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DOI: 10.1177/1470412909105694

2009 8: 243Journal of Visual CultureMatilde Nardelli

Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art

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journal of visual culture

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)Copyright © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav Vol 8(3): 243–264 DOI 10.1177/1470412909105694

AbstractIncreasingly, whirring film projectors, diaphanous filmstrips and cinema’s apparently obsolete materials more generally have become prominent features of contemporary art. This article explores the widespread pursuit of cinematic obsolescence in contemporary gallery installations, and considers its relation to our current phase of media and technological change. Seen in the context of the much-vaunted transition to the digital age, this artistic phenomenon of engagement with cinema’s materiality and historicity may seem an act of nostalgia, or even of mourning, for cinema itself. Even as nostalgic gestures, however, the most sophisticated of these cinematic installations, such as those by Rodney Graham and Atom Egoyan analysed at length here, are a way of thinking cinema, of (re)interrogating its very idea and the possibility of its future. Furthermore, and somewhat paradoxically, for all their courting of obsolescence – in fact, by very virtue of this process – these artistic practices configure not the death of cinema but its continuation.

KeywordsCinema • Art Installations • Obsolescence • Old and New Media • Analogue/Digital • Atom Egoyan • Rodney Graham • Samuel Beckett • Movement

Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art

Matilde Nardelli

In Transmitting Culture (1997), Régis Debray outlines his conception of the difference between art and technology; or, more specifically, between the afterlife of the artwork and the machine once these objects enter their respective museums:

244 journal of visual culture 8(3)

[P]aradoxically, the [art]work removed from its context continues to function, whereas the desituated machine is kaput. An art museum can be a school for apprentices, while a technology museum remains a storehouse of interesting dead curiosities. A museum of modern art in the hands of the active artist functions like a laboratory. A museum of industrial arts and sciences, as far as the active engineer is concerned, connotes only melancholy…. In a confrontation with the works that preceded it, the art object transmits futurity. The once-revolutionary industrial object, however, once it is withdrawn from circulation, transmits only pastness (Debray, 2000: 54).

The dichotomy could not be clearer: whereas the art object lives on in the museum, and can even function as an agent of futurity, the industrial one turned into object of display is not only itself lifeless, but of little use to ‘life’, a ‘dead curiosit[y]’ functioning as a marker of pastness and nothing more. The showcase of obsolete technology thus emerges as a form of what, in later pages, Debray describes as ‘revivals’, that is, sterile re-enactments, in contrast to ‘survivals’ which, in his view, are the genuine ciphers of endurance and continuation (ibid., 71, my emphasis). Even a cursory look at contemporary art, however, reveals a permutation not considered by Debray. Obsolete technology has entered the art museum or the gallery, and is there shown as part and parcel of an artwork, if not, indeed, as the artwork itself. The very years in which Debray drew the contrast above saw the emergence of what is now an inescapably increasing trend in contemporary art: the pursuit of outmoded technologies. Since the early 1990s, slide projectors1, turntables, magnetic tape recorders2 and, above all, the machines and materials of (filmic) cinema have become prominent features of artistic practice. Installations by the likes of Rodney Graham, Atom Egoyan, Steve McQueen, Matthew Buckingham, Rosalind Nashashibi, Tacita Dean, T. J. Wilcox, Daria Martin and Marcel Dzama stand out for their engagement with the materiality and historicity of technology in general and cinema in particular; works such as these endeavour not only to display, but also to use cinema’s ‘original’ materials, down to the inclusion of actual film projectors, and celluloid strips whirring away within them, as integral parts of the pieces.

It is this pursuit of obsolescence in contemporary art, and its relation to our current phase of media and technological change – our much-vaunted transition to a regime of digitality – that this article explores. For, indeed, cinema’s incipient obsolescence seems to have brought different scope and nuance to the by-now widespread phenomenon of ‘cinematization’ of the gallery. Certainly, the historical antecedent to the current trend of cinema in the gallery and, even more specifically, to this trend’s interest in cinema’s actual materials, lies in the installations of the late 1960s and early 1970s by the likes of Anthony McCall, Paul Sharits, Malcolm LeGrice, William Raban, Annabel Nicolson and so on (see e.g. Iles, 2001 and Phillpot, 2000). Then, more or less overtly, the aim was often germane to what was beginning to be articulated in critical discourse as ‘apparatus theory’: a reclamation and exhibition of cinema’s material base which would critique the institution of cinema and reveal how even the physical apparatus could be ideologically co-opted (see e.g. De Lauretis and Heath, 1980;

Moving Pictures Matilde Nardelli 245

Rosen, 1986). Now, however, instances of cinema in the gallery seem to display a fascination with the apparatus and the spectacle it is able to produce. So, if artists in the 1960s and 1970s intended to alert the public to the ideological workings of cinematic spectacle via a show of its material objects and dynamics, contemporary artists, it seems, want to lure us with – and are possibly equally lured by – the very spectacle of cinematic materiality, its machines and mechanics.

