Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis

In the Fluxus film Disappearing Music for Face (based on an idea by Mieko Shiomi) the spectator is confronted by a single static shot of a mouth filmed in black and white (see figure 3.1). Since most of the face falls outside the shot, the mouth dominates the screen. The shot is intentionally off-center, and consequently, only the left side of the face (including the cheek and a prominent dimple) is visible. The mouth is frozen into an open smile, revealing a significant gap between the front teeth. Minutes pass. Nothing seems to change. One begins to wonder if the work is nothing more than a filmed photograph, since it seems devoid of any traces of movement (apart from the movement suggested by the imperfections of the film stock). After several minutes, however, a slight change becomes noticeable. The smile is still there, but it seems less pronounced. One cannot help but question this perception, since at no point has the mouth (or anything else in the mise-en-scène) moved—or has it? Could it be that staring at this static face for a lengthy period of time has produced the illusion of change?

After about five minutes, it becomes increasingly evident that the mouth (which belongs to Yoko Ono) has been moving, albeit at a rate too slow to be perceived. (As Scott MacDonald describes it, “Viewers never actually see Ono’s mouth move; they only see that it has moved.”)¹ The smile is almost gone now, leaving only a trace of Ono’s original pleasure; it is evocative of the forced half-smiles that often appear in family photographs. Several minutes later, the smile has faded entirely, as has the dimple on the left cheek. The mouth is still slightly open, but the teeth can barely be seen. Eleven minutes into the film, the teeth have disappeared and the mouth that once smiled now curves slightly downward, in a pose that can be read as either neutral or melancholy. The face is abruptly replaced by a black screen, and the film is over.

In addition to being fascinating, strange, and (as Tony Conrad asserts) “beautiful,” Disappearing Music for Face displays an insistence on stasis that was ubiquitous not only in the works of Mieko Shiomi but in the works of Fluxus artists more generally.² In this chapter I will attempt to map out the aesthetic and temporal dimensions of protracted films, works that (like Disappearing Music) use extreme slow motion to create the perception of stasis. I will argue that, in addition to blurring the lines between cinema and photography, these experiments enable access to a series of interstitial moments that are generally hidden from perception. Furthermore, it is my assertion that by manufacturing alternate temporalities, protracted films foreground the plasticity and contingency of time itself.

It will be useful to begin by contextualizing Disappearing Music within the broader context of Fluxus art, as well as the aesthetic traditions that it was rebelling against. Fluxus arose as part of the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a loose collection of radical art movements such as neo-Dada, minimalism, pop art, and conceptual art.⁴ The origins of Fluxus itself are often traced back to the 1960s, a time when many avant-garde artists—such as La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Mieko Shiomi—sought to create artworks that ignored traditional boundaries between media. George Maciunas, the group’s founder and leader, organized a number of Fluxus happenings in New York, and their notoriety ultimately helped the group become international in scope.

Central to the Fluxus aesthetic was intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in 1966 to refer to artworks that “fall between media.” As examples of these aesthetic hybrids, Higgins referenced the readymades of Duchamp (which fused sculpture with “life media”), the self-playing musical instruments of Joe Jones (which straddled the lines between sculpture and music), and the compositions of John Cage (a blend of music and philosophy).⁵ Higgins’s essay remains a powerful defense of artworks that disregard conventional categorizations. In the twenty-first century, when most intellectuals recognize the importance of Duchamp and Cage, it is easy to forget just how radical this defense was. It rebelled against a long-standing resistance to intermedia experimentation that stretched back at least as far as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1766.

Laocoön is unquestionably an important text. When Lessing writes that “succession of time is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter,” he provides a valuable way of thinking through the distinctions between temporal and spatial art forms.⁶ He errs, however, when he moves from the realm of the descriptive to the realm of the prescriptive. It is one thing to simply describe the various ways that visual art and music offer different experiences or serve different functions. It is quite another to prescribe rules for the arts, to demand that each art form stay in its place to preserve aesthetic “purity.” Such prescriptions are clearly central to Lessing’s project. For example, he claims that whenever a painter depicts events from more than one period in a single work (as in many medieval triptychs), “it is an intrusion of the painter into the domain of the poet.” Similarly, whenever a poet offers a detailed description of a person or object, “it is an intrusion of the poet into the domain of the painter.” For Lessing, painting and poetry are like “neighbors”: they can coexist peacefully so long as they do not trespass on each other’s property.⁷

