Performing Moving Images: Access, Archives and Affects [1 ed.] 9462985839, 9789462985834

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SENTA SIEWERT

PERFORMING MOVING IMAGES Access, Archives and Affects

FRAMING

FILM E YE FILMMUS E UM

p e r f o r m i n g m ov i n g i m ag e s

FRAMING

FILM framing film

is a book series dedicated to

theoretical and analytical studies in restoration, collection, archival, and exhibition practices in line with the existing archive of EYE Filmmuseum. With this series, Amsterdam University Press and EYE aim to support the academic research community, as well as practitioners in archive and restoration. s e r i e s e d i to r s

Giovanna Fossati, EYE Filmmuseum & University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Leo van Hee, EYE Filmmuseum Frank Kessler, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Dan Streible, New York University, United States Nanna Verhoeff, Utrecht University, the Netherlands e d i to r i a l b oa r d

Richard Abel, University of Michigan, United States Jane Gaines, Columbia University, United States Tom Gunning, University of Chicago, United States Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Martin Koerber, Deutsche Kinemathek, Germany Ann-Sophie Lehmann, University of Groningen, the Netherlands Charles Musser, Yale University, United States Julia Noordegraaf, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of ­Technology, United States Linda Williams, University of California at Berkeley, United States

SENTA SIEWERT

PERFORMING MOVING IMAGES Access, Archive and Affects

a m s t e r da m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Published by EYE Filmmuseum / Amsterdam University Press Cover illustration: formal b/w photo of Guy Sherwin’s Man with Mirror © by Ben Dowden Cover design and lay-out: Magenta Xtra, Bussum isbn

978 94 6298 583 4

e-isbn

978 90 4853 707 5

doi 10.5117/9789462985834 nur 670

© S. Siewert / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

i n t ro du c t i o n : e x p e r i m e n ta l c i n e m a , e x pa n d e d c i n e m a ,

1

acc e s s : ag e n ts , a rc h i v e s 17



Archive – Whether to Preserve or to Show Programming – Historiography in the Making Curating – Montage of Contexts Case Study: Living Archive Project – Arsenal, Berlin Expanded Cinema – Expanded Consciousness and Event Case Study: Forum Expanded, Berlin Film Festival Case Study: International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen Case Study: Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone Archival Impulse – Archive Fever

2

a n d a rt i s ts ’ f i l m

| 5 7

19 24 26 30 33 37 39 41 43

a f f ec t : p e r f o r m a n c e , au d i e n c e 53 Black Box and White Cube 54 Case Study: Anthology Film Archives, New York 60 Case Study: LUX, Light Industry, Filmforum, Lightcone, LaborBerlin 63 Case Study: Harun Farocki 65 Case Study: Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam 68 Aesthetic Experience 73 Music in Film Studies 76 Sensual Pleasure 81 Case Study: Sonic Acts Festival 83 Case Study: Psychedelia and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 86 Programming affects 94

3 r eco n s t r u c t i o n : m e m o ry a n d au d i o - v i s ua l h e r i tag e 107 Historiography – Films that Make History 109 Case Study: The Realm of Possibilities 4–Access: Diamonds, Enter, Fin 112 Documents – Testifying the Past 114 Found Footage – Sampling and Remixing images and music 117 Experimental Music Video Clips 120 Case Study: Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum, Frankfurt 124 Audio-Visual Heritage 129 Expanded Heritage 131 Memory – Joyful Archive of Experiences 132 Experimental films and philosophy 135

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o u t lo o k 149



co n c lu s i o n 157



ac k n ow l e d g e m e n ts 159



i l lu s t r at i o n s 161



g e n e r a l b i b l i o g r a p h y 171



i n d e x 183



Introduction: Experimental Cinema, Expanded Cinema, and Artists’ Film

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Siewert, S., Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462985834_intro

The beauty and intensity of experimental film and the Expanded Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s can be an enthralling experience for audiences. However, an engaged viewer who wishes to discover more of these films or to repeat the experience would be presented with quite a challenge. With most of these films being held in archives in their original 16mm film cans, public access to these works tends to be limited to screenings at film festivals and art venues. Hence, usually only specialized festivals and art institutions offer viewing opportunities for an interested audience. Performing Moving Images. Access, Archive and Affects presents some of the institutions, engaged individuals and networks that in recent years have worked to ensure that these art forms continue to be screened rather than be consigned to oblivion. Selected case studies of experimental films, Expanded Cinema, installations and music videos engage with the wider issues of aesthetic experience, perception, reception, history, and memory. What are the processes by which moving images are performed, how is access to images and sounds granted, and what are the dynamics in archival setups? Exploring these questions, I will study film programmes, exhibitions, and festivals as well as contemporary artworks that utilize the aesthetics of experimental film and Expanded Cinema, including, for example, found footage and the remake. My initial impetus for this research originated in the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2011, where I attended programmes by the Los Angeles-based curator and archivist Mark Toscano, who screened 16mm short



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films that had not yet been digitized. These programmes included artists’ films from the 1960s and 1970s that were both visually and aurally stimulating. They were shipped over from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive (Academy Archive) in Los Angeles. One of the most captivating films was --- ------- (aka The Rock ‘n’ Roll Film) (1966-1967), made by Thom Andersen and Malcolm Brodwick. The collage of sound and images felt like a symphony of audio-visual impulses. While I felt elated by this experience, I also found myself laughing at the hilarious beauty of its jump cut audio-visual assemblage. It was an unusual aesthetic experience, with no obvious fades or music overlaps. The hard edits of the visuals and sounds were, nevertheless, highly controlled and fascinating to watch. Perhaps in that moment I realized the impact of the subjective visceral experience in viewing these films and became fascinated with the complexities of these artistic compositions. The short films in the programme seemed to relate to each other and together to tell a broader story, the story of a specific era, which showcased exciting visuals, sounds and narratives. Moreover, the whole programme of experimental films was arranged in an order and followed a specific rhythm which gave me a heightened, uplifting experience. After the screening, I was gripped by the memory of this experience, which would later compel me to travel to Los Angeles and watch the film again on an editing table in the Academy Archive, where they are stored. Aware of the surveillance cameras and the ban on taking pictures, travelling to the archive was like finding your way to the centre of a labyrinth, where these images and sounds resided. Here, I was met by Mark Toscano, who showed me through their incredible vault storage areas. Before we reached the visitor viewing rooms with editing tables for 16mm films, we passed by an installation of digitized loops of bits and pieces of experimental films by Gary Beydler (Hand Held Day, 1975; Venice Pier, 1976) – a wonderful coincidence, as I had seen these exact films in Rotterdam at the festival. This installation showcased new restoration and digitization programmes from the Academy Archive. As we entered the viewing area, a close-up of Beydler, rubbing his face on a window screen, served as a visceral welcome to the archive (Glass Face, 1975). In archives such as this I would soon conduct parts of my research for the present study, interested precisely in what happens to experimental and artists’ films from the 1960s and 1970s when they are preserved and accessed anew, when reconstructed and re-performed in the cinema, museum and beyond. In this book I intend to not only study and analyse, but also to celebrate the experiences and fascination with these films. It appears I am not the only one fascinated – Los Angeles based film scholar David E. James uses ‘minor cinema’ as an umbrella term for ‘experimental, poetic, underground, ethnic, amateur, counter, non-commodity, working-class, critical artists’ film-­making’

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films that to him are a very specific aesthetic experience that should be more widely appreciated (James 2005, 13). Other scholars classify these films as experimental film, underground film, avant-garde film, Expanded Cinema or artists’ cinema (Renan 1967; Youngblood 1970; Vogel 1974; James 2006). In what follows, I will utilize the term ‘experimental film’ to refer to films made by artists with a film background, whereas ‘Expanded Cinema’ refers to art forms that can be described as performative experimental film and ‘artists’ film’, works which are mostly shown in museums and made by visual artists. In order to acknowledge the complete environment of experimental films and Expanded Cinema, I will explore some of the dominant discourses on the discursive, cultural, social, and political contexts of film production, projection, reception, archiving, and reuse by the various agents including the film industry and art markets. Cultural practices such as programming, curating, and reconstruction, are analyzed here as elements of a ‘performative practice of film historiography’. Methodologically speaking, the book seeks to close the traditional and outdated gap between analysis and theoretical modelling in film theory on the one hand and the reconstruction of the reception experience on the other. This will be done by drawing on historical reconstruction combined with an accompanying participatory analysis of programming and curatorial work. Many of the screenings of experimental films and the Expanded Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s covered here were either part of festivals or re-enactment events staged in the period 2007-2016. These events took place (amongst others) at the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin; at the Berlin Film Festival; at Kunstwerke gallery in Berlin; at the Eye Film Museum and the Sonic Act Festival in Amsterdam; at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, at the Bozar in Brussels; at the Tate Gallery in London; at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, at redcat, Filmforum and Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; at the New York Film Festival, the Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry in New York. Such events will serve as illustrative case studies of interesting and sometimes innovative strategies of presenting and preserving experimental films and Expanded Cinema in recent years. This book will read in parts as a history of events. Particularly so in view of the power of events and artworks to arouse or elicit emotions that facilitate an immediate experience of these films from a bygone era and, thus, provides access to the past. I have discussed these topics with a number of people involved in the field, whose voices and views have greatly contributed to my study. Therefore, this study is guided by and adopts a variety of perspectives drawn from interviews I conducted with film makers, artists, programmers, curators, festival directors, archivists, and academics. I perceive my interviewees as cultural agents. Their interviews can be understood as an oral history,

INTRODUCTION

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contributing subjective insights to the academic discourse.1 The interview approach is complemented by comparative, transnational, analytical perspectives on concrete curatorial concepts, restoration, digitization strategies of selected film and video art institutions, and the respective preservation and reconstruction practices for their archives and collections. The research will help to outline how film images circulate. Accordingly, the study adopts a mixed approach, in which this ethnographic research is in dialogue with film aesthetics and economics. Since film material is fragile and the viewing experience a fleeting one, the preservation of film heritage and the protection of film knowledge is vitally important. This raises the pertinent questions concerning the safeguarding of the cultural heritage of film. Who or what guides decisions about what should be preserved and curated considering the vast amount of digitized films already available on DVDs and the internet? What is the role of curators in the process of re-showing, re-contextualizing, re-enacting and remembering? What are their conservation and restoration strategies? What are their thoughts about obsolescence? These questions will be discussed throughout the book. I believe that programmers, curators, scholars and archivists play important roles in this process, because they select films or Expanded Cinema works for cinemas, cinematheques, and festivals. In the act of selecting and presenting they support the continuing existence of films, artworks and archives. Moreover, they underline the necessity of funding for presenting, exhibiting, documentation and restoration of film as cultural heritage. In today’s fast-moving field of film and media, technological and economic changes have had far-reaching consequences, ranging from the removal of analogue projectors from cinemas and a partial end to the distribution of film prints to the closure of some film laboratories. A common approach to preserving such films is to migrate them to a digital format before transferring them to other film stock. However, during my research, film makers, artists and archivists repeatedly told me that digital formats are not always the most satisfactory archival medium, nor are they always an adequate projection medium, especially for experimental films and Expanded Cinema works. Preserving digital works presents its own set of problems, for example the constant necessity to convert digital films into new formats and purchase new hardware. The threat of the disintegration of the carrier material of film and video and the quick succession of technical systems for generating, saving and replaying pictures have triggered diverse academic discussions on questions about digitization, reproducibility, versions, distribution, and copyright (Cherchi Usai 2008; Fossati 2009; Frick 2011). As the boundaries demarcating film and art are becoming less rigid, my book presents not only a history of film, or a history of artists’ film, but instead

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an ‘expanded history of the moving image’. I use the term ‘expanded history’ here to reference both Expanded Cinema and the expanded nature of image and sound in the different experimental films. I will focus on the developments in the historiography of film known as ‘revisionist film historiography’, ‘historical poetics’, and ‘new film history’ (Elsaesser 2016). Additionally, concepts from art history are brought into play (Dubois 2013), namely in the ‘cinema effect in museums’ and the more general ‘cinematographic turn’ in the arts that describe the relationship between the institutions ‘black box’ of the cinema and the ‘white cube’ of the museum. In Chapter 1 ‘Access: Agents, Archives’ the question of locating and accessing experimental films from the 1960s and 1970s is central in conjunction with questions of identifying who is responsible for showing them today. The chapter will introduce selected institutions and their presentation and preservation strategies and relevant media and cultural policies as well as the work of different stakeholders, archivists and curators. The chapter is a response to the frequently voiced opinion that cinema is in danger of disappearing altogether. Rather, the chapter will demonstrate that cinematic experiences still maintain special qualities in comparison to other ways of watching moving images. Therefore, discussions on the ‘death of cinema’ and the understanding of the medium’s specificity will be addressed. To elucidate practices in the circulation of moving images as well as their position within the field of film studies, this chapter engages with relevant discourses about the archive and various concepts of programming and curating (Baron 2014, Brunow 2017; Cherchi Usai 2008; Derrida 1995; Ebeling and Günzel 2009; Foucault 1972; Fossati 2009; Foster 2004; Graham and Cook 2010; Marks 2004; Russell 2018). Chapter 2 ‘Affect: Performance, Audience’ explores the specific aesthetic experiences of viewing experimental films and Expanded Cinema in the movie theatre and in the museum. Particular attention is paid to concepts of perception, participation, experience, phenomenology, and affect (Bruno 2007; Casetti 2015; Shaviro 1993; Zryd 2002), the societal, economic, architectural, and technical contexts of cinema as a space of perception (Balsom 2013; Gass 2013), and the role of performativity (Taylor 2003; Hanstein 2017). The analysis includes experimental films, the forerunners of the music video clip, describing their influence on recent music video clips. The chapter makes a special point of highlighting the significance of music for the film experience in general, since it is often treated as a secondary consideration in film studies.2 Chapter 3 ‘Reconstruction: Memory, Audio-Visual Heritage’ is concerned with how to actually analyze the activity of re-screening, re-enacting and reconstructing film. Given that film archives have grown in relevance in recent years, one may ask, what the relationship between aesthetic experience and memory at the intersection of film archives, cinema, and exhibition practices may be. It

INTRODUCTION

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was in a similar vein that Miriam Hansen (2012) addressed the desirability of integrating digital transformations into a wider cultural memory, while at the same time rediscovering and reinventing cinema. A key part of the process of rediscovery is the artistic practice of reconstruction. The focus will be on the concept of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1998; Brunow 2015) while analyzing artistic practices dealing with the past, using found footage, re-enactment, and sampling (Baron 2014; Blümlinger 2009). Furthermore, questions relating to audio-visual cultural heritage and cultural memory are addressed with recourse to general concepts of memory (Assmann 2008; Bohn 2012; Klippel 1997; Landsberg 2004) and transnationality of memory (Erll 2011). It will be necessary to add to Assman’s and Erll’s concepts an understanding of experimental films, Expanded Cinema, and film and video installation art as important constituents of the culture of memory. The method of ‘pragmatic poetics’, which I have developed in my previous work (Siewert 2013), links economic (pragmatic) issues with aesthetic (poetic) questions. This method helps to frame processes of remembering as intellectual work in which perception, memory and recognition are permanently woven together in continual motion. My approach is informed by Gilles Deleuze’s writing on memory and on remembering (1989/1990), in which he connects past experiences with current perceptions. I will provide my own definition of memory, redirecting the focus to the affective power of experimental films, artistic works, and live events, which enable an intensive access to films from earlier eras and, therefore, have the potential to carry an audience back in time. A special focus lies on both the visual and aural power that these events have on their audience. Furthermore, I describe the special aesthetic experience of some experimental films, Expanded Cinema, installations and music videos, which often emerges from the combination of visual and sonic sensations and can be described as ‘sensual pleasure’. This aesthetic experience, in connection the ‘historical sensations’ (Benshop 2009) and ‘joyful memory’ (Fevry 2015) is the reason for my interest for these selected artforms. On the whole, my own concept of ‘expanded heritage’ can be understood as an expansion of both research and practice beyond a nationally bounded audio-visual heritage. Aside from presenting my research and analysis, I do hope that I may also be able to communicate my fascination with experimental film and archives to the reader. Experience plays an integral role both in viewing and in analyzing of artistic and experimental films and, hence, also in the archives’ call to preserve not only the material but the many dimensions of film in the darkness of vaults and in the limelight of projections. Inherent in the experiential dimension of film is the subjectivity of the experience, be it by the individual or a collective audience. This subjectivity requires space for telling its story

PERFORMING MOVING IMAGES

as part of the viewing and reviewing processes. This storytelling requires, if you will, an exhibition space to be explored for the purpose of meta-reflection and analysis. In this book, I seek to create such a space and use it for suggesting some of the sentences that may comprise, in time, such a dynamically and collectively evolving meta-narrative, or rather, meta-discourse. Hence, my approach to writing this book follows in part traditional academic standards and has in part been inspired by the method of montage in films and by technique of sampling in music performances. You as reader are invited to explore with me the archival and projection spaces and to debate my attempts at an explanatory meta-narrative.

NOTES | 13 1

More on oral history: Sandrino and Partington 2013.

2

I refer to my previous work on affect and music (Siewert 2010; 2013f).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Assmann, Aleida. ‘Canon and Archive.’ Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. 97-107. Balsom, Erica. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam ­University Press, 2013. Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of ­History. London: Routledge, 2014. Benshop, Ruth. ‘All the Names: Soundscapes, Recording Technologies, and the ­Historical Sensation’, Sound Souveniers. Eds. Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijk. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 182-198. Blümlinger, Christa. Kino aus zweiter Hand. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2009. Bohn, Anna. Denkmal Film: Band 1: Der Film als Kulturerbe. Cologne: Boehlau, 2012. Bolter, David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Brunow, Dagmar. ‘Curating Access to Audiovisual Heritage: Cultural Memory and Diversity in European Film Archives’. Image [&] Narrative, 18(1): 97-110 (2017). Brunow, Dagmar. Remediating Transcultural Memory: Documentary Filmmaking as Archival Intervention. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2015. Casetti, Francesco. The Lumière Galaxy. Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

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Cherchi Usai, Paolo. Film Curatorship. Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace. Co-Eds. David Francis, Alexander Horwath, and Michael Loebenstein. Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum/SYNEMA, 2008. Cook, Sarah and Beryl Graham. Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2010. Deleuze, Gilles. Das Bewegungs-Bild. Kino I. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Das Zeit-Bild. Kino II. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’. Diacritics 25.2 (Summer, 1995): 9-63. Dubois, Phillipe. ‘A ‘Cinema Effect’ in Contemporary Art’. Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. 311-325. Ebeling, Knut, Stephan Günzel, eds. Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten. Berlin: Kadmos, 2009.

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Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Fevry, Sébastien. ‘Aesthetics of Recognition and Photofilmic Dynamics: Remembering in the Cinema of Henri-François Imbert.’ Image & Narrative, 16.3 (2015): 4-16. Fossati, Giovanna. From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009 (revised edition 2018). Foster, Hal. ‘An Archival Impulse.’ OCTOBER 110 (Fall 2004). Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1972. Frick, Caroline. Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Hansen, Miriam. ‘Max Ophuls and Instant Messaging. Reframing Cinema and Publicness.’ Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema. Eds. Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöhler. Vienna: Synema, 2012. 22-29. Hanstein, Ulrike. ‘Framing Performance Art. Acts of Documenting in Being and Doing (1984)’. Fluid Access: Archiving Performance-Based Arts. Eds. Barbara Büscher, Franz Anton Cramer. Hildesheim: Olms, 2017. 151-166. James, E. David. The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Klippel, Heike. Gedächtnis und Kino. Frankfurt and Basel: Stroemfeld, 1997. Koch, Gertrud, Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöhler, eds. Screen Dynamics. ­Mapping the Borders of Cinema. Vienna: Synema, 2012. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Marks, Laura. ‘The Ethical Presenter, or How to Have Good Arguments over Dinner’. The Moving Image 4.1 (2004): 34-47. Russell, Catherine. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

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Sandino, Linda, Matthew Partington. Oral history in the visual arts. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Schulte Strathaus, Stefanie, Uli Ziemons. Eds. Living Archive: Archivarbeit als künst­ lerische und kuratorische Praxis der Gegenwart/Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice. Berlin: b-books, 2013. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Siewert, Senta, and Barbara Le Maître. ‘Introduction to Exhibition Strategies’ Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013a. 309-310. Siewert, Senta. ‘Across the Territories: Exhibiting Music Video’ Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013b. 346-351. Siewert, Senta. ‘An der Peripherie des Kinos. Experimentelle Bewegtbilder’. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (zfm) 09.2 (2013c). Siewert, Senta. ‘Born to be alive’. Living Archive: Archivarbeit als künstlerische und kuratorische Praxis der Gegenwart/Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice. Eds. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Uli Ziemons. Berlin: b-books, 2013d. 196-197. Siewert, Senta. ‘Programmgestalten und Kuratieren von Experimentalfilmen’. Augenblick. Konstanzer Hefte der Medienwissenschaft 56/57 2013e: 64-70. Siewert, Senta. Entgrenzungsfilme – Jugend, Musik, Affekt, Gedächtnis. Eine pragmatische Poetik zeitgenössischer europäischer Filme. Marburg: Schüren, 2013f. Siewert, Senta. ‘Affektive und partizipative Erfahrung bei Expanded-Cinema-Auf­ füh­run­gen auf Filmfestivals’. Eds. Florian Mundhenke, Thomas Weber. Kino­ erfahrungen. Theorien, Geschichte, Perspektiven. Hamburg: Avinius, 2017. 233-246. Siewert, Senta. ‘ Am Puls der Zeit’, in: Ursula v. Keitz, Ed., ‚Alles dreht sich ... und bewegt sich’. Der Tanz und das Kino. Marburg: Schüren, 2017. 46-54. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. London: Distributed Art Pub, 1974/2005. Zryd, Michael. ‘Found Footage- Film als diskursive Metageschichte’. montage/av (2002): 113-134.

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CHAPTER 1

Access: Agents, Archives

Siewert, S., Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462985834_ch01

ABSTRACT In Chapter 1 “Access: Agents, Archives” the question of locating and accessing experimental films from the 1960s and 1970s is central in conjunction with questions of identifying who is responsible for showing them today. The chapter is a response to the frequently voiced opinion that cinema is in danger of disappearing altogether. Rather, the chapter demonstrates that cinematic experiences still maintain special qualities in comparison to other ways of watching moving images. Therefore, discussions on the ‘death of cinema’ and the understanding of the medium’s specificity will be addressed. To elucidate practices in the circulation of moving images as well as their position within the field of film studies, this chapter engages with relevant discourses about the archive and various concepts of programming and curating. k e y wo r ds

access, archives, experimental film, Expanded cinema, programming, c­ urating

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Access to experimental films from the 1960s and 1970s has become increasingly difficult, since institutions often have to decide whether they either want to store the films safely, restore or digitize them or whether to throw them away, often because they need space in their vaults. Also, some of these films are not yet catalogued and, hence, are hard to locate. Others have not left a trail in publications; therefore, they are invisible to film history. In the process of selection, preservation, storage, and presentation, the responsible people in film archives, collections, and museums as well as independent curators and scholars have to make complex decisions of consequence for the visibility and the continuing existence of films. Who is offering access to films and what are strategies of accessing films? What is the role of those ‘cultural agents’? This chapter will lead to various perspectives and horizons of understanding, viewing, and showing film. In 2011, one institution came up with a new strategy in order to make their collection visible. The Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany and Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie-funded collaborative Living Archive Project in Berlin invited forty artists, film makers, performers, musicians, curators, and scholars from around the world to explore and research the archive for three years. This group – of which I was part – was presented with material usually hidden in the archival depths. We were able to view as many films as we wanted, met once a month for public screenings and held a workshop to discuss concepts and strategies about archiving, presenting and reusing film material. The idea of developing new archival methods and practices led to a festival that celebrated the Living Archive Project at the Berlin Arsenal cinema and the Kunstwerke gallery for the month of June in 2013. The Living Archive Project conceives of archival work as artistic and curatorial practices and has become a model for other international institutions. I will restrict the following observations to my own exploration as it is beyond the scope of this book to touch on all aspects of the great number of past and ongoing Living Archive projects.1 My archive work began with research on 16mm films at editing tables in the archive, video-recorded interviews with members of the project, film makers, artists, curators, programmers, archivists, projectionists, and scholars. I documented on video all of these activities, resulting in my documentary film Born to be Alive (2020). It led to the following observations on experimental

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film and Expanded Cinema work and presentations in London, Dublin, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Frankfurt, and Bochum. Later on, I will describe a workshop that I offered in London in 2016, in collaboration with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, the head of the Living Archive project. Before going into detail, a short overview of some foundational concepts we were discussing seems in order as well as an introduction to relevant historical developments and persona instrumental in the archive and Expanded Cinema.

ARCHIVE – WHETHER TO PRESERVE OR TO SHOW The discourse on archives, and on film archives in particular, covers the archive as an institution and concurrently in relation to philosophical questions and those of heritage. As ‘a storage of knowledge’, the archive is often seen as a construction site where histories are created. The distinction between archive as the institution and as a source of cultural memory is often blurred.2 Michel Foucault identifies the term ‘archive’ as pertaining to different contexts. According to him, the word ‘archive’ describes firstly a historically embedded institution that registers, stores, processes, and provides data. Secondly, it describes a singular space that belongs to a group of socially and historically constructed spaces that Foucault elsewhere3 referred to as ‘heterotopias’, and thirdly, in his historical epistemology ‘archive’ is an analytical and systematic concept. Complementarily, according to art historian Hans Belting, there is a distinction between a physical archive, which stores material of the past, and an inner archive that is in the minds of people (Belting 2001). Both these dimensions are dependent on one another. The distinctions between archive as the institution and as a source of cultural memory are explained in detail by different authors who refer back to Jacques Derrida’s (1995) term archive­ ology (Ebeling and Günzel 2009; Russell 2018). Catherine Russell understands archiveology as ‘a critical-theoretical framework’ within which one can think about how the avant-garde and moving image arts ‘can contribute to the humanities, and are part of the humanities.’4 That is why she studies moving images, which are now easily accessible on the internet and in archives for recycling and remixing. She states: The film archive is no longer simply a place where films are preserved and stored but has been transformed, expanded, and rethought as an ‘image bank’ from which collective memories can be retrieved. The archive as a mode of transmission offers a unique means of displaying and accessing historical memory, with significant implications for the ways that we imagine cultural history.5

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I follow Ray Edmondson’s philosophy and ethics of audio-visual archiving, when he writes: So I’d like to look at preservation and access and what these terms mean to an audiovisual archive. They are two sides of the same coin, and before discussing them separately let’s consider them together. They are so interdependent that access can be seen as an integral part of preservation.6 Later Edmondson writes about the misused term preservation in memory professions, such as film archives:

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In the profession it is a precise and fundamental concept: the totality of things necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity. It is not a discrete process. In the digital context, more than ever, it is a never-ending management task. Nothing has ever been preserved – it is only being preserved. Yet preservation is never an end in itself: without the objective of access it has no point. (Edmondson 2016: 1) In this context the term restoration is defined as ‘a set of technical, editorial, and intellectual procedures aimed at compensating for the loss or degradation of the moving image artefact,’ as Cherchi Usai states (2000: 66). In early years, archivists have been understood as gatekeepers, preventing access and safeguarding the archival stock. Nowadays, archivists can be understood as curators (Siewert 2013). The role of the archive has changed since the digital turn, from storing to accessing, as Trond Lundemo noted: ‘Where it used to be the size and selection of the holdings, access has become the pride of the contemporary archive.’ (Lundemo 2011: 193) Since 2011 the so-called ‘digital rollout’ describes the time period, when digital projection and film distribution superseded the analogue one. Fosatti states that the ‘roles had reversed with digital becoming the norm rather than the exception’ (2018: 13). Both the ‘digital turn’ and ‘digital rollout’ not only change film practice, archiving, programming and curating but also the way we perceive films and their experience today. In what follows, I will briefly introduce the beginnings of film archives as institutions.7 The first film archives were established in the 1920s and 1930s at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Cinémathèque Française in Paris, the British National Archive (BFI) in London, the Cinémathèque Royale in Brussels, and the Reichsfilmarchiv in Berlin. During the first years it was difficult to access the archives. One event was recognized as a beginning of an

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opening of the archives and a collaboration between archivists and scholars: in 1978 at 34th Annual Congress of the Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) held in Brighton, a group of film scholars were invited to view and discuss several hundred early films. What is sometimes forgotten is that the archives were started around the time that also avant-garde filmmaking began and film theory was developing. (Hagener 2014) Moreover, a strong impulse at that time was to establish film as an artform. From the beginning on, the focus on international avant-garde film was the main priority for all film archive institutions. Therefore, holding experimental films has become a common practice of film archives. Questions of national heritage or commercial films in general came later and with a stronger focus on the establishment of archives as national heritage institutions. Even though the collection policies changed over time, avant-garde films have remained a central component of film archival collection activities. In the USA, the Film Library, headed by Iris Barry, was established as part of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, in 1935. MoMA has provided a rental collection of historical films that it deems to possess canonical status. Dana Polan describes the impact of this distribution collection: Virtually overnight there was a proliferation of scattered courses in film appreciation or film history that were based on the MoMA collection and that regularized the study of film in standard patterns that would still be in place when universities came more systematically to introduce film curricula in the 1960s. (Polan 2007: 16) During this early period, Barry helped organize a film course at Columbia University, which she later claimed to be the first of its kind.8 As an influential member of the Film Society in London, Barry had already been active in avantgarde film culture before moving to New York in 1930 (Sitton 2014). Since the beginnings, MoMA and Iris Barry have been considered important players in the writing of film history (Wasson 2005). A similar development in connecting film art, archiving, and film critique happened in France, where Jean Mitry, who was both one of the founding members of the Cinémathèque Française and a film scholar, argued that the fluidity of film practice and film theory existed from the beginning. This led to the idea that theory and archival practice are intertwined. The underlying question of whether an archive just preserves the films or actually shows them became relevant to film studies and goes back to Henri Langlois’s early activities as a collector. Langlois chose to collect the work of specific auteurs for the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. He not only selected the films, he also controlled access to the films through programming.

