Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis

2. My use of the term static film should not be confused with that of Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, who uses the appellation to refer to photomontage. See Raoul Hausmann, “Photomontage,” in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Aperture, 1989), 178–81, 179.

3. For lack of a better term, I will use the term traditional visual art to refer to sketches, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and other historically “static” visual arts.

4. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 25.

5. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (1985): 81–90, 83 (italics in original).

6. OED Online, s.v. “movement,” accessed May 2, 2014, www.oed.com/view/Entry/123031?redirectedFrom=movement.

7. Of course, Deleuze uses the French term mouvement; however, a similar polysemy inheres in this word as well. I should briefly note that one could also conceptualize the constantly changing sound track of a film as a kind of auditory movement. While this book will primarily explore stillness as a visual phenomenon, I will examine the relationship between visual and aural stasis in chapter 3.

8. Throughout this book I will use the word ontology to refer both to film’s relationship to being and to the way this relationship has historically been theorized.

9. In the days of early cinema it was widely believed that this illusion was the result of persistence of vision, a phenomenon produced by afterimages that would briefly persist on the retina and thus provide a false sense of continuity. While many film scholars and lecturers continue to parrot this view, Joseph and Barbara Anderson (among others) have exposed the numerous holes in this etiology, claiming that soon “only the creationists among us will cling to the myth of persistence of vision as an actual explanation of how movies come to be.” Instead, the Andersons present empirical research suggesting that the perception of cinematic movement can only be understood through the study of “short-range apparent motion.” See Joseph Anderson and Barbara Anderson, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” Journal of Film and Video 45, no. 1 (1993): 3–12, 11. See also their essay “Motion Perception in Motion Pictures,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 76–95. For a detailed account of the biology of motion perception see Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 465–518.

10. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 862–76, 866.

11. This is not the case in all languages, however. As experimental filmmaker Takahiko Iimura has pointed out, in the Japanese word for film (eiga), “the emphasis is … on the state of reflection rather than motion.” See Esperanza Collado, “Takahiko Iimura in Interview,” Experimental Conversations 5 (Winter 2009–10), www.experimentalconversations.com/articles/484/takahiko-iimura-in-interview/.

12. Rudolf Arnheim, “Motion,” in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 181–87, 181.

13. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 158.

14. R. L. Rutsky, “Walter Benjamin and the Dispersion of Cinema,” symplokē 15, nos. 1–2 (2007): 8–23, 8.

15. Quoted in Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 29–52, 38.

16. Quoted in William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 12.

17. Quoted in Tom Gunning, “Machines That Give Birth to Images: Douglass Crockwell,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, ed. Jan-Christopher Horak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 335–60, 343. Crockwell specifically had the Mutoscope in mind, which permitted the viewer to control the movement (or stasis) of the stills. His unorthodox definition of cinema remains useful, however, particularly since modern technologies (DVDs, computers, etc.) again give the viewer a certain amount of control over cinematic movement (with the ability to pause, as well as rewind and fast-forward at varying speeds).

18. Peter Kubelka, interview by Jonas Mekas, in Structural Film Anthology, ed. Peter Gidal (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 98–108, 103. (The interview was originally published in the Spring 1967 issue of Film Culture.)

19. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), 22.

20. Jean Goudal, “Surrealism and Cinema,” in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, 3rd ed., trans. and ed. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2000), 88–89.

21. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 9.

22. Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 44.

23. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Breinigsville, PA: Nabu Press, 2010).

24. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 69.

25. Deleuze makes much the same point in his first Cinema book through a series of rhetorical questions: “Is not the reproduction of the illusion in a certain sense also its correction? Can we conclude that the result is artificial because the means are artificial?” See Deleuze, Cinema 1, 2. For a more extensive analysis of the “reality” of cinematic movement see Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London: Continuum, 2011), 28–44.

26. Peter Wollen, “Fire and Ice,” in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 108–13, 112.

27. Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 50.

28. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 85–122.

29. Raymond Bellour, “Concerning ‘The Photographic’” (trans. Chris Darke), in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 253–76.

30. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 168. In contrast to the films Schrader focuses on (which shift from movement to stasis), Elena del Rio explores how the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder often feature tableaux vivant that suddenly erupt into violent mobility. See Elena del Rio, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 67–69.

31. Noël Carroll, “The Essence of Cinema?” Philosophical Studies 89, no. 2/3 (1998): 323–30, 327–28.

32. Philosopher Arthur C. Danto also makes this point in his essay “Moving Pictures.” He imagines screening a film in which the first page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace is displayed for eight hours and then projecting a slide of the same page for eight hours. He concludes that “a perfectly legitimate right [to expect movement] is frustrated in the case of the film, whereas there is no legitimate expectation either to be frustrated or gratified in the case of the slide.” See Danto, “Moving Pictures,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 100–112, 102.

33. Carroll, “The Essence of Cinema?” 330, 329.

34. Noël Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 113–33, 126.

36. Philosopher Robert Yanal also prefers the term film to moving picture for similar reasons. See Robert Yanal, “Defining the Moving Image: A Response to Noël Carroll,” Film and Philosophy 12 (2008): 136–37. I will continue to use the term cinema in relation to these films, even though it is etymologically derived from the Greek word for movement (kiné), since in its modern connotation, cinema does not seem as inextricably tied to movement as terms such as motion picture and movie.

37. Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” 130.

38. Yanal, “Defining the Moving Image,” 137 (italics in original). Yanal and Russell do not seem to be aware that a film very much like Spot has already been created: Situationist Gil Wolman’s L’anticoncept visually consists of nothing more than a static illumination projected onto a weather balloon.

40. Jonas Mekas, “Extracts from Village Voice ‘Movie Journal,’” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, ed. A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis (London: Tate, 2011), 72–79, 79.

41. Noël Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of ‘Serene Velocity,’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (2006): 173–85, 185.

44. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 131. Christian Metz claims that movement is “one of the greatest differences, doubtless the greatest, between still photography and the movies” (Metz, Film Language, 7).

45. Maya Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” Daedalus 89, no. 1 (1960): 150–67, 160. When Deren emphasizes the temporal nature of the cinematic medium, she is not merely making the banal assertion that films must be apprehended in time. After all, this is true of any art form—or any phenomenal experience, for that matter. Films do not simply exist in time; they unfold in time. Thus, the cinematic encounter involves the merging of two temporal horizons: that of the film and that of consciousness itself.

46. Quoted in Karen Rosenberg, “A Controversy over ‘Empire,’” New York, May 21, 2005, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/art/10422/. Empire’s shot includes the top of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, which does in fact flash at regular intervals to provide the time. Since the film was shot at twenty-four frames per second and projected at sixteen, however, cinematic time here moves at only two-thirds the speed of actual time.

47. Raymond Bellour, “Six Films (In Passing),” in Between-the-Images, trans. Allyn Hardyck (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2013), 158–74, 172.

48. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 2.

49. Wayne Koestenbaum makes this point in his monograph on Warhol: “The only thing moving, in much of Warhol’s art, is time, lapping over icons.” Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York: Viking, 2001), 25.

50. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 6.

51. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Several Eisenstein Stills,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 58–61.

52. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 163–64 (italics in original).

53. Bellour, “Concerning ‘The Photographic,’” 271.

54. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 401.

55. Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image,” 176.

56. Ibid., 179 (italics in original).

57. For a somewhat different critique of Carroll’s argument about Serene Velocity see Bruce Russell, “Film’s Limits: The Sequel,” Film and Philosophy 12 (2008): 1–16.

58. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 112.

59. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Observations on the Laocoön” (trans. unknown), in Goethe on Art, ed. John Gage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 78–88, 81.

60. Danto, “Moving Pictures,” 109. For more on the depiction of movement in traditional visual art see Sergei Eisenstein, “Laocoön” (trans. Michael Glenny) in Selected Works, vol. 2, Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 109–202.

61. Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films” (trans. Brian Holmes), in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 313–19, 314.

62. Danto, “Moving Pictures,” 110 (italics in original).

63. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 81.

64. For more on the technological processes underlying streaming video see David Austerberry, The Technology of Video and Audio Streaming, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2005).

65. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 3rd version (trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 251–83, 267. It is worth noting that there is no mention of Duhamel at all in the second version of this essay, which Benjamin considered the “master version.” Nevertheless, Benjamin’s argument regarding the differences between painting and film remains effectively intact. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 2nd version (trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55.

66. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 55.

67. This quandary is even more obvious if one substitutes a Hollywood film for Warhol’s avant-garde fare. Imagine telling a friend that you have seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho after watching only two seconds of it on television. Interestingly, the rules for television programming itself are somewhat more flexible. One could honestly claim to have seen Star Trek without watching every single episode (although only a few seconds of viewing would still be insufficient to validate the claim).

68. Lessing, Laocoön, 19.

69. See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 229–35. See also Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Attractions” and “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 29–34, 35–52.

70. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction,” 232.

71. Amos Vogel has memorably claimed that, for the censor, “the erect penis” is “the most dangerous image in the known universe.” Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974), 219.