Lessing’s shadow loomed over aesthetics for centuries, and his resistance to intermedia remained a potent force even in the twentieth century. For example, in 1947 Theodor Adorno criticized Stravinsky for his “spatialization” of music,⁸ and in 1967 he described intermedia experiments as exemplifications of “the erosion of art,” a condition in which “the arts eat away at one another.”⁹ Clement Greenberg displayed a similar fear of intermediality. In 1981 he wrote, “Good art … hasn’t yet come from ‘intermedia’ or anything like it.”¹⁰ (And, of course, this was written after Duchamp, Cage, Warhol, and Fluxus.) For Greenberg, “the scene of visual art has been invaded more and more, lately, by other mediums than those of painting or sculpture.” And with rhetoric that is almost apocalyptic, Greenberg argued that intermedia is symptomatic of “the decline of taste” that “threatens to overtake art itself.”¹¹ Daniel Albright’s summary of Greenberg’s position on intermedia is particularly trenchant: “Each art should remain inviolate within its own private domain; every act of transmediation is a contamination; space and time are mortal enemies. It seems that painters would do well to be deaf and illiterate, and musicians blind and aphasic.”¹² All of this should suggest the radical nature of Fluxus artworks, which violated both the unspoken conventions of artistic praxis and the more explicit prescriptions that had dominated aesthetics and art criticism for centuries.

While intermediality is unquestionably central to Fluxus art, it is not its sole defining feature. In his essay “Fluxus: Theory and Reception” Dick Higgins identifies eleven defining characteristics of Fluxus art: “(1) internationalism, (2) experimentalism and iconoclasm, (3) intermedia, (4) minimalism or concentration, (5) an attempted resolution of the art/life dichotomy, (6) implicativeness, (7) play or gags, (8) ephemerality, (9) specificity, (10) presence in time, and (11) musicality.”¹³ After elaborating on each of these features, Higgins is quick to add, “Clearly not every work is likely to reflect all eleven of these characteristics or formal points, but the more of them a work reflects, the more typically and characteristically Fluxus it is.”¹⁴ Remarkably, the film version of Disappearing Music displays all eleven of these characteristics: (1) It is an international work. The film was made by the Lithuanian-born American artist George Maciunas and based on an idea by the Japanese artist Mieko Shiomi. (2) Disappearing Music is experimental and iconoclastic. By eliminating plot, characterization, sound, movement, and montage, it stages a revolt against the conventions of mainstream cinema. (3) Given its temporality and immobility, Disappearing Music straddles the boundaries between cinema and photography, thus becoming an intervention in intermedia. (4) It is hard to imagine a more minimalistic film than Disappearing Music—a single shot of a single, simple action: the cessation of a smile. (5) The work subverts the art/life dichotomy by trafficking in the quotidian. (6) For Higgins, implicativeness means that a work “should imply a maximum of intellectual, sensuous, or emotional content within its minimum of material.”¹⁵ Again, Disappearing Music is clearly implicative. In spite of its minimalistic content the film is poignant and evocative. (7) In its cheerful subversion of cinematic conventions there is a strong spirit of play in Disappearing Music. (In fact, when I began watching the film for the first time, my initial response was laughter.) (8) The work’s investment in ephemerality is foregrounded not only by its content (a transitory, fleeting action) but also by its title, with its emphasis on disappearance. (9) The content of the film is precise, concrete, specific. (10) Disappearing Music’s presence in time is central to its aesthetic. The work’s affective power derives from its gradual and deliberate temporal unfolding. (11) As the title implies, the film, in spite of being silent, is musical in spirit. (I will discuss the work’s relationship to musicality later in this chapter.) All of this is to suggest that Disappearing Music for Face is a quintessential Fluxus artifact, and as such, it provides a useful point of entry for exploring the relationship between the Fluxus collective and the cinema of stasis.

Shiomi did not authorize Maciunas’s film version of her event score; in fact, she had already returned to Japan when the film was made in New York in 1966.¹⁸ When she first saw it, she was disappointed with the interpretation because “the mouth is not the only body part which can smile.”¹⁹ However, she has since come to accept that “George had no choice,” since if he had shown the entire face, the slow-motion blinking of Ono’s eyes might have become a humorous distraction from the smile itself. (Still, she emphasizes that the Maciunas film is just one possible cinematic interpretation of her work, and she hopes that other interpretations will arise in the future.)²⁰

Stasis is a central component in Shiomi’s event scores. For example, Music for Two Players I (1963) instructs two performers to look at each other, face to face, for an extended period of time (a gesture reminiscent of the staring games often played by children). Piece for a Small Puddle (1964) suggests gazing at one’s own reflection in a puddle. And Shadow Piece II (1964) reads as follows:

