discuss
due 4.18
For Week 12
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cef8mId0dms
Reading Response:
What are the four primary operations or techniques that
contemporary artists use when appropriating older films? Briefly
describe each one. Then, either select one of the works of art
discussed in the lecture or reading that you would like to discuss
further in regards to the concept of the remake -or- share a link,
clip or screen shot of another video or film you are familiar with
that engages with the concept of the remake. This can be
something found on sites like the VDB or EAI, or youtube, tiktok,
etc.
Amsterdam University Press
Chapter Title: The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives
Book Title: Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Book Author(s): Erika Balsom
Published by: Amsterdam University Press. (2013)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt45kdsq.7
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Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New
Narratives
I suppose that if a work of art is by definition that which conserves, a mythology
never ceases, on the contrary, to manage itself and to recycle itself according to the
taste of the age and the state of technology… Nothing will be kept of cinema except
that which can be remade.
– Serge Daney
In the spring of , Chris Moukarbel, an MFA student in the Yale University
School of Art’s sculpture department, was sued by Paramount Pictures. Why?
The “nature of the case,” according to the affidavit issued to the United States
District Court, was as follows:
This is an action for copyright infringement pursuant to the Copyright Law of the
United States, U.S.C. § et seq. (the “Copyright Act”). This infringement claim
arises from defendant Chris Moukarbel’s (the “Defendant”) unauthorized creation
and distribution of a twelve-minute motion picture which is a virtually identical
copy of a substantial portion of the Plaintiff’s copyrighted screenplay for its upcom-
ing motion picture World Trade Center.
With a budget of one thousand dollars, a screenplay bought from a bootlegger,
and actors from the Yale School of Drama, Moukarbel remade – or rather pre-
made, as the feature had not yet been released to the public – sections of Oliver
Stone’s film, World Trade Center (), as his MFA thesis project. Stone’s
$ million film set out to tell the “true story” of John McLoughlin and Will
Jimeno, two of the last survivors to be pulled from underneath the rubble on
September . Whereas Stone’s version crosscuts between scenes of the men
trapped underneath the collapsed Twin Towers and diegetically antecedent foo-
tage leading up to the event, Moukarbel stays underneath the debris, stringing
together several disparate snippets of Andrea Berloff’s cliché-ridden screenplay.
Where Stone seeks to inject narrative interest through flashback, Moukarbel
questions the very possibility of responsibly producing such a story. Stone’s
World Trade Center was marketed with the tagline “The World Saw Evil
That Day. Two Men Saw Something Else.” What is this “something else” that
the men-turned-characters of Stone’s movie supposedly saw? True to the con-
ventions of the genre, perhaps it was the greatness of the human spirit. Moukar-
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bel, by contrast, drains the screenplay of its promises of visibility, knowledge,
and redemption. Throughout the video, it is very dark under the collapsed
buildings and there is nothing to be seen; there is no exit from the claustropho-
bic enclosure, just a few lines of dialogue torn from context and unsentimentally
delivered to the utter vacuity that Hollywood would bestow upon them. The
radical insufficiency of the representation becomes clear and the distance that
separates it from the event it purports to depict becomes impossible to ignore.
When the work was shown at the sculpture department’s thesis exhibition,
Moukarbel installed a single upward-cast blue-tinted spotlight outside the gal-
lery, recalling both a film premiere and the Tribute in Light ceremonies that
have been held in lower Manhattan to commemorate the events of /. By con-
densing the glitz of Hollywood and a monument in remembrance of national
trauma in a single gesture, the spotlight speaks directly to what is at stake in
the project that Moukarbel named World Trade Center (): it ques-
tions the cinema’s role as repository of public memory, who has the right to tell
a particular story, and why and how they will tell it. Five years after the event
(too late) and four months before the Hollywood debut (too early), Moukarbel’s
(p)remake deftly utilized its purposeful untimeliness to perform the becoming-
formulaic of an exceptional event with a difficult relationship to narration.
Chris Moukarbel, World Trade Center ().
Hollywood, with its astounding global reach, has emerged as perhaps the pri-
mary way the historical narratives of the twentieth century have been delivered
to us. Trauma is repackaged as spectacle, given an uplifting human-interest an-
gle, and fed to the public for consumption, eliding the socio-political vicissi-
tudes that reside therein in favor of individual-driven narratives with universal
humanist themes. The artist told the New York Times, “I’m interested in memor-
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ial and the way Hollywood represents public events… Through their access and
budget they’re able to affect a lot of people’s ideas about an event and also affect
policy. I was deliberately using their script and preempting their release to make
a statement about power.” By suing Moukarbel, Paramount compounded
what his project had always been about: the lawsuit pushed questions of own-
ership to center stage, prompting an inquiry into the relationship between nar-
rative as private property and as public memory.
The word trauma comes from the Greek for “wound,” an etymology that
evokes the manner in which the traumatic event punctures the fabric of signifi-
cation. It is only through repetition that this asignifying blot can be recuperated
into knowledge. The events of September functioned as a national trau-
ma that served to disrupt established frameworks of understanding, and yet in
the months and years that followed, real dialogue in mainstream media outlets
was quashed by the Bushism of “Either you’re with us or you’re with the terror-
ists.” As Judith Butler has written, “The articulation of this hegemony takes
place in part through producing a consensus on what certain terms will mean,
how they can be used, and what lines of solidarity are implicitly drawn through
this use.” Stone’s World Trade Center was central to the continuing produc-
tion of this consensus, as it worked to suture over the wound of trauma with a
representation that would deny ambiguity and contradiction in an embrace of
American unilateralism that told the “true” story of innocent citizens menaced
by an unseen and unknowable enemy. Moukarbel’s World Trade Center
starts from this problematic to ask: what transformations take place across these
proprietary retellings of an instance of national trauma? How does a fleeting
event – one that troubles our comprehension and quickly recedes into the past
– become digested, monumentalized, and standardized through the production
of Hollywood’s “official” version of it? And what might result from moving
beyond this practice into the domain of unsanctioned remakes that function as
hostile takeovers of an industry obsessive about holding tight rein on its intel-
lectual property?
Moukarbel distributed the video for free on his website, which eventually
drew enough attention that the project became known to Paramount, resulting
in legal action. Interestingly, the lawsuit names Moukarbel’s place of residence
as Washington, D.C., even though the Whois record for the artist’s website in-
cluded in Paramount’s dossier of supporting evidence lists his address as New
Haven, Connecticut. By locating the artist in the nation’s capital (where he had
resided some years prior), the lawsuit mobilizes a rhetoric of the enemy within
the heart of America, thus setting up the production of World Trade Center
as an exemplary unpatriotic act. To rephrase one of George W. Bush’s fa-
vorite sayings, “Either you are with Hollywood or with the terrorists.” While
this might seem like a stretch, it rhymes with a statement made by the late Jack
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 109
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Valenti, copyright extremist and long-time president of the Motion Picture As-
sociation of America; regarding unauthorized online distribution of Hollywood
products, Valenti asserted, “We’re fighting our own terrorist war.” The lawsuit
against Moukarbel also claimed that the “issuance of an injunction would not
substantially harm the other party” since he did not seek commercial gain from
the enterprise, putting forth a notably circumscribed understanding of “harm”
as well as making clear that the lawsuit was not at its core a financial matter.
The lawsuit claimed that, “The preemptive release of the Moukarbel Film on
the Internet before Paramount’s WTC Film means that unquantifiable but, most
likely, large numbers of people will see the Mourkarbel Film first for free and
determine, based on this poor-quality copy, that they do not want to pay to see
the remainder of the WTC Film.” An unnamed Paramount spokeswoman told
the Yale Daily News that, “He stole our material, and he shot a script that we
owned…People were confused, and that’s not something we want to happen.”
Obviously, the rhetoric of “confusion” is laughable, despite the fairly high pro-
duction quality (given the available resources) of Moukarbel’s video. Though a
case for fair use clearly presented itself, as Lawrence Lessig has written, “…fair
use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to
create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as
fair use is astonishingly bad… It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what
it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The
legal system may be tolerable for the very rich.” For a graduate student, the
cost of contesting the lawsuit made a claim of fair use unfeasible. The lawsuit
was settled out of court on the condition that Moukarbel destroy all existing
copies of the work.
Rather than any real fear that an unsuspecting Internet user might be dis-
suaded from a trip to the multiplex by coming across Moukarbel’s MFA thesis
project, Paramount’s lawsuit speaks to the current climate of copyright paranoia
brought about by the fact that, as Moukarbel himself has put it, “We’re at a
place now where technology allows the democratization of storytelling.” Re-
cent developments in hardware, software, and bandwidth have spurred prac-
tices of remaking, recycling, and retelling in a way that has disrupted Holly-
wood’s near-sovereign majesty over the right to fictionalize history, to say
nothing of its ability to regulate derivative uses of its products. The Internet is
awash with amateur “mash-ups” and reenactments, the cultural significance of
which has not been lost on contemporary art. While such non-professional on-
line activities have become the object of litigation, Moukarbel’s World Trade
Center is something of an exception in the art world, a space in which
practices of basing works on preexisting films have proliferated without major
interference from those who hold copyright on the source texts in question.
Since , there has been an explosion of new narratives created out of old
110 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
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movies, often with something to say about “the way Hollywood tells it,” to
borrow from the title of David Bordwell’s study of the narrative conventions of
dominant cinema.
This chapter will examine exemplary works of this tendency to remake com-
mercial cinema, embracing the notion of the “remake” broadly to designate any
artwork produced by reworking elements of an existing film. This might in-
volve recycling existing footage, reenacting a scenario from a film, interviewing
an individual whose life has been involved with film production, or producing
non-filmic objects by using an existing film as a source. Such practices appear as
the progeny of appropriation art born in the Internet age, making use of com-
mercially available software such as Final Cut Pro and manipulable digital
video files to take up the products of Hollywood as raw material for an investi-
gation into the ways in which popular media shape subjectivity and experience.
Claude Lévi-Strauss defined mythic narrative as an imaginary solution of a real
contradiction, ascribing to it a fundamentally synthetic function, while Frederic
Jameson has built upon this premise to demonstrate that this synthesis never
takes place without a residue that may be read so as to reveal the “political
unconscious” that lies latent. The counter-narratives produced by artists re-
making old movies often take this residue as a starting point and use it to pro-
duce narratives of analysis rather than synthesis. Instead of an imaginary reso-
lution of contradiction, the very terms of conflict that had formerly been
sublated now reemerge in tension with one another. In order to evade the traps
of a discursive position falsely external to the spectacle it seeks to criticize, these
artists bring together spectators through their common recognition of mass cul-
tural icons and stories. This at once forces them to take account of how thor-
oughly such icons and stories have shaped the ways in which they understand
their lives and their history. It also, however, allows for the formation of a com-
munity around such collective recognition, repurposing the shared memory to-
wards knowledge-producing ends.
Though the remake as a strategy in art since emerges as a privileged
iteration of a more widespread rejection of the unique and the original at this
time, it is in fact as old as cinema itself, with the Lumière brothers often making
multiple versions of their short actualités, which were then copied by others the
world over. It has a long history in Hollywood in particular, from repeated lit-
erary adaptations such as Imitation of Life (by John Stahl in and Douglas
Sirk in ), to Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Haneke’s self-remakes (the for-
mer with The Man Who Knew Too Much in and , the latter with
Funny Games in and ) to the contemporary trend of the transnational
remake embodied most forcefully in J-Horror crossovers such as Ringu/The
Ring (/) and Ju-on/The Grudge (/) and seemingly undying
action franchises such as Rambo and Terminator. The very action of remaking
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is central to the Hollywood system, which ceaselessly produces updates of the
same themes and retells the same stories, feeding off of the corpses of national
cinemas and cult genres when necessary. As Lessig notes, Hollywood is no bas-
tion of originality, but was built by “fleeing pirates” – people who left New
York for California in an effort to get away from the monopoly Edison had se-
cured through his patent holdings. Peter Decherney, meanwhile, has sug-
gested that, “The Hollywood studio system was built on plagiarism just as the
early film industry had been built on piracy.”
Though the action is the same, the forms of remaking that have emerged in
contemporary art often have very little in common with their Hollywood coun-
terparts, working to question mainstream cinema rather than to ensure profit
margins. When the tables are turned and Hollywood winds up as the host of
the derivative work rather than the parasite that creates one, the character of
the remake shifts from a hope for guaranteed revenue to a site of unsanctioned
use. Such works serve to call into question Hollywood’s univocity, interjecting
another perspective into a discourse that presents itself as seamless. Daniel Birn-
baum questions, “…[W]hy steal from cinema? Perhaps the answer is that video
can pose questions to film that film is incapable of putting to itself.” Birn-
baum’s use of language risks suggesting that the matter is a question of the
medium, that video might provide the remove necessary to ask questions that
would be impossible to confront through the medium of film. Rather than a
case of video versus film, however, what is truly at stake is a relationship be-
tween art and cinema: through appropriations of Hollywood films, artists ad-
dress questions of ideology, subjectivity, history, and collectivity that are at once
crucial to contemporary art practice and that reveal something about the past
and present of cinema. These works attempt to tell the other side of the story of
Hollywood’s official discourse: they actualize a possibility that had rested dor-
mant in the host text, sometimes in fierce opposition to it, sometimes in adula-
tion, but most often with a marked ambivalence that embraces certain aspects of
the text while challenging others. A remake might investigate the representa-
tional codes of an existing work, it might reflect on its relationship to history, it
might focus on the labor of spectatorship, it might fetishize a loved film, it
might question what new possibilities for freedom and control are made possi-
ble by the digitization of cinema, or it might do something else entirely. It is
impossible to generalize a single relation between a remake and its host text,
but what unites all the remakes that will be discussed in this chapter is that
they all exhibit cinema: that is, they hold it up for examination and investigate its
contemporary state by using its past products as raw material.
This chapter will bracket a consideration of cross-medium remakes that serve
to illuminate medium-specific characteristics through hybrid formations of cin-
ema/new media (such as Cory Arcangel’s Colors []) and cinema/painting
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(such as Sam Taylor-Wood’s Still Life [] and A Little Death []).
Instead, it will examine how strategies of remaking serve to set up a relation to
cinema as a social institution that functions as a cultural vernacular and a reser-
voir of shared experience. Through a discussion of work by Candice Breitz,
Douglas Gordon, Chris Moukarbel, and others, it will situate the popularity of
the remake as an aesthetic strategy within the histories of art and cinema and
provide an account of exactly what kinds of relationships to cinema – and to
Hollywood cinema in particular – are imagined by these artists. For Moukabel,
the concern is questioning how the cinematic institution digests and monumen-
talizes historical events. Breitz interrogates the status of fandom in a digital age,
while Gordon makes visible the contours of a post-VHS cinephilia. All of these
artists, then, turn to Hollywood cinema for different reasons, but all of them
find within it an ambivalent site of collectivity and make use of the shared cul-
tural memory of cinema to tackle spectacular culture from within.
Ambivalent Appropriations
While the remake may be used as a strategy of media critique, it must be em-
phasized that activities of remaking are by no means inherently critical; rather, a
diversity of positions vis-à-vis the host text is possible, ranging from outright
condemnation to lionizing homage. Chrissie Iles has remarked that “the rela-
tionship between art and film is a one-way love affair,” but if it is so, it is most
undoubtedly a love/hate affair. References to film history proliferate, making
it possible to speak of a palpable cinephilia within contemporary art, but simul-
taneously, a large number of these references hold up dominant cinema as a
great exemplar of the machinations of culture industries. One thus confronts a
marked ambivalence towards the cinematic institution. On one end of the spec-
trum, Moukarbel’s World Trade Center manifests nothing but contempt
for Stone’s original. Similarly, RSG-BLACK- (), Radical Software Group’s
algorithmic reediting of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (), reverse engi-
neers the racial segregationism of what group member Alex Galloway called a
“Jim Crow film” by algorithmically editing out all white characters. This re-
duces the running time of the film – which is “based on a true story” of the U.S.
Army mission to Mogadishu, Somalia, on October – from minutes to
only :. Works such as these engage the legacy of appropriation art as a
mode of critique, invoking the Situationist International’s technique of détourne-
ment as an important precedent.