Is this tendency a melancholic product of our phase of media change, a kind of ‘reflection’ of the digital age in the mirror of nostalgia? In this respect, D. N. Rodowick and Peter Geimer, for example, have recently noted that such emphatic recourse to outmoded gear, in a curious reversal, makes ‘auratic’ some of the machines of ‘mechanical reproduction’ whose very advent, as Walter Benjamin famously claimed, initiated a process of de-auratization of the art object itself (Rodowick, 2007: 157–58; Geimer, 2007: 9). No doubt, as their use leaves the everyday, photography and film, and their machines, are taking on a certain aura. But as acute as this assessment is, it does not take us very far beyond a mere symptomatology of the phenomenon under consideration. Also because of its contemporariness, this artistic trend is indeed more often described than analysed, and its significance is yet to be fully engaged and unpacked. Its richest and most sophisticated examples, however, such as the recent work of Canadian artist Rodney Graham and the installation Steenbeckett (2002) by fellow Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, deserve and warrant deeper critical attention. For they constitute, I believe, not so much a reflection of our current mediological concerns, as – however nostalgic – a reflection upon them. As Svetlana Boym suggested, nostalgia need not be obtuse and regressive, a moment akin to Debray’s revivals: nostalgia can be ‘reflective’ in the sense of thinking, rather than mirroring (Boym, 2001: xvi). In such sense, these works’ focus on the concrete and material – I shall argue – is a way of thinking cinema, of (re)interrogating its very idea and the possibility of its future in the wake of digitality. To the extent that they do so, these artistic practices work alongside and supplement contemporary scholarship, where, from Bolter and Grusin (1999) and Manovich (2001) to Rosen (2001), Cherchi Usai (2001) and Mulvey (2006), the very advent of ‘new’ media has rekindled interest in the ‘old’, and in the history and historicity of cinema especially. But if in these studies cinema’s oldness is an object of inquiry, whether in itself or as a source for the new, in the art installations under consideration below cinema’s obsolescence is a kind of actor. More than just a quality to contemplate or scrutinize, obsolescence is here made performative – or indeed, made to perform. Moreover, what obsolescence ultimately enacts here is not the fossilization of cinema but its plasticity; not its death but its continuation. For this is an artistic phenomenon aware of its own historicity and transience – aware, in short, of its own location in time. As its very emphasis on obsolescence answers the question ‘what is cinema?’ with a ‘not quite this anymore’, cinema itself is highlighted as a movement, a moment always already passing, rather than a thing. Paradoxically, then, it is precisely through such literal display and use of cinema’s machinery that what is essentially cinematic and yet transcends incarnation in a specific technological apparatus is also distilled.


Still Moving, and Arresting: The Spectacle of Cinema

If there is an aesthetics of cinema. . . .It can be summarised in one word: ‘movement’ (René Clair, 1951: 96 [my translation]).

Rodney Graham’s engagement with things cinematic, though dating back to the late 1970s, has become increasingly sustained in the last decade. Furthermore, while Graham’s earlier work was primarily intent, as Alexander Alberro suggested, on the demystification of ‘the entire cinema-machine’, more recent pieces seem to work towards a re-mystification of that apparatus (Alberro, 1999: 75; Krajewski, 2004). For, if these pieces provide a dissection of cinema, then they also entice us with their recreation of cinematic spectacle. To be more precise, the ‘spectacle’ we are offered is not only that of the ‘movies’ but also that of their material workings and physical apparatus. A delicate balance is trodden between giving us ‘cinema’ and disassembling it into its constitutive components and principles, and this operation is infused with a sense of fascination (love, even) with the machine it anatomizes. It is this delicate balance that differentiates Graham’s current practice, and the trend of which it is here exemplary, from both the ‘spectacle of cinema’ to be experienced at a local multiplex and the critiques of such spectacle at the heart of the material displays of cinema of 1960s and 1970s’ installations which, aesthetically at least, constitute the closest antecedent to the current trend.

Take, for example, Torqued Chandelier Release (2005; fig. 1). This consists of a five-minute silent film – a single take from a stationary camera – whose subject matter is effectively described in its title, as the work ‘documents’ the release of a crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling from a cable previously twisted a hundred times or so. The film, then, shows us the chandelier spinning back and forth and eventually coming to a rest, as its cable completely unwinds. It is through the cinema that the potential of both this action and its object as spectacle are realized. For a start, the action is lavishly shot on 35 mm colour film. Set against a dark background, the lit, rotating chandelier is as if suspended in a void, almost like a spaceship hovering in outer space. The vertical orientation of the frame (a deviation from the customary horizontal format, obtained by flipping camera and projector on their side) follows and enhances the chandelier’s shape. Image clarity and detail are further increased by the unusually high speed – both of filming and of screening – of 48 frames per second, which eliminates the strobe-effect such subject matter would generate at the standard speed of 24 frames per second. The overall effect is mesmerising. The larger-than-life, crisp clear play of light on the swirling crystals embodies and enacts the ‘magic’ of cinema: repetitious and keleidoscopic at the same time, this is, indeed, arresting movement – movement that, quite literally, arrests us as, mobile gallery viewers, we stop in contemplation.

Beautiful and alluring to look at, Torqued Chandelier is also a reflexive deconstruction of the very spectacle of cinema it sets up, an anatomy of the basic elements that constitute and enable such spectacle. Incontrovertibly, this is a film ‘about’ light and movement – the first principles of cinema. And as the chandelier


eventually comes to a stop, the stillness that, at the level of the individual frames, is inherent to cinema, is evoked as well. In fact, this juxtaposition of motion and rest could also be seen to recapitulate the dynamics of cinematic spectacle as such: the activation and de-activation of inert images as cinema in the looping journey of any film between two still points, its beginning and its end.3 However, in this precise case, the stilling of the chandelier is not met by a stilling of the film: for, on a loop, the film seamlessly starts again and again. Thus, Torqued Chandelier also draws attention to that other crucial aspect of cinematic spectacle: the possibility of its repetition. In addition to being physically embodied in the continuity of

Figure 1 Rodney Graham, Torqued Chandelier Release (2005), silent film projection, 35 mm film, purpose built projector and looper; detail. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London


filmic motion, this is also figuratively echoed in the circularity of the chandelier’s rotation. Moreover – and crucially – the film is only one half of the story, because the large machine from which the film is played is an intrinsic part of Graham’s piece (fig. 2). Placed proudly in the middle of the room, it is impossible to avoid, as its stertorous whirring makes it heard even before it is seen. Thus, the reflection on cinema observable in the subject matter of the film is here reinforced and completed by the visibility of projector and filmstrip. The dynamics of light, stillness and movement, and circular repetition that the film represents are also made materially present in the room: on show is the spectacle, and the materials and mechanics which produce it.

