After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation

Given that the moving image is founded in an economy of the multiple, what does it mean to speak of a “unique film”? Daniel Pennac’s comic novel Monsieur Malaussène (1997) orbits just such an object. Near the beginning of the book, the reader is introduced to a mysterious film made by Job Bernardin and Liesel Fraenkhel, a married couple. The pair made the film secretly over the course of sixty-five years with the intention that it would be projected only once, following their deaths, for a dozen handpicked spectators—a meaningful number, indeed. They envisioned that after the lone projection the print and its negative would be publicly destroyed. “Only one unique projection for the Unique Film,” says Julie Corrençon, the woman tasked with organizing the screening. “An event doesn’t repeat itself. I had Job drum that into me all throughout my childhood.”¹

If the moving image is often understood in relation to its ability to circulate through the act of copying, here one encounters a denial of this possibility, a stark refusal of reproducibility that goes beyond even the rarity of the limited edition. Whereas the editioning model proposes that the moving image attain near uniqueness for financial and institutional reasons, here one finds an absolute singularity achieved out of artistic and conceptual motivations. The refusal of circulation is not incidental, something necessary to make the work amenable to institutional or market protocols, but absolutely intrinsic. There are, of course, numerous precedents in the history of art of works purposefully rendered inaccessible or made to be ephemeral. (Not incidentally, it is often through film or video documentation that such works encounter a broader public.) When a performance artist like Tino Sehgal forbids the production of catalogues, photographs, or video documentation of his work, he may be understood as pursuing the telos of the medium of performance, provided that one conceives of it as grounded in an ontology of disappearance and ephemerality.2 Such a gesture, however, signifies very differently when working with the moving image, as it constitutes a major shift away from the historical alignment of film and video art with access and circulation, and a departure from their founding in an economy of the multiple. Whereas Sehgal’s stance arguably exploits the specific attributes of performance, when an artist working with the moving image refuses reproduction, he or she is actively suppressing a key attribute of the medium—at least as it is commonly understood.

It would be easy to assume that Pennac’s Unique Film is but a novelistic invention, purely the stuff of fiction, and that no real filmmaker would spend so much time working on something that would be seen by so few and only once. But in fact experimental film and artists’ moving image are littered with projects that annul or at least compromise the medium’s ability to circulate widely. Many artists and filmmakers working outside of the limited-edition model impose restrictions on the distribution and exhibition of their work that make it difficult to access, whether purposefully or as the by-product of an objective valued more highly than circulation. Sometimes the reasons behind this have to do with preserving the integrity of the primary aesthetic experience. A filmmaker might insist on being present at all screenings, refuse to allow a work produced on photochemical film to be exhibited via digital formats, or decide to produce no further prints of a work after its original film stock is discontinued. Or, a work might be seldom exhibited owing to difficult technical requirements, such as the use of multiple projectors or the employment of performative elements (such as live sound, bodily presence, or manipulation of the projector or image). There are also more idiosyncratic requirements: the screening must begin at dawn (David Larcher); the work can take place only in a single, remote location (Robert Smithson, Gregory Markopoulos, Melik Ohanian); a cycle of films must be exhibited according to a precise calendar (Hollis Frampton); the film must be remade each time it is shown in a new location (Morgan Fisher, William Raban).3 In all these cases, although the precise motivations may differ, one encounters a willingness to engage in an at least partial suppression of the moving image’s reproducibility, with the result that the moment of exhibition takes on the character of a special event marked by a sense of liveness.

Such strategies push back against the investment in access evinced by many artists and filmmakers and are particularly notable when considered in relation to a contemporary visual culture predicated on the simultaneous dream and nightmare of perpetually available images circulating freely across numerous formats and exhibition situations. In many recent cases, but not all, artists pursue these strategies in conjunction with a turn to photochemical film, finding in it a medium now less aligned with circulation than it once was. Gestures like these intervene into standard scenarios of circulation and exhibition and make these processes—normally occurring after the “release” from the author—into an integral part of the work’s conceptual framework, thereby rethinking how one might rightly draw a line between what counts as text and what counts as context. In positing cinema as event, such projects assert a viewer experience grounded in a face-to-face public encounter with a work in its original format, often one using strategies that would be difficult or even impossible to reproduce in a domestic viewing situation and that may vary from one iteration of the piece to the next.

This chapter will explore the relationship between the moving image and singularity through the interrogation of a term that might at first seem like an oxymoron: live cinema. The liveness of cinema might be found in a filmmaker’s presence at screenings; in performative practices that use live narration, live musical accompaniment, and/or manipulations of the projection apparatus; or in the imposition of unusual screening conditions such as those mentioned above, which endow the moment of exhibition with the sense of a departure from the ordinary. This chapter will examine these paradigms through a case study of a provocation nearly equal to the Unique Film imagined in Monsieur Malaussène: Paolo Cherchi Usai’s Passio (2006). Although reduced possibilities of circulation are sometimes a by-product rather than an express objective of works privileging the event, in Passio one encounters a quite purposeful intent to remain outside the domain of widespread accessibility. Finitude and filmic obsolescence loom large in this monumental undertaking, profoundly entangling its investment in singularity with a rejection of digital replication and circulation. Amid proliferating copies and “poor images,” Passio opts for uniqueness and authenticity. In the process it illuminates how conceiving of cinema qua event functions at once as an admission of variability and as the site of a reinscription of authorial control—conditions that might seem opposed but that join together in their shared departure from the standardization and dissemination that characterize the regime of reproduction. Through a consideration of Passio, I will suggest that liveness is not simply a quality possessed by a handful of unusual examples but can in fact function as a critical method by which one can approach any moving image work. Reconceiving of cinema as a performing art, I will question whether the moving image is indeed an art of the multiple after all.