This outright condemnation of the appropriated film is, however, by no
means generalizable as a characteristic of contemporary art remakes of old
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movies. In some cases, a distinct cinephilia emerges. Take, for example, Kota
Ezawa’s LYAM -D (), a three-dimensional animated remake of Alain Re-
snais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad, ) or
Stan Douglas’ Inconsolable Memories (), a loose remake of Tomás Gu-
tiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesar-
rollo, ) transposed to the Mariel boatlift of : here, beloved art cinema
classics are appropriated as a way to investigate temporality and historical
memory, respectively. There is no move to dismantle the host films, but on the
contrary a desire to mobilize the discourses they explore and bring them into
confrontation with present concerns. Meanwhile, Christoph Draeger’s Schizo
(Redux) () stages a cinephilic comparison between Psycho () and Gus
Van Sant’s remake of that film by laying one on top of the other in a
ghostly doubling that highlights the many differences between Hitchcock’s film
and its supposed shot-by-shot copy. In Feel Lucky, Punk??! (-), Drae-
ger moves into the fantasies of cinematic identification by engaging friends to
recreate hold up scenes from Magnum Force (), Natural Born Killers
(), Pulp Fiction (), Taxi Driver (), and Thelma and Louise
(). In describing the production of the work, Draeger invoked a gathering
of friends happy to return to the playacting of childhood and the joy of pretend-
ing to be robbers.
Most often, the polarities of love and hate are both present in a decidedly
ambivalent relationship to cinema that sees them intermingle within a single
work. If, as chapter one demonstrated, the moving image in contemporary art
must be seen as a major component of the spectacularization of that domain,
practices of remaking deploy the ambivalent pleasures of cinema and its status
as a cultural vernacular to problematize spectacular culture from within. Rather
than unqualified aggression or unqualified affection, one finds a conflicted rela-
tionship to cinema that sees it as occupying a double position: its mass appeal is
valorized for its ability to forge an imagined collectivity, but this mass character
is simultaneously acknowledged as a site of ideological interpellation and pos-
sible exploitation. In terms of the formal operations of remaking, one might say
that film history is submitted to a kind of murder by scissors, but this recontex-
tualization can also be a form of homage or tribute.
Douglas Gordon, perhaps the best known of the artists working with found
footage, has proclaimed that, “for us” – presumably his generation of artists –
the cinema “is already dead.” Pierre Bismuth, meanwhile, easily shrugs off
any apparent relation to cinephilia: “Anyways, I am not really that interested in
the cinema. I used it as a tool for capturing the viewer’s attention.” In a similar
vein, Pierre Huyghe has stated that,
The label of being nostalgic for cinema has been glued to me in an easy way. As if one
was to say of Cézanne that he liked apples or that Picasso liked bulls! I have no fasci-
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nation for the cinema. I’m interested in it because it is the vehicle of our collective
unconscious, of our relationship to the scenario. But only as much as the supermod-
el Kate Moss, an advertisement, or a music video!
Statements such as these seem to support Raymond Bellour’s assertion that
Douglas Gordon is “without nostalgia” and suggest that it might be extended
to other artists working with the remake. And yet, the often deadpan work of
Bismuth, Gordon, and Huyghe witnesses the continuation of cinema by other
means, a cinema that is perhaps uncannily “undead” rather than already buried
and gone. The disavowal of cinephilia in these artists’ statements does not neu-
tralize the ways in which their work makes use of a love for cinema; it does not
do away with the fact that their work manifests cinephilia even if the artists
themselves do not profess to be cinephiles. Significantly, Huyghe never does
investigate Kate Moss or a music video, but instead returns to the cinema again
and again as a repository of material to be replayed and remade.
Gordon may personally lack nostalgia; he may be blissfully unaware of the
experimental film traditions his work sometimes engages. He may see the his-
torical products of cinema as nothing but a moribund set of images ripe for
recontextualization, but his work nonetheless depends on a cultural climate
characterized by a widespread nostalgia for classical cinema. This nostalgia is
not that of the postmodern historicism described by Jameson, marked by an
eclectic mixing of signifiers at odds with genuine historicism and exemplified
by films such as American Graffiti () and Body Heat (). Rather,
though these works share “‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of
the aesthetic effect”, they in no way function as quotations that seek to displace
history with surface effects. On the contrary, many of these works use strate-
gies of remaking precisely to agitate against the ways in which cinema has func-
tioned to spectacularize the past and reduce it to nothing more than a space to
be colonized by glossy surface styles. They serve to assert cinema as a site of
collectivity and shared cultural memory, very different from the amnesiac pas-
tiche of Jamesonian postmodernism.
To assert that there is a cinephilic tendency in contemporary art is not to sug-
gest that the artists involved profess a personal love for cinema or have any
extensive knowledge of film history. Rather, it is to discern, on a cultural plane
that extends far beyond the individual subjectivity of a given artist, the emer-
gence of narrative cinema as a highly cathected object within the artistic pro-
duction of the last two decades. This is, of course, not the case without excep-
tion, as World Trade Center suggests. But the impact of a work such as
Hour Psycho () cannot be considered outside of its relation to a public
intimately familiar with Hitchcock’s films, a public that finds in these films
something to trigger a memory that returns with all the bittersweetness of time
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lost and regained. Through this employment of the resurrected familiar made
strange, these works stage a relation between the private and public dimensions
of contemporary cinema. They are made possible by the private cinema of VHS
and DVD and yet, through their location within the museum and their resurrec-
tion of a past image regime, they offer a possibility of recovering a relation to
collectivity crucial to the specificity of theatrical exhibition. The production of
art derived from old movies provides a way of taking the private cinephilia of
watching films on television and video back into the public sphere and subject-
ing it to scrutiny.
The Four Operations
Contemporary practices of remaking may be grouped into four primary opera-
tions that describe the technique used to repurpose an appropriated film: re-
enacting, interviewing, recycling, and translating. Before delving into works
that represent this tendency, it will be helpful to outline a schematic typology of
these operations so as to provide a broad overview of the techniques employed
in the practices that have come to prominence since .
Reenactment has become a widespread practice in contemporary art, extend-
ing beyond references to film history to also include the reenactment of events
both historical (Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave []) and art histori-
cal (Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces [], for which the artist re-
enacted seven canonical performance art pieces in one week at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York). Contrary to these examples, which reenact singular
events, the reenactments under discussion in this chapter repeat something that
already existed as a repetition, as a representation already mobile within cul-
ture. Brice Dellsperger’s body double series (-ongoing), for example, con-
sists of over twenty reenactments of segments of popular films that serve to
investigate the performativity of gender and the problem of authenticity. Often
Dellsperger will play all parts within an excerpt, as in body double (),
which remakes the elevator murder scene from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to
Kill (). A male artist playing both the female victim and the transvestite
male murderer remakes a movie that is itself in large part a very loose remake
of Hitchcock, thereby throwing into crisis any stable sense of copy and original.
Later in the series, Dellsperger explores having multiple non-professionals re-
enact the same role and exhibits all performances simultaneously as a multi-
screen installation; body double () uses nine screens for nine reenact-
ments of the scene from the conclusion of Blow Out (), in which Jack (John
Travolta) finds Sally (Nancy Allen) dead on the roof during the fireworks.
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Brice Dellsperger, body double ().
Stan Douglas’ Subject to a Film: Marnie () is a six-minute black-and-
white mm remake of the robbery sequence from Marnie () that loops
back to the beginning when the title character’s hands are on the safe. Instead
of continuing the narrative to depict the discovery of Marnie’s crime, Douglas
imprisons her in a nightmarish eternal return of never-ending theft but gives
her salvation from another kind of imprisonment: marrying Mark Rutland.
Through this tension between the loop (common in gallery exhibition) and the
teleology of start-to-finish viewing (proper to the cinema), Douglas highlights
the important question of how experiences of narrativity are impacted by cin-
ema’s integration into the gallery space. Reenactment emerges as a way of pro-
ducing difference from repetition, of producing the new from the old at a time
when notions of novelty and originality are held under suspicion. Maeve Con-
nolly has suggested that, “The rise of reenactment may also signal a crisis of
belief in the future, in line with the economic and social developments of the
post- era.” It introduces a complex and fractured temporality, as it sum-
mons an earlier event while remaining distinctly anchored in the present. It ac-
knowledges that the only access to the past is through a representation of it, but
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by remaking this representation, it can point to its failures, omissions, and
biases.
The interview provides artists with a way of engaging with individuals whose
lives have become intertwined with the production of feature films in one way
or another. The reified images of the culture industry occlude the labor that goes
into their production, seemingly materializing out of nowhere as glossy ciphers.
Countering this prevailing regime, the action of interviewing individuals in-
volved with the making of feature films reintroduces a social relation into the
circulation of images and prompts a consideration of the affective labor that
goes into their production. For Blanche Neige Lucie (), Pierre Huyghe
interviewed Lucie Dolène, the woman who dubbed the voice of Snow White in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves () into French in . In the mid-
s after receiving no royalties from the film’s VHS release, Dolène suc-
cessfully sued Disney and regained the legal rights to her voice. When Jane and
Louise Wilson were commissioned to make a work in response to the holdings
of the Stanley Kubrick Archives, they delivered Unfolding the Aryan Papers
(). For this work, the artists interviewed Dutch actress Johanna Ter Steege,
who was set to play the lead role in the Aryan Papers project, a film about the
Holocaust that Kubrick researched for many years but never made. The work
functions as a portrait of the actress and of a failed project, but also mobilizes
discourses of the Holocaust as an unrepresentable event, as Ter Steege recounts
that the film remained unfinished because Kubrick couldn’t bear the responsi-
bility; she says, “No one can represent this.”
Omer Fast’s Spielberg’s List () responds to a similar question from an-
other angle. In this double-channel installation, Fast interviews Polish extras
who participated in the production of Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust blockbuster
Schindler’s List (), a film that received both glowing praise and virulent
criticism. Fast makes use of three kinds of footage, each performing its own
negotiation between the Hollywoodization of the Shoah and the historical Real:
there are talking head interviews with these extras, footage of the replica of the
Plaszow camp built as a film set and never fully dismantled, and segments of
the “Schindler’s List Tour” that caters to the many (mostly American) tourists
that have visited Poland since the film’s release. Often, a tour operator tells us,
these visitors make little distinction between remnants of the Second World
War and their film-set replicas. Throughout the interviews, the distinction be-
tween personal experience and acted role blurs, as one respondent abruptly
shifts from a discussion of her own life in wartime Poland to some fifty years
later when she acted in Spielberg’s film.
Recycled works make use of footage from existing films, evincing a certain
kinship with the subgenre of experimental cinema known as the found-footage
film but often rejecting the model of start-to-finish viewing proper to it. The
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digitization and networking of cinema that took place in the s allowed
what was once a technique requiring access to stock footage and equipment
such as an optical printer to become something able to be accomplished with
minimal skill, resulting in an explosion of recycled works on the Internet and in
galleries. Many of these works make use of kinds of recycling that would have
been difficult or impossible before the advent of DVDs, high-bandwidth Inter-
net, and easy-to-use editing software, such as an increased emphasis on remak-
ing popular films. The found-footage genre has a rich history within experimen-
tal film, but before the s, such films often made use of repurposed footage
with no intent that the spectator would or should identify the original source.
In the years since, the recognizability of the source footage has become an inte-
gral part of much found-footage practice. The present viewing is always re-
doubled by a memory of seeing the source film in the past, introducing a differ-
ent relation to the host footage than the ur-text of the found-footage film, Joseph
Cornell’s Rose Hobart (). It is widely known that the footage of Cornell’s
homage stems from East of Borneo (), in which Hobart starred. And yet,
Cornell’s reediting of Hobart’s appearances in that film by no means necessitates
a familiarity with it in order to achieve its full impact.
Quite differently, since , many recycled works depend on their host films’
popularity and recognizability across a wide demographic. Christian Marclay’s
The Clock () is a supercut of twenty-four hours’ worth of narrative cin-
ema’s engagements with temporality that encourages spectators to remain
aware of time while at the movies rather than forgetting it, as is so often the
aim. Douglas Gordon is perhaps the best known of artists to engage the opera-
tion of recycling, famously subjecting feature films to extreme temporal dila-
tion: Hour Psycho is fairly self-explanatory, while Five Year Drive By
() made the running time of The Searchers () coextensive with its die-
getic time, resulting in one second of the Ford film lasting . hours. Gordon
has completed numerous multiscreen reedits of films concerning riven identity
and the double, including through a looking glass (), which excerpts
seventy-one seconds of the “You talkin’ to me?” sequence from Taxi Driver,
and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (-), which uses Rouben Ma-
moulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (), looping three sequences of transfor-
mation from good to evil in a double projection.
The final operation of remaking involves subjecting a preexisting film to a
cross-medium process of translation. Here, one might invoke Angela Bulloch’s Z
Point (), which translates the closing sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point () into a bank of forty-eight “pixel boxes,” six high and
eight wide to mimic the aspect ratio of mm film. Each box is a fifty-centimeter
glass-fronted square containing within it three fluorescent tubes. Using custom
software, Bulloch’s pixel boxes can produce up to sixteen million colors, as
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many as possible from a computer screen. Z Point samples one frame from
each second of the excerpt (since the pixel boxes are limited to one change per
second) and translates it into an array of forty-eight large pixels, one for each
box. Color and movement are retained while the representational powers of the
image are obliterated. The result is a pulsing grid that brings together a sense of
bodily rhythm with geometric rigor. Z Point recycles an art cinema classic as
new media artifact, bringing into tension the poles of senescence and novelty
that mark the integration of cinema into the museum since .
Angela Bulloch, Z Point ().
The remakes that engage in translation may remediate old media into new me-
dia, much as takes place in culture at large, but they may also translate cinema
into older media. Examples of such this kind of cross-medium translation are to
be found in Fiona Banner’s transcriptions of Vietnam War films, such as Apoca-
lypse Now (), a hand-scribbled text measuring some seventeen square me-
ters, or her artist’s book THE NAM (), which compiles typewritten tran-
scriptions of Apocalypse Now (), Born on the Fourth of July (),
The Deer Hunter (), Full Metal Jacket (), Hamburger Hill (),
and Platoon () into a single, nearly unreadable text. Pierre Bismuth’s Fol-
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lowing the Right Hand of… series does exactly what its title suggests: the
artist watches a DVD behind a plexiglass sheet and uses a marker to trace a
shaky line that follows the female star’s right hand throughout the film. This is
placed on top of a still of the actress, resulting in a defiled portrait of, for exam-
ple, Louise Brooks in Prix de beauté (, remade by Bismuth as Following
the Right Hand of Louise Brooks in Beauty Contest []). The scribbled
line indexes Bismuth’s viewing of the film, its nervous energy pointing to a tho-
rough redirection of attention away from the narrative progression and towards
the movements of an actress’ right hand. In the translations produced by both
Banner and Bismuth, the labor of spectatorship is made visible in the produc-
tion of manually produced artifacts that index the time spent as a viewer.
Precursors
Basing an artwork on an existing cultural product is by no means new, nor is
making use of the gallery space to comment upon the mass medium of cinema.
Strategies of appropriating mass media imagery are very familiar within art
historical discourse, whether one speaks of the Situationist International and
their strategy of détournement or the “Pictures” generation’s interest in the poli-
tics of the sign. It is imperative, however, to make certain distinctions between
these antecedents and the remakes of the s and s.
When Angela Bulloch substitutes the soundtrack of Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Solaris (Solyaris, ) with her own audio to make Solaris () or dubs
Jean Rouch’s Gare du nord segment of Paris seen by… (Paris vu par…, )
into German or English based on interior and exterior shots and adds scenes
filmed in Vienna to make From the Eiffel Tower to the Riesenrad (),
her gestures have a clear precedent: in , René Viénet, member of the Situa-
tionist International, took the martial arts film Crush (Tang shou tai quan
dao, ) and dubbed his own soundtrack to make Can Dialectics Break
Bricks? (La Dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?). This is a classic ex-
ample of Situationist détournement, that process by which mass cultural prod-
ucts are “diverted” or “hijacked” towards critical ends, contesting the spectacle
from within. And yet, Bulloch’s use of this operation possesses none of the po-
tency of the Situationists, none of the desire to appropriate an existing mass
cultural text in an indictment of that realm. For the S.I., détournement is an op-
eration of radical negation; in a critique of the Tel Quel group’s literary avant-
guardism, Guy Debord states, “Not some ‘writing degree zero’ – just the oppo-
site. Not the negation of style but the style of negation.” This contestation
must maintain a critical distance towards its object so as to restore “the ancient
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kernel of truth” that might be excavated from amidst the petrified surfaces of
spectacle.
