of
the two protagonists’ conflict. Due to the changing combinations
within the same setting, this conflict is represented as always
fissured and unending. This “recombinant” narrative is inspired by

Figure 5.11 Stan Douglas, Win, Place, or Show (1998), two-channel

video projection, DVDs, computer, color, sound, approximately twenty
thousand hours for 204,023 variations, with an average duration of
6 minutes each. Installation view, Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia,
Canada, Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner NY/London and Victoria
Miro, London.
 Cinematic video installations 293

his application of the computer to select certain elements, such as

characters, situations, rules, and story paths. The installation thus
produces contingency (in the sense that its elements are combined)
and partial perspectives (in the sense that each viewer comprehends
its spatiotemporal construct), while turning viewers’ attention to
its technological system that affects their perception of time. As
this playback system produces such temporalities as randomness,
difference, infinity, and recurrence, Douglas’s “recombinant”
narrative defies the notion that events happening in a fictional place
unfold in a chronological order.
The innovative aspect of Douglas’s recombinant works lies in
their time frame within which the viewer contemplates the art of
the moving image inside the gallery wall. Win, Place, or Show, for
example, makes it impossible for the viewer to obtain the whole
and coherent picture of its narrative space. For the viewer will not
be able to endure the time taken by the putatively infinite number
of permutations—about 6 hours for 204, 203 variations—during
his/her limited time available for viewing. Instead, the viewer may
watch as many different versions of the work’s sequence as possible
according to the moment he/she enters the installation and to the
duration of viewing he/she is willing to spend. Accordingly, one
visitor’s picture of the work may differ from that of another visitor.
In this sense, the “recombinant” works including Win, Place, or
Show make contingent the temporal condition of the exhibition
place that influences our perception of the artwork. The implication
of this contingency can be understood in reference to Groys’s
argument on the ways in which video installations deconstruct
the film’s image and its control of time. That is, the capacities of
electronic and digital technologies to stop, slow, and extend the
time of the image demystify both film’s motion and its rigid screen
time. By demystifying the latter with their putatively infinite time
frames, Douglas’s“recombinant” works demonstrate that the digital
playback system is able to re-temporalize cinematic narrative to the
extent that goes beyond the viewer’s threshold of perception.

Conclusion
The cinematic video installations examined herein thus far
demonstrate that hybridizations are at play on the dimension of
294 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

the media apparatus that determines the perceptual and ontological

conditions of cinematic images. Similar to the cases of transitional
found footage practices, the operations of spatialization and
temporalization in these works testify to the transition of video
from its analogue predecessor to digital technologies for projection
and imaging as they enable the viewer to perceive the cinematic
image and narrative in more decentralized and multiple ways than
projected in the normative cinematic apparatus. At the same time,
this transition allows for video to intimately merge with what
constitutes the cinematic—projection, narrative space and time,
montage, cinematography, and the historical forms of cinema—thus
leading to the ambiguous correlations of the two media. It could be
stated that these artworks are in large part driven by the desire to
reconfigure the cinematic, and that video in these cases serve as an
apparatus rather than a distinctive medium. But eventually, their
intermedial configurations on the level of the apparatus validate
how video’s specificities, its three-dimensional construction of
media space and architecture in the works of Farocki, Ataman,
Aitken, and Ahtila, and its manipulation of temporality at various
speeds and in multiple durations in Gordon, Breitz, and Douglas, are
maintained and reconstituted simultaneously. Video’s convergence
with the digital thus enables the artists to refashion the cinematic
montage, narrative, and spectatorship with the multiplied spaces
and times experienced by the viewer who negotiates his/her frontal
attention to the images with his/her perambulatory navigation
through them (as in the strategies of spatialization), or to investigate
how the post-cinematic technologies transform the time of cinema
as the art of formulating our perception and memory while also
shedding on it new light (as in the strategies of temporalization).
These two allow me to stress that hybridizations as the consequence
of the post-media conditions pervade not simply in the forms of the
moving image but also in the apparatuses by which they are framed
and circulated.
 Afterword

Andrew Neumann’s Double Psycho (2011, Figure 6.1) alternates

key sequences from both Hitchcock’s original movie and Gus Van
Sant’s 1998 remake at an extremely fast rate, such that the work’s
images appear as the rapid-fire cutting between the same, yet
different, scenes from the films, including the famous shower scene.
While it is true that this belongs to a kind of transitional found
footage practice, what is notable in this work is Neumann’s self-
invented algorithmic process by which two (or more) signals from
both encoded films could be fed into a video switcher. Neumann
himself explained to me that this algorithmic process is not simply a
technical feature specific to digital editing, which now can be easily
accomplished with nonlinear editing, but also a conceptual artifact
grounded in his digital remediation of a special effect originally
available from the optical printer: “A computer connected to the
switcher controlled the tempo of the cuts as well as the dissolve
duration. Essentially the system operated as a ‘real-time optical
printer.’”1 Accordingly, in Neumann’s system, the viewer is capable
of engaging with the correlation of digital editing’s automated
and real-time specificities and its hybridized link to the celluloid-
based technique. This correlation also goes for the complexity of
the resulting images in Neumann’s work. While still indicating that
they are derived from the two filmic versions of Psycho, the original
images, which are similar and arranged in contiguous manner,
morph into one another such that the resulting images explode
into a new temporal experience given by the algorithm’s automated
capacity, one that goes beyond film’s temporality based upon the
discreteness of its filmstrip.
296 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

Figure 6.1 Still from Andrew Neumann, Double/Psycho (2011), single-

channel video, 20–40 min, courtesy of the artist.

The double projection of both Psychos as film and their digitally

created rapid-eyed morph in Neumann’s work, I argue, provides
a compelling illustration of the coexistence of medium specificity
and media hybridization enabled by digital technologies: that is, a
double exposure of an image form (for instance, a filmic image) that
has maintained and still maintains its medium-specific possibilities
and limitations, alongside emergent forms of the image that are
grounded in various negotiations between the material, technical,
and aesthetic components of the image form and those of the others
(whether a video or digital image). This coexistence of one image
form and the others fits into what Raymond Bellour has recently
called the parallel between “cinema, alone” and “multiple cinemas.”
Replacing his terminology of “other cinema,” which he had used to
indicate the aesthetics of confusion in the cinematic film and video
installations in the 1990s, Bellour’s idea of “multiple cinemas”
suggests that those artworks cannot be immediately equated with
the rich histories of traditional cinema, which he terms “cinema,
alone,” originally indebted to Serge Daney.2 For the multiple cinemas
introduce new forms, materials, and experiences unavailable from
the components of the traditional cinema while also appropriating
and transforming those components. Bellour’s idea of “cinema,
alone,” then, draws our attention to the ways in which the variable
specificity of traditional cinema, long realized in its rich histories,
still persists in the contemporary imagescapes of art, media, and
culture, thereby stressing the demand to place traditional cinema as
 Afterword 297

a parallel to multiple cinemas. It also suggests that the cinema has

maintained its specific features, such as theatrical viewing, projected
images, and the larger-than-life single screen, in its multiple
configurations and appearances since its birth, communicating with
its neighboring arts and coping with the ongoing changes of media
technologies. We might call this “One Cinema,” but only in the
sense that it has enveloped and developed its own material, formal,
and technical multiplicities irreducible to larger generic categories
such as fiction film, arthouse film, or experimental film. While the
“specific” histories, forms, and experiences of this One Cinema will
remain and at the same time be diversified, they also serve as a
rich, inexhaustible resource for the multiple cinemas that we have
been witnessing in various media platforms—cinematic variants
that give birth to a vast array of hybrid moving images. In this
sense, Bellour’s idea of the parallel between “cinema, alone” and
multiple cinemas testifies to the compatibility of medium specificity
and media hybridity that this book has argued and demonstrated.
This book has examined various types of hybrid moving images
across different platforms of art in terms of how they are derived
from the hitherto unexpected interrelations of three time-based
media: film, video, and digital media. More than illustrating the
transgression of the borders between the different arts associated with
the media, these images testify to the dialectic of medium specificity
and media hybridization as an epistemological framework for
understanding how these interrelations shape our complicated and
even contradictory experiences of visual expressions. Grasping this
ontological complexity of moving images demands the negotiation
of different media-theoretical perspectives that have been centered
on the historically existing regimes of the time-based media. For the
artworks that I have investigated in this book ask us to consider
both the theories of the ontology of photographic and filmic
images in cinema studies as well as the theories of electronic and
digital images in art criticism and media studies. This intermedial
approach to the hybrid moving images produced by these artworks,
then, serves as a compelling collaborative framework for both
theories, not simply because it is an analytical tool in revealing the
array of cross-references between more than two media involved
in the production of an art form, but because it enables us to view
how material and technical properties of a media are altered and
redirected as they encounter other media and art forms.
298 Between Film, Video, and the Digital

From a broader perspective, this book rekindles debates about

medium specificity as it has continually been at stake in the broader
domain of social science and the humanities. The modernist
medium-specificity argument assumes that a medium’s pure and
essential features are directly organized into a unique set of artistic
objects. The current use of moving images within different forms
and platforms disallows this argument as technological innovation
blends and collides the properties of different media in varying
combinations. There have accordingly been two major theoretical
approaches to the dissolution of modernist medium specificity in the
humanities. First, recent media theories contribute in reconfiguring
digital media’s reliance on the techniques and language of old media
and in illuminating unique changes in their art forms brought by
digitization. However, these media theories go so far as to raise
the elimination of a medium’s particular features as such by simply
demonstrating that the forms and techniques of earlier media are
assimilated into the computer as a universal medium. Second, the
canonical trope of postmodernism in art criticism elucidates the
appropriation and mixture of existing materials and techniques
in contemporary art, but in doing so, this trope paradoxically has
a homogenizing effect on addressing this formal and aesthetic
plurality by simply bracketing it under the label of heterogeneity. In
this regard, the two kinds of dichotomy each championed by these
theoretical threads—the convergence of “old” media into “new”
media on the one hand, and modernism versus postmodernism
on the other—grossly lack a conceptual framework for tracking
how material and technical properties of a medium are channeled,
diverted, and altered as these properties are distributed across other
media and art forms.
In this book, my remapping of the two theories on the demise of
modernist medium specificity with regard to the growing impact of
digitization—the “post-medium” and the “post-media” theories—
has made clear how these dichotomies are still persistent in the
realms of arts and humanities. As David Joselit has convincingly
demonstrated in his refreshed study of video art, what is interesting
in the shifting regimes of art with respect to the penetration of
media technologies since the 1960s is “not the contest between
art history and visual culture, but a parallel (though not identical)
relation between medium, typically associated with the fine arts,
and media, a term commonly associated with commercial modes of
 Afterword 299

communication like television and film.”3 Seen in this light, this book
provides an extensive study of how this parallel has disseminated
and varied during the last two decades through particular visual
expressions that challenge three epistemological divides related
to the “old/new media” and the “modernist/postmodernist”
dichotomies: first, the divide between the discourses that emphasize
the separation of traditional media and those that celebrate or
bemoan digital convergence; second, the divide between the art
criticism, which strives to protect the singularity and autonomy of
artistic expression, and the strand of media theories that aim to
underline the broader communicability of technological media; and
finally, the divide between modernist reflexivity and postmodern
relativism concerning the ontology of media in the contemporary
practices of the art of the moving image. I wish that the concepts
of the hybrid moving image and the dialectical negotiation between
medium specificity and media hybridity that I strived to develop
in this book offer theoretical and methodological frameworks for
overcoming these three divides that still loom large over cinema
studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism. These two
will also be a necessary springboard for leaping into the questions
of when the post-media conditions will end, what will come after
them, and what exactly the “post” in post-media means.
 Notes

Introduction
1 Richard Shiff, “Look to See by Looking,” in Jim Campbell: Material
Light, exhibition catalogue (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz,
2010), p. 70.
2 Jürgen E. Müller, “Intermediality and Media Historiography in the
Digital Era,” Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, vol. 2
(2010), p. 25.
3 See, for instance, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture
(New York and London: Routledge, 1994); Néstor García Canclini,
Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity,
trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
4 Yvonne Spielmann and Jay David Bolter, “Hybridity: Arts, Sciences,
and Cultural Effects,” Leonardo, vol. 39, no. 2 (2006), p. 106.
5 Noël Carroll, “The Specificity of Media in the Arts,” in Theorizing the
Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 28.
6 Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” in Theorizing the Moving
Image, p. 53.
7 Ibid., p. 51.
8 Ibid., p. 52.
9 Carroll, “Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-consciously
Invented Arts: Film, Video, and Photography,” in Theorizing the
Moving Image, p. 13.
10 Noël Carroll, “Forget the Medium!” in Engaging the Moving Image
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 8–9.
11 D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 36.
12 Ibid., p. 41.
302 Notes

13 Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (New York and

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 288.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 19.
16 Ibid., pp. 291–92.
17 Rosalind E. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of
the Post-medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999),
pp. 31–32 (emphasis added).
18 Lev Manovich, “Post-media Aesthetics,” in (dis) Locations,
exhibition catalogue (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe and
Hatje Cantz, 2001), p. 10.
19 Ibid., pp. 11–12.
20 Peter Weibel, “Preface,” in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary
after Film, eds Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2003), p. 16.
21 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry,
vol. 25, no. 2 (1999), p. 296.
22 Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea,” p. 25.
23 For Krauss’s reflection on Broodthaers’s films, see “A Voyage on the
North Sea,” pp. 44–45, 52–53.
24 For Krauss’s discussion on Coleman’s “projected images,” see
her “ . . . And Then Turn Away?: An Essay on James Coleman,”
October, no. 81 (Summer 1997), pp. 5–33.
25 For Krauss’s detailed analysis of Kentridge’s “drawings for
projection,” see “The Rock: William Kentridge’s Drawings for
Projection,” October, no. 92 (Spring 2000), pp. 3–35.
26 Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” p. 296.
27 Jacques Rancière, “What Medium Can Mean,” Parrehsia, no. 11
(2011), p. 36. Rancière’s rejection of the Greenbergian argument on
the direct association between an art form and the material properties
of its medium is encapsulated in his following comment: “It is strictly
impossible to present a concept of art which defines the properties
common to painting, music, dance, cinema, or sculpture. . . . It is the
concept of a disjunction—and of a historically determinate unstable
disjunction—between the arts, understood in the sense of practices,
ways of making” (Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans.
Gregory Elliott [New York and London: Verso, 2007], p. 72).
28 See Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven
Corcoran (London: Polity Press, 2009), p. 56.
 Notes 303

29 Jacques Rancière, “Art of the Possible: Fulvia Carnevale and

John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Artforum
International, vol. 45, no. 7 (March 2007), p. 257.
30 Rancière, The Future of the Image, p. 42.
31 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance
and Fronza Woods (Paris: les presses du réel, 2002), p. 113.
32 Ibid., p. 18.
33 Ibid., p. 21. Bourriaud repeats the idea that his concept of
“relational art” is predicated upon his rejection of the modernist
medium specificity thesis in his book The Radicant (2009) as
follows: “Radicant art implies the end of the medium-specific,
the abandonment of any tendency to exclude certain fields from
the realm of art. . . . Its own spontaneous movement would be to
transplant art to heterogeneous territories, to confront it with all
available formats. Nothing could be more alien to it than a mode
of thought based on disciplines, on the specificity of the medium”
(Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili
Porten [New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009], pp. 53–54).
34 Lev Manovich, “After Effects, or the Velvet Revolution,” Millennium
Film Journal, nos. 45/46 (Fall 2006), p. 6.
35 Peter Weibel, “The Postmedia Condition,” paper given at the
“Postmedia Condition” exhibition, MediaLabMadrid, Madrid,
February 7 to April 2, 2006, online at http://www.medialabmadrid.org/
medialab/medialab.php?l=0&a=a&i=329 (accessed May 17, 2008).
36 Ibid.
37 Lev Manovich, “Understanding Hybrid Media,” in Animated
Paintings, ed. Betti-Sue Hertz (San Diego, CA: San Diego Museum
of Art, 2007), pp. 36–45, online at www.manovich.net/DOCS/
hybrid_media_pictures.doc (accessed March 9, 2011).
38 Manovich, “After Effects, or the Velvet Revolution,” p. 11.
39 For Krauss’s Benjaminian reading of the redemptive power of an
outdated technological means, see her “A Voyage on the North
Sea” and “Reinventing the Medium.” In her essay “The Rock,”
Krauss contrasts the Benjaminian idea of a medium’s obsolescence
with Friedrich A. Kittler’s theory of the influences of the computer
as declaring the teleological end of not simply the idea of medium
specificity, but also the traditional definition of the medium (33).
Kittler’s own writing on this point is as follows:
The general digitization of channels and information erases the
differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice
304 Notes

and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as

interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-
produced glamour will survive for an interim as a by-product of
strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything
becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice.
And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flow
into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can
be translated into any other. With numbers, everything goes.
Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage,
transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping—a total media link
on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium (Kittler,
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
and Michael Wutz [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999], pp. 1–2 [emphasis added]).
40 In fact, Krauss’s writings on the post-medium condition since the
mid-2000s strive to overcome her own limitation of blocking any
potential of new media by embracing video, which she previously
considered to eliminate film’s aggregative medium-specific condition
due to its constitutive heterogeneity, as a means for investigating
the expressive possibilities of sync sound as an outdated technical
support of film. For this revised idea demonstrated by Krauss’s
discussion of Bruce Nauman’s Lip Sync (1969) and Christian
Marclay’s Video Quartet (2002), see her “Two Moments from
the Post-medium Condition,” October, no. 116 (Spring 2006),
pp. 55–62.
41 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2001), p. 46.
42 Manovich, “Understanding Hybrid Media.”
43 Sven Lütticken, “Undead Media,” Afterimage, vol. 31, no. 4
(January/February 2004), p. 12. Krauss herself, too, stresses that
unlike Marshall McLuhan’s idea of “the medium as message”
that disallows any specificity of the medium, her concept of the
medium refers to not simply a technical support for undergirding
the very possibilities of art, but also the memory that bears a range
of layered conventions that lend themselves to diverse artistic
investigations into the medium’s specific qualities: “‘The medium
is the memory’ insists . . . on the power of the medium to hold the
efforts of the forebears of a specific genre in reserve for the present”
(Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2011], p. 127).
44 J. Sage Elwell, “Intermedia: Forty Years on and beyond,”
Afterimage, vol. 33, no. 5 (March/April 2006), p. 52.
 Notes 305

45 My definition of the cinema in comparison to film echoes

Lütticken’s idea on the “post-cinematic.” He characterizes Godard’s
Histoire(s) du cinéma as post-cinematic “in the sense of leaving
behind the medium, the apparatus, and the production system, but
they are still suffused with the history of film; they are film’s post-
cinematic afterlife” (Sven Lütticken, History in Motion: Time in the
Age of the Moving Image [Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013], p. 35).
46 See Geoffrey Cheshire, “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema,”
New York Press, vol. 12, no. 34 (August 26, 1998), online at http://
www.nypress.com/12/34/film/film3.cfm (accessed November 23,
2006).
47 See Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema,” New York Times,
February 25, 1996, online at http://www.nytimes.com/
books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-cinema.html (accessed November
23, 2006); Sylvia Harvey, “What Is Cinema? The Sensuous, the
Abstract and the Political,” in Cinema: The Beginnings and
the Future, ed. Christopher Williams (London: University of
Westminster Press, 1996), pp. 228–52.
48 See Tess Takahashi, “‘Meticulously, Recklessly Worked-Upon’:
Materiality in Contemporary Experimental Animation,” in The
Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema, eds Chris Gehman
and Steve Reinke (Toronto: YYZ Press, 2006), pp. 166–78.
49 See Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, pp. 163–74; Fredric
Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 4
(Summer 2003), pp. 695–718. The two thinkers’ arguments on the
change of temporality with regard to the transition from the filmic
to the post-filmic era echo key writings by Serge Daney and Paul
Virilio.
50 Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and
Technological Change,” in Reinventing Film Studies, eds Christine
Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 439. For a
fascinating summary of these discourses, see also Stefan Jovanovic,
“The Ending(s) of Cinema: Notes on the Recurrent Demise of the
Seventh Art, Part I,” Offscreen, vol. 7, no. 4 (April 2003), online at
http://offscreen.com/view/seventh_art1 (accessed May 15, 2010).
51 Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium
Specificity,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol.
18, no. 1 (Spring 2007), p. 131.
52 Ibid., p. 143.
53 See Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural
Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI Publishing, 2001).
306 Notes

54 Barbette Mangolte, “Afterword: A Matter of Time,” in Camera

Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson,
eds Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam, the
Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), p. 267.
55 Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, p. 171. To support this
difference, Rodowick examines how a seemingly uninterrupted
100-minute sequence in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002)
cannot be considered as one long take in the conventional sense
of celluloid-based cinema. Wishing to record continuous duration,
Sokurov and his team employed color filters, a perspective
algorithm, and digital compositing for the production of their
sequence. Although creating the sense of spatial continuity
comparable to that of the long take in celluloid-based cinema, these
techniques, according to Rodowick, ultimately form not blocks of
duration that are derived from recording and editing, but images
whose spatiotemporal qualities are discrete and variable as they
are subject to a variety of algorithmic transformations. For this
reason, Rodowick characterizes Russian Ark as a telling example
of the digital event from which film’s exploration of duration and
its profound temporality are absent. “Nothing endures in a digitally
composed world,” he writes. “Here the sense of time as la dureé
gives way to simple duration or to the ‘real time’ of a continuous
present” (The Virtual Life of Film, p. 163).
56 Vivian Sobchack, “‘At the Still Point of the Turning World’: Meta-
morphing and Meta-stasis,” in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation
and the Culture of Quick-Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 141.
57 Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 302 (emphasis in
original).
58 Ibid., pp. 78–87.
59 Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is quite exemplary to
Manovich’s claim on the continuity of cinematic elements in the
digital age. While the film’s untethered mobility of the camera and
unconventional viewpoints, aimed at incorporating the new visual
perception and epistemology appropriate for industrial modernity,
are granted a new life by the techniques of virtual camera and
3D visualization, its superimposition of images as a hallmark of
modernist technique is brought to the window interface where the
user becomes the editor able to create a montage of disparate still or
moving images within the same frame.
60 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, and Time,”
in Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel, Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital
 Notes 307

Age, eds Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (Amsterdam, the

Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), pp. 201–22;
Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-media: An
Archaeology of Possible Futures?” in New Media, Old Media:
A History and Theory Reader, eds Thomas Keenan and Wendy Hui
Kyong Chun (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 13–26.
61 See André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “The Cinema as a
Model for the Genealogy of Media,” Convergence, vol. 8, no. 4
(2002), pp. 12–18.
62 Philip Rosen, “Old and New: Image, Indexicality, and Historicity
in the Digital Utopia,” in Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity,
Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001),
p. 309.
63 Ibid., p. 325.
64 Malcolm Le Grice, “Mapping in Multi-space—Expanded Cinema
to Virtuality (1994),” in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age
(London: BFI Publishing, 2001), p. 283.
65 Markos Hadjioannou, From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of
Digital Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2012), p. 9.
66 Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema:
Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-garde film,”
October, no. 103 (2003), pp. 15–30.
67 Raymond Bellour, “The Battle of Images,” in Future Cinema, p. 56.
68 More precisely, Casetti uses the term “re-relocation” for this
double movement: “the departure from the film theatre in search
of new environments and devices (relocation); and the return
to the theatre enriched by a new patrimony accumulated in
the meantime (the ‘re-’ added to the relocation)” (“Back to the
Motherland: The Film Theatre in the Postmedia Age,” Screen,
vol. 52, no. 1 [Spring 2011], p. 9).
69 Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: 7 Key Words for the Cinema
to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 69.
70 Giuliana Bruno also sees the transformation of exhibition space into
rooms for film and video installation as motivated by “a drive to
access the work of the film apparatus itself in relation to modes of
picturing,” and in this sense the installation emblematizes that “the
cinema and the museum should renew their convergence in ways
that foster greater hybridization” (“Collection and Recollection: On
Film Itineraries and Museum Walks,” in Camera Obscura, Camera
Lucida, p. 236, 238).
308 Notes