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Unlike Langlois, Ernest Lindgren – founding curator of the United Kingdom’s National Film and Television Archive, now BFI National Archive – did not want to show rare films; he preferred to store them securely.9 Therefore, the discussion whether to present or to store films in archives has existed since the original stages of film archiving. Moreover, both the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the BFI National Archive, as founding member institutions of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), engage in inter-archive loans enabling screenings in different countries. They followed similar archiving and screening ethics. FIAF has been dedicated to the preservation of and access to global film heritage since 1938. It comprises of more than 166 institutions in 75 countries, which is a reflection of the extent ‘to which film heritage has become a worldwide concern’. Their mission statement speaks of commitments, such as ‘to uphold a code of ethics for film preservation and practical standards, to seek the improvement of the legal context within which film archives carry out their work and to ensure the permanent availability of material from the collections for study and research by the wider community’.10 In contrast, the Arsenal in Berlin has not followed that path, although Ulrich Gregor, co-founder of the Forum at the Berlin Film Festival, Friends of The German Film Archive and the Cinema Arsenal in principle follows the Langlois’s approach: To run a cinema for public screenings is one of the essential tasks of a film archive. There might well be an old, never-ending argument among film archivists as to whether it is more important to preserve or to show films, but nobody would seriously deny that one of a cinémathèque’s most important goals is to organize regular film screening sessions. Some film archives, such as the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, have influenced film culture in their countries for years thanks to cycles and retrospectives.11 Gregor mentions the decision-making processes that institutions have to go through in this respect. His own institution was not able to receive the approval as an archive, because it could not fulfil FIAF’s standards. It followed its own rules of celebrating their collection, working together with the Deutsche Kine­ mathek under the same roof at the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin – allowing the Deutsche Kinemathek to use their Arsenal cinemas also located in the same building. The Deutsche Kinemathek opened in 1963 under the founding director Gerhard Lamprecht. Together, the Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum (DFF) in Frankfurt, the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Federal Archive-Film Archive) in Coblenz and Berlin, and the Kinemathek in Berlin,

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constitute the Deutscher Kinematheksverbund (Association of German Film Archives) which, among other projects, works on problems related to archiving German films.12 In her ground-breaking work on archiving, preservation, and digitization From Grain to Pixel (2009/2018) Giovanna Fossati stresses that film archives have different agendas than collections, museums or film museums and cinémathèques: in some institutions, films are seen as objects of national heritage, while in others they are treated as objects of art. Fossati writes: Most film museums and cinémathèques are usually characterized by an active exhibition policy. This is typically realized in one or more public screening theatres run by the institution itself: here films from the collection are shown regularly, alongside films from other archives and contemporary distribution titles. (Fossati 2009: 23) | 23 Fossati explains that all film archives including Eye Film Museum feel that besides national film heritage there are two areas where the national borders do not apply very much: and these are the silent cinema and avant-garde films. One of the reasons worth mentioning, is that avant-garde films very often don’t have a very strong national specificity, also in terms of economics.13 That is why I think they are timeless and can travel from one country to another and always find their audiences. Other academics call for a new way of thinking about the archive, such as Arjun Appadurai, who writes: ‘We should begin to see all documentation as intervention, and all archiving as part of some sort of collective project. Rather than being the tomb of the trace, the archive is more frequently the product of anticipation of collective memory.’ (Appadurai 2003: 16) Following Appadurai the practice of presentation and preservation of films can be understood as a social practice. Caroline Frick underlines this in her book, Saving Cinema (2011), stating that the preservation and presentation activities of film archives and museums should be considered as socially constructed practices, which are influenced by contemporary discourses. Paolo Cherchi Usai, film historian and curator of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, USA and director of the film festival in Pordenone Italy, emphasizes the possibilities such institutions have. Cherchi Usai states: ‘The value of an institution is then not only the fictional value of thousands of prints that they want us to assess, but the capacity and competence of the institution to create ‘stories’ and draw knowledge out of that repository, to produce a cultural history.’ (Cherchi Usai 2008: 96). Following Cherchi Usai, I posit that film programmers and curators can be understood as storytellers with an influence on culture and knowledge history. As a result, I conceive

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of the concept of the archive as a mixture of the above-mentioned claims by Frick, Fossati, Appadurai and Cherchi Usai: archiving as a social practice that creates collective memory. Paolo Cherchi Usai, David Francis, Alexander Horwarth and Michael Loebenstein discuss from different angles of diverse generations of archivist in Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital (2008), the issue of medium specificity, arguing that film is film and not digital content. Francis and Horwarth both demand that film archives treat their collections as unique museum objects with intrinsic artistic value. Francis requires more respect from artists and curators when contacting archives, since some just seem to expect to get access and use everything without following the rules of ‘curare’. In a review of this book, Chris Horak, Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, states the following: 24 |

It’s tough being an archivist these days. The digital revolution has shaken the profession to its very foundations. All those hallowed archival values like originality, uniqueness, provenance, and protection of the material object, have become irrelevant, as the digital turns all material culture into infinitely reproducible data. Gone are the specialised areas of knowledge concerning conservation of physical materials, whether textiles, tapes or tri-acetate; gone are theories of medium and message being ontologically indivisible; forget Rudolf Arnheim and Siegfried Kracauer, digitality mashes it all up to 1 and 0.14 These changes in archiving require new strategies. Some archives, like the Irish Film Archive, explain the archive’s main desire: archives ought to ‘explore, discover, detect, unlock, reveal and celebrate’15 the treasures found. Later on, I will discuss this in more detail later, especially the celebratory aspect, more precisely, how the audience members are affected by re-screenings and re-enactments of films (Chapter 2), and concurrently how they receive insight into a bygone era, in other words, how they have a ‘historical sensation’ (Chapter 3).

PROGRAMMING – HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MAKING The idea that the film programme is a medium of film historiography, has thus far largely been neglected in research. Most concepts of programming refer to early cinema (Hagener 2007; Hediger 2003; Wasson 2005). In contrast, I will extend this discussion to event programming from the 1960s to the present. Historically speaking, a significant milestone in the connection between programming and experimental film was made with ‘The Absolute Film’ with

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works by Walther Ruttmann, Vikking Eggeling and Hans Richter etc. at the Berlin UFA Palace in 1925. In this context a special mention should be made of the collected volume The Art of Programming, edited by Heike Klippel (2008). In this volume Andrea Haller speaks about film programming in connection to early cinema as ‘a programming of affects of the spectator’. (Haller 2008: 18-51) I believe, that this affective function of programming can be applied to experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s, because the films, due to their visuals and music, often have a strong affective effect. That means, the programmer creates an affective experiential horizon for the audience. Moreover, when talking about the function of a programmer I agree with Laura Marks, who writes, ‘that the ethical presenter, whether for festivals, museums, nonprofit arts organizations, or occasional audiences, is one who frames a programme with an argument.’16 The American film programmer Mark McElatten talked in an interview about one of his famous experimental programmes in San Francisco and New York: I see a work and it is an experience. I have a memory of the work. That memory processes this and finds other memories other experiences it wants to be next to, experiences that clarify or thicken or blush when placed near another experience. Then I see if this is true in an exterior arena. These are things that are happening in my mind my memory but the work is what is important and whether a new experience of this work put in this arrangement might make something available for other people. I add another level of connection and juxtaposition to respond to, an aerial view or something like that.17 McElatten description of his programming technique offers a good insight into his work process and his objectives in programming as creating an intense experience for the audience members. Even his printed programmes are pieces of art, giving the viewer an opportunity to prolong the film experience. From 1997 McElatten worked at the New York Film Festival, which is an annual film festival presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and was founded in 1963 by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel. One section was called ‘Views from the Avant-Garde’, which is an experimental showcase, presenting many programmes of short and feature-length work. Initiated by McElatten and Gavin Smith, the experimental film section was re-titled as ‘Projections’ in 2014 following McElatten’s departure. Before I analyze single programmes or the aesthetics of the films of the films, I would like to turn to Laura Mulvey’s question of how film programming became film curating.18

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CURATING – MONTAGE OF CONTEXTS

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Nowadays, programming of films is increasingly referred to as curatorial, which is derived from the Latin curare ‘to take care’. Cherchi Usai defines the curation of films as follows: ‘The art of interpreting the aesthetics, history and technology of cinema through the selective collection, preservation, and documentation of films and their exhibition in archival presentation.’ (Cherchi Usai 2008: 231) The term curating is now used in the context of archives, cinemas, museums, and galleries. What is the significance of using programming and curating interchangeably? Formerly, the term programming was mainly used for cinemas, later, the notion of ‘curating the moving image’ comes up in connection with small and large scale projects in museums and gallery spaces. During my research I noticed that people increasingly engage in critical discussions on the importance of the curator. I heard the curator described as a consultant, mediator, expert, auteur or DJ. In the book Film Programming – Curating for Cinemas, Festivals, Archives (2015) Peter Bosma combines the two terms already in his title. He further states that curating films may sound ‘a little presumptuous for some members of this group of professionals’ who consider themselves as film programmers. In his view ‘it is about time to acknowledge that all of the various film programmers worldwide are ‘custodians of cinema culture’.’ He argues that film programmers or film curators keep the ‘varied and complex past of cinema alive through screenings of all sorts of film heritage’.19 In the art world, the term curating is mainly used in reference to exhibitions. A curator provides information and connections to help the viewer understand the relevance of the artwork. A good description of a contemporary curator can be found on the website of Sotheby’s Institute of Art: Since the mid-1990s, curating has come to be seen as a creative activity, and there is more overlap between the artist and curator than before – they are increasingly engaged in similar activities. The curator is, more and more, an auteur who experiments with different formats, different ways of experiencing the art, and creating different meanings. Like an artist, the contemporary curator tests old formats and invents new ones.20 In the magazine Texte zur Kunst (2012) the editors write: Ever since Harald Szeemann’s trendsetting Documenta 5 (1972), the independent curator has counted as a new preeminent player in the art world. No longer employed by a museum but instead an initiator and author of project-based presentations at various institutions, the figure

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of the curator is also associated with the emergence of thematic group shows, in which artworks, everyday objects, and documents, as equally treated exhibits, are meant to illustrate a hypothetical curatorial concept. In the art world of the 1990s – which was characterized by relations and interdisciplinarity, contexts and displays – curatorial activities were both popularized and professionalized. Curators increasingly acted as skilled networkers whose influence also grew due to the rising number of international biennials. At the same time, the notion of the curator or of curating has expanded beyond the confined boundaries of the art field and can now be found in all areas of cultural production. 21 The Journal of Curatorial Studies takes a wider perspective in the inquiry into what constitutes ‘the curatorial’. The journal distinguishes curating from the older notion of ‘connoisseurship’. Connoisseurship was a model of arranging objects, whereas curating encompasses ‘performative, virtual and interventionist strategies.’22 In contrast the editors of the Artsugar magazine use connoisseurship and curating interchangeably. Connoisseurship ‘fosters the ability to discriminate and judge artworks based on quality. Some argue this ability is inborn and will only blossom if the talent is practiced. Therefore, connoisseurs acquire the skill to judge the quality of an artwork quickly and intuitively by exercising their innate abilities.’23 Hal Opperman also describes changes in ‘contemporary connoisseurship’ of art, ‘Today, connoisseurs do not rely solely on ‘a good eye’, they also rely on new technological methods, such as x-rays and infrared reflectography.’24 More recently, in Rethinking Curating (2010) museum and information scholars Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook add new aspects to the task of a museum curator, including ‘hybrid ways of working online and off, collaboration and social networking.’25 Nowadays curators need new sets of skills. Some scholars describe curators of ‘Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM)’ as artists (Checefsky 2015) or as authors (Richter 2013). The practice of curating can be also connected with the practice of editing or montage. In a similar vein to Dominique Païni’s concept of ‘programming as editing’, where the argument of a film programme is created through the juxtaposition of different films, what could be compared to editing,26 Laura Mulvey asked how film programming became film curating and how curating can be compared to montage.27 At a conference in London in 2015, Mulvey states that the concept of curation emerged in ‘the aftermath of what we can crudely call the digital revolution when film clunking away on its big wheels in the back of the cinema with its projecting light, suddenly was transferred to these small magical discs.’28 Mulvey coins the concept ‘curating as montage’, for the sake of her argument, she reminded the mixed audience of the confer-

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ence – both film scholars and art historians – of what montage is: ‘Montage can be understood as the editing together of two shots that have no apparent connection between them but create an idea or further meaning out of that juxtaposition.’29 The term montage is particularly associated with narrative Soviet filmmaking of the 1920s and also in connection with experimental films especially the found footage tradition since its origins in the 1920s with the work of filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub. Moreover, as I claim, the notion of montage is indispensable for understanding the practice of experimental filmmakers from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Harun Farocki, Bruce Conner, and Thom Andersen, whom I will introduce later. Later at the conference, Mulvey explains why she thinks that the practice of ‘curating as montage’ emerged already in the 1950s. She refers to Henri Langlois’s work in the Cinémathèque Française during the new wave of cinephiles. Following Mulvey’s argument, directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques ­Rivette, François Truffaut learned cinema through Langlois. Even though Lang­lois was ‘disorganized and disordered’ what he did, out of this disorder apparently arbitrary throwing films together, he created a dialogue or even a kind of a dialectical relationship with very unexpected movies, which started in that sense to talk to each other in an unexpected way and say something unexpected to the spectator, to the audience. Langlois in his oddity didn’t even put two films together, he put three films together, which is rather really a difficult concept. This is where this idea of juxtaposition, unexpected but exciting, emerged, and to my mind it is out of the Langlois tradition that the contemporary more conceptual, more informal practice of film curation has grown.30 The notion of ‘curating as montage’ allows a better understanding of recontextualization as a way to create new meanings. All things considered, various scholars use different terms in order to describe similar developments. One could say that the new use of the terms – such as programming as editing and curating as montage – mirrors the general change in film presentations. As films find new dispositifs, the vocabulary describing the presentation practices also changes. There are other voices, speaking against the recent curating of films on festivals, biennials and in museums. In a discussion at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2016, art historian Hans Ulrich Gum­brecht lamented about ‘what bugs him’ concerning curators. According to him, museums, whether with regard to fine art, film or video talk too much about curation, about the exhibition’s architecture, about the concept and the text on the walls, and too little about the artworks themselves. In a similar vein,

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Laura Marks states, ‘Rather than preconceiving a meaning that the audience must ‘get’, the curator stages a programme as a performative event (the dinner party) in which unforeseen meanings emerge.’31 These general remarks on self-presentation, guidance and education hint at the necessity of leaving more space for the audiences to experience films themselves, in order to let the objects speak for themselves. During my research I realized that there are different types of curators for moving images, for one, there are the ‘superstar curators’ in museums and furthermore, there are the freelance curators, who implement film programmes during film festivals, and then there are the curators in repertory cinemas. It has also become clear that curators have different backgrounds, some hail from the arts, some from art history or film studies, some are film makers, and very few are archivists by trade. I believe that like everywhere else in life, personality defines practice to a considerable degree: do people prefer to stand in the limelight or do they prefer to remain in the background? Either way has advantages and disadvantages: some curators can be followed at festivals like well-loved authors and critics, while others are known for a particular aesthetic or art of programming or mediation and presentation style. And if curatorial style has to do with personality, so has our preference as members of the audience; most people seem always to discover something that matches their own taste. However, referring to personality alone is being too narrow in scope. There are other considerations under advisement, since curatorial decision-making processes not only allow access to an archive, but can bring a film into the forefront that otherwise might slip into obscurity. Films that have reached the public may be circulated in other cinemas, and given sufficient demand, money can be generated to preserve them. In this context Bosma rightfully refers to curators as being part of an economy of ideas. They are not only protectors of cinema culture, their intervention allows access and operates ideally like the classic marketing principle of AIDA (Attention-Interest-Desire-Action). Bosma argues that the preservation are goods of consumption. From this perspective, the circulation of a film is based on its commercial worth. Contrary to that, in discussions at a workshop for curators at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA)32 in London in 2016, festival and exhibition organizers, curators, film makers and artists argued that especially in current film and video installations, not the commercial or cultural worth of an artwork is predictive as to whether it will be displayed, but the technical effort that needs to be put into its presentation. Questions on cultural worth and technical effort were also discussed in an interview with Los Angeles based filmmaker and film restorer Ross Lipman in 2014. Lipman says, ‘while museum conservators are well aware of the importance of medium integrity, nev-

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ertheless many of the purchasing institutions had no viable way to properly present 35mm and 16mm prints.’ Further Lipman states, ‘museums are ill adapted for audio-visual works, even though such works arguably constitute the core expressive form of contemporary life.’ This issue was further debated in Stefanie Schulte Strathaus’s (Arsenal, Berlin) and my workshop at the German Screen Studies Network (GSSN) ‘Living Pasts, Moving Present’ at King’s College in London, as well as following my presentation at the conference ‘ISTME – Locating and Dis-Locating Memory: In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe’ in Dublin (both in 2016), where we focussed in particular on questions of cultural worth in connection to the necessity of activating the memory of audience members. Generally speaking, curating analogue films is a complicated process which starts with questions on how to access films, followed by questions on how to contextualize them and how to find audiences, money and equipment to exhibit them. All these discussions underline the urgency of reconsidering programming and curating strategies. The following case study showcases attempts to change the practice of programming and curating of experimental films and Expanded Cinema.

CASE STUDY: ARSENAL – LIVING ARCHIVE PROJECT, BERLIN During the three years of the Living Archive project, I searched at the Berlin Arsenal collection for experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s. The Arsenal describes its own history on their website as follows: A great number of people – internally and externally – have participated in building up the collection over the past decades. This is the only way such a living impression of a century of international film history could have emerged. This is why we think that today a great number of people from the field can bring in their own specific perspectives to lead the collection in its extremely unique self-perception from the present to the future, keeping history in mind so as to break with a linear understanding of time. [...] New generations will approach the archive from a different background of socialization. This has to do with historical knowledge, cultural contexts, perspectives, geopolitical origins, theory, media competence.33 I presented some of the films, which were long hidden in the vaults of the Arsenal collection, at my programme ‘Pragmatic Poetics of the Archive’ during the Living Archive festival in 2013. By pragmatic I mean the institutional, archival, programming, and curatorial aspects of different organizations. It was one of

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my goals to bring curators and directors of different international film collections together in order to initiate new discussions and exchanges about pragmatics. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus’s (Arsenal, Berlin) and Simona Monizza’s (Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam) discussion of differences in the archival and presentation strategies of their respective institutions was a point in case. How could both institutions learn from each other? As they suggested, the Eye could learn from the Arsenal how to develop and manage international marketing strategies concerning experimental film; meanwhile the Arsenal could learn from the Eye’s expertise in restoration. In order to illustrate her recent archival and curatorial work, Monizza gave a short presentation about the film Liquidator by Karel Doing (2012) from the Eye Collection, which is a visually captivating film that also thematizes film preservation. It is a project which makes use of existing archive images of Willy Mullen’s silent film Haarlem (1922). Excerpts can be found on the internet with this description: Due to deterioration these images changed in a dramatic way. In the adaption Karel Doing zooms in on these effects with the aid of digital techniques like optical flow and morphing. Michal Osowski collaborated on the project with sound that is directly linked to the image, he used the changes in density of the film to control complex filters and distortion effects.34 This work, together with Monizza and Schulte Strathaus’s discussion, helped audience members to consider the specific discourse on archiving, preserving and re-using archival material via found footage. Thanks to the images, the narrative of decay and, most importantly, due to the distortion of the music, the discourse was even made palpable, since such artistic work has a direct affective influence on the spectator (more on the topic of affectivity in Chapter 2). Later, Monizza mentioned different projects from the Eye Film Museum, which can be compared in some ways to the Living Archive Project. They had worked with artists, such as Fiona Tan and Peter Forgacs, inviting them to work with the archive and create their own films out of the institute’s collection. Further, she spoke about the project ‘Celluloid Remix: 2 Found Footage’ (2012). Over twenty clips from the collection of early Dutch film from the period of 1917-1932 were made available online challenging professionals and amateurs to create new short films by remixing the footage and add one’s own soundtrack.35 On the same evening, following the discussion I had with Monizza and Schulte-Strathaus, I also introduced the poetic aspect of my event ‘Pragmatic Poetics of the Archive’. The poetic part of the evening was the curating a film

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programme titled ‘Rhythm in experimental film.’ This programme was a combination of seven 16mm short films mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, a selection combining material from the Arsenal and from the Eye film collection. All the films shown are characterized by special aural and/or visual rhythms. What made this specific selection remarkable was that the films facilitated an experience of a past era by offering their unique affective historical aesthetics. On top of that, in my theory and practice, I engage not only with the rhythms of the individual films but also with the rhythm of the short film programme as a whole. As a brief explanation of my programming choice; while doing research at the Arsenal, I discovered that most films I engaged with had a connection with the curator Alf Bold (1946-1993). Bold was well-known for his work with film and music and his special form of programming. He also was one of the first to establish the idea of programming short films combining old and new films, ‘which did not resemble one another primarily in terms of form or content, but which themselves were experimental compositions or discursive practices’, as film scholar Heide Schlüpmann noticed.36 His short film programming became a live event, allowed for a spontaneously changing order of the films in a DJ-style reaction to the audience.37 Schlüpmann describes Bold’s live programming practice in an interview with Karola ­Gramann: The projector stood in the cinema and he began with one or two short films and then he proceeded, using his feeling, for the reactions from the audience – he had a whole bunch of films lying beside him, which he chose from and of course he loved to provoke the audience with his audacity. (2008: 130) My programme at the Arsenal during the Living Archive Festival consisted of eight short 16mm films: Looking For Mushrooms (1961), Mongoloid (1976) by Bruce Conner, Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) by Kenneth Anger, Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961) by Marie Menken, Her Mona (1992) by Klaus Telscher, My Name is Oona (1969) by Gunvor Nelson, Lights (1965) by Marie Menken, and Labyrinth (1974) by Martin Visser. Conner’s and Anger’s work stands out in that they used pop music for their film soundtracks. Other films used image and sound materials from various archival sources combining pre-existing images to songs and thereby creating a whole new context because of the choice of music and a changing soundtrack. In such works the rhythm of the music determines the montage of the images and therewith the atmosphere of the films. In the spirit of Alf Bold, the programme included a more recent film (Her Mona 1992) and so produced a discourse with the earlier films. Also, when thinking back about

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Andrea Haller’s description of designing the programmes of early cinema as ‘a programming of the affect on the public’ is reminiscent of the rhythm led programmes of the 1970s. In connection to the second film Kustom Kar Kommandos by Kenneth Anger (1965) David E. James refers Anger’s films as ‘trance films’, which relates to a process of psychic self-realization. In the 1960s and 1970s ‘counter culture was attempting to reproduce the visual experience supplied by hallucinatory drugs.’ James describes programmes with such films as ‘alternative projections, a very specific aesthetic experience that should be more widely appreciated’ (James 2015: 13). In the discussion after my screening it became apparent that the audience members enjoyed a sense of time travel that the images and sounds. Evoked for them I will refer back to this programme in Chapter 2, when discussing the affective nature of film experience and in Chapter 3, when analyzing the ability of films and film programmes in accessing the past. Not only resembles my own programming practice Bold’s practice in these festival contexts but also when programming for university contexts, where I can reply to the audiences’ reactions in re-ordering the films. This case study shows, that not only the theoretical discussion about archiving and programming, but also the practice of programming short films is of great significance for my argument, as the presentation of films is indispensable for allowing such films to re-enter and remain in the cultural domain, to linger in cultural memory and cultural here-and-now-ness. Following the trend of expanding the idea of film programming, this technique could also be described as curating. Combining a film programme with a podium discussion, presentation and Q&A could, furthermore, be understood as curating as montage and event. The notion of ‘cinema as an event’ will be further discussed throughout my book, especially in connection with Expanded Cinema performances.

EXPANDED CINEMA – EXPANDED CONSCIOUSNESS AND EVENT In order to analyze some recent events, a brief outline of some relevant historical and contemporary events and the beginnings of Expanded Cinema is in order. During research and workshops at an academic conference in Gorizia, Italy in 2009, I was exposed to a series of re-enactments of 1970s Expanded Cinema works, which were so visually and aurally stimulating that I found myself inspired to work on these performances.38 The event, called ‘(A)LIVE! Performance, re-enactment, animation, simulation’, featured re-enactments of Expanded Cinema performances and experimental film programmes from the 1970s.39 Attending the event left me with several questions: what precisely

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were the aesthetic and bodily experiences these performances evoked for me and other members of the audience? How could I experience them again, and how could I share my experience with family, friends, students and the general public? The difference between the programming of short films and experiencing Expanded Cinema events of that era is that, generally speaking, the original performer is needed for Expanded Cinema to show his or hers work again. Realizing that, due to the age of the performers as well as the changes in their personality, artistry, outlook on life etc. and the potential of the deterioration of the fragile 16mm films, I realized that these Expanded Cinema performances seemed to have a profound relevance for experiencing the past, present and future. To get a historical understanding for these events, I will briefly refer back to the beginnings of Expanded Cinema, its currents and paradigms. Expanded Cinema is heavily reliant on its projection circumstances. When compared to the early days of cinema and up into the 1920s, the visibility of the projector was also determined by the projection hall. But later, with the banishment of the projector into the back room of the cinema since the 1940s, the awareness of a working machine dimmed, and with it, the difference of three distinguishable time logics. That is, the real time of the mechanical running time, the viewers’ bodily time, and the very specific, aesthetic-imaginary time constructions of the projected film. In narrative cinema, technical-aesthetic, and psychological dimensions overlap. The viewer’s wishes, fantasies, hopes, and worries, and the heroes and stars who seem to embody those musings, are provided by the projected images and sounds of the transmission process. In contrast, at Expanded Cinema performances since the 1950s, the projector is usually positioned within the cinema space or occupies other parts of the cinema spaces, as can be seen in the case of multiple projections. Other dispositifs, like the museum, open up further installation possibilities for analogue and digital moving images and projections. These new relationships between space, time, and architecture offer a rich arena for analysis. My case studies show a variety of re-enactments of the last years that give insight into different aesthetics, locations, and the people involved in making these events possible.40 Some of these Expanded Cinema events were shown in movie theatres, others in art institutions or other spaces. The first forms of Expanded Cinema in the 1950s to 1970s were especially rooted in the artistic underground. From the 1950s, Expanded Cinema artists critiqued the cinema dispositif. Peter Weibel (artist and director of the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM)), describes this era as a complete destruction of classical cinema: ‘The apparatus of classical cinema, from the camera to the projector, from the screen to the celluloid, was radically transformed, annihilated and expanded.’ (Weibel

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2003: 111) Similarly, Jordan Belson’s idea of ‘visual concerts’ left the classical cinema space behind. Belson was interested in expanding the filmic experience referring to the Visual Music of the 1920s.41 In 1957, together with the sound artist Henry Jacobs, Belson developed a series of film evenings, which were held in a planetarium in San Francisco. These were the so-called Vortex Concerts. They used the architecture of the observatory with its vaulted projection cupola and the technical equipment for projecting images to the sound. Belson let many films run parallel and also crossfaded them. In that way he was overcoming the rules of the classical cadrage. He stated: ‘The Vortex concerts became a form of controlled, expanded space experience which differ from the classical cinema experience.’42 William Moritz writes about their work: ‘Belson creates lush vibrant experiences of exquisite color and dynamic abstract phenomena evoking sacred celestial experiences.’43 In reference to such forms of presentation, Sheldon Renan coined the term ‘Expanded Cinema’ in his book The Underground Film from 1967. As Renan noted: Expanded Cinema is not the name of a particular style of film-making. It is a name for a spirit of inquiry that is leading in many different directions. It is expanded cinema to include many different projectors in the showing of one work […] to include computer-generated images and the electronic manipulation of images on television […] cinema expanded to the point at which the effect of film may be produced without the use of film at all. (1967) Also, Gene Youngblood used the term in his book Expanded Cinema from 1970. When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes. Renan’s and Youngblood’s statements reflect the fascination for this art form and why people may still desire to experience these art events. The intense bodily experience those films offer their audience is, indeed, a core element of Expanded Cinema. For example, Tony Conrad’s iconic structural film The Flicker (1965) was concentrated on the matrix of the elementary component of a film: the single image. The well-known film consists only of alternating black-and-white film images. During the projection, light and dark sequences alternate to changing rhythms and produce stroboscopic and

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flickering effects; viewing these causes optic impressions, which simulate colors and forms. In the process, the film does not address the senses as such, but rather trigger direct neural reactions causing those optic impressions.44 It underlines the insight that whatever is seen is not captured via the eyes, but rather first produced in the brain. Here the idea of a film was not only expanded into the architectonical space, but instead expanded into the inner body of the perceiver, with the body becoming part of the filmic dispositif. Conrad is a key figure for the development of extreme visual experience and a prototype of creating artworks, which mirror Youngblood’s idea of expanded consciousness. In the 1970s experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek describes Expanded Cinema as works which are both inside and outside of the gallery, including live performance, projector pieces, video and a range of media environments. He replaced one-dimensional film projection and produced film sequences for the Movie-Drome, which he started building in 1963. A critic writes: ‘Influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s spheres, VanDerBeek had the idea for a spherical theatre where people would lie down and experience movies all around them. […] His intention went far beyond the building itself and moved into the surrounding biosphere, the cosmos, the brain and even extraterrestrial intelligence.’45 In 1966 Vanderbeek, wrote a manifesto: It is imperative that we [the world’s artists] invent a new world language, that we invent a non-verbal international picture-language. I propose the following: – The establishment of audio-visual research centers, preferably on an international scale. These centers to explore the existing audiovisual hardware. The development of new image-making devices (the storage and transfer of image materials, motion pictures, television, computers, videotape, etc.) – The immediate research and development of image-events and performances in the Movie-Drome. I shall call these prototype presentations: Movie Murals, Ethos-Cinema, Newsreel of Dreams, Feedback, Image Libraries. – When I talk of the movie-dromes as image libraries, it is understood that such life-theatres would use some of the coming techniques...and thus be real communication and storage centers, that is, by satellite, each dome could receive its image from a world-wide library source, store them and program a feedback presentation to the local community that lived near the center, this newsreel feedback, could authentically review the total world image ‘reality’ in an hour-long show.

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–

Intra-communitronics, or dialogues with other centers would be likely, an instant reference material via transmission television and telephone would be called for and received at 186,000 m.p.s., from anywhere in the world. Thus, I call this presentation, a newsreel of ideas, of dreams, a movie-mural. An image library, a culture de-compression chamber, a culture inter-com. [sic]46

Vanderbeek’s vision in the 1960s foresees the internet and international festival collaborations. His work is reshown up until now, for example during the Venice Biennale 2013 or the Art Basel 2017. Analogue to Vanderbeek, also in the 1960s, Nam June Paik imagined a Center for Experimental Arts that would house a video archive. Media scholars Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore state in 1967 that the Expanded Cinema of the 1960s ‘helps us to see the world as a gigantic audio-visual warehouse’.47 Evidently McLuhan’s theory has been made real in the contemporary usage of server networks, when one can use search engines, for artistic or commercial purposes. In this context, Lev Manovich asserts that databases became the 21st century cultural form which employ more and more technicians and archivists today, but they interest artists as well.48  In 2011 A. L. Rees has surveyed the field of expanded cinema practices. He notes that a wide range of usages and practices encompassed by the term. He divides expanded cinema into three projects: ‘The first was to melt down all art forms, including film, into multimedia and live-action events. The second was to explore electronic technologies and the coming of cyberspace, as heralded by Marshall McLuhan. The third was to break down the barrier between artist and audience through new kinds of participation.’ (2011: 20)

CASE STUDY: FORUM EXPANDED, BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL Today, Expanded Cinema performances use similar practices. For example, the Berlin Film Festival (2013) featured an Expanded Cinema event as part of the Forum Expanded section in a crematorium in Wedding (now called silent green kulturquartier). Into the cupola of the crematorium, extracts from Levia­ than (2013) were projected, a film by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. The same film could be seen in the Arsenal cinema during the festival. The viewers could sit or lie on the floor and experience the cinematic film in new ways, on a cupola lying down or on a big screen in a cinema. The crematorium with its cupola is reminiscent of Jordan Belson’s and Stan Vanderbeek’s works during the 1960s.

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Another Expanded Cinema event also happened in 2013 at the Berlinale. The experimental piece Block Experiments in Cosmococa (CC) by the Brazilian film maker Hélio Oiticica was shown again for the first time since 1968. Oiticica (1937-1980, born in Rio de Janeiro) is regarded as one of the most influential Latin American visual artists of the 20th century. During the festival one Cosmococa piece, called Neville D’Almeida:CC4 Nocagions, was projected on the cupola ceiling of the Berlin swimming pool Liquidrom. The viewers had to float on the surface of the water, to hear the underwater music, in order to experience the filmic event in its entirety. For me going to a swimming pool during the film festival was a wonderful change, also interacting with other audience members and film students from my university in a new way. The Arsenal Forum Expanded webpage writes about this Berlinale performance:

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Each cosmococa installation, consisting of a slide show and sound track, was conceived for individually designed environments with hammocks, seats and mattresses, or even, on one occasion, a swimming pool. CC4 nocagions consists of a swimming pool situation with two projections which show a sequence of drawings made with cocaine powder on the cover of John Cage’s book notations. The viewer is invited to get into the pool and watch the projections from the water.49 During the festival, another installation was exhibited in the Hamburger Bahn­hof museum and this piece was called: Thomas Valentin: CC6 Coke Head’s Soup. It is an homage to the 1973 Rolling Stones album goats head soup, and reflects the interdisciplinary scope of references characteristic of Brazil’s avant-gardes in exile during the military regime. All cosmococas, originally a film project of Neville D’Almeida, consist of slide sequences that show abundantly displayed cocaine powder on book and LP covers and other surfaces, as well as ‘instructions for performance’ to be carried out by participants: exploring the specific environments, engaging with each other, or simply hanging out.50 Oiticica theorized his work as ‘quasi-cinema’, ‘a fragmentary form that explodes film into ‘moment-frames’, negating ‘the unilateral character of cinema spectacle’ in order to create a space for active participation of a kind not normally associated with cinema.’51 The word ‘Cosmococa’, a combination of cosmos and cocaine, refers to Oiticica’s interest in ‘organized delirium’. In the 1970s while living in exile in New York during military dictatorship, Oiticica was closely related to the local underground and avant-garde cinema scenes.