Like many of his contemporaries, Graham has chosen to go ‘literal’, as it were, by showcasing cinema in its celluloid incarnation. Indeed, the decision to shun newer digital alternatives for the ‘cinematization’ of the gallery is precisely what is at issue here. For the imposing presence of cranky projector and filmstrip chugging along within it point to another crucial aspect of Graham’s redoing and undoing of cinema in the gallery: the emphasis on obsolescence. Graham’s anatomy of cinema plays with the historicity of the medium; indeed, it plays it out. It is not only cinematic spectacle per se which is enacted but also its oldness, the historical status of the apparatus and its machinery of movement.

Figure 2 Rodney Graham, Torqued Chandelier Release (2005), silent film projection, 35 mm film, purpose built projector and looper; installation view. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London


This foregrounding of the historicity of cinema is most apparent in another of Graham’s recent works, Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003; fig. 3). The projector – an enormous 1950s Italian model, a Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 – is even more conspicuous and stertorous than in Torqued Chandelier. Furthermore, the status of the obsolete machine as one half of the whole piece is pointed out in the work’s very title. The other half is constituted by another now outmoded object: a typewriter – the titular Rheinmetall, a 1930s German model here represented by a pristine, shiny specimen – in the role of sole protagonist of a ten-minute, looped, film. Though the invention of the typewriter predates the cinema by a couple of decades, its mass diffusion coincides with it. Indeed, in many ways, these technologies are deeply intertwined, not only with respect to their by now well-rehearsed significance in/as ‘modernity’ (cf. Kittler, 1999 and Brooks, 2004), but also to the heyday of cinema itself, as the typing machine became both a functional administrative tool and, with the boom of screenwriting brought on by the ‘talkies’, an iconic one too, one of the signifiers of this burgeoning industry. Thus, two machines that, save for exceptions such as movies about ‘the movies’, have historically and customarily been involved in the creation of cinematic spectacle from a position of invisibility are in this piece propped into view and themselves made spectacle. While in the world at large these machines are being ‘put away’ and replaced by digital alternatives, Graham’s film starts with the typewriter being taken out of its box. A silent sequence of prolonged fixed-camera shots shows the old and yet also, in this specific instance, shinier-

Figure 3 Rodney Graham, Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003), silent film projection, 35 mm film, projector and looper, 10:50 minutes, continuous loop. Edition of five and one Artist’s proof; installation view. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago


than-new object in all its glory. Spectacularizing the typewriter and its parts, this series of extreme close-ups performs a ‘reinstatement’, however temporary, of the boxed-up machine. But as, at a point, a fine white powder starts descending on it, gradually covering its keys and filling its crevices, by the end of the film the typewriter is as hidden away as it was in its original box. And if this snowy substance under whose thick layer the machine gets trapped (or frozen?) allegorizes the typewriter’s obsolescence, its very fall is the element that underlines cinema’s own oldness. Before this snowfall, there is no motion within the images: the slow-paced alternation of static shots is so inert as to recall a slide show (and thus also a visual realm that, as with magic lantern shows, predates the cinema itself [Musser, 1990: 15–54 and Crompton, Franklin, Herbert, 1997]). It is this fine snow that, introducing visible movement in the film, assures us that what we are watching is a ‘movie’. This unexpected, and certainly eccentric, event recalls what Tom Gunning, in his ground-breaking revisions of early cinema history, has termed the ‘moment of movement’ (Gunning, 1989: 34). For indeed, as its evident artificiality also suggests, this snowy white powder functions as Graham’s ‘trick’ for revealing the moving image, and thus re-conjures early routines designed to flaunt the cinematograph’s novelty by placing emphasis on the moment of transition from stillness to movement, such as, for instance, the practice of starting projection with a frozen image which would then be cranked into motion. And indeed, in its actual display of the machine – and what a machine! – making movement reproducible and repeatable, Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 gestures more widely to the moment of cinema’s emergence, when, to refer to an even more well-known analysis of Gunning’s, its contraptions and their functioning were themselves the ‘attraction’, the spectacle (Gunning, 1986). Yet – and this is the key difference – it is not novelty Graham’s work relies on. On the contrary, it is precisely the ‘oldness’ of cinematic spectacle that is evoked: the obsolescence of its machinery, the historicity of its mechanics, the archaic in its attraction.4

Though Graham’s recent practice is possibly unrivalled in its enquiry of cinema, the concerns it displays are cognate with those of a number of contemporary artists who similarly engage with cinema and – in both senses of the word – its age. The historicity of cinema’s moving spectacle, for example, is at the core of Matthew Buckingham’s False Future (2007), which, in an almost documentary fashion, recounts and re-enacts the moving image experiments of cinema pioneer Louis Le Prince (1842–1890?; cf. Gunning, 2007b). T. J. Wilcox’s A Fair Tale (2006), shows cinema’s obsolescence in a more recent past, as a narrative of movement (a fairground ride, a car journey, a parachute fall) is composed via a montage of clips of 1970s home movies and 1950s feature films. The faded colours of the former and the almost luridly saturated ones of the latter emerge as two correlated, if contrasting, faces of cinema’s oldness. (As Technicolor teaches us, something does not need to be ruined or faded to look old.) In contrast with Graham’s work, this oldness, in both cases, is further evoked by the artists’ adoption of a makeshift, ‘artisanal’ aesthetics, as well as more modest 16 mm gear. In False Future, for instance, in a recreation of Le Prince’s pioneering experiments, the image is projected on a white sheet strung across the room (fig. 4).