71 Yvonne Spielmann, Video: A Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2008), p. 4.
72 Lucinda Furlong, “Tracking Video Art: ‘Image Processing’ as a
Genre,” Art Journal, vol. 45, no. 3 (Autumn 1985), p. 233.
73 See, for instance, David Antin, “Video: The Distinctive Features
of the Medium,” in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed.
John G. Hanhardt (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press,
1986), pp. 147–66; Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” in
Video Culture, pp. 192–219; Bruce Kurtz, “The Present Tense,”
in Video Art: An Anthology, eds Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot
(New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp.
234–43; Rosalind E. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,”
October, no. 1 (Spring 1976), pp. 50–64; Fredric Jameson, “Reading
without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-Text,” in The
Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature,
ed. Nigel Fabb (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 199–223.
74 Timothy Binkley, “Refiguring Culture,” in Future Visions: New
Technologies of the Screen, eds Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen
(London: BFI Publishing, 1993), p. 98 (emphasis added).
75 Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art: The Development of
Form and Function (New York and Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006),
p. 260.
76 Michael Rush, Video Art, rev edn (New York and London: Thames
and Hudson, 2007), p. 210.
77 Mark Mayer, “Digressions toward an Art History of Video,” in
Being and Time: The Emergence of Video Projection, ed. Mark
Mayer (Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1996), p. 29.
78 Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 133 (emphasis added).
79 Yvonne Spielmann, “Video: From Technology to Medium,”
Art Journal, vol. 65, no. 3 (Fall 2006), p. 58 (emphasis added).
80 Ibid., p. 64.
81 Irina O. Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation:
A Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités, no. 6
(Autumn 2005), p. 46 (emphasis in original).
82 Werner Wolf, “Intermediality Revisited: Reflections on Word
and Music Relations in the Context of a General Typology of
Intermediality,” in Essays in Honor of Steven Paul Scher and on
Cultural Identity and the Musical Stage, eds Suzanne M. Lodato,
Suzanne Aspden, and Walter Bernhart (Amsterdam, the Netherlands:
Rodopi, 2002), p. 17.
83 Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation,” p. 52.
 Notes 309

84 Rajewsky defines these two types of intermediality as “media

transportation” and “media reference,” respectively.
85 Joachim Paech, “Artwork—Text—Medium. Steps en Route to
Intermediality,” paper delivered at the conference “Changing Media
in Changing Europe,” Paris, May 26–28, 2000, online at http://
www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Philo/LitWiss/MedienWiss/Texte/interm.
html (accessed January 21, 2011) (emphasis added).
86 See Ágnes Pethő, “Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of
Methodologies,” Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media studies,
vol. 2 (2010), p. 53. For the first category of research, see Joachim
Paech, Literatur und Film (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 1988).
The second category includes so many works that it is sufficient to
enlist several of them that examine the ways in which conventions of
painting influence and are reworked in the representational system
of cinema. See, for instance, Pascal Bonitzer, Décadrages: peinture
et cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Étoile, 1987); Jacques Aumont, L’oeil
interminable: cinéma et peinture (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1989);
Angela Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in
Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996); Angela Dalle
Vacche (ed.), The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Brigitte
Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Ágnes Pethő, Cinema and
Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between (Newcastle, UK:
Cambridge Scholarly Publishing, 2011); Ágnes Pethő (ed.), Film
in the Post-media Age (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholarly
Publishing, 2012); Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev (eds), Impure
Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2013); finally, Robert Stam’s works on self-reflexivity
and adaptation, for instance, represent the last category of research,
in terms of how they are concretized similarly and at the same time
differently in literature and film. See Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film
and Culture: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992); Robert Stam, Literature through
Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2004); Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds),
Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film
Adaptation (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). It should be added that
Stam’s works in the 2000s pertain to the growing field of adaptation
studies, in which there have been numerous works that analyze the
relation of film and literature from the standpoint of intertextuality
and transmediality. Again, it might be the case that the works in this
field might be viewed as another direction of intermedial studies, but
310 Notes

it is beyond the range of this book to judge whether they genuinely

focus upon the intermedial translation of literary codes and
conventions into those of film or vice versa.
87 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding
New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 45.
88 Ibid., p. 65.
89 Bolter appears to acknowledge this shortcoming in one of his
writings after Remediation, as he puts it: “Hollywood cinema
has been reluctant to remind the viewer of the multiple sources
and constructed nature of the spectacle. . . . To acknowledge
hybridity has been the mark of the avant-garde or ‘art’ film—e.g.
the films of Peter Greenaway or Chris Marker rather than those
of James Cameron or Steven Spielberg” (Bolter, “Transference and
Transparency: Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema,”
Intermédialités, no. 6 [Automne 2005], pp. 16–17).
90 Raymond Bellour, L’entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris:
Éditions de la Différence, 2002), p. 14 (translation mine).
91 For these comparisons, see Edmond Couchot, “La mosaïque
ordonée, ou l’écran saisi par le calcul,” Communications, no. 48
(1988), pp. 79–87.
92 Bellour validates this point as follows:
Between-the-images is that space still new enough to be treated as
an enigma, and already established enough to be circumscribed.
It is not my concern here to write its history (as with all mixtures,
that would be hard to envision). Nor is it a matter of forming
a theory, in the sense of specific concepts which between-the-
images evoke and which would constitute the condition for
discussing it. Instead, the question has mainly been to try to
formulate an experience, such as it has gradually constituted
itself, that started when it became clear that we have entered, via
video and everything that it involves, a new time of the image.
(L’entre-images, p. 15, translation mine, emphasis added)
93 Raymond Bellour, “The Double Helix,” in Electronic Culture:
Technology and Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckrey
(New York: Aperture, 1996), pp. 173–99.
94 Yvonne Spielmann, “Intermedia in Electronic Images,” Leonardo,
vol. 34, no. 1 (2001), p. 55 (emphasis added).
95 Yvonne Spielmann, “Intermedia and the Organization of the Image:
Some Reflections on Film, Electronic, and Digital Media,” iris, no.
25 (Spring 1998), p. 65.
96 Spielmann, “Intermedia in Electronic Images,” p. 59.
 Notes 311

Chapter 1
1 Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October, no. 8 (Spring 1979), p. 75.
2 Ibid., p. 87.
3 Ibid., pp. 80, 83.
4 Quoted in Merriam-Webster.
5 Arthur Danto, “Moving Pictures,” in Philosophy of Film and
Motion Pictures: An Anthology, eds Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi
(London: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 108. In her book-length
study, Anne Hollander has also used the term for her wide-ranging
analysis of how painting in history depicted the subject in motion
with differing styles and conventions. See Anne Hollander, Moving
Pictures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
6 Ibid., p. 103.
7 For instance, Chris Marker has emblematized this crossover by
taking advantage of CD-ROM and multichannel video technologies,
as exemplified by Immemory (CD-ROM project, 1997) and Owls at
Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (eight-channel video installation,
2005).
8 See, for instance, David Campany (ed.), The Cinematic (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007); David Campany, Photography and Cinema
(London: Reaktion Books, 2008); Karen Beckman and Jean Ma
(eds), Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between
Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam,
The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2011); Neil
Campbell and Alfredo Cramerotti (eds), Photocinema: The Creative
Edges of Photography and Film (London: Intellect, 2013); Justin
Remes, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2015).
9 Hilde Van Gelder and Helen Westgeest, “Photography and
Painting in Multi-mediating Pictures,” Visual Studies, vol. 24, no. 2
(September 2009), p. 122.
10 Ingrid Hölzl, “Moving Stills: Images That Are No Longer
Immobile,” Photographies, vol. 3, no. 1 (March 2010), p. 99.
11 For a key influencing account of associating the nature of the
photographic and filmic images with Charles Sanders Peirce’s
idea of the index, see Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the
Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1969). Mary
Ann Doane’s argument emblematizes the position of defining
312 Notes

the indexical nature of film and photography as their image’s

connection to physical reality: “For the indexical image, through
its physical connection, touches the real, bears its impression, and
hence assures us that it is still there” (Mary Ann Doane, “The
Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Difference, vol.
18, no. 1 (2007), p. 142).
12 For the accounts of the “abstraction” of the physical connection
to the real in digital imaging in contrast to analogue photography,
see Timothy Binkley, “The Quickening of Galatea: Virtual Creation
without Tools or Media,” Art Journal, vol. 49, no. 3 (1990), p. 234;
Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, p. 117.
13 Geoffrey Batchen has neatly summarized these two as the
“epistemological” and “technological” crises of photography.
See Geoffrey Batchen, “Ectoplasm,” in Each Wild Idea: Writing,
Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 129.
14 For this point, see Martin Lister, “Introductory Essay,” in The
Photographic Image in Digital Culture ed. Martin Lister (New York
and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–27; William J. Mitchell,
The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 3–22; Lev Manovich,
“The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,” in Photography after
Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age,
eds Hubertus V. Amelunxen, Stefan Iglhaut, and Florian Rötzer
(Munich: Verlag der Kunst, 1995), pp. 58–66.
15 See Fred Ritchin, “The End of Photography as We Have Known
It,” in Photovideo, ed. Paul Wombell (London: Rivers Oram
Press, 1991), p. 9; Don Slater, “Domestic Photography and
Digital Culture,” in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture,
p. 131; Victor Burgin, “The Image in Pieces: Digital Photography
and the Location of Cultural Experience,” in Photography
after Photography, p. 31; Timothy Druckrey, “Fatal Vision,”
in Photography after Photography, p. 86; Fred Ritchin, After
Photography (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009), p. 75.
16 Timothy Druckrey, “Instability and Dispersion,” in Over Exposed:
Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squires (New
York: The New Press, 1999), p. 95.
17 Jeff Wall, “Frames of Reference,” Artforum, vol. 42, no. 1
(September 2003), p. 101.
18 Jeff Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Jeff Wall: The
Complete Edition, eds Jeff Wall, Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc,
Boris Groys, Jean-Francois Chevrier, and Mark Lewis (London:
Phaidon, 2002), p. 93.
 Notes 313

19 David Tomas, “From the Photograph to Postphotographic Practice:

Toward a Postoptical Ecology of the Eye,” in Electronic Culture:
Technology and Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckrey
(New York: Aperture, 1996), p. 151 (emphasis in original).
20 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Ontology, Essences, and Photographic
Aesthetics: Wringing the Goose’s Neck One More Time,” in
Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York and London:
Routledge, 2006), p. 268 (emphasis in original).
21 Peter Osborne, “Infinite Exchange: The Social Ontology of
the Photographic Image,” Philosophy of Photography, vol. 1,
no. 1 (2010), p. 61 (emphasis added). See also Peter Osborne’s
“Photography in an Expanding Field: Distributive Unity and
Dominant Form,” in Where is the Photograph?, ed. David Green
(Brighton: Photoworks/Photoforum, 2003), pp. 63–70.
22 George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October, no. 114
(Fall 2005), p. 138.
23 Christine Ross, The Past Is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The
Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2012), p. 127.
24 Here I define digital video as a technology for carrying the electronic
waveform by measuring it at regular intervals. This measurement
involves the determination of frame rates (temporal sampling) and
the frame’s horizontal and vertical spacing (spatial sampling). While it
shares these two sampling methods with analogue video systems, digital
video adds another sampling grounded in the encoding of the picture
conveyed by the waveform into numerical data (pixels) that describe
the brightness, hue, and saturation of parts of the picture. For a helpful
description of this technological constitution, see John Watkinson,
The Art of Digital Video, 2nd edn (Oxford: Focal Press, 1994).
25 Remes, Motion(less) Pictures, p. 8.
26 André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema—Part II,” What Is Cinema?,
vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2004), pp. 96, 98.
27 See Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October, no. 34 (Fall
1985), pp. 81–90.
28 Metz clarifies his distinction between photography and cinema
in terms of the stillness/motion binary, as follows: “It is not
sufficient to say that film is more ‘living,’ more ‘animated’ than still
photography, or even that filmed objects are more ‘materialized.’ In
the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of impression,
the real presence of motion” (Christian Metz, Film Language:
314 Notes

A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor [Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press, 1974], p. 8).
29 David Green, “Making Time: Photography, Film, and Temporalities
of the Image,” in Stillness and Time: Photography and the
Moving Image, eds David Green and Joanna Lowry (Bristol, UK:
Photoforum/Photoworks, 2006), p. 17.
30 Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the
Impression of Reality,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (2007), p. 50.
31 John Belton, “Painting by Numbers: The Digital Intermediate,” Film
Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3 (Spring 2008), p. 58.
32 Aylish Wood, “Pixel Visions: Digital Intermediates and
Micromanipulations of the Image,” Film Criticism, vol. 32, no. 1
(Fall 2007), p. 78.
33 In her behind-the-scenes comment on Prelude in Air (2006), a
work that films a musician playing a piece of music by Bach,
Taylor-Johnson has suggested her dependence on computerized
manipulations in her film-based pieces: “It was shot in July 2005
and I then spent 6 months working on having the cello that’s being
played digitally removed” (“Sam Taylor-Wood in Conversation with
Annushka Shani,” in Sam Taylor-Wood: Still Lives [Baltic Centre for
Contemporary Art: Steidl, 2006], p. 134). Lewis, too, has explicitly
remarked that he uses a video feed during shooting, as well as the
Avid software for editing. See Jérôme Sans, “Trying Not to Make
Films That Are Too Long: A Conversation Between Jérôme Sans and
Mark Lewis,” Trans: Arts. Cultures. Media, no. 7 (2000), p. 208.
He later confirmed this fact once again to Michael Rush (Michael
Rush, “In Depth, Briefly: The Films of Mark Lewis,” in Mark Lewis,
ed. Karen Allen [Liverpool: FACT and Liverpool University Press,
2006], p. 28).
34 In the film industry, the former is called “primary grading,” a
process of setting “the image’s overall color balance,” and the
latter “secondary grading,” by which “specific parts of a shot
are singled out for specific grading.” See Jack James, Digital
Intermediates for Film and Video (Burlington, MA: Focal Press,
2006), pp. 293–94.
35 For a brief history of this lineage, and the ways in which digital
color grading is integrated into Hollywood filmmaking, see Scott
Higgins, “A New Colour Consciousness: Colour in the Digital Age,”
Convergence, vol. 9, no. 4 (2003), pp. 60–76.
36 Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye, p. 102.
 Notes 315

37 Stephen Prince, “The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts: Cinema and

Cinematography in the Digital Era,” Film Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 3
(Spring 2004), p. 29.
38 Ibid., p. 28. Prince regards the hand-tinted postcard quality in
O Brother, Where Art Thou? as an example of how digital color
timing produces the painterly look of the image, while at the same
time not overturning its overall naturalistic appearance.
39 Philippe-Alain Michaud, “Mark Lewis from September (2001) to
Early March (2002),” Mark Lewis, p. 62.
40 Laura Mulvey provides a detailed analysis of the function of this
zoom in relation to Lewis’s other works. See her “Within a Single
Shot: Continuities and Discontinuities of Time and Space,” Mark
Lewis, pp. 82–83.
41 Raymond Bellour, L’entre-images: photo, cinéma, video (Paris:
Éditions de la Différence, 2002), p. 14 (translation mine).
42 Trond Lundemo, “The Dissected Image: The Movement of the
Video,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns
from Cinema to the Digital, eds John Fullerton and Jan Olsson
(Rome, Italy: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), p. 115.
43 Maureen Turim, “Artisanal Prefigurations of the Digital: Animating
Realities, Collage Effects, and Theories of Image Manipulation,”
Wide Angle, vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1999), p. 58.
44 Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image
(London: Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 7.
45 The artists’ seminal works that investigated video’s real-time
processing and feedback include Anastasi’s Free Will (1968),
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970), Graham’s Present
Continuous Past(s) (1974), and Paik’s TV-Buddha (1974).
46 Ross, The Past Is the Present; It’s the Future Too, p. 116.
47 Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, p. 138.
48 In an interview, Taylor-Johnson said, “It involved a nine-
week filming operation. We had to make a hermetically sealed
environment for it in which the light didn’t change then filmed
a few frames every other hour.” (Martin Gayford, “The Moving
Picture Show,” Telegraph, April 19, 2002, online at http://www.
telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3576219/The-moving-picture-show.
html [accessed May 15, 2009]). This suggests that the minute
changes in shading and luminosity in both Still Life and A Little
Death came from post-production manipulation.
49 See Rush, “In Depth, Briefly,” Mark Lewis, p. 28.
316 Notes

50 Lewis furthers this temporal figuration in his recent work entitled

Prater Hauptallee, Dawn and Dusk (2008). Here we see an image
of a park divided into two time zones, dawn on the left and dusk
on the right. An exact seam links the two zones, but does not fail to
mark the image’s composed nature.
51 John Walsh (ed.), “Emotions in Extreme Time: Bill Viola’s Passions
Project,” in Bill Viola: The Passions (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty
Museum in association with the National Gallery, London, 2003),
p. 33.
52 Mark B. N. Hansen, “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to
Life,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 3 (Spring 2004), p. 614.
53 Hans Belting and Bill Viola, “A Conversation: Hans Belting and Bill
Viola,” in Bill Viola, p. 216.
54 I was informed of this fact in a face-to-face interview conducted
with him on July 2, 2008, when he visited Seoul, South Korea for a
large-scale exhibition covering Ocean without a Shore (2007) and
Transfiguration (2008).
55 Belting and Viola, “A Conversation,” in Bill Viola, p. 207. Viola’s
association between the use of video effects and the painterly
technique is attuned to his embrace of digital technologies in
terms of manipulation and display alike, as he states in another
interview: “They [the Old Master Painters] had this new medium
and technique—oil paint—the most sophisticated imaging system
at the time, the equivalent of digital high-definition video today”
(Bill Viola, “Bill Viola Interviewed by John G. Hanhardt,” Bill
Viola: Going Forth By Day, exhibition catalogue [Berlin: Deutsche
Bank; New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2002],
p. 107).
56 Belting and Viola, “A Conversation: Hans Belting and Bill Viola,” in
Bill Viola, p. 200.
57 Bill Viola, “Video Black—The Mortality of the Image,” in Reasons
for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973–1994, ed. Robert
Violette (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 203.
58 Viola, “The Porcupine and the Car (1981),” in Reasons for
Knocking at an Empty House, p. 62.
59 Tim Sassoon, “Bill Viola’s Passions,” an interview originally
published online at http://www.DV.com/print_me.jhtml?LookupId=/
xml/feature/2003/sassoon1103, found at a personal website of
Harry Dawson, Bill’s long-time cinematographer www.hedjr.com/
DV.com.pdf (accessed on June 20, 2008).
 Notes 317

60 Both Prince and Rodowick have raised this point. See Prince, “The
Emergence of Filmic Artifacts,” pp. 30–1; Rodowick, The Virtual
Life of Film, p. 90. In his Film Art Phenomena (London: British Film
Institute, 2003), filmmaker Nicky Hamlyn also proposes a strong
advocacy for film inasmuch as its grain has a greater degree of color
spectrum and texture than video’s recording system. “Film grain
seems to hold out the promise of more detail at a greater level of
magnification in a way that video does not,” he claims, and “video’s
tonal range, too, is only a fraction of film’s and the consequent lack
of contrast within an image contributes to its lack of death and
dynamism” (p. 13).
61 The sharpness of focus is particularly obvious in all of Lewis’s
pieces examining the language of the established shot, in which a
variety of moving objects passing from left to right can be found.
Each is delicately positioned in the background or middle ground
of the shot, thus indicating that the seemingly static image is
actually moving. The object, captured from a distance, is made
more observable through postproduction and projection in a high-
definition format.
62 Sean Cubitt, Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 34. In his discussion on the
ontology of video in comparison to film, philosopher Maurizio
Lazzarato, too, has highlighted this point, as follows: “The video
image is not an immovable still set in motion by a mechanical
arrangement. Instead, it is a constantly reshaping profile painted
by an electronic paintbrush. It takes its movement from the
oscillations of matter; it is this oscillation itself. Video technology
is a modulation of the flows—its image is nothing more than a
relationship between flows” (Maurizio Lazzarato, “Video, Flows
and Real Time,” in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader,
ed. Tanya Leighton [London: Tate Publishing in association with
Afterall, 2008], p. 284).
63 Laura U. Marks, “How Electrons Remember,” in Touch: Sensuous
Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 172 (emphasis in original).
64 Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 7
(emphasis added).
65 Ibid., p. 284.
66 David Green, “The Visibility of Time,” in Visible Time: The Work
of David Claerbout, ed. David Green (Brighton, UK: Photoworks,
2004), p. 31.
318 Notes

67 David Green and Joanna Lowry, “Photography, Cinema and

Medium as Social Practice,” Visual Studies, vol. 24, no. 2
(September 2009), p. 140.
68 Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books,
2004), p. 23. Campany reaches the same point as Burgin’s in his
Photography and Cinema.
69 George Baker, “Reanimations (I),” October, no. 104 (Spring 2003),
p. 35.
70 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 2.
71 Raymond Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” Camera Obscura, vol. 8, no. 3
(September 1990), p. 100.
72 See Mary Ann Doane, “Real Time: Instantaneity and the
Photographic Imaginary,” in Stillness and Time: Photography and
the Moving Image, pp. 23–38.
73 Ibid., p. 32.
74 Peter Wollen, “Fire and Ice,” in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany,
p. 110.
75 Ibid., p. 109.
76 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), p. 16.
77 For a helpful overview of these films, see Erika Balsom, “Saving
the Image: Scale and Duration in Contemporary Art Cinema,”
CineAction, no. 72 (Spring 2007), pp. 23–31. Also, for some recent
studies on “slow cinema,” see Matthew Flanagan, “‘Slow Cinema’:
Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental
Film,” doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, October 2012; Ira
Jaffe, Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014).
78 See P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” in Visionary Film: The
American Avant-garde, 1943-2000, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 348.
79 Catherine Russell, “Framing People: Structural Film Revisited,” in
Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 168.
80 Ibid., p. 183. To be sure, the recent landscape films of Benning (13
Lakes [2004], 10 Skies [2004], and Ruhr [2009], to name just a
few) and Peter Hutton (Time and Tide [1998–2000], Looking at
 Notes 319

the Sea [2000–01], and At Sea [2004–07]), as well as some films by

Abbas Kiarostami (Five Dedicated to Ozu [2003]) and Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, who hover between experimental/art cinema and
media installation art, illustrate Russell’s point by revisiting the
fixed frame in accordance with their engagement with or allusion to
the representation of photography or painting.
81 Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Image, Music,
Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977), p. 70. He further coins the term “dioptric arts” to indicate
that the scene, the picture, and the shot all share the tableau as
a convention to organize the geometrical representation of the
observed reality.
82 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 32.
83 Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 26.
84 Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, ed. and trans. Ben Brewster
(London: British Film Institute, 1990), pp. 155, 163.
85 Mark Godfrey, “Fiona Tan’s Countenance,” in Fiona Tan:
Countenance, exhibition catalogue (England: Modern Art Oxford,
2005), p. 75.
86 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity,
Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), pp. 162–63.
87 Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist
Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006), p. 452.
88 Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium
Specificity,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol.
18, no. 1 (2007), p. 136.
89 Ibid., p. 137.
90 Malin Walberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 92.
91 Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,”
October, vol. 3 (Spring 1977), p. 80.
92 David Green and Joanna Lowry, “From Presence to the
Performative,” in Where Is the Photograph?, p. 59.
93 Ibid., p. 58.
94 This interest drove Tan to produce Tuareg (1999) and Facing
Forward (1999), two video installation pieces that recycle and
320 Notes

project fragments of film footage taken by tourists and colonists.

