I’m watching a film that has been filmed on film and is being projected … by a projector.
Colin Perry, 2009
In any consideration of structural film and the materialist creed that dominated avant-garde practices in the second half of the twentieth century, it is wise to interrogate some of the foundational principles to which it adhered. The structuralist critique of cinema was based on a number of interconnected suppositions, and we will begin with the belief we have already explored, that film, and by extension television, lulls audiences into accepting a series of cinematic illusions as reality, thereby laying themselves open to ideological messages embedded in screen-based entertainment. A related idea was that audiences are so enthralled to the ‘dream screen’ that, in the parlance of the day, they ‘passively consumed’ the phantasmagoria that passed before them. We should now ask, were (and are) audiences indeed rendered incapable of thinking critically about the conservative worldviews woven into the subtext of Hollywood scripts – from jingoistic expansionism, through stereotyping by race and sexual orientation to sexist representations of women? Of course, the answer is, ‘yes and no’; so, having explored the affirmative, we can now turn to the caveats that have accrued in subsequent considerations of film spectatorship, and take these forward when discussing the claim that installation liberated the passive viewer and offered her a new creative relationship with the moving image.
MAINSTREAM PLAYS WITH THE ILLUSION: PUSH−PULL
However staggeringly convincing cinema and television illusionism has become with the advent of wide-screen, 3D and high definition, commercial moving image products are beset by the ever-present tension between the narrative and its setting. This, argues Sean Cubitt, is why ‘a narrative is always incomplete’.1 In addition, the fantasy world onscreen is destabilised by the material reality of the instruments of its manufacture, principally the screen, which, according to John Welshman, defines ‘the battlefield between depth and surface’.2 The immediate effect of immersion in the moving image may be powerful, but it is temporary and absorption in the cinema experience is never total. The well-worn genres of film and television entertainment already establish an anticipatory distance between the viewer and the cinematic experience; genre places a gilded frame around the artefact itself. ‘We know a thriller when we see one’, observed Richard Maltby, ‘indeed, we know a thriller before we see one’.3 Movies and television have a previous existence and an afterlife in the wider world of fashion, magazines, chat shows, books, websites, trailers, games and music, forms of representation that reinforce awareness of the product but are also naturally self-reflexive. Television is always half-watched by the grazing spectator, the Internet encourages short attention spans, magazines remain objects in the hand whilst they deliver their messages, logo-bearing clothes are worn by real bodies and these proto-cinematic, promotional artefacts can undermine the verisimilitude of the film itself as well as reinforce its cultural impact.
I will revisit issues of spectatorial attention in the next chapter, but now turn to other aspects of mainstream film that militate against the credibility of their putative narratives. As we have already seen, Catherine Russell argued that ‘archival cinema’ records the history of a place as well as the story for which it provides a setting. Eu Jin Chua has made a similar observation in relation to well-known actors in Hollywood movies, stars who create what Pat O’Neill calls ‘perceptual ambiguity’.4 Our reading of their onscreen presence involves a denotive doubling and Chua quotes Jean-Luc Godard to drive home his point: ‘every film starring Marilyn Monroe is also a documentary about Marilyn Monroe’.5 We watch, not only the character she embodies, but also her performance and her persona. Driven by the intensity of our fandom and informed by the diligence of our researches into her tempestuous and unhappy private life, we speculate about her state of mind and body at the time the film was made. In the history of mainstream film, the shadow narrative of performers’ lives can threaten to crack the veneer of the parts they play and publicists have often laboured to screen the seedier side of the stars’ existence from public gaze, something that in the age of the Internet is increasingly hard to achieve.6