Made with the participation of eleven film archives around the world, Passio is a 35 mm found-footage work projected with a live performance of Arvo Pärt’s 1982 passion cantata, Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secondum Joannem. The piece requires a solo baritone, a solo tenor, a vocal quartet, and a choir of twelve to fifteen vocalists, accompanied by an organ, violin, cello, and bassoon. Cherchi Usai destroyed the original negative after the creation of seven numbered prints, even making a video that shows him taking to the negative with an axe to prove that the event took place. These prints were then hand-colored, each in a different hue: ruby, violet, indigo, magenta, vermillion, minium, and gold. Six were deposited at film archives around the world; a seventh remains in Cherchi Usai’s possession.5

Cherchi Usai has explained his use of live music in Passio as resulting from the fact that the film “requires a human presence,” but the particular choice of a piece that thematizes the last days of Christ—a time of suffering that prepares the way for redemption—also has significant resonances for the medium of film in an age of obsolescence.⁶ At the beginning of the seventy-four-minute film a credit appears onscreen: “This is print 7 of 7.” At the end another reads, “This film was produced on Eastman Kodak 35mm motion picture film stock and edited with manual equipment.” Issued in a limited edition, edited by hand, colored by hand, and accompanied live: all aspects of the film work together to surround it with the singularity of human presence and thereby distance it from forms of reproduction engaged in the proliferation of identical copies that circulate widely. Cherchi Usai returns to techniques of filmmaking used before the automation of color processes and the development of online editing. In this regard one might say he returns to the older within the old: he looks to techniques that are outmoded even within photochemical filmmaking, itself an anachronism in a digital age.

In Passio the access-to-quality ratio is weighted overwhelmingly in favor of the latter. Cherchi Usai rejects the capacity for reproduction that has long been considered a central feature of film and proposes instead that film is a medium of singularity. Cherchi Usai’s cultivation of rarity occurs not out of a need to render the work fungible on the art market but instead out of a desire to advance the proposition that photochemical film is aligned with the authenticity, uniqueness, and frailty of the human over and above the mechanical sameness of the machine, that it is an evanescent performative event rather than a repeatable object. The proposition that film must leave behind its machinic deadness in order to be able to confront its finitude, to first be allied with life so as to then be able to die, is borne out in the particular images Cherchi Usai culls from archives worldwide and redeploys in his film. Unlike Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002), which is composed of images selected for the aesthetic interest of the decay they manifest, Cherchi Usai chooses images of relatively pristine quality. Their integrity is reinforced by the formal decision to separate them from each other by stretches of black leader to emphasize that they are to be beheld in their uncontaminated purity—something that notably also occurs in Gregory Markopoulos’s Eniaios (c. 1947–91), the eighty-hour site-specific film cycle that I will discuss in the next chapter.

Passio’s images fall into four general categories: depictions of the process of filmmaking and the display of the materials and machinery of film; images of nature; abstract animation; and images of bodies drawn mostly from medical and educational films. Taken together, they can be seen to set forth a series of propositions concerning the status of photochemical film in the digital age. The recurring images of the material basis of photochemical film and the processes involved in its manufacture and use are perhaps Passio’s most obvious gesture toward advancing a thesis concerning filmic obsolescence. Near the beginning, when a hand takes a reel of film out of a canister, or later, when emulsion is scratched off of a filmstrip, the claim for the palpable tactility of the film medium is clear. Film not only makes the world visible but is itself visible and tangible to us in a way that computer technologies are not. Images of leaves, waves, and fighting beetles evoke the romantic association of authenticity with nature. A relation of analogy is proposed, whereby film’s own status as animate and organic is emphasized through repeated recourse to images of the natural world. These images also summon a consideration of the revelatory power film derives from its indexical dimension, from the fact that its images are produced through a form of direct contact with the world—contact that is lost in computer-generated images and attenuated when digital images are subject to painterly manipulation. Cherchi Usai underlines the automatic analogical causation of the image, putting Passio in league with the many other artistic and film-theoretical discourses of the early twenty-first century that focalize discussions of obsolescence through the concept of indexicality.7 The abstract animation, meanwhile, emphasizes the plasmatic plasticity of the film image, the pure pleasure taken in the motion that endows film with a vivacity unknown to photography. Finally, the many images of frail and anguished bodies once again move into the domain of medium-specific analogy. From the first image of an emaciated body with limbs spread in a star formation, through an examination of scars and seizures, Cherchi Usai proposes a metaphorical equivalence between body and film: a film is, like a body, a mortal and material thing subject to aging and gradual degradation. Like a body, it will die (figures 6.1 and 6.2).

Cherchi Usai describes his project very specifically using this corporeal metaphor. When asked why he destroyed the negative and chose to produce only seven copies of the film, he responded, “When a child is born, you don’t keep the umbilical cord and you don’t keep the placenta. Why would I clone a child?”8 What does it mean to claim humanity for film in this way? Or, if not to claim humanity per se, to at least understand the filmic medium as more allied with the human than with the machine, more tied to individual uniqueness than to the identical replications of cloning? As we saw in chapter 1, at the threshold of the twentieth century An Artist’s Dream and The Artist’s Dilemma dramatized the tension between artist and machine, definitively locating film on the side of the latter. The reproductive powers of the filmic medium were seen to threaten the livelihood of the artist, to render him obsolete. Passio retains the same epistemological framework as the Edison films, working within a firm binary that sees new technology not as a prosthesis of humankind but as a potential threat to the very humanity of the human. In both the Edison shorts and Passio one witnesses the same phobia of reproducibility—it is simply that the place of film within this matrix has shifted. As an obsolescent medium film has moved from the side of ubiquity and reproducibility to the side of rarity. Leaving behind the regime of the copy allows film to gain access to the domain it had once opposed: authenticity.