The fragments show the ethnographic record of groups of people
from Africa and Asia, and in some of them the subjects are posed
frontally to the camera, in the same way that they might be aware
that they were having their photographic portrait taken.
95 Joanna Lowry, “Portraits, Still Video Portraits, and the Account of
the Soul,” in Stillness and Time, p. 72.
96 For an excellent study of this tension, see Anne M. Wagner,
“Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October, no.
91 (Winter 2000), pp. 59–80.
97 Jacques Rancière, “The Pensive Image,” in The Emancipated
Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York and London: Verso,
2009), p. 108.
98 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 91.
99 Barthes clarifies this idea of the difference between film and
photography in temporality and spectatorship as follows: “Film can
no longer be seen as animated photographs: the having-been-there
[of photography] gives way before a being-there of the thing [in
film]” (Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” Image, Music, Text, p. 45).
100 Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein
Stills,” in Image, Music, Text, pp. 67–68.
101 Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” Wide Angle, vol. 9,
no. 1 (1987), p. 9. He elaborates on the uses of these techniques
in his essay entitled “The Film Stilled,” in which he claims that
they add up to a film that includes a form of image marked by the
intermedial encounter between cinema and photography, a type
of moving image permeated by the “trance of the negative and the
specter of photography” (p. 120).
102 Ibid., p. 10.
103 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image
(London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 186.
104 Green, “The Visibility of Time,” in Visible Time, p. 38.
105 David Claerbout and Lynne Cooke, “Conversation,” in David
Claerbout: Video Works, Photographic Installations, Sound
Installations, Drawings: 1996-2002, exhibition catalogue
(Kunstverein Hannover, August 24–September 29, 2002, Brussels: A
Prior, 2002), p. 53.
106 Claerbout explains how he came up with this combination: “I have
noticed two different approaches to [video]: one considers its roots
as video signal, and the other attributes monumental/architectural
 Notes 321

qualities to the surface of the projection. As the older form of the

video-as-signal shifts to that of the pixel artists like myself think
of digital projection in terms of square centimeters and no longer
solely as video/television signal” (David Claerbout and Christine
van Assche, “Interview,” in David Claerbout: The Shape of Time, ed.
Christine van Assche [Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2008], p. 13).
107 As François Parfait points out, the spatial layering of this temporal
simultaneity dates back to Peter Campus’s image processing
works and Thierry Kuntzel’s videos pioneering exploration of the
relationship between photography and film. See Parfait, “Cloudy,
Becoming Mostly Sunny by Late Afternoon,” in David Claerbout:
The Shape of Time, p. 27.
108 Gilles Deleuze elucidates his concept of “incompossibility,” in The
Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) and his essay “The
Actual and the Virtual” (published in Gilles Deleuze and Claire
Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Barbara Habberjam, Janis Tomlinson,
and Eliot Albert [New York: Columbia University Press, 2002], pp.
148–52).
109 Timothy Murray, “Digital Incompossibility: Cruising the Aesthetic
Haze of the New Media,” CTheory, January 13, 2000, online at
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=121 (accessed on July 14,
2010).
110 Ibid.
111 Green, “The Visibility of Time,” in Visible Time, p. 32.
112 Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as
Paradox,” October, no. 5 (Summer 1978), p. 117.
113 Ibid., p. 121.
114 Here I agree with Damian Sutton’s view that this work explores
“how the traumatic exists in the everyday details also picked up by
the camera” (Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory: The
Crystal Image of Time [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009], p. 224).
115 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 27.
116 Claerbout and Cooke, “Conversation,” p. 42.
117 Barthes himself has called this medium-specific view of photography
“the chemical revelation of the object” (Camera Lucida, p. 10).
118 Barthes himself suggests this unintentionality in his emphasis upon
the private nature of the viewer’s encounter with the punctum:
“Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent”
322 Notes

(Camera Lucida, p. 98). For the strongest case of highlighting

the photographer’s unintentionality as integral to the concept of
punctum, see Michael Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry,
vol. 31, no. 3 (Spring 2005), p. 546.
119 Claerbout and Cooke, “Conversation,” p. 53.
120 Rancière, “The Pensive Image,” p. 132.
121 Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” p. 136 (emphasis in
original).

Chapter 2
1 Clint Enns, “Escaping Time: An Interview with Thorsten Fleisch,”
Incite!: Journal of Experimental Media, Back and Forth: Interview
Series, online at http://www.incite-online.net/fleisch.html (accessed
July 1, 2015).
2 For a helpful summary on the influence of the Greenbergian
modernism on the idea and practice of avant-garde cinema, see A. L.
Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video, 2nd edn (London:
BFI Publishing, 2011), pp. 8–14.
3 See Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video, pp. 27–29.
4 Standish D. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York
University Press, 1975), p. 49.
5 Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1977), p. 152.
6 David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 241.
7 For instance, critic Lucinda Furlong notes that central to the
aesthetic of image-processing videos is their “treatment of the
electronic signal as a plastic medium, a material with inherent
properties that can be isolated” (Lucinda Furlong, “Tracking
Video Art: ‘Image-Processing’ as a Genre,” Art Journal, vol. 45,
no. 3 (1985), p. 234). Furlong’s voice echoes Stephen Beck’s artist
statement on the ways in which the developments of the abstract
forms produced with video imaging instruments or synthesizers
allowed him to manipulate the electronic signal: “[Electronic imaging
techniques], as applied to television, utilize the inherent plasticity of
the medium to expand it beyond a strictly photographic/realistic,
representation aspect which characterizes the history of television
in general” (Stephen Beck, “Image Processing and Video Synthesis,”
 Notes 323

in Video Art: An Anthology, eds Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot

[New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976], p. 184).
8 Kerry Brougher, “Visual-Music Culture,” in Visual Music:
Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1990, ed. Kerry Brougher
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), pp. 112, 117.
9 For the helpful information that complies the digital slit-scan
videos, see Golan Levin, “An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video
Artworks and Research,” online at http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/
slit_scan/ (accessed May 1, 2015).
10 Camille Utterback, “Project Description: Liquid Time Series,” online
at http://camilleutterback.com/projects/liquid-time-series/ (accessed
June 1, 2015).
11 Gregory Zinman, “Getting Messy: Chance and Glitch in
Contemporary Video Art,” in Abstract Video: The Moving Image in
Contemporary Art, ed. Gabrielle Jennings (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 2015), p. 99.
12 Ibid.
13 Malcolm Le Grice, “Color Abstraction—Painting—Video—Digital
Media,” in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI
Publishing, 2001), p. 267.
14 Gene Youngblood, “Cinema and the Code,” Leonardo,
Supplemental Issue, vol. 2 (1989), p. 28.
15 The film-video or film-computer hybrids of those artists include
Bartlett’s OffOn (1967), VanDerBeek’s Poem Field series (1964–67),
Whitney’s Lapis (1963–66), and Yalkut’s collaborations with Nam
June Paik, such as the works of Video-Film Concert (1966–72). An
earlier discussion of some of these pieces, including Bartlett’s and
Whitney’s, can be found in Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (New
York: Dutton, 1970). For an excellent study of these pieces, see
Gregory Zinman, “Analog Circuit Palettes, Cathode Ray Canvases:
Digital’s Analog, Experimental Past,” Film History: An International
Journal, vol. 24, no. 2 (2012), pp. 135–57.
16 Other filmmakers who have experimented in the combinatory use
of film and video to achieve the material hybridization of abstract
imagery but who are not discussed in this chapter include Kerry
Laitala, Stephanie Maxwell, and Marcy Saude, to name just a few.
17 Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um) (Amsterdam, The
Netherlands: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011), p. 9.
18 Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin, “Glitch,” in Software Studies:
A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011),
p. 111.
324 Notes

19 Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after

Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 213.
20 For a detailed explanation of the techniques of databending applied
to the different picture and video files, see Rosa Menkman, “A
Vernacular of File Formats: A Guide to Databend Compression
Design” (Amsterdam, August 2010), online at http://www.slideshare.
net/r00s/rosa-menkman-a-vernacular-of-file-formats-4923967
(accessed June 1, 2015).
21 Evan Meaney, “On Glitching,” INCITE: Journal of Experimental
Media, no. 2 (Spring-Fall 2010), online at http://www.incite-online.
net/meaney2a.html (accessed July 15, 2015).
22 Clint Enns, “From 16mm to 16-bit: An Interview with Evan
Meaney,” INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media, no. 2 (Spring-
Fall 2010), online at http://www.incite-online.net/meaney.html
(accessed July 10, 2015).
23 For a detailed account of Shannon’s theory of entropy and
noise, see Susan P. Ballard, “Information, Noise, et al.,” in Error:
Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures, ed. Mark Nunes
(New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 59–79.
24 William Brown and Meetali Kutty, “Datamoshing and the
Emergence of Digital Complexity from Digital Chaos,”
Convergence, vol. 18, no. 2 (2012), p. 168.
25 Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, “The Rest Is Noise: On
Lossless,” in On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual
Culture, ed. Frances Guerin (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 66.
26 Ibid., p. 71.
27 Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin, “Notes on Glitch,”
World Picture, no. 6 (Winter 2011), online at http://www.
worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/Manon.html (accessed May 1, 2015).
28 Marianne van den Boomen et al., “Introduction: From the Virtual
to Matters of Fact and Concern,” in Digital Material: Tracing New
Media in Everyday Life and Technology, eds Marianne van den
Boomen et al. (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University
Press, 2009), pp. 9–10.
29 For this technical procedure, which is also known as “drift and
roll,” see Sherry Miller Hocking, “The Grammar of Electronic Image
Processing,” in The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television
Becoming Unglued, eds Kathy Hight, Sherry Miller Hocking, and
Mona Jimenez (London: Intellect, 2014), pp. 465–66.
30 Carolyn L. Kane, “Compression Aesthetics: Glitch from the Avant-
garde to Kanye West,” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for
 Notes 325

Visual Culture, no. 21 (2014), online at http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/

compression-aesthetics-glitch-from-the-avant-garde-to-kanye-west/
(accessed June 1, 2015).
31 Clint Enns, “Structural Digital Video,” INCITE: Journal of
Experimental Media, no. 3 (Fall 2011), online at http://www.incite-
online.net/enns3.html (accessed May 1, 2015).
32 Ed Halter, “The Matter of Electronics,” in Vague Terrain, last
modified February 3, 2010, online at http://vagueterrain.net/
content/2010/02/matter-electronics (accessed May 5, 2012).
33 Ibid.
34 For a detailed survey of these errors, see Johannes Gfeller, Agathe
Jarczyk, and Joanna Philips (eds), Compendium of Image Errors in
Analogue Video (Zürich, Switzerland: Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess,
2013).
35 David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 48.
36 For a detailed survey of the Vasulkas’ works and their technical
operations, see Yvonne Spielmann, “Video and Computer: The
Aesthetics of Steina and Woody Vasulka,” The Daniel Langlois
Foundation, 2004, online at http://www.fondation-langlois.org/
media/activites/vasulka/Spielmann_EN.pdf (accessed February
1, 2015).
37 Regarding his Digital Still Life, Le Grice clarifies this point as
follows: “In Digital Still Life, like in Berlin Horse, representational
images . . . have been transformed, mainly in respect of color values.
However, in the digital work, I wrote a program which achieved
this transformation across a much broader base for discriminating
regions of the image than was possible in the essentially two-
component ‘matte’ of Berlin Horse” (Le Grice, “Color Abstraction—
Painting—Video—Digital Media,” pp. 268–69).
38 Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual
Experience of History (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 158.
39 Zinman, “Getting Messy,” p. 110.
40 Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2014), p. 266.
41 Brown and Kutty, “Datamoshing and the Emergence of Digital
Complexity from Digital Chaos,” p. 171.
42 Furlong, “Tracking Video Art,” p. 233.
43 Jacob Ciocci, Takeshi Murata, and Melissa Ragona, “From Bell
Labs to Best Buy: Takeshi Murata and Jacob Ciocci in Conversation
326 Notes

with ‘PREDRIVE: After Technology’ Curator Melissa Ragona,”

online at http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/nov/26/from-bell-labs-to-
best-buy/ (accessed June 1, 2015).
44 Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, p. 135.
45 Yvonne Spielmann, “Analog to Digital: Artists Using Technology,” in
The Emergence of Video Processing Tools, p. 526.
46 Manovich, “After Effects, or the Velvet Revolution,” p. 19.
47 N. Katherine Hayles, “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance
of Media-Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring
2004), p. 72. Citing Hayles’s view, Menkman argues that “Glitch
genres perform reflections on materiality not just on a technological
level, but also by playing off the physical medium and its non-
physical, interpretative or conceptual characteristics” (Menkman,
The Glitch Moment(um), p. 56).
48 Rosa Menkman, “Glitch Studies Manifesto,” in Video Vortex
Reader II: Moving Images beyond YouTube, eds Geert Lovink and
Rachel Somers Miles (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Institute of
Network Cultures, 2011), p. 346.
49 Federico Windhausen, “Assimilating Video,” October, no. 137
(Summer 2011), p. 78. Malcolm Turvey also examined Michael
Snow’s and Ken Jacobs’s use of digital video effects to continue
and extend the desires that they had long developed since their
pre-digital avant-garde filmmaking, such as Snow’s desire to
control space and time, and Jacobs’s desire to reveal what lies
beneath the forgotten frames of early cinema. See Malcolm Turvey,
“Dr. Tube and Mr. Snow,” Millennium Film Journal, vols. 43–44
(Summer 2005), pp. 131–40; Malcolm Turvey, “Ken Jacobs: Digital
Revelationist,” October, no. 137 (Summer 2011), pp. 107–24.
50 Malcolm Le Grice, “Art in the Land of Hydra-media,” in
Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 283.
51 Ibid., pp. 308–09.
52 René Thoreau Bruckner, “Travels in Flicker-Time (Madre!),”
Spectator, vol. 28, no. 2 (Fall 2008), pp. 61–62.
53 See Michael Sicinski, “Incremental Framebusting: The Paragon
Example of Lynn Marie Kirby,” in California Video: Artists and
Histories, ed. Glenn Philips (San Francisco, CA: Getty Research
Institute, 2008), pp. 138–41.
54 Zinman, “Getting Messy,” p. 101.
55 Jonathan Walley, “Materiality and Meaning in Recent Projection
Performance,” Velvet Light Trap, no. 70 (Fall 2012), p. 32.
 Notes 327

56 Ibid., p. 20.
57 Johanna Vaude, “Greffe, fusion, hérédité: L’hybridation dans le
cinéma expérimental contemporain,” Corps 1/2009 (n° 6), p. 110
(translation mine).
58 Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New
York: Film Culture, 1963), p. 1.
59 Jürgen Reble, “Chemistry and the Alchemy of Colour,” Millennium
Film Journal, nos. 30/31 (Fall 1997), p. 13 (emphasis added).
60 Jürgen Reble, “Project Description: Materia Obscura,” online
at http://www.filmalchemist.de/films.html#obscura (accessed
October 1, 2014).
61 Jennifer West, “Acting Out: The Ab-Ex Effect,” Artforum, vol. 49,
no 10 (Summer 2001), p. 133.
62 The film’s full title is Skate the Sky Film (35mm film print of clouds
in the sky covered with ink, Ho-Ho’s, and Melon juice—filmstrips
taped to Tate Turbine Hall ramp and skateboarded over using ollie,
kick flip, pop shove-it, acid drop, melon grab, crooked grind, bunny
hop, tic tacs, sex change, disco flip—skateboarding performed live
for Long Weekend by Thomas Lock, Louis Henderson, Charlotte
Brennan, Dion Penman, Sam Griffin, Jak Tonge, Evin Goode and
Quantin Paris, clouds shot by Peter West).
63 Quinn Latimer, “The Film Looks Like a Licked Sunset: A
Conversation with Jennifer West,” published in eastofborneo.org,
March 3, 2011, online at http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/the-
film-looks-like-a-licked-sunset-a-conversation-with-jennifer-west
(accessed January 15, 2015).
64 Zinman, “Getting Messy,” p. 105.
65 The film’s full title is Spiral of Time Documentary Film (16mm
negative strobe-light double and triple exposed—painted with
brine shrimp—dripped, splattered and sprayed with salted liquids:
balsamic and red wine vinegar, lemon and lime juice, temporary
fluorescent hair dyes—photos from friends Mark Titchner, Karen
Russo, Aaron Moulton and Ignacio Uriarte and some google
maps—texts by Jwest and Chris Markers’ Sans Soleil script—shot by
Peter West, strobed by Jwest, hands by Ariel West, telecine by Tom
Sartori).
66 Latimer, “The Film Looks Like a Licked Sunset” (emphasis added).
67 Lev Manovich, “Abstraction and Complexity,” in
MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007), pp. 339–54.
328 Notes

Chapter 3
1 Paul Arthur, Brian Frye, Chrissie Iles, Ken Jacobs, Annette
Michelson, and Malcolm Turvey, “Round Table: Obsolescence
and American Avant-garde Film,” October, no. 100 (Spring 2002),
p. 122.
2 Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settele, “Introduction,” in Found
Footage Film, eds Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settele (Luzern,
Switzerland: VIPER/zyklog verlog, 1992), p. 5.
3 David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, “Introduction: Toward an
Aesthetics of Transition,” in Rethinking Media Change: The
Aesthetics of Transition, eds David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 11.
4 Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, p. 41.
5 Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film
in Transition (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University
Press, 2009), p. 107 (emphasis added).
6 Ibid., p. 127.
7 Yann Beauvais, “C’est toujours du cinema” (translation mine),
an essay published in the Catalogue for Taipei Golden Horse
Film Festival, 2005, online at http://manou16.phpnet.org/article_
us.php3?id_article=190 (accessed on July 10, 2010).
8 Catherine Russell, “Archival Apocalypse,” in Experimental
Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999), p. 241.
9 Ibid., p. 264.
10 Scott Mackenzie, “Flowers in the Dustbin: Termite Culture and
Detritus Cinema,” CineAction!, no. 47 (1998), p. 27.
11 For the valuable collection of those discourses, see David Evans
(ed.), Appropriation, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
12 Paul Arthur, “Bodies, Language, and the Impeachment of Vision:
The Avant-garde at Fifty,” in A Line of Sight: American Avant-garde
Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2005), p. 140.
13 Paul Arthur, “The Status of Found Footage,” Spectator, vol. 20, no.
1 (Fall 1999/Winter 2000), p. 63 (emphasis added).
14 Willem de Greef, “The Found Footage Film as An Art of
Reproduction,” in Found Footage Film, p. 81.
15 Ibid., p. 83.
 Notes 329

16 For Wees, “collage” is the most genuine method of montage

inasmuch as it dates back not simply to the Soviet transition
of cinematic montage but also to the early twentieth century’s
modernist aesthetic exemplified by the work of readymade and
assemblage in visual arts, both of which provoked the viewer to
recognize visual representations as nontransparent, fabricated,
and fragmented. The collage films are in this sense distinguishable
from “compilation films” which, according to Wees, follow “a
clear, linear development” of borrowed images and do not question
their “representational nature” (William C. Wees, Recycled
Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films [New York:
Anthology Film Archives, 1993], p. 52). And they also differ
from “appropriation films” although those two have something
in common: both collage and appropriation “present images as
images, as representations of the image-producing apparatus of
cinema and television, but collage also promotes an analytical and
critical attitude toward its images and their institutional sources”
(Ibid., p. 53).
17 Wees, Recycled Images, p. 25. The found footage films based on
this mode, according to Wees, include those made by Al Razutis
(Visual Essay series [1973–84]), Chick Strand (Waterfall [1967]),
Pat O’Neil (Runs Good [1971]), David Rimmer (Variations on a
Cellophane Wrapper [1970]), Caroline Avery (Midweekend [1985],
Simulated Experience [1989]), Cécile Fontaine (Two Made for
TV Films [1986], Cruises [1989]), and Phil Solomon (The Secret
Garden [1986]), along with a few seminal films such as Ernie
Gehr’s Eureka (1974) and Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son
(1969).
18 Michele Pierson, “Special Effects in Martin Arnold’s and Peter
Tscherkassky’s Cinema of Mind,” Discourse, vol. 28, nos. 2 and 3
(Spring and Fall 2006), p. 33 (emphasis added).
19 Michael Zyrd, “Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory:
Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99,” The Moving Image, vol. 3, no. 2
(Fall 2003), p. 51.
20 Adrian Danks, “The Global Art of Found Footage Cinema,” in
Traditions in World Cinema, eds Linda Badley, Steven J. Schneider,
and R. Barton Palmer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2006), pp. 243–44.
21 For the discussion about remix’s role in blurring the boundaries
between commerce and culture, as well as about the economic and
legal issues that it raises, see Lawrence Lessing, Remix: Making Art
and Culture Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin
330 Notes

Press HC, 2008). Critic Eduardo Navas, who has managed his
website Remixtheory.net, has written a number of valuable essays
widely addressing key topics related to remix, including the impacts
of software and web applications on cultural production, types
of remix spanning across different media and arts, and remix
as a mode of critical thinking and practice. For other valuable
resources on remix, see, for instance, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ
Spooky), Rhythm Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Lev
Manovich, “Remixability,” in After the Digital Divide: German
Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Media, eds Lutz Koepnick and
Erin McGlothlin (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), pp. 43–51.
22 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, Culture as Screenplay: How Art
Reprograms the World, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Lukas &
Sternberg, 2002), p. 40.
23 Eli Horwatt, “A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing:
Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet,” in Cultural
Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, ed. Iain
Robert Smith (Nottingham, UK: Scope, An Online Journal of Film
and Television Studies, 2009), p. 76.
24 Martin Lefebvre and Marc Furstenau, “Digital Editing and
Montage: The Vanishing Celluloid and Beyond,” Cinémas: Journal
of Film Studies, vol. 13, nos. 1–2 (2002), p. 73 (emphasis added).
25 Ibid., p. 75.
26 Ibid., p. 82.
27 Susanne Østby Saether, “Between the Hyperrepresentational and the
Real: A Sampling Sensibility,” in The State of the Real: Aesthetics in
the Digital Age, eds Damian Sutton, Susan Brind, and Ray Mckenzie
(New York and London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), p. 60.
28 Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 139.
29 Manovich, “After Effects, or the Velvet Revolution,” p. 14 (emphasis
added).
30 Lev Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?,” in The Digital Dialectic:
New Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge, MA:
MTI Press, 1999), p. 180.
31 Tilly Wanes, “Story without End?: Found Footage in the Digital
Era,” Movement (online journal) 1.1 (2009), online at http://www.
movementjournal.com/issue_1.1_futures_of_cinema/01_story_
without_end_walnes.html (accessed June 16, 2014).
32 See Stefano Basilico, “The Editor,” in Cut: Film as Found Object in
Contemporary Video, exhibition catalogue, Milwaukee Art Museum
(2004), curated by Stefano Basilico, pp. 29–46.
 Notes 331