Not only do the parallel stories of screen legends’ lives compromise the transparency of mainstream moving image culture, but cinematic realism is also constantly betrayed by technical failures in production and post-production (defective microphones, faulty playback, picture roll, etc.), glitches that inadvertently produce a disruptive effect and help us maintain the distinction between reality and fiction. These caesurae can also be triggered by any number of lapses of taste; for instance, an overblown musical soundtrack, an actor’s poor performance, rushed or inaccurate subtitles, exaggerated effects of lighting and sound that tip over into filmic mannerism. The façade of controlled authority that characterises live television broadcasts can also be shattered by unscripted malfunctions.7 In the BBC television series Acorn Antiques (1985–87), Victoria Wood built an entire comedic conceit out of the poor standards of production dogging the soap operas of the day. The daily drama of life in the antiques trade was constantly upstaged by wobbly titles, cod acting, dodgy camerawork and defective sets; in one case a low boom practically decapitated the male lead. Citing John Thornton Caldwell’s notion of ‘industrial reflexivity’,8 Maeve Connolly argues that in the 1970s and 1980s television was formally innovative and developed self-reflexive strategies, not only with comedic shows like Acorn Antiques but across the whole spectrum of programming. This resulted in ‘stylistic excesses’ that would help public service networks compete with the growing independent television companies.9 It also became standard practice of breakfast TV, news programmes, chat shows and outside broadcast sports events to display the paraphernalia of production. Nowadays, reality TV has dispensed with any pretence at fictional treatment and instead sets up an equivalence between life onscreen and that of the viewer’s quotidian existence. In a reversal of the inadvertent betrayals of narrative film, this brand of television ‘reality’ is often revealed to be a fabrication, a simulacrum of ordinary life played out for the cameras.10 Viewers must unravel illusion masquerading as reality behind which lurks another reality based largely on narcissistic introjection of societal aspirations. The difference here is that the imbricated layers of half-truths and artifice are not discerned through visual cues, by slippages in the image or sound, but by means of external interventions, verbal revelations, exposés and rumours circulating in the wider media.
The concatenations of clues that betray the constructed nature of the cinematic display promote the audience’s continuing awareness of their own spectatorship, which is never entirely forgotten however much they might surrender, in the moment, to the spectacle played out onscreen for their delectation and delight. A mainstream film can also risk its own undoing if the director chooses to inject anti-illusionistic, even ‘experimental’ elements into the narrative flow, creating an opposing dynamic in the diegetic plausibility of the film. However, these ‘mistakes’ are sometimes exploited to enrich the plot, playing on the audience’s incomplete suspension of disbelief. For example, Buster Keaton’s ingenious Sherlock Jr. (1924) features the filmmaker making a joke about editing as he is catapulted from one scene to another, tumbling between a snow-bound landscape, a lion’s den, the edge of a precipice among other perilous settings. Keaton literally jumps across the edits drawing attention to the compression of space and time that the audience, already well schooled in the grammar of narrative film, habitually smoothes out into a logical continuum. The knowing wink to the audience also occurs in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), in which there is a direct reference to the apparatus of proto-cinematic illusionism. The character of Dr. Reeves is seen operating his vintage camera obscura located at the top of his house from where he surveys the life of the village. The heroine of the film, the ‘love interest’ coded as an object of male desire, cycles through the village, and we observe Dr. Reeves voyeuristically appreciating her charms, mirroring the viewer’s equivalent spectatorial privileges. Later in the film, Powell and Pressburger employ freeze frames and incongruous, offstage sounds to disrupt the first-line narrative and intimate both the intervention of supernatural forces, and deeper levels of delusion suffered by the main protagonist. These effects create a syntactical wobble in the film while simultaneously exploiting the lapse in the audience’s suspension of disbelief to drive home a key element of fictional meaning. Michael Chanan claims that the history of cinema is ‘a process of the limits of the image repeatedly transgressed’.11 In the case of A Matter of Life and Death, the directors’ contraventions of the rules of narrative cinema not only thickened the plot but also, as did the early pioneers of cinema, brought into focus the wondrous technical capabilities of film, circa 1940. The successful telling of the story paradoxically depended on the incomplete immersion of the audience in the illusionism of the film, on their ability to simultaneously appreciate the constructed nature of what they were seeing, and only partly believing.