In his landmark “Work of Art” essay Walter Benjamin wrote, “From a photographic plate, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ [echten] print makes no sense.”9 Here, as in most of its theorizations, authenticity is set against reproducibility. The assumption is that some form of limited availability is a necessary condition for authenticity; the possibility of a theoretically infinite number of copies casts film and photography into the domain of inauthenticity. Benjamin wrote at a time when there was a reasonable expectation that the capacity for reproduction inherent in photographic media would be actualized without restriction. Today, however, the situation appears rather different: contrary to Benjamin’s statement, to ask for an “authentic print” makes very much sense, indeed. To take an extreme position, one might say that “authentic print” is no longer a contradiction in terms but rather a pleonasm, as in an age of analog obsolescence photochemical film is frequently thought of as an authentic original in comparison with a digital copy. The locus of the moving image’s inauthenticity has shifted away from the existence of multiple prints and toward the act of transcoding, which is seen by some as a betrayal of the specificity and historicity of analog film. Crucially, photochemical film is not just older than digital video but rarer, too. Although it remains possible in theory to make any number of copies of a film, the capacity to do so is less and less actualized and appears feeble next to that of digital technologies. The reproducibility of film is not just dwarfed by that of electronic media but, in fact, reduced in comparison with the predigital era, as it has become increasingly difficult to source and process stock and to exhibit the finished product. Fewer prints are made, and those that are in existence circulate less freely owing to the decreasing number of exhibition spaces equipped for projection in 16 or 35 mm. Today, to see a film made on film and exhibited on film has taken on the character of a special event, marked out as an encounter with an original.

Whereas Kracauer wrote in 1927 that “the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory,”¹⁰ now the photochemical image is more likely to be aligned with humanity and memory, while the digital image is described using viral metaphors that signal its ability to replicate, as if it possessed an uncontrollable, infectious, and inhuman animus. As W. J. T. Mitchell has noted, one often encounters the notion of a “plague” of digital images, of “self-generating, virulent entities that threaten, not just traditional photography, but traditional forms of life itself.”¹¹ Such discourses are not new, but persistent echoes of a long-standing unease surrounding new forms of reproduction. Corporeal metaphors and the rhetoric of host and invading pathogen speak of nothing other than the endurance of the nineteenth-century articulation of authenticity as a moral ideal connecting subject to object. The authentic image is spoken of as a body among others, endowed with qualities of subjecthood that bring it into a relationship with the self that is proximate and intimate, as if the two might share in communion. Meanwhile, the inauthentic image is cast as an invading threat, one to guard against lest the body’s fragile membranes be penetrated. As a new reservoir of authenticity, photochemical film is now thought to promise a healing form of mimetic transfer to its viewers: the return of a lost wholeness, the escape from a rationalized existence. This situation highlights the need to conceive of “new media” and “old media” as relational categories rather than fixed essences, and signals the extent to which our understandings of media are culturally and discursively determined rather than dictated solely by material or ontological characteristics. As digital media has usurped film’s place as the exemplary inauthentic image, the algorithmic image is both feared for its supposed machinic deadness and inorganic calculability as well as prized for its promises of access and circulation—just as film had been some one hundred years before.

Passio goes even further than many other works engaging with photochemical film as an obsolescent material by ensuring that its every aspect—editing, coloring, soundtrack—is marked by a human presence and unable to be duplicated by a machine. In so insistently reconfiguring film’s relationship to reproducibility, Passio rejects the notion that authenticity is an essence and instead understands authenticity as a relational effect. For Benjamin authenticity is always positional, deeply imbricated in the shifting temporalities of old and new media and existing in multiple varieties and intensities. In a footnote to the third version of the “Work of Art” essay he posits the passage of time and the appearance of new technologies of reproduction as central to the production of authenticity where none had existed before: “Precisely because authenticity is not reproducible, the intensive penetration of certain (technological) processes of reproduction was instrumental in differentiating and gradating authenticity…. To be sure, a medieval picture of the Madonna at the time it was created could not yet be said to be ‘authentic.’ It became ‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries, and perhaps most strikingly so during the nineteenth.”12 Authenticity comes into view as an accumulative temporality that breaks with that of the present. Benjamin may have emphasized that the aura of the work of art withers in the age of mechanical reproduction, but as this quote demonstrates, he acknowledged that it simultaneously flourishes as well. Amid a qualitative change in the transportability of images and sounds, authenticity takes form as a criterion of value, elevating selected objects and experiences over and against an ever-shifting ground of debased copies. As Benjamin notes, this happened in a striking manner in the nineteenth century; it has recurred at the dawn of the twenty-first. Photochemical film has shifted from an alliance with reproducibility, circulation, and the machine, to now forge associations with authenticity, rarity, and the human. Like perhaps no other object, Passio foregrounds this new understanding of the medium.

In what might seem like a curious statement to come from a film archivist, Cherchi Usai has said, “Film was never meant to be permanent. Film was born as something ephemeral. I consider film more as a performing art than an art of reproduction.”13 The claim that Passio’s images make for the life of film itself—for the medium as having a life cycle, one that is perhaps nearing its end—is buttressed by the work’s emphasis on the performative dimension of cinematic projection. Given the limited number of prints and the difficulty and cost of organizing the required musical accompaniment, a screening of Passio participates not in the economy of reproduction but rather in the economy of the special event marked by liveness.