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In the same year during at the Berlin Film Festival Oiticica’s nephew Cesar Oiticica Filho showed a found footage documentary about his uncle and the tropicália cultural movement, called Helio Oiticica (2012). Marc Siegel writes about this found footage documentary: the film allows Oiticica himself to narrate his life and expound upon his art in his own words, and in extremely rare archival audio and visual material… The film’s rhythmic montage of images doesn’t simply illustrate the artist’s commentary, but both contextualizes and radically expands upon it. The result is a bold and complex portrait of an artist for whom life (including homosexuality and drug use) and work determined and transformed each other.52 Every year, during the Berlin Film Festival, the curators of the section Forum Expanded surprise its audience with new locations, contexts and experiences.

CASE STUDY: INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL, OBERHAUSEN With the title Memories Can’t Wait – Film without Film, the 60th International Short Film Festival at Oberhausen dedicated its main thematic programme in 2014 to works for cinema that experiment with traditional visual experiences. This thematic programme focussed on Expanded Cinema and its projection processes. The festival, founded in 1954, is one of the oldest short film festivals in the world and one of the major international platforms for the short form. The curator of the thematic series, Mika Taanila, had initially decided not to project any moving images from film, video or data files, and just focus on projector, light, screen and audience, the constituencies for a cinema event. But in the end this original idea proved to be too challenging. Among the films were many re-enactments from works of Expanded Cinema, which were still able to reach a modern audience forty years later. Among others, there were works by Valie Export, Ernst Schmidt Jr., William Raban, and Tony Hill. The starting point of the programme was the seldom shown 1969 work Hell’s Angels by Ernst Schmidt Jr. Light was projected onto the screen and shortly after, paper aeroplanes were thrown towards it by a delegated person from the public space, so that they were visible as shadows on the screen. Other people then joined in spontaneously with flyers that had been left on the seats and were easily folded into paper aeroplanes. This work relies on merely suggesting a single specification and is explicitly open to variations due to the differing public reactions at each showing.

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Hell’s Angels can be described as an open art work that is sustained by the three basic components of Expanded Cinema: projection on a screen, the cinematic space, and the audience. During the short film festival, Valie Export’s first official Expanded Cinema work from 1967, Abstract Film No. 1, was performed as an updated version. Under the title Abstract Film No. 2, the artist projected light on the screen, during which she poured liquid onto the mirror producing large abstract patterns. In the original performance, Export acted alone and used less water, in the updated version she was assisted by another artist and used a double projection. Such re-enactments were immediately sold out at the short film festival, which indicates the appeal of a historic performative live event. Taanila combined this thematic programme with current works, such as: Museum of Loneliness Presents Lee Harvey Oswald’s Last Dream (2014) by Chris Petit, Stations of Light (2014) by the artist duo Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, as well as Negative Inspection (2014) by film maker Tobias Putrih. Putrih’s film did not need a projector, instead it ran through the hands of the viewers as they sat in their rows, thereby connecting the viewers with one another. The inclusion of the viewers led to heated discussions, while some filmed the event on their smartphones. The attempt to capture the event with another medium seems to express a current desire to document otherwise ephemeral events, people’s own experiences and their own place in time and space and social networks. These Expanded Cinema performances become events, which can be compared to theatre performances, music concerts and happenings. These events proved popular with audiences, with the clear awareness that this one performance will not be able to be experienced again. Memories Can’t Wait (as the title of the festival underlines), that means: old Memories Can’t Wait to be re-activated, new Memories Can’t Wait to be made. Also in Oberhausen, in the section ‘Archives’, the festival offered a space for archives to showcase some of their held works together with an introductory presentation and information about their preservation strategy. Archives can feature a selection of films from recent preservation projects. In 2015 the Academy Film Archive from Los Angeles showed parts of their collection, Mark Toscano gave an introduction and a presentation. For me it was interesting to note that someone like him travels through the world in order to curate programmes and to educate audience members about the films, his work and the archive, which stores films amongst others by Thom Andersen, Stan Brakhage, Su Friedrich, Morgan Fisher. Under the section ‘Archives’ other film archives had the chance to show their work at the festival: Austrian Film Museum, Wien (2015); BFI National Archive, London (2015); Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles (2016); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2016); Cinemateca Portuguesa, Lisbon (2017); Cinémathèque Française, Paris (2013); Eye Film, Amsterdam (2014); Filmoteka Muzeum, Warsaw (2014); Gosfilmofond, Mos-

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cow (2017); Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge (2014); National Film Center, Tokyo (2015); Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna (2017); Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2013); Slovenska Kinoteka, Ljubljana (2013); Swedish Film Institute, Stockholm (2017); The Temenos Archive, Zürich (2014), Videokunstarkivet, Oslo (2016). This new section of the festival shows, that audience members are more and more interested in experiencing original celluloid prints and are eager to learn more about the aesthetics and history of the films and institutions. In another section, called ‘Market’, museums, collections and non-profit institutions could also showcase their work and allow, as the title implies, arrange distribution deals with other institutions, programmers and curators. This means that at international festivals such as the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen or the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, artists can mingle with programmers, curators, collectors and audience members. | 41

CASE STUDY: ANTHONY MCCALL’S LINE DESCRIBING A CONE This case study focusses on one of the most important Expanded Cinema artists, Anthony McCall, because it introduces his work which has been popular since the 1970s and can be found in different contexts. Since the 1970s, McCall has produced large-scale light-projection installations. As McCall remarked: ‘The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time [...] the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential.’ (McCall 1978: 250) After a twenty-year break, McCall presented the piece: Line Describing a Cone (1973) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York for the first time in 2001 and after that all over the world. Improved technical conditions offered McCall new possibilities to expand on his works from the 1970s. Line Describing a Cone probes the boundaries between film and sculpture, it liberates itself from the confines of cinema while foregrounding the temporal as well as spatial conditions of sculpture. A single white dot on the screen gradually grows into a full circle, while creating visual depth. Over the course of thirty minutes this line of light becomes a circle out of a dot as the projection takes the form of a three-dimensional hollow cone. Between the screen and the projector, the space is filled with a fog creating a sculptural quality to the light beam of the projector. With this art piece, the conventional primacy of the screen is completely abandoned in favour of the primacy of the projection event. This projection incorporates the entire cinematic apparatus into the work – projector, light beam, screen – and demands an audience perspective asking for a special involvement which has more in common with sculpture than with cinema. McCall himself stated:

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The viewer watches the film by standing with his, or her, back towards what would normally be the screen, and looking along the beam towards the projector itself. The film begins as a coherent line of light, like a laser beam, and develops through its 30-minute duration into a complete, hollow cone of light.53 With the help of artificial fog in the projection space the light seems to become tangible. This sensual experience has to do with the position of the body in relation to the lights and the screening. In 2014 at the Eye Film Museum an exhibition was titled: Anthony McCall – Solid Light Films and Other Works (1971-2014). Here, McCall’s sculptural light projections were described on the museum’s website as being in a permanent state of flux and visceral when experienced: 42 |

His multi-layered and interdisciplinary work challenges, exceeds and re-defines traditional divisions between ‘art’ and ‘cinema’. [...] By encouraging viewers to move around and in front of the projection, McCall allows for the line of light to be sliced momentarily by a passing body or limb. The fact that viewers can interact with the work challenges the passive, motionless viewing experience of conventional cinema, while the contingency of movement in the gallery space contrasts with the predetermined geometry of the line of light. As a result, the emerging cone can be seen as either convex or concave depending not only on where the viewers stand but also on when they enter the space and on how long they spend there.54 McCall’s piece is still widely performed in different locations and contexts. Apart from experiencing the ever-changing piece Line Describing A Cone in Amsterdam at Eye (2014) and the Sonic Acts Festival (2010), I also experienced it in London at the Tate (2007), in Paris at the Centre Pompidou (2007), and in Dortmund in the Museum Ostwall, U (2011). Or at the Bozar, The Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, for example, it was part of a programme called Smoke Signals – an evening of images and music, on fog and smoke machines (2012). Here Line Describing A Cone was curated with a contemporary audio-visual live performance for tape, video projectors, and fog machines, called Home is the Sea – Up in Smoke (Manuel Padding, 2012). Together with another piece, this event offered an immersive, poetic experience, combining Expanded Cinema from the 1970s with contemporary Expanded Cinema. Xavier Garcia Bardon, the curator of this evening, stated in my interview that this combination offers new contexts that go beyond the singular filmic texts.

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As well as these museum or exhibition settings, I also experienced the piece in a cinema, at the Arsenal in 2014. From their website: ‘The projection in a smoke-filled cinema auditorium allows the viewer to experience in 30 minutes what an analogue film is: light extending outwards in time and space. For the first time, we are showing the film in temporal overlap with its digital remake Line Describing A Cone 2.0 (2010)’.55 The experience in the cinema differed from the one in the museum spaces because there were more people in a room and only a few were interacting with the piece. Moreover, analogue and digital projections can change people’s ways of behaving and, thus, viewing and participating. In connection to Anthony McCall’s and others work, in her book Surfaces: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014) Giuliana Bruno draws parallels between the film experience and what she calls the ‘architectural design of light’, which describes the luminous screen of projection as an immersive and cinematic material phenomenon that expresses itself also into the spatial dimension. Such surfaces are ‘sites in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place’. 56 Bruno states, that in cinemas and museums spectators undergo ‘haptic experience of mediated encounters’.57 These haptic experiences broaden the spectrum of how to perceive films. When having the chance to experience one Expanded Cinema piece in different locations, cities, dispositifs, surfaces, contexts and times, allows audience members to discover something new each time while experiences blasts from the past.

ARCHIVAL IMPULSE – ARCHIVE FEVER Not only these re-enactments of Expanded Cinema pieces have an influence on experiencing experimental films nowadays but also newly arranged pieces using archival material can introduce audience members to a bygone era. Here, films are not taken out of the archive in order to show them in a curated programme, but instead artists use the archival material in order to create something new. They follow an ‘archival impulse’, a concept that stems from Hal Foster who observes artists using archives today in order to ‘make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’ (Foster 2004: 4). Foster suggests that ‘while art has absorbed much of the language of the digital age, like ‘inventory’, ‘sample’, ‘share’, and ‘interactivity’, archival art remains an obstinately physical calling for human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing.’ (Foster 2004: 4-5) Against this background Jaimie Baron discusses the use of found footage in experimental films, which she calls the ‘archive effect’ (Baron 2014). The

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‘archive effect’ shifts the perspective of gaze from the position of the artist to that of the spectator. She is also interested in the different conditions that the images were experienced in. That means extra-textual knowledge of the spectators is necessary for the ‘archive effect’. For Baron, the joy of found material is the trigger for the ‘archive effect’ which can spark an ‘archive fever’, which is a near obsession with in compiling and recycling of archive and found footage materials. Baron refers to Jacques Derrida’s ‘archive fever’, a concept that points to the fact that technology alters the content of what is stored.58 Baron expands Derrida’s notion as she conceives of it as a constant renewal of the present in the past. In a sense Baron understands the archive effect as a digital historiography and not as nostalgia. Eric Ketelaar goes a step further when he describes ‘that ordinary people have become archivists, too.’ (Ketelaar 2006: 14) Since nowadays, archives are being created and preserved collectively. Interesting in this respect are the politics of creating access to audio-visual heritage film archives through online video streaming opportunities and the usage of metadata. As Dagmar Brunow noticed: Online archival collections are both ‘dynamic’ and ‘sites’, aimed at transnational or global audiences, but often localised by various means: the language(s) in which the site can be navigated, the (lack of) sub-titles within the footage, geo-blocking, funding through national institutions, the current legal situation in copyright law or the national legislation of related rights, such as music rights. Therefore, digital archives create memories that can be guided by transnational and national frameworks at the same time. (Brunow 2017: 106) I believe that, since the ‘digital rollout’, digitization is helpful for everyday distribution, because digital films are made available online, often using platforms with password protection. Moreover, digital files allow film scholars and others to take time to consider and analyze films. Artistic work can be searched for on the internet. This internet research can be seen as a first step in organizing bigger events for viewing interesting films in their best quality and their largest projection format. This multimedia handling of films is comparable with today’s handling of music. Music is commonly found and consumed on the internet and afterwards can be celebrated in events such as concerts and festivals. These discussions come clearly into view in the Arsenal’s Living Archive project, where archivists, artists, academics, and ordinary people interact with films found in the archive.

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NOTES 1

On their website all the events are listed: https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/livingarchive/about-living-archive/the-project.html accessed: 1 January 2018. Moreover, their catalogue has extra information on the first Living Archive period from 2011-2013. (Schulte Strathaus 2013). https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/edition/ publications/living-archive.html accessed: 1 January 2018.

2

Further scholars worked on archive strategies: Penelope Houston (1994), Christophe Dupin (2007) on the relation of archive, power and knowledge Anja Horstmann and Vanina Kopp (2010).

3

Foucault 1972. The research project ‘Mediale Historiographien’ in Weimar understands media archives as institutions, which write or re-write history. https://www. uni-weimar.de/medien/grako-medhist/index2a9c.html?page_id=9 accessed: 1 January 2018.

4

Catherine Russell in an interview. Nicholas Baer (2018).

5

Russell 2018:1.

6

Edmondson, Ray. ‘Audiovisual Archiving: Philosophy, Principles and Ethics’. http://www.girona.cat/sgdap/docs/wkcg3y8edmonson_english.pdf accessed: 1 January 2018.

7

To name a few other influential accounts: the articles ‘Archives of Modern Art’ by Hal Foster (2002), the publications by Okwui Enwezor (2008), Charles Merewether (2006), Sven Spieker (2008), and Eivind Røssaak (2011).

8

Barry also supported Siegfried Kracauer in writing his book, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), which, according to Malte Hagener, he would not have been able to complete without her help (Hagener, 2007: 115).

9

Lindgren & Langlois: The Archive Paradox is a dramatized exchange of letters between the archivists. Artist Ruth Beale has constructed a narrative from the writing, correspondence and commentators of Ernest Lindgren and Henri Langlois, https://grand-union.org.uk/gallery/lindgren-langlois-the-archiveparadox/ accessed: 1 January 2018.

10 The whole mission statement and their activities can be found on their website: https://www.fiafnet.org/pages/Community/Mission-FIAF.html accessed: 1 January 2018. 11 https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/living-archive/about-living-archive/background. html accessed: 1 January 2018. 12 https://www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/en/about-us/history accessed: 1 January 2018. 13 Interview with the author in 2016. 14 http://sensesofcinema.com/2010/book-reviews/film-curatorship-archivesmuseums-and-the-digital-marketplace-edited-by-paolo-cherchi-usai-davidfrancis-alexander-horwath-and-michael-loebenstein-2/ accessed: 1 January 2018.

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15 On a flyer found in Dublin in the Irish Film Archive. 16 Marks 2004: 39. 17 I met Mark McElatten in Oberhausen and he sent me this unpublished interview afterwards. 18 Laura Mulvey, ‘Curating Now – Film curating as montage’, at Birkbeck’s Department of Film Media & Cultural Studies, London 2015. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yUvK_8aLg8Q accessed: 1 January 2018. 19 Bosma: 2015: 1. 20 https://www.sothebysinstitute.com/news-and-events/news/trends-incontemporary-curating/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 21 Beckstette, et al 2012. 22 https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-curatorial-studies accessed: 1 January 2018. 23 Ibid.

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24 Opperman 1990:1 2. 25 Graham/Cook 2010. 26 Quoted in: Louis 2013: 326. 27 Laura Mulvey, ‘Curating Now – Film curating as montage’, at Birkbeck’s Department of Film Media & Cultural Studies, London 2015. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yUvK_8aLg8Q accessed: 1 January 2018. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Marks 2004: 39 32 https://archive.ica.art/sites/default/files/downloads/ICA%20AFB%202016%20 Booklet.pdf accessed: 1 January 2018. 33 https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/living-archive/about-living-archive/background. html accessed: 1 January 2018. 34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHVfd73uW30 accessed: 1 January 2018. 35 More about Celluloid Remix in: Fossati 2016. 36 Schulte Strathaus 2013. 37 In another article, I focus on experimental music videos, which can be seen in the tradition of Conner. Siewert (2013b). 38 I was part of the ‘Imagines Futures’ group led by Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel during my four-year appointment at the University of Amsterdam. In connection to this group I participated for the first time in the spring school in Italy in 2009. I gave a presentation in 2009 with the title: ‘Re-enactment of MusicVideo Clips in Feature Films’; ‘The Restoration and Reproduction of Media Art Installations in the Rhine/Ruhr Area’ in 2010; and held a workshop together with Julia Noordergraf ‘Cinema and Contemporary Visual Arts’ and gave there a presentation ‘The ‘Music Video Effect’ in Art Exhibitions’ in 2011.

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39 Guy Sherwin, Experimental Films: Short Film Series, 1975-1998, 18’ (titles include Metronome, Bicycle, Tap, Eye, Portrait with Parents); Canon, 1977-2000, 4’; Animal Studies, 1998-2003, 16’ (titles include Cat, Gnats, Coots, Tree Reflection); Flight, 1998, 4’; Man With Mirror, 1976 (2006), 10’ and film performance with mirrored screen Man with Mirror (1979), presented by Guy Sherwin; Bruce McClure, My Little Pugnacious Dog, Zipper! Expanded cinema performance Presented by Bruce McClure; Phill Niblock/Experimental films; The Movement of People Working (China, Japan, Brasil), 1983-1988, live sound performance; Presented by Phill Niblock; Henk Kabos, Das musikalische Auto, 1942-1944, 8’; Frans Zwartjes, The Toilet, 1970, 3’; Matthijn Seip, Salad, 1972, 5’; Curated and presented by Simona Monizza (Nederlands Filmmuseum); OM production movies/Mammoth Hunting; Marta Znidarsic, Galactic Supermarket Presents Cosmic Rainbows, 1977, 15’; Emannuel Gott-Art, Aura/In Aurovision/, 1978, 9’; Ismailhaci Cankar, Yin-Yang, 1977-1978, 6’ (3D performance); Zend Kommandoh, Gate Gate Paramgate/Velika p ot nima vrat (The Great Path Has No Gates), 1977-1978, 5’ (3D performance); Veronique Gartenzwergel, Mangiafuoco, 1979, 5’ (performance); Amanda Fior Daliso, Te tr ap lan, 1981-1985, 29’; Franciska Knoblehar, Dislocated Third Eye Series: Next Movie – High Noon; (Hommage To Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon), 1983-1984, 15’ (performance); Curated by Sergio Fant and Alojz Sever (OM production); Presented by Slobodan Valentincic (Curator of OM production Museum). 40 In film history, projection also refers to the materiality and mediality of the transmission process. Its core meaning of ‘throwing’ comprizes the creation of distance between the throwing entity, the thrown entity, and the target. Concurrently, the throw produces a relationship to its target. Plato’s famous cave allegory sees the projection as responsible for the inability of people to realize awareness of the world of objects. The objects that appear on the back wall of the cave are only shadows of objects, that outside the cave, caught in the beam of light, become images inside the cave. Projections are, in turn, in their thrown together effect, cognitive processes, that contain an objective. The projection is dependent on the translation performance of the person viewing it. In the dispositif of the cinema, the projection is an elementary technical requirement, which constitutes the aesthetic experience of films. The cinematic enlargement of pictures ties in with other modes of shadow projections, magic lanterns, etc. – and connects to the traditional media that bring to light the analogue projector, whose machine temporality, constituted by a complex synchronized intertwining of its own mechanical components and coupled with the real time experiences of the film viewer through body and sense, results in a time modelling of films on the screen. 41 https://vimeo.com/channels/124018/179152992 accessed: 1 January 2018. 42 http://www.see-this-sound.at/print/42 accessed: 1 January 2018. 43 http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Belson/ accessed: 1 January 2018.

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44 Beforehand Conrad devoted himself to an intensive study of the physiology of the nervous system. Before the film started there was a warning on screen: ‘Warning: The producer, distributor, and exhibitors waive all liability for physical or mental injury possibly caused by the motion picture The Flicker. Since this film may induce epileptic seizures or produce mild symptoms of shock treatment in certain persons, you are cautioned to remain in the theatre only at your own risk. A physician should be in attendance.’ 45 Claus 2003: 229. 46 Excerpt from Vanderbeek, 1966, pp. 15–18. 47 Mc Luhan/Fiore 1967: 26. 48 Manovich, 2001: 218. 49 https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/berlinale-forum/archive/program-archive/2013/ artists-expanded/helio-oiticica.html accessed: 1 January 2018. 50 https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/berlinale-forum/archive/program-archive/2013/

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artists-expanded/helio-oiticica.html accessed: 1 January 2018. 51 Butler 2019: 128. 52 https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/arsenal-cinema/past-programs/single/ article/4318/2804/archive/2013/september.html accessed: 1 January 2018. 53 http://film-makerscoop.com/catalogue/anthony-mccall-line-describing-a-cone accessed: 1 January 2018. 54 https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/exhibition/anthony-mccall-solid-light-films-and-otherworks-1971-2014-0 accessed: 1 January 2018. 55 https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/arsenal-cinema/past-programs/single/ article/5162/2804/archive/2014/december.html accessed: 1 January 2018. 56 Bruno 2014: 62. 57 Bruno 2014: 144. 58 Derrida, 1995, pp. 9 ff; also compare to Archive Fever from Okwui Enwezor (2008).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Appadurai, Arju. ‘Archive and Aspiration.’ Information is Alive. Eds. Joke Brower, Arjen Mulder. Rotterdam: V2-Publishing, 2003. 14-25. Baer, Nicholas. ‘Shocking the Past into Attention,’ A Conversation on Archiveology with Catherine Russell. Film Quarterly, 71-73 (2018). Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. London: Routledge, 2014. Beckstette, Sven, Beatrice von Bismarck, Isabelle Graw and Oona Lochner. ‘The Curators’, Texte zur Kunst, 22-86 (2012). Belting, Hans. Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. München: Fink, 2001.

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Bosma, Peter. Film Programming: Curating for Cinemas, Festivals, Archives. London: Wallflower Press, 2015. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2007. Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Brunow, Dagmar. ‘Curating Access to Audiovisual Heritage: Cultural Memory and Diversity in European Film Archives’. Image [&] Narrative, 18(1): 97-110 (2017). Butler, Alison. ‘Devouring images: Hélio Oiticica’s anthropophagic quasi-cinema’, Screen, Volume 60, Issue 1, Spring 2019. Claus, Jürgen. ‘Art for a Solar Age’, Leonardo, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2003. Checefsky, Bruce. ‘Erasure: Curator as Artist.’ The Artist as Curator. Ed. Celina Jeffery. Bristol: Intellect, 2015. 97-112. Cherchi Usai, Paolo. Silent Cinema, an Introduction. London: BFI, 2000. Cherchi Usai, Paolo. Film Curatorship. Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace. Co-Eds. David Francis, Alexander Horwath, and Michael Loebenstein. Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum/SYNEMA, 2008. Cook, Sarah and Beryl Graham. Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’. Diacritics 25.2 (Summer, 1995): 9-63. Dupin, Christophe. ‘The origins and early development of the National Film Library: 1929-1936’. Journal of Media Practice. 7.3 (2007). Ebeling, Knut, Stephan Günzel, eds. Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten. Berlin: Kadmos, 2009. Edmondson, Ray. Audiovisual Archiving: Philosophy, Principles, Ethics. Paris: UNESCO, 2004 (revised edition 2016). Elsaesser, Thomas: Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. New York: ICP/Steidl, 2008. Fevry, Sébastien. ‘Aesthetics of Recognition and Photofilmic Dynamics: Remembering in the Cinema of Henri-François Imbert.’ Image & Narrative, 16.3 (2015): 4-16. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1972. Fossati, Giovanna. From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009 (revised edition 2018). Fossati, Giovanna. Exposing the Film Apparatus. The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory. Co-edited with Annie van den Oever. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Foster, Hal. ‘An Archival Impulse.’ OCTOBER 110 (Fall 2004). Foster, Hal. ‘Archives of Modern Art.’ OCTOBER 99 (Winter 2002).

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Frick, Caroline. Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gass, Lars Henrik. Film und Kunst nach dem Kino. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2012. Graham, Beryl, Cook, Sarah. Rethinking Curating. Cambridge: MIT, 2010. Gramann, Karola. ‘‘Man nehme…’ – ein Gespräch mit Heide Schlüpmann’. The Art of Programming. Film, Programm und Kontext. Ed. Heike Klippel. Münster: Lit, 2008. 127-140. Hagener, Malte. Moving Forward, Looking Back. The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Hagener, Malte. The Emergence of Film Culture. Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-garde in Europe, 1919-1945. Oxford: Berghahn, 2014. Haller, Andrea. ‘Das Kinoprogramm. Zur Genese und frühen Praxis einer Auffüh-

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rungsform.’ The Art of Programming. Film, Programm und Kontext. Ed. Heike Klippel. Münster: Lit, 2008. 18-51. Hediger, Vinzenz. ‘Putting the Spectator in a Respective Mood. Szenische Prologe im amerikanischen Stummfilmkino.’ montage/av 12.2 (2003): 68-78. Horstmann, Anja, Vanina Kopp, eds. Archiv – Macht – Wissen Organisation und Kon­struk­tion von Wissen und Wirklichkeiten in Archiven. Frankfurt: campus, 2010. Houston, Penelope. Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives. London: BFI, 1994. James, David E.. The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. James, E. David, Adam Hyman, eds. Alternative Projections. Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980. Bloomington: Libbey, 2015. Ketelaar, Eric. ‘Everyone an Archivist’, Managing and Archiving Records in the Digital Era. Changing Professional Orientations, Eds. Niklaus Bütikofer, Hans Hofman, and Seamus Ross. Baden: hier + jetzt, Verlag für Kultur und Geschichte, 2006. 9-14. Klippel, Heike, ed. The Art of Programming. Münster: LIT, 2008. Kracauer, Siegfried. Von Caligari zu Hitler: Eine psychologische Geschichte des deutschen Films. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. Louis, Stéphanie-Emmanuelle. ‘Exhibiting/Editing: Dominique Païni and Programming at the Cinémathèque Française at the Turn of the Centenary.’ Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art. Eds. Noordegraaf et al. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. 326-330. Lundemo, Trond. ‘Archival Shadows.’ The Archive in Motion: New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices. Ed. Eivind Rössaak. Oslo: Studies from the National Library of Norway, 2011. 183-196. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001.

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Marks, Laura. ‘The Ethical Presenter, or How to Have Good Arguments over Dinner’. The Moving Image 4.1 (2004): 34-47. McCall, Anthony. ‘Two Statements (1974)’, in: P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978. 250. McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects. San Francisco: Hardwired, 1967. Opperman, Hal. ‘The Thinking Eye, the Mind That Sees: The Art Historian as Connoisseur’, Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 11, No. 21 (1990). Polan, Dana. Scenes of Instruction The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Renan, Sheldon. An introduction to the American underground film. New York: Dutton, 967. Rees, A. L., David Curtis, Duncan White and Steven Ball, eds. Expanded Cinema: Art,

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Performance and Film. London: Tate Publishing, 2011. Richter, Dorothee. ‘Artists and Curators as Authors: Competitors, Collaborators, or Team- workers?’ On Artistic and Curatorial Authorship, ed. Michael Birchall. OnCurating.org 19 (June 2013). Røssaak, Eivind, ed. The Archive in Motion: New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices. Oslo: Studies from the National Library of Norway, 2011. Russell, Catherine. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Siewert, Senta. ‘Soundtracks of Double Occupancy: Sampling Sounds and Cultures in Fatih Akin’s Head On’. Eds. Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters, Wanda Strauven, Mind the Screen. Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. 198-208. Siewert, Senta. ‘Re-enactment of Music-Video Clips in Feature Films’. Extended Cinema, Le cinéma gagne du terrain. Eds. Philippe Dubois, Frédéric Monvoisin, Elena Biserna. Milan: Campanotto Editore, 2010. 136-142. Siewert, Senta, and Barbara Le Maître. ‘Introduction to Exhibition Strategies’ Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013a. 309-310. Siewert, Senta. ‘Across the Territories: Exhibiting Music Video’ Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013b. 346-351. Siewert, Senta. ‘An der Peripherie des Kinos. Experimentelle Bewegtbilder’. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (zfm) 09.2 (2013c). Siewert, Senta. ‘Born to be alive’. Living Archive: Archivarbeit als künstlerische und kuratorische Praxis der Gegenwart/Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and

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Curatorial Practice. Eds. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Uli Ziemons. Berlin: b-books, 2013d. 196-197. Siewert, Senta. ‘Programmgestalten und Kuratieren von Experimentalfilmen’. Augenblick. Konstanzer Hefte der Medienwissenschaft 56/57 2013e: 64-70. Siewert, Senta. Entgrenzungsfilme – Jugend, Musik, Affekt, Gedächtnis. Eine pragmatische Poetik zeitgenössischer europäischer Filme. Marburg: Schüren, 2013f. Siewert, Senta with Carolyn Birdsall.’Of Sound Mind: Mental Distress and Sound in Twentieth-Century Media Culture.’ Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 16.1 (2013g): 27-45. Siewert, Senta. ‘Musik, Affektivität, Erinnerung und Vermarktung bei Trainspotting’, in: Carsten Heinze, Laura Niebling, Eds., Populäre Musikkulturen im Film (Film und Bewegtbild in Kultur und Gesellschaft). Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016. 267-287. Siewert, Senta. ‘Affektive und partizipative Erfahrung bei Expanded-Cinema-

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Aufführungen auf Filmfestivals’. Eds. Florian Mundhenke, Thomas Weber. Kinoerfahrungen. Theorien, Geschichte, Perspektiven. Hamburg: Avinius, 2017. 233-246. Siewert, Senta. ‘ Am Puls der Zeit’, in: Ursula v. Keitz, Ed., ‚Alles dreht sich ... und bewegt sich’. Der Tanz und das Kino. Marburg: Schüren, 2017. 46-54. Sobshack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004. Sitton, Robert. Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Spieker, Sven. The big archive – art from bureaucracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Vanderbeek, Stan. ‘Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto’, Film Culture 40, 1966: 15-18. Wasson, Haidee. Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Weibel, Peter. ‘Expanded Cinema. Video and Virtual Environments.’ Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film. Eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 110-124. Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: Dutton, 1967.

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CHAPTER 2

Affect: Performance, Audience

Siewert, S., Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462985834_ch02

ABSTRACT Chapter 2 ‘Affect: Performance, Audience’ explores the specific aesthetic experiences of viewing experimental films and Expanded Cinema in the movie ­theatre and in the museum. Particular attention is paid to concepts of perception, participation, experience, phenomenology, affect, and the role of performativity. The analysis includes experimental films, which can be understood as forerunners of the music video clip. The chapter makes a special point of highlighting the significance of music for the film experience in general, since it is often treated as a secondary consideration in film studies. k e y wo r ds

affect, performance, experimental film, Expanded cinema, music, music ­video clip

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In the following, I propose that while watching some experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s, audience members can experience affects on their perceptions of self and the world, one affect being an altered state of consciousness. Some experimental films and Expanded Cinema use the aesthetics of a flicker effect, such films may affect the nervous system, since flickering excites nerves in the eyes. Other experimental films can also cause vertigo in the viewer, due to the use of aesthetics such as fast-moving images or fast colour editing. These experiences can be compared to loud music that can cause physical reactions in the audience. When soundwaves vibrate in the body, the aesthetic experience is visceral. Experiences of experimental films can, thus, be described as a holistic experience including the visual and auditory sensations. Since most of the experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s use music I will also focus on the auditory aspect in connection to the aesthetic experience. The influence of music, however, is often overlooked in general studies of a film’s affect on the audience. Yet, the specific usage of music in these experimental films of the 1960 and 1970s still have, I believe, a considerable impact on today’s viewers. In this framework I refer to my concept of ‘sensual pleasure’ (Siewert 2013f). Sensual pleasure captures how, through the direct bodily perception of music, transference takes place. For example, the beats of the music can raise or lower the pulse of the audience. Besides, the music may provide a gateway into a better sense of what that era was like. In this chapter I describe the aesthetic experience of these works and ask how the aesthetic experience differs when the experimental films are shown in a cinema, museum or gallery space. In order to go in more detail, I first study the different dispositifs, then I introduce the discourse on aesthetic experience in film studies and art history in order to present afterwards my case studies.