72. David Campany, “Introduction: When to Be Fast? When to Be Slow?” in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 10–17, 10–11.

74. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 126–29.

75. Quoted in Kracauer, Theory of Film, 34.

76. I borrow this formulation from Nietzsche: “Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity.” Quoted in Christoph Cox, “Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Ontology of Music,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 495–513, 495 (italics in original).

77. Significantly, this notion of “medium specificity” received its most influential formulation in another work released in 1960: Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting.” According to Greenberg, in the modernist era “it quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium.” See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, rev. ed. (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), 195–201, 196. Of course, Greenberg is, to a large extent, echoing claims about medium specificity made in Lessing’s Laocoön in the eighteenth century. I will give more sustained attention to Lessing and his successors in chapter 3.

78. As Miriam Hansen emphasizes, the indexical is central to Kracauer’s project, even if he does not use the term. See her introduction in Kracauer, Theory of Film, viii. I will return to the question of film’s indexicality in chapter 5.

79. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 71.

80. Ibid., xlix, xlvii.

81. Ibid., 187, 189, 191.

82. Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 37.

83. Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, trans. Daniel Hendrickson and Gerrit Jackson (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 11 (italics in original).

84. Ibid., 36, 55, 57 (italics in original).

85. Here, following the lead of Nigel Thrift, I am using the term affect to refer to “complex, self-referential states of being, rather than to their cultural interpretation as emotions or to their identification as instinctual drives.” See Nigel Thrift, Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (New York: Routledge, 2007), 221.

86. Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 3 (italics in original).

87. Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006), 1:45. In her description of the screen test Angell erroneously asserts that the first tear falls from Buchanan’s right eye.

1. Quoted in Robert Orledge, “Understanding Satie’s Vexations,” Music & Letters 79, no. 3 (1998): 386–95, 386. It is generally assumed that Vexations is a piece for piano; however, the score does not specify what instrument should be used.

2. Some sources that describe the event claim that twelve pianists were present; others claim that the number was only ten. This apparent discrepancy can be resolved by a New York Times article that appeared the day after the concert, which states that Vexations was played by “a relay team of 10 pianists, plus 2 pianists who made an occasional appearance.” See Harold C. Schonberg et al., “Music: A Long, Long, Long Night (and Day) at the Piano,” New York Times, Sept. 11, 1963, 45. Incidentally, Cage’s decision to use a team of pianists was probably a wise one, as individual pianists who have attempted to perform Vexations in its entirety have often encountered problems. For example, in 1970, Peter Evans was forced to terminate his performance after fifteen hours of playing, when he began to experience “frightful hallucinations.” See Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 103.

3. Quoted in Schonberg et al., “Music,” 48.

5. I should briefly note that there is some disagreement about whether Warhol actually attended the performance and, if so, for how long. See Gary Comenas, “Notes on John Cage, Erik Satie’s Vexations, and Andy Warhol’s Sleep,” www.warholstars.org/news/johncage.html. See also Branden W. Joseph, “Andy Warhol’s Sleep: The Play of Repetition,” in Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, ed. Ted Perry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 179–207, 180, 202. While it seems likely to me that Warhol was present for at least part of the performance, the arguments I present in this chapter are not contingent on this claim.

6. The idea for Empire was suggested to Warhol by the filmmaker John Palmer, whose reflection can be briefly glimpsed in the film’s last reel. See Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 153.

7. I will focus primarily on Sleep and Empire in this chapter because they represent two of the most striking manifestations of the furniture aesthetic in cinema. It is worth remembering, however, that Warhol’s cinematic practice was remarkably diverse, encompassing portrait films, pornographic films, and works of “expanded cinema,” among others. It is not always easy to determine which works of Warhol’s should be classified as furniture films, particularly since he often screened individual films in a variety of ways (e.g., alone or in conjunction with other films, with or without musical accompaniment, and so on). In other words my goal is not to construct a strict taxonomy to determine what does or does not “count” as a furniture film. I am merely hoping to theorize one of the many modes of cinematic spectatorship pioneered by Warhol.

8. Francis Bacon, “Of Studies,” in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 439–40, 439. As Vickers points out, curiously here means “with minute attention” (773).

9. For this insight I am indebted to Ann Blair’s discussion of Bacon in “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 11–28, 13–14.

10. Quoted in Gillmor, Erik Satie, 232.

11. Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 190–91.

12. John Cage, Conversing with Cage, 2nd ed., ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Routledge, 2003), 51. While this chapter focuses on manifestations of the “furniture” aesthetic in music and film, analogues can be found in all the arts. For example, in painting the most prominent advocate of this approach is Henri Matisse, who asserted, “What I dream of is an art without any disquieting or preoccupying subject, which would be … something analogous to a good armchair.” Quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968), 169. Significantly, it is said that when Warhol was asked what he wanted out of life, he responded, “I want to be like Matisse.” Quoted in Reva Wolf, “Introduction: Through the Looking Glass,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), xi–xxxi, xvii.

13. Quoted in Gillmor, Erik Satie, 233. For more on this incident see the excerpt from Arnold Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (1911) in Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources, ed. Daniel Albright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 66–70; and Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak®, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong®, rev. and exp. ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 14–21. While furniture music clearly has affinities with more recent forms of “background” music—such as ambient music and Muzak—an analysis of the complex relationship between these forms lies outside the scope of this chapter.

14. For more on this composition see Douglas W. Gallez, “Satie’s Entr’acte: A Model of Film Music,” Cinema Journal 16, no. 1 (1976): 36–50. It is worth noting that a significant number of cinematic scores function precisely as furniture music. As Aaron Copland has suggested, nondiegetic music in a film is often “the music one isn’t supposed to hear, the sort that helps to fill the empty spots between pauses in a conversation.” Igor Stravinsky was also well aware of this fact: “I believe that [film music] should not hinder or hurt the action and that it should fill its wallpaper function by having the same relationship to the drama that restaurant music has to the conversation at the individual restaurant table.” Although I cannot endorse Stravinsky’s unfairly dismissive attitude toward film music, this specific comment remains useful in foregrounding the deep affinities that exist between Satie’s furniture aesthetic and the aesthetic of many cinematic scores. See Aaron Copland, “Tip to Moviegoers: Take Off Those Ear-Muffs,” in Aaron Copland: A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923–1972, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Routledge, 2004), 104–110, 107; and Igor Stravinsky, “Igor Stravinsky on Film Music,” in The Hollywood Film Music Reader, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 273–80, 277.

15. It is not uncommon to see Vexations conceptualized as a kind of proto-furniture-music. In fact, some writers (such as Alan Gillmor) go so far as to suggest that all of Satie’s compositions could be called furniture music. See Gillmor, Erik Satie, 232.

16. A. R. Warwick, “Spending Time/Wasting Time: In Praise of Boredom and Confusion (Part I),” Artwrit 7 (Summer 2011): www.artwrit.com/article/spending-time-wasting-time/.

17. Ruth Hirschman, “Pop Goes the Artist,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 27–46, 41, 44. This open-ended temporality was also present in Cage’s performance of Vexations, as well as his late compositions: “The early works have beginnings, middles, and endings. The later ones do not. They begin anywhere, last any length of time.” See John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 31.

18. Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 85–96, 92.

19. Bess Winakor, “Andy Warhol’s Life, Loves, Art, and Wavemaking,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 221–28, 225.

20. Paul Arthur, “Resighting the Warhol Catechism,” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 146–53, 148.

21. Of course, one should not be too quick to take Warhol at his word, since many of his statements during interviews are cryptic or contradictory. This is in part because, as Wayne Koestenbaum has noted, “[Warhol] considered interviews to be collaborative art pieces; his job was not to convey truth but to perform” (Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, 79–80). Along similar lines Nicholas de Villiers has suggested that because of his penchant for unhelpful and opaque one-word answers during interviews, Warhol’s role could have easily been played by a Magic 8 Ball (“Yes, No, Try Again Later”). See Nicholas de Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 99. While these are valuable caveats, Warhol’s claims regarding the desired reception of Sleep and Empire are substantiated by his own screenings of these films.

22. George Bernard Shaw, “Music Hall,” in Shaw on Music, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Applause, 2000), 224–25, 224.

23. See Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, trans. and ed. Ben Brewster (London: British Film Institute, 1990), especially the chapter entitled “The Motionless Voyage: Constitution of the Ubiquitous Subject,” 202–33, 230. For more on Burch’s theory of cinema (and its relevance in understanding other visual media, such as comic strips) see “The Motionless Voyage of Little Nemo,” chapter 2 of Scott Bukatman’s The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 77–105.

24. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1922), xxxi. For a more thorough exploration of the phenomenon of talking during movies see Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 44–51.

25. Jonas Mekas, The Walden Book, 2nd English ed., ed. Pip Chodorov and Christian Lebrat (Paris: Éditions Paris expérimental, 2009), 59. The premiere of Sleep was less dramatic: only nine people were in attendance, and two of them left during the first hour. See John Giorno, “Andy Warhol Interviewed by a Poet,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 21–26, 21.