In his 1999 book, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander speculates, “Any change in the near future is likely to be toward a further diminution of the symbolic capital associated with live events.”¹⁴ This, however, does not appear to be the case. In the wake of the digitization of everyday life, there has been a marked increase in the symbolic capital associated with the live event, even while its financial capital may be significantly less than that associated with the economy of reproduction. This has been particularly evident in contemporary art, where a vogue for performance art and other forms of event-based spectacle—such as Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), for which museums around the world staged twenty-four-hour screenings and visitors queued for hours—has arisen precisely in tandem with the explosion of ubiquitous computing. In his discussion of the transformation of the cinematic experience after digitization, Francesco Casetti observes a shift from a culture of film “attendance”—the collective ritual of moviegoing—to one of “performance,” a situation in which viewers customize their own viewing experiences, often in a domestic setting.¹⁵ One might appropriate Casetti’s vocabulary and move in a slightly different direction to agree that while film “attendance” as a regularized, quotidian activity has indeed waned, film “performance” has gained ground not only as spectators interact with the “frangible” text of home viewing¹⁶ but also as they encounter film events that have perhaps more in common with performances of dance or music than they do with cinematic exhibition as understood in decades past. These are events that puncture the repetitive nature of habit and demarcate a particular duration of time spent in public as somehow exceptional or extraordinary, generally through the incorporation of elements either inassimilable or poorly assimilable to digital delivery. Such events range from avant-garde to mainstream: rare prints, musical accompaniments, filmmaker appearances, shadowcasts, sing-alongs, projector performances, marathon screenings, question-and-answer discussions, and lecture-performances all offer unreproducible experiences that insist on the allure of liveness.

It might seem strange to insist on the live event as standing in opposition to habitual media consumption; after all, contemporary media are in some sense more live than ever before, possessing as they do the numbing urgency of real-time communication. But liveness today is bifurcated. The dominant experience of liveness can be understood as a perpetual now of near-instantaneous access that depends above all on the extreme velocity of data and tends to be characterized by the physical separation of those involved. In reaction to this regime another form of liveness has emerged, one predicated on a desire to withdraw from circulation networks and insist instead on the locatedness and collectivity of an event that will remain largely outside of reproducibility, entering digital circuits of dissemination if at all only through secondary forms of documentation clearly legible as such. Here one finds the alliance between liveness, authenticity, and performance that is so central to Passio.

The very notion of live performance is a retronym, emerging only after the advent of recorded performance. And yet liveness and the rejection of reproduction have come to define the ontology of performance as it is commonly understood. Peggy Phelan has very influentially defined performance as something that “cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations,” adding, “to the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.”17 Performance, however, is always already implicated in the economy of reproduction. The very desire for the ephemerality of the performative event emerges precisely out of pervasive repetition and circulation; what “cannot be saved” becomes a locus of cultural value only when so much can be saved, revisited, repeated. The appeal of live performance stems from its dialectical negation of the cultural dominant. It thus should not be understood as the site of a pure essence that might be compromised by reproduction but rather as something possessing a value that is relationally produced precisely in tandem with reproduction. The operation that supposedly contaminates performance’s ontology of presence is in fact its ground.

In this regard it is particularly interesting to consider the status of liveness in relation to a reproducible medium such as film. Initially, “live cinema” might sound like a contradiction in terms. After all, liveness tends to be thought of as a quality of broadcast television and the Internet much more than of cinema; when watching a film, the spectator encounters an already-completed work that exists within an economy of the multiple as a copy without original. But to view cinema solely as a medium of recorded reproducibility is to take an exceedingly narrow view of film history, one that excludes the diverse exhibition practices of early cinema and the avant-garde, to say nothing of the forms of participatory spectatorship proper to cult films such as Showgirls (1995), The Room (2009), and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Similarly, the rich tradition of expanded cinema performance has often depended on live manipulation of the apparatus, transforming cinema into a performing art.

In a footnote Auslander makes an intriguing proposition regarding how such performative uses of media technologies might successfully respond to the deconstructionist critique of Phelan: “I would like to suggest in passing that in the context of a mediatized, repetitive economy, using the technology of reproduction in ways that defy that economy may be a more significantly oppositional gesture than asserting the value of the live.”18 This is precisely what one encounters in Passio, which remains anchored in a medium of the copy while engaging in a multifaceted suppression of the reproducibility of the moving image. Cherchi Usai ensures that each performance of the film will be different and would lose something if an attempt was made to record or otherwise document it. As such, he does not reiterate the untenable claim that the ontology of performance is to be found in pure presence; rather, he demonstrates the tension between iteration and singularity that is at stake in the cinematic event. Film performances such as Passio do not posit uniqueness as a pure origin that would then be compromised by a fall into an economy of repetition but instead suggest that singularity is produced precisely out of the difference generated through the repetition of a given notation—which in this case consists of both the musical notation of Pärt’s cantata and the filmic notation of the filmstrip.

This defiance of the economy of repetition from within has important ramifications for Phelan’s theory of performance. For Phelan the liveness of performance is derived not simply from the present-tense temporality of the event but from the existential presence of the performer’s body and the unavoidable recognition that this body is, like performance itself, ultimately ephemeral. As she writes in Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, “It may well be that theater and performance respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and especially for death.”19 The specificity of the experience of performance involves sharing space and time with these living and dying bodies. The integrality of the body is, to return to Phelan’s definition of performance, precisely what “cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations” without undergoing reduction or loss. In Passio, as I have noted, mortality is also clearly at stake; however, here this mortality is that of a humanized technology rather than that of the human proper. The presence of the musicians in the auditorium does, of course, allow Passio to qualify as performance in Phelan’s sense. But given that Passio’s recognition of finitude is so clearly tied to film itself more than to the musicians, Cherchi Usai’s cinematic event prompts a revision of Phelan’s ideas to encompass a situation in which the singularity of performance is located not simply in the frailty of the human body but equally in our encounter with a nonhuman agent once thought to be stable but now acknowledged as precarious—the filmic apparatus.

Film and video may be reproducible media, but, as we are told in Monsieur Malaussène, an event doesn’t repeat itself. Job’s plan for the Unique Film stemmed from his belief that the essence of a film lies in the memory one takes away after a screening rather than in its material existence as filmstrip. This conviction meant that he never saw a film a second time.²⁰ But according to another logic, one might retain Job’s emphasis on cinema as experience rather than object while finding no aversion to viewing a particular film over and over again. This line of thinking departs from Job’s own words: cinematic projection is an event, and precisely because an event doesn’t repeat itself, each screening will be marked by difference.