BLACK BOX AND WHITE CUBE In recent years, cinemas and museums have undergone a number of radical changes. Film is no longer solely projected in darkened cinema theatres, but broadcasted on television, featured in art galleries and museum exhibitions, and is accessible on mobile devices. These dispositifs demand that film makers and artists travel from one site to the next. Will the cinema be able to sur-

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vive, looking at the changed paradigm of accessibility? And what is the role of people involved in film festivals, film studies, and museums under these changing circumstances? What is changing in aesthetics and the new forms of reception, production and funding of screenings and new projects? The relationships between cinemas and museums are of particular interest in the current climate of experiencing art and films as events, since hybrid works expand the boundaries of cinema and museums. Hence most creators refuse to be boxed into traditional categories of film maker or artist. Many of the experimental films discussed here are shown either at film festivals or in gallery spaces and museums. And this leads me to the following questions: When did museum spaces first became venues for film screenings? How can the different viewing experiences in the different dispositifs of the cinema (black box) and museum (white cube) be described? Do the fact that moving images are performed also in other dispositifs result in the so called ‘death of cinema’? What are the different production and distribution modes of the different dispositifs? What can Film Studies learn from Art History and vice versa? Since the term ‘cinema’ is troubled by the new environments it relocated into and by the digital modes that foster a rediscovery and reinvention of cinema, can we continue to use the term ‘cinema’? What happens with the very notion of ‘cinema’? One of the first instances of inclusion of cinema in museums was as early as in the 1930s, when the Museum of Modern Arts in New York (MoMA) used films as art and considered them as part of the history of design. Curator Iris Barry was able to build up a significant collection. Concurrently in France in 1930, during the annual French design exhibition, there were pieces shown by László Moholy-Nagy and placed into relationship with works by Walter Gropius, Herbert Bayer and Marcel Breuer.1 In 2001, the Whitney Museum, New York, dedicated an entire exhibition to experimental film. Curator Chrissie Iles organized the exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, in which, for the first time in history, a number of experimental film makers, such as Anthony McCall, Michael Snow and Paul Sharits, scarcely known to the art world, were integrated into one framework. Since then, film images have increasingly appeared in museum spaces and have also become the object of many works of art, either citing films or using film as a medium. In 1996 I had the wonderful opportunity to visit an exciting exhibition that took place in London: Spellbound: Art and Film (Hayward Gallery) which was organized in collaboration with the British Film Institute. Ten artists and filmmakers working in Britain explored the relationship between art and film. The exhibition was curated by Ian Christie and Philip Dodd, then Director of the British Film Institute. Featured artists included Douglas Gordon; Damien Hirst; Steve McQueen; Ridley Scott; Terry Gilliam; Peter Greenaway and Sam

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Taylor-Wood. Maybe one of the most famous re-mediations of films was displayed on a giant screen at the entrance of the exhibition: Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), which consists of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) slowed down so that a single, continuous viewing lasts for twenty-four hours. Russel Ferguson writes, ‘While we can experience narrative elements in it (largely through familiarity with the original), the crushing slowness of their unfolding constantly undercuts our expectations, even as it ratchets up the idea of suspense to a level approaching absurdity.’2 This iconic piece influenced other artists in their aim of reworking cinema history. Against this backdrop there are publications that form a focal point that could serve as an outline for critical reflections on film in cinemas and museums. Film scholar Philippe Dubois (2013), interested in the relationship between cinema and the museum, describes certain video installations that introduce the cinematic apparatus into the museum context. At stake beneath his concept of ‘the cinema effect in contemporary art’ is, first and foremost, the overview of the wide-ranging phenomenon of migration, by which cinema, exceeding its traditional apparatus, took its independence from the darkness of theatres into museum spaces to be exhibited. One could understand the increased occurrence of cinematic installations in museums as the continuation of the classic Expanded Cinema. When cinematic installations are exhibited, sometimes the projector slides into the centre and becomes sculpture. This occurrence of film in the ‘white cube’ of the museum has renewed the talk of the ‘death of cinema’, meaning the death of the dispositif cinema.3 Addressing the subject of the endangerment of cinema, film scholars have long been concerned with issues such as the implications of the rise of television and the introduction of video, DVD, and the internet.4 By the same token, a discussion about the ‘death of cinema’ is inextricably connected with the ontological question, ‘What is cinema?’ This is a question that André Bazin raised in his plea for a social aesthetic of cinema. Walter Benjamin also underscored the special features of place, so that in cinema, an ‘aesthetic spectator’ could evolve and unfold. Raymond Bellour (2008) discusses cinema as a place of experience and stresses that other spaces cannot convey the true aura of film. As soon as the image leaves the cinema space, the film image seems to become less memorable. Inspired by the film theories of Béla Balàzs, André Bazin and Serge Dany among others, Bellour describes cinema as a place of memory and perception that requires a particular kind of concentration. Another source confirms that as early as 1926, Rudolf Harms had already declared that the ‘cinema should guarantee the highest degree of bodily detachedness and seek to alleviate the shortcomings of the individual’s fixed and local bonded-ness’. (Harms 1926: 60) Further, Robert Cambrinus writes about the experience in cinemas:

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It is always our individual perceptions in conjunction with our personal histories, in other words, our own images which merge with the images and sounds on the screen, and thereby lead to an emotional and intellectual experience. It is a wondrous, osmotic process. For this we need undivided time – like for the pictures at an exhibition. The dark room of the cinema affords us this time. (Cambrinus 2018: 33) In contrast to cinema, where the spectator’s perspective is fixed, the mode of viewing in the museum is mobile. The temporality and spatiality of the installation collides with the temporality of the spectator. The spectator wanders through rooms like a flaneur and decides when or where to take pause to look or move on. This can be critically viewed as a form of dispersal in which the viewer only perceives fragments of the works. It embodies the prototype of a transmedial experience, where the gaze of the spectator becomes analytical. This changeable viewing-perspective might be better described as an intervention, meaning an active choice making. Thomas Elsaesser writes: ‘In their distinctive logics, the dispositifs ‘cinema’ and ‘museum’ entail a further set of differential coordinates, which come to play or conflict when moving images enter the museum: a fixed image and a mobile spectator (museum) have to be aligned with the moving image and a fixed spectator (cinema).’ (Elsaesser 2015: 47) In describing the currents of Expanded Cinema of the 1970s up to the cinematographic installations of the 1990s, Volker Pantenburg steers the focus towards the question of ‘attention’.5 In museums the viewers have a choice of following the curated paths through the exhibition or to more freely create their own reception space, develop their own programming patterns, and, therefore, their own culture of performance. Francesco Casetti also discusses the experience of moving images in different locations, when the cinema underwent an ‘expansion’ that was quite different to that envisaged by Gene Youngblood about Expanded Cinema. Casetti uses the term ‘relocation’ (2015) to refer to the process in which a media experience is reactivated and re-purposed elsewhere in reference to the place it was formed in/for, with alternate devices and in new environments. Relocation emphasizes the role of experience. A given media is defined by a specific type of watching, listening, attention, and sensibility. To complicate matters further, the organization of the space and images in the installations are linked to sociological processes. The spectator experiences the complexity and the symbolic content of the artwork, firstly by moving through the space conjoined by the differing changes in perspective. One reacts to other people in the room, to whom one might keep distance or get closer. Casetti emphasizes the social exchange between the spectators, which

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also plays a role in the experience. Following Casetti, the exhibition space becomes a room of action, in which performative situations occur. The spectators pay attention to each other and fluctuate between active perceived subject and passive recognized object. Visitors to a museum space are encouraged to orient their perspective both on the image and the topography of space. In this manner, the aesthetic and narrative of the moving picture and the place of installation merge and, concurrently, the spectator and the event are also amalgamated. As a frame of reference Homi Bhabha’s ‘Third Space’ critical theory concept could be illustrative here, since the cinematic installation can be understood as an example of a postcolonial concept of hybridity, the perception modalities of the cinematic installation are described as an experience of the ‘other’ or as a collective aesthetic experience, a ‘mise en commune’.6 The circumstances of showing and viewing may affect the audience as well as the subsequent perceiving and experiencing the art. Film scholar John Belton states in this context: If the film playing on these new digital platforms is the same film that once played on a forty-foot screen in a movie theatre, it is also not the same. The term ‘cinema’ runs the risk of losing any meaning it might still have if it encompasses such devices as iPads, tablets and smartphones. Apparatus theory, for all its faults, has given us a definition of cinema. The cinema is the projection on a screen of life-size – or bigger than lifesize – images before an audience; everything else is movies.7 I agree with Belton and also Elsaesser when he states, ‘even though the ‘particular cinematic apparatus of camera, projector, screen, and auditorium’ might be diminishing in cultural prominence, cinema has increasingly become ‘digital culture’s internal reference point’.’8 My position, is to assert the persistence of cinema as a cultural form in the current media landscapes. This argument seeks evidence of how cinema, despite a convergent and cross-media landscape, continues to be an important aesthetic experience that is deeply anchored in visual culture and everyday life. Cinema experience is one possible filmic perception amongst many and the accompanying multiplication of performance venues can be seen as a chance to change how the structural, aesthetic and conceptual expansion of filmic and cinematographic work is understood. It is exciting to notice that well-known experimental films are finding new platforms and a new public – this is in striking contrast to frequent claims by museum curators to have re-discovered films (even though they have recently been shown in cinemas). One example is Kenneth Anger’s experimental work shown outside a cinema in an installation in the New York PS1 in 2009. When

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I researched in the US, I discussed this exhibition with UCLA archivist Ross Lipman who had worked on (among others) the films of Kenneth Anger and Bruce Conner, whose films I had shown as part of the already mentioned Living Archive Festival, in the programme, ‘Pragmatic Poetics of the Archive’.9 Lipman also introduced me to his procedures of restoration, preservation, conservation, and digitization. During my research I realized that parts of the art scene largely ignores film and cinema historiographies, because they seem to like to pretend to discover experimental film for itself. Similar to Lipman, Lars Henrik Gass, Head of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, examines in his book titled Film and Art after Cinema (2012) the different historiographies of moving images. Gass pointed to a related legal issue, namely that films that are presented by a gallery, cannot be shown at film festivals, because they are defined as artworks and, hence, cannot be circulated in the same way as films usually are. When films are additionally shown at festivals, they lose some of their value associated with exclusivity. As a practical solution, Gass recommends that ‘the model of film subsidy should be reviewed and that film festivals should become part of the promotion and re-financing cycle.’ This would guarantee that in particular makers of experimental films could show their films in the cinema again, independent from the art circuit. As a side benefit, this would achieve a welcome source of income. Taking up Gass’s line of thought, it may appear inappropriate to consider the economic side of art production as a relevant factor in deciding where and how to screen film works. However, it is true that films that are represented by galleries can often not be shown at film festival, because as artworks they are measured by their circulation and further, if films are shown at festivals, they lose part of their value. According to Gass, cinemas can only survive financially when they develop into special event spaces – into ‘temporary museums’. (Gass 2012: 48). Correspondingly, Erika Balsom (2013) is concerned with the present and future of the institution of cinema as well as the progressive integration of cinema into galleries and museums. For Balsom, in relation to avant-garde films, the differences in gallery films are justified by their divergent distribution models. The film avant-garde uses the rental model, the art scene on the other hand uses the model of the limited edition. Balsom refers to Raymond Bellour’s (2008) definition of the gallery film as an ‘other cinema’ and poses that it is not only Hollywood who is solely responsible for defining new cinema, for example with CGI based blockbusters or with films influenced by video games, but rather that artistic films have a contribution to make to the new definition of cinema. In accordance with Balsom and in distinction to Theodor W. Adorno’s equation of museum and mausoleum, I think, one should look at new possibilities of access provided by today’s museums. When discussing these aspects with artists and film makers in my interviews, I learned that – in

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contrast to Gass’s assumptions – Thom Andersen, for example, is ‘extremely happy when museums and festivals discover my work.’10 Therefore, I believe that it is important to hear as many voices from different perspectives as possible in order to broaden the picture. Since 2016, the section ‘Positions’ at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, has been a place of discussion about the relationships of both worlds. Here public museums, private collections, and commercial galleries are represented. In one of these discussions participants were invited from other festivals and art fairs, where similar discussions occur, for example about financing and development platforms for artists’ films – at Art:Film (Rotterdam), On & For Production (BFI Film Festival London), FIDLab (Marseille), and Feature Expanded (Florence). Artists, who have previously worked in a gallery setting, learn about film funding and film distribution and film makers learn the model of the limited edition. 60 |

CASE STUDY: ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES, NEW YORK Traditional and established motivations for curating, such as the cultivation of taste through ‘connoisseurship’, the training of future artists, or larger ideas of pedagogy can be found in different institutions. In the world of experimental and Expanded Cinema, two New York institutions are important here: the circulating film library of The Museum of Modern Art, which shaped the thinking of generations of filmmakers and the Anthology Film Archives with its ‘Essential Cinema’ programme. In 1968, the filmmaker Jerome Hill created films in a film museum dedicated exclusively to film as an art. The Essential Cinema Repertory collection’s main functions can be understood as a continuous ‘critical tool in the investigation of the essential works created in cinema.’11 On the Anthology Film Archive’s website filmmaker Jonas Mekas described its history: A special Film Selection Committee was created to begin to compile such a repertory. The understanding was that the Committee would constitute a permanent part of Anthology Film Archives and that it would continue into the future reviewing old and new cinema works, in all their different manifestations, and keep adding and expanding the Essential Cinema Repertory collection. With the enthusiastic support of Jerome Hill, the Committee, consisting of P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, James Broughton, Ken Kelman, and myself – and for a brief period Stan Brak­ hage – began its work.12

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The cinema was designed by the Austrian film maker Peter Kubelka and was called ‘Invisible Cinema’, which allowed the spectators to sit separate from their neighbours due to the architecture of the seats, consisting of blinders at the sides. This version existed in the 1970s in New York and in the Austrian Film Museum. Peter Kubelka describes it as a ‘viewing machine’, which can cause sensations of floating and immersion. Jonas writes about the impact of the Anthology Film Archives in 2018: As one looks back through the last thirty years of the history of cinema in the United States, one has to admit that even in its unfinished state, the Essential Cinema Repertory collection, as an uncompromizing critical statement on the avant-garde film of the period, has dramatically changed perceptions of the history of the American avant-garde film. The avant-garde film has become an essential part of cinema. […] In the decades since its founding, Anthology has grown far beyond its original concept to encompass film and video preservation; the formation of a reference library containing the world’s largest collection of books, periodicals, stills, and other paper materials related to avant-garde cinema; and a remarkably innovative and eclectic film exhibition programme. Anthology screens more than 900 programmes annually, preserves an average of 25 films per year (with 900 works preserved to date), publishes books and DVDs, and hosts numerous scholars and researchers. Fueled by the conviction that the index of a culture’s health and vibrancy lies largely in its margins, in those works of art that are created outside the commercial mainstream, Anthology strives to advance the cause and protect the heritage of a kind of cinema that is in particular danger of being lost, overlooked, or ignored.13 Jonas Mekas, who died aged 96 in 2019, was one of the most important and influential figures in American underground cinema. He was not only the cofounder of the Anthology Archives but he had also co-founded the New American Cinema Group and the Filmmaker’s Cooperative in 1962. He was also the founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine Film Culture and he wrote for the Village Voice since the 1950s. He wrote: ‘I had to protect all the beautiful things that I saw happening in the cinema and that were either butchered or ignored by my colleague writers and by the public.’14 Mekas was also an activist showing films which were censored. Once, in 1962 he was even arrested on obscenity charges and given a six-month suspended sentence for showing a ‘queer double bill’ of Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950) and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963).

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During my research at the Anthology Archive, the Arsenal (which has copies of his films) and during the Berlin Film Festival – where I was able to meet him – I was fascinated by him and his work. I had the privilege of studying his three-hour 16mm film diary Walden (1969) on the editing table over and over again, pausing and rewinding, showing his life with family and friends such as Timothy Leary, Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The film was made out of staccato flashes and was edited directly in the camera. Until his death Mekas travelled to festivals and exhibitions such as the Serpentine Galleries, which showcased an exhibition called Servant of a Cinematic Lyricist in 2012. The Lavender Piece was an installation of 16 TV monitors showing 16mm film transferred to video from various dates, each film 5 to 15 minutes long. Mekas expressed his excitement in the discovery of his work through a different dispositif. One of the forefathers of analogue experimental films was curious to exhibit outside of the cinema space and create an installation, emphasizing that he also embraces a new form of re-mediation and re-showing. In the shop of the Serpentine Galleries it was possible to buy some celluloid stripes of five images taken from copies of his films as limited editions. Moreover, Mekas’s films and archive material have been exhibited extensively throughout the world, including at Documenta 11, Kassel; the Venice Biennale 2005; the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Baltic Art Center, Stockholm; and the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo. Essential Cinema was also curated for the museums Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund (2010), exhibitions were called: ‘Images by Image – Film and contemporary art’, which combined static pictures with moving ones. On the Museum am Ostwall website, their aim for the show is explained: Invoking not just film’s structural qualities but also its narrative excesses, the fifteen sections of this exhibition are orchestrated around ­fifteen themes that draw visitors into a cinematic experience of the show. The digital culture that has invaded our viewing experience over the last decade has profoundly altered the way people view film. It has shifted the venue from cinemas to exhibition spaces and has given film a central role among the contemporary arts. Henceforth the film experience can no longer be conceptualized as an extension of photography that incorporates time and movement, but rather as a cluster of dematerialized properties which, once freed from cinema’s technical constraints, can be identified and activated within the various allegedly static arts. The juxtaposition of still and moving images, like the combination of light and darkness and / or sound and silence, thus become filmic experiences in themselves.15

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At these exhibitions were pieces by Anthony McCall, Kenneth Anger, Peter Kubelka, which allowed the visitors to experience Expanded Cinema and experimental cinema alike. The exhibitions in Paris and Dortmund offered my film students and a general public a wonderful introduction into the relationship of film and contemporary art. My students wrote essays, made blogs, video documentaries and visual essays of this and similar exhibitions and film festivals.

CASE STUDY: LUX, LIGHT INDUSTRY, FILMFORUM, LABORBERLIN Apart from archives, cinematheques, film museums, museums and festivals, also collections, agencies and non-profit organizations are important to mention, such as LUX in London, which is an international arts ‘agency that supports and promotes artists’ moving image practices and the ideas that surround them. Founded in 2002 as a charity and not-for-profit limited company, the organization builds on a long lineage of predecessors (The London FilmMakers’ Co-operative, London Video Arts and The LUX Centre) which stretch back to the 1960s.’16 LUX published amongst others the book Shoot Shoot Shoot (2016), which also included a newspaper. It is about the first decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative 1966-1976. It is ‘tracing its development from within London’s counterculture towards establishing its own identity within premises that uniquely incorporated a distribution office, cinema space, and film workshop.’17 Moreover, LUX publishes DVDs, one accompanying the book, about works of different artists such as Guy Sherwin, Liz Rhodes, Valie Export, Gunvor Nelson, Joyce Wieland, Jonas Mekas, Paul Sharits, Maya Deren, Ken Jacobs, and Wiliam Raban. Documentations of Sherwin’s Expanded Cinema performances can be found on YouTube, Archive.org and LUX.18 During my research, I attended some of LUX’s screenings and discussions in Hackney and their new location in Waterlow Park, Highgate. In 2016 they had a programme showing Thom Andersen’s --- ------- (19661967) in connection with a talk by David E. James. Other films were shown in that small space, where only thirty people fit at a time: Cosmic Ray (Bruce Conner),  Rabbit’s Moon (Kenneth Anger), --- ------- (Thom Andersen), We Love You (Peter Whitehead), US Down By The Riverside (Jud Yalkut), Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide from D. A. Pennbaker’s Ziggy Stardust The Motion Picture and Mongoloid (Bruce Conner). During this event on Rock ‘n’ Roll in experimental film, similar films were shown to my programme at the Arsenal in 2013. One difference is, that LUX was using their own prints not the ones from the Arsenal or the Academy Archive. Later that year, LUX moved to a lager place. Ben Cook, the founder director of LUX, showed me their new location and talked about different events and

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collaborations, for example with the Tate. They have an extensive collection of artist’s films, distribution, screenings and events as well as collaborations with Masters Programmes (Central Saint Martins and Kingston University) and the Oberhausen Seminar. On their website, there is further information and links to video documentations of some of the works they distribute.19 In Oberhausen during the annual film festival I had the chance to interview other curators and directors of festivals and events from all over the world, also from smaller institutions. Ed Halter from Light Industry in Brooklyn, for example introduced me to his work which made it possible to visit those events in New York. Light Industry is a venue for film and electronic art and can be seen in the long tradition of alternative art spaces offering screenings, performances, and lectures. ‘Its goal is to explore new models for the presentation of cinema. Bringing together the worlds of contemporary art, experimental film, and documentary (to name only a few), Light Industry looks to foster an ongoing dialogue among a wide range of artists and audiences within the city.’20 In the US I had also the chance to experience the programme of the Filmforum in Los Angeles, which ‘is the longest-running organization in Southern California dedicated exclusively to the ongoing, non-commercial exhibition of independent, experimental, and progressive media art.’21 In Paris a comparable institution is important in this context: Lightcone, a non-profit organization whose aim is the distribution, promotion and preservation of experimental cinema. It also operates as a filmmakers’ cooperative, ‘guaranteeing to the authors (or the rights-holders) the ownership of both the physical copies and the moral rights of the distributed works.’22 Lightcone’s Scratch screenings function as a kind of laboratory for generating programmes that can later be adopted and reworked by other programmers, for example The Centre ­Georges Pompidou and La Cinémathèque Française. These collaborations often result in co-edited publications. In Germany, the LaborBerlin e. V. which is a nonprofit, independent film collective, is open to every individual interested in artist-run initiatives and focusses especially on analogue film practice, ‘which embraces a more experimental and D.I.Y., craft approach to film production.’23 Together with the Arsenal, LaborBerlin in cooperation with the Film Institute of the Berlin University of the Arts organizes events, where Expanded Cinema is performed and discussed. They state that in spite of claims of its obsolescence, analogue film is still alive. It con­ tinues to exist as an inimitable artistic medium, put to use in myriad forms around the world. Nonetheless, in the context of our ever-expanding digital landscape, analogue film faces new challenges that have forced it into a process of deep transformation.24

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Those institutions function as agents to the filmmakers. They help to exhibit their work in different dispositifs and give artists and audience members a chance to access the collections and open up a space for performances.

CASE STUDY: HARUN FAROCKI In Berlin at the Arsenal, during my Living Archive participation, I conducted recorded interviews with artists, film makers, archivist, and curators. Some of my interviewees gave interesting insights not only in their handling of the different dispositifs but also in other topics. One of the interviews allows to get to know a perspective of a film maker, who also became popular in the art world. Harun Farocki was part of the Living Archive project and we talked over the years about different aspects of film practice. Here are excerpts of an interview I conducted with him in 2013, concerning his experiences of working with analogue and digital films for the cinema, television, museums and galleries. Especially his work Schnittstelle/Interface (1995) is of relevance here, ‘since it examines the question of what it means to work with existing images rather than producing one’s own, new images. The title plays on the double meaning of ‘Schnitt’, referring both to Farocki’s workplace, the editing table, as well as the ‘human-machine interface’, where a person operates a computer using a keyboard and a mouse.’25 In my interview, Farocki talked about many relevant topics and his experiences of film and video making since the 1960s: So, the film Schnittstelle/Interface (1995) happened because of an invitation. I have never made anything for a museum or an exhibition and then in Lille in a part of the city that was still independent, in a museum called the Musée d’art Villeneuve d’Ascq, the exhibition maker Regis Durant invited me and I was asked to make a self-reflection about my work. I would never have thought to make a film about it. I have at one time written something about what I do, but I never would have had the idea to treat it cinematically and then I thought about this, this current change­ over in terms of computers and the digital world and I noticed, that all this opposition that I had against video, and my love for the material of film, and also this magical aspect that through a particular experience you believe to know, what is on a particular image but one can’t be sure. You have to find out, maybe the next day or maybe a week later, like in our films that we shot in Africa. [...] The last one that I shot on film, was Zum Vergleich/In Comparison (2009), where we discovered sometimes fourteen days later when we were

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back here and it came out of the photo lab, whether it was OK what we had thought out. And that had a certain schooling and also a particular wealth and a particular economy as a result, and this automatic wastefulness that is video, is also a sort of loss of intensity. It is simply something that I have experienced, that is, any situation where there are ten people that come into question, then I would film all ten instead of betting on the right one, which I would have done if it were film. And that leads, at least in my case, to a loss of intensity. And I have tried to deal with this changeover and when the film Numéro Deux from Godard came out in 1975, I saw it and was very impressed. The film has a huge black cinematic space and in cinema scope, but not panorama, there are little video islands inside and that reminded me about what video does, that you always have two pictures in video. Really that is wrong, because it is only a divided picture, but you don’t edit it. You don’t edit a picture, you lay a picture on top. Let’s take this and say: and what is the picture that should follow, that is the connection isn’t it? That is arbitrary now, you look for a connection from one frame to another. You work closer to the pictures when you work on an editing table, where it is abstract. When you see only one image, and later when you finished, you can see the transition from one to another. The images are also really bigger and better than the ones you can see on the editing table. The sound is also much better. The old ways weren’t always better, no way, and I have to say this, this talking about working methods and according to my ideals there is really no distinction between production and post production, also none from reflection and action, when the action is the making of films, or anyway the act of making films and not prepared on some distant piece of paper, but so that the script develops from the montage and not the other way around. [...] There was a film called Stilleben/Still life (1997) that was a Documenta entry so to speak, and then there was some money from them and then, it was shown there and then there was nothing at all. First in 2000 Roger Buergel invited me to a very good exhibition in Vienna. Then I had a work that I was sitting on, but wasn’t progressing with, and I took the opportunity and sometimes it does you good when you have to work quickly on something that you have been messing about with for ages and I made a short film, that was called Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen/ I Thought I was seeing Convicts (2000). It spread unbelievably fast in the exhibition rooms and then that had the art world been increasing since then. And in the beginning I thought: that is great, now I can have both production possibilities, that were gradually varying. By some of them I must have been a bit popular and by others I could allow myself to be little more abstruse.

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I didn’t notice at first that with every win, I lost at least double the land behind me. [...] So, then television changed around the turn of the century. Not only in Germany, public television was operated by the rules of private television and lead by quotas. I’ll tell you a simple example: A film, a documentary without commentary is not really showable or do-able on television. I have recently made one and it will run on 3sat but that is absolutely an exception. A film that isn’t led by the sound and explains what you are supposed to think, what you are seeing etc., that is really not possible on television and therefore my work possibilities in television have been reduced to zero and instead I have been buried by the difficult-to-categorize funds of the art world. [...] The good thing about the art world is, that no one wants to read such long exposés. It is not because of my laziness that I don’t want to write, it’s just that I find it pointless to write about something, that hasn’t even been made yet, if you could, it would be an exaggeration to think, that one already knew what one was going to do. So really it is a total fakery, this piece of paper, that one inflates to fifty pages or so with many coloured images in a copy shop. And it’s different in the art world: it’s a bad idea from my position, to apply with an idea. They prefer to have the ideas themselves. And then they leave you pretty much alone, but they want to have them by themselves. So always when I try to say, I’ve got a project here, who wants to be involved it doesn’t lead to anything. If anybody wants to make something and has the means and I could somehow get on board with what they were doing then that worked better. And so I have created quite quickly, a secret reservoir collected from different production ideas and it has been proven, whenever there is the possibility or a production, I can quickly get something, out of my treasure trove, and accommodate it.26 These excerpts of the interview show an insider perspective and provide insights into the complexities of the decision-making processes of film makers and artists, such as Farocki. We learn about the different kinds of decision-making and funding processes involved in realizing film or video works. Clearly, the different materiality of film and video has an influence on the aesthetics, montage, and editing practices of the pieces. In Chapter 3, I will return to his interviews introducing his ideas on re-enactments and archiving of his own work.

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Farocki, who died in 2014, was one of the most creative and intellectually exciting filmmakers I met. The posthumously initiated Harun Farocki Institute (HaFI) is a fitting way to remember him and the legacy of his work. The HaFI is closely connected to the Arsenal in silent green kulturquartier in Berlin and its members are accessing his estate and further develop certain of his questions and methodologies. On their website their mission is explained:

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The HaFI initiates its own projects as an institute together with its network as well as in cooperation with institutional and individual partners. Their starting point can be themes or concepts from Harun Farocki, but also issues relating to documentary practices, changes in seeing and visibility, the work of images, and the work with images in general. Embedded in medium and long-term research processes, the projects are articulated in events and screenings, in publications, exhibitions, and educational offers.27 Also in my interviews with Farocki it became clear that artistic works have to be shown regularly, in order not to be forgotten. Therefore, it is necessary to find new ways to restore the digital formats of their elaborate installations and apparatus and to migrate the data to new storage media at regular intervals. The backups are costly and have the added risk that many data records are only available as proxies. Proxies do not contain all the information and the data is often saved on unstable drives. Most of all, I believe that a regular presentation and discussion of Farocki’s work is necessary in order to keep his legacy alive. In 2017 a workshop took place called Farocki Now: A Temporary Academy at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and silent green kulturquartier, Berlin. The ‘now’ in the title underlines the need for some people to re-experience his work and the discussions around them.