My own observation is that today, the more Hollywood movies want us to believe the impossible, mobilising increasingly elaborate CGI effects, the more the illusion breaks down. Even Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (2010), though modest in terms of special effects, does such a good job of recreating medieval England that I found myself engrossed in the authenticity of the period costumes and sets, as well as the seamlessly composited landscapes and set piece ‘action’ sequences – the mannerisms of the film – while the flimsy storyline passed me by. No doubt, Russell Crowe’s wildly varying interpretations of a northern English accent contributed to the sense of profound artifice that envelops the movie and encouraged my own transgressions as a viewer, including idle speculations as to the costs involved in such cinematic Rococo and how many artists’ films might have been created with the same budget. My experience of watching the film would seem to suggest that it is indeed possible to be an actively engaged spectator, pursuing trains of thought at a tangent to, but triggered by the narrative, however modest those musings might be.
THE UTOPIANISM OF STRUCTURAL FILM
If mainstream film was not the closed system of flawless realism that the theoretical armature of the 1960s and 1970s suggested it might be, did the antidote to ‘passive’ spectatorship offered by avant-garde filmmakers prove to be a successful treatment for the effects of repeated exposure to the pernicious influences of Hollywood? Peter Gidal and those espousing the structural/materialist doctrine endeavoured to focus attention solely on the apparatus and processes of film, as Colin Perry put it, ‘watching a film that has been filmed on film and is being projected … by a projector’.12 However, in spite of his best efforts, Gidal’s Room Film (1973) is more than an exercise in tautology and it cannot be distilled to the sum of its moving parts. Gidal may have been dedicated to an extreme minimalism in his films involving ‘signifiers approaching emptiness’, but he could not, by his own admission, avoid producing filmic images that aggregate into an aesthetic experience, one that carries associative meanings, albeit in ‘a very low key’.13 Room Film features indeterminate, soft-edged areas of light and shade that occasionally resolve into perceptible images of crumpled bedding, an angle-poise lamp, a wall plug and an open book – an autobiographical detail signalling Gidal’s rich intellectual life.14 In spite of what Perry called Structuralism’s ‘sensual self-abnegation’, these instances of representational clarity in a sea of abstraction seem to evoke a longing for the visual pleasures that Gidal’s absolutist theoretical platform forbade him. The film can also be interpreted as an allusion to physical and mental breakdown, with the distorted visualisations of the room or cell approximating impairment of the perceptual system in episodes of psychosis. There is in Room Film a sense of psychic turmoil reminiscent of Brakhage’s similarly claustrophobic glimpses into his domestic life or indeed, in the field of literature, the impersonal, attenuated descriptions of the world in the forensic novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. We know that it is possible to build narratives and a constellation of associations (mine will be different from yours) out of the barest audiovisual information. Our brains are hard-wired to interpret sensory data, however flimsy or ambiguous. If Gidal had wished to block all associative and illusory elements in his work, and test the limits of our definition of film, he might have followed the example of Nam June Paik whose Zen For Film (1964) consisted of an eight-minute strip of 16mm clear leader, devoid of any images, or man-made marks, continuously looping through a projector. The only narrative in this filmic tabula rasa is the phenomenon of projected light and the gradual accumulation of dust and scratches that tells the life story of an individual strip of celluloid. Gidal and his acolytes, then as now, draw on the indexical properties of film and its ability to re-animate an imprint of the real; they rarely, if ever, resort to blank film. In the same way that the mainstream has failed to create comprehensively compliant audiences, maintaining optimum levels of immersion in the illusionism of film, Gidal could regiment neither himself nor his audiences into a semantic vacuum. Neither could he guarantee the desired ‘political’ responses nor prevent spectators from narrativising, and indeed enjoying his inadvertently lyrical works. ‘Difficult’, esoteric films are driven by a utopian desire to promote criticality in their audiences and stimulate political action, in this case by means of the attempted withdrawal of visual and narrative pleasures. In practice, the anticipated political awakening rarely occurred beyond the already converted within experimental circles, and general audiences were simply baffled by what they saw. In addition, it could backfire. I suspect that, in the 1970s, I was not alone in seeking relief from experimental film fatigue and retreating into ‘ideological’ escapist fare on TV to recover from the dictatorship of those long sessions of avant-garde self-improvement. This, I assume, was not a desirable spectatorial outcome from the perspective of the structural/materialist project.