Notably, while the formal operations of some of the strategies of remaking
that have emerged since resemble those of Situationist détournement, on
the whole they by no means maintain its virulence towards the appropriated
objects, its critical distance from them, nor its focus on negation as a way of
instituting a new totality founded on a recovered truth. The S.I. aimed at noth-
ing less than cultural revolution, seeing the divide between art and life as an
integral part of the separations that characterized spectacular culture. In this
sense, their militant interventions must be seen as attempting to destroy the
category of art as much as violently contesting mass culture, seeking a Hegelian
Aufhebung that would institute a new totality free of alienation and atomiza-
tion. Recent artists’ remakes of existing films have abandoned the Situationist
call for the abolition of art as a distinct category and have ceased to view mass
culture as an unqualified villain. Firmly ensconced within the institution of art,
they leave behind negation and totality to instead forge an ambivalent and con-
flicted relationship to the fragmentary network of signs that constitutes popular
culture. Today, the act of appropriation in itself guarantees no criticality, but
rather functions as a starting point to open other avenues of investigation, some
of which may entail a critique of media, others not.
An earlier generation of moving image artists – one that included figures
such as Paul Sharits and Michael Snow – interrogated film as film as a turn
away from the ideological enclosures of “the movies.” Now, in addition to the
material of film, which has seen a renewed interest under the specter of obsoles-
cence, the institution of cinema has emerged as an object of fascination. The mul-
tiscreen projection formats this earlier generation pioneered may be employed,
but many components of the cinematic institution that had previously been re-
jected – such as stardom, screenplays, extras, studios, stories, sets, spectators –
are now precisely what is investigated. Artists take up the histories, conven-
tions, and social functions of cinema as the mass cultural medium responsible
for the production of narratives and experiences shared by a society, something
that demonstrates an affinity with the “Pictures” group of American appropria-
tionists. However, instead of following the “Pictures” artists in an examination
of the iconography of cinema through the stillness of photography – thereby
freezing circuits of desire and identification into the stasis of a single image to
be held up for analysis – now artists delve into an engagement with moving
images. In combining multiscreen film and video installations with a suspi-
cious embrace of mass cultural codes and the poaching of signs, the contempo-
rary generation synthesizes elements of s expanded cinema with s and
s appropriation.
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Artists make use of the pleasures of recognizability as central to the affective
resonance of their work, playing off of a conception of cinema as a storehouse of
communally shared narratives and resurrecting the utopian spark of cinema as
an alternative public sphere. But at the same time, it often surfaces that this
shared cultural memory is also a site of ideological interpellation to be ques-
tioned, as the cinema is seen as a spectacular machine churning out image com-
modities, regulating cultural norms, and impacting the way we understand his-
tory. Stemming from this is an irreducible ambivalence towards the mass
cultural texts that are integrated into the production of new works. This am-
bivalence must never be taken for indifference, but must be seen as describing
strong forces that refract, splinter, and enter into tension with one another. The
challenge now is to take ambivalence seriously, to see in it an opportunity to
render visible the contradictory libidinal investments elicited by the culture in-
dustries.
This ambivalence is an important response to the collapse of the complicity/
critique divide after postmodernity’s colonization of the last zones of resistance,
the realm of art foremost among them. In a discussion of the work of Pierre
Huyghe, Mark Godfrey writes, “Rarely has an artist associated with a critical
position been canny enough to work with affection, attraction, and amazement
and not just against them.” This coexistence of a critical position with “affec-
tion, attraction, and amazement” is the affective structure characteristic of the
ambivalent engagement with cinema that marks many strategies of remaking
since . Leaving behind the anti-pleasure polemics of the s and s,
the disavowal of enjoyment has ceased to be a necessary prerequisite for en-
gagement. Through such ambivalence, these artists rewrite the dominant narra-
tives of Hollywood into an array of multi-faceted and contradictory stories that
negotiate the borders between truth and fiction, industrial production and per-
sonal experience, visibility and invisibility, fantasy and criticality. Rather than
intervening solely at the level of representational codes, central to many of these
works is an attempt to locate the various vectors that bind subjects to the image
repertoire of popular culture and constitute them as viewing publics.
Like the work of the filmic avant-garde that preceded and paralleled it, the
artists making film installations in the s and s maintained a belief in an
“outside” to ideology. Indeed, the guarantee of a secure, external space from
which one might produce a critique of ideology served as one of the corner-
stones of filmic theories of “political modernism” of this time. Today, there is
a widespread acknowledgement that one cannot mark out an “outside” to
ideology, with the result that the contestation of narrative, the assaults on repre-
sentation and spectacle, and the polemics against cinematic pleasure no longer
stand as viable political strategies. Easy divisions of inside and outside are re-
jected in favor of a shifting topology of forces that takes care not to deny the
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involvement of one’s own discursive position within the libidinal and economic
structures of capital. Enjoyment is not at odds with critical engagement; rather,
both coexist. Harnessing the pleasures of Hollywood cinema within practices
that acknowledge the legacies of expanded cinema, Situationist détournement,
and “Pictures” appropriationism, these works try to find a way towards a dif-
ferent politics of the image. It must be remembered that there are different ways
of being bedfellows with spectacle. The examples of Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalk-
ers () and Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out ( Cubic Meters) ()
provided one paradigm in chapter one; now, the time has come to examine a
series of very different engagements with popular culture, engagements that
prove that knowledge can and must be produced from within the culture indus-
tries. For if it doesn’t come from there – a there that is everywhere – where will it
come from?
The False Promises of the “Utopia of Use”
World Trade Center and the lawsuit it inspired are significant, for they
speak to several of the key issues confronting the remake as a practice in con-
temporary art. That the art world has been cheerfully exempt from the increas-
ing copyright regulation of recent years has not prevented the most prominent
theorization of the remake in contemporary art to see it as a part of a utopian
move towards sharing and a testament to the new activity and freedom af-
forded to the consumer by the advent of digital, networked media. To great
popularity and great dispute, Nicolas Bourriaud’s Postproduction: Culture as
Screenplay, How Art Reprograms the World sees its title operation as a “neutral,
zero-sum process” wherein “the material [these artists] manipulate is no longer
primary.” Ignoring the history of appropriation art as embroiled in a politics of
representation, Bourriaud advances a new paradigm of derivative art-making
wherein the work no longer reflects back on its appropriated material in a criti-
cal relation, but instead merely reuses it to advance an emancipatory economy
of sharing that makes the formerly “passive” consumer into an “active” produ-
cer who creates new cultural objects from the availability of the old. We no
longer merely consume media, but take part as active participants. This position
follows from Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics (translated ), which
links what the author calls “post VCR art” to a “democratization of viewpoints”
made possible by technology. It is a statement that very much echoes Moukar-
bel’s concerning the “democratization of storytelling.” However, where Mou-
karbel was intent on using the availability of such technologies in a critique of
the representations of dominant cinema (democratization as allowing for new
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forms of contestation), in both Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction, critique is
left behind in favor of a harmonious community of sharing and the production
of benign social relations. Under such a paradigm, it becomes impossible to take
account of, for example, the ways in which remaking has been employed to
investigate the narrativization of historical events. Political intervention is jetti-
soned in favor of a joyous proclamation of neutrality.
Bourriaud draws heavily on the work of Michel de Certeau to champion a
“culture of use or a culture of activity” that allows one to “make do” and better
inhabit the world. He names the DJ and the programmer as the archetypal
figures of the operation, which proceeds with a neutrality that cannot help but
be enfolded in an affirmation of neoliberal consensus culture. Bourriaud valo-
rizes participation and activity without interrogating their character or their
place in structures of domination. As chapter one suggested, following Deleuze
and Foucault, the pervasive form of the administration of power is no longer the
injunction to conform and stay in place (though such forms persist as important
survivals). Rather, there is a constant incitation to participate and circulate. The
inside/outside distinctions of disciplinary power have largely given way to the
diagram of the control society, a robust and flexible network that thrives on
principles of connectivity and communication. As an economy based in materi-
al goods shifts to one founded in services and the creation of experiences, a new
“performative imperative” arises: participation and conviviality are far from
oppositional but, in fact, a new terrain of possible exploitation and expropria-
tion.
The advent of the Internet has undoubtedly changed the relationship between
production and consumption, but differently than the emancipatory thrust of
Bourriaud’s description would suggest. Rather than erasing the difference be-
tween production and consumption, post-Fordist production, as Maurizio Laz-
zarato has elaborated, is characterized by a shift to immaterial labor whereby
the act of consumption becomes an integral part of production. Therefore, parti-
cipation cannot be seen as inherently oppositional, but is in fact precisely what
is required for the generation of value. As Lazzarato writes, “Participative man-
agement is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the
‘subjective processes’…First and foremost, we have here a discourse that is
authoritarian: one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, coop-
erate, and so forth.” Consumers are called upon to invest immaterial products
with value by integrating them into social communication. Here, subjectivity
itself is commodified, as tastes, affects, and desires rather than material labor
become the locus of value production. The consumption of immaterial com-
modities is an activity that does not destroy the object but produces its value
through integrating it into the fabric of life. As such, the “culture of activity”
Bourriaud champions must thus be seen not as inherently oppositional but
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rather as native to the relationship between power, labor, and subjectivity that
marks the twenty-first century.
It is in this light that one must read the assertion in Relational Aesthetics that,
“[Modernism] was based on conflict, whereas the imaginary of our day and
age is concerned with negotiations, bonds, and co-existences. These days we
are no longer trying to advance by means of conflictual clashes…” While it
may be true that the old oppositions of modernism no longer hold true – the
lines, for example, between work/play, high/low, and complicity/critique have
been thoroughly blurred – the false permissiveness of neoliberalism is a fatal
problem in Bourriaud’s analysis. The kind of coexistence and cooperation he
valorizes is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize, immanent to im-
material labor and, as such, to the contemporary mutations of capital. Post-
production retains the Situationist term of détournement but cleanses it of the
negativity on which it was founded without acknowledging the conditions
and implications of such a recuperation. Harmony, sharing, and conviviality
become keywords in a paradigm that overwrites a politics of the sign with a
complacency toward the status quo that mirrors, rather than agitates against,
new forms of power.
Conceiving of the reuse of existing products as a “culture of constant activity
based on a collective ideal: sharing” not only buys wholeheartedly into the con-
trol society’s injunction to participate, but also occludes the real existence of
proprietary media, the high financial stakes involved, as well as the fact that
much of the source material has not been “shared,” but rather has been poached
against the will of its original producer, as Paramount’s lawsuit against Mou-
karbel makes clear. There is no disputing the fact that the Internet has made
media available like never before. However, despite such unprecedented access,
as Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker point out, “…the liberation rhetoric of
distributed networks…is a foil for the real workings of power today. The rheto-
ric of liberation is also a foil for the real nature of threats.” Decentralization
diffuses power but does not dissipate it; to buy into the technoromantic myth
of the unqualified freedoms of online culture is to ignore the ways in which
power continues to operate in and through decentralized and distributed net-
works.
Tom McDonough’s consideration of the work of Pierre Huyghe, “No Ghost,”
criticizes Bourriaud for his transposition of de Certeau’s “making do” from
everyday life to the gallery. McDonough writes, “Bourriaud adopts this schema
wholesale and, somewhat paradoxically if not perversely, returns it to the artis-
tic realm where it originated.” It is de Certeau himself who reminds us that
the everyday activity can only be understood in relation to the precise circum-
stances in which it is deployed, that is to say, in relation to its conditions of
enunciation. If de Certeau wanted to inject an “art of doing” into everyday
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life – the original French title of The Practice of Everyday Life is Arts de faire – and
addressed his book to the “murmuring voice of societies,” “a common hero, an
ubiquitous [sic] character,” Bourriaud reverses such a motion by returning to
the gallery and its relatively high-paid cultural producers. He describes an alto-
gether different context, as if such a transposition would have no effect on the
efficacy of the gesture. This changed site of enunciation allows the asymmetry
in power between strong and weak insisted upon by de Certeau to fade into
obscurity in Bourriaud’s analysis; the international art stars he discusses are by
no means “weak,” but rather are invested with a richness of cultural and finan-
cial capital possessed by only a small elite.
Bourriaud portrays a constant and equal availability of texts and outlets of
expression, drawing on the rhetorics of democratization and emancipation that
still characterize some discourses of online creativity despite their mythic char-
acter. The elision of the discursive position of the artists equally allows Bour-
riaud to ignore how the rigidification of copyright law over the last twenty
years might temper his ideal of sharing precisely because major artists are pro-
vided a substantial degree of protection via their professional status as “fair
users” with gallery-funded legal teams to back up the claim if necessary.
When Brian O’Doherty described the white cube as a “survival compound,” he
meant something very different, but now again the gallery functions as a barrier
between these artists and the possible legal proceedings that could threaten
them in the “real world.”
McDonough understands de Certeau’s notion of “making do” as smacking of
a post-’ defeatism that abandons both imagining an alternative to the status
quo and visible agitation against it in favor of clandestine and temporary ac-
tions that improve one’s quality of life under conditions taken to be perma-
nent. According to McDonough, both de Certeau and Bourriaud buy into “a
‘utopia of use’ that resists the logic of reification only by recourse to a kind of
petit-bourgeois fantasy of consumption as a realm of personal autonomy.”
Though McDonough does not, one might forgive de Certeau for laying out
ways in which an individual might make the best of it through microinterven-
tions. However, art is a sphere of relative freedom that does allow for creative
imaginations of alternative modes of life as well for as fierce indictments of ex-
isting conditions, activities that have constituted an important part of the politi-
cal function of art throughout the twentieth century. The power relations at
stake are different: the factory worker might lose a job that feeds his family if
he dissents; an artist might make the cover of Artforum or drive up prices. The
arguable resignation of “making do” is problematic but understandable within
de Certeau’s framework; its appropriation by Bourriaud speaks to a much more
troubling renunciation of the political, of the desire for real change, and of the
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possibility that art might provide a valuable space in which to criticize the mass
media.
Remaking Fandom
South African artist Candice Breitz has adapted the found-footage tradition to a
gallery context by producing multi-screen installations that investigate the libi-
dinal vectors that bind cinema to its public, as well as how they have been im-
pacted by the recent advent of the fan’s ability to manipulate and remix existing
films. Breitz’s installations ask: what kind of balance exists between control and
freedom when a tool of ideological interpellation such as Hollywood cinema
becomes available for recycling and remixing in new contexts? And what resi-
dues of disciplinary power persist within this institution when it is networked
and malleable? Far from being seen as an obsolescent technology or a historical
set of great directors, here cinema is used to generate the very image of contem-
poraneity, producing narratives that are decidedly new; that is, cinema is used
to articulate how the shift to a post-Fordist economy spawns new opportunities
for control as much as freedom. Breitz complicates Bourriaud’s assumption that
all participation is inherently positive by instead excavating the ways in which
the ideological interpellations of cinema persist in and through fan participa-
tion.
In Becoming (), Breitz makes use of seven different romantic comedies,
pruning them down to a key scene involving their female protagonist and re-
moving the appearance of any other actors. The work consists of fourteen
monitors positioned in seven groups of two. On one side of each screen, there is
an excerpt from a romantic comedy; on the other, Breitz acts out the star’s role
in black and white and mouths her lines. Due to the piece’s spatial configura-
tion, the spectator has to move around each of the seven pairs of monitors to
evaluate the effectiveness of each impersonation. Breitz might be said to engage
in the “zero-sum” game of postproduction, reclaiming the pleasures of fan cul-
ture and making them visible and valorized within contemporary art; or, one
might recognize in the artist’s laborious attempt to imitate these actresses a com-
mentary on the violence of attempting to mold oneself in the image of the star.