When authors release a work to the public, they always relinquish a certain degree of authority. The process of dissemination will unavoidably produce new meanings, as the work undergoes dispersal and drift beyond the author’s intention. The author sends the text out into the world, but that text does not necessarily always return to the author. Dissemination is thus fundamentally a production of difference that not only coexists with but feeds off of the sameness that results from the machinic production of copies as a major attribute of the economy of reproduction. Certainly, this is a process that can occur with unique works as well, but perhaps not to the same extent as it does with copies that accumulate new and unforeseen meanings throughout the course of their more extensive, less supervised travels. The moving image is especially subject to such drift because of its status as a two-stage form that requires a performative enactment in order to be realized, something that most often takes place in the absence of the author under variable conditions, with the result that the work as encountered by one viewer may possess significant objective differences from the work as encountered by another.

In the vocabulary of Nelson Goodman, cinema is in this regard an allographic art—that is, like music and theater, it is actualized by someone other than the author, by another creative agency acting based on a preset notation. In Goodman’s view all that is required to create a successful presentation of an allographic work is “correct spelling.”21 In the case of film this would involve a host of agents both human and nonhuman, including the architecture, the projector, the filmstrip, and the staff of the exhibition venue. To use the wrong lens or matte the screen in the wrong aspect ratio would constitute an orthographic error. But even within a “correct spelling,” significant variations will inevitably occur, rendering allographic works particularly open to difference, fluctuation, and modification even as they remain themselves. They are, in other words, non-self-identical from the very start.

Goodman sets allographic forms against autographic forms, such as painting, which are realized fully by their makers. This means that even “the most exact duplication of [an autographic work] does not thereby count as genuine” and would be considered a forgery.22 By contrast, one can copy a script, a musical score, or a film print and remain firmly within the domain of the genuine. Reproducibility is thus at the heart of the allographic/autographic distinction. Crucially, though, it is not a simple matter of aligning the allographic with the multiple and the autographic with the singular. The non-self-identity of the allographic arts guarantees that they, too, possess a relationship to uniqueness, albeit one that differs in character from that of the autographic arts. One might be able to copy a notation without entering into the realm of forgery, but one can never exactly duplicate the performance that results from it. The Unique Film would remain unique even if shown again. Considered in this way—as performance—the moving image ceases to belong solely to the economy of the multiple and begins to manifest an affinity with the singular as well. To insist on the reproducibility of the moving image is to consider it as material rather than as experience. The moment one shifts to a consideration of cinema as event, singularity comes to the fore. As such, those artists and filmmakers who suppress reproducibility in favor of the uniqueness of the event may be understood not simply as suppressing a key attribute of their medium—its ability to circulate—but rather as exploring a different, but no less important, attribute of the moving image: the liveness of the viewer’s encounter with it.

To understand cinema as an allographic art is to insist that the work is not found in the filmstrip or digital file alone—this is simply a part of its notation—but rather in what is experienced during the duration of a projection. Critic Ed Halter has put it simply: “Cinema’s an event, not an object.”²³ Filmmaker Ben Russell took up a similar view in a 2013 top-ten list he compiled for Senses of Cinema. Asked to list his best films of the year, Russell instead chose his top-ten “projections,” explaining, “My experience of cinema is increasingly tethered to both the physical space and the material transmission of the medium…. Timing is everything, space is the place!”²⁴ In ceasing to view cinema as object, one opens up what can be thought to be part of the work to a substantial degree. For Russell, for example, the strength of his experience of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s The Last Judgment (2013) was in part the result of seeing it projected on the ceiling of a former crematorium in Berlin; he felt Spring Breakers (2012), meanwhile, was enhanced by “an audience of screaming Selena Gomez fans” in Paris. In conceiving of the event of projection, one is no longer restricted to the consideration of an inert, autonomous text but rather can begin to ponder all that occurs during the time of exhibition, as well as all that may change from one instantiation to the next. Rick Altman suggested such an approach already in 1992’s Sound Theory, Sound Practice, where he argued that understanding cinema as an event would highlight attributes such as “multiplicity, three-dimensionality, materiality, heterogeneity, intersection, performance, multi-discursivity, instability, mediation, choice, diffusion, and interchange.”²⁵

This becomes particularly important today, as exhibition situations become increasingly varied and practices of versioning are widespread. If the text ever was an autonomous, stable entity, it isn’t anymore. Moreover, this approach provides a greater opportunity to account for the nonstandardized exhibition practices that are long-standing in experimental film and virtually the norm in artists’ moving image. Experimental cinema, for instance, has a long tradition of filmmaker attendance at screenings, constituting a form of liveness that may drastically influence a spectator’s experience of the work. In 1973 the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh began to publish the “Film and Video Makers Travel Sheet” to “encourage and facilitate the wider use of exhibition and lecture tours.”26 The document listed existing travel plans and institutional contact information, with the hope that filmmakers and institutions could use the information to flesh out their itineraries with further dates. Not only were such engagements an important means by which filmmakers might earn an income,²⁷ but they served to significantly differentiate experimental film screenings from those of industrial cinema. The presence of the filmmaker demarcates the screening as event and endows the mechanically reproducible medium of film with a human presence, while also providing the filmmaker an opportunity to assert the primacy of his or her own discourse as a means of approaching the work. Conceiving of cinema as event allows one to consider the impact of such in-person appearances on the apprehension of a particular film.

In artists’ moving image the event-based approach allows for a consideration of the similar phenomena of artists’ talks and gallery tours, while also supplying a means of accounting for the fact that the moving image installation possesses no single standardized apparatus; on the contrary, each artist invents his or her own configuration of the apparatus with each work. From a methodological point of view this means that the mode of display can never be taken for granted; scholars must instead take care to combine a consideration of what appears onscreen with how that screen appears within a surrounding space, which might include the presence of other artworks or variable architectural components. In the case of Passio the event-based approach would allow for a consideration of the impact of the audience’s knowledge that they are seeing one of seven prints in existence and the only print in that particular color. It would also allow for an account of changing situations of live accompaniment and—crucially, for reasons that will be elaborated shortly—print condition.