In all of these pieces the reader (or performer) is instructed to stare at an essentially static person or object for a substantial period of time (the instructions for Music for Two Players I involve sustaining a gaze for a total of twenty minutes). Shiomi’s insistence on stillness provides an opportunity for quiet contemplation; as she puts it, “To concentrate you need stasis.”²² But why should one’s concentration be directed at such ordinary objects? This is, in fact, part of the raison d’être of Fluxus: by dissolving arbitrary boundaries between art and life, Fluxus artists sought to reveal the beauty of mundane objects (faces, puddles, and shadows), objects that we frequently look at without seeing. In this sense Fluxus has a clear precursor in Duchamp’s objets trouvés (the bicycle wheel, bottle rack, shovel, urinal, etc.). But Fluxus goes one step further. As Wolf Vostell notes, Duchamp may have seen the ordinary urinal as an artwork, but the fundamental insight of Fluxus was that “using the urinal was equally an artistic activity.”²³ Thus, it is not just the smile (and its absence) that Shiomi foregrounds, but the act of smiling (along with the cessation of this act). She sought to produce a “conversion of trivial actions into artistic performances.”²⁴

I witness the disappearance of smiles several times each day, but until encountering Shiomi’s work, I never really experienced a disappearing smile as such. I would only notice the smile itself or, perhaps, the pleasant statement or situation that occasioned it. However, the suggested protraction of this action in Shiomi’s event score (and its later realization in Maciunas’s film) enables one to see the smiles that are encountered on a daily basis as performances teeming with aesthetic value. The smile can be seen as a smile, freed of its contextual contingencies. In this sense Shiomi is carrying on the tradition of John Cage (who was, along with Duchamp, one of the most important influences on Fluxus). As Cage states at the conclusion of his book Silence, “It behooves us … to see each thing directly as it is, be it the sound of a tin whistle or the elegant [mushroom] Lepiota procera.”²⁵

Shiomi’s dedication to the aesthetic value of stasis can be seen in the work of other Fluxus artists, as well. For example, several of Yoko Ono’s film scripts foreground stillness. Film No. 6 (A Contemporary Sexual Manual: 366 Sexual Positions) consists of nothing but a man, a woman, and their four-year-old daughter sleeping on a bed for an hour and a half. (As Ono mischievously remarks in the script, “The 366 sexual positions are all in the mind of the audience.”)²⁶ And Ono’s Film No. 2 (Mona Lisa and Her Smile) script simply reads, “Ask audience to stare at a figure (ANY FIGURE) for a long time and then immediately turn their eyes to the screen and see their reflection.”²⁷ But perhaps the most infamous example of stasis in Fluxus is provided by Jackson Mac Low, who in 1964 published a film script (of sorts) for a piece he called Tree Movie:

Select a tree*. Set up and focus a movie camera so that the tree* fills most of the picture. Turn on the camera and leave it on without moving for any number of hours. If the camera is about to run out of film, substitute a camera with fresh film. The two cameras may be alternated in this way any number of times. Sound recording equipment may be turned on simultaneously with the movie cameras. Beginning at any point in the film, any length of it may be projected at a showing.

*For the word “tree,” one may substitute “mountain,” “sea,” “flower,” “lake,” etc.²⁸

Like the aforementioned scripts by Ono and Mac Low, Maciunas’s Disappearing Music for Face is a part of the cinema of stasis, since it subverts the spectatorial expectations of movement and dynamism that are so central to most films. Unlike the scripts by Ono and Mac Low, however, the stasis in Disappearing Music is not achieved by giving attention to a static person or object. Rather, it finds stasis in flux, taking movement as its starting point and then slowing it down drastically to engender a sense of immobility. The filming of Ono’s disappearing smile with a high-speed camera (along with the use of extreme slow motion) drains the action of its original vitality. Ono’s smile becomes—as far as the eye can tell—a static object.²⁹ For this reason Disappearing Music is best understood as a protracted film, a work of cinema that uses extreme slowness to create the impression of stasis.

Several Fluxus artists, in fact, made use of this cinematic device. For example, Ono’s Eyeblink (1966) consists of a close-up of an eye blinking in extreme slow motion, and her film One (Match) (1966) applies the same process of protraction to the lighting of a match. Pieter Vanderbeck’s Five O’clock in the Morning (1966) shows chestnuts and rocks falling at a drastically reduced speed, while in Joe Jones’s Smoking (1966), the simple and brief act of exhaling cigarette smoke is radically protracted so that it takes almost five minutes to complete.³⁰ These minimalist explorations of the quotidian are the types of films that Fernand Léger had always dreamed about. In 1926 Léger wrote, “All current cinema is romantic, literary, historical expressionist, etc. / Let us forget all this and consider, if you please: A pipe—a chair—a hand—an eye—a typewriter—a hat—a foot, etc., etc. / Let us consider these things for what they can contribute to the screen just as they are—in isolation—their value enhanced by every known means.”³¹