Imitation is a central aspect of stardom, as the star both sets a standard to be
followed yet retains an existence as an impossible fantasy projection. Breitz’s
imitation of these female stars requires diligent and purposeful rehearsal, but
also points to the subtle and scarcely noticed imitation that occurs whenever
Hollywood influences fashion, cosmetics, language, or even the way we negoti-
ate interpersonal relationships.
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Candice Breitz, Becoming Drew ().
Becoming – which draws its title from the name of an MTV reality series that
gives fans makeovers to look like their favorite star and produces a reenactment
of one of the star’s music videos – explicitly takes up the relationship between a
digitized and networked cinema available for recycling and remaking and the
false positions of “activity” it may produce. The drained black and white of the
reenactment image, Breitz’s cropped hair, and her plain white shirt all appear in
stark contrast to the lush color of the source films and the costuming of the star.
Unlike Cindy Sherman’s elaborate self-fashionings, Breitz’s reenactments are
spartan. In Postproduction, the script is a jumping-off point for creative endea-
vor, but it must also be remembered that a script is something to be followed.
Breitz inhabits this contradictory position, showing how fan freedom and fan
control are in fact two sides of the same story, just as the images of Becoming
are projected onto two sides of the same screen.
What is perhaps most striking about Breitz’s appropriation of these romantic
comedy screenplays is the absence of the artist’s own voice. Becoming makes
use of the soundtrack from the source film, with the result that the Hollywood
texts seem to speak through Breitz’s body, usurping her voice and vernacular in
favor of a global narrative of heteronormative romance. The script is no longer
the locus of a generative freedom, but of an imperative to stay synchronized
with the voices that speak through the dispossessed subject. If according to
Bourriaud’s paradigm, she is the empowered consumer-turned-producer, fol-
lowing this alternate reading, she has instead become a ventriloquist’s dummy.
The strength of Becoming is that it allows for both readings at once, holding
them in suspension. For even if Breitz’s recycling and reenactment of these ro-
mantic comedies is one that points to the ideological interpellations of popular
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cinema, the mere possibility that such a statement can be made rests on the
activity of a fan/artist who chooses to make use of the availability of new tech-
nologies to create a work that will serve to interrogate such media representa-
tions. In this sense, Breitz’s self-placement as the one who imitates the star is
crucial, as the artist is present both as dupe and as demystifier.
Candice Breitz, Her (-).
In the works Him (-) and Her (-), Breitz creates stuttering ka-
leidoscopes of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep by combining clips from vari-
ous roles the actors have played throughout their careers. Him makes use of
twenty-three Jacks from forty years; Her brings us twenty-eight Meryls from
thirty years. By dating the works as beginning when the earliest source film
was produced and extending to Breitz’s completion of them in , the artist
playfully accords a historicity to her found material that a single date would
elide. It gives a sense of a devoted fan who has followed the stars through the
twists and turns of a career, through good roles and bad, watching films so
many times as to become familiar with each line and gesture of the perfor-
mance. The pieces are displayed in adjacent rooms, each consisting of six
screens arranged in a circle on a single wall, a formation that allows for the
various characters to call out and respond to one another. Breitz blacks out the
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background behind the figures, severing them as much as possible from the
mise-en-scène of the source film. By bringing together these disparate perfor-
mances – all of which belong to their own diegetic universes – according to the
rubric of the actor occupying the role, Breitz mobilizes the parallel text that ce-
lebrity always constitutes in our viewing of a film. She assembles such a text of
celebrity for easy inspection, combining common gestures such as Streep’s nail
biting from across dozens of films, as well as highlighting certain motifs that
recur, such as Nicholson’s incessant uncertainty about “who he really is.” Like
Warhol – the subject of Breitz’s unfinished doctoral dissertation at Columbia
University – Breitz stages the tension between seriality and uniqueness that
characterizes the star, making use of iteration upon iteration in a dizzying
mélange of often quickly edited clips that blend together in a single composite
portrait.
In addition to their function as star studies, Him and Her take up Holly-
wood’s constitution of gender roles, a preoccupation evident in the impersonal
pronouns used in the title of the piece. Throughout the work, Meryl Streep
comes to stand in for the idealized-yet-recognizable femininity of Hollywood,
defining herself solely, as one clip from Kramer vs. Kramer () says, in her
role as daughter, mother, and wife. The topic of marriage is a continual refer-
ence, as is self-sacrifice. Meanwhile, Him takes up a very different set of the-
matic concerns, such as anger, sex, and as just mentioned, an anxiety over iden-
tity – all of which speak to a particular constitution of American masculinity. In
this interrogation of archetypal norms through exceptional personalities, Him
and Her are the development of earlier works entitled Mother and Father
(both ), which each use six screens placed in a row to form a constellation
of mothers and fathers culled from various Hollywood films. This allows for
an exploration of gendered parental roles to be explored across a body of films,
letting the viewer witness the father’s hysterical policing of his daughter’s chas-
tity and the mother’s teary unhappiness and frigidity. By selecting excerpts from
numerous popular films, Breitz highlights the monolithic nature of Hollywood’s
depiction of parental roles. Though the excerpted characters have various sur-
face level differences, it quickly becomes clear that certain fundamentals about
what constitutes motherhood are shared across films as different as the sappy
Stepmom () and the grotesque Mommie Dearest (). To use Siegfried
Kracauer’s language, they all have the same secret to confess. As the original
narratives of these films fall away, so do their particularities. One is left with
attributes and words that might stem from a specific movie, but circulate
throughout culture as detached but recognizable signifiers of the essence of
motherhood. Out of six seemingly different Hollywood mothers, Breitz pro-
duces one Mother; particularity gives way to generality in a metamythology.
The individual star performances of Hollywood entertainment lose whatever
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specificity they might have had as they are recuperated back into the archetypes
of which they have always made use.
Breitz has described her practice using the abject metaphor of excretion:
We have no choice…but to consume the cultural produce of global capitalism. But
consumption must be followed by digestion, and digestion must be followed by ex-
cretion. This is a polite way of saying that if we have no choice but to consume what
the mass media feeds us, then we must insist on completing the digestive cycle – we
must insist on the right to chew up, process and regurgitate mass media forms such
that they might service us rather than merely milking us.
The invocation of the abject gets to the confounding of interior and exterior dis-
tinctions that takes place in a work such as this, figuring the way in which they
are borne of the system of image capital that Breitz describes and yet mark out
some difference from it. Breitz uses the availability of commercial DVDs and
editing software to divert performances from their original context, a process
she calls “involuntary acting,” since she “kidnaps” stars and puts them to work
within her own densely woven textile. Once again, one sees here how Breitz’s
practice would lend itself to Bourriaud’s discussion in Postproduction: the for-
merly passive consumer is made active through production. According to such
a reading, these works would be a part of a fan’s remix culture, playfully com-
bining clips into a new form that creates a utopian space for maneuvering with-
in the enclosures of mass media. However, more than simply embracing this
supposed freedom, Breitz never loses sight of the force-feeding of mass media
texts she describes in the passage cited above.
Consumption and production are linked but separate activities, with numer-
ous relations of varied character that can serve to connect the two. This vector
between the consumption of mass media texts and what their spectators do
with them is the central point of inquiry across Breitz’s practice. Rather than
asserting the inherent positivity of participation, she insists on the need to ex-
amine the activity itself. Sometimes it can lead to the possibility of turning
against dominant ideologies, other times it can confirm and reproduce them,
and still more often it can do both at once. There is a striking ambivalence pre-
sent that allows Breitz to at once embrace the activities of fandom as offering
something other than a soporific intoxication with the culture industries, but
also to cast a suspicious glance on its hollow promises of emancipation.
Just as the playfulness of Breitz’s reenactments of Hollywood actresses in Be-
coming gives way to a sense of violation and confinement of the voice and
body by the norms it would seek to replicate, it is important to note that the
overall experience of viewing Him, Her, Mother, and Father is one of disloca-
tion resulting from an incessant stammering and twitching. Jerkiness is culti-
vated, as Breitz will loop a tiny snippet of dialogue and image over and over so
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as to result in a kind of stutter. Something sinister emerges from within these
entertaining montages. For the spectator, the fun of enjoying the star’s perfor-
mance – taking pleasure in the clever correspondences Breitz excavates and
playing the “name that clip” game – is balanced with the realization that such
performances play a key role in the formation of the gender and parental norms
that frequently pass unquestioned. The opposition of critical distance versus en-
tertaining engagement is breached. There is no denial of the immense pull of
celebrity culture, no assertion by the artist that she is somehow above it or be-
yond it, and at times even a real sense that the fan’s reproduction can bend and
twist these texts into something new, different, and oppositional. At the same
time, the mimetic function of the star and the ideological interpellations of the
cinema are constantly called into question. The ambivalence of this work is not
to be mistaken for indifference, but rather is marked by contradiction and the
antagonism of irreconcilable and often asymmetrical forces. The ubiquitous
availability of the star’s image offers itself up for recontextualizations that hag-
gle with the text of celebrity while embracing it, assert the agency of the fan/
consumer while dismantling it, and revel in the malleability of poached signs
while testifying to the persistence of cinema as an ideological apparatus.
“Room-for-Play”
Breitz makes clear that the activity of the consumer may no longer be held to be
an inherently subversive action that would contest the megaphone of the pro-
ducer. Rather, producers call upon their consumers to be active and to invest
their immaterial products with value. As Lazzarato writes,
The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential
use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in
the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, trans-
forms, and creates the “ideological” and cultural environment of the consumer. This
commodity does not produce the physical capacity of labor power; instead, it trans-
forms the person who uses it. Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a “social
relation.”
Rather than seeing the activity of the consumer as an inherently oppositional or
as a free space of play, this paradigm allows for an understanding of fan/user
activity as value producing. Instead of unproblematically championing the ac-
tivity of today’s consumers who download and remix, Lazzarato reminds us
that this is in fact indicative of a colonization of that time once thought to be
free from capitalist exploitation:
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Play…no longer constitutes an alternative to work as domination. The dialectical op-
position between play and work has been transformed into a continuum, of which
play and work are only the two extremes. Between the two, it is possible to arrange a
thousand different ways the coefficients of work and play, autonomy and subordina-
tion, activity and passivity, intellectual and manual labour, which nourish capitalist
valorization.
Given that this paradigm achieves its full realization with Web . technologies
of participation and social networking, why look back at the cinema in order to
discuss a condition largely associated with digital media? Why is it that the
narrativization of this new mutation of capital takes place through the old me-
dium of cinema rather than through engagements with new media technolo-
gies?
Of interest here is a peculiar disjunction, an anachronism: cinema – a technol-
ogy that has historically been aligned with a unidirectional vector of mass con-
sumption and the enclosures of disciplinary power – becomes the primary way
that contemporary art speaks about a diagram of power (control) and an orga-
nization of labor (immaterial) that are typically aligned with digital technolo-
gies. One finds this at play in Breitz’s work, as well as in numerous projects by
Pierre Huyghe. Why this asynchrony? One might venture that it is because cin-
ema has historically participated in the colonization of leisure time, making it a
major site of immaterial labor before it became increasing dominant over man-
ual labor. When immaterial labor produces a “social relation,” it is engaged in
the production of subjectivity immanent to a process of capitalist valorization.
The film industry has always relied on the affective investments of its audiences
to give its products value, occupying their free time with activities that would
not merely produce value for the studios but also reproduce ideology, as Breitz
makes clear. The cinema is a technology of reproduction in a double sense: it
reproduces images and it reproduces ideology through these images, creating
subjects. The cinema epitomizes Lazzarato’s description of the immaterial com-
modity as something that “enlarges, transforms, and creates the ‘ideological’
and cultural environment of the consumer.” Today, as cinema is increasingly
digitized and available for fan manipulation, it presents an especially strong
site at which to diagnose the dissolution of work and play, autonomy and sub-
ordination.
If all of this provides possible reasons that artists might turn to cinema to
explore the increased opportunities for control and exploitation that stem from
the centrality of immaterial labor in what Yann Moulier Boutang has called
“cognitive capitalism,” there might be other, very different reasons that cinema
– rather than television or digital media – emerges as the privileged way of
interrogating this transition. Immaterial labor makes new zones of coloniza-
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tion possible, but it also makes new forms of resistance possible. There is always
a certain contingency to the consumer’s participation in the creation of value, a
space that is opened up for diversion and self-determination that one sees dis-
tinctly paralleled in theorizations of the collective reception of cinema. Lazzara-
to again: “What the transformation of the product into a commodity cannot
remove, then, is the character of event, the open process of creation that is estab-
lished between immaterial labor and the public and organized by communica-
tion.” The event is an unforeseeable and singular force that is marked by the
opening of potentiality. As such, the ways in which spectators reproduce the
immaterial commodities they consume can give way to negotiation from within
the colonized space of capital. This is not a “making do” that attempts to get by
within unchangeable structures, but a negotiation that takes place immanent to
the production of value.
This understanding of film reception as a node of interconnection proposes
another, alternate reason why the old cinema might be used to talk about the
new diagram of power: there was a time when the collective mode of spectator-
ship proper to cinema was endowed with a utopian potential. Walter Benjamin
wrote: “To put it in a nutshell, film is the prism in which the spaces of the im-
mediate environment – the spaces in which people live, pursue their avocations,
and enjoy their leisure – are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible,
meaningful, and passionate way.” Though much has changed in the institu-
tion of cinema since Benjamin’s time of writing, it would be difficult to find an-
other “prism” that might fulfill the same function today. For Benjamin, this re-
fractive “room-for-play” [Spiel-Raum] made available by the cinema was one of
its most important and progressive attributes. It is a space that is resurrected
and redoubled by artists remaking the products of film history, as they optimize
the prismatic and transformative ability that already resided in cinema by trans-
forming existing films in turn. If, for Benjamin, the cinema could take what was
second nature and deliver it over to a space of eventfulness, unforeseeability,
and the generation of new attitudes, the practice of remaking cinema shifts this
activity into a second-order system.
When artists call upon the shared narratives of cinema, they find within them
a Janus face: they are mechanisms of ideological interpellation but they also
open a possibility of shared experience. Collectivity thus emerges as a distinctly
double-sided notion, a concept that may function as a site of domination but
may also carry within it the utopian spark Benjamin gleaned. This hints at a
possible reason that the cinema has had such a forceful appeal for artists in the
s and s. Cinema undoubtedly partakes in the Adornian paradigm of
mass culture as mass deception, but it also functions as a horizon of collective,
public experience.
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Chrissie Iles has suggested that, “[A]rtists’ use of film in the s, particu-
larly popular Hollywood film, is partly to do with wanting to engage with, and
perhaps influence, the connective tissue that film creates, and participate in a
common language of communication.” The value attached to this “common
language of communication” is decidedly ambivalent. As an agent of standardi-
zation, the commonality generated by film spectatorship might be thought to be
inextricable from its functioning as an ideological apparatus, teaching its spec-
tators to be “good subjects” at the movies by disguising highly cultural and
historically specific notions of race, class, gender, decorum, and so on, as natur-
al. And yet, the fervor with which artists have returned to the products of film
history as a reservoir of this “connective tissue” suggests a desire to understand
cinema as a repository of cultural memory and shared experience despite its
ideological workings – or perhaps because of them, so that they might be pried
open for negotiation. One finds a distinct effort to work through the vicissitudes
of the relationship between subjectivity and spectacle. Rather than throwing the
cinematic baby out with the ideological bathwater, so to speak, remaking cin-
ema emerges as a way of gleaning a utopian possibility of belonging from with-
in a realm once dismissed as suspect.
Miriam Hansen has drawn upon Benjamin to outline the ways in which cin-
ema functioned as an alternative public sphere during its first decades, a poten-
tial that was increasingly quashed by the consolidation of Hollywood hege-
mony and the increasing disciplining of spectatorship. The mobilization of
references to cinema in contemporary art recalls this emphasis on the publicity
of the institution, which now takes on a renewed importance given the atomiza-
tion of spectatorship proper to electronic media. One must historicize both Han-
sen’s intervention and the tendency of artists to espouse a similar view of the
cinema. Now that cinema has definitively ceded its cultural dominance, the
promises of this modernist utopia may be recalled, and the redemptive possibi-
lities of cinema’s status as a shared vernacular resurrected.