According to Goodman, allographic arts have two distinct types of properties: constitutive properties that form an essential and unchanging part of the work’s notation and contingent properties that are subject to variability across that work’s various enactments.28 Considering cinema as event involves conceptualizing where the border between the constitutive and the contingent might be said to lie. It demands a description of how the work’s contingent properties change over time and an account of how they impact its constitutive properties. Though Goodman’s discussion suggests a fixed division between the constitutive and the contingent within a given art form, the example of the moving image—with all of the heterogeneous parts that form the dispositif—reveals that the designation of these properties can in fact shift from one work to the next. Industrial cinema tends to draw a firm line between the constitutive and the contingent, but in experimental film and artists’ moving image the boundary between them can vary tremendously. For some artists, attributes such as the celluloid substrate or a large-scale image are merely contingent factors, meaning that the work can be exhibited on a small, digital screen while remaining “itself.” For others, such factors may be deemed absolutely constitutive, with any betrayal of them resulting in a degraded experience in which one sees not the work itself but rather a “viewing copy.” As a part of the process of creation, artists and filmmakers legislate which properties of their work will fall into which category—although there is no guarantee that such distinctions will necessarily be respected. In addition to such authorial decisions, spectators also create their own distinctions between these categories, with some espousing what David Denby has termed “platform agnosticism” and others insisting that they have not truly seen the film until they have seen it in its ideal exhibition situation.²⁹

Thinking cinema as an allographic art means admitting a lack of authorial control stemming from the centrality of contingent properties to the overall experience of the work, even when all constitutive properties are respected. But conceiving of cinema as event can equally enable a move in the opposite direction. Rather than an admission of heterogeneity and variability, the event can equally become the site of a reinscription of authority. This might occur through the presence of the filmmaker, as noted above, whose discourse could serve as a primary means of interpretation, tamping down the possibility of semiotic dissemination. Though forms of projector performance as practiced by artists such as Sandra Gibson/Luis Recoder, Ken Jacobs, or Bruce McClure place the unforeseeability of the event at the core of the work’s meaning and experience, such practices are equally the site of tremendous authorial control, as the artist’s presence is in most cases a constitutive property of the work. Or, the event may enable an assertion of authority through the articulation of a conceptual premise key to the work. For example, Melik Ohanian’s Invisible Film (2005) is a site-specific, screenless projection of Punishment Park (1971) that takes place in the California desert where the Peter Watkins film is set. In this case the normally contingent property of the geographical location of a screening is transformed into a constitutive part of the work by the will of the artist. The cinematic event, then, is the locus of both increased self-difference and augmented authorial sovereignty. It is where text dissolves into context and where close to every detail of that context may be made available for specification, effectively recuperating it as part of the text. It sees reproducible media become singular, though in a manner wholly different from the contractually regulated scarcity of the limited edition.

Generally speaking, the aim in executing a performance of an allographic art in the age of mechanical reproduction is to create a standardized experience that conforms as closely as possible to industrial and authorial intentions. In the case of music Jacques Attali has described this as the paradigm of repeating, which he sees as dominating music from roughly 1900 to the present. Attali writes that within this paradigm the goal of public performance is to become a simulacrum of the record.30 What one encounters here is a quashing of variability, something that has been a keystone of mainstream cinematic exhibition since the 1910s and may be more generally aligned with a Fordist model of production. To put this in Goodman’s terms, in this paradigm, although contingent properties will always exist, ideally their impact on the viewer’s experience of the work is minimized. Quite differently, in the case of Passio, there is no “original” to which any given projection can aspire given how many contingencies are admitted into the performance. Although the degree of authorial control over the work is immense, Passio rejects the very notion of repetition and returns instead to what Attali terms the paradigm of representing, something that he sees as governing music between the period of roughly 1500 and 1900. Here, the notation remains constant, but value is generated from the contingencies of the performance, and variability is the norm.³¹

This variability stems in part from the live musical accompaniment and the hand-coloring but, perhaps more importantly, is generated from Cherchi Usai’s decision to destroy the film’s negative. With only seven numbered prints in existence Passio begs comparison to the limited-edition model of distribution that is proper to the art market. But despite sharing with this model a rejection of filmic reproducibility, Passio differs from it in a crucial respect. As we saw in the previous chapter, the limited-edition model resolved a problem that had prevented film from being collected by museums: every time a print is projected, it is subject to wear and tear. The editioning model overcomes this obstacle by selling the collector an internegative from which fresh exhibition copies may be made as needed. Through the destruction of its negative Passio rejects the desire for pristine prints and the investment in long-term preservation. All that is left are seven copies that will degrade each time they are shown. They are entities that, like bodies, will live, age, and die, inscribing their passage through time on their epidermal surface.

Endowed with a material finitude that the standard administration of the limited edition seeks to deny, the prints of Passio will accumulate dust and scratches each time they are shown, performing their own passage into ruin at each screening. To return to Attali’s terminology, each projection is not a repetition of an ideal standard but rather a representation of a notation that will necessarily differ from all others. In typical film screenings one hopes for a print in good condition and tries to look past whatever damage may exist if the print happens to be in less than good shape. But in Passio something very different occurs: the degradation of the print is not simply noise, which a viewer must look past in order to encounter the work, but an integral part of the work itself, much in the manner of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1962–64), a reel of blank leader on which dust and scratches accumulate, almost as a cinematic remake of John Cage’s 4′33″ (1952). The film print is acknowledged as organic material undergoing a ceaseless process of transformation. Cherchi Usai inscribes the practice of projection into the heart of Passio, further affirming that this act is a live and singular performance.