26. Quoted in P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 326–48, 343.

27. For more on Duchamp’s aesthetic of “visual indifference” see Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (London: Da Capo, 1987), 48; and Katherine Kuh, “Interview with Marcel Duchamp,” in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper and Row, 2000), 81–93, 92.

28. In fact, Warhol made a film entitled Couch in 1964. While it could certainly be conceptualized as a furniture film (in more ways than one), its graphic portrayal of a variety of sexual encounters on a couch in the Factory offers more onscreen movement than most of Warhol’s early films.

29. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 372.

30. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York: Marion Boyars, 1991), 39.

31. Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 287.

32. Koch, Stargazer, 39.

33. Amy Taubin, “****,” in Who Is Andy Warhol? ed. Colin MacCabe, Mark Francis, and Peter Wollen (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 23–32, 27.

34. Vivienne Dick, “Warhol: Won’t Wrinkle Ever: A Film-Maker’s View,” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 154–59, 156.

35. J. Hoberman, “Nobody’s Land: Inside Outer and Inner Space,” in From Stills to Motion and Back Again: Texts on Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Outer and Inner Space, ed. Bill Jeffries (Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2003), 18–25, 22. For a thoughtful analysis of stasis in contemporary video installations see Catherine Fowler, “Obscurity and Stillness: Potentiality in the Moving Image,” Art Journal 72, no. 1 (2013): 64–79.

36. Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” 92 (italics added). For more on Water see Callie Angell, “Andy Warhol: Outer and Inner Space,” in From Stills to Motion and Back Again: Texts on Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Outer and Inner Space, ed. Bill Jeffries (Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2003), 13–17, 16. Malcolm Le Grice is one of the few writers who has acknowledged the overriding importance of audience reaction in Warhol’s aesthetic. In Le Grice’s assessment “Warhol has always been more concerned with impact than form—formal innovation being a by-product of impact. He is essentially a neo-Dadaist attempting to provoke response.” See Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond (London: Studio Vista, 1976), 93.

37. Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, 185.

38. Koch, Stargazer, 39.

39. Quoted in David E. James, “Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in Walden,” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David E. James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 170 (italics in original).

40. Scott MacDonald, “An Interview with Taka Iimura,” Journal of the University Film Association 33, no. 4 (1981): 21–44, 38. Interestingly, Iimura goes on to compare 1 to 60 Seconds to Warhol’s Empire.

41. The quotation comes from Kiarostami’s Around Five (2005), a documentary on the making of Five.

42. Quoted in Branden W. Joseph, “‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (2002): 81–107, 85.

43. The multiplicity of screens used in the Quartet Installation would eventually be revisited in Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable productions (1966–67), which featured several film and slide projectors running simultaneously, along with numerous records playing, lights flashing, and a barrage of other visual and auditory stimuli. The Warhol film clips that were used for these productions were called EPI Background reels, a title that further hints at Warhol’s interest in the furniture aesthetic. For an excellent historical account of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and its relationship to the Quartet Installation see Joseph, “‘My Mind Split Open.’” Callie Angell also provides valuable information about the EPI in Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 264–79.

44. Joseph Gelmis, “Andy Warhol,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 160–69, 166.

45. This kind of spectatorial sampling has become more widespread than ever in the modern era; think, for example, of the way computer users often navigate among a multiplicity of websites, programs, and interfaces simultaneously.

46. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1975), 26.

47. Letitia Kent, “Andy Warhol, Movieman: ‘It’s Hard to Be Your Own Script,’” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 185–90, 187 (italics in original).

48. Graig Uhlin, “TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 3 (2010): 1–23, 6. Seemingly endless films were a constant fascination for Warhol, prompting Callie Angell to remark that he had a “radical fantasy of film as an omnipresent medium that could literally last forever.” See Callie Angell, “Andy Warhol, Filmmaker,” in The Andy Warhol Museum, by Callie Angell et al. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1994), 122. **** (Four Stars) (1967) (shown only once) is twenty-five hours long, and many of Warhol’s unrealized projects sought to push cinematic duration to even more extreme levels. For example, he considered making a thirty-day-long film called Warhol Bible, as well as a film that would last six months entitled Building.

49. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 22.

50. Noël Carroll, “TV and Film: A Philosophical Perspective,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 35, no. 1 (2001): 15–29, 28. While many media theorists interpret McLuhan’s hot/cool distinction more charitably, seeing it as a commentary on the immersiveness of film (and the nonimmersiveness of television), Carroll’s view is that McLuhan’s “coolness” claim is simply based on TV’s limited number of scan lines. Carroll is correct. McLuhan was insistent that television is immersive, a point most clearly spelled out in The Medium Is the Massage: “Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you.” See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2001), 125. McLuhan’s assertion that television “will not work as a background” strikes me as both bizarre and baseless.

51. It appears that this argument was first articulated by John Ellis in 1982. See John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 127–44.

52. Dennis Giles, “Television Reception,” Journal of Film and Video 37, no. 3 (1985): 12–25, 12.

53. I borrow the term post-medium from Rosalind Krauss’s book A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000).

54. Steven Shaviro, “The Life, After Death, of Postmodern Emotions,” Criticism 46, no. 1 (2004): 125–41, 128 (italics added). Along similar lines Lou Reed describes Warhol’s Empire as “wallpaper art” in the song “Style It Takes.” See Lou Reed and John Cale, Songs for Drella, Warner Bros. Records W2 26140, 1990, compact disc.

55. Throughout his career Warhol undermined simplistic (and arbitrary) dividing lines between media through a process of blending and appropriation. As Uhlin astutely notes, “Warhol’s artwork … frequently interrogated the properties of one medium by use of another—photography as painting, film as portraiture, and tape recording as novel.” See Uhlin, “TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol,” 3. Warhol’s Quartet Installation adds another media hybrid to this list: film as television.

56. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1990), 64.

57. See Gertrude Stein, “An Elucidation,” in Gertrude Stein: Selections, ed. Joan Retallack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 186.

58. For more on Warhol’s use of repetition in Sleep see Joseph, “Andy Warhol’s Sleep.”

59. “Sonnet: Homage to Andy Warhol,” by Ron Padgett, ©1964, reprinted by permission of the author. The poem can also be found in Film Culture 32 (1964): 13. Callie Angell mistakenly describes “Sonnet: Homage to Andy Warhol” as consisting of “thirty-five lines of z’s”; however, true to the sonnet form, the poem has only fourteen lines, each with thirty-five zs. See Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 150. For a more detailed treatment of Warhol’s influence on Padgett see Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 94–101.

60. Michel Foucault, “Theatricum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 165–96, 189.

61. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 205.

62. “Pop Art? Is It Art? A Revealing Interview with Andy Warhol,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 3–5, 5.

63. Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 191–92.

64. John Cage, John Cage: Documentary Monographs in Modern Art, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Praeger, 1970), 191.

65. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1981), 1.

66. Thomas Kellein, “Pleasure in Mechanics: Warhol’s Abstract Work,” in Andy Warhol: Abstracts, ed. Thomas Kellein (New York: Prestel, 1993), 9–23, 15.

67. Andy Warhol, a: A Novel (New York: Grove, 1998), 17, 41, 86, 221, 315, 387.

68. Ibid., 87, 114, 374, 424.

70. Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 54.

71. Gelmis, “Andy Warhol,” 163 (italics on movie in original; italics on photographing added).

72. Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 79.

73. As I mentioned in chapter 1, many film theorists have seen movement as the distinguishing feature of cinema; however, Empire makes this argument unsustainable. Jean Cocteau got it right. When he was asked to explain the difference between a photograph of a still object and a film of that same object, he responded that in the film “time courses through it.” Quoted in David Campany, Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008), 18.

74. Arthur, “Resighting the Warhol Catechism,” 152 (italics added).

75. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 64.

76. See Koch, Stargazer, 35–36; and Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 64.

77. See Justin Remes, “Sculpting Time: An Interview with Michael Snow,” Millennium Film Journal 56 (2012): 16–21, 17.

78. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 107. Manovich here follows the lead of Jean-Louis Baudry, who emphasizes the “forced immobility” of cinema, comparing it to Plato’s cave. See Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura 1, no. 1 (1976): 104–26.

79. Michael O’Pray makes a similar observation in his discussion of Empire: “While a painting of a mundane object had been perfectly acceptable since the impressionists of the nineteenth century (although it had at the time attracted similar objections), the idea of a film-maker filming an object over a lengthy period of time without any attempt at film construction or story or even drama was anaethema.” See Michael O’Pray, Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes, and Passions (London: Wallflower, 2003), 86.

80. Quoted in Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice, Feb. 9, 1967, 29.

81. See Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 2nd version, 40.

82. By conceptualizing Sleep and Empire as furniture films, I do not wish to downplay their status as mischievous practical jokes. Recall that Warhol wanted his early films to engender “comedy in the audience.” One can easily imagine the type of conversation that Warhol might have wanted to provoke: Q: “What could be more boring than watching a film of a building?” A: “Watching a film of a building shot in slow motion.”

83. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 260.

84. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), 83–109, 91.

85. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (San Diego: Harvest, 1984), 146.