A statement from Pierre Huyghe, who has worked extensively with both cin-
ema and questions of immaterial labor, exemplifies this view of the institution:
“A film is a public space, a common place. It is not a monument but a space of
discussion and action. It’s an ecology.” The preceding chapter argued that art-
ists such as Matthew Buckingham and Tacita Dean interrogate untaken paths of
film history and excavate the ruins of utopias that might have been. Despite the
very different concerns of the artists in this chapter, one might venture that
these remakes also attempt to resuscitate the failed utopia of cinema in their
insistence on the public, intersubjective space opened by the shared nature of
cinematic narratives. Both the promises and the failures of film history are in-
voked in an effort to reimagine collectivity anew without forgetting the ways in
which the radical potential of cinema was marshalled into a powerful ideologi-
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cal apparatus. From within a space of commonality, these transformative works
can open possibilities of reassessment, turning the spectacle in on itself by con-
fronting the gaps and fissures that puncture and rend its attempt at totality.
The insistence on recovering the utopian potential of collective reception that
had been dissipated by cinema’s role as a disciplinary technology becomes pos-
sible under the specter of a perceived crisis of the institution. While the uses of
mm discussed in the previous chapter respond to the superannuation of cel-
luloid as a material substrate, practices of remaking take up the notion of cin-
ema as a lost object at the institutional level. The many references to classical
Hollywood cinema function as a shared cultural memory and as a site of collec-
tive experience that is now perceived as lacking. In , Time magazine pro-
claimed “You” the person of the year in a gesture that explicitly linked the in-
dividualist thrust of the s and s to the popularity of YouTube as a new
venue of personalized image consumption. While it is beyond the scope of this
study to speculate on the new forms of collectivity and publicity that might be
made possible by that website and other comparable developments, there is no
avoiding the fragmentary and dispersed nature of online media when com-
pared to the mass reception of the classical Hollywood cinema. The return to
classical Hollywood in art since provides a way of excavating an experi-
ence of collectivity stemming from a shared reception of media at a time when
images are most often consumed individually and directed towards increas-
ingly specific niche markets.
VCR Memories
The many works that Douglas Gordon has made in reference to Alfred Hitch-
cock take up old Hollywood cinema as a lost image regime, fixating on the di-
rector as a kind of hinge between cinema in its classical incarnation and the
many transformations to which it has been subjected since its disintegration. As
Raymond Bellour has put it, for Gordon, Hitchcock represents “the ironic and
fascinated demiurge that engineered with an unequalled consciousness the
mediatized art of possessing his public through image and sound, and did so in
a cinema pushed from then on towards television.” This final assertion concerning
the relationship between Hitchcock’s cinema and television is key. Hitchcock’s
oeuvre includes multiple, seemingly contradictory responses to the disintegra-
tion of classical cinema: he broke down classical norms in his films – notably,
Psycho – and produced TV shows, but also participated in technological novel-
ties designed to maintain cinematic hegemony over this competing medium.
These responses position Hitchcock definitively on the cusp between one cin-
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ema and another, straddling a moment of intense transition – precisely the sort
of condition in which cinema found itself again in the mid-s as it reached its
one-hundredth birthday. For Laura Mulvey, Psycho might be the last film of the
classical cinema, “stand[ing] on the edge of the divide” between an old Holly-
wood and what it has become in the years since the film’s release in : “The
crisis in the old Hollywood film industry, caught at a crossroads, faced with its
own mortality, gave [Hitchcock] the opportunity to write its epitaph, but also to
transcend its conventions and create something startling and new.” In
Hour Psycho, perhaps the best-known remake of the past two decades, Gor-
don telescopes this past moment of transition with that of the present, confront-
ing the possibilities of a VHS cinephilia while fetishistically overvaluing the di-
rector who both emblematized and reflexively interrogated the institution in its
classical form.
Douglas Gordon, Hour Psycho ().
The exhibition specifications Alfred Hitchcock laid out for the theatrical release
of Psycho would be virtually impossible to apply to Gordon’s remake. Through
lobby posters, special trailers, and the cooperation of movie theater owners,
Hitchcock instituted a special policy for the film. Perhaps as a publicity stunt or
perhaps out of fear the audience would be disappointed if they arrived to find
the female star already dead, Hitchcock required spectators to show up on time
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or they would be refused admission. In an era of moviegoing when it was com-
mon to duck in and out of screenings at will, such a practice was unheard of. As
a result, Hitchcock has often been credited – perhaps wrongly – with single-
handedly changing habits of film spectatorship. With Hour Psycho, Gor-
don changes the protocols of spectatorship once again, altering the way the
spectator views this most familiar of films by eliminating its soundtrack,
stretching its duration to the titular twenty-four hours, and projecting it on a
translucent screen that cuts through the center of the gallery space like a knife.
The spectator is free to walk around the image, which also is visible in reverse
on the recto of the screen, lending the work a sculptural quality.
Philip Monk has written of the relationship between the temporal distension
of Hour Psycho and the film’s “symbolic condensation” in the iconic shower
scene. For Monk, the slowed version “denies the pleasure of this sight: it takes
too long to reach this ‘climax.’” Given the unique position Psycho occupies in
the disciplining of spectatorship and the requirement to watch a film start-to-
finish, in addition to this instance of denial in Gordon’s appropriation of Hitch-
cock, one must add another: no spectator, save for an incredibly patient insom-
niac lucky enough to be at a gallery staying open all night, will be able to show
up “on time” for Hour Psycho, nor see it in its entirety. Viewing the work
is a necessarily fragmentary experience; even staying for minutes, the origi-
nal duration of the film, will result in seeing what used to be about nine minutes
of it. This has led some critics to see it as a “celebration of peripatetic mobility”
that overcomes the physical paralysis of the cinema. The assignments of mo-
bility and immobility that marked movie theater spectatorship here exchange
places, as now, instead of an immobile spectator seated in front of a moving
image, one finds a mobile spectator who moves around a relatively immobi-
lized image. According to such a reading, Hour Psycho is a critical interven-
tion that dismantles the visual pleasure of Hollywood and liberates the viewer
from the disciplined spectatorship of the movie theater.
It would be easy to understand Hour Psycho in this way, to see the instal-
lation as an attempt to demystify the manipulative powers of narrative cinema.
However, as elaborated in chapter one, the perambulation of the gallery specta-
tor by no means guarantees a critically “active” viewer. And what of the claim
that Gordon’s use of slow motion might tear the viewer out of absorption and
into a distanced, intellectual engagement with Psycho? Daniel Birnbaum ad-
vances this position by comparing Gordon’s work to the anti-illusionism of Pe-
ter Gidal, writing that, “Here nothing is hidden, and the tools are displayed in
such a fashion that nobody can forget that this is all highly artificial stuff, and
that there is nothing natural about the ways stories are told on the screen
through complex editing technique intent on effacing the marks of the editing
slice.” There is no dispute that Hour Psycho refuses the pleasures on
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which Hitchcock’s film rests. But, in a manner that puts it greatly at odds with
Gidal’s anti-representationalism, the work retains a distinct investment in the
pleasures of the image. In Gordon’s installation, there is no refusal of iconophi-
lia, but simply a substitution of one kind of pleasure in the image for another.
Instead of viewing Hour Psycho as a series of denials, it should be under-
stood as an analysis of the transformations to which cinematic pleasure is sub-
ject when classic films are watched on video, an analysis made possible by im-
porting VHS-based cinema into the museum and rendering it gigantic. For
instead of holding a fascination with the cinematic image under suspicion,
Hour Psycho uses the analytic powers of slow motion to fetishize detail and
monumentalize a new form of cinephilic spectatorship, that of the VCR and the
remote control.
These domestic media technologies played an important role in the genesis of
the installation. Gordon explains how the project came to be:
In I had come 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.
In search of a cinephilic fragment, Gordon used the capabilities of home view-
ing technologies to slow the film and attempt to find the desired image. With
a video dubbed off of a televised broadcast of the film, the artist went in search
of a memory, perhaps one of adolescent desire. Gordon has remarked that,
“Slow motion is truly the desire to see what is hidden, it’s very erotic.” Erotic,
but also marked by death: here one finds a sadistic impulse of possession that
returns the liveliness of cinema to the quietus of the photograph. This is not a
temporal protraction that would produce a distanced, critical commentary, but
a libidinally charged penetration of the film that recalls the violent effort to tame
life evoked in Psycho’s taxidermy birds and the embalmed corpse of the
mother. Slow motion is here employed in its capacity to make possible a kind
of viewing not afforded by a film rushing through the projector with little re-
gard for a spectator who might want to return to a favorite scene or review a
line of dialogue. Mulvey has described this form of spectatorship, designating it
“possessive”: “With electronic or digital viewing, the nature of the cinematic
repetition compulsion changes. As the film is delayed and thus fragmented
from linear narrative into favorite moments or scenes, the spectator is able to
hold on to, to possess, the previously elusive image.” In Hour Psycho,
140 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
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each image is present as a still for about half a second before giving way to the
next, allowing for the spectator to grasp filmic instants, but only through their
mutilation.
Videotape is not merely the inspiration for Hour Psycho, but is also key to
the work’s material and aesthetic dimensions. Working in the early s before
the rise of DVDs, Gordon produced the piece using a commercially available
VHS tape and an industrial Panasonic VCR that plays at a speed of roughly
two frames per second. The artist did nothing to alter the tape itself; his inter-
vention took place on the level of technologies of spectatorship. Amy Taubin
compares the use of slow motion in Hour Psycho to Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom,
the Piper’s Son (), but Gordon’s work is far removed from this optical
reprinting of individual frames for it makes no material alteration to the video-
tape. Her comparison to Warhol’s early films is more accurate (despite the fact
that they make no use of found footage), for here sound film was projected at
silent speed so as to create slow motion at the moment of exhibition. However,
neither one of these comparisons captures the centrality of video to Hour
Psycho. The use of the VHS format causes a significant degradation of the im-
age when compared to a mm print, made especially evident by the large-scale
projection of the image, a scale for which VHS is by no means suited. Hour
Psycho is not merely Psycho slowed to an approximate duration of twenty-
four hours; it is also an unabashedly video-based copy of Psycho slowed to an
approximate duration of twenty-four hours. Along with inserting Hour Psy-
cho into an existing history of found footage and slow motion, its relationship
to the home video technologies that made it possible must be emphasized.
Though it was certainly possible for non-professionals to make copies of films
before the popularization of the VCR, it was difficult and required both expen-
sive equipment and technical knowledge that few amateurs possessed. The
mass marketing of home video technologies made the bootlegging of movies a
real possibility for the first time, leading to the Sony versus Universal law-
suit, popularly known as the “Betamax case.” Home video marks the first time
that movies could be dubbed and manipulated by the average viewer, inducing
an anxiety on the part of the studios as to the ability to protect their intellectual
property. It is significant that when Gordon returned to his parents’ house at
Christmastime, it was a copy of Psycho recorded off of television that he chose
to review – it was a VHS copy of a televised copy of a mm film, already two
steps removed from the original format.
The ability to produce private copies and shift formats is central to Hour
Psycho. It makes monstrous a VHS copy of Psycho and shifts formats again,
this time to a gallery installation. Such activities are inextricably linked to ways
in which spectators’ relations to cinema changed after the domestic use of vi-
deotape. The VHS format, which incidentally owes much of its early success to
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 141
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the pornography industry, allowed illicit channels of tape circulation to
emerge. As Lucas Hilderbrand has suggested, “[B]ootlegging is exemplary of
videotape: it foregrounds the technology as a recording format, it exposes the
formal degeneration of the signal, it stresses the importance of access, and raises
issues of intellectual property rights.” Though Hour Psycho does not in
fact produce a new copy of Hitchcock’s film (it exhibits a commercially available
copy under unusual circumstances to change the parameters of aesthetic experi-
ence), it monumentalizes bootleg aesthetics to highlight precisely these attri-
butes of videotape. Unlike early artists’ uses of the medium, which often fore-
grounded the technical possibilities of closed-circuit video, feedback, and real-
time playback, here video is investigated as a social technology that makes cin-
ema both mutable and available within the home.
Hour Psycho is an artifact of a post-VHS cinephilia, exploiting the in-
creased playback control afforded to the viewer by that technology, as well as
making visible the ramifications for image quality and copyright that result
from its capacity for dubbing. The copy cannot help but throw the original into
crisis, and yet it also expands the reach of that object, disseminating it in new
contexts. Dominique Païni has called VHS an “antibody” against the dissolu-
tion of cinephilia. If this is true, it is an antibody that fights the immune sys-
tem as much as the virus that affects it. It makes possible obsessive re-viewings
of films and a greater access to the products of film history, but does so through
a degraded image and CinemaScope frames subject to pan-and-scan. Though
thankfully these qualities have been minimized by the advent of DVDs, there is
nonetheless a discernible loss (of scale, of attention, of publicity, of historicity)
that still accompanies the increased access and control afforded by home view-
ing technologies. Hour Psycho captures the contradictions of this new cin-
ephilia, and does so by rendering these private rituals of image consumption
gigantic, taking them back out into the public sphere for examination thanks to
the portability of video. It combines the large-scale projection and collective re-
ception 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.
While Hour Psycho carries weight as a conceptual gesture, it must be
emphasized that the work also possesses an important phenomenological di-
mension. Gordon has discussed the experience of viewing Hour Psycho as
one of a riven temporality: “The viewer 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 expectation of an already familiar narrative…a slowly changing present
forces itself in between.” The installation draws upon the viewer’s memory of
the original film for its appeal and its success, calling upon him or her to con-
textualize and give meaning to the slowed snippet in relation to a larger whole
142 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
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recalled from past viewings. If Hour Psycho incessantly summons the past,
its future can be difficult to access since any sense of anticipation is frustrated by
viscous slowness. Even the future Gordon describes in the above quotation re-
mains a matter of pastness: it is generated out of the viewer’s previously estab-
lished familiarity with the film. Any true sense of futurity, of time moving for-
ward in a meaningful way, is palpably lacking. Temporal progression splinters
into a succession of disjoined instants that are exhausting to assemble into a
continuous trajectory. While viewing the work, it can be difficult to anticipate
what will happen next, even for a viewer intimately familiar with Psycho. The
grueling pace of the film and the absence of the soundtrack disrupt the patterns
of editing and the narrative cues that would normally serve to structure specta-
torial expectation. Anticipation brings frustration more than anything else, leav-
ing the viewer stalled in the “slowly changing present,” weighed down by
memories of the past.
As a result, Hour Psycho possesses none of the suspense that marks the
original. While this appears to pit the dilation of time against the functioning of
suspense, temporal protraction is in fact central to the building of such tension,
particularly in Hitchcock’s cinema. Hour Psycho does away with sus-
pense by hyperbolizing the very same temporal techniques on which it de-
pends, making Gordon’s alteration of the film an exaggerated allegory of its
own temporality. Without suspense to infuse time with desire, Hour Psycho
might be thought to possess no affective resonance for its spectator in its current
form, just nostalgia for the film it remakes. This however, is far from the case.
While the installation lacks suspense, it does maintain a relationship to the ero-
ticization of time. However, instead of the erotic delay of suspense, this tempor-
al eroticism is linked to a freezing of the film into a slowed, fetishistic crawl as
described above with reference to Mulvey’s notion of the “possessive spectator”
– with the important difference, of course, that the viewer of Hour Psycho
has none of the control Mulvey ascribes to such a spectator.
Out of the degeneration of narrativity and suspense, these other possessive
pleasures are cultivated. With each frame lasting approximately half a second,
the enduring present of Hour Psycho is a present of scrutiny, one in which
each frame of the film offers itself to the viewer for a moment before passing on.