On this count Passio once again offers a fascinating comparison to the cycle of decay films that proliferated around the turn of the twenty-first century. André Habib has described films such as Decasia and Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) as partaking in an “imaginary of the ruin” and locates their condition of possibility in the “patrimonialization” of cinema that reached full force around the 1995 centennial. In these films he discerns “the melancholy or nostalgia for a cinema that is forever lost (destroyed copies, incomplete films, anonymous reels).”32 The preservative function of cinema vows that it will embalm time and thereby conquer mortality. However, accompanying this impossible promise, this refusal of finitude, is the fragility of the medium and the inevitability of decay. Dust accumulates and the projector scratches; prints are stored under unfavorable conditions, even thrown on garbage heaps. As celluloid rots, so does the archive. The decay films remind their viewer of this archiviolithic pathos by re-presenting fragments of ruination. Yet the resulting film—Decasia, Lyrical Nitrate—will then be watched in pristine condition, often in a digital format, not subject to the same organic degradation it depicts from a safe remove. Passio engages with the discourse Habib identifies as informing the imaginary of the ruin in cinema, but unlike those films that reprint decayed footage, its ruination occurs precisely as we watch the film, in the event of projection. Passio’s decay is not something that happened “then,” something that we know better than to allow to happen now, but is offered up live for us to witness.

For Cherchi Usai, despite conforming to a certain cultural imperative, motivations to restore the moving image are alien, if not contrary, to the medium. In his 2001 book, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age, he writes, “On the contrary, becoming part of the process [of degradation] and accepting it as the working of a natural phenomenon is to recognize the nature of the model image and to cultivate an intelligent awareness that each showing will hasten its demise.”33 The model image is a theoretical fiction that posits the existence of the image at the moment of its creation, that irrecoverable moment in which the referent and the indexical sign would be perfectly united. Once a film has been projected, it becomes subject to physical decay and, writes Cherchi Usai, “thus [gives] birth to the history of cinema.”³⁴ For Cherchi Usai the goal is not to return to this model image; rather, film history can only exist as an account of its degradation. The preservative function of the cinema, so often emphasized in accounts of the medium’s ontology, is here haunted by an impulse to destruction that always marches forward, regardless of whatever efforts of restoration are taken to attempt to halt its progress.

By limiting the number of prints and destroying the negative, Passio offers a radical acceptance of this entropic economy. It transforms the cinema of decay from a reflection on a process to a true enactment of that process. Time resides in the images of Passio more profoundly than most films precisely because it is invited into the image, to pass and change within it. In a query that one might imagine Phelan posing in relation to performance, Cherchi Usai asks, “The real question is, are viewers willing to accept the slow fading to nothing of what they are looking at?”³⁵ Passio brings the spectator face-to-face with this prospect, dramatizing it graphically before our eyes.

Despite the fact that authenticity promises an escape from the leveling of experience, we must remember that it also harbors a dangerous return to the purity of origins. Discussions of filmic obsolescence often make use of a theoretical framework drawn from Benjamin’s “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” where he makes a claim for “the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’” that allow for a recovery of the utopian dimension present at a technology’s birth.³⁶ In this understanding an engagement with obsolescence is no mere nostalgia but rather an opportunity to engage in media archaeological inquiries that unsettle a narrative of historical progress and refute the capitalist logic of incessant novelty. This framework is very much in line with the notion that the authentic object, vested with inscriptions of time, has the power to disrupt the logic of capitalism by puncturing it with an alien temporality. It neglects, however, the second understanding of authenticity as an inherently elitist, conservative value that rests on a false origin.

For Theodor Adorno authenticity—understood as the Heideggerian Eigenlichkeit37—is dangerously aligned with an attachment to origins and a mystified retreat into the self as ontological ground that misrecognizes the subject’s social constitution.³⁸ In The Jargon of Authenticity he attacks German existentialist philosophers—particularly Heidegger—for marshaling language that is affirmative and redolent of “deep human emotion” but ultimately empty in order to summon religiosity in an increasingly secularized world.³⁹ For Adorno authenticity offers no alternative to the impoverishment of modern experience but is simply its by-product.

The truly authentic remains elusive; what proliferates is a reified, false authenticity. Adorno’s critique of authenticity is thus two-pronged. First, an attachment to the authentic can be allied with a reactionary attachment to origins that may be used to justify both right-wing nationalisms and the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Second, as industrial modernity threw the category of the authentic into crisis, a kind of pseudoauthenticity emerged: a hollowed-out, reified form that is immanent to capitalist production. This spurious authenticity became a fetish, covering over for its real lack. What seizing too simply on the “revolutionary energies of the outmoded” fails to consider is the extent to which the appeal of obsolescent media is also the appeal of this spurious authenticity: it is about the thrill of experiencing something difficult to access, of seeing something that someone else cannot. It is a rearticulation of our culture’s obsession with private property by other means. This is not to suggest that all engagements with outmoded devices should be written off but simply to propose that considerations of authenticity and its ambivalent status must be introduced into the theorization of obsolescence to better draw out the complex and contradictory nature of resurrected aura.

This intervention is particularly necessary in relation to Passio. Hypothetically, its pristine 35 mm images are not long for this world. Eventually the seven prints will become so damaged that they will no longer be able to be projected, and the work will simply cease to exist. In this sense one might see Passio as evading Adorno’s critique of authenticity and instead partaking of what he describes as a true authenticity that would index time’s passing in all of its violence and entropy, foregrounding those “scars of damage and disruption” discussed in relation to Struggle in Jerash (2009) in chapter 4. The central position the degradation of the film print occupies in the conception of Passio would seem to align the project very much with this notion. But because of the particular exhibition requirements of the work—35 mm projection of a very rare print, live musical accompaniment—it is unlikely that the prints of Passio will be shown often enough to experience the iconoclasm that is present at the conceptual heart of the work. If the small number of screenings that have taken place since the work’s premiere in 2006 is any indication of its future trajectory, Passio has a chance at a very long life. Its images will perhaps never be blotchy or scratched but will remain safely protected in the climate-controlled vaults of film archives around the world. In this sense the work does render unto the moving image an authenticity invested in an impossible return to the purity of origins, one that Adorno might very well spurn as nothing other than the emanation of a disintegrating aura. One is confronted with radically different implications depending on whether one approaches Passio in terms of its conceptual grounding or from the point of view of its practical existence.