33 Wanes, “Story without End?”.

34 Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 158.
35 Røssaak, “Algorithmic Culture: Beyond the Photo/Film Divide,” in
Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, ed.
Eivind Røssaak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011),
p. 196.
36 Wees, Recycled Images, p. xx.
37 John Tozer, “Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock, and Contemporary Art,”
Camera Austria International, no. 67 (1999), p. 179.
38 In this sense, Federico Windhausen suggests that The Phoenix Tapes
falls under the category of the “psychological tradition” within
found footage practice. See his “Hitchcock and the Found Footage
Installation: Müller and Girardet’s The Phoenix Tapes,” Hitchcock
Annual, no. 12 (2003-04), p. 104.
39 Christa Blüminger, “On Matthias Müller’s Logic of Appropriation,”
in The Memo Book: Filme, Videos und Installationen von Matthias
Müller, ed. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005),
pp. 83–85.
40 Charles Shino Tashiro, “Videophilia: What Happens when You Wait
for It on Video,” Film Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 1 (Autumn 1991), p. 7.
41 Scott MacDonald, “Interview with Matthias Müller,” in A Critical
Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2006), p. 291.
42 Tashiro, “Videophilia,” p. 16. See also his “The Contradictions of Video
Collecting,” Film Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 2 (1997), pp. 11–18; “Home
Video and Film: The Case of Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” Journal of
Film and Video, vol. 48, nos. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 1996), pp. 58–66.
43 Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological
Change,” in Reinventing Film Studies, eds Christine Gledhill and
Linda Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 444.
44 Caetlin Benson-Allott, “‘Before You Die, You See The Ring’: Notes
on the Immanent Obsolescence of VHS,” Jump Cut, no. 49 (Spring
2007), online at http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/
bensonAllott/text.html (accessed May 1, 2014).
45 See Laura Mulvey, “The Possessive Spectator,” in Death 24x a
Second, pp. 161–80.
46 Müller suggests this point as follows: “At the beginning of the
project, we established themes that we wanted to treat in individual
segments. With these themes in mind, we watched the forty films
and recorded a detailed protocol of them” (MacDonald, “Matthias
Müller,” p. 299).
332 Notes

47 Blüminger, “On Matthias Müller’s Logic of Appropriation,” p. 81.

48 MacDonald, “Interview with Matthias Müller,” p. 299.
49 William C. Wees, “The Ambiguous Aura of Hollywood Stars in
Avant-garde Found Footage Films,” Cinema Journal, vol. 41, no. 2
(Winter 2002), p. 4. Wees’s argument aims to substantiate that this
kind of film represents the ambivalent relationship that avant-garde
cinema has had with its mainstream counterpart—for example,
Hollywood cinema, against a line of critical discourses that assume
a clear separation between the two. For other claims that stand in
line with Wees’s, see David James, Allegories of Cinema: American
Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989),
p. 24; Paul Arthur, “The Last of the Last Machine: Avant-garde Film
since 1966,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 16–17–18 (1986–87),
p. 70.
50 Ibid., p. 13.
51 Catherine Russell, “Dialectical Film Criticism: Walter
Benjamin’s Historiography, Cultural Critique and the Archive,”
Transformations (online journal), no. 15 (November 2007),
online at http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_15/
article_08.shtml (accessed on March 18, 2010). Interestingly
enough, for Agamben, cinema is the very medium that due to
its movement “leads images back to the homeland of gesture,”
to its dynamic force (Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,”
Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino
[Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000],
p. 56).
52 For Benjamin’s key works that deploy his concept of allegory,
see The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(New York and London: Verso, 2003); “Surrealism,” in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 2: 1927-1934, eds Michael W.
Jennings et al., trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 207–21.
53 Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in
Avant-garde Film (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2005), p. 7 (emphasis in original).
54 Russell, “Archival Apocalypse,” p. 252.
55 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 462.
56 Ibid., p. 475.
 Notes 333

57 Russell, “Archival Apocalypse,” p. 263.

58 Emma Cocker, “Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives,”
in Cultural Borrowings, pp. 92–93.
59 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings Vol. 4: 1938-1940, eds Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 391.
60 Jane Connarty, “Introduction,” in Ghosting: The Role of the Archive
within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video, eds Jane Connarty
and Josephine Lanyon (Bristol, UK: Picture This, 2006), p. 10
(emphasis added).
61 Reynolds, “Outside the Archive: The World in Fragments,” in
Ghosting, p. 22 (emphasis added).
62 Gerda Cammaer, “Film: Another Death, Another Life,” Incite!:
Journal of Experimental Media and Radical Aesthetics (online
journal), Issue 1 (Fall 2008), http://www.incite-online.net/cammaer.
html (accessed on June 6, 2014) (emphasis added).
63 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 463.
64 Ibid., p. 462.
65 See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility [Third Version],” in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings Vol. 4: 1938-1940, eds Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 251–83.
66 Catherine Russell, “New Media and Film History: Walter
Benjamin and the Awakening of Cinema,” Cinema Journal, vol.
43, no. 3 (Spring 2004), p. 84. Even Miriam Bratu Hansen, who
has developed the most elaborate “materialist” interpretation of
Benjamin’s key concepts and thus maintained a critical view on
the digital modes of image production and reception for their
elimination of the materiality of photographic media, leaves certain
room for considering the digital as the means for the reorganization
of collective sense perception in the post-industrial, information
society: “I don’t think Benjamin would have gone Luddite in the
face of digital technology, inasmuch as it opens up for human
beings another, dramatically enlarged Spielraum, a virtual space that
significantly modifies the interrelations of body- and image-space
and offers hitherto unimaginable modes of playful innervation.”
(Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with
Cinema,” October, no. 109 [Summer 2004], p. 41).
334 Notes

67 Sven Lütticken, “Viewing Copies: On the Mobility of Moving

Images,” e-flux journal, no. 8 (September 2009), online at http://
www.e-flux.com/journal/view/75 (accessed on April 20, 2010).
68 Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards, p. 172.
69 Baron, The Archive Effect, p. 22.
70 Ibid., p. 158.
71 Aysegul Koc, “An Interview with R. Bruce Elder,” CineAction, no.
61 (Spring 2003), p. 38.
72 This information is quoted from filmmaker Brett Kashmere, see
his “In the Realm of Mystery and Wonder: R. Bruce Elder’s Book
of Praise,” Take One, no. 45 (March–June 2004), pp. 36–39,
online at http://www.brettkashmere.com/elder.htm (accessed
April 3, 2010).
73 Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural
Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI Publishing, 2000),
p. 7.
74 Ibid., p. 41.
75 André Habib, “Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter
Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate,” Substance, vol. 35, no. 2 (2006),
p. 132.
76 Ibid., p. 134.
77 Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin, “Notes on Glitch,”
World Picture, no. 6 (Winter 2011), online at http://www.
worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/Manon.html (accessed May 3,
2012).
78 Arthur, A Line of Sight, p. 157.
79 Laura U. Marks, “Loving a Disappearing Image,” in Touch:
Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 96.
80 For the difference between mourning and melancholia, see Sigmund
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On Murder, Mourning and
Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside and Maud Ellman (New York:
Penguin Classics, 2005), pp. 201–18.
81 Koc, “An Interview with R. Bruce Elder,” p. 38.
82 Laura U. Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” in Touch, p. 9.
83 R. Bruce Elder, “The Foreignness of the Intimate, or the Violence
and Charity of Perception,” in Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film,
eds Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000), p. 341.
 Notes 335

84 Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,”

pp. 145–46.
85 Ibid., p. 148.
86 Scott MacDonald, “Ken and Flo Jacobs,” in A Critical Cinema 3:
Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1998), p. 364.
87 Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real and Other Essays (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1948), p. 44. One example of Jacobs’s remarks on
Hofmann’s lesson is as follows: “Spatial anomalies were becoming
evident, where the optical effects of motion and color would cause
lesions in what I knew were flat surfaces. Yet Hofmann was saying
the worst thing a painter could do was ‘make holes’. Compound
or multiple depth readings of surface signs was desirable. Subtly
planted signifiers that made for solid/open-area interchange vitalized
the picture-plane” (Ken Jacobs, “Painted Air: The Joys and Sorrows
of Evanescent Cinema,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 43–44
[Summer 2005], p. 44) (emphasis in original).
88 Eivind Røssaak, “Negotiating Immobility: The Moving Image and
The Arts in Andy & Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix, Ken Jacobs’s
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, and Bill Viola’s The Passions,” doctoral
thesis submitted to the University of Oslo, December 2007, p. 78
(emphasis added).
89 See Jonathan Walley, “Ken Jacobs—Paracinema and Ideas of
Cinematic ‘Experience,’” in “Paracinema: Challenging Medium-
Specificity and Re-defining Cinema in Avant-garde Film,” Doctoral
Dissertation Submitted to University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005,
pp. 110–196. Based upon his study of Jacobs along with the non-
standardized cinematic experiments by Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad,
and Anthony McCall, Walley defines paracinema as an array of
non-filmic (but cinematic) experiments that go beyond the material
limits of film but still seek to explore cinematic qualities and effects
outside the parameters of filmic medium specificity. See Jonathan
Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting
Practices in the Sixties and Seventies Avant-garde Film,” October,
no. 103 (Winter 2003), pp. 15–30.
90 For Muybridge’s influence on the invention of cinema, see Gunning,
“Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity,” in
Time Stand Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography
Movement, ed. Philip Prodger (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), pp. 223–72. As Gunning points out, Muybridge’s pioneering
effort to expand the limits of the photographic medium, his dialectical
conception of the relation between the still image and motion, his
336 Notes

predilection for abstraction and repetition, and his scientific approach

to the human figure, all provided a model for some structural
filmmakers (Frampton and Gehr) and Minimalist painters (264–68).
91 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity,
Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), p. 11.
92 Ken Jacobs, “Interview with Ken Jacobs,” in Films That Tell Time: A
Ken Jacobs Retrospective, ed. David Schwartz (New York: American
Museum of the Moving Image, 1989), p. 32.
93 Tom Gunning, “Films That Tell Time: The Paradoxes of the Cinema
of Ken Jacobs,” in Films That Tell Time, p. 10.
94 Malcolm Turvey, “Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist,” October, no.
137 (Summer 2011), p. 121.
95 Jacobs’s comment on digital technologies corroborates this point:
“I can imagine the Futurist delighting in digital. . . . But for a cubist
painting to work [in the digital] I think the weight of the figure,
the gravitational pull of its presence must remain pulling at the
shards in their light-play. That’s its drama.” (Jacobs, “Addenda to
Interview,” in Films That Tell Time, p. 61).
96 Spielmann, “Intermedia in Electronic Images,” p. 57.
97 Philippe Dubois, “La question video face au cinema: déplacements
esthétiques,” Cinéma et dérnières technologies, eds. Frank Beau,
Philippe Dubois, and Gérard Leblanc (Paris : INA, De Boeck
Université De Boeck & Larcier, 1998), p. 196. For Dubois, the
first term points out that “each superimposed image appears as a
translucent surface through which one can see another picture,”
while the second refers to a “sedimentation of successive layers” in
the single picture frame. (Ibid., translation mine).
98 Raymond Bellour, “The Images of the World,” in Resolutions: Con-
temporary Video Practices, eds Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 151.
99 Marika Sturken, “The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic
Erasures and Inscriptions,” in Resolutions, p. 12.
100 Ibid., p. 5.
101 Paul Arthur, “Cinematic Spectacles from Dross: The Chimeric
Cinema of Ken Jacobs,” Film Comment, vol. 33, no. 2 (March/April
1997), p. 61.
102 Ibid.
103 Ken Jacobs, “Eternalism: A Method for Creating an Appearance
of Sustained Three-Dimensional Motion-Direction of Unlimited
 Notes 337

Duration, Using A Finite Number of Pictures,” United States Patent

Application Publication, No. US 2006/0187298 (August 24, 2006),
p. 2.
104 Brooke Belisle, “Depth Reading: Ken Jacobs’s Digital, Stereoscopic
Films,” Cinema Journal, vol. 53, no. 2 (Winter 2014), p. 12.
105 See David I. Tafler, “When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital
Memory,” Wide Angle, vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1999), p. 189.
106 Jussi Parikka, “Archaeologies of Media Art: Jussi Parikka in
Conversation with Garnet Hertz,” CTheory.net, January 4,
2010, online at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=631
(accessed on July 10, 2014). See also Siegfried Zielinski, Deep
Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing
by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp.
1–38.
107 Jeffrey Skoller, “Reanimator: Embodied History, and the Post-
cinema Trace in Ken Jacobs’ ‘Temporal Composites,’” in Pervasive
Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan (New York: Routledge, 2013),
p. 234.
108 Mark J. P. Wolf, “Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and
Simulation,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds Jane Gaines and
Michael Renov (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), pp. 281 (emphasis in original).
109 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings Vol. 4, p. 328.
110 Bernard Stiegler, “The Discrete Image,” in Jacques Derrida and
Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews,
trans. Jennifer Bajorek (London: Polity Press, 2002), p. 153
(emphasis in original).
111 Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes
and Hypotheses,” in Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video,
Texts 1968-80 (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press,
1983), p. 113.
112 In fact, despite his identification of the differences between film and
video in the light of material and movement, Frampton does not
exclude a possibility for the two media to correlate with each other:
“Video confirms, finally, a genetic eroticism. That eroticism belongs
to the photographic cinema as well, through the virtually tactile
and kinesthetic illusion of surface and space afforded by an image
whose structure seems as fine as that of ‘nature,’” (Frampton, “The
Withering Away of the State of the Art,” in Circles of Confusion,
p. 165.)
338 Notes

Chapter 4
1 Phillip Lopate, “In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film,” The
Threepenny Review, no. 48 (Winter 1992), pp. 19–22; Paul
Arthur, “Essay Questions: From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore,”
Film Comment, vol. 39, no. 1 (2003), pp. 58–62; Nora M. Alter,
“Translating the Essay into Film and Installation,” Journal of
Visual Culture, vol. 6, no. 1 (2007), pp. 44–57; Laura Rascaroli,
“The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments,”
Framework, vol. 49, no. 2 (Fall 2008), pp. 24–47; Laura Rascaroli,
The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film
(New York: Wallflower Press, 2009); Timothy Corrigan, The Essay
Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011).
2 Rascaroli, “The Essay Film,” p. 25 (emphasis added).
3 Michael Renov, “The Subject in History: The New Autobiography
in Film and Video,” in The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 110.
4 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 30.
5 See Rascaroli, “The Essay Film,” pp. 37–38.
6 See Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 30; Arthur, “Essay Questions,”
p. 39; Lopate, “In Search of the Centaur,” pp. 19–20.
7 Arthur, “Essay Questions,” p. 39.
8 Astruc’s envisioning of the proliferation of 16-mm format and
television as a breakthrough for the democratic and personal uses
of cinema is as follows: “A Descartes of today would already have
shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm camera and some
film, and would be writing his philosophy on film . . . With the
development of 16mm and television, the day is not far off when
everyone will possess a projector, will go to the local bookstore and
hire films written on any subject, of any form, from literary criticism
and novels to mathematics, history, and general science” (Alexandre
Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-garde: la caméra-stylo,” in The
New Wave: Critical Landmarks, ed. Peter Graham [London: Secker
& Warburg, 1968], p. 19).
9 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 66.
10 See Raymond Bellour, “Video Writing,” in Illuminating Video: An
Essential Guide to Video Art, eds Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer
(New York: Aperture/Bay Area Video Coalition, 1991), pp. 421–43.
11 Raymond Bellour, Eye for I: Video Self-portraits (New York:
Independent Curators Inc., 1989) p. 10.
 Notes 339

12 Michael Renov, “The Electronic Essay,” in The Subject of

Documentary, pp. 185–86.
13 Corrigan, “Expression, the Essayistic, and Thinking in Images,”
online at http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/efaden/ms5/corrigan1.
htm (accessed July 1, 2015).
14 Bjørn Sørenssen, “Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-
stylo: The New Avant-garde in Documentary Realized?,” Studies in
Documentary Film, vol. 2, no. 1 (2008), p. 58.
15 Ohad Landesman, “Reality Bytes: Reclaiming the Real in Digital
Documentary,” dissertation submitted to the Department of Cinema
Studies, New York University, January 2013, p. 187.
16 Bellour, Eye for I, p. 10.
17 Renov, “The Electronic Essay,” p. 188.
18 Ursula Biemann, “The Video Essay in the Digital Age,” in Stuff It:
The Video Essay in the Digital Age, ed. Ursula Biemann (Vienna and
New York: Springer, 2003), p. 9.
19 Ágnes Pethő, Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-
between (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholarly Publishing, 2011),
p. 294.
20 Ibid., p. 324.
21 Bellour, “The Images of the World,” in Resolutions, p. 151.
22 Jacques Rancière aptly summarizes this point in his take of
Histoire(s) du cinéma: “Video should offer Godard its new
capacities for making images appear, vanish, and intermingle;
and for forming the pure kingdom of their co-belonging and the
potentiality of their inter-expression ad infinitum” (Rancière, The
Future of the Image, p. 66).
23 For a detailed discussion on this transitional aspect of
Farocki’s montage in this work, see Christa Blümlinger, “Incisive
Divides and Revolving Images: On the Installation Schnittstelle,”
in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, ed. Thomas
Elsaesser (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University
Press, 2004), pp. 61–66.
24 For a helpful discussion on Immemory, see Erika Balsom’s “Qu’est-
ce qu’une madeleine interactive?: Chris Marker’s Immemory and the
Possibility of a Digital Archive,” Journal of E-media Studies (online
journal), vol. 1, no. 1 (2008), online at http://journals.dartmouth.
edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/4/article/289
(accessed July 1, 2015).
25 For a detailed discussion on the interrelations of film and the
computer in Level 5, see Yvonne Spielmann, “Visual Forms of
340 Notes

Representation and Simulation: A Study of Chris Marker’s Level 5,”

Convergence, vol. 6, no. 2 (June 2000), pp. 18–40.
26 Rascaroli, The Personal Camera, p. 78.
27 Pethő, Cinema and Intermediality, p. 9.
28 Arthur, “Essay Questions,” p. 60.
29 Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic
Folds (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008),
p. 143. In this sense, he also argues that what is most notable in
Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma is the conflation of cinema with the
sense of crisis from television and video, which compels Godard’s
cinema to be aligned with “the coda of a new baroque aesthetic
caught between clashing systems of visual projection and digital
information” (Ibid., p. 88).
30 Domietta Torlasco, The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the
End of Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2013), p. xiv.
31 Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of Poor Images,” in The Wretched of the
Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p. 38.
32 Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” in Too
Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl, ed. Nick Aikens (Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2014), p. 34.
33 Hito Steyerl, “Cut! Reproduction and Recombination,” in The
Wretched of the Screen, p. 183.
34 Ibid., p. 187.
35 Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” in The Wretched of the
Screen, p. 54.
36 See Hito Steyerl, “November: A Film Treatment,” Transit, vol. 1,
no.1 (2004), pp. 1–15.
37 For a helpful comparison of these two films, see Pablo Lafuente’s
“In Praise of Populist Cinema: On Hito Steyerl’s November and
Lovely Andrea,” in Too Much World, pp. 83–85.
38 Hito Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” A Prior 15 (2007), p. 304.
39 T. J. Demos, “Hito Steyerl’s Traveling Images,” in The Migrant
Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 82.
40 Demos, too, observes “the dissolution of such distinct filmic
elements as they succumb to the endlessly fluctuating economy of
images and flexible networks of power that constitute our new
digital milieu.” (“Hito Steyerl’s Traveling Image,” p. 81).
 Notes 341

41 Lafuente, “In Praise of Populist Cinema,” p. 89.

42 For an illustrative reading of this film in this context, see
Paolo Magagnoli’s, “Capitalism as Creative Destruction: The
Representation of the Economic Crisis in Hito Steyerl’s In Free
Fall,” Third Text, vol. 27, no. 6 (2013), pp. 723–34.
43 Sven Lütticken, “Hito Steyerl: Postcinematic Essays after the
Future,” in Too Much World, p. 29.
44 See Fredric Jameson, “Video: Surrealism without the Unconscious,”
in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 67–96.
45 David Riff, “‘Is this for real?’: A Close Reading of In Free Fall by
Hito Steyerl,” in Too Much World, p. 136.
46 Rosemary Heather, “Hito Steyerl Speaks to Rosemary Heather,”
APEngine, posted on September 22, 2010, online at http://www.
apengine.org/2010/09/hito-steyerl-speaks-to-rosemary-heather/
(accessed December 20, 2014).
47 Steyerl, “Cut! Reproduction and Recombination,” p. 187.
48 Lucas Hilderbrand, “Experiments in Documentary: Contradiction,
Uncertainty, Change,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 51 (Spring/
Summer 2009), p. 7.
49 Ibid., p. 6.
50 Lynne Sachs, “Experimental Documentary Questionnaire: I Am
Not a War Photographer,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 51 (Spring/
Summer 2009), p. 41.
51 See Catherine Russell, “Archival Apocalypse,” in Experimental
Ethnography, pp. 239–45.
52 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 177.
53 Lynne Sachs, “Last Happy Day: Lynne Sachs Director’s Statement,”
published in April 2010, online at http://www.lynnesachs.
com/2010/05/18/last-happy-day-lynne-sachs-directors-statement/
(accessed December 10, 2014).
54 To be sure, this tendency encompasses disparate films and directors
affiliated with certain genres of the documentary and avant-garde
cinema, including Ross McElwee’s autobiographical documentaries
about his family and personal life (Bright Leaves [2003],
Photographic Memory [2011]), Andrew Jarecki’s portrayal of the
story of a Long Island family in Capturing the Friedmans (2003),
Nick Broomfield’s biographical documentaries (e.g., Aileen: Life and
Death of a Serial Killer [2004]), to name a few.
342 Notes

55 Patricia R. Zimmermann, “The Home Movie Movement:

Excavations, Artifacts, Minings,” in Mining the Home Movie:
Excavations in Histories and Memories, eds Karen L. Ishizuka and
Patricia R. Zimmermann (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2008), p. 18.
56 Ibid., p. 1 (emphasis added).
57 Marsha Orgeron and Devin Orgeron, “Familial Pursuits, Editorial
Acts: Documentaries after the Age of Home Video,” Velvet Light
Trap, no. 60 (Fall 2007), p. 47.
58 James M. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 43.
59 See Jane Simon, “Recycling Home Movies,” Continuum: Journal of
Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 2 (June 2006), pp. 189–99;
Susan Aasman, “Saving Private Reels: Archival Practices and Digital
Memories (Formerly Known as Home Movies) in the Digital Age,”
in Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web,
eds Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan (New
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 245–56.
60 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 131.
61 Scott MacDonald, “Interview with Clive Holden,” in Adventures of
Perception: Cinema as Exploration, Essays/Interviews (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2009), pp. 141–42.
62 Scott MacDonald, “Poetry and Avant-garde Film: Three Recent
Contributions,” Poetics Today, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 2007), p. 35.
63 MacDonald, “Interview with Clive Holden,” p. 140.
64 Pethő, Cinema and Intermediality, p. 345.
65 Russell, “Autoethnography,” in Experimental Ethnography, p. 277.
66 Caouette has confessed as to how his acquisition of iMovie affected
his approach to making Tarnation as follows: “I began to obsessively
digitize everything I’d shot on Super-8 and on VHS and Betamax,
maybe a hundred and forty hours of stuff, including photographs
that I’d recorded on Hi-8 video. I digitized the audio diaries that
I’d kept as a kid” (Scott MacDonald, “Jonathan Caouette,” in
Avant-doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-garde Cinema
[Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014], p. 212).
67 Anna Poletti, “Reading for Excess: Relational Autobiography, Affect
and Popular Culture in Tarnation,” Life Writing, vol. 9, no. 2 (June
2012), p. 170.
68 Efrén Cuevas, “Home Movies as Personal Archives in
Autobiographical Documentaries,” Studies in Documentary Film,
vol. 7, no. 1 (2013), p. 23.
 Notes 343

69 Laura Rascaroli, “Working at Home Movie: Tarnation, Amateur

Authorship, and Self-Inscription in the Digital Age,” in Amateur
Filmmaking, p. 241.
70 Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Processing Trauma: The Media Art of
Daniel Reeves,” Afterimage, vol. 26, no. 2 (1998), online at http://
www.experimentaltvcenter.org/processing-trauma-media-art-daniel-
reeves (accessed January 15, 2015).