Peter Gidal, Room Film (1973), 16mm, colour, silent speed (16/18 fps). Courtesy of the artist.
Other objections have been raised in relation to materialist film. Not only has it been configured, as Perry suggests above, in puritanical terms, with a proscriptive agenda complete with a long list of prohibitions, but it has also been accused of creating formulaic house styles with a whiff of elitism. According to Noël Carroll, the sometimes-fetishistic embrace of film’s material base, an occupational hazard in the search for its inner nature, has resulted in a tendency among modernist artists to isolate a given attribute of a medium, one among many possible characteristics, and claim it as emblematic of a whole practice, thereby excluding any other approach. When form has become content, the discovery ‘that these things have a nature’ also results in ‘that nature actually tell[ing] you or even dictat[ing] to you what you should and should not do’.15 Carroll argued that what makes a medium significant is not the molecular or electronic infrastructure that gives it its character – the viscosity of paint, the solidity of wood, the chemical miracle of light-sensitive celluloid or magnetised tape – but the uses to which artists put the materials at their disposal.16
Grahame Weinbren has contended that in his richly processed and multi-layered, non-narrative works, Pat O’Neill achieves the filmic equivalent of ‘luxurious hybrid thickets’ and further, that in his case, ‘pictorial density is invariably the result of a conceptual density’.17 This is indeed the case in his ingenious Foregrounds (1979) in which a close up of a film-strip hanging from a tree becomes a screen, and footage of a seaside landscape rattles through the frames. Less so, I would argue, in works dominated by elegant and very complex visual reprocessing of both self-generated and found footage. There are interesting arguments to be made for the value of abstraction in the contemporary field, some of which I have rehearsed in the previous chapter and to which we can add the view that non-representational art resists the commodification and commercial exploitation of ‘logocentric’ figuration. Some have argued that it reflects the profound underlying structures in nature and in the brain.18 However, in the context of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the denser optical confections in both abstract film and video had a tendency to dissolve pictorial and conceptual density into undifferentiated surface decoration, and it is this aspect of the avant-garde that has proved so vulnerable to re-appropriation by the mainstream. Hollywood film, already adept at exploiting self-reflexive elements to enhance its narrative thrust, has adopted any number of ‘avant-garde’ devices, from abstraction, through oscillating points of focus and handheld ‘subjective’ camera, to pictorial and temporal fragmentation. Television and music videos have consumed the rest and as O’Neill himself remarked, ‘what can you do that won’t eventually be redigested in that way?’19
Pat O’Neill, Foregrounds (1979). Courtesy of the artist. © Pat O’Neill.
I will return to the theme of re-appropriation by the mainstream of artist’s formal innovations in the context of video art, but what I wish to emphasise here is that the mainstream cannot hope to exert total control of spectator response any more than structural/materialist film can elicit specified reactions, negatively, by blocking those habitually obtained in narrative film. If the somnolent spectator is less in need of rescuing from her narcotic consumption of the mainstream than was supposed, and the experimental film aficionado is more resistant to a materialist reading of structural film that had been hoped by Gidal et al, what lessons can we learn from the work of avant-garde filmmakers of the twentieth century?
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF STRUCTURAL FILM
In spite of the arguments of its detractors, including my own, there is no doubt that experimental film was responsible for some extraordinary formal developments, what Rod Stoneman called its ‘visual compensations’.20 The era of ‘counter culture’ both enriched artists’ film and video and revitalised the mainstream, and although much of the political impetus for early forms of deconstruction and abstraction was neutralised in its popular media manifestation, the conceptual intelligence, technological innovation, wit and sheer inventiveness largely survived the transition. One striking example will suffice. In 1980, while still a student at Bath Academy, Tim Macmillan developed a time-slice technique partly inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering work with multiple still cameras in the 1880s and partly by Tony Hill’s ‘satellite crane’, a vertiginous rotating camera rig he constructed in the 1980s.21 Macmillan shot an action or event from multiple viewpoints and then stitched the sequences together in post-production. What began as an attempt to render Cubist visualisations of space on film, ended in a technical tour de force, ‘a tracking shot through space’.22 Viewers were confronted with the spectacle of a frozen moment, in which objects, people and, memorably, a horse at the point of death appeared to hover, immobilised in mid-air while the camera floated around the subject affording us a timeless, celestial perspective from which to contemplate the vicissitudes of the human and animal condition. Macmillan eventually sold his time-slice technique and it can now be seen sustaining a different agenda in commercials ranging from Centre Parks, through Birds Eye to Toshiba. Meanwhile the working processes Macmillan developed have gone full circle and returned to serve the speculative poetics of art, achieving even greater technical refinement in the work of contemporary practitioners such as David Claerbout in Belgium and Daniel Crooks in Australia.