In their use and display of the materials of cinema, all of the above pieces thematize and dissect the ‘aesthetics of cinema’ invoked by René Clair in my epigraph at the beginning of this section – aesthetics which, he suggests, the word ‘movement’ strikes at its core. As these pieces do so, however, they also offer a sense of the oldness of cinema’s moving spectacle presumably quite absent from Clair’s enthusiasm (he made this statement in 1924) for the then young medium. But, in this evocation of oldness, is it not in fact cinema’s pastness that is actually at stake? After all, to invoke one reviewer’s comment on Graham’s Rheinmetall: the snow falling makes one think of ‘time falling’ (Searle, 2005: 15). Certainly, as – settling softly and without melting – the floury dust eventually all but buries the outmoded typewriter, it is a sombre image we face (fig. 5). In our present of ‘new’ media, the backward gaze of artists such as Graham, their engagement with the dust encrusted, may seem a form of mourning for cinema, and the era cinema itself at once represents and embodies. To explore this question, let us turn to an ostensibly more dramatic elegy to cinema, Egoyan’s Steenbeckett, and to its association of the medium’s obsolescent materials with the twilight of the analogue, and the emergence of the digital.

A Matter of Life and Death

A large-scale installation, Steenbeckett stretched over several rooms of the London building that, host to the ethnographic collection of the British Museum, was known as the Museum of Mankind until the late 1990s. Though the site is

Figure 4 Matthew Buckingham, False Future (2007), continuous colour 16 mm film projection with sound, canvas, steel cable; installation view. Courtesy Murray Guy, New York


now part of the Royal Academy, at the time of Egoyan’s project, in 2002, it lay dormant and between these two identities, having already been under wraps for a few years. Cinema was doubly at Steenbeckett’s core. Firstly, the project was based on a film, Egoyan’s own adaptation (2000, UK; starring John Hurt) of Samuel Beckett’s monologue Krapp’s Last Tape (1959), extracts of which played in the exhibition. Secondly, the physical apparatus of cinema was both used and displayed: materials such as celluloid, film canisters and, indeed, the Steenbeck editing table punned in the title were here exhibited as part of the work, as well as used to make the work. In fact, if Graham’s large projectors lay emphasis on the ‘hardware’ of cinema, Egoyan’s focus in this installation was rather with what we may call its ‘software’. The centrepiece of the installation was a complex structure made out of a 2,000-foot reel of 35 mm film, strung between floor and ceiling via an elaborate system of hinges (figs. 6–7). Creating an intricate moving web of celluloid, this long filmstrip wound its way across the room and through a Steenbeck editing machine in a corner, on whose small monitor images of Egoyan’s film became visible (cf. Evans, 2002 and Kent, 2002). But the ‘matter’ of cinema was present throughout. For example, what was ostensibly the content of an old ethnographic film archive (possibly one that had belonged to the Museum itself – after all, the setting begged the question) crowded the narrow passageways leading to the major structure, with film reels and unspooled lengths of celluloid heaped up in corners and on shelves (fig. 8).

Figure 5 Rodney Graham, Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003), silent film projection, 35 mm film, projector and looper, 10:50 minutes, continuous loop. Edition of five and one Artist’s proof; installation view. installation view. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago


Figure 6 -7 Atom Egoyan, Steenbeckett (2002), detail. Courtesy Artangel

Figure 8 Atom Egoyan, Steenbeckett (2002), detail. Courtesy Artangel


In a press release, Artangel, the UK arts charity that commissioned the project, described the installation as a ‘monument to analogue’ (Artangel, 2002). Indeed, Steenbeckett’s flaunting of (filmstrip-based) cinema needs to be seen in the wider context of the diffusion of the digital, whether as a technological alternative to extant analogue media (e.g. photography, radio, sound recording), or as the basis of ‘new’ media (as may be, for instance, the Internet).5 As all information can now be converted into a binary code transmissible to a variety of media platforms, what above all fades away in the digital era is, arguably, a sense of the physical consistency of recorded information – if not, even, of the materiality of media as such.6 The ‘cultural dream of the digital’, as Mary Ann Doane has recently pointed out, ‘is a dream of immateriality’, in which ‘information or representation appears to exist nowhere’ and media are ‘virtual’ (Doane, 2007: 143). In this respect, Egoyan’s insistence on the filmstrip – or on what I have called the software of cinema – is particularly interesting. For, though it is true that the all-too-necessary materiality of the hardware of the digital is often remarkably disregarded, the corporeality of the software does really seem to ‘disappear’ in the digital age; or to disappear, at least, from the purview of human perception. With this, what also retreats from view is precisely what, in different ways, both Egoyan and Graham insist on in their installations: the possibility of materially witnessing how the hardware itself becomes operative – not just the machine, but its workings, its internal ‘movement’.