Chapter 5
1 Chris Darke, “Cinema Exploded: Film, Video, and the Gallery,” in
Light Readings: Film Criticism and Screen Arts (London: Wallflower
Publishing, 2000), p. 160.
2 Malcolm Turvey, Hal Foster, Chrissie Iles, George Baker, and
Matthew Buckingham, “Round Table: The Projected Image in
Contemporary Art,” October, no. 104 (Spring 2003), p. 76.
3 Raymond Bellour, “Battle of the Images,” in Future Cinema: The
Cinematic Imaginary After Film, eds Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 59.
4 Dominique Païni, “le retour du flâneur/The Return of the Flâneur,”
Art Press, no. 255 (March 2000), p. 39.
5 Chris Dercon, “Gleaning the Future from the Gallery Floor,” Senses
of Cinema, no. 28 (September to October 2003), online at http://
www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/gleaning_the_future.html
(accessed May 16, 2014, emphasis in original).
6 Chris Dercon, “Still/A Novel,” in Screen-based Art, eds Annette W.
Balkema and Henk Slager (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi,
2000), p. 101.
7 Chrissie Iles, “Video and Film Space,” in Space, Site, Intervention:
Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 253.
8 Campus, “The Question.” Quoted in Iles, “Video and Film Space,”
p. 255.
9 Ibid., p. 260.
10 Ibid., p. 261.
11 Anne-Marie Duguet, “Dispositifs,” Communications, no. 48 (1988),
p. 227 (translation mine).
12 The history of remakes in Hollywood is well-known, including
Hitchcock’s self-remake (The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934
344 Notes

and 1956), a film remade by another director (for instance, Gus

Van Sant’s 1998 adaptation of Psycho), and the transnational
remakes of Asian genre and auteur films (for instance, Ringu/The
Ring [1998/2002], and Spike Lee’s 2013 remake of Park Chan
Wook’s Oldboy [2003]). However, there are also notable examples
of the remakes in the context of arthouse cinema, such as Michael
Haneke’s self-remake (Funny Game in 1997 and 2008).
13 See Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
(Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2013),
pp. 116–21.
14 To be sure, the concept of remake in the context of video
installations does not necessarily delimit itself to the works that
appropriate and rework the components of cinema, including
particular excerpts from existing films, film narrative, conventions
of editing, the images of archival time, etc. That is, although this
chapter focuses upon the works of “remaking cinema,” the concept
of remake can also be applied to the works that investigate the
capacity of video’s real-time processing to alter the temporality of
the images that do not necessarily have the components of cinema.
For instance, in Camille Utterback’s interactive installations Liquid
Time Series (which I discuss briefly in Chapter 2), video’s real-
time image processing assembles multiple images captured from
a single street and at different moments into a single image plane.
This transformation can be seen as a “remake” of the images of
multiple times coming from different picture frames into a single
image marked by the spatial sections of those times. I am grateful to
Francisco J. Ricardo for indicating this point.
15 Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Towards a Post-Cinematic Space-Time
(From an Ongoing Inventory),” in Black Box Illuminated, eds Sara
Arrhenius, Magdalena Malm, and Cristina Ricupero (Sweden:
IASPIS and Propexus; Finland: NIFCA, 2003), p. 111.
16 Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Cinema as Exhibition, Duration as
Space,” Art Press, no. 262 (November 2000), p. 26. In this sense,
this view is also applied to numerous artists or filmmakers who
draw on multiple media elements or art forms and set up their
cross-referencing to one another, for instance, Huyghe (live-action
film, animation, puppet play, mixed-media installation), Gordon
(video installation, feature film, drawing), Douglas (film and video
installation and photography), and Matthew Buckingham (film and
video installation, slide projection, photography), to name just a few.
17 Raymond Bellour, “Of An Other Cinema,” in Black Box
Illuminated, p. 41.
18 Raymond Bellour, “Challenging Cinema,” in Screen-based Art, p. 37.
 Notes 345

19 Bellour, “Battle of the Images,” p. 58.

20 Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Remaking Cinema,” in Cinéma Cinéma:
Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience, exhibition
catalogue (Rotterdam: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven/NAI
Publishers, 1999), p. 21.
21 Dominique Païni, Le temps exposé: le cinéma de la salle au musée
(Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2002), p. 29 (translation mine).
22 Ibid., p. 30 (translation mine).
23 The key exhibitions are as follows: “Into the Light: The Projected
Images in American Art 1964–1977” (Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York, October 18, 2001 to January 6, 2002)
and “X-Screen: Film Installation and Actions of the 1960s and
1970s” (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna,
December 13, 2003 to February 29, 2004).
24 Chrissie Iles, “Between the Still and Moving Images,” in Into the
Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, ed. Chrissie
Iles (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001), p. 33.
25 Iles, “Video and Film Space,” p. 254.
26 Catherine Elwes, Video Art: A Guided Tour (London: I. B. Tauris,
2006), p. 151.
27 Chrissie Iles, “Issues in the New Cinematic Aesthetic in Video,” in
Saving the Image: Art after Film, eds Tanya Leighton and Pavel
Büchler (Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2003), p. 132.
28 Liz Kotz, “Video Projection: The Space between Screens,” in Art and
The Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London:
Tate Publishing, 2008), p. 376.
29 David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube: Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside
Day Follies and the Rise of Video Projection,” Artforum, vol. 42, no.
7 (March 2004), pp. 154–55.
30 A. L. Rees, “Projecting Back: UK Film and Video Installation in the
1970s,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 52 (Winter 2009/2010), p. 69.
31 Baker, “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,”
p. 85.
32 Foster, Ibid., p. 75 (emphasis added).
33 Foster encapsulates this view as follows:
The viewer feels that she’s having an absolutely immaculate
experience with no sense of the apparatus or the space, all
effectively virtualized. . . . In media culture at large now, we’re
so used to being dematerialized, and what disturbs me is the way
that some projected images have a similar effect. Go to the top of
346 Notes

the Guggenheim now to the Bill Viola piece, and you’ll find what
Walter Benjamin calls the “blue flower in the land of technology,”
an experience of spiritual immediacy effected through intense
media immersion. (Ibid., pp. 80–81, emphasis added).
34 Kate Mondloch, “Thinking through the Screen: Media Installation,
Its Spectator, and the Screen,” doctoral dissertation, Department
of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 58
(emphasis in original).
35 Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 17.
36 Spielmann, “Video: From Technology to Medium,” p. 64.
37 Kotz, “Video Projection,” p. 382.
38 The examples of this type of exhibition include “Passages
de l’image” (1990, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990), “Hall
of Mirrors: Art and Film since 1945” (1996, Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles), “Alfred Hitchcock: The
Exhibition” (2000–01, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), “Jean-Luc
Godard: Voyage(s) en utopie” (2006, Centre Georges Pompidou),
“Les mouvements des Images” (2006, Centre Georges Pompidou),
among many.
39 Erika Balsom, “Screening Rooms: The Movie Theatre in/and the
Gallery,” Public, no. 40 (2010), p. 26 (emphasis in original).
40 Ibid, p. 35.
41 Mondloch, Screens, p. 41.
42 Maria Walsh, “Cinema in the Gallery–Discontinuity and Potential
Space in Salla Tykkä’s Trilogy,” Senses of Cinema, no. 28 (2003),
online at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/28/salla_tykka_
trilogy/ (accessed February 13, 2014).
43 Daniel Birnbaum, Chronology (New York: Lukas & Sternberg,
2005), p. 68.
44 See Royoux, “Cinema as Exhibition, Duration as Space,” pp. 27–28.
45 Birhbaum, Chronology, p. 60.
46 John Conomos, “Collage, Site, Video, Projection,” in Mutant Media:
Essays on Cinema, Video Art, and New Media (Sydney, Australia:
Artspace/Power Publications, 2007), p. 121 (emphasis added).
47 Margaret Morse, “The Body, The Image, and the Space-in-Between:
Video Installation Art,” in Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and
Cyberculture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 159
(emphasis added).
 Notes 347

48 Ibid., p. 162 (emphasis added).

49 Dominique Païni, “le cinéma expose: flux contre flux/Movies in the
Gallery: Flow on Show,” Art Press, vol. 287 (2003), p. 29.
50 See Païni, “le retour du flâneur,” p. 41.
51 Païni, “le cinéma expose,” p. 24.
52 Bellour, “Of an Other Cinema,” p. 42.
53 See Païni, Le temps exposé, p. 17.
54 Morse, “The Body, The Image, and the Space-in-Between,” p. 170.
55 Boris Groys, “From Image to Image File—and Back: Art in the Age
of Digitalization,” in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008),
p. 86.
56 Boris Groys, “On the Aesthetics of Video Installations,” in Stan
Douglas: Le Détroit, exhibition catalogue, ed. Peter Pakesch (Basel:
Kunsthalle Basel, 2001), unpaginated.
57 Groys, “From Image to Image File—and Back,” p. 87.
58 Catherine Folwer, “Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and
Vertical Time from Maya Deren to Eija-Liisa Ahtila,” Screen,
vol. 45, no. 4 (Winter 2004), p. 343.
59 Ibid., p. 333. In another essay, Fowler elaborates on her use
of the term “out-of-frame” by drawing on discussions of “off-
screen space” by Pascal Bonitzer, Noël Burch, and Stephen Heath.
For Fowler, the “out-of-frame” space—she also uses the term
“off-frame” to indicate it—is referred to as a concrete, material
kind of the space outside the framed diegetic space, which is
differentiated from the “imaginary or fictional” off-screen space.
“Once the frame is either emphasized or connected to the gallery
space that surrounds it,” she writes, “so the off-frame can be
configured differently and the off-screen is highlighted as a space
where we confront the limits of representability.” (Catherine
Folwer, “Into the Light: Reconsidering Off-frame and Off-screen
Space in Gallery Films,” New Review of Film and Television
Studies, vol. 6, no. 3 [December 2008], p. 253).
60 Anne-Marie Duguet, “Scenography of the Image,” in Screen-based
Art, p. 81.
61 Ibid., p. 83.
62 Kotz, “Video Projection,” p. 383.
63 Kathy Rae Huffman, “Video and Architecture: Beyond the Screen,”
in Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, ed. Timothy Druckrey
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 137.
348 Notes

64 The works of architectural or sculptural video by those artists

include Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (Rist, 2008),
Bremen Lobe Of The Lung (Rist, 2011), Stasi City (1997, Wilsons),
Erewhon (2004, Wilsons), and Trecartin’s collaborations with
Lizzie Fitch, which were incorporated into multichannel sculptural
theaters in the gallery (as in the cases of Ledge [2014] and Range
Week [2014]).
65 Thomas Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media
Theorist,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2004), p. 24.
66 In an interview with Rembert Hüser, Farocki himself explains the
relationship between the dimension of the editing table and that of
double projection surfaces or monitors as follows: “You are dealing
with two images! On the right is the edited image; on the left, the
next image to be added on. The right image makes a demand, but
is also being criticized by the left one, sometimes even condemned.
This made me experiment with double projection works.” (Rembert
Hüser, “Nine Minutes in the Yard: A Conversation with Harun
Farocki,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, p. 302).
67 Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki,” p. 22.
68 The term “vision machine” is indebted to Paul Virilio.
69 Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, “A to Z of HF or: 26
Introductions to HF,” in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against
Whom? eds Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (London: Raven
Row, 2009), p. 211. Of all the terms the “operational image” is the
most central and inclusive to Farocki. Media artist and theorist
Jordan Crandall also uses the term “operational media” in the
same way as Farocki: “Operational media is motored by the need
for an instantaneity of action, where time delays, spatial distances,
and ‘middlemen’ are reduced through computational systems that
facilitate the sharing of human and machinic functions.” (Jordan
Crandall, “Operational Media,” CTheory.net, published on January
6, 2005, online at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=441
[accessed on June 17, 2014]).
70 Concerning this, Farocki has once remarked that the installation
version of Eye/Machine contributes to “displacing” all the found
images into the newly designed media environment open to the
viewer’s embodied perception and contemplation: “When I saw Eye/
Machine for the third time in an exhibition, in a gallery in New
York, both images appeared on a white wall, side by side. The work
had a large space to itself and I liked the displaced character of
all the images we had gone to great trouble collecting in research
 Notes 349

centers, public relations departments, educational film and other

archives. Mostly operational images spent in technical execution,
necessary for one operation and later erased from the data collector
one-way images. That the US Army command showed operational
images during the Gulf War, images that were produced for
operational reasons and not for edification or instruction, is also an
incredible displacement and is also conceptual art.” (Harun Farocki,
“Cross-Influence/Soft Montage,” in Harun Farocki: Against What?
Against Whom?, p. 74).
71 Christa Blüminger, “The Art of the Possible: Notes about Some
Installations by Harun Farocki,” in Art and the Moving Image, p. 279.
72 Blüminger, “Memory and Montage: On the Installation Counter-
Music,” in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, p. 106.
73 For a detailed account of these ambivalent aspects in Ataman’s
works, see T. J. Demos, “Kutluğ Ataman: The Art of Storytelling,” in
Kutluğ Ataman: The Enemy inside Me, ed. Esin Eskinat (Karaköy,
Istanbul: Istanbul Modern, 2010), pp. 30–36.
74 This summary is indebted to Birnbaum’s eloquent description of
the temporality in Aitken’s works. For Birnbaum, central to them
is “no longer a question of pushing the linear model of time to
the verge of collapse, but rather of suggesting more sophisticated
and complex networks that allow for temporal heterogeneity in a
multiplicity of non-synchronous connections, delays, and deferrals”
(Daniel Birnbaum, “That’s the Only Now I Get: Time, Space, and
Experience in the Work of Doug Aitken,” in Doug Aitken, ed. Daniel
Birnbaum et al. [New York and London: Phaidon, 2001], p. 51).
75 Doug Aitken, “Amanda Sharp in Conversation with Doug Aitken,”
in Doug Aitken, p. 16.
76 Eleanor Heartney, “Video Installation and the Poetics of Time,”
in Outer & Inner Space: Pipilotti Rist, Shirin Neshat, Jane &
Louise Wilson, and the History of Video Art, ed. John B. Ravenal
(Richmond, VA: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), p. 16.
77 Alexander Alberro, “The Gap between Film and Installation Art,” in
Art and the Moving Image, p. 427.
78 Ursula Frohne, “Dissolution of the Frame: Immersion and
Participation in Video Installations,” in Art and the Moving Image,
p. 369.
79 Aitken was well aware of this point in conceiving this work: “To
me, the act of watching a film has an affinity with walking through
a city. I see the moving image like a street, and you’re going down
this street making constant decisions about what to see.” (Doug
350 Notes

Aitken: Sleepwalkers, exhibition catalogue [New York: The Museum

of Modern Art, 2007], p. 65).
80 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 173.
81 Elizabeth Bronfen, “The Fragility of the Quotidian: Eija-Liisa
Ahtila’s Work with Death,” in Eija-Liisa Ahtila, exhibition
catalogue, Jeu de Paume, Paris (January 22 to March 30, 2008),
published by Hatje Cantz, p. 174.
82 In an interview with Iles, Ahtila has acknowledged the influence
of Godard and Ingmar Bergman on her work. See Chrissie Iles,
“Thinking in film: Eija-Liisa Ahtila in conversation,” Parkett, no. 68
(2003), p. 59.
83 Alison Butler, “A Deictic Turn: Space and Location in Contemporary
Gallery Film and Video Installation,” Screen, vol. 51, no. 4 (Winter
2010), pp. 322–23.
84 Mark B. N. Hansen, “Technical Repetition and Digital Art, or
Why the ‘Digital’ in Digital Cinema is not the ‘Digital’ in Digital
Technics,” in Technology and Desire: The Transgressive Art of
Moving Images, eds Rania Gaafar and Martin Schulz (London:
Intellect, 2014), p. 79.
85 Sean Cubitt, “The Chronoscope,” in Screen-based Art, p. 70.
86 For instance, Gordon says: “I haven’t been interested in exploiting
the medium . . . but what I am interested in is in the status of the
medium.” Graham Fagen, “The Exact Vague History,” in Douglas
Gordon, Déjà-Vu: Questions & Answers, Vol. 3, 1999-2000 (Paris:
Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 2000), p. 86.
87 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 75.
88 Ibid., pp. 75–76.
89 Païni, Le temps exposé, p. 76, (translation mine, emphasis added).
90 For instance, 10ms1 (1994) presents a man who is trying to stand
up but crashes to the ground over and over again because of
some powerful trauma caused by the First World War in which he
participated as a soldier. Gordon’s interest in the interpenetration
between the physical and the psychological dimensions of human
subjectivity is evident in Hysterical (1994/1995), another piece that
uses the medical footage of a woman undergoing the procedure of
healing her hysteria.
91 For the technical details of the work, see Philip Monk, Double-
Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon (Toronto, Canada:
The Power Plant, 2003), pp. 149–51.
 Notes 351

92 For instance, Gordon considers DJs as pertaining to a new

generation of readymade, linking them to such artists as Marcel
Duchamp and Jasper Johns who paved the way for it: “In
appropriating extracts from films and music, we would say, actually,
that we are creating time readymades, no longer out of daily objects
but out of objects that are a part of our culture. Take the music
industry in general and DJs in particular. They sample words and
riffs and make that something personal by the way they use them.”
(Christine Van Assche, “Douglas Gordon: A New Generation of
Readymades,” Art Press, no. 255 (2000), p. 30).
93 Van Assche, “Entretien,” in Douglas Gordon, Déjà-Vu: Questions
& Answers, Vol. 1. 1992-1996, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Musée
d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 2000), p. 85.
94 “The theatre is not just a means of projecting images, it is a
communal space for common focus and on a scale that is not
possible, or desirable, in my opinion, in a museum.” (Ibid.)
95 Quoted in Amy Taubin, “24 Hour Psycho,” in Spellbound: Art
and Film, exhibition catalogue (London: Hayward Gallery in
collaboration with British Film Institute, 1996), p. 70.
96 Harold Fricke, “As Beautiful as a Barnett Newman,” in Douglas
Gordon, Déjà -Vu: Questions & Answers, Vol. 2, 1997-1998,
exhibition catalogue (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris,
2000), p. 133.
97 Nancy Spector, “This is All True, and Contradictory, If Not
Hysterical,” in Douglas Gordon, Déjà -Vu: Vol. 2, p. 75.
98 Mulvey, Death 24  a Second, p. 103.
99 Martin Gayford, “Playing Hide and Seek,” Modern Painters (Winter
2002), p. 23. In this interview, Gordon explains how video meant not
a medium for distinguishing an artist’s intent and technical mastery
but a medium for the “discovery” and realization of his conceptual
ideas on recontexualizing films as follows: “I’d been doing various
experiments with trying to hold two films in my head at the same
time, and run them concurrently. Then I went to Paris to show 24
Hour Psycho at the Pompidou Centre years ago. . . . [The Pompidou
Center] cancelled the opening and said we’ll just have a party in a
café—could you do something for it? So I said ‘Ok, could you get
me two projectors and two video players, I’ll find something.’ And I
went out to the shop and found The Exorcist. . . . Then I found The
Song of Bernadette, which was a much more appropriate thing to
use. The coincidence of images and dialogue between the two are
absolutely incredible. . . . Most of it’s discovery” (emphasis added).
352 Notes

100 Klaus Biesenbach, “Sympathy for the Devil,” in Douglas Gordon:

Timeline, exhibition catalogue (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2006), p. 15.
101 Quoted in Douglas Gordon: Kidnapping, exhibition catalogue
(Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1998), p. 34.
102 Deleuze, The Time-Image, p. 13.
103 Simon Sheikh, “Art Is Merely an Excuse for Communicating,” in
Douglas Gordon, Déjà-Vu: Vol. 2, p. 22.
104 Monk, Double-Cross, p. 88.
105 Marie de Brugerolle, “Seeing Is Believing,” in Douglas Gordon:
Déjà-vu, Vol. 1, p. 98.
106 Bruno, “Collection and Recollection,” p. 236.
107 Vilém Flusser, “On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise),” Leonardo,
vol. 23, no. 4 (1990), p. 399.
108 Nancy Spector, “Trust Me,” in Douglas Gordon, ed. Russell
Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 16 (emphasis
added). Other critics call it the “terminal present” in order to
designate this extended duration. (De Brugerolle, “Seeing Is
Believing,” p. 96).
109 Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, p. 142.
110 Jessica Morgan, “A Scripted Life,” in Candice Breitz: Multiple
Exposure, ed. Octavio Zaya, exhibition catalogue (Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León Spain, 2007), unpaginated.
111 T. J. Demos, “(In) voluntary Acting: The Art of Candice Breitz,” in
Candice Breitz, Mother + Father/Monuments, exhibition catalogue
(Monaco: Prince Pierre of Monaco Fondation, 2007), p. 16.
Breitz acknowledges the influence of this tradition as follows:
“To appropriate and sample existing material is to draw on a
long avant-garde tradition. . . . The fundamental difference now is
that using found or readymade material in one’s work no longer
seems like just an option—rather, at this point, it is an inescapable
condition.”(Louise Neri, “Candice Breitz and Louise Neri: Eternal
Returns,” in Candice Breitz, ed. Louise Neri, exhibition catalogue
[London: White Cube, 2005], unpaginated).
112 Jennifer Allen, “Candice Breitz: From A to B and Beyond,” in
Candice Breitz: Re-Animations, ed. Suzanne Cotter, exhibition
catalogue (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2003), unpaginated.
113 Undoubtedly, those two “scripted lives” are viewed as
interdependent and less distinguishable from each other. Breitz
demonstrates this point in a fourteen-channel installation Becoming
 Notes 353

(2003), where each short sequence of seven Hollywood actresses,

including Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and Reese Witherspoon
in Legally Blonde, is placed side by side with its corresponding
reenactment clip by Breitz herself.
114 Morgan, “A Scripted Life,” unpaginated. The six actors and six
actresses whose fatherhood and motherhood are cast by Mother
+ Father include Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, Shirley MacLaine,
Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, and Streep (for Mother), as well as
Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel, Steve Martin, Donald
Sutherland, and Jon Voight (for Father).
115 Neri, “Candice Breitz and Louise Neri,” unpaginated.
116 Nicholas Chambers, “Candice Breitz: Mother + Father, Interview
with Nicholas Chambers,” Artlines (Queensland Art Gallery, South
Brisbane, Volume 2: 2005), p. 13 (emphasis added).
117 Gerald Matt, “Sound Minds: Gerald Matt in Conversation with
Candice Breitz,” in Candice Breitz/Inner + Outer Space, ed.
Angela Rosenberg (Berlin: Temporaere Kunsthalle Berlin, 2008),
unpaginated.
118 William Kaizen, “Live on Tape: Video, Liveness and the Immediate,”
in Art and the Moving Image, p. 266.
119 For a detailed description of how the work is installed, see Hans D.
Christ, “Stan Douglas, Win, Place, or Show,” in Present Continuous
Past(s): Media Art, Strategies of Representation, Mediation and
Dissemination, eds Ursula Frohne, Mona Schieren and Jean-
François Guiton (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2005), pp.
124–31.

