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WRO 07 Reader

Laboratory of Seeing and Hearing

I.
It may very well be possible that an exhibition which was staged in the mid-1990s in London’s Hayward Gallery, and which was hardly taken notice of in Germany, marked a new beginning. It was called “Spellbound: Art and Film”—a case of mutual enchantment. Film directors such as Monty Python star Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway and Ridley Scott set up large-scale installations in the rooms of the Gallery, located on the Thames near the National Film Theatre. Douglas Gordon attracted droves of especially young people with sleeping bags in front of a huge movie screen on which scenes from Hitchcock’s Psycho that he had extended to 24 hours were projected in an endless loop. A young, at that time still unknown, black experimental filmmaker and photographer from London’s Goldsmith College was allowed to show his poetic summarisations of time-based moving images for the first time in a large gallery. A short while later Steve McQueen’s unconventional adaptation of Buster Keaton’s amazing stunt of the front of a house falling over his head even reached the sacred temple of contemporary art. His installation, which also functions simply and wonderfully as a film, was purchased from New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The work was produced just like as a feature film. Keith Griffiths of Koninck Studios, which has promoted filmmakers including the Brothers Quay, Jan Svankmajer, Chris Petit and Patrick Keiller, was responsible for production, and the filming was done in the legendary Pinewood Studios.

During the past decade the close interrelationship between film and the fine arts, which had already characterised the first avant-garde in the 1920s and the second one after the Second World War, again came alive with new energy. Galleries and art associations even in Germany rediscovered the “sound” of film projectors in operation as an attractive auditory ambiance, and the visitors of these establishments, who are accustomed to viewing paintings and drawings, have now learned to appreciate the coarse grain of 16mm and super-8 film material. Cinemas have sporadically and temporarily opened their economically ailing rented halls in which mainly ready-made films are shown to the experiments of those creating fine art. Distinguished directors such Harun Farocki or Chris Marker have expanded their cinematic language into the sphere of installations and multi-linear narrations. At the more that fifty biennial festivals, which now exist all over the world, in the past few years the screens for the projection of chronophotographs have competed more and more with the canvases of static painted pictures. At the last Dokumenta in Kassel the rebirth of film as a medium of art was established once and for all.

This “expanded cinema”, which is part of the second avant-garde, is now being rediscovered. And it is even possible to have a separate festival to celebrate the crossing of boundaries both officially and with massive public support, something which media art festivals such as the one in Osnabrück or VIPER in Switzerland have been doing for many years as a matter of course: the constructive and for this reason peaceful coexistence of different art genres of the visual and the audiovisual forms. Even the first KunstFilmBienale in Cologne demonstrated that there were simply no longer any walls to be torn down between films that strive to deal with art and artists who also give practical expression to their enthusiasm for the cinema. They have long since fallen without so much as a crash. For those who create art, just as for those who enjoy it, the dogmatic definitions or the struggles for territory and privileges were never really of any importance. This is now also being understood by those institutions in which making definitions and delimitations and thinking in terms of ownership are a common practice. Fortunately. This is good for the experimental work with film and video.

II.
Every genre of art, every artistic theory and practice, has a laboratory. For the theatre this continues to be the individual stages in studio or workshop theatres; for poetry it is the readings organised in drawing rooms by passionate lyricists or magazines like Eiswasser; for modern music it is, for example, ensembles and cooperative projects such as the “Musikfabrik” in Cologne. Here is where new ideas and productions are tried out, and how an audience deals with the artists’ expectations is tested here.

For the audiovisual media it is the experimental film and the single-channel video that represent this laboratory. At one time this unwieldy genre carried out its functions of trying out, training and testing basically for the cinema. This has changed not only as a result of the fact that the opto-chemical and mechanical technologies have to a great extent been displaced and superseded by electronic and digital ones. The movie theatre certainly continues to be the most important place where the desires of filmmakers are expressed and those of cinephile spectators are fulfilled. But in the fractionalised audiovisual culture of the closing 20th and the beginning 21st centuries it is no longer the main location of film, that dominant medium of art which Roland Barthes was even ecstatic about in his essay significantly entitled “Upon Leaving the Movie Theatre”—as a dark cube in which anonymous bodies abide casually and in which orgies of emotion take place. It has become one place out of many where cinematic experiments are shown and performed, in addition to museums, galleries, lecture halls and the post-industrial cathedrals of electronic music found in converted industrial plants, the steel factories or collieries converted into cultural palaces and the more mundane places such as the few niches of benign television programmes. In all of these places experimental films are shown and appear in the widest variety of perceptual contexts, ranging from contemplation to absent-minded reception while dancing, and are played back from a great many different types of media, the traditional film projector as well as magnetic tape, the DVD and directly from the computer’s hard drive. Or the artists may dispense completely with the audiovisual form and simply print their films on paper, just as Rosa Barba did in 2004 with the first of her ten-part project entitled “Printed Cinema – Broadcasting From Home”.