In addition to presenting mundane objects and actions “just as they are—in isolation,” the aforementioned Fluxus films are notable for their unrelenting stasis. Not only do these films generally deprive the viewer of any perception of movement; they do not even provide any implication of motion through montage (what Deleuze calls “pure mobility”).³² How might one account for Fluxus artists’ fascination with stillness? Dorothée Brill provides a cogent theoretical framework. She notes that even though Fluxus has many affinities with Dada, its historical precursor, there is a crucial distinction. While Fluxus, like Dada, was not afraid to use sudden shock as an aesthetic strategy (e.g., Nam June Paik’s placement of a cow’s head hanging from the ceiling at one of his exhibitions in 1963), Fluxus also often moved in the opposite direction, using a kind of boredom to produce a very different kind of experience: “By deliberately producing impulses that can be characterized as either unexpectedly strong or unexpectedly weak, Fluxus works attempt to resist their casual or incidental reception through the one or the other extreme…. Since both shock and boredom run counter to the audience’s expectations, both were legitimate means for Fluxus artists either to jolt or drag the recipient into a mode of productive or engaged reception through a moment of irritation.”³³ In other words, by offering stillness to an audience expecting movement, Fluxus artists deliberately engendered boredom as a strategy of subversion. As Paik put it (in his discussion of Mac Low’s Tree Movie), Fluxus was interested in generating a “meaningful boredom.”³⁴

Additionally, by using stasis, Fluxus artists prompt the spectator to become more aware of the movement of her own body. Recall, for example, John Cage’s famous visit to Harvard’s anechoic chamber in 1952. Cage expected complete silence, but he was instead surprised to experience a heightened awareness of the sounds of his own body, the almost inaudible sounds of his “nervous system in operation” and his “blood in circulation,” moving him to remark, “Until I die there will be sounds.”³⁵ (This experience inspired him to compose his landmark 4’33" later that year.) Similarly, the static mouth of Disappearing Music for Face makes the spectator more aware of the subtle, often involuntary, movements of her own mouth, while the static eye of Eyeblink heightens the viewer’s awareness of her own blinking. This attunement to the sounds and movements of one’s own body is a goal that Fluxus shares with Zen Buddhism (which Cage studied). As David T. Doris notes, in Zen Buddhism “the act of sitting is perceived as a ‘dynamic stillness’—one sits in a rigorously prescribed posture, unmoving, yet constituted by interior processes in constant motion: the heart beats, the blood courses through its vessels, air enters and is expelled through the lungs, the stomach churns away at its food.”³⁶ The protracted Fluxus films consequently encourage the spectator to become attuned to her own bodily movements rather than seeking pleasure or engagement in the movements of others.

It is difficult to find many precedents for the unrelenting (and unsettling) quasi-photographic stasis of these Fluxus films. Of course, Warhol’s early films (much like Disappearing Music for Face) often focus on static faces, as in his numerous screen tests, which frequently feature a stationary individual staring at the camera for several minutes. But the effect here is quite different. Warhol’s subjects do move occasionally, however slight and subtle those movements might be (the blinking of the eyes, the shifting of the head, a slight quiver of the lips), while the image in Disappearing Music seems to never move—it only changes. Furthermore, even though both Warhol and Fluxus use slow motion to engender a kind of immobility, they use it in radically different ways (although neither uses the type of slow motion that is generally employed in commercial cinema). I would not categorize Sleep and Empire as protracted films, since the slow motion is so slight that it barely registers as slow motion. This is why many viewers of Warhol’s early cinema assume that what they are watching is “real time,” until they discover through research that his films were shot at twenty-four frames per second and screened at sixteen (or sometimes eighteen) frames per second. (Of course, with certain Warhol films the misperception is almost inevitable; in Empire, for example, how could one determine whether the Empire State Building is being shot at normal speed or in slow motion?) Once one is aware of the slight protraction, however—particularly in a film that studies the human face, like Blow Job (1964)—the temporal shift becomes palpable, inescapable. Each subtle movement performed becomes infused with lethargy and ennui. In Disappearing Music the effect is of a different order. Here, too, the viewer may not initially realize that the film is in slow motion, but this is only because the motion is so slow that it no longer seems to be motion at all. Disappearing Music (along with the other protracted Fluxus films) was shot at two thousand frames per second so that a few seconds of real time become stretched almost indefinitely, to the point that time seems to freeze altogether.³⁷