This present is not the present of the unfolding of the film’s diegesis; attempting
to follow a developing narrative would quickly exasperate the viewer. Rather, it
is the present of the spectator’s perceptual encounter with the cinema itself, re-
doubled by the past memory of seeing Psycho. Because the spectator is severed
from absorption in the diegesis and the soundtrack has been eliminated, a hy-
perawareness of detail and minute changes sets in. As the extreme slowness
works to defamiliarize these recognizable images, sometimes a perfectly normal
continuity cut can become unexpectedly surprising, introducing the eventful-
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ness of kairos into the dull crawl of chronos. It is as if the work were obeying
what Pascal Bonitzer has designated to be a law of Hitchcockian narrative: “the
more a situation is somewhat a priori, familiar or conventional, the most liable it
is to become disturbing or uncanny, once one of its constituent elements begins
to ‘turn against the wind.’” The Foreign Correspondent () reference is
apposite here, as the uncanniness of Hour Psycho is, like the windmills
turning against the wind, a matter of aberrant movement. The intensity of the
slow motion strips the film of the terror it once induced but introduces a new
feeling, the eerie return of the familiar made strange. These moments appear
suddenly and without warning, possessing nothing of the gradually augment-
ing intensity one associates with Hitchcockian suspense. These jarring instants
constitute a kind of cinephilic detail that protrudes from the text as a point of
interest for the attentive spectator. They serve to puncture the empty time of
Hour Psycho with bursts of revelation that telescope past and present view-
ings, bringing together the movie theater, the VCR, and the gallery (and wher-
ever else the viewer might have previously watched Psycho) into a single, tem-
porally disjointed experience of cinema.
In a seemingly simple gesture, Hour Psycho effects a complex triangula-
tion of issues of technology, temporality, and spectatorship. The represented
time of Psycho – the time of the narrative – is overtaken by the time of the
apparatus and the time of reception. These temporalities come into tension
with one another, as the regimented slow motion evinces a patient regularity
that contrasts with the contingent meandering of the viewer around the room.
As the viewer wanders around the sluggish movements of the work, she will
cross over to the other side of the screen and see a mirror reflection of Hitch-
cock’s iconic images, creating an even stronger sense of defamiliarization and
disorientation than had already been induced by the stagnation of the image, as
they nearly match a memory of an earlier viewing but not quite. But of course,
in memory things are never exactly as they really were. Anthony McCall has
noted that, “With Douglas Gordon’s work, there is a strong element of nostalgia
for a particular period of Hollywood, a classical period that never actually ex-
isted in fact.” It may not have existed then, but it certainly exists now. This
idea of classical cinema, and indeed, of a golden age of cinema in general, is
retroactively produced in the present amidst fears of the institution’s future.
Hour Psycho is an encounter with extreme slowness in a culture of in-
creasing speed and also an encounter with cinema in an era when, as A.O. Scott
has pithily remarked, in Hollywood, “Auteur is French for unemployed.”
Hour Psycho replaces the animation of cinema with the mortification of the
still and does so through a regime of viewing largely thought to be responsible
for the death of that cinema, the VCR. And yet, it by no means asserts such
developments as lamentable. Rather, it proposes that such a mode of spectator-
144 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
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ship can cull new pleasures from an old cinema. It enacts the very kinds of
transformations to which cinema is now subject, but does so with a reflexivity
that allows for an assessment of what is at stake in the contemporary cinematic
migration. The individual spectator is engaged in a comparison between the
“then” of Psycho and the “now” of its gallery-based remake that is equally a
comparison between the “then” and the “now” of moving image culture.
Hour Psycho is a swollen emblem of commemoration, offering a public perfor-
mance of grief that would be taken up by numerous artists throughout the
s. Even Gordon himself would resuscitate the work with ’s hour
psycho back and forth and to and fro, a double-screen projection that plays
the slowed-down film forward on one screen and backward on the other.
In the art of the s and s, the obsession with remaking cinema may be
understood as indicative of an anxiety over the proliferation of digital media
and the attendant effects it would have on the cinema and a simultaneous em-
brace of the new possibilities offered by these technological developments. But
as this chapter has suggested, this obsession with remaking cinema has a symp-
tomatic meaning that goes beyond a concern for the medium in and of itself. In
its general usage, a medium is defined as “an agency or means of doing some-
thing,” “an intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed.” In
their repurposing of Hollywood movies, these artists mobilize cinema as a me-
dium in this sense of the word: they use it to grasp at something else, as a way
of relating to history and of recovering an imagined collectivity felt to be lack-
ing. Recycling and citation are aesthetic strategies most often associated with
postmodernism and its accompanying atrophy of history and swell of amnesia.
In the practices discussed throughout this chapter, however, these techniques
are put to work within a framework that insists that media images, after they
have aged, might in fact work with rather than against attempts to recover a
memory of collective experience and a relationship to the past.
The remake of contemporary art emerges as the inverted twin of the Holly-
wood remake; that is, rather than remaking the ever-same with a false promise
of novelty, since the s, artists have been remaking old Hollywood films so
as to explode what resides latent within them and put them in service of the
present. Daney worried that only the mythologies of cinema would be kept and
remade, perpetuating the ever-same in the guise of the ever-new. These artists,
by contrast, remake the mythologies of cinema to sometimes indicate what the
repetitions of Hollywood might elide, to other times serve as an act of mourn-
ing, and still others, to do both at once. Whether this is accomplished by sharply
diverging from the host text, such as Becoming, or by repeating it almost ex-
actly, such as World Trade Center , such works attempt to work within
the interstices of dominant cinema rather than refusing it outright. The remake,
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which is itself a process of translation, is used to interrogate the processes that
translate experiences and events into images, questioning the assumptions,
omissions, and affects that reside therein.
With ambivalence as their primary affective mode, such practices parasiti-
cally make use of the pleasures of dominant cinema while contesting their very
foundation. The function of cinema as a site of affective labor and ideological
reproduction remains central, and yet a certain “room for play” is opened that
makes use of cinema as a common cultural vernacular and a site at which mass
media representations become integrated into subjective experience in a way
that might disrupt the dominant order. This ambivalent structure of feeling pro-
vides a way of acknowledging that there is no outside from which one might
critique the representations of the mass media; rather, these representations are
understood to make up the fabric of our everyday lives. Though these artists
take up Hollywood cinema as an industry that concocts fantasy simulations for
the masses, they locate other possibilities for the moving image alongside and
within its function as image commodity. These artists embrace cinema due to its
status as a vast cultural commons, a lowest common denominator that com-
prises a shared vernacular that connects subjects to representations and to each
other. They engage in acts of filmophagy, cannibalizing Hollywood – sometimes
violently, sometimes playfully – in order to reflect on the mediation of experi-
ence, something that engages both power and pleasure. Recognizing the extent
to which Hollywood functions as dream factory, as myth factory, as history fac-
tory, many of the artists producing derivative works turn to cinema as a site that
crystallizes the pleasures and horrors of capitalist societies of control, finding in
it a synecdoche for a spectacle that is inescapable.
Mulvey writes: “Just as Psycho, in , marked a final staging post in the
history of the studio system as a basis for the Hollywood film industry, Hour
Psycho, like an elegy, marks a point of no return for the cinema itself.” It is
true, there is no going back. In very different ways, the works discussed in this
chapter all serve to memorialize a particular age of cinema as over and gone,
and yet summon it as a “connective tissue” that might have something to offer
in the present. The much-vaunted “death of cinema” never really means the
death of cinema full stop, but the death of a certain idea of cinema. When Doug-
las Gordon proclaims that the cinema is dead, he does so very much in the same
way as another figure who has consistently promulgated the idea, Jean-Luc
Godard: he declares cinema dead while at the same time continuing to make
cinema. Drawing on a nostalgia that calls upon the products of film history as a
reservoir of collective memory, these artists come to terms with the passing of
one cinema while laying the ground for the birth of another. Next to the conti-
nuation of blockbuster spectacle in the multiplexes, this “othered cinema” is
emerging, often marked by an interest in what the cinema once was, but also
146 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
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actively contributing to what it will become. For within all of the reflections on
the senescence of cinema, there is also a trajectory that moves forward to clear a
space for a new cinema of the gallery, a cinema of artists who will continue to
push the boundaries of what is possible with the moving image as cinema
moves into its second century.
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d f the twenty-first century, it has become practical! . In the first deca e O • • • • • • y irnp
d th gallery distnct of a maior city, or v1s1t a biennial t . ossibJ to walk aroun e b f k . . ‘ nenn. I e
. . h t eeing a large num er o artwor s consisting of irn 1a
or art fa1fr, WI~ othue:e works, an image-sequence made in one mediurn~ges that
move. 0 ten m 1 . . h b h . is tak
. d t another: for examp e, 1t m1g t es ot in film, edited. _en up morconverte o . . , . f .
1
. db 1nd
1
·
h S DVD This ‘remediat10n is ac1 itate y digitalisat· gitaJ and thens own a · . ion Wh
. . ‘ly transferred across different platforms-monitor p . ere the Image is easI . . , roiecti
TV I It · s largely the shift in the nature of remediation brought b 0 n screen, • I . . 1 f h , . a Out b
digitalisation that justifies us m speaking current yo t rn_oving irnage’ rat y
than film or video.2 Moving images today are not only ubiquitous, but also her
infinitely transformable. . . . . .
Moving image is an art that 1mphes both time and a spatial _d1s~lay in the
11 This may involve the enlargement of the screen of proiection to a h ga ery. . . h w ole
wall from floor to ceiling, or drawing attent~on tot e screen as an object, for
example by tilting it, or by em~loying ~ultiple screens. A bodi~y relation to the
image may be established that is very different from that expenenced by the
spectator of cinema fixed to their seat and t~ken out of thems~l~e_s,_identifying
with the image and engrossed by the narrative. Contrary poss1b1hties are opened
up by moving image installation: the freedom to move around the space rnay
enable a more detached and inquisitive attitude towards the apparatus, or
alternatively the multiplication of screens may induce an absorption into
a panoramic spectacle. At stake in much moving image work is the possibility
of a critical relation in a thoroughly mediated corporate global culture. The
history of moving image art has in part been one of increasingly portable and
accessible technology, to which has been added, through the internet, widely
available means of distribution to a potentially vast audience. These open
up counter-possibilities to the more repressive, controlling and commodifying
aspects of global media.
Work using moving image since the 199Os has been extremely diverse-the
result of a confluence of sources, varied technical possibilities, and different
contexts of production – and this essay can only include a very limited and
inevitably partial selection of the art that has been produced since the 1990s and
deserves consideration. The rationale for the selection here situates the artists in
relation to two key influences on moving image work: on the one hand, bodily
performance in front of the camera, and on the other, cinema in its mainstream,
avant-garde and experimental forms. In addition, TV has provided a model both
of a different temporality- the illusion of immediacy and real time – and the
possibility of a relation to a wider audience- a possibility that has been realised
by the internet, although at the cost of audience fragmentation. 3 The confluence
of these factors has set the parameters of embodiment and disembodiment,
presence and absence, relation to mass culture and intimate experience, within
which subsequent work in moving image has continued to develop, while
taking new directions as the technological and_cultural context changes.
Retrospect on cinema
An im_portant gesture of’moving image’ art was to recontextualise cinema.
In taking the projected image into the space of the gallery, moving image has d
~eturned to
th
e early ‘cinema of attractions’: 4 the viewer is not physically fixe
in pl~c~ by a seat, and may therefore respond emotionally and directly, like th
e VISI_to’. to_ an attraction in a fairground booth before the advent of the e
more_ ~isciplinary set-up of the auditorium. While in a sense returning to th rt
conditions of displa t th . . . . ·mage a
1 . Ya e ongin of cmema contemporary movmg i . d
so~n~rod_uce~ a new dimension of reflexivi~y because of the frame provide
Y t e institution of art and its history . h
The return to ea 1 · . . · 86 wh
1
c
r Y cinema is evident in Stan Douglas’s Ouverture I9 ‘
88
89
Stan Douglas
Still of Nathanael
from Der Sandmann
(The Sandman) 1995
16mm film loop
installation for two
optical sound projectors
rr
Rodney Graham
VexaNon Island 1997
Vi deo mstallahon
(35mm fil m transferred
to DVD), sound
consists of a six-minute loop made up of sequences of archival footag
· f 8 d f · · e, made by the Edison Company rom 1 99 an 1901, o a tram Journey through th R
. . d k f . e ocky
Moun tams, accompanied by a soun trac o reworked readings from the O e .
of Marcel Proust’s novel cycle In Search of Lost Time(r9r3-27). The linear t p nin g
. . ~n
journey-co-extensive with the emergence of film as the registration of th 1. · · ‘ d b h 1 · e !near vector of t1me-1s trans,orme y t e oop mto a cycle of repetition which· ‘ in turn
is shadowed by our knowledge that Proust’s work has a circular structure, endi
as the narrator begins to write the novel. The loop thus simultaneously expose;g
(through its negation oflinearity) and traps (though its repetition) an unrealised
utopian possibility-the ‘promise of happiness’ encapsulated in Proustian
involuntary memory.5 The connection of the loop with the memory of a stall ed
utopianism is more explicit in The Sandman 1995. The work was made at the
former UFA studios, a centre for German film production in the 1920s. The
location, in Bagelsberg near Potsdam, is also where many Schrebergiirten or
allotments are to be found. Douglas’s film comprises two 360-degree pans
through allotments that were reconstructed in the studio to show, in th e first
instance, how such a garden might have looked twenty years previously, and in
the second, its transformation into a building site for new housing, as was the
case with many of the gardens at that time. In both, an old man is shown worki ng
on a mechanical contraption. The two pans are combined in a single projection,
with a seam down the centre, so that at first the past appears to emerge from and
replace the present scene, while later the present emerges from and replace s th e
past. On the soundtrack, three voices read from adapted versions of the letters
that open E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story, TheSandman(1817), the tale of a man who
throws sand into and steals the eyes of children who are not asleep, which Freud
discusses in terms of the return of the repressed childhood memory of the fear of
castration. In Douglas’s film the two loops with the seam between them, each
seemingly erasing the other, create an experience of the present moment divid ed
between an uncanny return of the repressed and progress stalled in a ruin of
redevelopment.
Re-siting cinema in the gallery in front of an audience with different
expectations opens up the possibility of transforming its normally linear
narrative trajectory, in particular through the use of the loop. The implications
of thi s for the transformation of moving image’s relation to time and space is
ex plored by Rodney Graham in his ‘costume film’ Vexation Island 1997 and th e two
others that follow it to form a trilogy: How I Became a Ramblin’ Man 1999 and City
Self/Country Self 2000. All three films are conditioned by the form that gallery
display most often imposes on the moving image: the loop-that is, the st ructu;s
of rec urrence – while pondering an event that is both conditioned by and exc ee
. . a~
repetition. On a sandy shore a man dressed in eighteenth-century costume,
who · d barrel. we guess 1s a castaway, is lying, apparently asleep, with his hea on a .
Vexatron Island begins with a parrot perched on another barrel calling for him_
t k h’ h1J11 0 wa e up. He wakes, sees a tree with coconuts shakes it one falls and
115
h h ‘ ‘ · d an,
o n t e_ ead, he falls back … and the film repeats itself. Three ‘flows’ – bH ‘m
‘.ree – i~tersect, and an event (what th e Classical atom is ts called a c/inamen or
d1vers1on’)isge t d Th’ . . . · ns – th e . nera e . 1s event can give nse to many mterpretatio
failure of humanity to dominate nature, a reworking of the story of Robin soil ·11
Crusoe orad1sru 1· f h 1. . {ilm – but
1
h ‘ . P Ono t e meantyofnarrativeintheadventure 1 .
1 c end· part!~ because of its circular st ructure and rep e tition, the viewer is
co nfro nted with an enigma. . c
Returningtoth fi • sofP1err
H h e un mished business of cinema is one of the concern h oiCC
ofingo c. Wlnh~lanche Neige Lucie 1997, Lucie Dol e ne, who provided the Frenc_ ,~dr,1′
w lle m th e 19 D’ . · cc vie
(s d
3 7 1sn ey animation sings ‘Un ,·our mon pnn
o rn e ay rn · · ‘ I
app ears a y pldnncc will come) in a high, girlish tone, while on sere_ en 5
1
e
s an o er worn d 11 • D’sneY an, an le s th e story of h er lawsuit against 1
90
Pierre Huyghe
The Third Memory 1999
Double projection,
beta digital, video on
monitor, sound
. . h F h ersion of Snow White. claiming the rights for the use of her voice m t e renc v . . .