CASE STUDY: EYE FILM MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM In Amsterdam at the Eye Film Museum, a format was created which is called ‘Eye on Art’, where film meets the visual arts.28 After experiencing the Expanded Cinema piece Man with Mirror (1979) performed by Guy Sherwin in 2009 in Italy, I saw it again in 2013 at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam. Sherwin was invited by curator Monizza to re-enact several of his Expanded Cinema works of the 1970s. In the re-enactment of Man With Mirror Sherwin stood in the light beam of a projector, with a canvas in his hands, which he positioned toward the audience. On this canvas a Super 8 film from the 1970s was projected that showed Sherwin at a young age and how he performed a rhythmic rotating

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movement with the canvas. In the live re-enactment, Sherwin repeated these exact movements. During the performance he again rotated the canvas and a mirror revealed the cinema space, including the audience. Lucas Ihlein writes about this work: Some exquisite works, sadly, will go to the grave with the artist, and cannot be re-enacted by other artists or archivists. For me, one of the more poignant works in this category is Man with Mirror by Guy Sherwin. In this piece the artist, standing in the beam of a Super 8 projector, holds and tilts a square mirror painted white on the reverse. The mirror/screen reflects back into the room, or catches and reveals the Super 8 footage shot in 1976 showing Sherwin tilting an identical mirror/screen outdoors. As the film is projected, the live performer attempts to ‘mirror’ his own earlier movements, with confounding results. Which is the real Guy Sherwin, which is the projected image? Each time Sherwin attempts to re-enact his own movements from 1976 the passage of time is further marked by his ageing body [...] the work’s subsequent enactments have now become a sharply focussed document of transience.29 When Sherwin re-enacts his own movements from 1976, the passage of time is marked by his ageing body. The re-enactment and the film’s video documentation provide an impulse for other artists to re-enact this work, for example the Australian artist-archivists duo Lucas Ihlein and Louise Curham created their own version, (Wo)Man With Mirror (2009),30 where they re-enacted a re-enactment in Melbourne, Australia. Would that mean, that such cineaste-performer reliant works could still be portrayed after the artist is deceased? Can the archiving of media art be understood as versions made by other artists in new interpretations? The first short answer could be, that Ihlein and Curham with their unauthorized reenactments could offer a wider understanding for expanded cinema, whereby they are also producing new artworks, which are wholly inspired by Man With Mirror, thus a sort of descendant of the original work. Their work is therefore to be understood as a re-appropriation. In their adaption of Sherwin’s piece, I think, that Ihlein and Curham cannot completely reproduce the special doubling time experience of Man With Mirror, because their shot material was only made a few months before, and not like Sherwin, thirty years earlier. The process of obvious aging cannot be included. However, the experience of the self-reflection, the direct addressing and involvement of the viewers in the artworks is similarly present in Ihlein and Curham’s artwork. As Jonathan Walley writes, the motivation for carrying out a re-enactment may begin with a desire to access an ‘authentic’ experience

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of a past work of ephemeral art, but the physical-material practice of actually executing a re-enactment can prove unpredictably generative of insights that go far beyond the historical (Walley 2013). Curham, an archivist herself, said in this context, ‘Sure, we can watch a performance on YouTube and that gives us some kind of contact with the work but [...] the experience of it in the flesh is entirely different.’31 Ihlein and Curham follow in Sherwin’s footsteps, who proclaimed the motto of fellow 1970s Expanded Cinema artist Malcolm Le Grice. Le Grice preferred the ‘present experience’ to new technologies. Both works are about the process of perception and the experience of time. Particularly in Sherwin’s Man With Mirror a moment of immersion is created for the spectators, a moment that is broken again and again by the visibility of the filmic process.32 Yet another filmic process is demonstrated in Sherwin’s own re-enactment, namely the function of the montage. This happens through the showcasing of stringing together and under- and over-another layering of the different media layers (performance and image). Sherwin’s expanded cinema shows, how, despite his original ephemeral structures, during the course of the re-enactment, the artist themselves will be re-experienced. With his own re-enactment, an extraordinary experience of time is made possible, namely the experience of the simultaneousness of earlier and contemporary movements and images – and the simultaneous failure thereof. The work of other artists, such as Ihlein and Curham, with pieces, such as Man With Mirror, shows that these art forms of Expanded Cinema, which are often decried as being threatened by extinction, do live on. At the Eye Film Museum, another important British film maker of that era, the already mentioned Malcolm Le Grice also re-enacted his Expanded Cinema performance Horror Film (1971) as part of ‘Eye on Art’ in 2014. This performance had a similar effect as Sherwin’s performance in the prior year. In 2014, also Louise Curham re-enacted the piece by Le Grice at the Canberra Contemporary Artspace in Australia.33 In 1979 Malcolm Le Grice describes the relationship between film and the audience: Investment by the spectator in an experience of current duration (the currency of duration) carries over to a value for (evaluation of) the duration of the recorded event. The spectator’s investment is matched and reinforced by the investment evident in the recording act, measured in part by its duration – its temporal magnitude.34 Before his live performance of Horror Film in 2014, a programme about physical presence was shown including films about light and the body, selected in collaboration with Le Grice. Here Le Grice is not only the performer and

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film maker but also the film programmer and curator. Short films by him and Dutch filmmakers were shown, mostly from the 1970s. Marinus Boezem, Het beademen van de beeldbuis (1971, video, 3’), Jan van Munster, Zelfportret (1972, 16mm, 3’) and Cirkels (1972, 16mm, 3’), Ger van Elk, Some Natural Aspects of Painting and Sculpture (1970-1971, video, 12’), Bas Jan Ader, Nightfall (1971, 16mm, 4’), Malcolm Le Grice, Threshold (live performance with 3x 16mm, 17’), Malcolm Le Grice, Anthony Dundee (video, 2’), Malcolm Le Grice, Self Portrait After Raban Takes Measure (1999, video, 8’20), Malcolm Le Grice, Horror Film (1971, live performance with 3x 16mm, 20’). The flyer with this information tells the audience which format is used when. This form of programming opens the opportunity to compare the aesthetics of 16mm celluloid, video, and live performance during one event. Additionally, the discussion with the artist allows for further contextualizing. The documentation video of the event that can be accessed on the Eye Film Museum website and YouTube contributes to the hope, that this event will be remembered and stay in the collective memory.35 In his question and answer session, Le Grice shares with the audience his own memory of the original ‘projection event’, as he calls it. He refers to the 1970s projection spaces which were different from the normal cinema spaces. He explained to the audience that he has been performing it ever since and referring to his aging body he commented, ‘I’m not in the right shape for it anymore’ and finally asked ‘if there is anyone in the audience who wants to take it over from him/me, they are very welcome.’ In the piece three projectors from different angles superimpose on each other. The superimpositions create a continually changing colour light mix. Le Grice describes it as follows: ‘I interrupt the beam with a series of formal actions creating a complex set of coloured shadows. The final section involves focusing a pair of skeleton hands onto the screen in relationship to my own hands. The intention with this as with my other shadow pieces is to build a complex visual experience out of simple and readily available aspects of the projection situation.’36 His experimental film maker friend Jonas Mekas called Le Grice’s work: ‘One of his most simple, most classical, and also most ecstatic pieces.’37 The Eye Film Museum was also involved in the Images for the Future project: ‘Spread over a period of seven years, the FES (Fund for the Reinforcement of Economic Structure) is providing a budget of 115 million Euros for the digitization of the Netherlands’s audiovisual memory. With it, the imminent threat of decay and loss of vulnerable films and video- and audiotapes is being taken away.’38 Furthermore, in 2013 the Eye Film Museum initiated a digitization and access project called ‘The Short Film Pool’. Approximately three hundred short films were converted to Digital Cinema Package (DCP). Curator Monizza writes:

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While operating within the boundaries of a film heritage institute, and thus benefitting from its infrastructure and knowledge bases, this proj­ ect has been devised primarily as a business- to- business model with EYE acting not so much as an archive than as a distributor. Previously, digitized collections have been published online for academic, artistic, or educational purposes. (Monizza 2017: 130) Once cinemas have subscribed, they can preview titles online and order films. Apart from that, cinemas can also choose curated programmes. As a frame of reference, Monizza reflects on ethical issues she encountered during this project,

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over the way image and sound were transformed during digitization and over settling on levels of tolerance that we would accept. In the case of experimental and artist- made films, more than other genres, changing the original screening format affects the ways the films are perceived, understood, and appreciated. This becomes even more crucial with those filmmakers who chose the film medium specifically for its inherent aesthetic and technical properties and who expose or manipulate them in their works. (Monizza 2017: 131) In this context Monizza refers back to Mark-Paul Meyer, also a curator at Eye, who explains ‘the physical archives hold some hundred years of film history enclosed in a large variety of material objects. And many ‘stories’ that these artefacts contain, may never be ‘translated’ unto the new formats.’39 These initiatives and concerns allow a better insight to the people involved in archiving, digitization, curating, and critical thinking. For me personally, such ethical questions are increasingly relevant to a consideration of film archiving, programming, curating, and preservation. Monizza’s questions correspond to FIAF’s codes of ethics and Marks’ observations about an ‘ethical presenter’ that was mentioned earlier. As I mentioned before, the ethical aspect connects back to the meaning of curare – both to take care of the films and also the audience members. In addition to that, The Association of Moving Image Archivists’ (AMIA) codes of ethics are also helpful to consider in this context40 as well as Eye’s own collection policy which can be downloaded on the FIAF website amongst other collection policies by the BFI National Archive, the Cinémathèque Française, Library of Congress Collection and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia amongst others.41 In Eye’s collection policy from 2019 it is written, that

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[i]n the coming years, Eye would like to research how non-traditional works such as Expanded Cinema installations and online/on-site digital presentation projects can best be registered and preserved. Such works contain different components that often fall outside the traditional categories of film and film-related collections. These include installations developed or acquired for (temporary) exhibitions and installations produced by Eye, such as the 360° installation in the Panorama or The Scene Machine (on-site installation and an online platform). Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality projects, such as the Eye Walk, also partially fall into this category. Eye aims to keep a record of the first presentation of these works, so as to maintain the possibility of presenting them again. These documentations allow future artists, curators, scholars and audiences to experience these events again.

AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE In the following I will go into more detail on discourses of the aesthetic experiences in general and of the aesthetic experiences of moving images using music in particular.42 Music in film is an important part of the aesthetics, montage, narrative, and aesthetic experience of the films and artistic pieces. Since the study of music has often been overlooked when describing films, I will introduce some relevant concepts. The case study of Sherwin’s Man with Mirror shows that the experience of Expanded Cinema and experimental films open up philosophical questions on epistemology, perception, experience and aesthetics. In Sherwin’s own re-enactment, a doubling, layering and repetition of time is created. Furthermore, the differences between earlier and contemporary performances become noticeable. This is caused by the little discrepancies between the special loops and rhythmic movements of the performers in younger years, on film, and the visible live action of the performers today. For the viewers the first confusion becomes apparent when the now older hands of Sherwin lie on top of the pictures of his hands from the year 1976. It could be compared to an optical illusion and unsettles the viewers in their perception of the real experienced Expanded Cinema performance and the recorded images. One could imagine that Sherwin quoted Deleuze’s book ‘What is Philosophy’, especially the part in which Deleuze says ‘to stand up in an aesthetic experience, to become simultaneously younger and older within it, and to pass through all of its components and singularities’ (Deleuze 1991). In Sherwin’s work it is,

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in my opinion, possible to both affectively experience this concept of time and also rationally understand it, in view of its formal structure, the patterns of movement and the experience of the live performance. The viewer is thus intellectually and somatically addressed. Over and above there is the idea of how the presentation of a re-enactment could look like in some years to come. Sherwin himself stated in an interview in this context: ‘Time’ was the first thing that intrigued me about film. Images that move in time. It may not be so obvious with video, but when you’re working with cine-film there is something magical about winding a little strip of images backwards and forwards through a viewer, making some insignificant action, captured from the world of movement, move forwards or backwards or stand still. Aren’t we all obsessed with time?43 74 |

To answer this question, it is apparent that we are. Man with Mirror describes in an exemplary way the time experience that is typical of Expanded Cinema re-enactments: the entanglement and interplay of different timelines. The chronology of time seems to dissolve in Man with Mirror. This refers to an alternative concept of time, that is not born of Chronos but rather Kairos, the time of being in the right moment and being in the depth of the moment, so that this time moves to another rhythm. Besides visualizing the passage of time through the ageing of the artist, the performance generates a kind of echo, a re-actualization and fusion of several temporalities. The spectator experiences the images of the past and present simultaneously. Also in early film studies philosophical questions are raised, for example Béla Balázs’s concept of reality (1930)44 holds that the audience members in cinemas add ‘somatic-affective transformations’ to the narrative. Therefore, they will be capable of a real experience. He formulates the basic cinematic idea of immersion, when he states that the agile camera carries the eye and thus the consciousness along into the heart of the picture, into the middle of the space where the action takes place.45 This seems to be a productive approach also for studies of performative art forms. The viewers with their ‘somatic-affective transformation’ complete the action on the screen, whereby the activity of the viewer can be understood as a connection of affective and cognitive reactions that produced the impression of reality in the film. Besides the movement of persons and objects in a given space, the movement related to the camera and the montage, there is a third movement of particular interest, that is carried through the entire picture, in which action and film image are connected: the unrolling, unfolding, unveiling of the special perception world of the individual film in the presence of a bodily experience.

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Others who have pushed experience on to the centre stage, are largely schooled in the phenomenology approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His concept of perception (aisthesis) postulated a reality that is ontologically perceptible: ‘The world is that, which I perceive.’46 Particularly noteworthy works on tactility, physicality, and the embodied-physical experience of films have been penned by a.o. Vivian Sobchack (2004) and Steven Shaviro (1993). These studies do not require an analogy or a difference between human or filmic perception. Analyzing the aesthetic experience means to also study the affect. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of physicality as corporality – the body (le corps propre) is ‘not just a physical entity’ but an intermediary between body and spirit – a continuing experience. Following this discussion, Vivian Sobchack and Steven Shaviro describe the audience reception as somatic, because the viewers are woven physically into the film. Shaviro understands seeing as a tactile experience, that stimulates the nervous system directly. Concepts on spectatorship, such as ‘haptic visuality’ and ‘contemplative cinema’, offer new ways of understanding the complexity of the affective bonds linking film and spectator. Giuliana Bruno also studies Expanded Cinema events which sometimes allow ‘haptic experience of mediated encounters’47 which broaden the spectrum of how to perceive films. Annette Kuhn (1995) follows a film scholarly approach, that tries to connect film experience with ethnographical methods, she, similarly to Victor Burgin, pursues questions about the memories of cinema. In this new field of film ethnography also the work of Catherine Russell (1999) should be mentioned. I claim that the concept of ‘haptic visuality’ can be applied to all visual film experience, especially to the ones in this study. Moreover, this notion of ‘haptic visuality’ should be expanded to an ‘haptic audio-visuality’, because I believe that the sounds and music in the films I study have an effect on the aesthetic experience. Consider, for example, the following case study. Lis Rhodes installed Light Music as a re-enactment of Expanded Cinema at the Oil Tanks in the Tate Modern in London in 2009. This exhibition called Expanded Cinema is documented as a video on the Tate Modern’s YouTube channel48 while the original installation happened in 1975. Works by other artists from the 1970s were also shown during this exhibition, for example, Expanded Cinema by William Raban, Malcolm Le Grice, Annabel Nicolson and Gill Eatherley. In her re-enactment more than thirty years later and setting up her installation not in a cinema but a museum, Liz Rhodes furthered the flickering effect of the original. Light Music is formed from two projections facing one another on opposite screens. Rhodes composed a score comprised of drawings that form abstract patterns of black and white lines onscreen. The drawings are printed onto the optical edge of the filmstrip. As the bands of light and dark pass through the projector they are read as audio, creating an intense soundtrack,

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forming a relationship between the sonic and the visual. What one hears is the aural equivalent to the flickering patterns on the screens. Light Music is projected into a hazy room and encourages the viewers to move between the screens, directly engaging with the projection beams, forming a set of social relations with other audience members – the museum is transformed into a collective event. This event at the Tate Oil Tanks and its documentations allow now future re-enactments in other locations. The notion of ‘haptic visuality’ or ‘haptic audio-visuality’ has an effect on the aesthetic experience. Therefore, later, I will introduce my concept of analyzing the specific aesthetic experience of music used in films, with a particular focus on pop, rock and electronic music (Siewert 2013f). But first of all, I will give an overview of scholars working on the relationship of images and music in film studies. 76 |

MUSIC IN FILM STUDIES More than twenty years ago, Kathryn Kalinak called for the inclusion of film music in the curriculum of film studies: Narrative is not constructed by visual means alone. By this I mean that music works as a part of the process that transmits narrative information to the spectator, that it functions as a narrative agent. Mood, emotion, characterization, point of view, even the action itself are constructed in film in a complex visual and aural interaction in which music is an important component. (Kalinak 1992: 30) That sound and music are neglected elements of the filmic craft or that they are viewed as secondary may have to do with the simple pragmatic fact that films are mostly finished before they are set to music. Music is often newly composed for films and, therefore, is ascribed the role of serving the images by underscoring the narration and reinforcing the atmosphere. In this context the theoretical work of Michel Chion49 is remarkable in that he was one of the first to develop a theory of sound and the complex and varied relationships between sound and image. Observing the human senses, he found that the ear processes, analyzes, and synthesizes stimuli faster than the eye. He calls the phenomenon of our perceived synchronicity between hearing and seeing synchresis (from synthesis and synchronization). Because of this audio-visual connection between the visual and the audible and because he sought to rehabilitate sound, Chion created a new conceptual apparatus. The new concepts serve to describe the effects of sound.

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He categorizes bodyless film-voices from the off, phone, radio, and records as acousmêtre. In the analysis of music in film the concepts of diegetic and extra-diegetic are used: diegetic music means, that the source of the sound is visible (for example a record player, radio, a performer); extra-diegetic music, in contrast, plays in the background, its source invisible. The current approaches to the study of music in film can be roughly outlined as follows: technology of production, economics, cognition, semiotics, psycho-analytics, aesthetics, genealogy, and narratology. Approaching the study of music in film from the perspective of the production technology, the focus lies on the collaboration of all involved in the production of the film. An insight can be gained into the contributions of the composer, the sound designer, the musicians, the cutter etc. Often composers of film music will comment on their work. The economics approach takes into view the mutual relationships between the movie and the music industries, specifically the synergy and marketing strategies of the so-called cross-promotion. The cognition approach deals with issues of meaning, memory, and the construction of reality through music, while cultural codes and the communicative power of film music are subjects of the semiotic approach. The psychoanalytic approach, often based on the work of Jacques Lacan, scrutinizes the relationship between film music and the spectator, the keywords being gaze, audience identification, and structures of desire. The aesthetic approach is interested in the interaction between music and film; while the examination through the genealogical lens finds relevance in the specific genre of a film. Take, for instance, Rick Altman’s50 work on the American musical: based on the audio dissolve principle the hierarchy of ‘image leading sound’ is turned upside down in musicals, where ‘sound leads image’. Altman understands film as event and cinema as event. This is in contrast to the idea that film is text-based. As a proponent of narratology, Claudia Gorbman (1987) assigns music a special status within film, because music can be both diegetic or extra-diegetic. Her canonized text about music has contributed to the careful examination of the various levels on which music is negotiated within film. To do so, she distinguishes between three codes: the pure musical codes, which reference the music itself; the cultural musical codes, which reference the cultural context of its production and reception, and the cinematic musical codes, which describe the formal relationship between music and the film image. Gorbman’s differentiation of the various musical codes points to the extensive framework of reference of potential approaches: musicology, cultural analysis, sociology and film studies. According to Gorbman, film music can affect the audience emotionally as music transports cultural codes and, thus, evokes affective connotations.

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Unfortunately, though, Gorbman argues in her explanations on the cultural musical codes in favour of an exclusion of pop-music from film. The pop-song, she argues, is an external factor that, due to its structure, is not sufficiently adapted to the requirements intrinsic to the film. Hence, she poses, popmusic does not fulfil the film’s needs. Other than classical music, which, in her reading, follows the rhythmic structure of the image, the content and formal cohesion of pop- and rock-songs render them too self-contained to serve film. In addition, lyrics would disrupt the narrative of the movie, distract and irritate the audience. Thus, Gorbman argues, pop and rock genres are unsuitable for film.51 I disagree, because I think, that films using pop and rock music can add new layers to the understanding and experiencing of films, especially when thinking of cultural memory. My understanding of the experience of music in film is more in the line of music scholars such as Simon Frith, whose focus lies in the construction of an aesthetical musical experience, which takes on a subjective and collective identity. Before I will go back to the analysis of music in film I will briefly stress the importance of music in general. Frith explains the relationship of music and spectator as one, in which the spectator does not identify herself with the characters but rather with her own emotions. According to Frith, the musical rhythm is concurrently a mental and a physical phenomenon.52 Furthermore, Frith refers to the various functions of the pop and rock music: on the one side, the ability of the music to affect and move us, and on the other, the way we are touched or come in contact, which is similar to a sexual experience, in that it can convey a feeling of being in the present. In the end, music is ‘sexy’ not because it makes us move, but because (through that movement) it makes us feel; makes us feel (like sex itself) intensely present. Rhythm in short is ‘sexual’ in that it isn’t just about the experience of the body but also (the two things are inseparable) about the experience of time. (Frith 1989: 22) Analyzing music, music scholar Aden Evens distinguishes between the listening experience of analogue, live, and digital music. In his book Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (2005),53 Evens examines the experience of the listener, composer, technician, and of the musician.54 He develops the terminology musical as something that not only positions itself in relation to the ontological question of what music is, but also includes the aesthetic question of the quality or the value of the music. Evens observes a change in the consumption of music: the fidelity of the sound production has become less important than the newest technical equipment. Evens calls this the ‘enjoy-

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ment of mere recognition’. According to Evens this kind of listening is a form of remembering. He observes a ‘paradox of remembering’, namely ‘the whole past is compressed into the present moment.’ Beyond that, Evens underlines that digital is limited in its expressive force. Currently there is always an excess that digital mediums cannot capture, because in the digital a presence or a ‘being here’ is missing. For Evens, the experience of analogue music offers an added value. Evens describes this impression of a particular type of analogue music as ‘musical expression’. One climbs a mountain listening to Beethoven in one’s living room, one is drunk to the point of sickness with Nick Cave. Though there are no sore legs or nasty mess to clean up afterward, these events are real if implicated. We hear them in music, differently each time. The idea is to climb a new mountain, to find a new intoxication. The reproduction of sound is not a matter of physics but of affect and percept. Expression exceeds fidelity, so hold on to your LPs. (23) Evens’ idea of the ‘musicandum’,55 inspired by Deleuze, as a moment in which music connects the past with the present, lifts up an insight that I also gleaned from films using music. Deleuze calls, in the context of cinema, this kind of cross-layered time folded time. He divides the time into two moments: ‘the passing present and the self-preserving past. Time lets the present pass but preserves the past for itself.’ (Deleuze 1991: 132) These findings of music scholars such as Frith and Evans are also a subject of discussion in film studies. The theoretical work of the composer and film director Philip Brophy is particularly noteworthy. He encourages us ‘to hear and not to watch’ when analyzing films. He does not believe the layers of sound should be ‘read’ to be ‘understood’ or to be ‘deciphered’, but rather we should learn to ‘think with our ears’ (Brophy 2005: 5). In general, he describes the particularities of perception and carries on the tradition of music scholars, who talk about a ‘listening experience’. In this context, I coined the term Entgrenzungsfilme (border-pushing films or delimination films) and used the concept of ‘pragmatic poetics’ to analyze both economic (pragmatic) and aesthetic (poetic) aspects of the films, in order to analyze music in film.56 Music in film can fundamentally define the relationship between temporality and the experience of time. The length of a single piece of music defines a specific period, and the rhythm determines the speed. Because sometimes (especially in the 1960s and 1970s experimental films) music is part of a cultural memory before it is experienced in the film, it has a substantial influence on the perception of the film. Robb Wright describes this as temporal compression.

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Film scores are usually brand new to each viewer and it falls upon the composer to create every nuance of feeling and association that the music seeks to produce. By contrast, previously heard pop songs carry their own sets of feelings and associations, often developed over months or years of repeated hearings. The potential emotional punch of those established associations is considerable, and arguably greater than a virgin score could hope to elicit. The right song in the right place can be an extremely powerful device, which enables a film to effectively build on the work that the song has already done. (Wright 2003: 10ff) This ‘emotional punch’ can be transferred to the aesthetic experience of experimental films, referring to a function of memory and also to a direct bodily affection. Kevin Donnelly writes: 80 |

The relationship between pop music and time has to be seen as one of direct affect: pop music harnesses and articulates time. It concretizes time by converting real or experimental time into a regulated musical time. One of the central attractions, and indeed the primary use of pop music – dancing – attests to the musical articulation of time, largely through rhythm in its relation to the human body. The beat of pop music is formalized into what is customarily known as the ‘backbeat’, characterized by the snare drums’ provision of an emphatic accent on the second and fourth beats of the bar. This is precisely a musical and temporal spine. (Donnelly 2000: 28) The power of the music and, by association, the teenage sub-culture, have been intriguing to film directors and resulted in a number of documentaries of the youth scene. Pop music in film effects two simultaneous promotions, vertical and horizontal, that entail increased publicity. The synergy of the music and film industry is most obvious by the production of film soundtracks. When thinking about the time period of my case studies the influence of pop and rock music is omnipresent. In an earlier study I examined, for example, the soundtrack of Richard Lester’s Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night (1964), which received so many advance orders that the film was the first to earn back its production costs before it even premiered – from then on, the youth market became a target group taken seriously.57 Besides a horizontal integration, in which bigger companies buy smaller ones, a vertical integration is also in effect, in which Hollywood studios buy into the music industry.58 I believe, that in general, pop and particularly rock is associated with youth, adolescent dissonance, emancipation, and advance change. It influences macro social devel-

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opments, which delineate the connection between the individual cultural areas. The post war young generation offered resistance against their parents and grandparents whose experiences were marked by war. They positioned themselves especially against notions of authority and restrictions of sexuality. In the 1960s fashion designer Mary Quant coined the term youthquake to describe this generation.59 A pop art exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in 1965 is deemed to have initiated the movement. The exhibit displayed works under the motto ‘New Generation’ by Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, and Andy Warhol. This exhibition not only inspired artists and designers but also musicians from such bands as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, and The Yardbirds, who started bands while at art school. They adopted the style of American pop art for their record labels and stage outfits.60 Pete Townshend from The Who wore pullovers with street signs or targets and had a jacket tailored from the Union Jack.61 One of the record labels of Gered Mankowitz shows the band The Yardbirds posing as rebels. (They also had a legendary appearance in the film Blow Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni). In the photo, two prototype father figures can be seen between the legs of the musicians: a man wearing a bowler hat and another in work overalls, thus expressing the conflict between the generations and classes. Beat music is of particular historical importance influencing nearly all of the newer music styles and directions during the 1960s. Arguably most of the well-known basic patterns of European youth and pop culture find their roots in this time. Beat music emerged from the cross-pollination of cultures, such as The Beatles listening to the music of America on the pirate radio station Radio Caroline, with the American rock music in turn referencing African roots. With the lyrics of ‘Tomorrow never knows’, ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ or ‘I hope I die before I get old’ the Beatles and other musicians formulated a new feeling and sense of life. This new feel penetrated the general consciousness of artists and film makers and gave content to youth culture, one that had not played a huge role previously.62 Later, I will study the song ‘Tomorrow never knows’, used by experimental film maker Bruce Conner for his experimental film Looking For Mushrooms (1961), in more detail.

SENSUAL PLEASURE Rock and pop music, electronic music, but also symphonic scores and jazz in film all can evoke an intense bodily sensation. Especially when the bass is placed to the foreground of the musical experience, the audience resonates with the music and even embodies it. The physicality of the experience trans-

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lates into emotional experiences. This relationship between physicality and emotion offers itself to be analyzed. Often the extreme bodily experiences that are triggered by films are associated with the genre of melodrama. These findings will be compared later with the experience of 1960s and 1970s experimental films. Going back to the theoretical discussions about the Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s it is noteworthy that they already began in the 1970s and were divided between genre and auteur as well as psychoanalytical and feminist theories. In a melodrama mélos is brought into relationship with drãma, whereby mélos, ‘song’ in Greek, adds the singing and the melody to the drãma, the ‘action’. The semiotic approach from Peter Brooks (1979), whose research has brought about a revaluation of the genre of melodrama, is based on the assumption that melodrama is not invested in the protagonists, but rather in their symbolism. He developed his aesthetics of embodiment out of the sentimental novels of the 18th century and the works of Henry James; Brooks puts the classical stage melodrama in relation to silent films in which the body, similarly to pantomime, becomes the signifier. Film allows physical effects to be read from the body of the figures and so – combined with language – become representation. Christine Gledhill (1994) studies the psychological emotions, that are read from the body and describes them as gestures, that visually and with the aid of music provide a formal ‘excess’ in melodrama ‘that pressures the objective world into expressing the unmentionable’. In melodramas the audience may shed tears and show other expressions of the emotion of sadness – the primary emotion produced by those films. Compared to melodramas, experimental films of the 1960s or 1970s are often using fast-paced or trance-like music. Here, the direct affective force of music can connect the audience members to an experience akin to dancing. The perceptible raising of the pulse during the passive film experience, coupled with the memory of dancing, can release a feeling of freedom, sexuality, and rebellion. Past experiences become the present and the present is intensified when the narrative of the film represents the experiences of youth. The entanglement of the layers of time allows a particularly intensive experience of the present. A feeling of living in the now is intensified, tuning itself to a state of feeling lost-in-the-music. The showing of these films was, thus, a moral hazard for a bourgeois minded public. Steve Goodman describes general acoustic experiences in time as bodily remembering with sounds. His research leans on the noises and jingles that lie outside the realm of film and cause earworms (2010). His description of an auditive déjà-vu can also be traced to the experience and memory of pop music in experimental films. Goodman calls this auditive déjà-vu, déjà-entendu (already heard), something that has already been heard by the body and is only

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waiting for feedback in the future, a latent and addictive historical acoustic memory. The pre-existent pop music in film functions, according to my thesis, likewise, like a déjà-entendu: it reminds you of a strong personal experience, that resonates with your personal experience and functions like an enhanced feedback. The music stimulates the memory functions, actualizes the past and connects it with the present. The activated physical memory is entirely differentiated from a rational memory. In interviews with audience members after showing the experimental films of the 1960 and 1970s at the Arsenal in 2013, a woman said that she ‘felt twenty again’ and grabbed the hand of her elderly husband with fervour. The music as a mode of addressing the audience supports a somatic, bodily experience. In extreme situations this experience can lead to a symbolic dissolving of the stabilizing and anchoring perception of the body in space. This in turn is connected to the secondary function of the ear as a balancing tool. After an analysis of these films, one should no longer speak solely of the visual pleasure of the viewer, but rather expand Laura Mulvey’s gender-oriented concept of the gaze with the affectivity or emotion arousing qualities of music. In other words, the aesthetic experience of these films emerges from the combination of visual and sonic sensations. Thus, when visual pleasure and sonic pleasure are found together, I call the result sensual pleasure. The otherwise most favoured experiences of visual pleasure can be described as being one of many experiences in a large sea of bodily resonance. A pop song in those films activates a memory, which is rooted in another ambience. Consequently, 1960s and 1970s artists’ films that use pop music are outstandingly suitable to reactivate memories in the more aged among the audience, that not only speak to the visual memory but also to the auditory memory. And it may create, by associations, a sense of temporal collapse and participation in the past among younger members. I see the concept ‘sensual pleasure’ as useful in understanding the music-oriented aesthetic experience in 1960 and 1970s experimental films and Expanded Cinema works.