Nicky Hamlyn has argued that structural film inaugurated a programme of investigations into ‘perception, exploring the human eye, the experience of time and movement and their complex relationship to film technology’.23 Indeed, Stan Brakhage conceived of his ‘psycho-dramas’ as analogues of the perceptual processes that the fractured visions of Cubism had first attempted to evoke in painting, collage and sculpture. In Brakhage’s films, as in those of both Marie Menken and Jonas Mekas, abrupt changes of point of view, agitated camerawork and staccato editing mimic the saccades of the eye as it darts about the visual field. As suggested above, the disconnected succession of impressions that characterise structural film also evokes the malfunctioning of the senses, the cognitive impairment of injury and old age, as well as the anarchic mash-up of memories, fears and wish-fulfilment that dominate our dream world. The many points of intersection between perception and the apprehension of film were investigated in these early years and as Brakhage pointed out, it is the cognitive processing of visual information that creates the illusion of a smooth pan across a horizon, a function of the brain that film has so successfully exploited. Investigations of spectatorship arising from the experimental phase of artists’ moving image are also precursors to studies measuring the effects of concentrated, long-term exposure to screen information and they can help us consider aspects of spectatorship that arise when we encounter the moving image in the context of installation. We will return to this theme in chapter twelve where we will consider issues of film spectatorship illuminated by recent research in cognitive science.
THE SECOND GENERATION AND BEYOND
In the 1980s, the British structural project spawned a second-generation of filmmakers who stepped back from the more extreme anti-narrative doctrine championed by Peter Gidal, and to a lesser degree, by Annabel Nicolson and Malcolm Le Grice. Artists now combined an engagement with identity politics and a constellation of social concerns with a new sensorium of film that included the ecstatic (Nina Danino), the affective engagement with cultural icons (Jean Matthee) and a poetics of memory and identity (Michael Mazière, Sarah Pucill). The academicism of structural film expanded to a broader form of discursive writing, appearing principally in the pages of the journal Undercut (1980–90), a research activity that was understood to constitute a critical component of the filmmakers’ practice. In an introductory essay to The Undercut Reader (2003), Danino posited the notion of the artist as an ‘intense subject’ struggling to find a filmic form in which to ‘speak itself’.24 In the same publication, Michael O’Pray conceded that the enigmatic workings of the unconscious were also at play in our relationship to film25 and Maziere, for his part, advocated a ‘poetic empiricism’ that, following Spinoza, also incorporates intuitive understanding. Although these filmmakers rejected the formal prohibitions of structural/materialist film – storytelling, pictorialism, lyricism and even song were reintroduced – they nonetheless retained the central lesson of the pioneering generation, namely that language cannot be counted on as a neutral vehicle for the unmediated expression of artists’ creative enterprise. Film and its television and online manifestations are laden with precedent derived mainly from the history of cinema, but also from painting, photography and advertising. Pre-determined meanings are indelibly inscribed on the bodies of all who appear onscreen and without any strategies to undermine the process, they will embody conventional readings of masculinity and femininity, sexual orientation, ethnicity or ‘foreignness’ and every other permutation of human typologies. The markers of dress, speech and gesture, establish the class of a subject conjuring associations ranging from the authority of the expert, through the inherited privileges of the ‘toff’ to the ignominy of the vilified ‘benefit scrounger’.26 Each group is fixed into its relative position in the social order, categories that have proved remarkably resilient in spite of the social mobility inaugurated by the radicalism of the 1960s.