Afterword
1 Andrew Neumann, in an email conversation with the author (Sep-
tember 7, 2015).
2 Raymond Bellour, “‘Cinema, Alone’/Multiple ‘Cinemas’,” trans.
Jill Murphy, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 5
(Summer 2013), online at http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue5/
HTML/ArticleBellour.html (accessed July 1, 2014).
3 David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 34 (emphasis in original).
 Index

Aasman, Susan 228 Ahtila, Eija-Liisa 46, 242, 245,

abstract/abstraction 28, 33, 256, 258, 260, 262, 274–6
43–4, 55, 97, 100–7, Where is Where? (2008)
109–10, 113–28, 131–2, 274–6
134–5, 137, 139–43, 181–2, Ahwesh, Peggy 145
185, 187, 222, 231, 312 Aitken, Doug 46, 242, 245, 247,
n.12, 322 n.7, 323 n.16, 256, 258, 262, 269–74,
see also hybrid abstraction 349 n.79
abstract film and video 4, 97, blow debris (2000) 270
102–4, 107, 116–17, 126–7, electric earth (1999) 269–71,
139, 143, 322 n.7 274
abstract painting 102, 139, Sleepwalkers (2007) 272–4,
142, 181–2 349 n.79
clean abstraction Akerman, Chantal 78, 242
(Zinman) 105, 126 D’Est (1993) 78
as coexisting with Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du
representational Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
or figurative (1975) 80
components 101, 104–5, Alberro, Alexander 272
118–19, 121–7, 135, 137, algorithm/algorithmic 3, 12,
139, 141–2 16, 21, 27–30, 37, 44, 102,
as complexity 143 107–8, 110, 113, 115,
digital abstraction 99, 119–20, 125, 128, 143, 159,
109–10, 121–5 173, 190, 265, 276, 295,
messy abstraction 306 n.55
(Zinman) 105, 109, 115, Alter, Nora M. 197
120, 126 Anastasi, William 65, 315 n.45
Acconci, Vito 87, 242 Free Will (1968) 315 n.45
Agamben, Giorgio 168, animation/animated image 2,
332 n.51 12–13, 15, 19, 22, 40,
356 Index

49, 68, 79, 91–2, 95, 104, Arnold, Martin 76–7, 152,
106–7, 124, 181, 190, 205, 161, 289
276, 289, 344 n.16 Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy
in Bill Viola’s works 68 (1998) 289
cartoon animation 13–14 Pièce Touchée (1989) 76–7
computer animation 15, artists’ film 78
22, 124 Arthur, Paul 145–6, 150–1, 179,
in David Claerbout’s 197–8, 200
works 91–2, 95 Astruc, Alexandre 201, 338 n.8
hand-drawn/direct Ataman, Kutluğ 46, 245, 247,
animation 14, 19, 104, 258, 261, 268–9
106–7 Küba (2005) 268–9
Antin, David 29 Mesopotamian Dramaturgies:
apparatus/dispositif 11–12, Column (2009) 268
19–20, 26–9, 32–3, 39, 43, avant-garde/experimental film
46, 50, 52, 74, 124, 148, and video 2, 4, 20, 23,
154, 162, 189, 201, 203, 27, 38, 44, 48, 56, 76–8,
220, 222, 238, 245, 252–3, 85, 101, 107, 116, 127,
257, 261–2, 264, 269, 289, 145–7, 149, 152, 154, 156,
293–4, 345 n.33, see also 161, 167, 173, 179, 182–3,
cinematic/filmic apparatus 190, 194–5, 197, 209, 216,
appropriation 37, 47, 52, 150, 220–1, 227, 230, 234, 247,
153, 169, 177, 216–17, 220, 260, 297, 310 n.89, 319
243, 286, 329 n.16, 344 n.80, 322 n.2, 326 n.49,
n.14, 351 n.92, 352 n.111 332 n.49, 341 n.54
Arcangel, Cory 108 Avery, Caroline 329 n.17
The Super Mario Cloud Midweekend (1985) 329 n.17
(2002) 108 Simulated Experience
architecture/architectural 243, 256, (1989) 329 n.17
262, 269–76, 294, 348 n.64
archive 43, 45, 81, 110–11, 148, Baker, George 52, 75, 79, 96
153, 158, 161, 163, 168–73, Baldwin, Craig 152, 175
176, 182–3, 190, 200, 207, Spectres of the Spectrum
211, 223, 225–8, 233–5, (1999) 175
275, 349 n.70 Tribulation 99: Alien
archive effect (Baron) 172–3 Anomalies under America
digital archive 110–11, 153, (1991) 175
158, 207 Balsom, Erika 246, 254–5, 286
film archive 148 Baron, Jaimie 121, 172
found footage as Baron, Rebecca and Douglas
archival 168–73, 176, 183, Goodwin 44, 113, 115,
200, 223, 225–7, 233–4, 120–1, 124
275, 279 Lossless (2008) 113
 Index 357

Lossless #2 (2008) 113, 120 and materialist

Lossless #3 (2008) 113, historiography 169–70,
120–1 333 n.66
Lossless #5 (2008) 113 and the shock experience of
Barthes, Roland 80, 87, 93–4, modernity 193
319 n.81, 320 n.99, 321 Bennett, Vicky (aka People Like
n.117, 321–2 n.118 Us) 45, 158–9
his idea of punctum 93–4, The Remote Controller
321–2 n.118 (2002) 158
Bartlett, Scott 106, 323 n.15 We Edit Life (2002) 158
OffOn (1967) 323 n.15 Work, Rest, and Play
Basilico, Stefano 157 (2007) 158
Batchen, Geoffrey 312 n.13 Benning, James 78, 318 n.80
Bauhaus 23 10 Skies (2004) 318 n.80
Bava, Mario 121 13 Lakes (2004) 318 n.80
Mask of Satan (1960) 121 Landscape Suicide (1987) 78
Bazin, André 57, 85 Ruhr (2009) 318 n.80
Beauvais, Yann 148 Benson-Allott, Caetlin 164
Beck, Stephen 26, 322 n.7 Bergman, Ingmar 274
Belisle, Brooke 190 The Seventh Seal (1957) 274
Bellour, Raymond 26, 38–40, Bergson, Henri 75, 90
56, 64, 75–6, 88, 90, 188, Berkeley, Busby 113
201–2, 248, 258, 296–7, 42 n.d Street (1933) 113
310 n.92, 320 n.101 Biemann, Ursula 203
between-the-images (l’entre- Biermann, Gregg 45
images) 38–40, 310 n.92 Labyrinthine (2010) 159
multiple cinemas 296–7 Spherical Coordinates
other cinema (autre (2005) 159
cinema) 248 Utopian Variations
Belting, Hans 69–70 (2008) 159
Belton, John 58 Biesenbach, Klaus 284
Benjamin, Walter 16, 151, Binkley, Timothy 30, 312 n.12
168–72, 175–7, 179, 181, Birnbaum, Daniel 256, 259
193, 195, 303 n.39, 333 Birnbaum, Dara 286
n.66, 346 n.33 Bitzer, G. W. “Billy” 182–4, 188
and the aesthetics of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son
ruin 176–7, 179 (1905) 182–4, 188
and allegory 168, 170, Blümlinger, Christa 162, 266–7
175, 179 Bolter, Jay David 37–8, 310 n.89
and the destruction of Bonitzer, Pascal 347 n.59
aura 170–1, 181 Bosch, Hieronymus 68
and the dialectical Christ Mocked
image 168–70, 195 (1490–1500) 68
358 Index

Bourriaud, Nicolas 10, 14–15, Cameron, James 310 n.89

153–4, 278, 303 n.33 Cammaer, Gerda 169
relational aesthetics 14–15 Campbell, Jim 1–3
Brakhage, Stan 100 Home Movies 300–1
Mothlight (1963) 100 (2006) 1–2
Breer, Robert 104 Campus, Peter 244, 250–1, 264,
Brehm, Dietmar 107, 133, 136–7 272, 321 n.107
Akt (1996/2008) 136 Caouette, Jonathan 45, 200,
Berlin (1985/2009) 137 209, 229, 233–8, 342 n.66
Paris (2002/2009) 137 Tarnation (2003) 229, 233–8
Personal (1976/2009) 137 Carroll, Noël 4–8, 22
Praxis 5–8 (2008–09) 136–7 Casetti, Francesco 26–7,
Rodox-1 (2002/2008) 137 307 n.68
Rodox-2 (2002/2008) 137 relocation of cinema 26,
Sonntag (1995/2008) 136 307 n.68
Breitz, Candice 46, 245, 247, 277, Cavell, Stanley 29
286–92, 294, 352 n.111, CD-ROM 204, 206, 311 n.7
352–3 n.113, 353 n.114 celluloid 8, 12, 20–1, 23, 33,
Babel Series (1999) 287 45–6, 55, 58, 66, 70–1,
Becoming (2003) 353 n.113 75, 88, 100–5, 107, 110,
Four Duets (2000) 287 113, 121, 125, 128,
Him + Her (2008) 288–92 130–1, 136–42, 146, 148,
Karaoke (2000) 288 151, 155–6, 158–9, 163,
King (2005) 288 169–73, 175–7, 179, 181,
Mother + Father (2005) 287, 183–4, 189, 194–5, 199,
353 n.114 203, 216, 221, 228–9,
Queen (2005) 288 231–3, 238–9, 306 n.55,
Soliloquy Trilogy (2000) 287 310 n.89, see also film and
Working Class Hero photochemical
(2006) 287 its emulsion 100, 104–5, 107,
Broodthaers, Marcel 13 137–9, 141, 173, 176, 179
A Voyage on the North Sea physical manipulation of
(1973–74) 13 it 102, 107, 110, 137,
Broomfield, Nick 341 n.54 139–42, 175, 229
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Child, Abigail 152
Killer (2004) 341 n.54 cinema 13–14, 20–3, 25–7,
Brougher, Kerry 104 31–2, 36–8, 40, 43–4, 46,
Brown, William 112, 124 52–3, 56–7, 60, 64, 72–3,
Bruckner, René Thoreau 128 75–7, 80, 86, 88, 91, 97,
Bruno, Giuliana 285, 307 n.70 121, 146, 161, 163, 169–73,
Buckingham, Matthew 344 n.16 175–6, 179, 181, 183,
Burch, Noël 80, 347 n.59 187–90, 192, 204, 206, 216,
Burgin, Victor 75 242–94, 296–7, 305 n.45,
Butler, Alison 276 306 n.55, 306 n.59, 313
 Index 359

n.24, 332 n.49, 332 n.51, its temporalization 245,

335 n.89, 340 n.24, 343–4 258–9, 276–93
n.12, 344 n.14, see also cinephilia 246, 248–9, 279, 285
celluloid and film Ciocci, Jacob 100, 124, see also
art cinema 77, 165–7, 246, Davis, Paul B. and Paper
275, 297, 344 n.12 Rad
cinema of stasis (Remes) 56 Claerbout, David 43, 56–7, 74,
cinematic image 13–14, 79, 89–96, 320 n.106
72, 121, 247, 256, 294, Boom (1996) 89
306 n.55 Kindergarten Antonio
cinematic time 76 Sant’Elia, 1932
“death of cinema” (1998) 89–90
Discourse 20–1, 281 Reflecting Sunset (2003) 91
digital cinema 21–2, 27, 31, Retrospection (2000) 90, 93–5
73, 96, 176 Ruurlo, Bocurloscheweg, 1910
early cinema 80, 86, 175–6, (1997) 89–90
184, 189, 192 The Stack (2002) 91
expanded cinema 12, 132 Vietnam, 1967, near Duc
history of cinema 43, 175–6, Pho (reconstruction
179, 204, 206, 248 after Hiromishi Mine)
Hollywood cinema 161, 163, (2001) 90–3
165–7, 176, 216–17, 246, cluster (Spielmann) 40–1, 187
279, 287–92, 310 n.89, 332 Coen, Joel 58
n.49, 343 n.12 O Brother, Where Art Thou?
its narrative 242, 244–7, (2002) 58
251–2, 256, 260–3, coexistence 27, 35, 41–2, 59,
268–9, 271–6, 283–6, 294, 64, 70–1, 75, 89, 101, 126,
344 n.14 155, 199–200, 232, 296,
its spectacle 271–4 see also interrelation and
paracinema 26, 183, 187, hybridization/hybridity
335 n.89 Coleman, James 13–14, 19, 53,
slow cinema 77 75, 79
cinematic/filmic apparatus 12, projected images 13–14, 19
19–20, 26–7, 40, 75, 116, collage 150, 156, 158, 163, 165,
128, 130, 146, 183, 190, 185, 200, 206, 220, 222–3,
243–4, 246, 248–50, 252, 229, 233, 236, 329 n.16, see
256, 258, 268, 274, 285, also montage
294, 307 n.70 color 58–9, 60–3, 65, 68–71,
cinematic video installation 42, 100, 103, 106, 109, 112–13,
46, 242–94, 307 n.70, see 118, 120–3, 128–9, 134–5,
also apparatus and video 137, 139, 165, 179, 187,
installation 225, 231–2, 235, 317 n.60
its spatialization 42, 245, colorization 235
255–76 de-colorization 165, 179
360 Index

color grading/correction 59, convention 7–9, 12–13, 18, 23,

62–3, 70, 148, 314 n.34, see also medium
315 n.38 convergence 19, 40, 45, 169,
comparative studies 18, 37, 80 253, 298–9
compilation film 151–2, 160–1, Corrigan, Timothy 197–8, 202,
165–7, 329 n.16, see 223, 229
also found footage film/ Cranberries, The (rock band) 99,
filmmaking see also O’Riordan, Dolores
composite 5–6 Crawford, Joan 167, 176
compositing 22, 148, 156–9, Crewdson, Gregory 53, 74
161, 167–8, 187, 203, 206, Crimp, Douglas 47–8, 78
218–19, 286, 289, 306 n.55 Cubitt, Sean 72, 277
digital compositing 156–9, Cuevas, Efrén 234
167–8, 187, 218–19, 286, cultural interface (Manovich) 23,
289, 306 n.55 306 n.59
Compression Study # 1 (Untitled
data mashup) (Davis and Daney, Serge 296, 305 n.49
Ciocci, 2007) 99–101, 105 Danks, Adrian 152–4
computer/computerization Danto, Arthur 48
15–21, 23, 29, 32–3, 39, database 173–5, 177, 206
65, 96, 101, 106, 108, 111, databending 108–11, 115, 119,
115, 118, 124–5, 138, 173, 123, 125, see also glitch/
175, 194, 236, 255, 266–7, digital glitch video
276–7, 284, 292, 298, data compression 108–9,
303–4 n.39, 348 n.69, 111–12, 114, 120–1
see also digital/digital datamoshing 108–9, 111–15,
technology/digital media 120–5, see also glitch/digital
analogue computer 106, 124 glitch video
computer graphics 8, 15–16, Davenport, Nancy 53
31, 38, 41 da Vinci, Leonardo 134
computer image 39, 266–7 Davis, Bette 176
conceptual art 11, 26 Davis, Paul B. 100, see also
configuration 35–8, 40–1, 45, Ciocci, Jacob
149, 193, 294 Dean, Tacita 53, 79
conjuncture (Green) 75 Disappearance at Sea (1996) 79
Connarty, Jane 169 Fernsehturm (1999) 79
Conomos, John 256–7 Palast (2004) 79
Conrad, Tony 26, 116, 335 n.89 DeBont, Jan 217–18
Constable, John 62 Speed (1994) 217–18
contemporary art 10, 15, 28, 42, de Duve, Thierry 92
46, 48, 79, 81, 150, 153, de Greef, Willem 150–1
242, 251, 286, 298–9 Deleuze, Gilles 75, 90, 283–4
contemporary art movement-image 75, 283–4
criticism 10, 15, 251, 299 time-image 90, 283–4
 Index 361

Delpeut, Peter 176–7, 179, 181 digital file 100–1, 108–10,

Lyrical Nitrate (1991) 176, 179 112–15, 120–1, 152, 154,
Demand, Thomas 51, 53 158, 177, 217, 219
Demos, T. J. 213–14, 340 n.40 digital image 9, 20–1, 35, 50,
de Nettesheim, Agrippa 134 173, 188–9, 218–19
Dercon, Chris 243–4 digital imaging 3, 6–7, 16, 23,
Deren, Maya 113 193, 312 n.12
Meshes of the Afternoon digital incompossibility
(1932) 113, 120 (Murray) 90
Diderot, Denis 80 digital manipulation 3, 8, 24,
differential properties 9, see also 29, 32–4, 43, 50, 56, 58–9,
Gaut, Berys 64, 66, 70–2, 79, 89–90, 94,
digital/digital technology/digital 97, 101, 109–10, 112, 114,
media 1, 3, 6–12, 15–21, 125, 131, 134, 148, 161,
23–7, 29–36, 38, 40–1, 180, 184, 188, 235–6, 306
43, 49–52, 56, 58, 64, 66, n.55, 314 n.33, 316 n.55
70–3, 79, 88–91, 94–7, digital network/Internet 152,
100–1, 105–6, 108–10, 112, 202, 210, 213, 215, 218,
114–15, 120–1, 123, 125–7, 278, 291–2
131, 134, 137, 140–1, 143, digital playback 286–93
145–9, 151–61, 169–74, digital projection 20, 27, 32,
177, 180–1, 184, 187–90, 140–1, 148
193–5, 202, 206–7, 209–11, digital revolution 11–12, 31
213, 215, 217–20, 228–33, digitization 3, 20, 29–30, 35,
235–6, 238–9, 245, 263, 58, 64, 100, 148, 202, 281,
276–8, 281–2, 286–93, 298, 303 n.39, 342 n.66
295–6, 298–9, 303–4 n.39, digital intermediate (DI) 58–9,
306 n.55, 306 n.59, 312 61, 232
n.12, 314 n.33, 316 n.55, digital mimicry (Rosen) 24
333 n.66, 340 n.29, 340 digital video 2–3, 5, 8, 29–30,
n.40, 342 n.66, see also 32–4, 43–5, 49, 54–6, 58–9,
computer, new media, 64–7, 70–3, 89–90, 95–7,
surface, and temporality 102, 107, 109–11, 113,
digital art 3, 10 124–6, 128–33, 136–8, 143,
digital as information 265–7 146, 173, 177–8, 181–4,
digital code 106, 108–10, 112, 187, 190, 199–200, 202–3,
114, 121, 125, 127, 143, 173 222, 225, 227–9, 231, 233,
digital conversion/encoding 8, 236, 250, 255, 313 n.24,
30, 58, 71, 111, 146, 158, 316 n.55, 317 n.61, 326
172, 342 n.66 n.49, see also video
digital editing 21, 155–60, discreteness 1
189–90, 228–33, 235–6, as DV 202, 233
286, 289, 295, 314 n.33 its frame buffing 72
362 Index

high-definition (HD) video 5, DVD 20, 24, 27, 88, 154, 171,
32, 40, 64, 70, 72, 131, 194, 198–9, 202, 210–11,
137–8, 250, 255, 316 n.55, 217–20, 249, 278–9, 281,
317 n.61 289, 292
its progressive scanning 72
its time-based correction 72 Eastwood, Clint 287
Dijkstra, Rineke 81 Eggeling, Viking 102
Doane, Mary Ann 21, 23, 25, Egoyan, Atom 242
76, 85, 181, 184, 192, 311 Eisenstein, Sergei 80, 215
n.11 October: Ten Days That Shock
documentary 78, 175, 187, the World (1928) 215
197–8, 200, 209, 212, Elder, R. Bruce 45, 149,
220–1, 225, 227–9, 233–8, 173–82, 194
247, 267–9, 276, 341 n.54 Crack, Brutal Grief
animated documentary 220 (2001) 174–7
autobiographical The Young Prince
documentary 200, 209, (2006) 177–82
228–9, 233–8, 341 n.54 electronic signal 28–30, 32,
experimental 34, 70–3, 90–1, 94, 114,
documentary 200, 209, 118–19, 125, 161, 163, 171,
220–1, 225, 236, 238 176, 180, 184, 203, 205,
Donenbauer, Peter 28 222, 276, 284, 313 n.24,
Douglas, Kirk 167 320 n.106, 322 n.7, see also
Douglas, Stan 46, 245, 247, 277, video
292–4, 344 n.16 electronic technology/media
Win, Place, or Show 10–11, 17–18, 20, 27, 32–3,
(1998) 292–3 39–41, 49, 51, 73, 79, 88,
Druckrey, Timothy 50 95, 103, 155 106, 116, 146,
dual articulation (Baker) 75, 77, 148, 169, 171–2, 178–81,
79, 89, 91 187–8, 193–5, 209, 238–9,
Dubois, Philippe 336 n.97 245, 253, 261, 263–4,
Duchamp, Marcel 351 n.92 276–8, 282, 293
Duguet, Anne-Marie 245 Elsaesser, Thomas 24, 263
Dumont, Bruno 77 Elwell, J. Sage 19
L'Humanité (1999) 77 Elwes, Catherine 250
duration 21–2, 43, 48, 55, 57, Enns, Clint 116–17
65–7, 74, 77–9, 81, 84–7, Eros, Bradley 132–3
91–2, 184, 251, 253, 255–6, essay film 45, 197–239, see also
259, 269, 271, 284–6, 294, Intermedial essay film
306 n.55 as diary film 229, 234
in film and video its reflectivity and
installation 251, 253, subjectivity 197–201, 204,
255–6, 259, 269, 271, 208–9, 212–15, 219–27,
284–6 229–38
 Index 363

exhibition 243–4, 247, 255–6, cameraless film 128, 139–40

260, 270, 293, 348 n.70, film footage 70
see also installation/media filmic image 28, 39, 41, 58,
installation 67, 71–2, 74, 95–6, 159,
expanded field (Krauss, 180, 203, 206, 283, 293,
Baker) 53–4, 56, 79, 97 296–7
filmic techniques 37
Farocki, Harun 46, 204–8, 242, film installation 14, 247–52,
245, 258, 261, 263–7, 348 254, 257, 260, 272, 296,
n.66, 348 n.69, 348–9 n.70 307 n.70
Counter-Music (2004) 266–7 film preservation 148
Eye/Machine I, III, and III film projection 212–13, 223,
(2001–03) 264–6, 348–9 247, 250, 294
n.70 filmstrip 5, 12–14, 21–2,
his idea of operational images 74–6, 88, 103, 105, 129–30,
263–7, 348 n.69, 349 n.70 137–8, 146, 152, 183, 192,
Inextinguishable Fire 195, 206, 295
(1969) 206 focus in film 71
Schnittstelle (Section/Interface) grain in film 71
(1995) 205–6 its mortality 176–7
Videogram of a Revolution (co- film stilled 44, 56–8, 75, 77–9,
directed with Andrei Ujica, 89, 95, 284, 320 n.101, see
1992) 205 also still film
Workers Leaving the Factory Fleisch, Thorsten 100–1, 105
(1995) 206 Wound Footage
Fast, Omer 247 (2003/2009) 100–1, 105
Spielberg’s List (2003) 247 Fleisher, Richard 266
film 2, 5, 8–9, 12–14, 16–17, Fantastic Voyage (1966) 266
19–22, 26–31, 33–4, 36–7, Fleming, Victor 158
39, 41, 43–4, 47–9, 51–2, The Wizard of Oz (1939) 158
55–6, 58–60, 62, 64–5, 67, flicker film 5, 78, 117
70–2, 74–8, 87–8, 90, 95–6, flicker effect 76, 78–9, 101, 117,
102–3, 105, 113, 117–18, 128–9, 131, 190, 232, 281
123, 125–6, 128–30, 132, Flusser, Vilém 285
137–40, 145–9, 152, 159–60, Fontaine, Cécile 329 n.17
169, 172–3, 176–8, 180, Cruises (1989) 329 n.17
183, 186, 192, 194–5, 203, Two Made for TV Films
206, 212–13, 223, 232, 236, (1986) 329 n.17
238, 243, 247–52, 254, 257, Ford, John 113
260, 272, 279, 283, 293–7, The Searchers (1956) 113,
299, 307 n.70, 311 n.11, 317 121
n.60, 320 n.99, 321 n.107, Forgács, Péter 152
337 n.112, 338 n.4, see also form/formalism 9, 15, 35, 41,
celluloid and cinema 52, 102, 109, 113, 116, 135
364 Index