Passio was meant to stage the disintegration of the film print, but in fact it will in all likelihood be preserved in impeccable condition for years to come. In return it will remain largely unseen. In Pennac’s Monsieur Malaussène the fate of the Unique Film also ends up being slightly different from its original forecast. Before its sole screening has been arranged, the film is stolen by a man eager to see it and angry that he had been left out of the group of the twelve chosen spectators. The thief watches the film, decides he wants to legally own it, and somehow (the novel does not specify) persuades Job to sell its television broadcasting rights. The broadcast of the Unique Film retains the character of an ephemeral, special event but undoes its relationship to exclusivity: rather than being invisible, it becomes hypervisible. One of the book’s many characters explains: “It seems that this was Job Bernardin’s wish, to make this Unique Film a planetary event…only one projection, but for the entire world.”⁴⁰ The film appears on all channels at 8:30 P.M. to celebrate the centenary of cinema, or perhaps to mourn the cinema’s end. The conclusion of the book finally reveals the contents of the film: it shows a body, the filmmakers’ son, alone and naked on a bed throughout his whole life, from his birth, through his return from a World War II concentration camp, to his death at seventy-five years of age. On the soundtrack the boy’s mother recounts in voice-over the world-historical events occurring at the time of filming. Here, once again, the ephemerality of performance is tied to the mortality of a human body and a proposal is made concerning the isomorphism of that body and the cinema itself.

Surely, the knowledge that the film would be broadcast only once was part of what led crowds of people to tune in that evening. And this knowledge is also what prompted them to turn on their VCRs. In the face of the singularity of the event (l’événement), the broadcast of Job’s film became “an entry into repetition” (un avènement à répétition),41 as home viewers produced copies that inhabit the unauthorized distribution circuits of poor images. The desire to cultivate the singularity of the event is born out of an attempt to reject the economy of repetition, but in turn such rarity inspires a desire for precisely what it has denied. Though seemingly opposed, l’événement and l’avènement à répétition are not so far removed from one another after all. Pennac’s imaginary Unique Film cannily recognizes this dialectic, making it a fitting snapshot of today’s systems of circulation.

Passio, by contrast, is an unavailable film in an age of availability. Even if one travels to view a print on a flatbed, it will be without its live accompaniment. It has deserted the networks of visibility and mobility that constitute contemporary visual culture. Within a dominant regime of circulation and surveillance, forms of exodus and withdrawal today figure as privileged modes of (non)engagement, with an imperative emerging to evade detection and clog pathways of dissemination. Such strategies have been particularly elaborated by theorists invested in thinking the relations between digital media and the societies of control. As Irving Goh has written, “The imperative to think this ‘right to disappear’ cannot be more timely today, given the enclosing perfectibility of the politics and architecture of a terrifying twenty-first-century peace and security.”⁴² Alex Galloway elaborates: “Instead of a politicization of time or space we are witnessing a rise in the politicization of absence—and presence—oriented themes such as invisibility, opacity, and anonymity, or the relationship between identification and legibility, or the tactics of nonexistence and disappearance.”⁴³

To some degree it is possible to see Passio’s purposeful withdrawal from regimes of circulation as participating in this impossible yet necessary task of becoming imperceptible. In dropping out of circulation, Cherchi Usai’s investment in old media crosses paths with the vanguard of digital theory. It refuses the imperative for media products to circulate—even in a degraded manner—in order to generate value. What is one to make of this perhaps unexpected alliance of nineteenth-century discourses of authenticity with newer discussions of disappearance and invisibility? Though both sound a call to escape the increasing administration of life by structures of discipline and control, key differences exist: disappearance makes no claim on a bygone past, nor is it marked by any attempt to recuperate a sense of wholeness now lost to the subject. As such, it evades the reactionary aspects of the discourse of authenticity. For artist and theorist Zach Blas the forms of informatic opacity that are central to what he calls “contra-Internet aesthetics” not only offer a critique of the Internet, and propose alternatives to it, but do so within the context of a broader political investment that is intersectional and engaged with turning new technologies to subversive uses.44 Passio clearly does not fall into this paradigm, but it does possess something that many other artworks dealing with these issues lack: while a work such as Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Educational Didactic .MOV File (2013) may be about informatic opacity as Blas theorizes it, the artwork itself remains hypervisible, circulating online and in galleries. There is, then, a contradiction between the relationship to circulation and visibility Steyerl proposes in her work and the ways in which the work itself circulates and becomes visible. By contrast, Passio does not thematize the exodus from data networks but rather enacts this condition in its very distribution choices.

There is no doubt that Passio remains in key respects inassimilable to the category of works most associated with the recent “politicization of absence.” Yet the connection between its suppression of reproducibility and digital tactics of nonexistence and informatic opacity remains important, since it underlines the pervasiveness of fantasies of escape at a time when the grid—of communication, of circulation—is seemingly without end. The attraction to live cinema must be understood in these terms. But as much as it may be seen to effect a rupture with the forms of mediated liveness that pervade contemporary image consumption, breaking with a seeming imposition of reproducible sameness, the notion of cinematic liveness can also be used as the basis for a critical method, offering a template through which to rethink screen experience and reawaken our attention to the small differences and quieter forms of uniqueness that are all around us.