If here Huyghe can be seen to foreground a forgotten act of explmtatr~n m fil
· h t · 1·neofamov1e The m popular culture, in L’ellipse 1998, he fills a gap mt e 1me 1 . ·
‘fills in’ a jump-cut in Wim Wenders’s movie The American Fnend 1977· Some
twenty years after the movie was made, Bruno Ganz, who plays the cent~al
protagonist in Wenders’s film, walks from one location to another, c~oss~ng
a bridge over the Seine in the district ofBeaugrenelle, which was b~gr1:mng to be
rebuilt when the movie was shot. Apparently there to restore contmmty, the
ellipse takes the form of a return that marks the difference between the real and
the fictional, where it is the former rather than the latter that becomes spectral:
Ganz is like a ghost revisiting his past, completing something that was left
incomplete. Huyghe’s interest in restitution continues in The Third Memory 2000,
where John Woytowicz restages the robbery with hostage-taking that he
committed in 1972, which was the source for the movie Dog Day Afternoon 1975,
directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Al Pacino as Woytowicz. Now Woytowicz
can tell his story, as Dolene told hers. This is not a remake, but a reconstruction –
and if reconstructing a crime, would this crime be Woytowicz’s attempted bank
robbery, the slaying of his gay partner by the police, or the exploitation of his story
by Lumet? Huyghe’s installation stages memory not as a true representation of
the past ‘as it was’, which in any case could only be correlated with another
representation, but rather as a reconstruction that opens up an area of dispute.
Two recent projects combine the insertion of fictions into reality with an interest
in the relation between art and festivals or holidays, celebrations that are also
interventions in the economy of time. Streamside Day Follies 2003, a film shown
as part of an installation with moving walls at Dia Center for the Arts, New York,
invents a festival for the inauguration of a new suburban housing development;
A Journey that Wasn’t 2005, in which the film relates to an installation and
a multi-media performance celebrating a voyage to an Antarctic island inhabited
by a previously undiscovered (and, outside the parameters of the film, purely
mythical) albino penguin. In both cases, moving image projection only forms one
element of a larger, open-ended project, whilst also functioning to create effects
rather than to represent reality.
At a cinema the audience cannot control the time of the film, which becomes
possible once film is watched as video or DVD. This new relation to the medium
is a condition inhabited by the work of Douglas Gordon. For 24 Hour Psycho
19
Gordon removed the sound from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho 196o, and slowed if 3′
down so that the shower sequence, for example, lasts approximately half a h
Each moment of the film, including those that are marginal to the core n ?ur.
. . . narrative becomes monumental. The poss1b1hty of slowing the film to such an e t t ‘
depends entirely on the remediation of film through video. Another e x en
1 h k . f . . G d , h xamp e of t e rewor mg o cmema 1s or on st ree-screen projection De,·a-vu h”
. f . 2000, w ich involves the trans er onto VIdeo and subsequent projection onto th
ree screens
91
Douglas Gordon Mark Lewis
24 Hour Psycho 1993 Algonquin Park, Early
Video installation, March 2002
Royal Scottish Academy, 35mm film transferred
Edinburgh 2007 to DVD, silent
ofRudolph Mate’s 1949- 50 film noir D.O.A. (Dead OnArriva0, where the fi
projection is at twenty-five frames per second, and the third at twenty-thr rSl
frames per second, the middle one being at the ‘normal’ speed of twenty/e
f d
,, fil . h . our rames per secon . Mates m opens wit a man reportmg a murder at a J’
station: he has been poisoned, and in the time before the poison takes eff~c~ ice
has managed to kill the man who poisoned him, so he is both murdered and
murderer, subject and object of his own story-in a more extreme version of
what had become possible for the everyday viewer of a film on video, Gordon h
changed the ‘timings’ of a film that is itself about time and suspense. as
An analysis of the rhetoric and syntax of cinema is the starting point for the
work of Mark Lewis. Take, for example, the zoom combined with tracking shot
which penetrates the broken window of an old office to close in on a spinning to
in North Circulariooo; or his Jay’s Garden, Malibu 2001 with its long, steady-camp
shots along the winding paths of a landscaped garden in California, where every
so often actors from porn films are encountered, fully clothed, as if enjoying a
break from their work. One scene with glass grapes gives a clue to the artificiality
of this Bacchic idyll, a mnemonic of painting’s mythological portrayals of ideal
scenes. If Jay’s Garden is an attempt to outbid painting- to do as a temporal art
what a static art cannot, two later works, shot in the Canadian wilderness of
Algonquin Park were, rather, an attempt to slow film down to the extent that it
might sustain the intense scrutiny that has seemed painting’s right, while at the
same time creating an event of disclosure that takes place between image and
viewer, and that requires time. Algonquin Park, Early March 2002 begins with the
screen filled with white light which the reverse zoom reveals to be ice, in a bay
fringed by pine trees, on which we see skaters, the whole scene recalling Pieter
Breu gel the Eider’s Hunters in the Snow 1565. Algonquin Park, September2001 shows
a canoe being paddled across the frame in front of what looks like an island in the
fog, which only lifts at the end. The Algonquin Park films re-explore the tradition
oflandscape using the possibilities of zoom and camera movement offered by the
movie camera in order to both to show the role of time in the desire to see, and
bring the intensity of attention to the structure of what is seen that is the norm in
the reception of the art of the still image to moving images.
Having made political films on aspects of policing in the black British
experience during the 1980s, Isaac Julien found his form with Lookingfor Langston
1989, a film about the black, gay American poet Langston Hughes which included
imagined scenes from a Harlem speakeasy, scenes set in 1980s London, fantas y
sequences, and the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Julien subsequently d
moved from work that grew out of the tradition of experimental filmmakin~ an
was intended to be shown in cinemas, to sumptuous moving image insta!latJOn.
93
Isaac Jul· ien and
Sunil Gupta
Looking for L H angston-
1 image Nair 1989 .
mm film, sound
Sharon Lockhart
Tea tro Amazonas 1999
35mm film , sound
Most of his installations have the underlying narrative of a joumey: the t
cowboys in The Long Road to Mazatlan 1999; the young man whojourn Wo
the Carribean to the UK and back in Paradise Orneros 2002; the black weys &oni
0 111.an · True North 2004, who stands for _the black explorer Matthew Henson Who 1n
accompanied the explorer Admiral Robert Peary to the North Pole in
1
has only recently been credited with being the Pole ‘s co-discoverer. Ali9t
0
h9• and
. h . . db ese installations are multi-screen – a tee mque p10neere y the filmmak . . er Ab 1 Gance in Napoleon 1927-and by panoram1cally extendmg the image e
. , or crear
parallels and cross-overs, :~plor~ co~plex s~atial and temporal relationshi 1ng
between images with the Ir 1mphcat10ns of history, geography and othe Ps
. fb h . d . rness Another approach to the history o ot cmema an Video is taken b C ·
von Wedemeyer in works which draw attention to their own making. I~ leniens
Occupation 2002 we are shown a film crew and a number of extras in a field
floodlights at night, who are being directed by a production manager dre un?er
‘f . 11· . h ssed in a grey anorak that looks like a um arm, s1gna mg m ways t at do not enf
1 seem to be understood by the extras. The whole thing appears rather poin;e Y
something between a rock festival and the behaviour of the crowd in the fi]ess,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind 1977. Soundtrack music begins to play as tt
camera passes through the crowd; tracks are laid down for a dolly shot; whit:
lines are painted on the grass as if for some sporting event; the extras form
a square within the lines, and allow themselves to be organised according to thes
dispositions. After condensing in a group, the extras suddenly scatter to dramar e
music as the lights are knocked over and extinguished, which concludes the fil ic
Accompanying the large project~on is a video on a moni:or about the making
0
r
the film, so a film about the makmg of a film about makmg a film which reverses
the sequence by beginning with the scatter. On reflection, it is possible to see the
‘action’ as linking the hierarchical and disciplinary structure of cinema, including
Hollywood-with its arrangement of bodies – to the disposition of troops and
followers in fascist propaganda film (think ofLeni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the
Will r 934), where the scattering of Wedermeyer’s extras might be understood
as the contrary assertion of a diverse multitude.
Tableaux of time and the untimely
If time can be technologically mediated, its experience is also profoundly affected
by social and cultural factors. Sharon Lockhart’s film NO 2003 shows husband
and wife farmers in Ta pan evenly distributing piles of mulch and then spreading it
on a field, which appears to be square. Filmed from a fixed viewpoint in a single
long shot with a 16mm camera, it becomes clear, on reflection, that the physical
structure of the field is organised for the point-of-view of the camera. The
94
“18oean
rac1 efJran ce at Sea II
o,saPP de Guerison)
t1oyage
1997 . namorphic film ,
16mm~ ·
50und
apparently ‘real’ is a spatio-temporal illusion created for the viewer, and the
Japanese subject matter shows up the subject-centred perspective as a culturally
specific Western mode. With her Teatro Amazonas 1999, we are presented with
a twenty-nine-minute unedited take, shot from the stage, of a local audience
in the theatre in Mana us, Brazil, which was the focus of Werner Herzog’s film
Fitzcarraldo 1982 . They are listening to a live performance of a Minimalist choral
work by Becky Allen, sung by the Choral do Amazonas, who are out of sight of
the audience in the pit, and which, as it gradually reduces to silence, is replaced
by the sounds of the audience of 308 people, who are a statistical sample of the
population ofManaus. The film enacts a reversal of the traditional relationship
of spectacle to audience, of director to performers, and of international art to
local representation. Another moving image work that ‘measures’ time within a
specific geographical and cultural context is Francis Alys’s Zocalo 1999, where the
flagpole in the square of that name in Mexico City functions like a sundial during
the twelve-hour duration of the video’s running time – the people who form a line
sheltering from the sun become inadvertent performers in the public space that
is also measured by the real time of the rotating shadow, implying an intersection
of the historical memory embodied in the city square with the cosmic time
measured by this impromptu sundial. The memory of the calendrical systems of
native peoples and their accompanying rituals meets the traditional function of
the town square as the locus of a clock from which time may be synchronised.
It is striking how much of the best recent moving image work draws on models
that were established in the 1960s and 1970s, and technology that is obsolete.
Robert Smithson’s film Spiral Jetty 1970, about the building of his earthwork, was
very influential, offering a multi-layered model of time that was simultaneously
mythic, geological, and scientific. Tacita Dean draws the consequences of
Smithson’s emphasis on entropy and time’s irreversibility: that the repetitive
structure of moving image work is actually related to loss. Her films -and here the
celluloid medium as an indexical registering of time, in all its fragility, is essential
– become acts of salvage. In many ofTacita Dean’s films, the concern with
documenting something combines with a sense of the relation between what is
being filmed and the historical situation of the medium. In Disappearance at Sea II
1997, Dean used the rotating lamp of a lighthouse as a platform from which to
film. This recalls the way Michael Snow had a mechanism constructed for one of
his films in order to achieve 3 60-degree pans in a mountain wilderness near
Quebec for La Region Centra/e 1970. Both works share a sense of desolation, but
whereas for Snow this revealed a way of seeing that is specific to the camera, for
Dean it connected both with the idea of the lighthouse as something that protects
the sailor, and a sense of searching the far horizon for someone lost. We could see
Tacita Dean’s work performing a double act of salvage: on the material, and on the
medium. The beached sailboat on the island of Cayman Brae of Donald
Crowhurst, a child of colonialism and quixotic yachtsman who had faked his
95
Matthew Buckingham
A Man of the Cro wd
2003
16mm film installation
part in a round-the-world sailing competition and committed suicide by jum .
off his boat holding the chronometer, was the subject ofDean’s film Teignmou~~n g
Electron 2000. In Fernsehturm 2001, which was shot in the rotating restaurant
of the old East Berlin TV tower, a past vision of a future is presented by Dean
in the combination of a sunset panorama and the conviviality of the diners
accompanied by pop tunes on an old synthesizer. In each case, film is associated
with the analog measurement of time and inscribed with its own temporal
and physical fragility as a medium at a moment in history when it is being
displaced by the digital.
The position of the observer is destabilised and fragmented in the urban
labyrinth of Matthew Buckingham’s film installation A Man of the Crowd 2003 ,
based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe that influenced Baudelaire’s account of
modern, urban beauty in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’.6 Buckingham
has a r 6mm film projecting through an opening in the gallery wall onto
a freestanding two-way mirror in the centre of the space, which both reflects
and doubles the image that is also seen on the further wall. The glass reflects
the viewer’s image (a device borrowed from Dan Graham’s installation rooms
using two-way mirrors and time-delay), thus achieving the aim of much moving
image installation, which is to physically implicate the viewer in ways that
are impossible in the cinema auditorium. This set-up also reflects the topol ogy
of the film itself: as the anonymous latter-day man of the crowd is followed
through the streets- in this instance, Vienna -we are shown reflections in
cafe and store windows, creating a mise-en-abfme between the content of the
film and the mirror-installation.
Stillness in movement and movement in stillness . . trast
Movement, when it concerns the image, is necessarily experienced lil its co~icall y.
with stillness, a contrast mediated by technologies that have changed h1st?rnply
. . . . rather than s1 Once it became possible to reproduce movement m images- . h meaning
reflect it in a mirror or produce it ephemerally with optical devices~~ : ges that
of stillness in an image changed forever. In a sense, the emergen_ce 0b’.mts and still
· f · obile o iec move in a fine art context that had been the provmce o 1mm. ovesisa na
images reversed the situation.7 Whereas for cinema, that the im~~e :plicitly
priori condition, once the moving image is placed in the gallery it is and
. . sculpture,
experienced in relation to art that does not move: pamtmg, being taken
• f · h · e ratherthan . photography. The meanmg o movement mt e imag_ , . to qu esuon
for granted as ubiquitous in everyday life, is once agam thrown lil
96
David Claerbout
Vietnam, 1967, near Due
Pho (Reconstruction after
H1romishi Mine) 2001
Digita l video, silent
If the moving image, in particular in film which comprises individual,
still photograms, mementos of an absent, past moment which are made to
move through the physiological effect of the after-image, conveys a sense of
a re-animation, conversely effects of stillness within movement-whether
freeze-frame, the filming of a still image, or some other form of stoppage – are
often used to signify memory or death. 8 In Untitled: Philippe VACHER r99o, James
Coleman extended a four-second clip of the eponymous French actor’s portrayal
of a doctor who seems to be keeling over onto his instruments until he turns to
look at the viewer, into a 3 5mm film lasting seventeen minutes. The film
gradually transforms from colour into black-and-white, as if reversing the history
of cinema in order to reflect on film’s role as the embalmer of time. 9 It is as if the
slowing of the film is an attempt to discern the invisible: for example, the moment
of transition from life to death in the becoming of each image, or a secret, like a
murder-recalling the photographer’s enlargements of his prints in Michelangelo
Antonioni’s Blow Up 1966 in order to try to detect whether a murder has taken
place in a park where he happened to be photographing. Coleman’s film is
projected as a large image with a long throw- the scale of an auditorium
projection – but in a gallery space where the viewer may walk up to the image
and examine it closely, becoming aware of his or her own body in the space of the
installation in relation to a clip which concerns precisely the medical gaze and
the emergence of a certain relation between the body, knowledge, and power. 10
The ontology of the image shifts in the transition from the grain of indexical
celluloid to the digital pixel. David Claerbout uses the digital, supplemented by
sound and silence, to condense multiple temporalities within single images.