Fossati, Giovanna 148 Exterior Extended

Foster, Hal 252, 345–6 n.33 (2013) 131
found footage film/ Structural Film Dissolution 1
filmmaking 45, (2003) 130–1
145–6, 149–93, see also Furlong, Lucinda 28, 322 n.7
compilation film and Furstenau, Marc 154, 156
transitional found footage
practice gallery/museum 242–4, 247,
as counterhistory 172–3 250, 254–5, 257, 259,
as dialectical 168–73, 183 271–6, 279, 293, 307 n.70,
Fowler, Catherine 260–1, 347 n.59, 348 n.70
347 n.59 Ganz, Bruno 247
frame 70–3, 76–9, 82, 85, Gaudreault, André 24
88–90, 100, 112–14, 121, Gaut, Berys 7–9, see also nesting
125, 135, 138, 154, 156, and differential properties
164, 169, 184–5, 188–92, Gehr, Ernie 56, 131, 145, 329
260–1, 281, 283–5, 313 n.17, 336 n.90
n.24, 319 n.80, 344 n.14, Eureka (1974) 329 n.17
347 n.59 Serene Velocity (1970) 56,
film frame 70–3, 76–8, 138, 131
169, 184–5, 188–90, 260–1, Géricault, Théodore 83
281, 283–5, 347 n.59 The Raft of the Medusa
fixed frame 76–7, 79, 82, 85, (1818–19) 83
319 n.80 Gianikian, Yervant, and Angela
frame rates 70, 313 n.24 Ricci Lucci 152
frame time (Stewart) 73 Gibson, Sandra and Luis
framed time (Stewart) 73 Recorder 132–3
freeze-frame 76, 79, 88–90, Gidal, Peter 251
154, 156, 164, 260, 285 Gieskes, Gijs 108
keyframe 112–14, 121, 125 Gilbert, Charles Allan 83
video frame 70–2, 100, All Is Vanity (1892) 83
112–13, 260–1, 283–5, 313 Girardet, Christoph and Matthias
n.24, 344 n.14 Müller 45, 149, 160–8,
Frampton, Hollis 117, 119, 128, 171–2, 194, 286, 331 n.46
195, 336 n.90, 337 n.112 Kristall (2006) 165–8
and his idea of The Phoenix Tapes
metahistorian 195 (1999) 161–5
Friedberg, Anne 20, 164, 274 glitch/digital glitch video 44,
Friedrich, Casper David 62 106–8, 110, 112, 115–17,
Frohne, Ursula 272 119, 123–7, 142–3, 177,
Fruhalf, Siegfried A. 44, 107, see also databending,
130–2 datamoshing, and noise
Exposed (2001) 130 in analogue video 116
 Index 365

in film 116 Graham, Dan 65, 244,

glitch as error 107–8, 127 250–1, 264, 272,
Godard, Jean-Luc 14, 80, 201, 315 n.45
204–5, 207–8, 212, 216, Present Continuous Past(s)
242, 339 n.22, 340 n.29 (1974) 315 n.45
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988– Green, David 57, 74–5, 86, 90
98) 14, 204–5, 339 n.22, Greenaway, Peter 40, 310 n.89
340 n.29 Prospero’s Books (1991) 40
La Chinoise (1967) 216 Grimonprez, Johan 152, 175
Letter to Jane: An Investigation Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
About a Still (co-directed (1998) 175
with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Groys, Boris 259, 293
1972) 212 Grusin, Richard 37–8
Passion (1982) 80 Greenberg, Clement 11–12, 14,
Scénario du film “Passion” 17, 102, 142, 302 n.27,
(1982) 201 322 n.2
Godfrey, Mark 82 Gunning, Tom 57, 335 n.90
Goldstein, Jack 47–8, 78 Gursky, Andreas 51–3
Jump (1979) 48
Gonzalez-Foerster, Habib, André 176–7
Dominique 247, 256 Hadjioannou, Markos 25
Riyo (1999) 256 Halter, Ed 117
Gordon, Douglas 46, 242, 245, Hamlyn, Nicky 317 n.60
247, 256, 277–86, 294, 344 handmade film 5, 8, 13, 139
n.16, 350 n.90, 351 n.92, Haneke, Michael 344 n.12
351 n.99 Funny Game
10ms-1 (1994) 350 n.90 (1997/2008) 344 n.12
24 Hour Psycho (1993) 256, Hannah, Adad 43, 56–7, 79,
279–86, 351 n.99 83–4, 86–7, 95
Between Darkness and Light 4 Chairs (2002) 84
(After William Blake) Crying (2002) 84
(1997) 279 Museum Stills (2002) 83–4,
Déjà-vu (2000) 279 86–7
Hysterical (1994/95) 350 Tribute (2002) 83
n.90 Hansen, Mark B. N. 276–7
left is right and right is wrong Hansen, Miriam Bratu 333 n.66
and left is wrong and right happening 11
is right (1999) 279 Hayles, N. Katherine 126,
Through a Looking Glass 326 n.47
(1999) 279 Heartney, Eleanor 271
Goriunova, Olga 108 Heath, Stephen 347 n.59
Gottlieb, Carl 121 Hilderbrand, Lucas 220
Cavemen (1981) 121 Hill, Gary 242
366 Index

Hitchcock, Alfred 158–9, 161–5, hybrid abstraction 42, 44,

176, 256, 282–5, 295–6, 101–44, see also abstract/
343–4 n.12 abstraction
The Man Who Knew Too hybrid moving image 3–4,
Much (1934) 343 n.12 7–10, 19, 27, 33–9, 41–4,
The Man Who Knew Too 59, 64–5, 74–5, 79, 93, 95,
Much (1956) 344 n.12 101–2, 119, 123, 143–4,
North by Northwest 182–3, 188, 190, 194,
(1959) 165 199–200, 223–7, 230–3,
Psycho (1960) 159, 176, 256, 238–9, 294, 297–9, see
282–5, 295–6 also moving image and
Spellbound (1945) 165 impurity
Vertigo (1958) 158–9 hybridization/hybridity 1–2,
Hofmann, Hans 182, 335 n.87 4–7, 9–11, 13–16, 19,
Holden, Clive 45, 200, 209, 22, 24–6, 31, 33–5, 38,
229–33, 238 40–2, 45–6, 51, 72, 78, 97,
18,000 Dead in Gordon’s 102–7, 116, 119, 123–4,
Head (A Found Film) 126–7, 132–6, 143, 147–8,
(2002) 230–2 151, 154–5, 160, 174–82,
Hitler! (Revisited) 188, 198–200, 204, 206,
(2004) 232–3 208–9, 212, 223–7, 229–30,
Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film 234, 238, 245, 254, 256,
Poems (2004) 229–33 258–9, 261–2, 276, 283–6,
Hollander, Anne 311 n.5 292–9, 307 n.70, 310
Hölzl, Ingrid 49 n.89, 323 n.15, 323 n.16,
home movie/home video 223, see also coexistence and
227–38, 338 n.4 interrelation
and amateur filmmaking in cinematic video
227–8, 233, 338 n.4 installation 245, 254, 256,
Home Stories (Müller, 1990) 163 258–9, 261–2, 276, 283–6,
Horwatt, Eli 153–4 292–4, 307 n.70
Huffman, Kathy Rae 262 as co-presence and exchange
Huillet, Danièle 77 2, 78, 208–9, 223–7
Hutton, Peter 318–19 n.80 diachronic hybridization 24,
At Sea (2004–07) 319 n.80 27, 34, 37, 40–1
Looking at the Sea (2000– as dialectical to medium
01) 319 n.80 specificity 6–7, 11, 33, 106
Time and Tide (1998– of film and video 106–7,
2000) 318 n.80 126–7, 133, 135, 160,
Huyghe, Pierre 242, 247, 344 n.16 223–7, 229–30, 283–6,
L’Ellipse (1998) 247 292–5, 323 n.15
The Third Memory hybrid materialism 119, 143,
(1999) 247 179, 181, 323 n.16
 Index 367

hybrid revolution 16 223–7, 230–1, 237–8, 294,

in the media transition 297, 309–10 n.86
147–8, 154, 198–200, 204, intermedial essay film 42, 45,
206, 209, 212 199–239, see also essay
as a medium’s constitutive film
nature 5 interrelation 3, 9, 13, 27, 35,
plastic hybridization 41–2, 59, 70–1, 101, 126,
(Vaude) 133–6 155, 199–200, 208, 238,
synchronic hybridization 297–9, see also coexistence
26–7, 34, 38, 40–1, 72, 106 and hybridization/
hybridity
Iles, Chrissie 244 intertextuality 37
image processing 4, 28–9, 103, interval 41, 128, 183–4, 189,
106, 116–19, 124, 127, 131, 279, 284
143, 174, 187, 236–7, 322 Isou, Isidore 104
n.7, 344 n.14, see also video
image-processing video 103, Jackson, Michael 287
106, 116–19, 124, 127, 143, Jacobs, Ken 45, 145, 149,
187, 322 n.7 182–94, 326 n.49, 335 n.87,
immaterial/immateriality 21, 335 n.89
107, 115, 169, 181, 219, Anaglyph Tom (Tom with
251 the Puffy Cheeks)
impurity 3, 9, 24, 97, 103, 120, (2008) 183–9
126, 133, 145, 194, 243, see Capitalism: Child Labor
also hybrid moving image (2007) 190–3
index/indexicality 21–2, 24, 43, and his “Eternalism” 189–93
51–2, 85, 87–8, 94, 121, Return to the Scene of the
193, 276, 311 n.11 Crime (2008) 183–9
as deixis 85 Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son
as trace 85, 121 (1969) 182–6
installation/media James, David E. 103
installation 11, 14, 26–7, Jameson, Fredric 29, 217,
32, 38, 46, 48–9, 242–3, 305 n.49
245, 252–4, 259, 261, 319 Jarecki, Andrew 341 n.54
n.80, see also exhibition, Capturing the Friedmans
spectator/spectatorship, and (2003)
video installation Jenkins, Henry 147
instantaneity 43 JODI (artists collective) 108
intermedia (Spielmann) 40–1 Johns, Jasper 351 n.92
intermedial/intermediality 24, Jonas, Joan 87, 116, 250
34–41, 56, 76, 78, 80, 96, Vertical Roll (1973) 116
149, 168, 181–3, 193, 199, Joselit, David 118, 251
203–4, 207, 211, 213, 218, Julien, Isaac 242, 247
368 Index

Kane, Carolyn L. 116–17 Lazzarato, Maurizio 317 n.62

Kentridge, William 13–14, 19 LED 1–3
drawings for projection Lee, Bruce 215
13–14, 19 Game of Death (1978) 215
Kiarostami, Abbas 46, 242, Lee, Spike 344 n.12
319 n.80 Lefebvre, Martin 154, 156
Five Dedicated to Ozu Léger, Fernand 102
(2003) 319 n.80 Le Grice, Malcolm 25, 103, 106,
Kirby, Lynn Marie 44, 107, 118–19, 127, 251, 325 n.37
128–9 Berlin Horse (1970) 118,
Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: 325 n.37
Poised for Parabolas Chronos Fragmented
(2004) 128 (1995) 119
Karate Class Exposure: Three Digital Still Life (1984–86)
Variations (2004) 128–9 119, 325 n.37
Latent Light Excavation series Little Dog for Roger
(2003–07) 128–9 (1967) 118
St. Ignatius Church Exposure: Leigh, Janet 282–3
Lenten Light Conversions Lemaître, Maurice 104
(2004) 128 lens-based/live-action image 2,
Time-Dilation series 9, 22, 31, 40, 50, 52, 54, 59,
(2000–03) 128 104, 133
Kittler, Friedrich A. 303–4 n.39 Lettrist film 104
Knowlton, Kenneth 124 Lewis, Mark 43, 54–6, 59, 62–6,
König, Sven 113 71–3, 75, 79, 96, 314 n.33,
Kotz, Liz 251, 262 316 n.50, 317 n.61
Krauss, Rosalind E. 10–13, Airport (2003) 66–7
15–17, 19, 29, 53, 85, Algonquin Park, Early March
303 n.39, 304 n.40, 304 (2002) 62–4
n.43 Algonquin Park, September
Kubelka, Peter 129 (2001) 62–4
Arnulf Reiner (1960) 129 Downtown Tilt, Zoom, and
Kuntzel, Thierry 321 n.107 Pan (2005) 67
Kurtz, Bruce 29 Prater Hauptallee, Dawn and
Kutty, Meetali 112, 124 Dusk (2008) 316 n.50
Windfarm (2001) 66
Lafuente, Pablo 216 Lockhart, Sharon 53, 79
Laitala, Kerry 323 n.16 Goshogaoka (1997) 79
Landesman, Ohad 202 Pine Flat (2006) 79
Landow, George 116–18, 130 Teatro Amazonas (1999) 79
Film in Which There Appear long take 54, 60, 77, 82, 292
Edge Lettering, Sprocket Longo, Robert 47–8, 78
Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. Sound Distance of a Good
(1966) 117, 130 Man (1978) 48
 Index 369

Lopate, Phillip 197–8 173, 176–7, 179–81, 183,

Lowry, Joanna 74, 86 187, 193, 195, 203, 210–15,
Lumet, Sidney 247 225, 228, 230–2, 234–5,
Dog Day Afternoon 250–1, 257, 278, 283–6,
(1975) 247 296, 322 n.7, 326 n.47
Lundemo, Trond 64 of celluloid/film 20–2, 26,
Lütticken, Sven 18, 172, 217, 70–1, 85, 96, 101, 103–5,
305 n.45 107, 118, 125, 127–31,
133, 137–8, 140–1, 148,
MacDonald, Scott 230 152, 157, 163, 169, 173,
Mackenzie, Adrian 149–50 176–7, 179–81, 183, 193,
Madonna 287 195, 203, 213, 225, 228,
Mangolte, Barbette 21 230–2, 234–5, 250–1,
Manovich, Lev 10–12, 15, 278, 283
17–19, 22–3, 32–3, 123–5, of the digital image 106–8,
142–3, 156–7, 306 n.59 112–13, 115–16, 119–21,
Marclay, Christian 304 n.40 126, 127, 129, 177, 187,
Video Quartet (2002) 210–12, 218–20, 296
304 n.40 of video 28, 33, 70, 73, 101,
Marey, Étienne-Jules 40, 76 125, 127, 161–3, 168, 173,
Marion, Philippe 24 176, 180, 187, 212, 214–15,
Marker, Chris 46, 76–7, 141, 228, 230–2, 234, 250–1,
206–8, 310 n.89, 311 n.7 257, 284–6, 322 n.7
The Case of the Grinning Cat materialism 15, 44, 100–1,
(2004) 202 115–17, 125–8, 130, 141–2,
Owls at Noon Prelude: 179, 187
The Hollow Men digital materialism 115–17,
(2005) 311 n.7 125–7, 142, 177, 210–12,
Immemory (1997) 206, 218–20
311 n.7 in experimental film and
La Jetée (1962) 76–7 video 100–1, 128, 130,
Level 5 (1997) 206–7 141, 169–70, 187
Sans Soleil (1982) 141 random materialism
Marks, Laura U. 72, 179–80 (Bourriaud) 15
haptic visuality 180 Maxwell, Stephanie 323 n.16
Marley, Bob 287 Mayer, Marc 32
Mastroianni, Marcello 167 McCall, Anthony 26, 250, 335
material/materiality 5–8, 10, 13, n.89
15, 17–18, 20–2, 26, 28, McClure, Bruce 132–3
33, 43–4, 50, 64, 70–1, 73, McCoy, Jennifer and Kevin 247
85, 96–7, 101–4, 105–8, McElwee, Ross 341 n.54
112–13, 115–16, 118–21, Bright Leaves (2003)
124–31, 133, 137–8, 140–1, Photographic Memory
148, 152, 157, 161–3, 168, (2011) 341 n.54
370 Index

McLuhan, Marshall 304 n.43 its properties 9–12, 71

McQueen, Steve 247, 260 as milieu (Rancière) 14–15
Meaney, Evan 44, 109–11, 115, as old supports and
119, 142 techniques 13, 17
Beneath the Pressure of the Sky reinventing the medium
(2008) 109–10 (Krauss) 13, 16–17, 19
The Ceibas Cycle (2007–11) video as medium 70
109–10 medium specificity 4, 6–7, 9–18,
Ceibas: Epilogue-The Well of 20–1, 25–6, 28, 31, 33–4,
Representation (2011) 110 42, 44–6, 48, 51–2, 55,
Ceibas: Sigma Fugue 58, 65, 71–5, 91, 95–7,
(2009) 109 102, 108, 119, 129, 132–3,
Ceibas: we things at play 137–42, 145, 147, 155, 157,
(2010) 109, 111 171, 180, 183, 194, 204,
Prologue: How Mayan Loves 248, 250–1, 253–4, 262,
Might Find the Next Life 273, 281, 294, 297–9, 303
(2007) 109 n.33, 303 n.39, 304 n.40,
Shannon’s Entropy 304 n.43, 320 n.99, 335
(2008) 109–111 n.89, see also hybridization/
media 3–4, 6–12, 15, 17–18, hybridity
25–7, 32, 34–5, 40–1, 50, coupled with metaphoric or
65, 106, 108, 234, 297–9 symbolic meanings 132–3,
its multiple components 3, 137–42
5–8, 10–12 as dialectical to media
its properties 9 hybridity 6–7, 11, 13–14,
media equivalence and 16, 19, 25, 28, 33, 45–6,
mixing 15 96–7, 297–9
as old media 8, 18, 25–6, of the digital image 108
34–5, 40, 106, 108, distinction between film and
234, 298 photography 55, 58, 73–5,
media archaeology 24, 190, 204 91, 96, 204, 320 n.99
media combination of film 95, 100, 129, 147,
(Rajewsky) 36–7 155, 157, 171, 183, 194,
media incorporation 8–9, see 250–1, 253, 281, 304 n.40,
also Gaut, Berys and nesting 335 n.89
medium 3–15, 17–18, 28–30, as modernist thesis 4, 6,
37–9, 42, 47, 70–1, 74, 10–16, 18–19, 26, 29, 42,
147–8, 186, 210, 298–9, 51–2, 71, 97, 102, 145, 183,
303 n.39, see also 273, 298–9, 303 n.33
convention, Krauss, of video 72, 96–7, 129, 180,
Rosalind E., and Rancière, 250–1, 253–4, 262, 294
Jacques Meigh-Andrews, Chris 31
as composite 5, 8, 12, 147–8 Mekas, Jonas 145
 Index 371

memory 18, 43, 45–6, 188, 167, 175–6, 194, 198, 200,
195, 199–201, 204–9, 211, 205–6, 208–9, 212, 217–18,
214–15, 221–7, 229–39, 220, 223, 238, 263–7,
277, 279, 281, 285, 294, 270–3, 275, 286, 292, 294,
304 n.43 329 n.16, 348 n.66, see also
memories-in-between 200–1, collage and video
208–9, 214–15, 223–7, video-based montage 14, 150,
229–39 155–61, 164–5, 167, 194,
Menkman, Rosa 44, 107, 200, 205–6, 209, 217–18,
114–15, 120, 126, 326 n.47 220, 238, 286, 292
The Collapse of PAL Moran, James M. 228
(2010) 114 Moreau, Jeanne 167
Compress Process (Revisited) Morgan, Daniel 85
(2010) 114–15 Morrison, Bill 104, 176,
Dear Mr. Compression 179, 181
(2009) 114 Decasia: The State of Decay
mimicking lo-fi aesthetics (2002) 104, 176, 179, 181
(2011) 114 The Film of Her (1997) 176,
Mettler, Peter 202 179
Gambling, Gods & LSD Light is Calling (2003) 176
(2002) 202 Morse, Margaret 256–9
Metz, Christian 57, 164, motion/movement 13, 35, 40,
313 n.24 43, 48–9, 51, 53–4, 56–8,
Meyer, Russ 215 62–4, 66–7, 70, 72–6, 79,
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! 88–9, 91–5, 131, 135, 184,
(1965) 215 187–8, 192, 279, 313 n.24,
Michaud, Philippe-Alain 63 335 n.90, see also moving
Mitchell, William J. 59 image
mixed-media abstraction 44, moving image 2–4, 6–9, 12,
106, 126–8, 131–43, 15–16, 18–20, 22, 27–8,
323 n.16 31–2, 35–7, 39–40, 42–3,
modernism/modernist 10–12, 48, 59, 66, 68, 74, 80, 86,
18, 23, 28, 32, 38, 41–2, 48, 88, 109, 159, 186, 188, 190,
52, 55, 76, 91, 96, 102–3, 242, 248, 261, 299, see also
132, 143, 150, 156, 183, hybrid moving image and
242, 245, 249, 253, 255, motion/movement
260, 264, 277, 286, 292, as discussed by Noël
298–9, 306 n.55, 329 n.16 Carroll 4, 6, 22
Moholy-Nagy, László 23 movement-image
Mondloch, Kate 252–3, 255 (Deleuze) 75
Monk, Philip 284 time-image (Deleuze) 77
montage 4, 14, 23, 27, 45, 71, moving picture (Danto,
86, 150–3, 155–61, 164–5, Hollander) 48, 311 n.5
372 Index

moving still (Hölzl) 49 noise 55, 100, 104, 106, 110–11,

multi-mediating Picture (Van 114–15, 117–18, 127, 213,
Gelder and Westgeest) 49 see also glitch/digital glitch
Mulvey, Laura 88, 90, 164, video
192, 282
Murata, Takeshi 44, 121–4 obsolescence 17, 145, 181, 195,
Monster Movie (2005) 121–3 255, 281, 303 n.39
Untitled (Pink Dot) O’Neil, Pat 329 n.17
(2007) 121–3 Runs Good (1971) 329 n.17
Untitled (Sliver) (2006) 121–3 ontology/ontological 24–5,
Murnau, F. W. 135 27–8, 30–1, 33–5, 41–4, 49,
Nosferatu (1922) 135 53, 57, 65, 80, 87, 93, 146,
Murray, Timothy 90–1, 209, 148, 150, 154, 161, 170–1,
340 n.29 176, 193, 200, 243, 293,
Muybridge, Eadweard 40, 76, 297, 299, 317 n.62
178, 183, 335 n.90 optical printing/printer 16, 76,
118, 152, 156, 161, 175–6,
Narkevicius, Deimantras 247 289, 295
Revisiting Solaris (2007) 247 O’Reilly, David 113
Nauman, Bruce 65, 87, 244, Orgeron, Devin 228
250, 264, 304 n.40, Orgeron, Marsha 228
315 n.45 O’Riordan, Dolores 99, see also
Lip Sync (1969) 304 n.40 The Cranberries
Live-Taped Video Corridor Osborne, Peter 52
(1970) 315 n.45 Oursler, Tony 242
nesting (Gaut) 8–9, see also Ozu, Yasujiro 77
differential properties and
media incorporation Paech, Joachim 36
Neumann, Andrew 295–6 Paik, Nam June 26, 65, 116,
Double Psycho (2011) 295–6 118, 242, 315 n.45
new media 10–12, 16–18, 23, Electronic Opera #1
27–8, 34–5, 40, 50, 171, (1969) 118
193–4, 201, 206, 209, 304 TV Buddha (1974) 315 n.45
n.40, see also digital/digital Videotape Study #3
technology/digital media (1967–69) 118
new media art 28 Païni, Dominique 242, 244, 249,
“new media camp” 257–8, 278, 281
discourse 10–12, 16, 23 patrimony [patrimonie] 249
Nicholson, Jack 287–92 painting 7–8, 12–16, 33–4, 37,
Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) 288 41, 43, 47, 51, 53–6, 59–62,
The Departed (2006) 288 64–5, 67–70, 72–4, 79–80,
The Shining (1980) 288 83, 97, 102, 104, 134–5,
The Witches of Eastwick 139, 178, 180–3, 186–7,
(1987) 287 204, 221, 243, 248, 259,
 Index 373