CASE STUDY: SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL, AMSTERDAM This sensual pleasure could best be understood by referring to a case study. At the 2010 Sonic Acts festival in Amsterdam, works from the 1930s, the 1970s, and the 2010s were presented, spanning genres from experimental films, Expanded Cinema, Live Cinema, audio-visual projections, intermedia art, electronic music, VJing, live performances, film programmes, exhibitions, to a conference. This biennial festival showcases historical and contemporary developments side by side. It commissions and co-produces new works,

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often in collaboration with other festivals, arts organizations, and partners. The Poetics of Space, the title of the 2010 festival, is derived from the English translation of the 1958 book La Poétique de l’Espace by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. In his work, Bachelard describes the influence of space and architecture on humans and implicitly argues for a new type of architecture based on experience and imagination. The performances and screenings took place in the Paradiso, a former church, which is normally used as either a concert hall for pop and rock music or as a nightclub. The artists were mostly situated in the middle of the audience, suspending the usual separation of the cinema screen and the audience space. Some of the performances could be classified as Expanded Cinema, while others could be described as VJing. The Sonic Act festival is considered a special event not the least because the Paradiso offers a unique space for presenting diverse art forms under the same roof, on the same night, bringing together a diverse audience sharing a physical, emotional, and cognitive experience. Expanded Cinema, for example, is mostly shown in museums, while Live Cinema is seen in nightclubs. Live Cinema refers to for real-time audio-visual performances and stands for the simultaneous creation of sound and image by sonic and visual artists. Even though the different audio-visual modes are often seen as having their own distinct traditions, it should be stressed that they have similar film historic roots. Both kinds of performances could be described as having an influence on the aesthetic experience of the audience, simultaneously creating a visceral bodily experience. A good example of an Expanded Cinema performance that creates an extreme visceral bodily experience is the work by film maker and artist Bruce McClure, who includes performative and musical aspects in his art. In Pie Pellicane Jesu Dominae: And After Several Rapid Strokes of Their Wings (2009) he uses the projector as a musical instrument. He played it at Paradiso on the main stage in front of approximately five hundred people. McClure’s work is immersive and intense, and the high decibel sound in combination with the visuals, creates an intense visceral experience. His work refers back to historical Expanded Cinema artists such as Paul Sharits and Lis Rhodes who discarded the established rules about film presentation. Paul Sharits’s Color Sound Frames (1974) and Lis Rhodes’s Light Music (1975) were also shown at the festival the same evening called Expanded Space. The well-known expanded film Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiß-Grau by László Moholy-Nagy from 1930 was featured using light props. In his time, MoholyNagy used flashes of light, whirling spirals, which dissolve into light. During the Sonic Acts festival, his work was recreated by projectionists, thanks to the fact that there are descriptions and recordings of his work. On the same night, a relatively unknown young artist duo from the Netherlands called Optical

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Machines also presented their work Shift at the Paradiso. Shift is a live performance with an abstract play of light images that are generated, manipulated, mixed, and projected during the performance using home-made equipment.63 They work with an open set-up and their tools include modified record players, pattern models, cardboards, lamps, lenses, cameras, customized projectors, and self-made analogue synthesizers. Similar to McClure’s performance, the audience had the possibility to watch the screen and be engulfed in sounds, but also to turn their heads and see the artists creating the sounds and images live. The idea of a spatially open form of a filmic presentation reaches back to the beginnings of early cinema, where not only the filmic image, but also the technique and the spectacle of the staging were part of an expansive performance. This phenomenon can also be found in other situations such as concerts and audio-visual installations, also shown at the Sonic Acts festival. In many cases, these performances are classified as Live Cinema. One could say that Live Cinema can be seen in the line of traditional forms of Expanded Cinema, which are developed in concerts and nightclubs. In interviews, some artists would call themselves film makers, in others performers or constructors, composers, Audio-visual Artists, Live Cinema artists or VJs. It is apparent that the artistic influence reached back to early Expanded Cinema performances and early avant-garde cinema (for example, Walther Ruttmann’s well-known Light-Play Opus 1 (1921)). During the video area it became easier to composite images, with video synthesizers, which enabled an overlay of images. The new video technologies followed the musical technical developments. As Live Cinema artists tend to use various clips or visual layers simultaneously, mixing them together resembles more a musical composition than video editing. Various visual instruments (like in McClure’s case) are being played together, in different combinations of rhythms, volumes and patterns. Often a loop structure has been used, which is already known from Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique (1924). Other young audio-visual artists and VJs performed at the Sonic Act Festival at an evening event called Deep Spaces. Space is created here by sound, light, smoke, and lasers. The artists Russell Haswell (UK) for visuals and Florian Hecker (Germany) for music performed their UPIC Diffusion Session, which used lasers and extreme sounds to create an immersive multisensory environment. Sounds and lasers engulf the audience and create a visceral experience, references to Conrad, Rhodes, Ruttmann, and McClure could be seen and heard. I agree with Peter Weibel, who stresses that most Expanded Cinema artists of today take their cue less from the achievements of the 1980s video artists, but instead they deliberately focus on the expansion of image technologies and social consciousness that took place in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Another obvious reference of UPIC Diffusion Session was to the Expanded Cinema work of Anthony McCall, the only permanent exhibition presented at the Sonic Act Festival, housed in a small room at the Paradiso, where only twelve people could enter at a time. His work Line Describing a Cone (1973) is one of the so-called ‘Solid Light Films’ (see Chapter 1). At this festival, traditional parameters of narrative cinema were expanded by much broader conceptions of cinematic space, the focus of which is no longer the photographic construction of reality as seen by the camera’s eye, or linear forms of narration. The Expanded Cinema performances crossed the lines from film screenings and music performances, some referring to fine art and sculpture. The sounds and the visual loops engulf the audience and evoke a visceral bodily experience. Both Expanded Cinema artists and Live Cinema artists seem to use similar film historical roots as points of reference, even though they usually attract a different age group audience in different projection spaces. The festival location of the Paradiso fulfils what Bachelard asks for: a new type of architecture based on experience and imagination. The exceptional nature of having Expanded Cinema audiences and Live Cinema brought together to share the same space highlights the importance of the Festival. These audiences, then, together enjoy or have to cope with immersive and intense experiences that due to the power of the sound and music, become visceral experiences – while at the front the audience was seated like in the cinema, at the back people were dancing.64

CASE STUDY: PSYCHEDELIA AND THE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ­ROTTERDAM (IFFR) Some of the Expanded Cinema performances and films studied here use pop and rock music of the time. David E. James refers to those Expanded Cinema works in having the most extensive cultural influence: those liquid projections were multimedia psychedelic spectaculars of projected light at rock concerts, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. More than any other single technique, liquid projection produced the swirling interplay of otherwise autonomous colors that provided a visual correlative to the extended and similarly unrepeatable improvisations that came to characterize the jams of Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and other Bay Area rock ‘n’ roll bands. [...] In January 1966, the Grateful Dead performed at the epochal three-day Trips Festival, the culmination of Ken Kesey’s LSD parties, or acid tests, held at Longshoremen’s Hall, San Francisco, and also featuring the Living Theater.65

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These art forms created an immersive environment. They supported ‘dissolving the boundaries between audience and performers, between mind and body, between the different senses, and between individual and communal identity.’66 Other artists have taken up these impulses in their works combining visuals with sound and music. In Andy Warhol’s and Jud Yalkut’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1965) these strategies were truly pushed. Together with the band The Velvet Underground, they staged a performance, in which five projectors simultaneously played films, slides were shown, a disco-bulb illuminated, stroboscope lights flashed, and musicians performed. Film was projected onto the figures of members of the audience dancing to the music. Just as the capacities of the multimedia setting were put to a test, so arguably were the perceptive limits of the participants. Warhol himself operated as a director at the turntables, and when he sensed that the audience got used to images and to a flow of perception, he intervened with new image and sound impulses. With these spatial expanded cinema approaches, the whole body of the audience members becomes a multisensorial field of experience. In 2016 Exploding Plastic Inevitable was re-enacted in parts, in the Paris Philharmonic, accompanied by John Cale, former member of Warhol’s factory, and The Velvet Underground. Using the dispositif of a philharmonic orchestra house gave the former underground piece a bourgeoise setting and also invited other generations of audience members into the experience of this iconic work. As mentioned in Chapter 1, one of the films I studied in detail is Thom Andersen’s 16mm film --- ------ (aka The Rock ‘n’ Roll Film). This film uses music in the most extraordinary way. Bits and pieces of songs by varied musicians were edited together as a huge assemblage of samplings conveying different moods. The film, which was selected and shown during the 2011 International Film Festival in Rotterdam, was part of the programme titled ‘Fragments of Seeing’, and subtitled ‘Recovering the Los Angeles avant-garde: Restorations from the Academy Film Archive’. The film was programmed alongside films by Gary Beydler and Fred Worden, among others. The director Andersen and the curator Toscano discussed the film and programme afterwards, and addressed broader questions about experimental film, curating, restoration and the festival circuit. The history of each of the copies can be tracked down in different performances of the films in various contexts. In the programme this is noted: Long ignored in the traditional histories of avant-garde film, Los Angeles has been a major artistic centre of cinematic experimentation nearly since the birth of the industry. With the 2005 publication of David James’ seminal The Most Typical Avant-Garde, a complex and influential his-

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tory began to be unearthed. These two programmes, curated by Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, will reveal some of the extensive range and unique energy of this L.A. experimental work, with a particular focus on the incredibly productive period of 1966-1982. All films will show in restored prints from the Academy, in their original 16mm format, unless otherwise noted. The film is a montage of fragments of shots of bands performing and records being played and pressed. As David E. James noted: ‘Beginning as a flicker of very short shorts (2:4:2:5:3:5:3:6 frames), the film gradually extends their length and finishes with a shot several seconds long of Mick Jagger dancing, apparently to the accompaniment of the Penguin’s ‘Earth Angel’.’ (James 2016: 43) The Academy Archive in Los Angeles was provided with a description about the film by the director Andersen himself: 88 | A documentary about rock ‘n’ roll. Making, buying, selling. Radio, jukebox, scopitone, pinball, poolhall. Canned Heat, City Lights, Seeds of Time, LA Tymes. Llyn Foulkes, Charlie Watts. Chris & Craig, Duke of Earl. Seeburg, Wurlitzer. Standing, walking, jumping, singing, d ­ ancing, gesturing, surfing. LAPD, LA County Sheriffs Dept., The Trip, The Lynch Bldg. Tops, Pandora’s Box, Maverick’s Flat, someone’s backyard. California Music Co. Riot in cell block number nine, riot on sunset strip. Hot rod, coin slot, go cart, bomp club. Hound Dog Man, King Creole. Kim Weston, The Rainbows, The Shangri-Las, The Supremes, Earl-Jean. Stupid girl, 19th nervous breakdown. Bill Haley & The Comets: you can get no further back than that. Wolfman Jack, Ernie Bushmiller, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, The Who, The Coasters. Great balls of fire. Standing at the crossroads of love. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, John Cale, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Howlin Wolf, James Brown-The King. You can’t catch me. Frankie Avalon, The Beatles, The Yardbirds. Wax reclamation, an early clue to the new direction. Mick Jagger/Earth Angel. Documentary material organized by a predetermined structure. A sequence of picture-sound equations with randomly chosen terms. Vertically, --- ------- is completely structured; horizontally it is completely random. A pastiche of cinematography, a parody of montage. 1:2. 3:7. Right, left. Right to left-left to right. Up-down. Stasis, motion. Orange, magenta. Yellow, blue. Red, green. Magenta, orange. Blue, yellow. Green, red. 1:2, 1,5:3, 2:4, 3:6, 5:10, 8:16.67 His own description poetically describes the viewing experience: its fragmented and positively overwhelming assemblage of images, sounds, and height-

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ened emotions. This film certainly is a forerunner of the artistic music video clip using sampling techniques. In an interview Andersen stated: We did do image track and sound track independently after predetermining the length of each fragment. I tried to find oppositions in the shots, particularly of color. That’s why all the shots from the Beatles film are tinted magenta. I think the shots in the record plant—both the pressing of records and the melting—saved the film. That plant belonged to Capitol Records and it was in the heart of Hollywood. It’s the only film I’ve ever shot, except for animation camera in Muybridge film. I learned that the Arri-S is a better camera than the Bolex—you can see it in the movie.68 The film was the first film in a series of films. In the catalogue and the website of the International Film Festival Rotterdam the two programmes under the category Signals: Regained are described as followed: Recovering the Los Angeles avant-garde: restorations from the Academy Film Archive. Two programmes of restored films from 1966-1982, curated by Mark Toscano. Long ignored in the traditional histories of avant-garde film, Los Angeles has been a major artistic centre of cinematic experimentation nearly since the birth of the industry. With the 2005 publication of David James’ seminal The Most Typical Avant-Garde, a complex and influential history began to be unearthed. These two programmes, curated by Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, will reveal some extensive range and unique energy of this L.A. experimental work, with a particular focus on the incredibly productive period of 1966-1982. All films will show in restored prints from the Academy, in their original 16 mm format, unless otherwise noted. 1st programme: fragments of seeing --- -----Thom Andersen, Malcolm Brodwick, 1967, 16mm A documentary about rock ‘n’ roll. [...] Documentary material organized by a predetermined structure. A sequence of picture-sound equations with randomly chosen terms. Vertically. --- ------ is completely structured; horizontally it is completely random. A pastiche of cinematography, a parody of montage. (Thom Andersen)

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Throbs Fred Worden 1972, 16mm Found footage of circuses, fairgrounds and car crashes are repeated, distorted and layered, brought to the point of destruction and then back again, recoalescing to a hypnotic, looping and crescendoing soundtrack. (Danny Birchall) Bondage Girl Chris Langdon 1973, 16mm Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. (Mark Toscano) Drugs are bad. (Chris Langdon)

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Evolution of the Red Star Adam Beckett, 1973, 16mm, courtesy of The iotaCenter Coloured pen-and-ink drawings, like topological maps of biomorphic objects, grow and evolve from the red star. Once the master image is formed, this continuously throbbing, pulsating sight is used to ring changes based on years of optical work. Music (by Carl Stone) and picture work together to create a mood of ecstatic tranquility. (Adam Beckett) unc. Bruce Lane 1966, 16mm A haunting, affecting three-minute epic constructed of memorable images and densely imagined narrative fragments distilled to an essence that registers dread, dissolution, fear and despair, but also a bittersweet melancholy, both for an idealized past and a diseased present. (Mark Toscano) Bertha’s Children Roberta Friedman, Grahame Weinbren 1976, 16mm My great-aunt Bertha had seven children. When I visited New York one winter, I asked each of them to be in a film and all of them agreed. When I returned the following winter, however, only David, Marty, Aaron, ­ eople Bernie and Thelma would do it. Frieda, concerned about the crazy p who might see the film and then write her nasty anonymous letters, refused, and Sylvia was in Florida at the time. (Roberta Friedman) Eclipse Predictions Diana Wilson, 16mm Diana Wilson’s mysteriously beautiful animated tableaux fluidly unfold before our eyes, a generous receptacle for the mournful, harrowing

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soundtrack, in which the filmmaker recounts a tragedy from her youth. (Mark Toscano) Venice Pier Gary Beydler, 1976, 16mm Shot spatially out of order on the Venice pier over the course of an entire year, Gary Beydler recomposed the footage in editing to make it proceed consistently forward in space, resulting in an intricate mixing up of chronology. Some cuts could represent a jump of months either forward or backward in time. The result is one of gauzy impressionism brought into vivid and breathtaking clarity. (Mark Toscano) Death of the Gorilla Peter Mays, 1966, 16mm A sight/sound combine of exotic imagery shot semi-randomly in superimposition off a TV and then cut to make a fast moving but extremely ambiguous ‘story’. Death of the Gorilla moves through modern man’s myth mind like a runaway train bursting at the seams. (Peter Mays) The Divine Miracle Dina Krumins, 1973, 16mm A surrealist take on Catholic devotional postcard imagery set into incredible motion, The Divine Miracle took two solid years of labour-intensive work to make, and features a hypnotic original soundtrack by composer Rhys Chatham. (Mark Toscano)

2nd programme: rear view mirror By the Sea Pat O’Neill, Robert Abel, 1963, 16mm Muscle Beach is a fascinating location for people-watching in the L.A. area, and in 1963, the strangeness of its sights was much more pronounced than today. Pat O’Neill’s first film (made with Robert Abel) progresses from humorous, curious observation to energetic, graphical interaction with the sights and sounds of Santa Monica’s famed beach. (Mark Toscano) Documentary Footage Morgan Fisher, 1968, 16mm In an inspired setup, Morgan Fisher taps into the near-infinite nuance

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and complexity to be found in human performance. Unlike much narrative cinema, for which numerous takes are often required for actors to unlock the ideal natural performance, any more than one take would have destroyed this film and rendered it impossible. (Mark Toscano) Olivia’s Place Thom Andersen, 1966, 16mm Olivia may have felt no need to change, but the world around her was not bound by such an impractical sentiment. Olivia’s Place is gone. The site where it used to stand is now a sort of plaza between two large old woodframe houses that were moved to their present location from elsewhere in the city. One of these houses is occupied by a restaurant, the other is occupied by the California Heritage Museum. (Morgan Fisher) 92 |

Hand Held Day Gary Beydler, 1975, 16mm Beydler’s magical Hand Held Day is his most unabashedly beautiful film, but it’s no less complex than his other works. The filming approach is simple, yet incredibly rich with possibilities, as Beydler collapses the time and space of a full day in the Arizona desert via time-lapse photography and a carefully hand-held mirror reflecting the view behind his camera. (Mark Toscano) Future Perfect Roberta Friedman, Grahame Weinbren, 1978, 16mm Future Perfect is an early algorithmic film, based on a collection of decreasing mathematical series that produce visual and auditory rhythms beyond the control of the filmmakers. (Grahame Weinbren) Venusville Chris Langdon, Fred Worden, 1973, 16mm The two filmmakers had a bet: how easily can you tell the difference between a moving image of a still object, and a freeze frame of the same? Pretty easily. No montage, no human subjects, minimal visual content, and the artists basically pissing on the fourth wall by calling attention in every way possible to the artifice of what they’re doing. An anti-film school film made at film school. (Mark Toscano)

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Mirror People Kathy Rose, 1974, 16mm A weird animation about weird people who make weird sounds. Kathy Rose drew the entire film upside-down and lit the artwork from underneath instead of above, to achieve its subtle and strange appearance. (Mark Toscano) Dead Reckoning David Wilson, 1980, 16mm A film which seems deceptively simple, Dead Reckoning comprises three identical-length shots which subtly address our very human tendency to want to give order to our environment, and the poignant failure inherent to such an impulse. The film presents us with not only a view of the filmed landscape, but also a map of the filmmaker’s own movements within the space he attempted to capture. (Mark Toscano) 7362 Pat O’Neill, 1967, 16mm Pat O’Neill’s celebrated mind bomb, the L.A. film that launched a thousand other films. Contact printing, hand processing, and polarization mix in a bizarre, hallucinatory visual feast. (Marc Toscano) A bilaterally symmetrical (west to east) fusion of human, biomorphic and mechanical shapes in motion. Has to do with the spontaneous generation of electrical energy. A fairly rare (forty years ago) demonstration of the Sabattier effect in motion. Numbered after the film stock of the same name. (Pat O’Neill) These programmes allowed the audience members to dive into this special often psychedelic aesthetics of this unique era. The magic of these films shown on 16mm as part of a programme at a festival is, in my view, the best possible way to experience them, since they are part of a wider context. Also knowing, that the 16mm cans had to be shipped over from Los Angeles in their cans and the fact that the archivist and one of the directors were present, makes the event even more valuable. Afterwards I conducted interviews with experimental filmmakers such as Andersen in 2012 during the ‘Think:Film – International Experimental Cinema Congress’ in Berlin69 and in Los Angeles in 2014, I watched his films again at an editing table in the Academy Archive in Los Angeles and another print at a screening organized by Ben Cook and David E. James at LUX in London in 2016.70 Luckily since 2018, after a long time, the beautiful film can be watched online on their website, available to everyone, not just for the few who can trav-

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el to archives and international festivals.71 But still, the best way of experience such films is on a big screen in the original format with an audience. All in all, most of the above-mentioned case studies exemplify the importance of music in films – influencing the visuals, the editing and ultimately the aesthetic experience of the audience members. David E. James and Adam Hyman compiled a book with ‘alternative projections’ (James and Hyman 2015), which mentions experimental film programming in Los Angeles. Their study offers a historical overview on programming and could potentially provide motivation for a similar selection and ordering of future programmes.

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Returning to the programme I organized during the Living Archive festival at the Arsenal Cinema in 2013, I will now analyze it in more detail referencing the affective nature of film experience. In the first film Looking for Mushrooms, Bruce Conner goes on the hunt for mushrooms in Mexico with Timothy Leary, accompanied by the song ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by The Beatles. The music supports the hallucinogenic imagery, the fragmented angles, the disorientating camera movements, and the elements of surrealistic cinema. The guitar sounds convey an atmosphere of floating. When talking about the origins of the song, singer John Lennon referred to Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead (1995), where he found the first line of the song: ‘Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.’ The book was intended as a guidebook for those seeking spiritual enlightenment. Paul McCartney wrote about the song: The final track on Revolver, Tomorrow Never Knows, was definitely John’s. Round about this time people were starting to experiment with drugs, including LSD. John had got hold of Timothy Leary’s adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a pretty interesting book. For the first time we got the idea that, as with ancient Egyptian practice, when you die you lie in state for a few days, and then some of your handmaidens come and prepare you for a huge voyage. Rather than the British version, in which you just pop your clogs. With LSD, this theme was all the more interesting. […] John got his guitar out and started doing ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and it was all on one chord. This was because of our interest in Indian music.72

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George Harrison said about the song’s lyrics and atmosphere: Then it says, ‘Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void – it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within – it is being.’ From birth to death all we ever do is think: we have one thought, we have another thought, another thought, another thought. Even when you are asleep you are having dreams, so there is never a time from birth to death when the mind isn’t always active with thoughts. But you can turn off your mind, and go to the part which Maharishi described as: ‘Where was your last thought before you thought it?’ The whole point is that we are the song. The self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world (including all the fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions) is just clutter. The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So the song is really about transcending and about the quality of the t­ ranscendent.73 The idea of alternate states of consciousness, which was crucial to many people of that era, can be felt throughout the song and film experience. While others use Expanded Cinema in order to expand their consciousness, Conner, with the help of The Beatles, used the short experimental film format. Blurred and distorted pictures are synchronized with the psychedelic music which make a special emotion of being ‘lost in music’ audible and visible. The result is a boundary pushing experience of sound and image. Additionally, the next film in my programme, Mongoloid is Conner’s earliest music video about Devo’s song of the same name. In Kustom Kar Kommandos by Kenneth Anger, a young man strokes the car of his dreams with a powder puff accompanied by the music ‘Dream Lover’. As mentioned before, David E. James refers to the films by Kenneth Anger and others as ‘trance films’. In the next film of the programme the director Marie Menken thanks Kenneth Anger for helping her to film Arabesque for Kenneth Anger in Spain, in which Menken portrays tiles and Islamic architecture alongside Spanish guitar music. The next film Her Mona by Klaus Telscher can be described as a poetic portrait of a young man standing in front of a waterfall to the sound of Asian music. This film was followed by another short film, the 1974 film My name is Oona by Gunvor Nelson, with a soundtrack by Steve Reich. Amos Vogel writes: ‘My name is Oona shows in its long lasting, deeply lyrical pictures, fragments of the coming of consciousness of a little girl. It’s a perfect example of poetic cinema.’74 The abstract classical music gives the film a dreamy feeling to it. In the silent film Lights Menken paints with the nightly illuminations displayed shortly before Christmas and so her ‘joyful dancing light pictures change reality – everything

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is movement and light. A hymnal to the art of filming.’75 The final film of the programme was Labyrinth by Maarten Visser. Here mosaic tiles are used to capture the spirit of music. All the films together created the festival-experience of a bygone but present era. After the screening, audience members discussed the heightened emotional aesthetic experience they had just shared. The event made a special experience palpable, due to their usages of visuals, sound, and music, which, I believe, evoked a ‘sensual pleasure’. The films form a community by creating a remembered and shared reference system. They become vehicles of space and time, in which the actual and virtual, fantasy and reality are blurred. On the basis of the boundary crossing qualities of the music or ecstatic experience or ‘trip’, a film can put you in another world or in another state of consciousness. These case studies show that re-screenings, re-enactments in cinemas, museums and galleries can affect audience members and at the same time can help for an understanding of analogue media in new contexts today. Moreover, they allow for a ‘sensual pleasure’. I believe that creative innovations in film music that characterize contemporary cinema could be traced back not only to the scoring practice of commercial narrative films, but also to the experimental films since the 1960s. Some usage of music of music offer an immersion into the images, while others reject an immersion in order to expose the experimental materiality of the artistic works. Are the films and Expanded Cinema practices of the 1960s and 1970s extending this fundamental element of the cinematic experience into viewing experiences in the 21st century? Or to what extent do the films represent a shift in the reception and how so? One could argue, that already in 1896 Maxim Gorky comments in his famous text ‘Lumière’s Cinematograph’,76 written after his first encounter with Lumière films and discussing the alteration of the state of consciousness. When Gorky chronicles his feelings of excitement and awe as he first experienced moving images, he refers to an entirely new medium and new form of perception.77 Gorky illustrates the transition of the familiar experience of looking at a photograph to a fundamentally new and unexpected experience: the image starts to move, it comes to life. He refers to a new seemingly magic medium unlike anything seen before.  Compared to Gorky’s experience, the experience of an experimental film nowadays is perhaps not so fundamentally different from the experience of watching films of other genres. Therefore, it is not an experience of a new paradigm per se. In a contemporary context, one could perhaps compare this experience with using a virtual reality headset for the first time. When I address the issue of another state of consciousness caused by experimental films, I trace an experience of a now well-known medium. Nevertheless, I claim that the experience of experimental films can still alter the viewer’s

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state of consciousness. The issue is not whether the medium is new or familiar, but whether the viewer experiences new (or well-known) aesthetics used by filmmakers and artists. These films can have a drastic experiential effect on the viewer. By using the aesthetics of a flicker effect, for example, experimental films may affect the nervous system, since flickering excites nerves in the eyes. Experimental films can also cause vertigo in the viewer, due to the use of aesthetics such as fast-moving images or fast colour editing. These experiences can be compared to loud music that can cause physical reactions in the audience. When soundwaves vibrate in the body, the aesthetic experience is visceral. Experiences of experimental films can, thus, be described as a holistic experience including the auditory and visual sensations. When having the chance to curate a programme of those experimental films, one also programmes affects, which allow a sensing of a zeitgeist these films had when they were created more than 40 years ago. | 97

NOTES 1 See: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Elcott/Elcott-2011-Rooms-ofOur-Time.pdf accessed: 1 January 2018. 2

Ferguson 2001:16.

3

Compare Senta Siewert 2013b.

4

Further publications to the theme: Cherchi Usai, 2001; to presentation forms before the cinema: Mulvey, 2006; Blümlinger, 2009; Dubois 2010; Haber, 2012; Aumont, 2013.

5

Pantenburg, 2012 p. 77. Screen Dynamics – Mapping the Borders of Cinema (2012) is an anthology developed from a conference of film scholars that alongside museums, includes moving images on the internet, on DVD, in theatre and on television and furthermore talks about the circulation and the convergence of media contents on different platforms above and beyond national borders.

6

Bhabha, 2004. Texts by Ursula Frohne (2001), Volker Pantenburg (2010) and Giuliana Bruno (2007) allow a good introduction to the theoretical discussions about the experience of art in museums. In the contemplation of video installations, Giuliana Bruno refers in her media archaeological project Atlas of Emotion, to the displacement of an experience of cognitive mobility from an experience of bodily movement.

7

Belton 2014: 470.

8

Elsaesser 2016: 264.

9

The 16mm films are stored in the Arsenal collection as well as in a newly restored version in the UCLA archive.

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10 Translation by the author from an interview in June 2014. 11 http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/about/essential-cinema accessed: 1 January 2018. 12 http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/about/essential-cinema accessed: 1 January 2018. 13 Ibid. 14 Mekas, quoted in https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/24/jonas-mekasobituary accessed: 1 January 2018. 15 https://www.dortmunder-u.de/en/event/image-image-film-and-contemporary-art accessed: 1 January 2018. 16 https://lux.org.uk/about-us accessed: 1 January 2018. 17 https://lux.org.uk/product/shoot-shoot-shoot-first-decade-london-film-makersco-operative-1966-76 accessed: 1 January 2018. 18 In Germany, there is an enormous collection of documentation of Expanded Cinema performances at the Württembergischen Kunstverein in Stuttgart, which

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shows besides Sherwin artists such as Malcolm Le Grice, Anthony McCall and Bruce McClure. U. a. von Yann Beauvais, Michael Snow, Tony Conrad, Gill Eatherly, Valie Export, Wilhelm und Birgit Hein, Ken Jacobs, Werner Nekes, Sally Potter, William Raban, Jürgen Reble/Thomas Köner, Lis Rhodes, Barbara Rubin, Carolee Schneemann, James Scott /Claes Oldenburg and Paul Sharits. 19 https://lux.org.uk/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 20 http://www.lightindustry.org/about/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 21 https://www.lafilmforum.org accessed: 1 January 2018. 22 https://lightcone.org/en/about-light-cone accessed: 1 January 2018. 23 http://www.laborberlin-film.org/about/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 24 http://www.laborberlin-film.org/film-in-the-present-tense/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 25 https://www.harunfarocki.de/installations/1995.html accessed: 1 January 2018. 26 Translation by the author from an interview in June 2013. 27 https://www.harun-farocki-institut.org/en/category/projects/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 28 https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/themes/eye-on-art. In 2012, experimental film curator Simona Monizza, film programmer Anna Abrahams, and Expanded Cinema senior curator Mark-Paul Meyer initiated the series. ‘Eye Filmmuseum is the Dutch national film institute and the only museum for film heritage and the art of film in the Netherlands. Eye was founded in 2010 by merging the Nederlands Filmmuseum (preservation, management, and accessibility of film heritage), the Filmbank (management and promotion of experimental films), the Netherlands Institute for Film Education (national film education) and Holland Film (international promotion of Dutch film).’ (eyefilm collection policy download) 29 Quoted on luxonline http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/guy_sherwin/man_ with_mirror.html accessed: 1 January 2018.

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30 http://teachingandlearningcinema.org accessed: 1 January 2018. 31 http://teachingandlearningcinema.org accessed: 1 January 2018. 32 This experience can be compared with the curiosity that Tom Gunning presents in Early Cinema. 33 https://www.ccas.com.au/exhibitions/horror-film-1 accessed: 1 January 2018. 34 Le Grice 1979: 70. 35 https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/themes/eye-on-art, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?time_continue=13&v=sZSz_jHIGKE accessed: 1 January 2018. 36 Le Grice 1972. 37 Mekas 1973. 38 http://beeldenvoordetoekomst.nl/en/project/general-information.html accessed: 1 January 2018. 39 Mark- Paul Meyer, ‘Care for the Material Archive,’ https://www.academia.edu/ 29828464/Care_for_§_Archive accessed: 1 January 2018. 40 https://amianet.org/wp-content/uploads/AMIA-Code-of-EthicsDUPE.pdf accessed: 1 January 2018. 41 https://www.fiafnet.org/pages/E-Resources/Collection-Policies-Affiliates.html accessed: 1 January 2018. 42 Bernhard Waldenfels (2010) delivers a good overview of the history of concepts, likewise the DFG sponsored publications of the specialized research area 626 ‘Aesthetic Experience’ (2006). 43 Quote found in Garcia Bardon 2010, p. 262. 44 Balázs 1930. 45 Balázs 1995: 215. Martin Seel speaks of a ‘contemplative and imaginative realisation of the sensual nature of discernment’. (Seel 2003: 82). 46 cf. also Laurent Jullier (2002). 47 Bruno 2014: 144. 48 https://lux.org.uk/work/light-music accessed: 1 January 2018. 49 Chion 1994. 50 Altman 1992. 51 Gorbman 1998. 52 Frith 1989: 136. Cf. Frith, 1996: 109. Frith contradicts the above-mentioned dualism, that differentiates between ‘brainless’, physiscal sexy pop music and serious, intellectual, cerebral avantgarde music. 53 Evens connects this with Hegel’s phenomenology. Moreover, Evens describes the etymological source of the word ‘digital’, that stems from deictic and means that the finger can show something. He ascertains that for a sound digitization (A/D conversion) the sound is divided into units (samples), in the case of an image digitization the picture is divided in to small squares (pixels). 54 Evens investigates in which way music incorporates contemporary history. Among others, he refers to the artistic works of Glenn Gould, Keith Jarrett, Steve

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Reich, Keith Rowe, Jimi Hendrix, Scanner and John Zorn and investigates in which way the sounds make sense and can be sensed. 55 The immersive character of making music is, according to Evens, a ‘musicandum’. Evens writes that it ‘is not exactly heard or felt or even produced in the music; it exists at the limit where a passive sensation and an active playing collide’ (Evens 2005: 146). I would add, that one is rather dealing with the present re-writing of the past. 56 Siewert 2013f. When describing poetics, David Bordwell recurs to the Greek ­poietike ποιητικη which means = the creating art: ‘Poetics is thus not another critical ‘approach’, like myth criticism or deconstruction. Nor is it a new ‘theory’ like psychoanalysis or Marxism. In its broadest compass, it is a conceptual framework within which particular questions about films’ composition and effects can be posed.’ Bordwell, 1989: 371. 57 David Picker (Productions manager of United Artists) said about the soundtrack

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negotiations: ‘Let’s get something very clear about the Beatles deal. We made the deal for one reason… we were expanding our music recording company so we were going to get publishing rights and a soundtrack album.’ In: Catterall, 2001: 1 58 For example: 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, MGM, Paramount, United Artists, Warner Brothers. 59 Cf. The documentary Youthquake ’65 – The London Pop Explosion (director: Christoph Dreher, Assistant Director: Senta Siewert, 2005 for Arte). Quant, 1966. 60 Cf. Youthquake ’65. See also 3 SAT TV series Lost in Music (Assistant Director ­Siewert). 61 Townshend called it ‘Union Jack-Jacket’. 62 Another artist that revolutionized rock music is Jimi Hendrix with his singular electronic celestial guitar music, which is recognized by its particular use of feedback. 63 The artists are Rikkert Brok for the visuals and Maarten Halmans for the music. 64 More on affects in Chapter 3. 65 See this Sound (http://see-this-sound.at) accessed: 1 January 2018. 66 See this Sound (http://see-this-sound.at) accessed: 1 January 2018. Also in this context: Sitney, 1979. 67 From the synopsis at the database at the Academy Archive in Los Angeles. 68 From my interview with Andersen. 69 During this event I also had the chance of doing an interview with experimental filmmaker Michael Snow about his films Wavelength (1967), Standard Time (1967), Dripping Water (together with Joyce Wieland, 1969). 70 In Los Angeles I did also research at the Getty Institute and the UCLA-Archive, UCLA Information Studies and USC Cinematic Arts. I furthermore talked to Haden Guest from the Warner Brothers Archive and Harvard Archive; Steve Anker from CalArts and went to events at Filmforum, redcat, lacma and Echo Park Film Center. Andersen’s films were also shown (amongst others) at the Hammer museum in 2009 during the exhibition Restoring the Los Angeles Avant-Garde.