The second generation of Co-op filmmakers understood that film is a loaded medium, controlled by the institutions that make it available to the public, and that only a careful negotiation of its forms and conventions can avoid unwitting expression, in their own work, of meanings that were contrary to those they intended, reinforcing ideologies to which they did not subscribe. I fear this is a lesson that has been largely forgotten in the contemporary field where we witness what Mike Dunford has designated ‘the rush back to unreflective representation’.27 The postmodern age saw the wholesale recycling of dominant filmic forms, borrowing liberally from comedies, tragedies, game shows and ‘factual’ reportage, as well as mining the history of mainstream film, strategies that have continued unchecked into the new millennium. The loss of critical attention to form has given rise to a concomitant impoverishment of political engagement and an insistence on ethical neutrality. Although in some of her recent work Rosalind Nashashibi has explored the structures of the gaze, she declared at a recent screening of her film Carlo’s Vision (2011) that ‘there is no moral code to the film’,28 thereby disavowing some of the deeper resonances of her own practice.
After the inevitable backlash against the strictures imposed by the structural/materialist regime, there is now evidence of a critical re-assessment of works by individual filmmakers, not least in the pages of academic publications such as the Millennium Film Journal in the USA and MIRAJ in the UK. However, what survives of the structural project in contemporary practice too often revolves around the visual style of the era rather than a revision of the deeper concerns of the deconstructive programme and few artists have publicly embraced the radical politics that underpinned the work of filmmakers in the 1970s. However, important exceptions can be found in the practices of artists such as Shirin Neshat whose non-narrative film installations directly address the social position of women within Islamic culture. A socialist strand can be found in works by Uriel Orlow who engages with a politics of place. In Sounds from Beneath (with Mikhail Karikis, 2010–12) he convened the Snowdown Colliery Male Voice Choir at the site of an abandoned colliery in Kent. Taking up the formation of a picket line, the singers ‘resuscitated the mines vocally’, arranging the sounds of a working pit into a communal lament. T. J. Demos has identified a group of comparable contemporary artists including Zarina Bhimji, Sven Augustijnen and Steve McQueen who engage with postcolonial geopolitics and subjectivity.29 Yet most of these works are organised around a revision of evidentiary documentary practices and the rigorous analysis of cinematic language that distinguished structural/materialism is largely absent; for Mark Lewis, contemporary works lack the ability to ‘make me think about what it means to take a picture of something today’.30 While there are contemporary artists such as Nicky Hamlyn, Alia Syed and Simon Payne who continue to investigate the language of celluloid film, as I shall discuss in chapter twelve, it is in the area of digital code that the deconstructive techniques of structural film have re-emerged, but mainly without the socialist cultural politics that underpinned the work of the 1970s.
Mikhail Karikis and Uriel Orlow, Sounds from Beneath (2010–2011). Sound and video, 6:49 min. Courtesy of the artists.
If the major contribution of the structural era was indeed its critical analysis of film form and the apparatus of cinema, and its secondary achievement, the inauguration of a contemporary interest in visual perception, then the whole enterprise turned on a consideration of spectatorship. We will now divert into a more detailed examination of spectatorship on our way to a discussion of expanded cinema, the next, critical antecedent of moving image installation.
NOTES
2 John Welshman speaking at the Drawn Encounters, Complex Identities conference, British School at Rome, September 2008.
3 Richard Maltby (1995) Hollywood Cinema. Malden, MA: Blackwell, p. 107.
5 Eu Jin Chua speaking at the AHRC Moving Image Art seminar, CCW Graduate School, Chelsea College of Arts, London, 19 January 2011.
6 In the 1970s, Robert Powell was cast as the lead in Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli, 1977). He was, at the time, in a relationship with Babs Lord, a dancer from the BBC TV music show, Top of the Pops. It was rumoured that he was put under pressure to marry her before filming started so that ‘Christ’ would not be living in sin.