The most ‘cinematic’ of his works is probably Bordeaux Piece 2004, which presents
_ a narrative of Oedipal rivalry, but the narrative is repeated, which seems to empty
it, and in the course of the repetitions the viewer gradually becomes aware of the
continuous change from day into evening into night (a process that takes about
fourteen hours). When the viewer puts on the headphones, the dialogue becomes
inaudible, but birdsong can be heard: behind the repetitions of a scenario of
desire and Oedipal rivalry is the diurnal and seasonal time of nature. Elsewhere
Claerbout works at the level of the pixel to introduce stillness into a moving
image: in Vietnam, r967, near Due Pho (Reconstruction after Hiromishi Mine) 2001,
the exploded plane is frozen in a fast snapshot as the wind-touched foliage moves
. gently and the light changes (although we should remember that a still image
in video or DVD is actually moving). Rocking Chair 2003 comprises a two-sided
projection: as the viewer enters a darkened room, he sees a black-and-white image
of a woman sitting on a sunny porch, her eyes in the shade, gently rocking as if
resting yet marking time; walking past the screen the viewer sees her from
behind, and she stops rocking and turns slightly, as if to listen. In this encounter
97
11111
between the viewer’s reality and the virtual image, the gulfbetwe
felt all the more strongly. In Shadow Piece 2005, the point of view. en t~ern is
. . . k’ h h . IS POSiti in side a modernist bmldmg, loo mg out t roug Its glass wall and d 0 nect
approach the building and try to enter, but the door is locked-on! ~o~; People
is able to pass inside, as if to remind us that we, too, are excluded f/ t eir shact01V
h 1 . . . orn the· which is a realm of shades, g ost Y re-appant10ns. Sections of a Hap 1tnage
. d ‘d . . ul . 1 PY Marne is a single-channel proJecte v1 eo compnsmg m tip e ‘still’ shot fr nt i
007
points of view of a single moment in the life of a Chinese family Ins om various
surrounded by social housing a basketball has been thrown int~ th: s~uare
suspended: this single moment is spatially fragmented and laid out i an anct hangs
time, and so the fleeting moment of familial happiness becomes mo; sequential
. . d . . b urnenta] and even suggests a memento man, accompame as 1t 1s y the generic . ,
piano music that might be applied to a family video. ‘soothing
Moving image is capable of both speeding time up and slowing it do
Using a fixed viewpoint and an uninterrupted take, Jeroen de Rijke and wn.
Willem de Rooij’s Ban tar Ge bang 2000 shows the transformation brought b
the coming of day to a walled shantytown built on a rubbish dump near ,a{
It is a ravishingly beautiful film, but this response is unsettled by the view ~rta.
knowledge of the circumstances in which people there have to live and w:;:
?ne might consider t~is reflecti_on on context to have been extended to the fiirn
itself when the ten-mmute vers10n was reduced to a three-minute ‘trailer’ for
Art Basel 2000, as if it became an advertisement for itself. In Untitled
2001
, the
artists again exploit the rich detail produced by a static shot of a slowly-chan in
distant scene. This time, the setting is a graveyard, in which people appear, Jth g
the city ofTakarta in the background. The graveyard is the burial place of the
wife of Indonesia’s first President, which might be the reason for its preservation
amid rampant development-this goes to show how the viewer’s experience
of a representation of a place is affected by their knowledge, or ignorance, of its
history and politics.
The temporality of video – the possibility of a continuous recording of the
present which may appear simultaneously with itself-distinguishes it from
cinema. This is exemplified by Dan Graham’s time-delay video installations of the
mid-197os, also using two-way mirrors. The aspect of surveillance- that video can
just be left running or triggered by sound or movement- is taken up by Bruce
Nauman in his installations, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), shown at
Dia Beacon in 2002, and Mapping the Studio II with color shift,jlip flop, 8-jlipljlop (Far
Chance John Cage) 2001, both of which include video projections shot in the studio
at night (Nauman just left the camera running with a motion sensor on) as well
as multiple audio tracks of ambient sound. In a reworking of the genre of’artist’s
studio’ in which in this case the artist is absent, we can see on multiple screens
and hear the infestation of mice, his cat, the movement of moths. This kind of
untouched presentation of a segment of the world, when done in the context
of an art installation, raises questions about meaning in such a way that the.
. . erience 1t as presentat10n becomes simultaneously ‘full’ or replete (we try to exp . n
. . . h , Id . . d . d’ . ‘t ·s a representatIO 1t 1s mt e now’ as we wou a pamtmg) an ’empt1e smce 1 1 . .
of something that is not present. We necessarily ask why the image _is b~ngit
presented in this context, what its meaning might be. It is at this pomt t at
becomes allegorical.
Traces and dreams of history
I
le artists
. . . . · g0~~ · 1 At a time of rapid social and technological transformat10n on a . – bothaS1
have used the possibilitie_s of the _mo~ng ima~e to engage with ~~~~:space and
relates to personal narrative, subjective expenence and_fan~asy, ork Felix ni
geography, as well as time. In William Kentridge’s movrng image wh wail in a
Exile 1994, drawings fly out of a suitcase and attach themselves tot e
98
l’lilliam Kentridge
Ubu Tells the Truth 1997
35rnrn fil m transferred to
video, laser disc, DVD:
an1rn 1· a 10n, drawing,
photography, sound and
docu rnentary film.
Based on the 1996 pla
Ubu and the Truth y
Cornrniss · b Th ion Y Handstring
eatre Company,
configuration that · 1 . • ·
M 1 . , precise Y resembles the way paintings were hung m Kas1mu a ev1ch s ‘Last Futu · t E h’b • . . . ah . . ns x 1 1t10no.rn’mPetrogradin1915.Kentndgecreates
G ybrid art, drawmg on the history of painting- Francisco Goya, Max Beckmann,
erge Gr~sz – and the graphic tradition, especially William Hogarth, theatre,
an . earl~ cmema. And in fact, the artist came to moving image art primarily from
actmg, ~uecti~g and set design for the theatre, particularly a hybrid form of
theatre m:ludmg puppets and moving image projection. In Johannesburg: 2nd
Greatest City After Paris 1989, the artist introduced the industrialist and financier
Soho Ekstein and his younger, artist-intellectual double, Felix Teitelbaum:
alter-egos, but with an Oedipal father-son relation also implied- the former
w_as based on a photograph of Kentridge’s grandfather, and the latter resembled
him~elf. Here and in subsequent works, Kentridge established a highly
ambivalent position from which to speak, that of the South African Jewish
co~munity, who are simultaneously exploiters and defenders of the black South
Afncan population. In a history-which stretches from the Holocaust to the
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in 1995, and beyond-
where bearing witness has become a public, political act, as reflected in his Ubu
Tells the Truth I 997, Kentridge has developed an art using animation which plays
on the relation between the trace and its erasure. The film becomes the memory
of the drawing, which in the new stage replaces the old one , save for the traces
of the erasure of the previous marks. The imperfection of the erasure is essential
to Kentridge’s art, and indeed distinguishes is from the utopian tabula rasa
of the early Modernism on which he draws. While the particular representations
of memory are subject to dispute, common to all Kentridge’s work is his
incorporation of the traces of the erasure of the trace, in other words, not just
remembrance, but the memory of forgetting and the effacement of the oppressed.
With Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions 2004, Kara
Walker turned to film as a development of her previous practice, in which she
used painted silhouettes to present a phantasmatic history of slavery and sexual
exploitation in America. The cut-outs she used for the film placed it between
animation and shadow-puppetry. It begins with the depiction of a black female
effigy, followed by the appearance of a dreadlocked black female protagonist who
performs an inversion of history by enslaving white men, and ends with the
screen filled by the whiteness of the fluid produced by the fellatio she performs
on the lynched body of the leader of the white men. As if Walker were to
American slavery what the Marquis de Sade was to the French Revolution,
99
7
Harun Farocki
Eye/Machine Ill 2003
Double-screen video,
sound
she shows history to be inseparable from the effects of sexual desire and the
repetitive rituals of perverse pleasure.
Historical memory and collective trauma is also the subject of work by T
· h h · h d “fi · 1· ra ce Moffatt which she approaches wit e1g tene art1 c1a 1ty and a stylised Y
‘ · d” h h N. C I ‘ gener” mode of presentation. In films mclu mg t es arts ice o oured Girls 198 . 1c
Cries: A Rural Tragedy_ 1989 ~nd the full length Be~eu’.l 1993, she employs s:c~’9ht
devices as tableaux with pamted backdrops as an art treatment of popular
culture that throws into question both objectifying representations of the
Australian aboriginal people and the complicity of the viewer as a passive w·
. h 1 f 1 d . llness to atrocity and injustice. The context 1st e strugg e or an nghts, and retri
1 f b . . 1 h”ld f h · eva of the history of the forced removal o A ongma c 1 ren rom t err families.
Moffatt equally uses the devices of avant-garde film -such as sound that com
b 1
. es
from somewhere other than the i1:1age – _to su vert m~ar narrative, allowing the
interweaving of past and present, mcludmg the hauntmg of the present by the
past, and the projection of an alternative future in which injustice can be held to
account. Like those of Kara Walker, Moffatt’s films deal with their troubling
subjects with what Surrealist Andre Breton called ‘black humour’: the disruption
-through excessive, grotesque and perverse pleasure-of dominant discourse.11
For filmmaker Harun Farocki, since the mid-r 990s the museum installation
has provided a site for reflection ori. the contemporary machines of vision as
historic modes of visualisation, both as a means of power and control, and as
opportunities for knowledge. Ich glaubte, Gefangene zu sehen (l thought I saw
Prisoners) 2001 shows on a projection wardens shooting quarrelling prisoners in
a yard, where the field of fire and of surveillance coincide. The double projections
of the Eye/Machine trilogy 2001-3 deal with the loss of distinction between the
photographed and the computer-simulated in the ‘operational’ images produced
by missiles and other equipment in the context of the first Gulf War of 1991, and
therefore marks the moment when the human eye is denied its role as a historical
witness. Farocki’s installations could be understood as an extension of montage
– indeed the Eisensteinian dialectical montage – from the relation between
shots or images in the film to the combination of simultaneity and sequence in
his double projections. A different kind of work is Deep Play 2007, shown at
Documenta I 2, where Farocki presented the final of the FIFA World Cup soccer
match between France and Italy being converted into a video-game over twelve
screens – including commentary, game analysis and player statistics – so that
viewers could witness the representation becoming a simulation.
The moving image engrosses the viewer in a spectatorial present in a way that
is different from a still photograph, which is more like a relic of a past present
– the moving image, whether in film or video, doesn’t so much interrupt the time
of the viewer, as take it over.12 How then to indicate ‘pastness’ in the moving
image? One way is through content – costumes, sets and so on; another is through
obsolescence in the medium -insisting on celluloid for example, and putting the
projector in the room with the viewer, or by retaining that same quality of im age
but contained within a later technology. But neither of these really prevents the
viewer from creating a present of the action in the image through a process of
self-insertion into the image-space. In Third Generation (Ascher Family) 2oo~ Ma rk
Wallinger draws on both of these aspects, and adds a third, whereby reces~i ve
framing becomes an analogue for distance in the past, while at the same ume
d . . h . h” h film Home rawmg attent10n tot e context m which the viewer is watc mg t e · • h
. f . . the r eW IS movies o a Jewish family, probably from the 1930s, are being shown m . . ge
M B 1. . . . h f ·1 Th!S ,ma useum, er m. We see v1s1tors walkmg past the images oft e ami Y· d
· · d” h thesoun 1s proJecte ma neutral space, which may be a studio, where we ear
of footsteps . Finally, Wallinger’s film is projected onto a screen in the gallery. _
Thus the spatial recession of frames encapsulates three generations of imat
we are seeing a film of a film of a film, as well as a remediation ofSuper-S fi m
100
Wal< Wa lli nger
j ,•::, 2002
c :· :- ‘-‘ 2 · Cathedra l
.. ,
into DVD. Wallinger’s installation simultaneously makes us feel the pastness of
the family ‘s films – and the loss inscribed in that history-while also making it
possible to see what is normally lost in the viewing of a film, namely the context
in which that viewing is taking place.
In Angel 1997 Wallinger ran time in reverse: he filmed himself performing
as a blind preacher apparently walking down an escalator running upwards.
The ‘preacher’ can just be made out saying the first words of the gospel of St fohn,
‘In the beginning was the word .. .’, which Wallinger recorded himself saying
backwards (recalling Gary Hill’s film Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? [Come on
Petunia] 1984), until finally he ascends backwards up the escalator at Angel
underground station, to the sound of Handel’s 1727 coronation anthem Zadok the
Priest. In this and other works, Wallinger seems to be attempting to prise apart the
exploitation of religious representations and the need to which religion responds.
(In fact, he literally effaces such representations in Via Dolorosa 2002, where he
places a black square in the centre of the frame of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1975 TV film
Jesus of Nazareth, making the representation itself into a frame for what is not
represented.) An analogue for this need is found in Threshold to the Kingdom 2000,
for which Wallinger simply placed the camera facing the swing door of the
arrivals gate at one of London’s airports, showing the visitors and home-comers in
slow motion to the sound of Allegri’s Miserere, a setting of the s 1st psalm (‘Have
mercy on me, God, in your kindness/In your compassion blot out my offence’),
which for centuries was sung only in the Sistine Chapel. The threshold to paradise
is evoked in one of modernity’s ‘non-places’, a gateway policed by immigration
officials rather than angels.
101
r
I
I
Joshua Mosley
Lindbergh an d the
Trans-Ra/Jona/ B oy 1997
Com puter an imation
and 16mm fil m, sound
Chen Chieh -jen uses long takes and reconstructions on site to create
‘dialectical images’ of a suspended history, opening up the past as a site of
and unfinished business . In Factory 2003, a silent film shot on 16mm and llleniory
transferred to DVD, textile workers in Taiwan return to the abandoned fa t
where they had worked until the owner closed it down without paying c ory
retirement or severance, a re sult of global capital’s continual search for cheap
labour. Passages showing the gestures and move~ents of ~he workers-their
bodily memory of another time made present agam – are mtercut with footage
from their protest. In The Route 2006, Chen made a 3 5mm film transferred to DVD
ofa protest that never took place at the Port of Kaohsiung, where the cargo sh ·
h . h ,,… . lp Neptune Jade was unloaded in 1995. At t e time, t e 1a1wanese dockers had not
known that the ship had been forced to seek another port as a result of a
dockworkers’ strike at Liverpool and that it had been turned away by dockers
across the world. The film thus reconstructs a past that never happened as a cal]
for solidarity today. In another film, Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph
2002 shot in r 6mm and transferred to DVD to make a three-channel projection, Chen’
makes a deliberately inaccurate reconstruction of Lingchi, a form of Chinese
torture which involves the drugging and gradual dismemberment of its victim,
which can be seen here as a harbinger of the dismembering and pain inflicted by
modernity. In his work, documentary is transformed into the phantasmagoria of
modernity and an exploration of alternative histories.
Different historical moments are brought together in the films of Yang Fudong.
The five-part cycle Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest 2003-7 combines references
to the ancient stories of’The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove’ from the Wei and
Jin dynasties of China with a setting in the 1950s and 1960s, when the role of
intellectuals came into question. By taking a historical distance, the series shows
the marginalisation of intellectuals -and, by implication, critical and political art
– in the current epoch of globalisation and rapid economic development in China.
The setting moves from the famous Yellow Mountain to city life in Shanghai,
where the protagonists live an isolated life with little connection to their
surroundings. They then move to the southwest of China, attempting to become
involved with nature, before moving on in the next film to the isolation of
a fishing island. Finally they return to the city to become a part of its life. From
a Western perspective, the cycle appears to deal wi th the relation of the aesthetic
– including the films’ own dated beauty- to modernization, while at the same
time including references which would only be evident to viewers conversant
with the Chinese historical and cultural context. Yang Fudong’s cycle is in effect
traditional cinema presented in the black box of the gallery-while using the
international art world as a way to get his work circulated, he reflects on the rol e
of the artist in society.
In both mainstream cinema and artists’ moving image, animation has
increasingly become a feature, both when it is evident and when it is not. For
artists , animation provides new ways of presenting narrative and expl~ring
a subjective relation to history. History is related to fantastic narrative m the
1
,
5 works of Joshua Mosley, which combine film with computer animation. Mos ey
Lindbergh
00
and the Trans-Rational Boy 1998 is about a child crossing the ocean
i~ a sm~ll boa~, power~d by large mice in a treadmill, ~v~r wh!ch an airpl~n~a ge
flies, as 1flookmg for him. The accompanying speech 1s man mvented la g
and the atmosphere conveyed is that of infinite motion and of timelessness.
The title hints at a darker side: that the boy might be the abducted son of -stop
Charles Lindbergh, the man who in 1927 made the first single-handed ~on As the
. . d 1 . N . mpath1zer. transatlantic crossing, an was ater suspected ofbemg a azi sy much
son rocks back and forth, urging the mice on, Mosley suggests he is ~ot so e are
abducted as trying to flee the father. In this highly condensed narrativ~t~les),
shown something we will never fully understand (regardless of the su
102
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