The use of Krapp’s Last Tape did much to crystallize the installation’s global homage to a fading – and more self-evidently tied to matter – technological era. For, also shown as a large-scale projection in yet another room of the museum, the film made cinema, as well as a representative, also a representation – a sort of display cabinet – of that other important, now obsolescent, analogue technology: magnetic tape.7 This, as is well known, is at the centre of Beckett’s play, in which Krapp, who has kept an audio-diary for over forty years, listens to recordings from his past as, now an old solitary man, he sets out to make what he has decided will be his last tape. In 1958, when the play was first performed, magnetic tape was a new technology, and indeed, so as to make good the claim that Krapp has been using it for several decades, the play is set ‘in the future’ (Beckett 1959: 9). The contrast between this newness and Krapp’s oldness, together with the tension between the fact that Krapp’s has aged but his recordings – and recorded voice – haven’t, certainly contributed to the poignancy of the play’s meditation on approaching death. But in 2002, from the contemporary viewpoint of the digital era, Egoyan’s staging of Beckett’s play also brought to the fore the oldness of the technology itself. While audio-tapes might have been charged with the task of preserving Krapp’s time, by the time of the exhibition, time’s passing had spared neither Krapp nor them. Such emphatic representation of technology’s materiality within the film element of Egoyan’s installation of course resonated with the scenario outside it: the sheer quantity of cinema’s materials in the space of the installation at large. The figure of Krapp, which Egoyan’s choice of close-up shots brought into relief as not simply old but also physically aged, added further resonance to this. The displayed corporeality of Krapp’s ageing flesh, his wrinkled face and hands, conjured a parallel with cognate processes of material decay


affecting cinema – processes that the installation at once represented and itself produced.

Unlike in Graham’s work, where obsolescence shines and sparkles, in Steenbeckett, the matter of cinema was presented in correlation with physical ruination and decline. The corrosive effects of time were dramatically manifest in the scattered materials of the film archive, which, as if to comment at once on the pastness of cinema and the failure of its archival function, looked not merely superseded but actually beyond use, because of damage or decay. Film canisters were rusty or dust-encrusted, filmstrips often unfurled and battered, index cards badly yellowed, camera lenses smashed, sound apparatuses broken. (And again, the mothballed venue added further resonance in this respect – its very status of disuse a testimony of the superseded, and contested, rationale for its ethnographic display [Coombes, 2003]). But in addition to being thus displayed, the decay of cinematic matter was performed in the installation’s centrepiece, that intricately moving celluloid structure that one reviewer, effectively evoking its precarious and delicate consistency, described as ‘a quivering spider’s web’ (Lockhart, 2002). Literally in transit across space, here the matter of cinema – and more specifically, as we have seen, its visibly material ‘software’ – was also presented as something temporally transient. With each passing day, as Egoyan keenly stressed in interviews, the effects of wear and tear on the celluloid strip would become more noticeable, eroding the quality of sound and image relayed through the Steenbeck machine (Kent, 2002: 49 and Egoyan, 2002: 12). The work’s timed existence also added to the sense of impermanence. Installed (and, indeed, conceived to exist) for only 31 days, Egoyan’s installation was an intentionally temporary affair. However grand and complex, Egoyan’s ‘monument to analogue’ was, unlike most monuments, emphatically not made to last.8

Though in contemporary art the markedly temporary is often a correlative of the markedly site-specific (and it certainly is a trademark of Artangel’s commissions), here the features of provisionality, ‘self-erosion’ and planned extinction had particular resonance. At some level, the installation acted out, or rehearsed, the end of the technological realm and related representational regime it purportedly commemorated. Furthermore, the emphasis on the material base of such technology, and on the corruptibility inherent to such material base and the information therein stored, was certainly meant to evoke a contrast with the vaunted matterlessness of the digital. In the ‘dream’ of digital immateriality, as seen above, freedom from the decay inescapably affecting matter is a crucial attribute (Doane, 2007: 143). As no more than intangible numbers infinitely convertible and transmissible across different platforms, the digital is theoretically unsusceptible to degradation or loss, free from the shackles of a frangible contingent support. This contrast between celluloid and the digital was directly presented in the installation itself by also including a sample of the latter technology: for the large-scale projection, in fact, Egoyan’s film had been transferred onto DVD. But just as this partly practical, partly demonstrative choice should make us wary of considering Steenbeckett simply a regressive elegy of the analogue, so it should not appear as an implicit comment on, or indeed


fetishization of, a digital realm predicated on stability, endurance and enduring pristinity. If anything, Egoyan seems to lean toward the idea that digitality begets more impermanence and fragility, not less. For, as data transmission becomes ever swifter and effortless – Egoyan underlined in an article on Steenbeckett – so does erasure: ‘a few strokes of the keyboard’ will do (Egoyan, 2002: 12).

Transience… and Continuation

Movement is not just about motion…. Movement can also be about transience. (Marcel Dzama)

What interests me more in Steenbeckett, however, is the way in which the installation reflected upon not just any analogue media, but cinema in particular. Premised on the irrevocability of entropic decay over repetition and reversibility, and ephemerality rather than durability, Steenbeckett disclosed another aspect of the movement fundamental to cinema. Graham’s work, as we have seen, recreates and dissects the spectacle of cinematic motion, in all its obsolete and archaic glory. Through just a slightly different focus, Egoyan points to the instabilities that unmake cinema even as it is being made: the structural and dynamic impermanence that ‘dissolve’ cinema in the very process of constituting it. Or, to put it another way: if, as Clair suggested, ‘movement’ is the word able to encapsulate the ‘aesthetics of cinema’, then Egoyan highlighted how ‘movement can also be about transience’, as the emerging artist Marcel Dzama succinctly put it apropos his own obsolescence-pursuing cinematic work (Bismuth, 2007: 13). Egoyan, that is, pointed to the evanescence which defines movement as such. In its emphasis on the ephemerality of both cinematic movement and cinema’s moving matter, Steenbeckett prized open this sense of movement as transience. Cinema moves, but it also passes. In fact, everything about the installation – theme, structure, venue, duration – was designed to enforce a sense that rather than merely passing, cinema was actually passing away.