There is another crucial difference between these two protracted films: while the inordinate length of 24 Hour Psycho (like Warhol’s Sleep and Empire) elicits a partial and distracted form of spectatorship, the protracted Fluxus films are brief, encouraging a close meditative gaze. Such an approach enables the spectator to see dimensions of everyday objects and experiences that are ordinarily invisible. For Bergson, this is the function of art: “to make us see what we do not naturally perceive.”³⁸ And as James Broughton has argued, cinema is uniquely positioned to do just this: “Film is a way of seeing what has been looked at by everyone else and never really seen.”³⁹ This is precisely the effect of the protracted Fluxus films. The extreme slowness of these works exposes us to elements of our everyday viewing experience that are always present but that never present themselves to us. As such, these films offer a rare glimpse into microtime, the infinitesimal intervals of duration that form the backdrop of every experience.⁴⁰ For most of human history these temporal interstices existed beneath the threshold of perception; only with the advent of the cinematographic apparatus did microtime become affectively accessible. The title of Shiomi’s event score—Disappearing Music for Face—hints at her interest in such interstitial moments. It is not necessarily the smile itself that interests Shiomi, nor is it the nonsmile; rather, it is the disappearance, the space between the two affective states. While disappearing normally involves making the visible invisible, the film version of Disappearing Music for Face does just the opposite: it offers access to the hidden dimensions of a visual experience and consequently makes the invisible visible.

This mode of temporal protraction remains common in contemporary art. The most well-known example is the work of Bill Viola, who frequently uses slow motion to access microtime in video installations such as Anima (2000), Dolorosa (2000), and The Quintet of the Astonished (2000). Viola’s comments on these protracted video works could apply with equal force to a film like Disappearing Music: “I was most interested in opening up the spaces between the emotions. I wanted to focus on gradual transitions—the idea of emotional expression as a continual fluid motion. This meant that the transitions, the ambiguous time when you shift from being happy to sad, is [sic] just as important as the main emotion itself.”⁴¹ In 2003 the Los Angeles Getty Museum displayed a number of Viola’s protracted works in an exhibition called Passions. Visitors often assumed that the works were entirely immobile—until these visitors gave them sustained attention. Here is how Giorgio Agamben described his encounter with Viola’s work at the Getty: “At first sight, the images on the screen appeared to be still, but, after a few seconds, they started to become animate, almost imperceptibly. The spectator then realized that the images had always been in movement and that it was only the extreme slowness that, by dilating the temporal moment, had made them appear immobile. The effect explains the impression of at once familiarity and strangeness [estraneazione] that the images stirred up. It was as if one entered the room of a museum and the old masters’ canvas miraculously started to move.”⁴² Agamben’s evocation of painting here is instructive. If we associate painting with stillness, and film and video with movement, how do we approach works that reside in the interstices between these mediums, works that constitute “a threshold between immobility and movement”?⁴³

Deleuze’s theorization of the evental offers one way forward. For Deleuze, the event is not merely the moment that something happens; rather, “events always involve periods when nothing happens. It’s not even a matter of there being such periods before and after some event, they’re part of the event itself.”⁴⁴ For Deleuze, these periods in which “nothing happens” are routinely overlooked by the mass media, so they are best interrogated by art. (Interestingly, he cites the films of Ozu and Antonioni as examples here—among the most static films outside of the avant-garde—since in these works, “the periods in which nothing happens don’t fall between two events, they’re in the events themselves, giving events their depth.”)⁴⁵ Through their use of extreme slow motion, protracted works of Fluxus, Douglas Gordon, and Bill Viola are especially well suited to plumb these Deleuzian depths. They posit ordinary events as both actions and nonactions, movements and nonmovements. If, as Deleuze asserts, “People miss the amazing wait in events they were least awaiting,” protracted films reinstate this immanent (albeit overlooked) period of waiting that undergirds the evental.⁴⁶ As a consequence of the inordinate slowness of protracted films, one no longer waits for an event; rather (as in the plays of Beckett), waiting becomes the event.

Pudovkin was one of the first film theorists to note the great cinematic potential of slow motion; he was excited by “the disconcerting strangeness of retarded movements on the screen, the possibility of perceiving forms that ordinarily are imperceptible and invisible, yet none the less existent in actuality.”⁴⁷ (This sentiment is precisely what inspired Gordon to make 24 Hour Psycho; when he first began to watch Psycho at a reduced speed, he remarked, “It was as if the slow motion revealed the unconscious of the film.”)⁴⁸ Maya Deren was similarly enthusiastic about the aesthetic possibilities of slow motion. Since art forms like dance and theater were already capable of utilizing motion for artistic purposes, Deren believed that it was incumbent on serious filmmakers to use cinema to “discover a new dimension altogether of movement.” For Deren, slow motion represented one such new dimension, since it could be “brought to the most casual activities to reveal in them a texture of emotional and psychological complexes.” Just as the close-up enabled one to excavate the recesses of space, slow motion enabled the excavation of new temporalities. In Deren’s view “slow-motion is the microscope of time.”⁴⁹