III.
Has not the experimental film, on the one hand, become a dinosaur that doesn’t really fit in anywhere and has thus been made homeless and, on the other hand, is it not a productive territory in which the greedy and forever hungry channels exploiting the audiovisual media have their future product material pre-tested at favourable prices? And if the answer to questions like these is a definite “no”, then in an age of the infinitely (re)producibility of image-sound arts what does the particular quality of the object of our desire consist in and what will it permanently consist in?

What has remained and will remain is the fundamental function of the experimental film, which initially reads like a tautology when we attempt to describe it: It is the form in which artists of different origins, working with images of the period and with sounds, radically examine their relationship to film and place this at our disposal, the form in which they communicate internationally with those of a similar mind, the form in which they attempt to transcend the bounds of each predetermined framework of the media or at least to explore it in depth. Their designs are not aimed at the individual viewer sitting in front of a monitor, but rather are intended for projection on a movie screen and sounds coming out of a spatial sound system for an anonymous audience.

Fortunately, no fashionable trends can be derived from the material included in this new film and video package, but there are indeed striking artistic practical values that distinguish current experimental films and experiments with single-channel videos. Interestingly enough these practical values essentially cannot be linked to the inner aesthetic quality of each individual work, but rather are expressed more clearly in their untiring work on the modernisation of production methods, on the actions and formats of the productions as well as in their underlying vibrations.

Ever since artists began working with the successive series of 16, 18 or 24 frames per second, the “autonomy of the means of production” has become an important goal and field of experimentation for them. Just as a painter creates his paintings in his own studio, a writer composes his texts at his desk, a musician develops and writes his works of music in his sound studio in the bedroom or in the basement, filmmakers should also be able to make films in their own way. Some of them have even fulfilled this dream, at least to some extent. They’ve done this by acquiring a Steenbeck at a good price when editing benches were being sold off by the big film companies, or by getting hold of cameras and reconstructing them to suit their purposes, and later by purchasing electronic editing systems either individually or together with other filmmakers, with which they could edit and create their films according to their own dynamics of time and not to dance to the expensive tune of those renting out the studios. However, a number of important tasks still remained, for whose completion diverse branches of the film industry, working under the principle of job-sharing, were indispensable: the development of film material, laboratories for adding special effects, studios for the sound mix, making prints suitable for screening, etc.

The computer is a “monomedium” with which all steps of an audiovisual production can be done. Depending on the possibilities available this can range from creating images and sounds as well as editing and rearranging them, producing optical and acoustic special effects and diverse sound mixes all the way to preserving the results in archives, inasmuch as these will at all still be necessary in the future. The Polish film alchemist, inventor and director Zbigniev Rybczynski has been working for two decades on the development of this kind of production method, which is related to the classical studio, and after sojourns in Berlin and Cologne has now created in Los Angeles the most important foundations for self-sufficient filmmaking at a high productional and aesthetic level. Other artists, such as Heinz Emigholz in Berlin, are specifically using classical cinematographic technology again for his films and are focusing the use of digital storage, supervisory and controlling technology particularly on pre- and post-production as well as distribution. His last film about the buildings of the architect Bruce Goff, who was forced from his university position and from the public consciousness (from Emigholz’s extensive series Fotografie und Jenseits), has not only found an audience in the cinema but is also available worldwide on DVD. The former director of the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Simon Fields, is currently developing together with Keith Griffiths a project in which the possibilities of digital production and distribution are to be explored with directors of the avant-garde of international cinema.

In contrast, the Sisyphean task of, for example, Timothee Ingen-Housz is indeed an experimental miniature. But it demonstrates self-confidently that the extremely individual method of production can be artistically attractive and also make sense. That the film Wanderlost is also humorous and appears with an air of (self-)irony distinguishes this method from the often just strenuous comparable attempts used in making material films. The presumably thousands of hours spent working on the electronic details of individual pixels and frames cannot be endured without unrepressed laughter, which is true for the artist as well as for the audience. The flashy and absurd electronic idiolatries of Björn Melhus are fortunately again a prominent part of the package.

Time-image-sound: Even the earlier avant-gardists were characterised by an interplay between the graphic and language arts, on the one hand, and music, the time-based art par excellence, on the other. Walther Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, the collaboration of René Clair and Francis Picabia, the choreographic compositions of Maya Derens or the cooperative projects between John Cage and Nam June Paik are just a few outstanding examples.