86. Again, one sees a precursor to Warhol’s aesthetic in the plays of Beckett, which often feature only the most uneventful and routine human actions. (Think of Act Without Words II [1956], for example, in which the two characters do nothing more than sleep, eat carrots, brush their teeth, pray, get dressed, etc.) Furthermore, like Warhol, Beckett consistently manifested an interest in stasis. Theater, like film, is a medium that comes with expectations of movement, but Beckett’s plays often feature none—and many of his characters are completely immobilized. In Happy Days (1960) the protagonist, Winnie, is buried in earth; in Play (1963) all three characters are trapped in urns; and Breath (1969) displays only a dimly lit stage littered with garbage for roughly thirty seconds. For an extended comparison of Warhol and Beckett that focuses on their abandonment of meaning, see Enoch Brater, “The Empty Can: Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol,” Journal of Modern Literature 3, no. 5 (1974): 1255–64. Peter Gidal also notes several affinities between these artists in his book Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings, the Factory Years (New York: Da Capo, 1971).

87. Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond, 94.

88. Frances Colpitt, “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting?,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 4 (1985): 359–65.

89. Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), 293–304, 303.

91. Cage, Silence, 93.

92. Dick Higgins, “Boredom and Danger,” in Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Critical Anthology of the New Music, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1981), 20–27, 21. Ina Blom also discusses this kind of aesthetically satisfying boredom, pointing out its “capacity to cause disappearance on two different levels which must be experienced as reciprocal: the work will disappear into the surroundings, and the spectator will disappear into the work.” See Ina Blom, “Boredom and Oblivion,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (London: Academy Editions, 1998), 66.

93. Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, 11.

94. For extended analyses of the multivalence and complexity of boredom see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom (London: Reaktion, 2011).

95. Mark Leach, #Empirefilm (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2011), 15–16, 37.

98. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues, 1997), 97.

99. David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 178.

100. Leach, #Empirefilm, 55.

101. Ibid., 11, 44, 47.

102. Quoted in Schonberg et al., “Music,” 48. Shortly after the performance, Karl Schenzer and John Cale appeared on the TV game show I’ve Got a Secret to discuss the event. See “John Cale—I’ve Got a Secret—normal resolution,” YouTube video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYHIqMmtS-0.

103. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 8.

104. Gelmis, “Andy Warhol,” 165.

105. Erik Satie, A Mammal’s Notebook, trans. Antony Melville, ed. Ornella Volta (London: Atlas, 1996), 200.

1. Scott MacDonald, Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 23.

2. Interview with Tony Conrad, in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 73.

3. Around 1966 Higgins put this language on a rubber stamp, which he subsequently used to stamp the endings of his letters.

4. For more on the neo-avant-garde see Hal Foster, “What’s Neo About the Neo-Avant-Garde?” October 70 (1994): 5–32; and David Hopkins, ed., Neo-Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).

5. Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, rev. ed. (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), 173–76.

6. Lessing, Laocoön, 91. When Lessing refers to painting, he is using that medium metonymically to refer to visual art writ large, including sculpture.

8. Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of New Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 142.

9. Theodor Adorno, “Art and the Arts,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 385, 387.

10. Clement Greenberg, “Intermedia,” in Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, ed. Robert C. Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 98.

11. Ibid., 93 (italics added), 98 (italics in original).

12. Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 11.

13. Dick Higgins, Modernism Since Postmodernism, 174–75.

16. Mieko Shiomi, e-mail message to the author, May 20, 2011.

17. Quoted in Ken Friedman, “Events and the Exquisite Corpse,” in The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game, ed. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 55. An alternative version of Shiomi’s event score simply reads, “smile/stop smiling.” See David T. Doris, “Zen Vaudeville,” in Friedman, The Fluxus Reader, 91–135, 99, 132.

18. Shiomi also did not authorize the Fluxus flip-book version of Disappearing Music for Face. See Sally Kawamura, “Appreciating the Incidental: Mieko Shiomi’s ‘Events,’” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 3 (2009): 311–36, 333.

19. Quoted in Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 229.

20. Shiomi, e-mail message to the author, May 20, 2011.

21. See Ken Friedman, Owen Smith, and Lauren Sawchyn, eds., The Fluxus Performance Workbook (A Performance Research e-Publication, 2002), 96–97, www.thing.net/~grist/ld/fluxusworkbook.pdf.

22. Shiomi, e-mail message to the author, May 20, 2011.

23. Quoted in Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 134 (emphasis added).

24. Shiomi, e-mail message to the author, May 20, 2011 (emphasis added).

25. Cage, Silence, 267.

26. See Scott MacDonald and Yoko Ono, “Ideas on Film: Interview/Scripts,” Film Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1989): 2–23, 18.

28. Quoted in Friedman, “Events and the Exquisite Corpse,” 61. Mac Low’s concept may be seen as the forerunner of films like Stan Brakhage’s Song 27, My Mountain (1968) and James Benning’s 13 Lakes (2004), in which still natural objects are displayed for lengthy periods of time. Hannah Higgins even suggests that Tree Movie may have paved the way for Warhol’s static films, although it is difficult to determine which came first: Mac Low’s idea for Tree Movie or Warhol’s idea for Sleep. See Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 123–24.

29. Even though the film is based on an event score, the disappearing smile no longer seems to be an event at all, at least if we take seriously Rudolf Arnheim’s distinction between events and objects. Arnheim suggests, on the one hand, that the presence of the event entails the perception of movement, a sense that something is happening before our eyes. On the other hand, “a cloud … [or] a lobster turning red, [or] a potato getting tender” are not experienced as events but as “object[s] in transformation.” See Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 373.

30. Peter Moore operated the camera in the aforementioned protracted films, and they were later compiled by Maciunas into a single work called Fluxfilms (1966–67). (Vanderbeck’s Five O’clock in the Morning is the only protracted film in this compilation in which the movement, while decelerated, is still recognizable as movement.) While I have mentioned all of the protracted films that appear in this compilation, several other static films are also included, such as Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1962–64). In fact, Fluxus artists remained interested in cinematic stasis well after the production of Fluxfilms. For instance, in 1975 Fluxus advertised an event called 12! Big Names! (Some of the names mentioned on the distributed flyers included Ono, Warhol, Snow, and Philip Glass.) Attendees who expected to see these well-known artists ended up seeing a film that displayed only their names, one at a time. The names were “big,” as promised, filling up the entire screen. (Each one lingered for about five minutes before being replaced.) While this was clearly an impudent prank, it still exemplifies Fluxus artists’ fascination with static cinema.

31. Fernand Léger, “A New Realism—The Object (Its Plastic and Cinematic Graphic Value),” in Introduction to the Art of the Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), 96.

32. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 25.

33. Brill, Shock and the Senseless, 141.

34. Quoted in ibid., 144. For more on the strategic use of boredom by Fluxus see Dick Higgins, “Boredom and Danger,” 20–27. As is the case with Warhol’s cinema, the Fluxus artworks being discussed here are certainly not boring in the sense of being uninteresting. They are, however, restrained and uneventful.

35. Cage, Silence, 8.

36. Doris, “Zen Vaudeville,” 108.

37. Shiomi’s Disappearing Music for Face (along with many of her other event scores) shares striking similarities with Warhol’s static films: for example, both collapse distinctions between art and the “real world,” and both traffic in individual static objects. While Shiomi acknowledges the affinity, she was not aware of Warhol’s films when she wrote her event scores (Shiomi, e-mail message to the author, May 20, 2011).

38. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 112.

39. Quoted in Follow Your Own Weird: The World of James Broughton (Chicago: Facets Cine-Notes, 2006), 31.

40. For an excellent history of scientific and philosophical treatments of microtime see Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

41. Bill Viola, “A Conversation,” interview by Hans Belting, in Bill Viola: The Passions, ed. John Walsh (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum; and London: National Museum, 2003), 200.

42. Giorgio Agamben, “Nymphs” (trans. Amanda Minervini), in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 60–80, 60.

43. Ibid., 68. For an extensive analysis of “the odd stasis” of Viola’s protracted video installations see Mark Hansen, “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004): 584–626. While Hansen’s interrogation is both compelling and philosophically rich, he problematically emphasizes “the capacity of new media to broker a technical enlargement of the threshold of the now” (589). As the Fluxus films demonstrate, the traditional cinematographic medium is just as capable of extending duration as Viola’s digital video technology. Of course, this is not to say that the two mediums are identical. For example, unlike the Fluxus films, Viola’s installations lack the emulsion grain that potentially reminds the viewer of the movement of the projector. Nevertheless, by suggesting that temporal protraction is a function unique to new media, Hansen overplays his hand.

44. Gilles Deleuze, “On Leibniz,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 160.

46. Ibid. (italics in original).

47. Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin, “Close-Ups in Time,” in Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. and ed. Ivor Montagu (New York: Grove, 1976), 146–54, 180.

48. Quoted in Amy Taubin, “Douglas Gordon,” in Spellbound: Art and Film, ed. Philip Dodd and Ian Christie (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 68–75, 70. Gordon’s statement echoes Benjamin’s famous assertion that the camera enables the discovery of “the optical unconscious.” See Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 2nd version, 37.

49. Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film (Yonkers, NY: Alicat Book Shop Press, 1946), 47–48. Deren wrote this about fourteen years before Siegfried Kracauer made much the same observation in his Theory of Film: “Slow-motion shots … are, so to speak, temporal close-ups, achieving in time what the close-up proper is achieving in space” (Kracauer, Theory of Film, 53).

50. Michael Kirby, “Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre,” Drama Review 17, no. 2 (1973): 5–32, 28.

51. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 172.

52. Béla Balázs, “The Close-Up,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 314–21, 318–19.

53. Quoted in Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2003): 89–111, 92.

54. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 168, 171.

55. Doane, “The Close-Up,” 94.

56. Since Disappearing Music for Face, several films have exploited the disconcerting intensity of the massive mouth. I am thinking here of the opening of Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), as well as the film versions of Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1972), including a filmed performance of the play from 1973 (starring Billie Whitelaw) and a more recent version directed by Neil Jordan in 2000.

57. Quoted in Friedman, Smith, and Sawchyn, The Fluxus Performance Workbook, 96.

58. Quoted in Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 114. This kind of absurd imagery has clear precursors in the stories of Zen Buddhism, as in the master who claimed that “Zen is an elephant copulating with a flea.” Quoted in Osho, Zen: The Path of Paradox (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001), 119.

59. Cage, Silence, 15.

60. La Monte Young, “Lecture 1960,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (1965): 73–83, 77–78. As Dorothée Brill points out, this philosophy is reminiscent of the Zen master who raises his hand and asks his students to listen to its sound. See Brill, Shock and the Senseless, 137–38.

61. Young, “Lecture 1960,” 75.

62. Quoted in Yoshimoto, Into Performance, 146.

63. Shiomi, e-mail message to the author, May 20, 2011.

64. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 10.

65. In 1964 Young agreed to provide his Composition 1960 #9 as a sound track to Andy Warhol’s Quartet Installation. The composition was realized as a very loud recording of a sustained tone produced by a bowed brass mortar. When officials asked Young to turn down the volume, he withdrew his composition altogether, leaving Warhol’s four films to continue playing in silence. See Joseph, “‘My Mind Split Open,’” 83–86. For an exemplary analysis of Young’s oeuvre and its aesthetic significance see also Branden W. Joseph’s Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (New York: Zone, 2008).

66. The most mesmerizing performance of X for Henry Flynt that I have heard is 42 for Henry Flynt, performed by Peter Winkler in 1965 at the Third Annual Festival of the Avant-Garde in San Francisco. In this performance Winkler hits a gong forty-two times, and the result is an absorbing and mysterious soundscape.

67. Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965–2000, ed. Steve Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 44. Given Reich’s saliently cinematic description of Four Organs, one cannot help but wonder if it was in any way inspired by Michael Snow’s famous protracted film Wavelength, in which the camera’s move from one end of a room to another takes forty-five minutes to complete. Reich saw the film and wrote about it in 1968. See Steve Reich, “Wavelength by Michael Snow,” in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 106–7.

68. Aristotle, Physics, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 105.

69. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 230.

70. J. J. C. Smart, “The River of Time,” Mind 58, no. 232 (1949): 483–94, 484. This kind of conundrum is ubiquitous in popular discourse. For example, astrophysicists are frequently asked, “What existed before the big bang?” But since the big bang represents the advent of space-time, this may be a meaningless question. To ask what came before time itself assumes the existence of some kind of metatime. As Stephen Hawking has famously suggested, asking what existed before the big bang may be comparable to asking what is south of the South Pole. See Stephen Hawking, “Hawking on the Future of Mankind,” BBC News, Jan. 6, 2012, http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9672000/9672233.stm.

71. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 17.

72. Smart, “The River of Time,” 485.

73. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 179.

74. Jean Epstein, “Magnification and Other Writings,” trans. Stuart Liebman, October 3 (1977): 9–25, 16, 18–19, 20.

75. James Broughton, All: A James Broughton Reader, ed. Jack Foley (Brooklyn: White Crane, 2006), 162.

76. 5 Year Drive-By was meant to be displayed on a drive-in movie screen in Utah’s Monument Valley. However, as of this writing Gordon’s ambitious desire to display the film in its entirety has not come to fruition—only part of the work has been screened.

77. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1:14–15.

1. Translations from the French text are taken from Katrina Martin, “Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic-cinéma,” Studio International 189, no. 973 (1975): 53–60. The original French sentences appear as follows: “L’enfant qui tête est un souffleur de chair chaude et n’aime pas le chou-fleur de serre chaude.” “Si je te donne un sou, me donneras tu une paire de ciseaux?” “Inceste ou passion de famille, à coups trop tirés.” “Avez vous déja mis la moëlle de l’épée dans le poêle de l’aimée?” Given the complexity and polysemy of the original French text, Martin correctly points out that a faithful English translation of Anémic cinéma is “impossible.”

2. Quoted in P. Adams Sitney, “Image and Title in Avant-Garde Cinema,” October 11 (1979): 97–112, 102.

3. And silent films without intertitles did not necessarily forgo written text altogether. For example, as Scott MacDonald points out, Murnau still managed to smuggle written language into The Last Laugh “within the imagery.” See Scott MacDonald, introduction to Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers, ed. Scott MacDonald (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1–14, 2.

4. Although P. Adams Sitney has called Anémic cinéma “the first film within the tradition of the avant-garde to claim equality of title and image” (see Sitney, “Image and Title,” 102), there is arguably a precursor to Duchamp’s experiment in Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), which combines documentary footage of Manhattan with poetic intertitles. One might reasonably contend, however, that the text of Manhatta serves as a commentary on the film’s images and is thus more closely allied with traditional narrative intertitles—ones that are subservient to cinematic imagery—than Duchamp’s more autonomous text. Interestingly, Man Ray, who assisted Duchamp in the filming of Anémic cinéma, would go on to make several films of his own that used written text for poetic (rather than diegetic) effect; see, e.g., L’étoile de mer (The Starfish) (1928) and Les mystères du château de Dé (The mysteries of the Chateau of Dice) (1929).

5. See, e.g., Hollis Frampton, “Film in the House of the Word,” October 17 (1981): 61–64, esp. 61.

6. The most notable scholar in the field of text-based cinema is undoubtedly Scott MacDonald. In addition to the aforementioned Screen Writings, see his “Text as Image in Some Recent North American Avant-Garde Films,” Afterimage 13, no. 8 (1986): 9–20.

7. The term structural film was coined by P. Adams Sitney in 1969 to refer to film that “insists on its shape,” resulting in content that is “minimal and subsidiary to the outline.” See P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” 327. For Sitney, Snow’s Wavelength “may be the supreme achievement of the form” (Sitney, Visionary Film, 355).

8. Dripping Water appears to be a cinematic interpretation of George Brecht’s event score Drip Music (Drip Event) (1959), the instructions for which simply read, “A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.” See Friedman, Smith, and Sawchyn, The Fluxus Performance Workbook, 22. Snow’s film represents a distinctive “performance” of Brecht’s score, however, since the water falling into the vessel and the dripping heard on the sound track are deliberately asynchronous.

9. It is worth noting that not all textual films are static. For example, the text of Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman’s Television Delivers People (1973) continuously scrolls from the bottom of the screen upward, in the style of closing credits.

10. Annette Michelson and Michael Snow, “The Sound of Music: A Conversation with Michael Snow,” October 114 (2005): 43–60, 56.

11. Slashes do not appear in So Is This. However, the fact that words only appear one at a time is destabilizing for the reader/viewer. I use slashes when quoting from the film to elicit a comparable reading experience, one that is stilted and desultory.

12. Deren, “Cinematography,” 160.

13. Michael Kirby, “The Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde,” in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, rev. ed. (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), 35–64, 46.

14. Anthony McCall, “Line Describing a Cone and Related Films,” October 103 (2003): 42–62, 56.

15. Anthony McCall, “Two Statements,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 252–53.

16. In the theorizations of Jonathan Walley, works like Conrad’s Yellow Movies would be considered “paracinema,” since they “recognize cinematic properties outside the standard film apparatus” and thus find “cinematic qualities or effects in nonfilmic materials.” See Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film,” October 103 (2003): 15–30. See also Walley’s “The Paracinema of Anthony McCall and Tony Conrad,” in Avant-Garde Film, ed. Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 355–82.

17. Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” 81.

18. Greenberg, “Intermedia,” 95.

19. I borrow the term remediation from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, who use it to describe the McLuhanesque appropriation of one medium by another. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

20. Throughout this chapter I will use the term book as a convenient shorthand for referring to all traditionally typographical mediums, including magazines, journals, newspapers, text-based websites, and e-books.

21. Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 128–51, 137 (italics added).