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71 https://lux.org.uk/work/a-rock-and-roll-movie accessed: 1 January 2018. 72 https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/tomorrow-never-knows/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 73 https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/tomorrow-never-knows/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 74 https://www.the-paulmccartney-project.com/song/tomorrow-never-knows/ accessed: 1 January 2018. Cf. Amos Vogl 1974. 75 Quote from Ute Aurand on the Arsenal website. http://films.arsenal-berlin.de/ index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/316 accessed: 1 January 2018. 76 Maxim Gorky, ‘Lumiere’s Cinematograph’, July 4, 1896, http://www.mcsweeneys. net/articles/contest-winner-36-black-and-white-and-in-color accessed: 1 January 2018. 77 Gorky describes his experience: ‘Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without color. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, It is not motion but its soundless specter. Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont’s and saw Lumière’s cinematograph—moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances. However, I shall try to convey its fundamentals. When the lights go out in the room in which Lumière’s invention is shown, there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture, ‘A Street in Paris’—shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings and people in various poses, all frozen into immobility. All this is in grey, and the sky above is also grey—you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life.’ Maxim Gorky, ‘Lumiere’s Cinematograph’, July 4, 1896, http://www. mcsweeneys.net/articles/contest-winner-36-black-and-white-and-in-color

BIBLIOGRAPHY Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Altman, Rick, The American Film Musical. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Aumont, Jacques. Que reste-t-il du cinéma? Paris: Vrin, 2013.

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Balázs, Béla. ‘Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films.’ Schriften zum Film. Band I: Der sichtbare Mensch – Kritiken und Aufsätze 1922-1926. Eds. Helmut H. Diederichs, Wolfgang Gersch, and Magda Nagy. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1924. 43-136. Balázs, Béla. Der Geist des Films. Halle: W. Knapp, 1930. Balázs, Béla. Theory of the Film. Character and Growth of a New Art. London: Dennis Dobson, 1952 (1930). Balázs, Béla. Zur Kunstphilosophie des Films (1938). in: F.-J. Albersmeier (Ed.). Theorie des Films. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995. Balsom, Erica. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Bellour, Raymond, ‘Of an other cinema’, in: Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader. Tanya Leighton (Ed.). London: Tate, 2008. 406-424. Belton, John. ‘If film is dead, what is cinema?’ Screen, Volume 55, Issue 4, Winter

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2014. 460-470. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. Blümlinger, Christa. Kino aus zweiter Hand. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2009. Bordwell, David. Making Meaning: Interference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of ­Cinema. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Brophy, Philip. 100 Modern Soundtracks. London: BFI Screen Guides, 2005. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2007. Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Cambrinus, Robert. ‘In the Cinema.’ OnCurating.org 23: The Future of Short Film [special issue, ed. John Canciani] (May 2014): 30-33. http://www.on-curating.org/ issue-23-reader/in-the-cinema-by-robert-cambrinus.html#.W8sUuMRCTIU. accessed: 1 January 2018. Casetti, Francesco. The Lumière Galaxy. Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Catterall, Ali and Simon Welles. Put Your Face Here. British Cult Movies Since the Sixties. London: Fourth Estate, 2001. Cherchi Usai, Paolo. The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age. London: BFI, 2001. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. Was ist Philosophie? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Donnelly, K. J. Film Music: Critical Approaches. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

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Dubois, Philippe, et al. Extended Cinema, Milan: Campanotto, 2010. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Between knowing and believing’. Cine-Dispositves, Essays in Epistemology Across Media. Eds. Maria Tortajada, François Albera. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. 45-72. Elsaesser, Thomas: Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Evens, Aden. Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Ferguson, Russell. Douglas Gordon, Cambridge/Mass: MIT, 2001. Frith, Simon. ‘Music and Identity’ Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall, Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 1996. 108-127. Frith, Simon. ‘Zur Ästhetik der Populären Musik.’ Pop Scriptum 1 1992. Frith, Simon. Andrew Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader. London: Routledge, 1988. Frith, Simon. Music for Pleasure. London: Routledge, 1989. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites – On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Frohne, Ursula. ‘‘That’s the only now I get’: Immersion und Partizipation in VideoInstallationen. Kunst/Kino. Ed. Gregor Stemmrich. Kassel: Oktagon 2001. 217-238. Garcia Bardon, Xavier. ‘Sur Man with Mirror de Guy Sherwin’. Extended Cinema, Le cinéma gagne du terrain. Eds. Philippe Dubois, Frédéric Monvoisin, Elena Biserna. Milan: Campanotto Editore, 2010. 261-268. Gass, Lars. Film und Kunst nach dem Kino. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2012. Gledhill, Christine. ‘Signs of Melodrama.’ Und immer wieder geht die Sonne auf. Texte zum melodramatischen Film. Eds. Christian Cargnelli, Michael Palm. Vienna: PVS, 1994. 191-209. Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare. Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Gorbmann, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Haber, Lilian, Ursula Frohne. Kinematographische Räume. Installationsästhetik in Film und Kunst, Paderborn: Fink, 2012. Harms, Rudolf. Philosophie des Films. Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1926. James, E. David, Adam Hyman, eds. Alternative Projections. Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980. Bloomington: Libbey, 2015. James, E. David. Rock ‘n’ Film: Cinema’s Dance With Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Jullier, Laurent. Le son au cinema. Paris: Editions Cahiers du cinéma / Les Petits Cahiers / Scérén-Cndp, 2006. Kalinak, Kathryn. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

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Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso, 1995. Leary, Timothy. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead. New York: Citadel Press, 1995. Le Grice, Malcolm. ‘Independent Cinema: Towards Temporal Economy’, Screen, ­Volume 20, Issue 3-4, Winter 1979. Mekas, Jonas. Village Voice, Oct 11th 1973. Monizza, Simona. ‘The Short Film Pool Project: Saving Short Films from Oblivion in the Digital Era’. The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 17.2 (2017). Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaction, 2006. Pantenburg, Volker. ‘1970 and Beyond. Experimental Cinema and Installation Art’, in: Koch, Gertrud, Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöhler, eds. Screen Dynamics. Mapping the Borders of Cinema. Wien: Synema, 2012. 78-92.

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Pantenburg, Volker. ‘Migrational Aesthetics. Zur Erfahrung in Kino und Museum’. montage AV 19(1) (2010): 37-53. Quant, Mary. Quant by Quant. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966. Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography. The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Seel, Martin. ‘Über die Reichweite ästhetischer Erfahrung’. Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste. Epistemische, ästhetische und religiöse Formen von Erfahrungen im Vergleich. Ed. Gert Mattenklott. Hamburg: Meiner, 2004. 73-81. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Siewert, Senta. ‘Soundtracks of Double Occupancy: Sampling Sounds and Cultures in Fatih Akin’s Head On’. Eds. Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters, Wanda Strauven, Mind the Screen. Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. 198-208. Siewert, Senta. ‘Re-enactment of Music-Video Clips in Feature Films’. Extended Cinema, Le cinéma gagne du terrain. Eds. Philippe Dubois, Frédéric Monvoisin, Elena Biserna. Milan: Campanotto Editore, 2010. 136-142. Siewert, Senta, and Barbara Le Maître. ‘Introduction to Exhibition Strategies’ Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013a. 309-310. Siewert, Senta. ‘Across the Territories: Exhibiting Music Video’ Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013b. 346-351. Siewert, Senta. ‘An der Peripherie des Kinos. Experimentelle Bewegtbilder’. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (zfm) 09.2 (2013c).

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Siewert, Senta. ‘Born to be alive’. Living Archive: Archivarbeit als künstlerische und kuratorische Praxis der Gegenwart/Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice. Eds. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Uli Ziemons. Berlin: b-books, 2013d. 196-197. Siewert, Senta. ‘Programmgestalten und Kuratieren von Experimentalfilmen’. Augenblick. Konstanzer Hefte der Medienwissenschaft 56/57 2013e: 64-70. Siewert, Senta. Entgrenzungsfilme – Jugend, Musik, Affekt, Gedächtnis. Eine pragmatische Poetik zeitgenössischer europäischer Filme. Marburg: Schüren, 2013f. Siewert, Senta with Carolyn Birdsall.’Of Sound Mind: Mental Distress and Sound in Twentieth-Century Media Culture.’ Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 16.1 (2013g): 27-45. Siewert, Senta. ‘Musik, Affektivität, Erinnerung und Vermarktung bei Trainspotting’, in: Carsten Heinze, Laura Niebling, Eds., Populäre Musikkulturen im Film (Film und Bewegtbild in Kultur und Gesellschaft). Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016. 267-

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287. Siewert, Senta. ‘Affektive und partizipative Erfahrung bei Expanded-CinemaAufführungen auf Filmfestivals’. Eds. Florian Mundhenke, Thomas Weber. Kinoerfahrungen. Theorien, Geschichte, Perspektiven. Hamburg: Avinius, 2017. 233-246. Siewert, Senta. ‘Am Puls der Zeit’, in: Ursula v. Keitz, Ed., ‚Alles dreht sich ... und bewegt sich’. Der Tanz und das Kino. Marburg: Schüren, 2017. 46-54. Sobshack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004. Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. London: Distributed Art Pub, 1974. Waldenfels, Bernhard. ‘Vom Rhythmus der Sinne.’ Sinnesschwellen. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden (Teil 3), Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999. Walley, Jonathan. ‘Recreating Expanded Cinema.’ Incite Journal of Experimental Media 4 (Fall 2013) 25 October 2013 accessed 10.08.2018. Wright, Robb. ‘Score vs. Song: Art, Commerce, and the H Factor in Film and Television Music.’ Popular Music and Film. Ed. Ian Inglis. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.

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CHAPTER 3

Reconstruction: Memory and Audio-Visual Heritage

Siewert, S., Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462985834_ch03

ABSTRACT Chapter 3 ‘Reconstruction: Memory, Audio-Visual Heritage’ is concerned with how to actually analyse the activity of re-screening, re-enacting and reconstructing film. Given that film archives have grown in relevance in recent years, one may ask, what the relationship between aesthetic experience and memory at the intersection of film archives, cinema, and exhibition practices may be. A key part of the process of rediscovery is the artistic practice of reconstruction. My focus will be on the concept of remediation while analysing artistic practices dealing with the past, using found footage, re-enactment, and sampling. Furthermore, questions relating to audio-visual cultural heritage and cultural memory are addressed with recourse to general concepts of memory and transnationality of memory. k e y wo r ds

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Re-screenings, re-enactments, and re-workings have the potential to evoke emotions that help communicate to the audience a thicker description and understanding about the films and artwork of the 1960s and 1970s from both within and without the art. The various kinds of re-presentation may encourage philosophical questions about perception, while also addressing practical issues of archival strategies and purposes. Film archives as heritage institutions have grown in cultural significance over the past decade not the least because archives increasingly offer screenings of the films stored in their vaults. What are the relationships between aesthetic experience and memory at the intersection of film archives, cinema, and exhibition practices? A further question raised in this chapter is: what can we learn about the memory and experiential effects of artistic tools, such as found footage and re-enactment, sampling and appropriation, when applied to the historic materials? The differences between the 1960s and 1970s films and those of this century articulate different paradigmatic assumptions regarding society and aesthetics. Experiencing a film from a different period in time, the viewer may get a ‘historical sensation’ of a past era. The term ‘historical sensation’ was originally coined by historian Johan Huizinga (1920) and denotes the unexpected feelings emerging when encountering a historical object or when experiencing art of a bygone time. Huizinga described ‘historical sensation’ as an ‘immediate contact with the past, a sensation as deep as the purest enjoyment of art […] an almost ecstatic perception of no longer being myself, of flowing into the worlds around me, touching the essence of things, experiencing truth through history.’1 A mystical experience of immediate contact with the past, an experience that does not produce historical knowledge or offers a privileged insight into the completed past, but may stimulate a ‘passion for the past.’ This passion can be compared to a love for historical research, archive fever or as care for an ‘historical heritage’. Ruth Benschop (2009) notes that one needs a certain sensitivity, interest, or prior knowledge to be overcome by a ‘historical sensation’. Huizinga’s research strategies and the notion of a ‘historical sensation’ are beneficial for widening the often too narrow horizons of film studies. In the context of my case studies, a teenager beholds a replay, re-screening or reenactment differently than a seventy-year old who holds an embodied knowledge of the past and, perhaps, experiences a past screening of the film, but the

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younger person without such memories and experiences still can be overcome by a ‘historical sensation’ of the experience in the now. The analysis of the following case studies will explore the revelatory potentials of the concepts of ‘historical sensation’, memory, and audio-visual heritage.

HISTORIOGRAPHY – FILMS THAT MAKE HISTORY ‘Historical sensation’, memory, and audio-visual heritage are tightly connected to questions on history and historiography. One should notice that there is a difference between a canonical historiography and the awareness that history is always in the making. In what follows, some current discourses on the historiography of film and art, and concepts of film history in general are briefly summarized. However, the point is not to simply provide a historic overview, but to review it from the vantage point of the nature of remembering, recollecting, and representation – making past and present anew. Some historians who have analyzed historiographies within literary theory have contributed to such issues as thinking about history, memory and preservation, and specifically the preservation of elapsed time. These contributions are relevant also for the discussion about the preservation of film and video. In his essay ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, Hayden White asks if an audiovisual account of history could equal a ‘professional writing of history’, for film is, after all, ‘a shaped representation of reality’ (White 1988: 1195). White references three philosophers of history, namely Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Rancière. Kracauer and Benjamin’s ideas are directed by the question of whether film and photography make an incommensurable experience of the historical possible that would not be obtainable otherwise. Benjamin describes photography and film making as an optical unconscious, as providing a possibility, by means of optical media, to obtain an opportunity to experience the modern world. Kracauer’s concept of history does not seek an objective historical truth, but rather concentrates on how to make it understandable and experiential (Kracauer 1973: 17). Following this theory, the past behaves towards the present as the photographic medium behaves towards reality. The historical categorization does not define time periods but rather reveals intervals that could be described as ‘folds in time’, in which the chronology of the course of time is favoured over the simultaneity of time periods (Kracauer 1973: 17-20). Implicitly connected to Kracauer’s considerations are Jacques Rancière’s concepts, which seek probe the tension between individual and general time periods. For Rancière, film plays a decisive role in the question of the historicity of the arts (Rancière 2003: 231). André Bazin posits in a similar direc-

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tion the ‘mummification of change’, that in cinema the quality of process is ‘embalmed’, allowing an experience of the permanence of time (Bazin 2004: 39). Benjamin’s, Kracauer’s, Rancière’s and Bazin’s perspectives informed my analysis, since their concepts open up a panorama about thinking of historiography.2 The analysis of the following case studies will explore the revelatory potentials of the concepts of ‘historical sensation’, memory, and audio-visual heritage. Film scholars, such as Philip Rosen, maintain that the concept of historicity should not only be understood within the area of discourse about the specific temporality of a film, but rather with the indexicality of the film as a historical document (Rosen 2001: 354). Sylvie Lindeperg (2003) speaks of a ‘cinema in action’ that casts each film as having a completely separate access to its historical context. Lorenz Engell (1995) takes a step further in stating that the study of history is determined by cinematic thinking. Likewise, the ‘New Film History’ understands film as a historical source that shapes its own form of knowledge of a historiographical or historical commentary.3 The ‘New Film History’ coincided with the digital turn in the humanities, which constituted a fundamental change in access to films as well as ways of collecting, storing, presenting and analyzing them. Thomas Elsaesser writes explicitly from this perspective of the present relating it to the concept of multiple pasts: The project of a ‘film history as media archaeology’ is thus intended to liberate from their straight-jackets all those repositionings of linear chronology that operate with hard binaries between, for instance, early cinema and classical cinema, spectacle versus narrative, linear narrative versus interactivity. Instead, film history would acknowledge its peculiar status, and become a matter of tracing paths or laying tracks leading from the respective ‘now’ to different pasts, in modalities that accommodate continuities as well as ruptures. (Elsaesser 2004: 99) The concepts of ‘film history as media archaeology’ and ‘revisionist film historiography’ allow change within the conventional understanding of film historiography. Since film historiography is tied to questions of memory, concepts like Elsaesser’s ‘historical imaginary’ and the ‘diagonal memory’ are noteworthy, since they describe the film as an aesthetic possibility of experience, that allows the always-known to be re-experienced. The history of cinema is being reviewed, ever since new media, media convergence, and the transformation of analogue to digital. The new media has led to a ‘remediation’ of cinema (Bolter and Grusin 1998). Sean Cubitt argues looking from the vantage point of the digital era to the beginnings of cinema, ‘I use the terms pixel, cut, and vector here, both to anchor the discussion in

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the material of film, and to shape the whole as a retrospective historiography of images in motion from the standpoint of the digital era, written for a digital audience’ (Cubitt, 2004: 3). These new perspectives allow a better understanding of art forms from a different era, in particular the case studies mentioned later. Yet, since many images are no longer only accessible in archives but can be found in the internet, Catherine Russell claims that ‘the death of ‘film’ and the rise of digital media, have effectively enabled and produced a new critical language that we are only really learning to speak’ (Russell 2018: 28). This new language can be understood as bearing important implications for the construction of history and cultural memory, ‘carrying the promise of shocking the past into attention’ (Russell 2018: 50). In contrast to these positions, Miriam Hansen (2012) claims that digital transformations should be integrated into a wider cultural memory, while, at the same time, a rediscovery and reinvention of cinema should occur. Indeed, more and more initiatives entice audiences with new concepts back into cinemas. One initiative seeking to make cinema a more aesthetic and communicative place operates in the Netherlands with the Cineville-pas: for around twenty euros a month one can visit nearly all repertory and art house cinemas, sneak previews and discussions with film makers as often as one likes. The pass is also valid for selected documentary film festivals, like the IDFA. Such initiatives are important to offer a variety of possible presentation areas for different art forms and new chances for the dissemination of moving images. Moreover, different forms of ‘counter-history’ have developed since feminist writing on film history of the 1970s and the idea of an oral history originating from cultural studies (Rosen 2001, Gledhill and Knight 2015). Marcia Landy examines film, television, and the internet as multimedia systems and detects in them a new form of ‘counter-history’ (2015). I think that the expansion of the cinematic forms in regard to artistic practices, such as reenactments of experimental films (or other films), can also be understood as ‘counter-history’, because film historiography is not chronological or genealogical, but rather can be re-experienced whenever wanted and can, therefore, be understood as a performative practice. Inspired by Jacques Rancière, I understand film generally as part of history, and at the same time as a maker of history. In this respect my scholarly accompaniment of the practical works and the theoretical aesthetic investigations inform a reciprocal relationship with the discussions about the conservation and exhibition practices of ephemeral art forms. The scholarly accompaniment serves the updating of theoretical discussions, whereby the results can, in the end, be advantageous for the participants themselves. Or as Farocki said in my interview about his own work in respect to memory:

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Coming back to Schnittstelle/Interface (1995) and the question whether it is a re-enactment, I had the idea to repeat the text, because that is so interesting. When I edit something and there is a person in it and then I meet this person co-incidentally in life, then I think, I know this person better than they know themselves, naturally not in depth, but their ­mimics, behaviour and concerning social interaction, then yes. And from film, there is such an experience that you can obtain from making films, but the other is, that I know the sound of it by heart for the rest of my life. So, from films, I can recount the commentary decades later or what the people say. And then I realized that when I have to check the subtitles, and because I have spent so much time editing the film, I don’t have to check the original and I know immediately on the screen whether the titles deviate or not. And this form or memory or sound, I found it a reasonable way of remembering. But so that, the work itself is so, that you have a distance to the remembered and it has a life of its own, hopefully.4 Farocki describes his artistic decisions of making films as a way of remembering. Farocki was also part of the now following case study of an Expanded Cinema work performed during the Berlin Film Festival in 2012 for an international audience.

CASE STUDY: THE REALM OF POSSIBILITIES 4 – ACCESS: DIAMONDS, ENTER, FIN One of the most unusual and interesting projects from the Living Archive group resonates with a large variety of questions on archives, aesthetic experience, history, and memory. The project was called The Realm of Possibilities 4 – Access: Diamonds, Enter, Fin and is part of Speculations on the Invention and Emergence of New Subject Constellations in Cinema, which focusses artistically on access to the Arsenal archive. Against the backdrop of Forum Expanded 2012 of the Berlin Film Festival, Angela Melitopoulos and Constanze Ruhm collaborated as directors on this particular cinema performance, which took place in the Arsenal cinema. Standing on the cinema’s proscenium was a 16mm editing table. During this Expanded Cinema performance, film maker Harun Farocki sat at that editing table in front of the audience and gave a commentary to muted films chosen from the 1972 Berlin Film Festival Forum programme, while Eunice Martins and Mehmet Can Özer played the piano and synthesiser to extend the sonic space of the films been shown. Farocki and his handling of the film was video­ taped and projected live on the cinema screen. At the same time Erika and Ulrich Gregor, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Anselm Franke, and I positioned

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ourselves among the film rolls in the archive space next to the cinema. We, as archivists, curators or film scholars, discussed new forms of access to the archive and programming decisions. This discussion was documented live on video and was projected as a split screen next to the image being filmed from the editing table in the cinema. The announcement of the programme of this ‘performative archival viewing’ read as follows: This control room between archive, theatre, and cinema will become a psycho-technical plateau with invisible entrances and exits and a few magical archival films. Coincidence, the bodily insistence of being there, and reflections on the relationship between institutional architecture and cinematographic projection will all play an important role. The invited archivists will discuss the question of access to a virtual space of programming by means of films and film clips from fiction films, documentaries, and experimental films about workers’ struggles and urban warfare, relations between the sexes, and the ties between statement and film time, always focusing on the question of access. 5 During the live discussion with the archivists and curators, which was filmed and projected live in the cinema screen, I had the chance to ask questions and also quote from Foucault on the archive. Moreover, this unrehearsed debate evoked a heated reaction by curator Anselm Franke when I asked about the sometimes difficult communication between archivists, curators and artists when accessing archival films, which already David Francis mentioned in his book Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital (2010). In this discussion during this Expanded Cinema performance, I realized that there is also more communication necessary between academics and curators in order to understand each other. This Expanded Cinema performance had multiple layers: live performance, screening, commentary, discussion, and parallel spaces were brought together on the screen using a split screen technique. In the course of the three-hour event, practical archival issues were discussed, aesthetics analyzed, and philosophical questions raised dealing with issues of perception, memory, and the archive. At an Expanded Cinema event the hierarchies between audience spaces and sound streams are flexible. Different time and space levels of the event become part of the structure. In this process the audience members play an important role, since they may connect all these levels during their experience. This complex performance shows that Melitopoulos and Ruhm are able to initiate and analyze different topics simultaneously on a meta-level, name-

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ly juxtaposing two spaces: the cinema and the archive. After the three-hour ephemeral experience, discussions took place and it was noticed that some audience members picked up on most of these layers. Such a live experience can not only raise many questions among the viewers but also for theoretical discourses concerning different aspects about film art, archival work, and access to the past. Melitopoulos reflects on this performance by referring to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: ‘The participants of The Realm of Possibilities take on the role of the ‘new archivist’, who, as Gilles Deleuze writes, works with a new aesthetic paradigm.’6 Due to the access to the film archive by means of art, an aesthetic paradigm can be introduced into the realm of politics. Melitopoulos underlines the advantages of such an ‘archive cinema’:

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With the Living Archive project, the ‘archive cinema’ of the Arsenal is a paradigmatic site of reflection about the machines of desire and affect that have determined our politics and will continue to do so. It is an experimental practice in which artistic production experiences its political field. The Arsenal is, or will be a postmodern, ‘sacred’ site, which allows us to position our urban society beyond the rite of film projection, and which will constantly deterritorialize and reterritorialize. ‘What’s political is not the film, but the cinema,’ or more precisely, the ‘archive cinema.’ […] The Arsenal works with the living and transitory aspects of the film image and sees each screening as an event in which the gazes, gestures, and languages of the audience contribute to defining and extending the archive and its location. The connection between the singularity of the cinema experience (every print in the archive gets traces every time it’s screened, every festival creates genealogies through its own programming) and feeding back to the work with the archive creates a memory-cosmological force field that constructs relations to the institution beyond persons, networks, and documents, thus producing an agency between audience, producer, and the film image.7 This idea of an archive creating a ‘memory-cosmological force field’ is new and depicts cinema and the archival practices as a living ‘meta-historical subject’ that causes agency and, thus political interventions.

DOCUMENTS – TESTIFYING THE PAST The whole event was filmed with a third camera and edited for a documentary film. A year later, Melitopoulos showed this documentation as a part of an installation in the Kunstwerke (KW) gallery. Thus, a documentation of an

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Expanded Cinema performance, which uses films from the 1970s that were shown in a cinema, had now entered the gallery space. On the left monitor, one could see the documentation and on the right monitor, films from the 1970s. For my own documentary film project, I filmed the exhibition space and the installation of the former Expanded Cinema performance. In essence, I documented an already documented film, which, in turn, documented a live Expanded Cinema performance using documentary films. The following questions arise: To what extent can recordings read as documents? What do they testify? I would argue, that documentations enable new re-enactments of ephemeral works in the present day. But I also agree with Diana Taylor who says that performances cannot be properly saved or documented, as it is a bodily experience that can only be transferred through the body and can only live in the present (Taylor 2003). Nevertheless, performance should be taken seriously as a way of transferring knowledge. Taylor writes: The oral tradition of renewing a story with every telling should allow us to expand and reinvigorate the treasures of the past. In dance, gestures, movement and the sounds of the body lies a hidden code of crossreferencing possibilities. The potential for the body to be understood by others in a coded or in a direct way allows different people their own level of access. In antithesis to the ‘so-called’ stable objects that are kept in an archive, the repertoire of the performative process does not necessarily remain the same. It simultaneously retains and transforms its own meaning and terrain. (Taylor 2003: 9) Taylor differentiates between repertoire and archive as a repertoire enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge. Repertoire, etymologically ‘a treasury, an inventory’, also allows for individual agency, referring also to ‘the finder, discoverer’, and meaning ‘to find out’. The repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there’, being part of the transmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning. (Taylor 2003: 20) For Taylor, in the performances of the 1960s and 1970s, the body is the basis of all knowledge. In comparison to the portrayal in theatre or drama, in which

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a person takes on the persona of another character, performance is, following Taylor, ‘the expression of the deepest thoughts and desires of the performer’ (Taylor 2003: 20). I agree with Taylor, when she states that digital technologies have forced us to re-evaluate our understanding of the place which is now not a localized place but rather a transitory experience. Against this backdrop Ulrike Hanstein’s approach is inspiring, because she considers some of the documents as being art pieces of their own.

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I wish to discuss the artistic practices of documenting performance art on film as aesthetic interventions that accomplish a transition from embodied acts and choreographic developmental forms. [...] I shall explore the ways in which the heightened iconic characteristics of performance works – when they are captured on displayed as sequences of framed shots – introduce new relations between the physicality of the event, material configurations in time and durations of embodied acts. (Hanstein 2017: 151) Following these observations, another question arises: How important is the internet as an archive and research tool in a post-postmodern time? A positive aspect of documented events on the internet is that one can access the histories of Expanded Cinema and other performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and appropriate them. The already mentioned example of the re-enactment by Lucas Ihlein and Louise Curham shows how they found first a document of Guy Sherwin’s performance on YouTube and afterwards got in contact with the artist and then created their own versions und used these for further educational purposes. Repeated displays of artistic works at public events can initiate new discussions, enable more creative work, re-enactments, and new programmes. It is necessary to have experts or institutions share their expertise with the public in order to more easily find the treasures. The growing number of re-enactments coincides with a new understanding of archiving that questions the adequacy of institutionalized forms of collecting. Here, I take my cue from the philosophy of the Visible Evidence network of scholars. Our group emphasizes that attention should be paid to the historical intersections of documentary and avant-garde cinema using concepts such as ‘experimental ethnography’ as a hybrid form in historical and contemporary media practices.8 That is why some documents and documentary films can themselves be understood as ‘alternative archives’. Such documents can testify to past events and allow for further creativity to occur.