All of this is to suggest that one experiences a peculiar intensity when watching Disappearing Music for Face. The film’s minimalism, its stark simplicity, may seem to be deliberately boring, but those who view it in its entirety are often surprised to find just how gripping the film is. Michael Kirby (in an article on the ontological-hysteric theater of Richard Foreman) discusses the powerful affective responses engendered by temporal protraction. Although Kirby is primarily concerned with theatrical (rather than cinematic) slow motion, his remarks remain relevant in theorizing protracted cinema:

Artificially slowing down the rate of change in the perceptual field may … create what can be thought of as intensification through analogy. When the mind is involved with a crisis situation, things often seem to be happening in slow motion. The mind responds so actively that the progress of the skidding car seems retarded; each detail seems more sharply defined than it would be normally. A performance done in slow motion can create, by analogy, the same sense of crisis. The amount of information and the complexity of detail perceived are much greater than would be registered unless the mind were responding rapidly to a crisis situation. Even when the occurrences observed are not dangerous or threatening, the retardation of flow creates psychic intensification.⁵⁰

But the fact that the object being filmed in Disappearing Music is a human face (rather than anything else) amplifies its affective force. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari challenge conventional theorizations of the face that see it as a locus of compassion and humanity. They argue instead that the human face is “a horror story,” adding, “The face is not animal, but neither is it human in general; there is even something absolutely inhuman about the face…. The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start.” Deleuze and Guattari are quick to note that they are speaking of the face as such, not merely one which has been modified or magnified in some way; in fact, they insist that the face is “by nature a close-up.”⁵⁴ Nevertheless, a film like Disappearing Music for Face, by offering an extreme close-up of this close-up, infinitely magnifies the face’s immanent inhumanity. As Mary Ann Doane asserts, “The scale of the close-up transforms the face into an instance of the gigantic, the monstrous: it overwhelms.”⁵⁵ This description is especially apropos for the face of Disappearing Music, since the magnification is even more extreme than the kind used in a traditional close-up. We are so close to the face that much of it falls outside the frame. All that remains is an enormous disembodied mouth. Its size on the cinema screen is so formidable that one can imagine being devoured by it, in much the same way that Judas, Brutus, and Cassius are eaten by Satan at the end of Dante’s Inferno.⁵⁶

This may seem like a meaningless admonition. Can a smile (and its subsequent disappearance) be heard? In the absence of laughter it is difficult to imagine literally hearing the smile of another person. Still, the Shiomi score certainly might inspire an individual to listen to his or her own smile, which could potentially produce barely audible sounds, such as changes in breathing or the movement of one’s saliva. It is true that Maciunas’s film version of Disappearing Music for Face is completely silent, so any attempts to listen to Ono’s fading smile will be fruitless; nevertheless, the very act of attempting to listen to something that makes no noise can effect a kind of aesthetic enlightenment. Fluxus composer La Monte Young was well aware of this. This is why his Composition 1960 #5 (1960) consists only of “turn[ing] a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.” While this may seem like a worthwhile piece of experimental theater or conceptual art, Young insisted on calling it a musical composition. When a puzzled Tony Conrad admitted that he did not understand this work, Young responded, “Isn’t it wonderful if someone listens to something he is ordinarily supposed to look at?”⁶⁰ On another occasion, Young asserted, “It didn’t seem to me at all necessary that anyone or anything should have to hear sounds…. It is enough that they exist for themselves.”⁶¹ Like other Fluxus artists (and like Cage himself) Young was intent on radically expanding the definition of music. Any event—whether it produced sound or not—had a certain musicality. Disappearing Music for Face, then, can be conceptualized as a kind of silent music. (Of course, if one attempts to listen to Maciunas’s and Shiomi’s film, one may still come to appreciate the sounds of one’s immediate environment: the hum of the film projector, for example, or—for the true Cagean—the noise of one’s own nervous system and blood flow.)