22. The text of So Is This can be found in MacDonald, Screen Writings, 140–55.

23. Remes, “Sculpting Time,” 18.

24. In fact, So Is This goes so far as to address Mary Brown, the censor who banned “Rameau’s Nephew,” by name: “Hello / Censors, / Hi / Mary. / This / Film / is / as / clean / as / a / whistle. / Ha / Ha / Ha / Ha / (Hollow / laughter). / This / film / wouldn’t / say / shit / if /its / mouth / were / full / of / it. / Gulp.” The “Gulp” in this passage simultaneously expresses Snow’s fear of censorship (the nervous gulp) and his utter defiance of censorial strictures (the evocation of coprophagia).

25. Remes, “Sculpting Time,” 18.

26. MacDonald, Screen Writings, 137. In addition to this implicit form of audience participation there are points in the film when participation is explicitly encouraged—for example, when audience members are incited to sing together in their minds: “Let’s / all / raise / our / mental / voices / mutely, / mutually / in / song / (please / don’t / move / your / lips). / Ready? / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4: / ‘Some / where / o / ver / the / rain / bow / skies / are / blue …’”

27. Remes, “Sculpting Time,” 20.

28. A rather different form of cinematic “Communal / reading” arises when an audience watches a foreign film with subtitles. Since entire phrases or sentences are usually displayed (as opposed to the word-by-word approach favored by Snow), reading rates can vary slightly, resulting in two kinds of temporal asynchrony: (1) individual spectators may read at different speeds, leading some to apprehend textual content before others, and (2) spectators may experience a “delay,” reading the textual translation of a piece of dialogue before or after it is spoken. (For example, when watching foreign films, I often find myself quickly reading the subtitles with enough time remaining to anticipate how the actor or actress will deliver the lines I have just read.)

29. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 305.

30. Warhol Bible appears to be a kind of practical joke, although this should not diminish its status as a serious meditation on the distinction between text and cinema. Since most viewers would hear the title and expect some kind of Warholian interpretation of biblical stories (using actors, sets, dialogue, and so on), the absurdly literal content of the film would subvert these expectations. In fact, the idea for Warhol Bible is strongly reminiscent of the aforementioned Fluxus film 12! Big Names!, in which spectators were lured into the theater by flyers that promised they would see “big names”—like Warhol and Snow—only to be disappointed when they realized that the event was simply a textual film that displayed the stars’ names in typographical text, one at a time.

31. Allen S. Weiss, “‘Poetic Justice’: Formations of Subjectivity and Sexual Identity,” Cinema Journal 28, no. 1 (1988): 45–64, 50. Textual films like Poetic Justice are often characterized as “new talkies,” experimental films from the 1970s and beyond that foreground language. (See, e.g., J. Hoberman, “After Avant-Garde Film,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis [New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984], 59–73, 66.) However, I do not find this designation particularly helpful, since what was novel about the original talkies was not language per se but spoken language and aural synchronicity—elements that are altogether absent from silent textual films like Poetic Justice and So Is This. To his credit, Noël Carroll (who appears to be the originator of the term new talkie) categorizes Poetic Justice as a structural film. See Noël Carroll, “Interview with a Woman who … ,” Millennium Film Journal 7/8/9 (Fall 1980/1981): 37–68, 37.

32. Remes, “Sculpting Time,” 21.

33. MacDonald, “An Interview with Taka Iimura,” 26.

34. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 64.

35. Remes, “Sculpting Time,” 20.

36. Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” 130.

38. Here is a succinct summation of the fallacy by Antony Flew, who originally conceptualized it: “No Scotsman would do such a thing. But one did. Well, no true Scotsman would.” See Antony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy, rev. 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 251 (italics in original). In the context of Carroll’s argument the fallacy might look something like this: “No film is three-dimensional. But Line Describing a Cone is three-dimensional. Well, no true film is three-dimensional.”

39. McCall, “Two Statements,” 250.

40. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 36 (italics in original).

41. Ibid., 37 (italics in original), 38. In 1956 the American aesthetician Morris Weitz made a similar argument regarding Wittgenstein’s usefulness in conceptualizing art. See Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (1956): 27–35.

42. D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 23, 86.

43. Ibid., 59 (italics in original).

44. Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 137.

45. Snow has mentioned his interest in Wittgenstein in numerous interviews. See, e.g., Andree Hayum, “Information or Illusion: An Interview with Michael Snow,” in The Michael Snow Project: The Collected Writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994), 85; John Du Cane, “The Camera and the Spectator: Michael Snow in Discussion with John Du Cane,” in The Michael Snow Project, 88; Scott MacDonald, “Michael Snow,” in A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 75; and Remes, “Sculpting Time,” 20–21. For an extended analysis of Wittgenstein’s influence on Snow’s noncinematic visual art see Elizabeth Legge, “Taking It as Red: Michael Snow and Wittgenstein,” Journal of Canadian Art History 18, no. 2 (1997): 68–88.

46. Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image,” 185.

47. Remes, “Sculpting Time,” 16–17 (italics in original). Snow’s conception of sound as a kind of auditory “movement” echoes a remark made by Daniel, the protagonist of Isidore Isou’s Treatise on Slobber and Eternity (Traité de bave et d’éternité) (1951): “Who ever said that the cinema, whose meaning is movement, must absolutely be the movement of the photograph and not the movement of the word?” Quoted in Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 321–453, 345 (italics in original).

48. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The Blue Book,” in Major Works, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 109.

49. Ibid., 116 (italics in original).

50. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 10, 15 (italics in original).

51. This is not the only occasion on which the text proves to be untrustworthy. Early in the film, we read, “This / film / will / be / about / two / hours / long,” even though the actual running time is under fifty minutes.

52. Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1992), 60.

53. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 146.

54. For the text of Secondary Currents see MacDonald, Screen Writings, 162–74. Rose, like Snow, was influenced by Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In fact, after Secondary Currents Rose released another film about the progression from meaning to nonsense, entitled The Pressures of the Text (1983), which ends with a quotation from Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” I should also briefly note that Rose’s early films have a clear precursor in the writings of Samuel Beckett, who was similarly interested in the breakdown of language and meaning. This debt to Beckett is explicitly indicated in Secondary Currents, when one of the sentences reads, “given the existence as uttered forth by”—a direct quotation from the beginning of Lucky’s rambling nonsensical soliloquy in Waiting for Godot. See Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York: Grove, 1982), 45.

55. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 103.

57. Snow acknowledges his debt to Magritte in So Is This, in a passage written entirely in French: “Ça / fait / penser / l’auteur / au / tableau / bien / connu / de / Magritte: / Ceci / n’est / pas / une / pipe. / C’est / vrai / ici / aussi. / L’auteur / aime / beaucoup / le / mot / ‘ceci.’” (It / makes / the / author / think / of / the / well / known / painting / by / Magritte: / This / is / not / a / pipe. / It’s / true / here / also. / The / author / likes / the / word / ‘this’ / a / lot.) My translation.

58. Michael Snow, “Trying to Figure It Out,” in The Michael Snow Project, 280 (italics in original).

59. Steven Wright, I Have a Pony, Flashback Records R2 79549, 2005, compact disc.

60. Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 273.

61. Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 36.

62. Noël Carroll, “Engaging Critics,” Film Studies 8 (2006): 161–69, 162. The infelicitous grammar of this final sentence is quoted directly from Carroll’s text.

63. See, e.g., William C. Wees, “Words and Images in the Poetry-Film,” in Words and Moving Images, ed. William C. Wees and Michael Dorland (Montreal: Mediatexte, 1984), 105–13. In this chapter I favor the term textual film over poetry-film since poetry is not the only text-based medium that cinema can appropriate.

64. David Campany, “Posing, Acting, Photography,” in Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, ed. David Green and Joanna Lowry (Manchester: Photoforum/Photoworks, 2006), 97–112, 98.

65. Wittgenstein, “The Blue Book,” 119 (italics added).

1. Quoted in David Hopkins, “Sameness and Difference: Duchamp’s Editioned Readymades and the Neo-Avant-Garde,” in Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 91–107, 101.

2. Quoted in Barbara Rose, “The Meanings of Monochrome,” in Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present, ed. Valerie Varas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 21–86, 45.

3. For more on Klein’s influence on Jarman see Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2000), 196, 398–400.

4. The term new queer cinema was coined in 1992 in a Sight and Sound article by B. Ruby Rich to refer to a series of recent films that aggressively challenged the heteronormative foundations of classical cinema, such as Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (1991), and Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991). According to Rich these films are united by a “Homo Pomo” aesthetic of appropriation, pastiche, and irony. See B. Ruby Rich, “New Queer Cinema,” in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. Michele Aaron (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 15–22, 16.

5. For an overview of Jarman’s paintings see Michael Charlesworth, Derek Jarman (London: Reaktion, 2011).

6. Peake, Derek Jarman, 511.

7. Vivian Sobchack, “Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue,” in New Takes in Film-Philosophy, ed. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 191–206, 197. Some scholars see Jarman’s blue screen as an escape from imagery, while others see the monochromatic screen as an image. According to Robert Mitchell and Jacques Khalip, the nature of “the image” is precisely what Blue seeks to interrogate: “The apparent visual poverty of Jarman’s film—a poverty that we might take as emblematic of a more widespread strategy in twentieth-century avant-garde film and visual works of art—is thus an attempt to pose two related questions: what is an image? And—perhaps more important—what can an image be?” See Robert Mitchell and Jacques Khalip, “Release—(Non-)Origination—Concepts,” in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1–24, 2.