311 n.5, 315 n.38, 319 105, 107, 116, 134, 137–42,
n.80, 319 n.81, see also 173, 175, 178–81
tableau/tableau vivant photograph/photography 2, 3, 9,
of Abstract 11, 13, 15–17, 19–20, 22,
Expressionism 139, 182 27, 31, 33–4, 39–41, 43,
of Cubist, Futurist, and 47–52, 54–7, 59–61, 64–5,
Dadaist painters 102, 178, 67, 71–4, 76–81, 85–7,
182–3, 187 89–97, 135, 180, 183, 190,
painterly quality of the 193, 204, 206, 235–8, 248,
image 58, 62, 69–73, 297, 311 n.11, 312 n.13,
79, 104, 180, 187, 221, 313 n.28, 319 n.80, 320
315 n.38 n.99, 320 n.101, 321 n.107,
of Renaissance and 321 n.117, 321–2 n.118,
Baroque 83 335 n.90, 344 n.16
as tableau 80, 319 n.81 cinematic photograph 74
Paper Rad (artists digital photography 31, 38,
collective) 100, 113, see 50, 59, 94
also Ciocci, Jacob instantaneous
Parfait, François 321 n.107 photography 76, 335 n.90
Park, Chan Wook 344 n.12 long-exposure
Oldboy (2003) 344 n.12 photography 77
Parreno, Philippe 242 as pensive image 87
Peck, Gregory 165 photographic image 3, 9, 20, 27,
Peirce, Charles Sanders 85, 71, 73, 76, 96, 135, 180, 183,
311 n.11 193, 204, 206, 235–7, 297
performance 11, 19, 26, 47, 87, photographic portrait 86
132–3, 182–3, 189 post-photography 49–50, 52
film projection as snapshot 92–3
performance 132–3, 182 photorealistic/photorealism 27,
Nervous System performance 43, 55, 58, 60, 64, 71, 96,
(Jacobs) 183, 189 103, 105–6, 112, 143–4,
video performance 87 156, 187
Perkins, Anthony 167, 282 Pierson, Michele 152
Pethő, Ágnes 37, 203–4, 208 pixel 1, 3, 33–4, 56, 58–9, 65,
Peucker, Brigitte 80 90, 94, 99–101, 108–13,
photochemical 9, 20–1, 24, 43, 115, 119–25, 127–8, 156–7,
49, 51, 62, 94, 100, 103, 171, 184, 203, 213, 215,
105, 107, 116, 129, 134, 222, 313, 321
137–42, 148, 173, 175, Poletti, Anna 234
178–81, 187–9, 193, 225, Pollock, Jackson 140
276, see also photography post-cinematic 20, 25–6, 46,
and celluloid 217, 243, 249, 263–7,
chemical manipulation/ 278–9, 285, 291, 305 n.45,
transformation 100, 103, see also post-filmic
374 Index

post-filmic 20–1, 23, 25–6, 44–5, Ragona, Melissa 124

73, 89, 120, 141, 150, 164, Rajewsky, Irina O. 35, 309 n.84
168, 194–5, 198–201, Rancière, Jacques 10, 14–15, 87,
203–4, 208–9, 211–13, 95, 302 n.27, 339 n.22
215–18, 220, 223–4, 238, Rascaroli, Laura 197–8,
277, 283, 285, 292, 305 n.49, 207, 236
see also post-cinematic Razutis, Al 329 n.17
post-media condition 10, Visual Essay series
15–23, 26–7, 29, 33–5, 39, (1973–84) 329 n.17
41–2, 44, 72, 144, 151, 155, readymade 150, 329 n.16, 351
171–3, 194–5, 198–209, n.92, 352 n.111
211, 238–9, 294, 298–9 real time 32, 55, 65, 85, 87, 96,
of film 20–2, 27, 41, 44, 244, 290, 295, 306 n.55,
151, 155, 171–3, 194–5, 344 n.14
198–209, 211, 238 realism/realist 5, 16, 38, 84, 103,
post-media aesthetics 220, 250, 322 n.7
(Manovich) 11, 15–16 Reble, Jürgen 44, 107, 133,
post-media condition 137–9
(Weibel) 11, 15–16 Instabile Materie (1995) 138
of video 29, 33–4, 41, 72 Materia Obscura (2009)
post-medium condition 138–9
(Krauss) 10–12, 16–19, Rees, A. L. 251, 322 n.2
51, 298, 304 n.40, see also Reeves, Daniel 236–7
technical support Obsessive Becoming
post-minimalism 26 (1995) 236–7
postmodernism/postmodern remake/remaking cinema 246–9,
47, 298 254–6, 278, 343–4 n.12,
postproduction 58–60, 67, 70, 344 n.14
73, 128, 143, 153–4, 202, Remes, Justin 56
211, 278, 286, 315 n.48 remediation (Bolter and
as Bourriaud’s concept 153– Grusin) 37–8, 79, 310 n.89
4, 211, 278, 286 as hypermediacy 38
in digital video 59, 67, 73, as immediacy 38
128, 202 remix 153–5, 160, 329–30 n.21,
in filmmaking 58, 60 see also sampling
Preminger, Otto 279 Renov, Michael 198, 201–2
Whirlpool (1949) 279 Reynolds, Lucy 169
Prince, Richard 286 Richter, Hans 102, 104
Prince, Stephen 59–60, 71, 315 Riff, David 218
n.38, 317 n.60 Rihanna 99
process art 11 Rimmer, David 329 n.17
profilmic reality 5, 9, 20, 27, 39, Variations on a Cellophane
49, 81 Wrapper (1970) 329 n.17
 Index 375

Rist, Pipilotti 262, 348 n.64 Scorsese, Martin 58

Bremen Lobe Of The Lung The Aviator (2005) 58
(2011) 348 n.64 screen/multiscreen 250, 255–6,
Pour Your Body Out (7354 258, 261–2, 265, 267,
Cubic Meters) (2008) 271–6, 279, 282, 288–92
348 n.64 sculpture/sculptural 250, 256,
Rodowick, D. N. 6, 8–9, 21–3, 259, 348 n.64
25, 65, 71, 125, 147, 306 Sedgwick, Edie 290
n.55, 317 n.60 self-reflexivity 36–7, 39, 65, 78,
Romero, George A. 135 97, 102–3, 127, 139, 198,
Night of the Living Dead 200, 204, 209, 215, 218,
(1968) 135 223, 238, 242, 253, 262,
Rosen, Philip 24 309 n.86
Ross, Christine 54, 65 Shannon, Claude 111
Røssaak, Eivind 159 Sharits, Paul 26, 116–19, 128–9,
Royoux, Jean-Christophe 247–8 250–1
cinema of exhibition (cinéma Epileptic Seizure Comparison
d’exposition) 247–8 (1976) 117
Russell, Catherine 78, 149–50, Ray Gun Virus (1966) 129
167–8, 171–2, 223, 234, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G
319 n.80 (1968) 117
Russian constructivism 23 Sherman, Cindy 53, 78
Rush, Michael 31 Shiff, Richard 1
Ruttmann, Walter 102, 104, Shulgin, Alexei 108
266–7 Sicinski, Michael 129
Berlin: Symphony of a Great Siegel, Eric 28
City (1927) 266 Simon, Jane 228
simulation 18–19, 27, 29, 91,
Sachs, Lynne 45, 200, 209, 107, 206–7, 265–7
220–7, 238 site-specific art 26
The Last Happy Day Sitney, P. Adams 77
(2009) 224–7 Skoller, Jeffrey 168, 172
States of Unbelonging slow motion 32, 64, 68, 70,
(2005) 221–4 72–3, 76–7, 89, 138, 154,
Saether, Susanne Østby 155 156, 161, 204, 222, 260,
Sala, Anri 247 279, 281–3, 285–6
sampling 153–5, 160, 286, 351 Smith, Harry 104
n.92, 352 n.111, see also Smithson, Robert 141
remix Spiral Jetty (1970) 141
Sander, August 81 Snow, Michael 85, 145, 250,
Saude, Marcy 323 n.16 326 n.49
Schwartz, Lillian 124 Wavelength (1967) 85
Pixillation (1970) 124 Sobchack, Vivian 22
376 Index

software 15–16, 18, 23, 29–30, Spielmann, Yvonne 28, 33, 40–1,
59–60, 64–5, 70, 100, 125, 253
107–9, 113, 115–16, 125, Stallone, Sylvester 121
128, 142–3, 147, 152–3, Rambo: First Blood
157–9, 174, 182, 184, 234, (1982) 121
236, 314 n.33, 330 n.21 Stam, Robert 309 n.86
Sokurov, Alexander 306 n.55 Stark, Scott 145
Russian Ark (2002) 306 n.55 stereoscope/stereoscopic 182,
Solomon, Phil 329 n.17 189–93, see also three-
The Secret Garden dimensionality/3D
(1986) 329 n.17 Steyerl, Hito 45, 200, 209–20,
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 52 238, 340 n.40
Sørenssen, Bjørn 202 her concept of the poor
special effect 5, 45, 152–3, image 210–11, 213–14,
155–61, 164, 184, 187–8, 216–18, 238
193–4, 200, 208–9, 221, her concept of travelling
286, 295 images 212, 215, 218–20
in avant-garde In Free Fall (2010) 212,
filmmaking 152–3, 216–20
155–61, 187, 295, 320 n.101 November (2004) 212–16,
spectator/spectatorship 88, 340 n.40
90, 161, 163–5, 243–5, Stewart, Garrett 73
250–9, 265–6, 269, 271–6, Stiegler, Bernard 193
279, 281–94, 346 n.33, still film 44, 56–8, 75–9, 81, 85,
see also installation/media 95, see also film stilled
installation and video stillness 2, 12–14, 35, 40, 43–4,
installation 48–9, 52–4, 56–7, 59, 61,
and fetishism 164 63–7, 73–6, 79, 82, 87–9,
in film and video 91, 93–5, 131, 135, 158,
installation 243–5, 250–9, 178, 182–4, 187–8, 190,
265–6, 269, 271–6, 281–94 192, 205, 235, 279, 282–3,
as illusory 252–3, 257–8 313 n.24, 335 n.90
as immersion 251–3, 346 still image 2, 12, 48, 59, 74,
n.33 87, 158, 182, 188, 190, 205,
mobile spectatorship 254, 235, 282–3
256–9, 269, 271–6, 279 still photograph/photographic
pensive spectator (Bellour stillness 2, 13–14, 40, 44,
and Mulvey) 88, 90, 74–76, 82, 88, 93, 178,
320 n.101 183–4, 187, 192, 335 n.90
spectatorship in video 163–5, Stone, Sharon 287
279, 281–3 stop-motion effect 66
Spector, Nancy 285 Strand, Chick 329 n.17
Spielberg, Steven 310 n.89 Waterfall (1967) 329 n.17
 Index 377

Straub, Jean-Marie 76 Countenance (2002) 81–2, 86

Streep, Meryl 288–92 Tuareg (1999) 319 n.94
Bridges of Madison County Tashiro, Charles Shino 162–4
(1995) 288 Taylor, Elizabeth 167
The Hours (2002) 289 Taylor-Johnson, Sam 43, 53–6,
Kramer vs. Kramer 59–62, 65–6, 71–3, 75, 79,
(1979) 288 96, 242, 247, 314 n.33,
Sophie’s Choice (1982) 288 315 n.48
Streuli, Beat 81 A Little Death (2002) 60–2,
structural digital video 65–6, 315 n.48
(Enns) 116 Prelude in Air (2006)
structural film 44, 77, 102, 106, 314 n.33
116–17, 119, 126–8, 130–1, Still Life (2001) 60–2, 65–6,
152, 250, 336 n.90 315 n.48
structural/materialist film 103 technical support (Krauss)
Struth, Thomas 51, 81 12–13, 15–17, 304 n.40, see
Sturken, Marita 188 also Krauss, Rosalind E. and
superimposition 185, 187–8, Post-medium condition
191–2, 194, 204–5, 225, television/televisual 11, 20,
230, 232–3 29, 36, 160–1, 163, 175,
surface 32, 43, 55–6, 58–60, 64, 201, 212, 215, 222–3,
67–70, 72, 74, 90, 96, 148, 233, 244, 249–51, 267–9,
155–6, 161–2, 167–8, 173, 290, 292, 299, 322 n.7,
180, 194, 203, 235, see also 338 n.4
digital/digital technologies/ Temkin, Daniel 108
digital media temporality 21–2, 29, 31–3, 43,
surface manipulation 56, 54–7, 59, 62, 64–7, 72–4,
70–2, 90, 96, 155–6, 167–8, 76–7, 84–91, 95–6, 148,
180, 194, 203 150–1, 155–7, 172–3, 177,
synthesizer 28, 55, 65, 106, 116, 181, 184, 192, 194, 203,
118, 125 229, 231–2, 254, 258–60,
270–1, 275–94, 344 n.14,
tableau/tableau vivant 37, 56, see also digital/digital
80–1, 83–5, 87, see also technologies/digital media
painting of cinema 76–7, 87–90, 96,
single-shot tableau 80–1, 192, 194, 277–9
84–5, 87 condensation of time 66, 72
Tafler, David I. 190 of found footage film 150–1,
Tan, Fiona 43, 56–7, 79, 81–2, 172–3, 177, 181
84, 86–7, 95, 319–20 n.94 of photography 76–7, 85–90,
Facing Forward (1999) 319 95–6, 192, 194
n.94 temporal manipulation 56,
Correction (2004) 81–2, 86 64–7, 72–3, 90, 96, 150–1,
378 Index

155–7, 184, 194, 203, 260, Usai, Paolo Cherchi 21, 176
276–9, 283–6, 289–94 Utterback, Camille 105,
in video installation 254, 344 n.14
258–9, 270–1, 275–93 Liquid Time Series
theatricality/theatricalization 82, (2000–02) 105, 344 n.14
261–9
as Duguet’s concept 261–9 VanDerBeek, Stan 106, 323 n.15
Thorburn, David 147 Poem Field series
Thornton, Leslie 152 (1964–7) 323 n.15
three-dimensionality/3D 182, Van Gelder, Hilde 49
186–90, 192, 244, 250, Van Sant, Gus 77, 296, 344 n.12
254, 257, 267, see also Gerry (2002) 77
stereoscope/stereoscopic Psycho (1998) 296, 344 n.12
in film and video Varda, Agnès 202
installation 244, 250, 254, The Gleaners and I
257, 267 (2000) 202
Tomas, David 52 variability 5–7, 32, 247, 306 n.55
Torlasco, Domietta 209 Vasulka, Steina 28, 116,
transcoding (Manovich) 17–19, 118–19, 242
21, 25, 33 Violin Power (1978) 119
transformation Imagery Vasulka, Woody 28, 116,
(Spielmann) 28–9, 118–19, 187–8, 242
33–4, 65 Art of Memory (1987) 187–8
transitional found footage C-Trend (1974) 119
practice 42, 45, 146–95, Vaude, Johanna 44, 107, 133–6
200, 207, 238–9, 278, 286, De l’Amort (Love & Death)
295, see also found footage (2005) 134–6
film/filmmaking Notre Icare (2001) 134
Trecartin, Ryan 262, 348 n.64 Samouraï (2002) 134
Ledge (with Lizzie Fitch, Totalité Remix (2005) 134–5
2014) 348 n.64 Velázquez, Diego 83
Range Week (with Lizzie Fitch, Las Meninas (1656) 83
2014) 348 n.64 Vertov, Dziga 23, 266–7, 306 n.59
Tretyakov, Sergei 217, 219–20 Man with a Movie Camera
Tsai, Ming-Liang 77 (1929) 266, 306 n.59
Goodbye, Dragon Inn Vésale, André 134
(2003) 77 video 2, 5, 8–9, 11–12, 14–16,
Tscherkassky, Peter 130, 19, 26–30, 32–4, 36, 39–41,
152, 161 43–7, 49–50, 52, 55, 64–8,
Turim, Maureen 64 70, 72–3, 86–8, 96, 99–100,
Turner, J. M. W. 62 102–3, 106, 109, 113–14,
Turvey, Malcolm 184, 326 n.49 118–19, 123–6, 128, 143,
revelationism in cinema 184 145–7, 149–52, 154–65,
 Index 379

167–9, 171–3, 175–6, 185– video playback 278–86,

8, 192–4, 199–205, 208–11, 284–6
213, 215–7, 222–3, 225–38, video projection 244–5, 251,
242–95, 299, 304 n.40, 313 253, 256–9, 262–3, 272,
n.24, 315 n.45, 316 n.55, 274, 279, 290, 321 n.106,
317 n.60, 317 n.62, 320–1 348 n.66
n.106, 321 n.107, 322 n.7, video sculpture 262, 269
326 n.49, 337 n.112, 339 video surveillance 263–7
n.22, 340 n.24, 342 n.66, video art 3, 6, 15, 26, 28–9,
348 n.64, 348 n.66, 351 31–2, 34, 43, 54–5, 201,
n.99, see also digital video, 230, 242, 244–5, 250–1,
electronic signal, image 253–9, 261, 272
processing, montage, and video game 38
video art video installation 2, 14, 32–3,
analogue video 8, 12, 28–30, 46, 86, 172, 204, 242–94,
32–4, 43–5, 64–5, 72–3, 96, 296, 307 n.70, 311 n.7, 319
102–3, 106, 114, 118–19, n.94, 344 n.14, 344 n.16,
123–6, 143, 187, 199, see also cinematic video
201–4, 228, 233, 238, 291, installation
313 n.24, 322 n.7 video portrait 81–2, 86–7, 201
closed-circuit video 244, 251, videographic moving picture 42–
243, 257, 262, 264 4, 49–51, 53–6, 58–97, 284
music video 99–100, 113, Viénet, René 216
216–17, 238 Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
online video platform 152 (1973) 216
as VCR 154, 163–4, 199, Viola, Bill 43, 54–6, 67–73, 75,
215, 228, 278–9, 281–3 79, 96, 316 n.54, 316 n.55,
as VHS 88, 162, 171, 346 n.33
210–11, 216, 228–32, 235, Ocean without a Shore
342 n.66 (2007) 316 n.54
video camera 86, 201, The Passions (2000–02)
229–30 67–8, 70–1
video feedback 29, 31, 65, Quintet of the Astonished
114, 251, 315 n.45 (2000) 68–70
videographic effect 7, 14, Quintet of the Silent
151, 164–5, 167–8, 175, (2001) 68, 70
185–8, 192, 200, 205, 208– Transfiguration (2008)
9, 222–3, 225–7, 235–6, 316 n.54
238, 316 n.55, 326 n.49 Virilio, Paul 305 n.49
video image 28, 41, 68, 203
video monitor 245, 250–1, Wachowski, Lana and Andy 58
253, 258, 261–9, 287–92, Speed Racer (2008) 58
348 n.66 Walberg, Marin 85
380 Index

Wall, Jeff 13, 51–3, 74 and Melon juice — filmstrips

Walley, Jonathan 26, 132, 183, taped to Tate Turbine Hall
187, 335 n.89 ramp and skateboarded over
Walsh, Maria 255 using ollie,
Wanes, Tilly 157 kick flip, pop shove-it, acid
Warhol, Andy 56, 76, 78, 85, drop, melon grab, crooked
290–1 grind, bunny hop, tic tacs,
Eat (1963) 78 sex change, disco flip —
Empire (1964) 56, 78 skateboarding performed
Outer and Inner Space live for Long Weekend
(1965) 290–1 by Thomas Lock, Louis
Sleep (1963) 78 Henderson, Charlotte
Weerasethakul, Apichatpong Brennan, Dion Penman,
319 n.80 Sam Griffin, Jak Tonge,
Wees, William C. 151–2, 157, Evin Goode and Quantin
160, 329 n.16, 332 n.49 Paris, clouds shot by Peter
Weibel, Peter 10–12, 15 West) (2009) 140
Welcome to Heartbreak (music Spiral of Time Documentary
video for Kanye West) 113 Film (16mm negative
Wenders, Wim 247 strobe-light double and
American Friend (1977) 247 triple exposed — painted
West, Jennifer 44, 107, 133, with brine shrimp —
139–42 dripped, splattered and
Lavender Mist Film/Pollock Film sprayed with salted liquids:
1 (70mm film leader rubbed balsamic and red wine
with Jimson Weed Trumpet vinegar, lemon and lime
flowers, spraypainted, juice, temporary fluorescent
dipped and splattered with hair dyes — photos from
nail polish, sprayed with friends Mark Titchner,
lavender mist air freshener) Karen Russo, Aaron
(2009) 139–40 Moulton and Ignacio
Nirvana Alchemy Film (16mm Uriarte and some google
black & white film soaked maps — texts by Jwest and
in lithium mineral hot Chris Markers ’ Sans Soleil
springs, pennyroyal tea, script — shot by Peter West,
doused in mud, sopped strobed by Jwest, hands by
in bleach, cherry antacid Ariel West, telecine by Tom
and laxatives — jumping Sartori) (2013) 141–2
by Finn West & Jwest) Westgeest, Helen 49
(2007) 140 What Ever Happened to Baby
Skate the Sky Film (35mm film Jane (1962) 176
print of clouds in the sky Whitney Sr., John 106, 323 n.15
covered with ink, Ho-Ho’s, Lapis (1963–66) 323 n.15
 Index 381

Willis, Holly 64 Yalkut, Jud 106, 323 n.15

Wilson, Jane and Louise 262, Video-Film Concert
348 n.64 (co-directed with Nam June
Erewhon (2004) 348 n.64 Paik, 1966–72) 323 n.15
Stasi City (1997) 348 n.64 Youngblood, Gene 106
Windhausen, Federico 127
Wolf, Werner 35 Zimmerman, Patricia R. 227, 236
Wollen, Peter 76–7 Zinman, Gregory 105, 123,
Wood, Aylish 59 129, 140
World Wide Web 38, 48, 175, 202 Zyrd, Michael 152