Like Cage, Young, and Brecht, what interests Shiomi about music is not aurality but temporality. She claims that “the essence of music” is “the very recognition of time itself—the duration of time that is not necessarily realized as sound.”⁶² A Shiomi event often causes one to “feel the slow process of a banal action as a static musical duration.”⁶³ Experiments in “static musical duration,” then, can be seen as important precursors to the protracted Fluxfilms. Of course, references to musical stasis are strictly metaphorical, since sounds cannot literally move or remain still. (Sound waves certainly move, but that is another story.) But the metaphor is a useful one. When a specific sound is held over a period of time, without variation, the effect is a kind of aural stasis analogous to the more familiar spatial varieties. Here is how the composer and film theorist Michel Chion conceptualizes this metaphor: “Sound does have means to suggest stasis, but only in limited cases. One could say that ‘fixed sound’ is that which entails no variations whatever as it is heard. This characteristic is only found in certain sounds of artificial origin: a telephone dial tone, or the hum of a speaker. Torrents and waterfalls can produce a rumbling close to white noise too, but it is rare not to hear at least some trace of irregularity and motion.”⁶⁴

The composer most closely associated with “static” music is almost certainly La Monte Young. His Composition 1960 #7 (1960) is simply a sustained open fifth (a B and an F#) “held for a long time,” while the score for his Composition 1960 #9 (1960) consists only of a horizontal line; it is generally performed as a single tone sustained for a significant duration.⁶⁵ Since, as Michel Chion has argued, “The effect of a fixed sound can also be created by taking a variation or evolution and infinitely repeating it in a loop,” a number of other Young compositions would also qualify as static, such as X for Henry Flynt (1960). In this piece a pianist repeatedly plays a single cluster of notes at regular intervals. The X in the title is a variable, so the title changes depending on the number of times that the notes are repeated, which can vary from just a few to more than a thousand. (For example, in 1961 Young himself performed a version with 1,698 repetitions, a radical gesture reminiscent of Satie’s Vexations.)⁶⁶ Another notable composer of static music is Steve Reich. In his Four Organs (1970), the titular instruments continually repeat a chord that gradually extends in duration until it (and its constituent notes) transmute into a static wall of sound. Interestingly, Reich has conceptualized Four Organs as “a sort of slow motion music,” which suggests that extreme slowness (whether in music or film) can effectively engender a sense of stasis, one that permits the experience of duration as such.⁶⁷

Years before these compositions, however, Yves Klein paved the way for static music with his Monotone Symphony (1949), in which a single chord is heard without interruption over the course of twenty minutes (followed by another twenty minutes of proto-Cagean silence). In traditional music a chord is merely a link in a musical chain and takes on meaning only in the context of other chords or notes. But here the chord is stripped of any contextualization and exists for its own sake. The listener hears the chord itself and is encouraged to appreciate its aesthetic value in a way that would be impossible if it were part of a melody. In much the same way, Shiomi and Maciunas take an action that would normally occur only fleetingly and allow it to exist purely, without cause, effect, or justification. Of course, Klein’s chord (like the fading smile of Maciunas’s film) must occur for a significant duration for its import to be appreciated. A chord or a smile lasting only a second or two will not be fully apprehended. But by stretching time, both Klein and Maciunas create aesthetic experiences in which time loses meaning, both as an organizing principle and as a phenomenological constant. In both works time seems to stretch to the point of tearing, leaving only naked duration in its wake. While Aristotle asserted that “thinking that time does not exist … happens when we do not distinguish any change,” I would argue that this statement only holds true for chronological time.⁶⁸ Psychological time, however (that is, Bergsonian durée), is at its most salient when no change is perceived. This is what enables both static cinema and static music to engender a corporeal sense of duration.

I would argue that films like Disappearing Music for Face offer profound insights about time itself, laying bare its plasticity and contingency. As many philosophers have noted, conceptualizing—or even defining—time has proven to be notoriously problematic. (Recall Saint Augustine’s formulation: “What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.”)⁶⁹ The immediate temptation is to hypostatize time by conceptualizing it as a river. But as J. J. C. Smart points out in his 1949 essay “The River of Time,” this metaphor begs the question, how fast does the river run? And to speak of the river of time moving quickly or slowly presupposes that time itself exists in time. As Smart puts it, “Just as we thought of the first time-dimension as a stream, so will we want to think of the second time-dimension as a stream also; now the speed of flow of the second stream is a rate of change with respect to a third time-dimension, and so we can go on indefinitely postulating fresh streams without being any better satisfied.”⁷⁰ (Though he comes from a very different philosophical tradition, Deleuze makes a similar observation in his second Cinema book: “Everything that changes is in time, but time does not itself change, it could itself change only in another time, indefinitely.”)⁷¹ As Smart notes, to ask, “How fast am I advancing through time?” or “How fast did time flow yesterday?” is almost incomprehensible: “What sort of measurements ought we to make? We do not even know the sort of units in which our answer should be expressed. ‘I am advancing through time at how many seconds per—?’ we might begin, and then we should have to stop. What could possibly fill the blank? Not ‘seconds’ surely. In that case the most we could hope for would be the not very illuminating remark that there is just one second in every second.”⁷²