For the current generation of audiovisual artists the intertwining of music and images has become a natural starting point and working principle. This generation has grown up together with the two time-based forms in art, photography and videography, which in terms of time and sounds only exist in duration. They work with machines with which images and sounds are created using the same algorithmic language. They present their work in contexts which visitors go into, because these observers enjoy seeing pictures as much as they enjoy listening to music, or rather because they hardly differentiate any longer between these two practical transpositions of symbols. It is all about rhythms, waves, movements, melodies, harmonies and cacatopias by means of which the world is experienced sensuously and rationally. The collaboration between Kirsten Winter and Simon Stockhausen or Herwig Weiser and Felix Höfler, for instance, is more than just an attestation to the mutual listening and looking of inveterate picture-people and sound-people. These are examples of profoundly synergetic productions, about which the most important thing is no longer the division of labour in the creation of a work but rather the joint development of an impression that with the same rights and intensities can be listened to as well as looked at. In more frequently occurring strokes of luck the relevant artistic sensibilities are combined in one single individual and have resulted in—in the truest sense of the word—congenial works, such as Corinna Schnitt and her Schlafendes Mädchen (A Maid Asleep), in Egbert Mittelstädt’s video Elsewhere, in which the artist not only shot the scenes in Tokyo’s underground but also played the wonderfully delirious sounds of the film on the guitar, or in Persuaders, in which Peter Simon seductively composed the pictures as well as the sounds on the computer.

After decades of working through cinematic structures and materials the artistic experiment can finally allow itself something that for a long time was frowned upon: an unconditional “praise of superficiality”, which is absolutely in the spirit of the famous text of the same title written by Vilém Flusser, the media philosopher from Prague. This move should not be confused with the superficial treatment of the profound dimensions of the world, as they are presented to us every day by the cultural water taps of the television stations. Quite the contrary, the more the conventional picture-creators avoid the task of respectfully celebrating the visual attractiveness of the experienceable world, the more it becomes a refuge of the experimental film and video to fill them with courage and intensity. Matthias Müller and Christoph Giradet’s Beacon is this kind of a praise of superficiality. Every scene, every shot, that they discovered and constructed about the visible world seems like the face of the other, and the two artists invite us to observe this face with contemplation. The most important means available to filmmakers to express respect for what can be seen is the time they devote to the things and processes they capture with the camera.

The time referred to here is the same time we experience as a gift when we get to see something we think is sensational: the archaic forms of making pictures in the everyday life in a large Indian city filmed by Thomas Bartels; Caspar Stracke’s brilliant visual discourse about the vertical lines of Manhattan, which at the same time is a subtle disquisition on power; Jürgen Reble’s ars magna lucis & umbrae, his unconventional great art of light & shadow using as an example the images he found of the most recent part of the earth to be discovered by man and which is now so mercilessly being put under ecological pressure by the modern variation of civilisation…


IV.
These are only a few aspects of the special practical values of this flickering and sounding package of energy from the laboratories of the Federal Republic of Germany. The production costs that went into putting together this package fall well below those required to make a single feature film for the international film market, the vanity fair of exchange values. What wealth of ideas, poetry, irritations and reflections on the present condition of our audiovisual culture are we capable of gaining from these—as a rule—self-exploitative experiments! Let us defend the culture of experimentation precisely at a time in which it is considered by many to be superfluous. It is a generous and wasteful culture, but one that is absolutely indispensable for our media sustenance and survival.

Around 1970 the French painter and philosopher Pierre Klossowski, who as a writer became famous with his trilogy on the laws of hospitality, wrote a remarkable book on economics, which was not published until the 90s. In it he reverses the clamour of the cultural pessimists about the capitalisation and thus also the mechanisation of the individual’s body by referring to it as an object of exchange, as a Living Coin (the title of his little book). Freed from the immediate and purposeful constraints of reproduction, the body conceived of in this way can become a master over its actions. In his book on economics Kossowski ascribes a special significance to the experiment. The manufacture of things is, he writes, confronted again and again with its “occasional infertility”. This appears “even more clearly as the accelerated rhythm of production unremittingly forces it to prevent inefficiency (in the products)—against which it has no recourse at its disposal other than wastefulness. Experimentation, which precedes efficiency as a condition, presupposes wasteful errors. Trying out experimentally what is producible with a view to a profitable operation essentially means eliminating the risk of infertility of the product at the price of wasting material and human energy (productions costs).”

The hospitality that this luxurious gift put together by the Goethe-Institut will experience in the world is the most wonderful acknowledgement of the wasteful work done by the artists. I wish the Living Coins of this “Film and Video Package” a lot of success, and I hope it will lead to many lively discussions.


Siegfried Zielinski, São Paulo & Cologne, November 2004
Barthes, Roland, “On Leaving a Movie Theatre”(1975), trans. Richard Howard, in Barthes, The Rustle of Language trans Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986): 345-349
Published in argos edition, Brussels, distributed by Walther König, Cologne, October 2004.