At the time Steenbeckett was shown, such sentiment found echo in (still contemporary today) debates around the fate of cinema, which a series of factors had contributed to bring to a critical mass. On the one hand, the occasion of cinema’s 100th birthday in 1995 promoted concerted attention on the medium. Yet, on the other, these commemorations all but coincided with the diffusion of digital production and viewing technologies and the cultural milestone of the ‘two-in-one’ ending of century and millennium (e.g. Belton, 2002). Adding to this sense of epochal ending, ‘the death of the last great Hollywood stars’ (Katherine Hepburn, Gregory Peck, and so on), as Laura Mulvey has recently argued in Death 24X A Second, contributed to turn centenary celebrations into a sort of elegy (Mulvey, 2006: 17). As its stars were dying so, many felt, was cinema. In this respect, Mulvey’s own book stands as a product of the very concerns it reviews, not unlike Paolo Cherchi Usai’s slightly earlier, and even more plainly titled, The Death of Cinema (2001).


It is easy to see how Steenbeckett speaks of, and to, all of the these preoccupations. Indeed, Egoyan’s scenario, down to the detail of Krapp and his celebration of a birthday similarly pregnant with foreboding, could almost be taken as an allegory of the death invoked by Usai. As it turns out, the affinity between the two runs even a bit deeper than the superficial sharing of a generic Zeitgeist. For what Steenbeckett intricately unfolds is germane to what Usai explores. And this is not so much the question of a historical, recent or imminent, death of filmic cinema as, more fundamentally, of a ‘death’ constitutive of the very category ‘cinema’. ‘Cinema’ which, Usai writes, ‘is the art of destroying moving images’ (Usai, 2001: 7). The ‘death’ of cinema he conjures is not, so to speak, a killing at the hand of the digital. Rather, as in Egoyan’s installation, it is something – a death process or a ‘death drive’ more than a punctual event – intrinsic to cinema itself. The very creation of moving images that defines cinema is inextricable from their destruction. Their generation and projection is also already their degradation and corruption, making of every viewer a ‘witness to [their] extinction’ or even, quite literally, their ‘consumer’ (ibid., 17, 66-7). From this perspective, then, not only Steenbeckett but also Graham’s work and, more widely, the artistic trend of which both are here exponents emerges as, at best, a wishful prolepsis, an impossible revival of a cinema which cannot, however, be preserved, for the attacks from within itself are even greater than any threat from without. Yet, I believe, these works admit and even suggest a less sombre interpretation. Despite their emphasis on oldness or decay – or, in fact, by very virtue of this process – these re-enactments ultimately ‘transmit’, to use Debray’s expression, not only a less negative picture of cinema’s fate, but a less negative picture of the idea of cinema as such: one in which, paradoxically, cinema’s continuation and future are articulated precisely through obsolescence and transience.

This paradox is most cogently manifest in another work by Graham, The Phonokinetoscope (2001), which I shall consider as a final example. The Phonokinetoscope comprises a silent, 16mm colour film showing Graham himself taking a bicycle ride in Berlin’s Tiergarten while on LSD, accompanied by a separate piece of music, also composed by Graham. Like the works discussed so far, this piece hinges on the simultaneous use and display of cinema’s machinery. In fact, here, in order to watch the film, viewers are required to activate the projector themselves. And they do so not directly, but by engaging the needle into a 12-inch vinyl record on a turntable connected to the projector by a mechanism that, setting both in motion, results in the screening of a ‘soundtracked’ film (fig. 9).

Graham’s device echoes Thomas Alva Edison’s early attempts at producing an integrated sound and moving-image apparatus, the kinetophonograph – which in fact, unlike the kinetoscope, based on peep-hole viewing, would allow for projection.9

But, as Graham stresses, his own mechanism is slightly more rudimentary than Edison’s (Kushner, 2001: 117). Where the ultimate goal of the kinetophonograph, as Edison’s assistant and biographer William Dickson recounts, was synchronicity


of sound and image, the faithful matching of what the ear hears to what the eye sees (Dickson, 1894: 303), in his own Phonokinetoscope Graham renounces any attempt at synchronicity from the start. Opting for musical accompaniment instead of location sounds is already a way of obviating the problem. But even though the soundtrack, as Graham tells it, was initially composed following the narrative of the images, this sequencing cannot be preserved when the film is being projected (Kushner, 2001: 117). Since activation of the piece depends on where in the record the needle is lowered, and because the film is shorter than the music (5 and 15 minutes respectively), different combinations of sound and image necessarily emerge. For Graham, as he puts it with his customary aplomb, this asynchronicity makes his Phonokinetoscope a machine able to generate ‘myriad music videos’ (ibid.). ‘Myriad music videos’: this expression’s flamboyance (these are, after all, relatively minor variations, different points of intersection and juxtaposition of two ‘tracks’ – image and sound – that do not themselves change) and the apparently cavalier stance toward the history and the specificity of media which underlies it, are the crux of the matter.

Its relation to the questions raised by this article can be fully appreciated by unpacking another layer of Graham’s palimpsest – the one, indeed, represented by the music. This is mainly inspired by Pink Floyd psychedelic rock, and in particular by the soundtrack they composed for the final scene of Michelangelo

Figure 9 Rodney Graham, Phonokinetoscope (2001), 16mm film and vinyl record, 5 minute loop; installation view, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2002. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery and Archives.


Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (USA, 1970). In this famous sequence, the explosion of a house in Death Valley is shown repeatedly, in slow motion, and is then followed by rather surreal images of debris and the house contents (television sets, roast chickens and other ‘signifiers’ of American consumerism) hurtling against gravity in a clear-blue sky. The undisturbed screen time – about six minutes or so – granted to Pink Floyd’s piece, to which, in a way, it is the imagery that becomes the accompaniment, makes of this sequence, as Graham notes, ‘the purest instance of the music video avant la lettre’ (Kushner, 2001: 117).10 Such an interpretation resonates with Antonioni’s own enthusiasm for the specific form and for magnetic video technology as such. His desire to experiment eventually found concrete manifestation in the feature-length The Mystery of Oberwarld (Italy/West Germany, 1981), and in the pop video (one of the first in Italy) for Gianna Nannini’s song Fotoromanza (1984). But Antonioni had been vocal in his support for the technological innovation since video’s emergence in the 1970s, saying that he hoped that it could become ‘the cinema of the future’(Ongaro, 1996: 350) and ‘the future of cinema’ (Tassone, 1996 [1995]: 241; Mori, 1996). Certainly, such an excited investment in the new makes it rather tempting to see Zabriskie Point’s apocalyptic yet exhilarating finale as a wishful allegory of the end of one media technology and the simultaneous beginning of another.

But I do not want to argue that this contention – ‘video’ as the future of cinema – is what Graham’s The Phonokinetoscope is really about. It is neither a teleology nor a chronology that is quite at stake here; yet, cinema stretches backwards and forwards in The Phonokinetoscope. For, on one side, the work points both to a beginning and, even, a ‘before’ of cinema, as the photographic loops of Edison’s early devices in turn conjure their genealogy in the drawn loops of nineteenth-century kinetic toys such as the phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and praxinoscope. And, on the other side, via its evocation of a generation of video that, prior to the digital, was similarly charged with cinema’s demise, The Phonokinetoscope points to an ‘after’ – indeed, an ‘after’ which is also a ‘during’ or, rather, the long, long beginning of cinema’s end. However, these different moments of cinema’s history are in Graham’s piece not sequential but coexistent, superimposed onto one another. Significantly, this configuration of past and future, pre- and post-cinematic as interpenetrating and simultaneous is played out on the very terrain of cinema: it is its historical machinery that, as in Graham’s other works, is the setting and, even more strongly, the operator, of such incorporation. Cinema here expands in divergent directions and different forms, it is divergent directions and different forms.

As the apparatus of cinema simultaneously articulates an antelife and an afterlife of itself, something in excess of the technology – yet dependent on it in fundamental ways – also emerges. That is, it is precisely via the use and display of cinema’s machinery that the ‘cinematic’ is dislodged from the cinema as such, and presented as a quality that transcends incarnation in a specific technological apparatus which, nevertheless, helped to define it and materialize it. Paradoxically, it is through this insistence on what became cinema’s ‘canonical’ apparatus that a non-coincidence between cinema’s technological and cultural life is brought into relief.


Where works such as Torqued Chandelier and Rheinmetall draw attention to the movement that cinema has, The Phonokinetoscope’s multiple incorporations, and the minimal variations of its image/sound juxtapositions, bring into relief the movement that cinema is. What is distilled is something like the essence of cinema itself: the fact that cinema is always in motion, always changing – even if this change may sometimes be no more than the ‘small’ difference that makes of every unfolding spectacle a unique event in time. Just as it ‘dissolves’ objects into evanescent images, so cinema ‘dissolves’ itself as it plays out.

Through its referential palimpsest and rudimentary splitting of sound and image gear, The Phonokinetoscope further manifests how, as Gunning puts it, ‘cinema has never been one thing’ but, rather, ‘a point of intersection’ (Gunning, 2007c: 36). For cinema has never been one, self-same and homogeneous. On the contrary, the cinema presents us with a medium whose very specificity lies in the paradox of self-difference. Its condition, as Rosalind Krauss has also argued, is ‘aggregative, a matter of interlocking supports and layered conventions’ (Krauss, 1999: 44) and hybrid – dependent on, and borrowing from, other media (photography, sound recording, and so on). And cinema has never stabilized into a thing, the very fleetingness of its spectacle and, indeed, the slippage between the materiality of the machinery and the immateriality of its images functioning as manifestations of cinema’s constitutive processuality. Considered in this light, even transience, the very transience that Steenbeckett dramatically brings to the fore as what ‘dissolves’ the cinema, may also begin to appear as a force of transformation; and, therefore, as what enables cinema’s endurance after all. The very movement that constitutes and destroys the cinema is also, in a further turn of the screw, that which keeps it moving on.

New Lives

Surprisingly, perhaps, in Death 24x A Second, even as she explores cinema’s relation to death, Mulvey addresses the question of cinema’s survival. More surprisingly still, it is the digital that emerges as the main agent of such survival as, ‘rather than killing the cinema’, Mulvey argues, digital technology ‘brings it new life’ (Mulvey, 2006: 26). For Mulvey, this ‘new life’ is largely a matter of the visibility of the old which the new digital media have spawned. One important aspect of this visibility is the unprecedented access to the archives of cinema (obscure and better known alike) that digitisation and formats such as the DVD and Internet streaming make possible. Another, related, aspect concerns the modalities of viewing that such media technologies facilitate or engender. Mulvey highlights in particular features of image-flow control that, now available in even the most basic playback software, enable what she calls an ‘aesthetic of delay’ (ibid., 22). What is crucial in such aesthetics, according to Mulvey, is a ‘dialectic between old and new’ where ‘new dimensions’ of the cinema, and ‘innovative ways’ of thinking about it, can be produced (ibid., 26). In this sense, then, rather than simply granting visibility to the old – making it available to sight via re-siting it in the digital – the new indeed renews the old and thus enables cinema’s survival.