7 In 1976, the newsreader Peter Woods was unable to maintain his air of calm detachment when he appeared to be drunk whilst reading the news. Within minutes, newspaper reporters were able to penetrate Television Centre to investigate, talking to the man himself propping up the BBC bar.
8 See John Thornton Caldwell (2008) Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
9 Maeve Connolly (2014) TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television. Bristol: Intellect, p. 11.
10 The producers of the American reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians (E!) allegedly restaged Kris Humphries’ marriage proposal to Kim Kardashian. Other scenes are said to have been faked to cement the logic of the show’s current storyline.
11 Michael Chanan (1998) ‘Latin American Cinema in the ‘90s: Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema’, Cultura visual en American Latina, 9:1. Available online: http://www.tau.ac.il/eial/IX_1/chanan.html (accessed 19 January 2014).
12 Colin Perry (2009) ‘Reel to Real’, Art Monthly, 328, p. 2.
13 Peter Gidal (1996) ‘Theory and Definition of Structuralist/Materialist Film’, in Michael O’Pray (ed.) The British Avant-Garde Film, 1926 to 1995. London: Arts Council of England/John Libbey Media, p. 153.
14 Nicky Hamlyn has argued that Gidal initiated a genre of ‘room film’ that was taken up by the second generation of experimental filmmakers in the 1980s. According to Hamlyn, a room provided ‘a convenient uninhabited space in which to manipulate form’; see Nicky Hamlyn (1996) ‘Structural Traces’, in Michael O’Pray (ed.) The British Avant-Garde Film, 1926 to 1995. London: Arts Council of England/John Libbey Media, pp. 219–60.
16 See Noël Carroll (1996) Theorising the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
17 Grahame Weinbren (2012) ‘Coloured paper in monument valley: Contradictions, resonances and pluralities in the art of Pat O’Neill’, MIRAJ, 1: 2, p. 158.
18 See for instance, the round table discussion, ‘The affects of the abstract image in film and video art’, in MIRAJ, 1:1 (2012), chaired by Maxa Zoller with Bridget Crone, Nina Danino, Jaspar Joseph Lester and RUBEDO.
20 Rod Stoneman (1995) ‘Incursions and Inclusions: The Avant-Garde on Channel Four 1983–93’, in Michael O’Pray (ed.) The British Avant-Garde Film, 1926 to 1995. London: Arts Council of England/John Libbey Media, p. 286.
21 This device resulted in Hill’s film Downside Up (1984) in which the camera described an arc of 180 degrees and then disappeared underground only to resurface in a different landscape, thereby simulating both the flight of a bird and the burrowing of a mole. He later leased a version of his crane for a Toyota car commercial: http://www.tonyhillfilms.com/films (accessed 3 February 2014).
23 Nicky Hamlyn (1996), op. cit, p. 234.
24 Nina Danino (2003) ‘The Intense Subject’, in Nina Danino and Michael Maziere (eds) The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video. London: Wallflower Press, pp. 8–12.
25 Michael O’Pray (2003) ‘Modernism, Phantasy and Avant-Garde Film’, in Nina Danino and Michael Maziere (eds) The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video. London: Wallflower Press, pp. 31–4.
26 In 1987, I shot the video Winter in a snowy landscape behind my house in Oxford. At one point in the work, I raise my hands and cover my eyes, in a gesture of fear at the potential loss of a child. The artist Kate Meynell pointed out that the gloves I was wearing were obviously skiing gloves, marking me as both middle-class and affluent.
27 Mike Dunford (2003) ‘Video Art: The Dark Ages’, Nina Danino and Michael Maziere (eds) The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video. London: Wallflower Press, p. 247.
28 Rosalind Nashashibi speaking at Tate Britain, 13 January 2014.
29 T. J. Demos (2013) Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press, and (2013) The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
30 Mark Lewis (2011) speaking at Moving Image & the Global Media Spectacle, the second in the series of Artists’ Moving Image Research Network events hosted by MIRAJ, University of the Arts London, June. Excerpts available online: http://www.movingimagenetwork.co.uk/seminars/seminar-2/ (accessed 19 July 2014).