8. Although this chapter focuses on the immobility of Blue, stasis plays a prominent role in many of Jarman’s films. For example, his ten-minute short A Journey to Avebury (1971) consists primarily of static shots of landscapes. Furthermore, it could be argued that Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation (1985) represents an interstitial link between traditional motion pictures and the cinema of stasis. The film focuses on two male lovers going through opaque rituals while Judi Dench’s voice is heard reading Shakespearean sonnets. Though there is a kind of movement in the film, it all takes place in stroboscopic slow motion. (The film was shot at six frames per second and projected at three.) In other words the movement is not smooth but seems to be composed of a series of “jumps.” This defamiliarizing cinematic device lays bare the process that creates the perception of movement in cinema. As one views the film, the mind seems to continually shift between processing a series of stills and processing actual “moving” images—even though the ostensible movement is stilted and alienating.

9. Any history of the monochrome in art must also give credit to the impish Alphonse Allais, a member of the Société des incohérents. Allais produced A Harvest of Tomatoes on the Edge of the Red Sea Harvested by Apoplectic Cardinals (1884), which was simply a small piece of red fabric on a stretcher, as well as Total Eclipse of the Sun in Darkest Africa (1889), a piece of blue fabric. While Allais’s monochromes are perhaps best understood as proto-Dadaist pranks—distinct in intent from, say, the nihilistic provocations of Rodchenko—his work remains remarkably innovative and prescient. It is unfortunate that Allais is not as well known as his successors, such as Malevich and Rauschenberg.

10. Throughout this chapter I classify solid black or solid white screens as monochromatic. While color is often contrasted to black and white in the discursive practices of film and media, I will here favor a broader definition of color, one that sees black and white as chromatic options on a par with any other that a filmmaker might use.

11. Even though films like Ma (Intervals) and Red/Green technically feature more than one color, I still classify them as monochromatic, since in both cases only one color dominates the screen at any given moment. Red/Green was the second version of a monochrome film that McLaughlin created entitled The Only Minimal Conceptual Structuralist Color Field Dissolve Film Done to a Rag Time Tune (1980). McLaughlin claims that one of his primary concerns in these works was blurring the lines between film and painting. Dan McLaughlin, telephone interview, April 24, 2011. Both films appear to be based on Fluxus artist George Brecht’s event score Two Durations (1961), the instructions for which simply read, “red/green.” See Friedman, Smith, and Sawchyn, The Fluxus Performance Workbook, 23.

12. Tony Conrad, “Yellow Movie 2/16-26/73,” Museum of Modern Art Multimedia, www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/53/1024. For more on Conrad’s yellow movies see Christopher Müller and Jay Sanders, eds. Tony Conrad: Yellow Movies (New York: Greene Naftali Gallery, 2008).

13. Quoted in Annette Michelson, “Frampton’s Sieve,” October 32 (1985): 151–66, 166.

14. Carroll, “The Essence of Cinema?” 328.

15. David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2002), 22–23.

16. Tom Gunning, “Colorful Metaphors: The Attraction of Color in Early Silent Film,” Fotogenia 1 (2004): 249–55, 250. Gunning cites the example of color in The Wizard of Oz (1939) (a movie that had a strong impact on Jarman when he saw it as a child). In the film there is a sharp contrast between Kansas, which is a mundane sepia tone, and the otherworldly Oz, which is overflowing with bright, vibrant colors.

17. Quoted in Steven Dillon, Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 225.

18. Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book of Color (Woodstock: Overlook, 1994), 58.

20. Jarman’s fascination with color is further revealed by the fact that he planned to make another monochromatic film after Blue (which was to be called either Demonology or Hell on Earth), which would have featured a red color field. Jarman described it as “a scarlet film in a choking hellfire: smashing glass, madness, a horror film with HIV as a conscious beast rustling around, hysteric laughter, Beelzebub, legions, PCP is summoned, HELL ON EARTH, red generated from sulphur, demonology.” See Derek Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 312. Unfortunately, Jarman died before this idea was brought to fruition.

21. Tracy Biga, “The Principle of Non-narration in the Films of Derek Jarman,” in By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman, ed. Chris Lippard (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 26.

22. Yves Klein, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, trans. Klaus Ottmann (New York: Spring Publications, 2007), 138.

23. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Lawrence, KS: Digireads, 2010), 73.

24. Another paratextual element worth considering here is the color blue’s association with chroma key technology. In analogue film the blue screen is often used as a neutral backdrop over which anything can be superimposed. Thus, Blue represents an embrace of spectatorial projection, in which the audience is invited to imagine whatever content they like on the empty screen.

25. Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color, trans. Markus I. Cruse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 180.

28. Jane Alison, Colour After Klein: Re-thinking Colour in Modern and Contemporary Art (London: Black Dog, 2005), 13.

29. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 38.

30. Kate Higginson, “Derek Jarman’s ‘Ghostly Eye’: Prophetic Bliss and Sacrificial Blindness in Blue,” Mosaic 41, no. 1 (2008): 77–94, 92, 78 (italics in original).

31. Ibid., 80, 81, 83. Higginson provides other examples of this queering of the sacred in Jarman’s work, such as Sebastiane, in which a traditional religious story is told while foregrounding graphic depictions of homosexual encounters, and The Garden (1990), in which Jesus’s death is juxtaposed with gay desire. Other notable examples, which Higginson does not mention, can be found in Jarman’s film Jubilee. At one point in the film a Christlike figure is at the center of an orgy in Westminster Cathedral, a scene that echoes the climax of Luis Buñuel’s L’âge d’or (The Golden Age) (1930). At the same cathedral a man dressed as the pope engages in homosexual foreplay. And Jarman’s visual art queers the sacred in similar ways. For example, in Flesh Tint a traditional artistic representation of Jesus is largely masked by what appears to be a used condom.

32. Quoted in Alison, Colour After Klein, 10.

33. Jarman, Chroma, 42.

34. William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Jaffrey, NH: Nonpareil Books, 1976), 69, 3.

35. Dillon, Derek Jarman and Lyric Film, 11, 237.

36. Gass, On Being Blue, 11.

37. Emily Dickinson, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), line 13.

38. Dickinson is often ambivalent when it comes to religion. While many of her poems are devout affirmations of Christian doctrines, I would argue that “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” expresses a profound skepticism about the possibility of life after death.

39. Klein, Overcoming the Problematics of Art, 164.

40. Patrizia Lombardo, “Cruellement Bleu,” Critical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1994): 131–33, 133.

41. Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” 83 (italics in original).

42. Many of Brakhage’s films are completely silent; nonetheless, the silence in The Act of Seeing is especially resonant, since the auditory void prompts the viewer to ponder the deprivation inherent in death.

43. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 22. Mulvey is here referring specifically to the intrusion of the freeze-frame in motion pictures; nevertheless, her remark remains pertinent in theorizing other forms of cinematic stasis.

44. For a meta-analysis of Stroop effect studies see Colin M. MacLeod, “Half a Century of Research on the Stroop Effect: An Integrative Review,” Psychological Bulletin 109, no. 2 (1991): 163–203.

45. See Mark A. Cheetham, “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, and Now,” Art Journal 64, no. 4 (2005): 94–108, 96.

46. See Peter Wollen, “Blue,” in Colour: The Film Reader, ed. Angela Vacche and Brian Price (New York: Routledge, 2006), 192–201, 197; and Roland Wymer, Derek Jarman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 173–74. Given their insistence on counteracting “the society of the spectacle,” it should come as no surprise that many Situationist films use blank, figureless screens as a kind of antispectacle: Isidore Isou’s Treatise on Slobber and Eternity begins by showing a black screen, accompanied by nonmelodic chanting, for five minutes; François Dufrêne’s Drums of the First Judgment (Tambours du jugement premier) (1952) provides only a sound track, with no visual component whatsoever; and the only “image” of Gil Wolman’s L’anticoncept is a static white circle that occasionally flashes on and off (in a manner that seems to anticipate the flicker films of Peter Kubelka and Tony Conrad). This is not to mention Debord’s continued use of empty white and black screens in his later films, such as Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the passage of a few persons through a rather brief unity of time) (1959) and In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (We turn in the night, consumed by fire) (1978).

Parallels between Debord’s monochromatic black and white voids and Klein’s blue paintings may be more than incidental. Debord has claimed that Klein’s monochromes were inspired by Hurlements: “Yves Klein, whom I knew at the time of Hurlements and who attended the first, very tumultuous showing of this film, was dazzled by a convincing 24 minute-sequence of darkness, and must have derived from that, some years later, his ‘monochrome’ paintings which—enveloped in a bit of zen mysticism during his famous ‘blue period’—made many an expert cry genius. Some still call him that.” Debord is careful, however, to avoid taking credit for the discovery of the monochrome: “When it comes to painting, it is not I who could possibly obscure the glory of Yves Klein. That is, rather, what Malévitch had done 40 years before, and which had been temporarily forgotten by these same experts.” Guy Debord, Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici, trans. Robert Greene (Los Angeles: Tam Tam Books, 2001), 30–31.

47. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 18, 21. According to Chion, the word acousmatic was discovered by the French author Jérôme Peignot and subsequently theorized by composer and musicologist Pierre Schaeffer in the 1950s (Chion, Audio-Vision, 71).

48. Chion, Audio-Vision, 72.

50. Translations from the French are taken from Ken Knabb, ed. and trans., Guy Debord: Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003).

51. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 46–47.

52. Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: “La jetée” (London: Afterall Books, 2009), 42. Given its lengthy periods of silence and stasis, Hurlements appears to have several striking affinities with Warhol’s furniture films. This may seem like a perverse comparison; after all, it is difficult to think of two experimental filmmakers who have less in common (in terms of both temperament and cinematic content) than Debord and Warhol. Nevertheless, like Sleep and Empire, Hurlements is a film in which (to a large extent) nothing happens, and which thus encourages a more active form of spectatorial engagement. As Thomas Y. Levin astutely notes, “The absence of the film—and similarly the lack of images in Hurlements—is employed as the essential ingredient in a recipe of provocation intended to ‘radically transform’ the cinematic ‘situation’ from a shrine of passive consumption into an arena of active discussion” (Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle,” 347).

53. The translation is taken from Kino International’s DVD release of the film in its two-disc collection Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema, 1928–1954 (2007).

54. Dillon, Derek Jarman and Lyric Film, 227.

55. Quoted in Nora M. Alter, “Screening Out Sound: Arnheim and Cinema’s Silence,” in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. Scott Higgins (New York: Routledge, 2011), 83.

56. Quoted in Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002), 66. Another monochromatic film evocative of Weekend in many ways is Ben Vautier’s Monochrome for Yves Klein, Fluxversion I (1963). The event score/script simply reads, “Performer paints a movie screen with nonreflective black paint while a favorite movie is being shown.” See Friedman, Smith, and Sawchyn, The Fluxus Performance Workbook, 104.

57. Wymer, Derek Jarman, 173.

58. Derek Jarman, Blue, Mute Records CDSTUMM 49, 1993, compact disc.

59. Audience expectations for Blue (and other static films) can certainly vary. For example, someone who is seeing the film for the first time—and who has not been informed of its content—would likely have a different set of expectations from someone who has seen the film before. Even in the case of repeat viewings, however, one cannot fully escape the anticipation of change. During my second viewing of Blue, for example, I looked down at one point to scribble some notes. Instinctively, my head jerked up momentarily to look at the screen, just in case I was missing something. I knew nothing had changed, of course, but the expectation of change is so central to most viewing experiences that it can be difficult to overcome this habit.

60. For an in-depth account of the reception of Hurlements see Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle,” 343–44. See also Zack Winestine, “Howls for Guy Debord,” Film Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2009): 14–15. In addition to outlining the reception that the film received in 1952, Winestine describes his experience seeing a screening of Hurlements at New York’s Walter Reade Theater in 2009. Since the audience is uncomfortable with the lengthy silence and black screen that close out the film, many begin to fidget and speak, creating problems with a security guard. Eventually, some in the audience decide to sing a song together: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Once again, what is central here is the way that the stasis and silence of the film tend to provoke movement and sound from the audience in an attempt to compensate.

61. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 298–99.

62. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 244–45.

63. Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 27.

64. Quoted in Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde Order (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 21.

65. Rose, “The Meanings of Monochrome,” 21.

66. Jim Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxii.

67. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 1969), 10.

68. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 322.

69. Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 49; Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 81.

70. Babette Mangolte, “Afterward: A Matter of Time,” in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 261–274, 264.

71. Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” 144.

72. Paul Sharits, “Words per Page,” in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, rev. ed. (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), 320–30, 324.

73. Leach, #Empirefilm, 5.

74. John Cage, Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 135. Cage’s enthusiasm for Zen for Film is unsurprising, since it is in many ways a cinematic version of his own 4’33". In fact, it appears that Cage had been anticipating the release of such a film for several years. In 1956 he remarked, “The most important thing to do in film now is to find a way for it to include invisibility, just as music already enjoys inaudibility (silence).” See John Cage, “On Film,” in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1991), 115–16, 116.

75. Mangolte, “Afterward,” 264.

76. Arnheim, “Motion,” 181.

77. Charles Sanders Peirce, “One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and of Nature,” in Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, vol. 1, 1857–1866, ed. Max H. Fisch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 245; Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011), 98–119, 104, 109.

78. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), 67.

79. As Tom Gunning has noted, Peirce’s use of the term index is more expansive than many of his readers have recognized. It need not refer simply to “the impression or trace” but can also encompass other elements, including “anything which focuses attention.” See Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 30. While this is a noteworthy observation, I will use the term in its more restricted sense here, since this is the one that has been most influential in film theory.

80. Two notable examples of this line of thought include Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? 1:9–16; and Kracauer, Theory of Film.

81. Mitchell and Khalip, “Release—(Non-)Origination—Concepts,” 1.

82. Any discussion of the anti-illusionist flatness of much modernist art is necessarily indebted to the writings of Clement Greenberg. See, for example, his essay “Modernist Painting,” in Kostelanetz, Esthetics Contemporary, 195–201.

83. Quoted in Manovich, The Language of New Media, 95.

84. xsetpointer’s works can be found at www.youtube.com/user/xsetpointer#p/u. While each one has thousands of views, there is a range of reasons for engaging with these works. For instance, comments suggest that some have simply used the monochrome screens as a backdrop for playing Snake. (By holding down the left and up arrows after clicking on the YouTube screen, one can play the famous video game superimposed over any video.)

85. A mischievous artist named Nigel Tomm exploited the digitally produced monochrome in a series of DVDs released in 2008, which were sold on sites like Amazon—apparently as a prank. The individual films are simply silent monochrome screens (magenta, turquoise, etc.) that last for more than an hour each, and they are given the names of famous works of literature, such as Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, Waiting for Godot, etc. (In one case the title of a classic is perversely altered to Oresteia in the Bambiland Having Ultimate Fisting.) The titles still show up on Amazon, although they are no longer available for purchase, presumably because of a swarm of angry one-star reviews from consumers who expected film versions of the titular literary works. Most reviewers angrily assert that the films are scams, although a handful attempt to see an artistic rationale for the monochrome. For example, one reviewer of Tomm’s Oedipus Rex, which features only a monochromatic red screen, writes, “Does this represent what Rex saw (or did not see) after poking his own eyes out?” See www.amazon.com/Oedipus-Rex-Nigel-Tomm/dp/B0014A96AA/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&qid=1322019067&sr=8-20.

86. The translation from the French comes from the DVD version of Le gai savoir, released by Koch Lorber Films in 2008. While Godard might appear to be a successor of the Situationists—given his radical politics, cinematic détournements, and use of blank screens—in actuality the Situationist International saw the “destructive style” of Le gai savoir as “plagiarized,” “pointless,” and “pretentious.” See The Situationist International, “The Practice of Theory: Cinema and Revolution” (trans. Tom McDonough), in McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 187.

87. Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” in Situationist International Anthology, rev. and exp. ed., ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 1–7, 5 (italics in original).

1. Translations are taken from the DVD version of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, released by Wellspring Media in 2005.

2. Tsai’s static shots of the theatrical space are reminiscent of Sharon Lockhart’s Teatro Amazonas (1999), which offers a single shot of a theater audience for its entire half-hour running time.

3. The term slow cinema is generally used to refer to modern feature-length films that carry on the legacy of art-house auteurs like Antonioni and Akerman by offering very little action, narrative development, and movement. For more on slow cinema see Ira Jaffe, Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014); and Matthew Flanagan, “‘Slow Cinema’: Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film” (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2012).

4. I borrow this term from Steven Shaviro’s book Post-Cinematic Affect. Of course, the term should not be taken too literally, since, as Wheeler Winston Dixon points out, “Film ‘as we know it’ has always been dying and is always being reborn.” See his “Twenty-Five Reasons Why It’s All Over,” in The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, ed. Jon Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 356–66, 366.

5. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 137 (italics in original).

7. Translation by Jon Jost, e-mail message to the author, Nov. 16, 2011.

8. Jon Jost, “Muri Romani,” www.jon-jost.com/work/muri.html. A similar process was used to create Jost’s strikingly beautiful static landscape film Canyon (1970), which comprises several shots of the Grand Canyon.

9. Jost has indicated his intention to make a much lengthier version of Muri Romani, one that would use a thousand stills and last more than eight hours (ibid).

10. Mangolte, “Afterward,” 273.

11. Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age (London: Wallflower, 2009), 2 (italics in original). A useful example of this reassertion of imperfection is provided by Lev Manovich. He notes how the synthesis of reality and computer-generated images in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) was only successful because the film’s CGI elements were consciously “degraded”: “their perfection had to be diluted to match the imperfection of the film’s graininess” (Manovich, The Language of New Media, 202).