A re-framing of this argument allows us to see how the artistic pursuit of cinematic obsolescence at the core of this article is another facet of the prominence of the old effected by the digital and, even, another incarnation of the ‘dialectic between old and new’ Mulvey invokes. Yet, here, new and old – the former, on the surface of it, conspicuously absent, the latter, excessively present – mark these works in different ways. It is not a matter of renewing the old via the new as, more or less explicitly, of providing ways for the new to be thought through the old. In so doing, further senses of cinema’s ongoingness are suggested. On the one hand, these works’ insistence on obsolescence, their dissection of cinema’s historical status, has the effect of rubbing some ‘newness’ off the new, charting cinema’s persistence by highlighting the continuities bridging the gap between old and new, celluloid and the digital. Paradoxically, chief among these continuities is ‘movement’. And here movement is not only ‘mechanics’ any more, but the very form of change constitutive of cinema as such which Egoyan’s Steenbeckett and Graham’s Phonokinetoscope, in different ways, so cogently bring into relief. On the other hand, the continuation of cinema refers precisely to the persistence, or return, of its obsolescent forms in various manifestations of thought (personal and collective memory, and contemporary scholarship such as, indeed, Usai’s and Mulvey’s) and practice (the works discussed here but also, still, various stages of commercial production). In fact, there is even a newness to the old itself here, as cranky projectors and early cinema, finding a new life in the gallery, become markers of contemporary art – not dissimilarly from how the pursuit of the bygone or the retro, largely fostered by the newness of the Internet, might signify being ‘modern’ and up to date. Debray’s rather crude dichotomy, then, is both confirmed and undermined by this current artistic trend: the art object does transmit ongoingness, if not even futurity, but it does so through the very objects that, in Debray’s view, can communicate only pastness.

Notes

1. The research for this article is part of a wider project funded by the British Academy, to whom I am grateful for their Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. In addition to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, I would like to thank Robert Lumley, J D Rhodes, Steven Gartside and Sam Halliday for their advice, suggestions and encouragement with earlier versions of the manuscript. I am very grateful to Artangel, Donald Young Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Murray Guy Gallery and Whitechapel for kindly providing the images.

Possibly the most sustained use and display of slide projectors in contemporary art is to be found in James Coleman’s practice. For an insightful discussion of Coleman’s use of this technology see Krauss (1997).

2. Among others, turntables and vinyl records have recently been used by Elizabeth McAlpine (see http://www. laurabatlettgallery.com, consulted 1 February 2009), while Atom Egoyan has used magnetic tape recorders in Out of Use (2003; see Grande [2003]).

3. The consideration of the intrinsic stillness of the film frame, ‘repressed’ in cinematic spectacle, is at the core of Baudry (1986), one of the classic texts of 1970s ‘apparatus theories’. These, contemporaneous with Graham’s artistic training, and


as Alberro (1999) implicitly suggests, find some resonance in Graham’s earlier dissections of cinema especially. More recently, stillness in the cinema has been the focus of much critical discourse, see e.g. Mulvey (2006), Green and Lowry (2006), Stewart (1999) and Bellour (1990).

4. For a discussion of the archaic root of our fascination with cinema because of its ability to (re)animate things, see Gunning (2007a), while, for an expansive pre-history of cinema and related media see Zielinski (2006).

5. Definitions of the ‘analogue’, the ‘digital’, and their difference, are often ambiguous and slippery. The chief distinction between the two is seen to reside in encoding. Whereas analogue encoding is continuous, though variable in intensity, and requires material contact between different substances, the digital is discontinuous and dependent on an abstract code of 0s and 1s – see, among others, Mitchell (1992). However, as Rosen (2001: 302) has pointed out, even the allegedly purely ‘technical’ definitions are already inscribed with – or, indeed, constructed by – socio-cultural ideas of what these technologies and their ‘difference’ should be or perform. This consideration also illuminates the way in which the digital is described as immaterial, virtual, or abstract, while the ‘analogue’ is by contrast often equated to the indexical, where the index is understood as a material trace of the real.

6. Possibly one of the most committed proponents of such ideas is Binkley (1990, 1997). Yet for contrary views see: Hayles (1993) and, more recently, Evens (2003) and Sterne (2007).

7. For a discussion of the representation of a medium within another medium, see the recent re-elaboration of McLuhan’s famous concepts by Bolter and Grusin (1999).

8. But for interesting explorations of ephemeral monumentality see e.g.: Young (2000) and Forty and Küchler (1999).

9. Just like the kinetograph and kinetoscope to which it effectively ‘added’ sound, the kinetophonograph consisted of two machines: one for recording and one for playback, the phono-kinetoscope paid homage to by Graham (see Dickson, 1894).

10. See Hayward (1990) for an analysis of the music video, and its affinities with early cinema.

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Matilde Nardelli is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London, researching the nexus between cinema, sculpture and monumentality. She is interested in the relationships between cinema, art and other media, and in the dialogues between ‘commercial’ and ‘experimental’ cinema. Her publications include: “Between Stillness and Movement: Boredom, Photography and Time in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse,” in Object [2004–05]) and “The Cut: Interruptions of Consciousness in Zorns Lemma and Red Desert,” Crash Cinema, ed. by Jill Good, Mark Goodall and Will Godfrey (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).

Address: Centre for Intercultural Studies, c/o Department of Italian, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, Email: [email protected]

Documents

Journal of Visual Culture 2009 Nardelli 243 64