But by constructing an alternate temporality, a film like Disappearing Music for Face offers one way of thinking through this paradox. It provides a point of departure, a temporal counterpoint that enables us to imagine other speeds at which time could flow. The film advances through time at approximately one second per eighty-three seconds (and so, in contrast, one could argue that “real” time is now moving at eighty-three seconds per second, at least if Disappearing Music is used as the measuring rod). While Kant emphasized that “different times are not simultaneous, but successive,” Disappearing Music allows one to provisionally experience different temporalities simultaneously.⁷³ Of course, the film can only be viewed in “real” time, but one’s perception of duration is inescapably altered by staring at this universe in which time has been radically transmogrified. That is, the extreme slowness of time in the film seems to bleed through to the real world, and the viewer’s own bodily movements unconsciously decelerate in response to Ono’s impossibly slow smile.

One of the most thoughtful analyses of the temporality of film is provided by Jean Epstein, in a short essay entitled “Timeless Time.” For Epstein, the cinematograph “demonstrates the variable nature of time” by extending or condensing duration. “By ‘laminating’ time to demonstrate its extreme malleability,” film “seems to free us of terrestrial—that is, solar—time, from whose rhythm, it seemed, nothing would ever dislodge us. We feel introduced to a new universe, to another continuum in which … a special time reigns, a local time which constitutes an enclave within earth time, which is itself merely a local time.” For Epstein, the fluid temporality of cinema implicitly undermines any attempt to reify time. Film exposes a destabilizing truth: “Time contains nothing that can be called time-in-itself any more than space is comprised of space-in-itself. They are only composed, one as much as the other, of relationships, variable in their essence, between appearances which are produced successively or simultaneously. That is why there can be thirty-six different times and twenty kinds of space just as there can be innumerable specific perspectives depending upon the infinitely diverse positions of objects and their observer.”⁷⁴

In other words cinema is uniquely positioned to expose the contingency (even the arbitrariness) of our temporal coordinates. By radically protracting movement, one imagines other speeds at which the river of time could (perhaps even does) flow. Of course, the fact that time is relative has been understood since Einstein, but film is capable of offering affective access to these radically different temporalities in a way that is unrivaled by any other art form. When viewing Disappearing Music for Face, one does not simply imagine time slowing down—one feels the temporal protraction. As the spectator becomes immersed in a new timescape—one in which there is no movement, only change—bodily processes begin to slow down, and one feels weightless. The screen’s unrelenting stasis provokes a hypnagogic reverie in which time itself seems to melt, as if one has entered Dalí’s painting The Persistence of Memory (1931).

Ever since the slow-motion experimentation of Fluxfilms, protracted films have remained a vital and provocative modality within the avant-garde. For example, James Broughton and Joel Singer’s Hermes Bird displays a penis becoming erect over the course of eleven minutes (“the slowest ascension of a penis that has ever been seen,” in Broughton’s words), while in Michael Snow’s See You Later/Au Revoir (1990), an ordinary thirty-second farewell is stretched out to more than seventeen minutes.⁷⁵ Along similar lines, in Super Slow Tetris (2004) media artist Cory Arcangel modifies the classic Nintendo game Tetris so that it takes several hours for the pieces to fall and the game to end. And in recent decades some filmmakers have taken this process of temporal protraction to new extremes. Recall, for example, Coleman’s La tache aveugle, which extends a minuscule fragment of footage from James Whale’s The Invisible Man into a work exceeding eight hours. Douglas Gordon ups the ante still further with 5 Year Drive-By (1995), in which John Ford’s western The Searchers (1956) is radically protracted, resulting in a film that would take an entire five years to screen.⁷⁶ While the Fluxus artists construct an alternate temporality in which it takes more than a minute for a second to pass, in La tache aveugle and 5 Year Drive-By, it takes several hours for a second to pass. Obviously, there is a crucial distinction between Disappearing Music for Face and 5 Year Drive-By: the protracted Fluxus films were designed to be seen in their entirety, but it would be practically impossible to see 5 Year Drive-By from beginning to end. Still, several important commonalities inhere in protracted cinema. These experiments in filmic duration all use extreme slow motion to derive stasis from flux, thus opening up opportunities to reflect on microtime, interstitial moments that regularly escape our perceptual awareness. Protracted films also manufacture alternate temporalities that modulate the experience of duration, effectively unmasking the contingency of time itself. If, as André Bazin asserts, “film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy,” protracted cinema represents a renewed embrace of the cataleptic.⁷⁷ By stilling the incessant movement of mainstream cinematic praxis, these films eschew momentum and seek instead to excavate the multiplicity of the momentary.