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FOUND FOOTAGE – SAMPLING AND REMIXING IMAGES AND MUSIC Not only documents and documentary film, but also films using a found footage technique could be called ‘alternative archives’. For Jaimie Baron (2014), the joy of found material is the trigger for the ‘archive effect’ which can spark an ‘archive fever’, which is a near obsession with in compiling and recycling of archive and found footage materials. How may such a creative involvement with archives shape historical consciousness and, hence, provoke an understanding of the changing contexts of remediation through the moving image? One example is the two-channel video installation Destroy She Said (1998) by Monica Bonvicini shows that with selected film clips of various film divas, such as Monica Vitti in L’Avventura (1959), Jeanne Moreau in La Notte (1961), Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (1965), and Brigitte Mira in Fear Eats the Soul (1973). Bonvicini’s found footage was exhibited for example in the Julia Stoschek Collection in Duesseldorf and even gave the exhibition its title: Number One: Destroy, She Said. On their website they describe this found footage work as an examination of ‘the role of women in auteur films of the 1950s to 1970s in a compilation of selected excerpts. It is remarkable to see how, even at the very zenith of the feminist movement, women were still being stereotyped as helpless creatures. The pieces on show centre on extreme spatial, psychological and interpersonal situations.’9  Another example of an interesting found footage work is the previously discussed Thom Andersen’s film --- ------- (aka The Rock ‘n’ Roll Film). As a subgenre of experimental film, the found footage film uses archival material and brings it into a new environment. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, the found footage films were associated with extreme experiences and were meant to broaden consciousness. In these films, music evokes hallucinogenic imagery; the fragmented angles, the disorientating camera movements and the elements of surrealistic cinema further create this atmosphere. In the early days of the psychedelic music scene, experimental film makers joined musicians in the clubs for live projections featuring imagery and music. Later, psychedelic films fed off this early collaboration. During the Living Archive festival, I showed films by Bruce Conner, who can be seen as a forerunner of the sub-genre of the found footage music videos. Conner influenced the following generations of artists who picked up on using already existing footage and edited it to music. He created well-known music videos for artists such as Brian Eno, David Byrne, and Terry Riley. For the song Mongoloid (1976) by Devo, Conner assembled material from old documentaries, advertizing, and feature films. This early example of using image materials from various archival sources showed how an artist could combine image with a song, and so create a whole new setting for a piece of art. By ana-

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lyzing these music videos, you can refer back to these histories, which underline the bodily experience of these music driven stories. That is why I bring the strands of these differing histories together. Without history it is impossible to understand the impulses of the future, arguably one of the main drives for preserving and presenting works of the past. Conner is also known for fast-paced collages and video-installations such as A Movie (1957), Cosmic Ray (1961), and Crossroads (1976), which have become popular choices for art museum exhibitions and collections. These artworks demonstrate Conner’s innovative technique of skilfully editing shots from pre-existing footage. In his other work, Conner also used pop music for film sound. A predominant theme in his works is a critique of the media, especially television and its effect on American culture and society. The ongoing legacy of Conner’s artistic themes and techniques is evidenced in Michael Moore’s famous use of material from the 2000 United States Presidential Election in the Rage Against the Machine music video clip Testify (2000). In 2010 Conner’s works were exhibited at the Kunsthalle Wien in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum. Arguably the significance of this exhibition and film series is reminder that – after television and the internet – the music video has entered both the ‘white cube’ of the museum and the ‘black box’ of the cinema. Re-enactments of the materials held in the archive by found footage or ready-made techniques were done by a number of other musicians and directors in the 1960s and 1970s, too, such as Eric Burdon and the Animals with their song When I was Young (1967). They used film material of World War II, integrating sounds of aeroplanes to the music. Music video clips can serve as an experimental field for the aesthetic of found forms, and they also provide information about the functioning of the perception of sound and image. Film scholar Carol Vernallis writes in this context, ‘My argument extends Bordwell’s to claim it is not just camera and editing, but all parameters – acting, lighting, performance, sound effects, musical materials. Everything becomes heightened, set off, voluble.’ (Vernallis 2008: 278) The aesthetic experience, which is evoked by both music video clips and experimental films using music, is often associated with so-called postmodern technologies. Some aesthetic techniques meaningful for the understanding of experimental films are repetition, collage bricolage, pastiche, cut ‘n’ mix, copy and paste, remix and, in particular, sampling. The term pastiche is often used in connection with the description of the postmodern. The term sampling refers to the process of scanning a continual analogue signal, in which samples are taken at regular intervals in order to be gauged. The respective measured value will then be converted into digital information. The digital media can then be saved in various ways, i.e. on a CD, a memory chip or in a cloud.10

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When analyzing contemporary music videos, it is apparent that the connection of film and music still thrives. In addition to music television, museums, and galleries, the music video has found yet another platform: the film festival. At the 2011 Oberhausen International Short Film Festival the music video Andere Leute was screened. Set to a song by Malakoff Kowalski, the video uses 1970s film clips. For this project, Kowalski collaborated with Klaus Lemke, who started as an underground film maker in the 1970s German New Wave. Lemke and Kowalski recycled more than one hundred close-ups of actors from Lemke’s films, including Liebe So Schön Wie Liebe (1971) and Sylvie (1973). This non-narrative series of images clearly marked by a 1970s aesthetics (colours, clothing of the actors) combined with a more recent upbeat post-punk music merges past and present and offers a new, re-worked interpretation of the past. While most of the actors featured were unknown, several were famous for roles in films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the 1970s. This referencing may supplement a viewer’s awareness about this earlier period in German film history with an additional sense of strangeness. The International Short Film Festival shows current music videos in the MuVi section, which was initiated in 1999 and has since become a key component of the Oberhausen festival programme. Oberhausen’s festival director Lars Henrik Gass confirmed this in an interview: It is really striking that music television, which introduced the genre of the music video, now shows fewer and fewer of them. It’s a completely absurd development, but it has led to the very real possibility that music video will outlive music TV. In other words, music video nowadays has a thriving life of its own. Videos are shown at film festivals, they are watched on the internet, and no longer need promotion from music TV to survive.11 The internet is the most recent presentation platform for music videos. Reinforced by the recent popularity of YouTube and other video websites, artists can now present and distribute their work directly and online. The official emergence of music television in the 1980s was predated by extensive experimentation in video art. During the 1970s, many artists attempted to liberate modern art from its static existence. First video art pioneers like Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell focused on the technology by manipulating the equipment itself. Vostell called this method ‘décoll/age.’ Television sets were covered in tape, wrapped in barbed wire or set in concrete, to emphasize the passive spectator sitting apathetically in front of the TV screen and waiting to be entertained. Examples include Nam June Paik’s Zen for TV (1963), Wolf Kahlen’s Mirror-TV (1969-1977), and Joseph Beuys’s Felt TV (1970).12

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The embrace of the music video as a new form of artistic practice by television coincided with experiments in video art. In this sense the new art form of the music video followed the earlier experiments with synaesthetic perception, colour-light-music and visual music in films by figures such as Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger, and Hans Richter in the 1920s and 1930s. All of these practices attempted to fuse images and music into a unified whole.13 Starting in the 1980s, musicians and visual artists began to make use of the new platform of music television, where they could work on forms of visual expression guided by music, and, so, develop a new aesthetic. Short units (intervals) would be repeated, analogous to the repetitive note or chord progressions (riffs) of pop/rock music. Besides the typical portrayal of sub-cultures, the aesthetic of the music video marks a specific interplay of image and sound as well as a rhythm of the montage and the creation of new visual worlds. From around 2000, music videos began to recede into the background of MTV’s programming, which increasingly focused on docu-soaps and reality shows. Since then, in order to be watched more widely, the music video was in need of new screening venues and exhibition platforms. As a result, music videos found their way into museums and gallery spaces, a phenomenon that can probably be explained both by a new acceptance on the part of the art scene and the adaptation of music video to the art world.

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC VIDEOS IN MUSEUMS In recent years digital and analogue experimental music videos have increasingly found their way into museums and art galleries, although without much recognition by art and film scholars.14 In exhibitions such as video: 25 years of video aesthetics (NRW Forum in Düsseldorf, 2004), I want to see how you see (Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen, 2010), and the Guggenheim show YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video (New York, 2010), music videos have found a new home. The exhibition video: 25 years of video aesthetics featured one hundred videos. The videos were displayed on individual monitors set up in rows, presenting the most important contemporary tendencies culled from the workshops and archives of the video avant-garde. Ulf Poschardt, the exhibition’s curator, stated, ‘In contemporary video, reality and fiction, high and low, art and advertizing, identity and virtuality, all coincide’ (Poschardt 2003: 10). The monitors displayed art videos, advertizing commercials and – for the most part – music videos. This selection meant that visitors were given the opportunity to compare the visual styles of the different videos and the overlap between genres. The exhibition demonstrated that many video-makers no longer have any res-

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ervations about working within multiple artistic forms. Among the artists and film makers whose work was shown in the VIDEO exhibition were Matthew Barney, Marina Abramovic, Anton Corbijn, William Kentridge, Pipilotti Rist, and Bill Viola.15 Chris Cunningham participated not only with music videos and commercials but also with his video installation Flex (2000). Surprisingly to some, Damien Hirst did not show classical video art, but a music video. Ridley Scott’s commercial for Apple Macintosh (1984) was included, as was David Lynch’s Adidas: The Wall (1994). In addition, the exhibition included videos by Jean-Luc Godard and an episode from Andy Warhol’s MTV show 15 Minutes (1986). The combination of music and advertizing in the work of a single artist was evident with Spike Jonze’s music video Praise You (1999) for Fatboy Slim and his Lamp commercial for IKEA (2002). The exhibition design reflected the equal status given to the three genres of music, art and advertizing: the monitors were set up in rows in such a way that the different genres and examples could coexist side by side.16 By contrast, I want to see how you see – a 2010 exhibition in Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen showing works by over fifty artists from the Julia Stoschek Collection – followed a different display strategy. The industrial architecture of the Deichtorhallen made it possible to use special structures to create a multifaceted video path leading the viewer through the exhibition. The roof of the great hall was covered up, creating a mysterious semi-darkness that served to draw attention to the video works. The most distinctive feature of the show was the central place of Björk’s music video Wanderlust (2008). The video’s position within the hall lent it equal, if not privileged status alongside video art classics by Monica Bonvicini, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Anthony McCall, Marina Abramovic, and Bruce Nauman. The video for Wanderlust was directed by the artist duo Encyclopedia Pictura (Sean Hellfritsch and Isaiah Saxon). Spectators equipped with 3-D glasses could experience the cinema ambiance of the black box and an immersion in Björk’s fairy-tale dreamworld. In the video, Björk drifts through fantastical mountain landscapes. The vivid stereoscopic 3-D images show animals and landscapes created through a mix of classical animation techniques, computer graphics, and live-action filmed sequences. The 3-D effects evoke a bizarre world with its own structures and perceptual possibilities, and thus help create a surreal, illusionary, sensuous, and immersive experience, which heightens the emotions of audience members. The video reflects the music’s rhythm and makes reference not only to the videos Björk created together with Michel Gondry, but also to films such as The Never Ending Story (Wolfgang Petersen 1984), early cinema classics like A Trip to the Moon (George Méliès 1902), and short films from cinema’s first decades.17 Early cinema shorts of the kind mentioned above were showcased in a retrospective programme at

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the 2010 Short Film Festival Oberhausen, under the title From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918. Some of them, such as the film Serpentine Dances (France/USA c.1896-1898), seem like precursors of the music video since they have certain features in common with it, such as the short length, the dancing, and musical accompaniment.18 One of the music videos that was shown in the MuVi-section of the Oberhausener Kurzfilmtage was also shown in the same year at the first video biennial organized by YouTube in cooperation with the Guggenheim. In the 2010 exhibition YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video, the music video Synesthesia by Terri Timely (2009) was one of the twenty-five winning films out of the 23,000 clips sent in from ninety-one countries. The jury evaluated the videos according to the categories of music video, experimental film, and animation.19 These videos were shown as large-scale projections on the walls in the Guggenheim Museum, New York. With this display at the museum, music videos left the apparatus of the television behind, as well as the classical cinema screen and black box space. These videos even extended beyond the Guggenheim museum space and reached a bigger audience with their projection on the outside walls of the museum, thus into public space. The barriers of the exhibition space were extended even further reaching an even larger global public, since the videos were shown at the same time in other Guggenheim Museums (Berlin, Bilbao, Venice) and on YouTube. With this exhibition, the music video (and also the other forms of short film) reached some of the most acclaimed museums as well as the internet, and mobile screens. The example of Björk mentioned above perfectly encapsulates the shifts undergone by the music video since its invention: a video abandons the TV monitor and is projected onto a film screen inside a black box in a museum space, thus becoming part of a complex exhibition strategy. It is simultaneously shown on the internet and distributed on a DVD, which can be purchased in the museum shop and taken home. Presently, music videos are not just shown on the internet but streamed and these videos are counted as plays on music charts. In the case of Björk, her music video work was shown as a singular exhibition called Björk at MoMA in 2015, following in the steps of the famous David Bowie exhibition David Bowie Is, which was touring: 2013 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, 2014 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, and finally in 2018 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.20 It toured to twelve museums around the world and attracted over two million visitors. There were rooms inviting audience members to fully immerse themselves in concert situations by using innovative exhibition settings and offering captivating music.

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Nevertheless, in scholarly research on media art, the music video genre generally tends to receive only passing mention. The reason for this seems to be that music videos are usually perceived as a purely commercial medium and not an art form.21 The art world’s failure to recognize the music video is compounded by its ever-decreasing presence on television, which has led some media critics to speak of the ‘death of the music video’, not unlike the proclaimed ‘death of cinema’. By contrast, music videos should remain relevant to film studies, and the changes taking place within music television can be seen as an opportunity for music video to expand into other venues. I think that the music video deserves the same kind of attention as film and video art, since these accepted art forms often clearly borrow from the visual and narrative strategies of the music video. Philippe Dubois’s idea of the ‘cinema effect’ can be used productively in discussing the role and place of music videos in the contemporary exhibition scene.22 However, I suggest calling this phenomenon the ‘music video effect’. While Dubois examines only video installations that reference films, it is noteworthy that music videos also reference films and television, often using the technique of found footage. In the museum, various exhibition strategies reveal to what extent an artistic work is shaped by a particular mode of presentation. Given the numerous developments that have affected the music video, I propose that we speak of a ‘music video effect,’ comparable to the ‘cinema effect’. The music video aesthetic crops up in other artistic media and, thus, gains entry into the cinema, museum, festival, internet, and urban space environments. When the music video enters these various contexts, its avant-garde aesthetics of visual pastiche is foregrounded. The significance of experimental short films on moving image culture is perhaps most evident in its influence on one of the most popular cultural forms of the late twentieth century: the music video. In the 1960s and 1970s, at the beginning of the psychedelic music scene, experimental film makers joined musicians in the clubs doing live projections so that the imagery and music were being created simultaneously. Later psychedelic films fed off this early collaboration. At that time these artforms were connected to extreme experiences and broadening the consciousness. It was time of cultural change and nowadays if you analyze music videos you can see that the connection of film and music still thrives. This dense and resource packed medium speaks with the voice of the future. It is so important to understand history and artists have the advantage of having accessed art history which give as vibrant and completely divergent view of the world and musicians have music history to inform their work, so that music video artists have a foot in both worlds and even a grasp of film history. In summary, when thinking back on some of the films from the 1960s

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and 1970s, especially the psychedelic, blurred, and distorted pictures that are synchronized with music and editing to make a special emotion of being ‘lost in music’ audible and visible, then the result is a boundary-pushing experience of sound and image. The films form a community-creating reference system due to the social impacts of showing and availability of video materials. These films become space and time vehicles, in which actual and virtual, fantasy and reality become blurred. The interaction of camera technique and music simulates an experience that cannot be created by a simple succession of pictures or through the narration, rather it is something that happens in the duration of a song. On the basis of the boundary crossing qualities of the music or ecstatic experience or ‘trip’ a film can put you in another world or in another state of consciousness.

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CASE STUDY DEUTSCHES FILMINSTITUT FILMMUSEUM, FRANKFURT The following case study focuses on different aspects of short experimental films which were shown outside of a cinema in a museum. The exhibition Fassbinder – NOW: Film and Video Art was installed at the Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum (DFF) from 30 October 2013 to 1 June 2014 as part of the B3 Moving Image Biennial.23 It juxtaposed excerpts from films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) with works of contemporary film and video art by Tom Geens, Runa Islam, Maryam Jafri, Jesper Just, Jeroen de Rijke & Willem de ­Rooij, and Ming Wong, all of whom connect to Fassbinder’s work either topically or aesthetically. The film excerpts were of feature films by Fassbinder, perhaps the German filmmaker of the 1970s. To younger generations, the exhibition provided an opportunity to get to know Fassbinder’s films; for others it was an occasion to examine the films in a new perspective. This approach shows that museums can provide a unique strategy for learning about film history through contemporary video art. It is the institutional and pedagogical ambition of this exhibition to reassess Fassbinder as ‘the auteur’ and Fassbinder’s archive from the point of view of contemporary art. The entire exhibition shows the impact cinema has on current artistic media and also how the boundaries between film and video art are blurred. Here excerpts of feature films from the 1970s form a dialogue with video pieces. The videoartists do not use found footage or re-enactments, they rather get inspired by Fassbinder’s aesthetic and remediate this for and condense it in short video format. Fassbinder’s films offer a social critique and are concerned with failed relationships, emotional exploitation, discrimination against minorities, and the burden of the past. My focus here is on the aspects of Fassbinder’s

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critique, alienation, cultural identity, and sexual identity – themes which are re-articulated in the works of the contemporary artists. A key to this exhibition is the confluence of commemoration, cultural memory, and re-enactment. I agree with art historian Ursula Frohne, who states, that Fassbinder’s films follow Youngblood’s vision of Expanded Cinema, which ‘aimed for a space of cinematographic immersion at the cross-over point of art and living space, then Fassbinder’s early films […] also seem to be aesthetic interfaces to the real’ (Frohne 2013: 32). Even though cinema as cultural memory is less pronounced here than in Douglas Gordon’s and others’ re-appropriation of popular Hitchcock films in the late 1990s, the signature of Fassbinder still serves as the cultural heritage of these artists, who explore the reference to Fassbinder conceptually while ascribing new meanings to it. For Claudia Dillman (former director of the museum) and Anna Fricke (curator of the exhibition), the main motivation for the show was to raise the question of ‘how film history can be made accessible, this inexhaustible reservoir of moving images full of narrative, aesthetics and emotional power?’24 Moreover, I think the exhibition shows the influence films by Fassbinder have on audio-visual strategies explored by contemporary artists, who use the techniques of remake, mash-up, pastiche, and citation. Here Laura Mulvey’s notion of ‘curating as montage’ reaches a new level, since already in Fassbinder’s films montage plays a crucial role in telling the story.25 Curating the excerpts of feature films with pieces inspired by Fassbinders’s aesthetics allows audience members to experience a recontextualization of aesthetics. The film museum was turned into a veritable house of Fassbinder: in the basement is the cinema, in the corridor were documents, and in the exhibition hall different installations were on display. In front of the entrance of the exhibition was a display of screenplays and production stills from the archive of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (RWFF), close to an installation of video screens showing Fassbinder in television interviews. There were seven compilations of Fassbinder’s films in the exhibition grouped at the centre in two black boxes under the headings ‘relationships’ and ‘social criticism’. These two black boxes were the only individual spaces for Fassbinder’s films – the other excerpts were shown in the corridor under the titles ‘light and colour’, ‘framing and mirroring’, ‘theatrical singing’, and ‘group behaviour’. Due to an event of this size which includes different media, the exhibition questioned any easy definition of ‘gallery films’, ‘cinematographic installation’, ‘entre-image’, ‘cinéma d’exposition’, ‘relational aesthetics’, ‘extended cinema’, or ‘othered cinema’. The reason for the difficulty in defining the art works is, that the excerpts of Fassbinder’s films themselves become ‘cinematographic installations’.

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The contemporary video works formed a dialogue with these pieces: when entering the exhibition an excerpt of Fassbinder’s melodrama Martha (1973) was shown, using a scene highlighting the famous 360-degree tracking shot where the camera revolves around a woman and a man during their first encounter. This excerpt is part of a seven-minute loop showing a compilation of different camera movements in Fassbinder’s films.26 In proximity to this screening was the three-screen installation Tuin (1998) by Runa Islam, projected on 16mm film. This piece deconstructs and radicalizes Fassbinder’s method of the 360-degree tracking shot. When visitors walk in the black box towards the screens, which hang freely in the middle of the room, they become part of the overall narrative. Ming Wong’s installation, which was also on display outside the main exhibition space in the hallway on a monitor, mirrored the mise-en-scène from Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) by using a television screen on a white rug. That screen showed Wong’s video piece Learn German with Petra von Kant (2007) in a 10-minute loop. Playing all of the roles himself, Wong dressed as the original film characters, lying on a similar white rug and repeating lines from the film in broken German. He used the same strategy with Eat Fear (2007), which not only works as a re-enacting of Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (1973), but also as a parody of the film. In Mandarin Ducks (2005), Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij refer to Fassbinder in terms of both aesthetics and narrative. The protagonists’ struggle with society is similar to those in Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (1976) and In a Year with 13 Moons (1978). A Fine Romance (2004) by Jesper Just is a trilogy of short 35mm films projected on digital video. The trilogy recalls Fassbinder with its melodramatic staging of men in the mirror-surfaced space of a brothel, where the mirrors reveal the emotional states of the protagonists. Costume Party (2005) by Maryam Jafri plays with the particular staging of characters from Fassbinder’s films, echoing for example The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. When asked about Fassbinder’s work Jafri is quoted in the exhibition catalogue: ‘[h]is work can be sometimes cynical, often cruel, but he does not foreclose the possibility of political or social transformation – this balance is what I find relevant today.’ In his short video You’re the Stranger Here (2009) the artist Tom Geens depicts a totalitarian society and, in this process, draws aesthetic parallels with Fassbinder’s films about the persistence of fascist structures in post-war Germany. The director creates a dystopian world which could be anywhere, anytime. Here, the eerie quality of sounds, voices, and music enhances the strangeness of the protagonists’ behaviour. Geens states that Fassbinder’s films are timeless and that their imagery and narratives ‘stay in our collective subconscious.’ The video works are linked to a critical impulse that utilizes

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the resources of film and explore their affective power through exaggeration. When the French philosopher Rancière explains ‘the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought’ (2004: 61), his thinking is aimed at the possibility of a political impulse through art. During the opening week of the exhibition, at a podium discussion in the cinema of the film museum, Geens talked with students about the ways in which history is treated and visualized in contemporary art. The discussion followed a screening of excerpts of Fassbinder’s film In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden/In a Year with 13 Moons, set in Frankfurt in 1978. In my presentation I referred to my former studies on Fassbinder (Siewert 2008, 2012) and stressed his unique aesthetics while analyzing Fassbinder in the line of Deleuze’s cinema philosophy (Siewert 2009). Moreover, I explained, that when visiting the exhibition, in this new presentation I was interested in the influence of Fassbinder’s work on the video art aesthetics, especially in view of Fassbinder’s (Douglas Sirkinspired) mise-en-scène, where the colour and framing of the film, the mirrors, the decors, and costumes tell the story. In his films often walls occupy about two-thirds of the screen, leaving only small rectangular frames inside which the characters have to find space to move. Door frames become picture frames for the protagonists. The artificial character of such images, a key characteristic of his style, is enhanced by a distanced camera. Another component typical of Fassbinder’s style is the mixture of pop and rock music with classical music. Considering In a Year with 13 Moons, the feeling of inescapability sticks fast to the film characters as well as the film images. Beyond the verbal construction of meaning, music is a key element to represent the sphere of the unspeakable. Music continually thwarts the spoken word. It creates its own rhythmical patterns which undermine the visual impact. The collage of different musical styles (such as classical music by Mahler and pop songs) can be interpreted as Fassbinder anticipating the technique of sampling. The cut-up on the soundtrack is a sample indeed, a specimen that shows how different sounds and music pieces are assembled and even cross-faded. The volume of outside noise, footsteps, or machine sounds is often oversized, even tending to become dissonant. Inside noise can also be present outside, thus the border between the two is abandoned – there is a kind of musical de-bordering. Essentially, music does not have an illustrative function in Fassbinder’s films; it does not support the image harmoniously and instead creates a very idiosyncratic quality of expression. After my own presentation on Fassbinder, Geens’s film You’re the Stranger Here was shown on the big screen. During the panel discussion, Geens, the students, the audience members and I discussed the different phenomenological experiences of the films shown in these unequal dispositifs. These expe-

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riences refer to the broader discussion on mobility and attention mentioned earlier in Chapter 2. While some audience members criticized the poor sound quality of the exhibition space, because the soundtracks of other video works or of Fassbinder’s films were audible, others favoured the possibility to walk in and out of the black boxes inside the museum. One might also argue that it is exactly those overlapping sounds that entice the viewers to stroll between the different parts of the exhibition. The sound dilemma is typical of contemporary art exhibitions (unless one uses sound cupolas), but here, with Fassbinder’s films, it is particularly drastic since speech, noise, and music play such an important role in his work. Due to the sound quality, the experience of the film in the cinema would be more intense than it was in the exhibition. The show succeeded in granting access to Fassbinder’s oeuvre through the looking-glass of present-day video art. All the new works play with the topics and aesthetics of Fassbinder’s films. The re-contextualization allows the films to become even more innovative and modern than they already are. This exhibition enables Expanded Cinema experiences of synesthetic environments and mobilized spaces. Frohne writes about the exhibition: ‘The installative approaches of art are here tied to performative re-enactments or to real-spatial expansions of the filmic that absorb the viewers into visual spaces and thus introduce them into the symbolic order as both subject and collective.’ (2013: 32) Furthermore, Frohne makes an excellent connection to the philosophy of Deleuze and Rancière when analyzing Fassbinder’s films: They embody cinema not just as a medium of depiction but also as a ‘transit medium’ avant la letter whose images strive to realize themselves in a moment of the social. Thus may the dream of space of ‘complete sensualisation’ of the filmic, which Gilles Deleuze emphasizes in his reflections on cinema, be realized, especially in the legacy of Fassbinder’s films. That will be achieved above all when their re-stagings come close to what Jacques Rancière recognizes as the potential of installative moving-image space – a possible future for the cinema in the field of art. (2013: 39) Frohne’s approach is in line of my earlier connections to Deleuze’s and Rancière’s philosophy. In this context I also agree with Julia Noordegraaf when she states for gallery films in general that ‘the coexistence of various mediums, formats, and exhibition techniques and styles is not something to be avoided, but a way to make the past experiential in the present.’27 The ‘now’ in Fassbinder – NOW: Film and Video Art was visible and palpable throughout the whole exhibition, as the repetitions of the films and videos function like feedback loops in time. This phenomenon is not only connected to the exhibition

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practice, but also to the quality of Fassbinder’s films. Further, in the Frankfurt exhibition, different types of audiences were enabled to experience the works beyond the boundaries of one discipline or aesthetic (film studies or art history) or one generation. In the catalogue Thomas Elsaesser describes their own historicity as an ‘effect of something appearing in retrospect as prescient and prophetic: a sort of short-circuiting of causality and consequence in the convergence of retroactive recognition’ (Elsaesser 2013: 75). Consequently, I argue that it is important to pay particular attention to the relationship between the functions of memory and film aesthetics at the site where cinema and exhibition practices come together. This means that film foundations such as the RWFF are gradually gaining in significance under the banner of the reflective historization of media culture. Therefore, the horizons of previous reflections on film theory have to be expanded and opened up to the assumption, that screening practice plays just as important a role in determining the subject and aesthetics of a film as does the performance of a musical piece, for example.28

AUDIO-VISUAL HERITAGE All these case studies show that experimental films rework the past in an artistic way and allow the audience members to get a ‘historical sensation’ of the past and at the same time get an intense feeling of the ‘now’, being present in that moment at that event. In the following, I will elaborate on how institutions interested in our audio-visual heritage try to make sure that films from a bygone era are saved from decay. In the course of the digitization of cinema and its continuing musealization, a lively debate around archiving, presentation platforms, and the epistemological questions about the legacy of cinema is unfolding. Since technological developments in digitization and its funding are changing so rapidly in the various counties, I will focus for the moment on examples from the German film heritage. Over the years, archivists and scholars have brought many petitions on this pressing issue to the relevant authorities. One of those petitions, ‘Our film heritage is in danger’, addressed to the Minister for Culture and Media, Monika Grütters, demanded an increase in funding for the digitization of national films – only one million Euro were granted by Grütters; in contrast France made 400 million Euro available for the same endeavour.29 The initiators argued: ‘Our films must be preserved, especially in the digital age. To hold true to this, there must be the establishment of a permanent fund to support the digitisation of these films and to strengthen the film archive.’30 The petitions and activities by scholars and archivists were fruitful – in 2017,

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Grütters announced that they would double the funding for the digitization of film heritage. The significance of the German case is not only that it validated the archival film, but it also gives expression to the importance of theoretical research, curating, and archiving that brought about political changes. Concerning the preservation of film heritage, the work by Anna Bohn, Denkmal Film (2012), generates ground-breaking work for the analysis of the politics of handling audio-visual documents and films. In her theory of film restoration she refers to the conceptual pair of ‘monument or memorial’, notions that herald from architecture. Architecture and film, to her, resonate, because both can refer to a bygone era. She interconnects theories of art history and philology with concepts derived from the preservation of monuments. She underscores that original film negatives constitute primary sources, and therefore should be regarded as historical artefacts worthy of protection, because original film negatives provide the basis for restoration and digitization. In her historical study, she describes the conditions which led to the destruction of nearly ninety per cent of the film negatives from the silent movie era as the ‘chronicle of the loss foretold’ (Bohn 2012: 17).. More­ over, the quickly ignited nitrate film had led to major fires in archives, which were, for the most part, destroyed.31 Bohn compares the technological change to less combustible celluloid with the transition from celluloid to digital film. The institutional and policy contexts of archival and historical preservation follow the storyline of an increasing awareness of the loss caused by material degradation and destruction. But it was not before the end of the twentieth century that film was recognized as cultural heritage and incorporated into the UNESCO list of the ‘Memory of the World’ programme. Bohn’s international cultural-political comparison emphasizes the persistent deficit in the German law: ‘The comparison of the legislation reveals that the USA, France, and the Russian Federation have explicitly anchored the protection of film heritage in their national legislation, whereas this protection remains an urgent concern in the Federal Republic of Germany.’ (Bohn 2012: 218) Bohn demands: in order to save audio-visual documents sustainably, a long-term conservation of analogue film material must be guaranteed. In this context discussions during the 2019 FIAF-conferences give a good insight on the current practice of restoration and digitization. In her presentation, Caroline Fournier, Head of the Film Department of the Cinémathèque Suisse, points to the dilemma of the demand from commercial companies that asking for perfectly restored films. Chris Horak writes in his blog on her presentation: And while it is a utopia to recreate the original experience of a film, the new digital technologies actually frustrate that effort. Restoring and

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screening historical films should be a matter of compromise, while maintaining a strict code of ethics. Maybe, Fournier suggests, two versions should be produced: an archival version that doesn’t look like it was produced for Netflix in 2019, intended for long-term preservation, and a ‘popular’ version for the marketplace and contemporary screenings.32 I believe that Bohn’s, Fournier’s and Horak’s convincing problematic for the digital future should be considered closely in the framework of film studies discussions around archiving, commemoration, and historiography and should become part of our experience of films. It remains interesting to address the question of how to preserve, archive and digitize installation art since it involves environment that is ephemeral and resists the archival impulse.

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Together with Film Scholar Erica Carter I have started to develop a concept called ‘expanded heritage’, a term which is borrowed from Expanded Cinema and is used literally as an expansion of both research and practice beyond a nationally bounded audio-visual heritage.33 The concept of ‘expanded heritage’ addresses the challenges that the intrinsic extraterritoriality of the audiovisual poses for heritage practice and policy. Expanded heritage includes archival objects, social subjects, and communities whose histories are neither archived nor remembered primarily in respect of national origin, but are situated instead within expanded spaces of transnational and translocal experiences.34 Audio-visual archives are both a repository of lost time and an orientation toward the future, since it is through access to history and memory that societies re-think for a future that is to happen. Thus, while UNESCO and the European Union work in tandem with international stakeholders to develop international frameworks for audio-visual heritage preservation, heritage policy remains formally channelled through nation states, with policies shaped around national jurisdictions, and access funnelled in the first instance through national archives and museums.35 The concept of ‘participatory governance’ (European Council 2014) addresses this as a product of collective forms of creative labour that re-make heritage as a social resource. Participatory practice and ‘participatory heritage’ (Roued-Cunliffe and Copeland 2017) can be further understood through an approach to policy that is not a top-down dissemination, but a ‘policy as translation’ (Clarke 2015) cocreated by policy-makers, practitioners, and audiences. Besides, online initiatives like the European Film Gateway (EFG) and Europeana have also played an important role in securing transnational knowledge

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about films in archives.36 Since the democratizing of knowledge we can also name the online archives ‘participatory archives’ (Huvila 2008). These curated platforms fight against those which work with algorithmic recommendation systems, where curatorship has become automated. Further, one should identify the role of audio-visual heritage as a resource for social inclusion and evolving discourses on identity rights. Writers on the effects of collective engagement have demonstrated its role in forging a sense of collectivity through the aesthetic formation of shared tastes.37 The sensus communis (Kappelhoff 2016) emerges from shared access to and creative engagement with aesthetic heritage. The topic of identity and heritage is interesting here, especially for my case studies, in that I have found this process at work in those screenings that include people of various generations, tastes, and backgrounds. My case studies that fall within the ‘expanded heritage’ arena contribute to the creation of an expanding overview of participatory modes of preserving and sharing audio-visual heritage. Since images, sounds, artefacts, media practitioners and audiences travel perpetually across national, cultural and symbolic borders; narratives, meanings, values, memories and experiences are diffused across translocal and transnational networks of media production and exchange.38

MEMORY – JOYFUL ARCHIVE OF EXPERIENCES Another aspect is relevant to this study: how is expanded heritage connected to memory? As a way to demonstrate that it is necessary to understand experimental films, Expanded Cinema, and film, and video installation art as vital parts of the culture of memory a recourse to concepts of remediation and transnationality of memory is helpful, since they also raise questions relating to audio-visual cultural heritage.39 Against this background Bolter and Grusin’s concept of ‘remediation’ comes to mind. They understand remediation as a ‘representation of one medium in another’ (Bolter and Grusin 1998: 45). I agree with Dagmar Brunow that this concept should take the industrial context into account and address the notion of the archive and the impact of curatorial practice. Brunow writes about curators: ‘For them remediation is conceptualised within terms of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, whereas the relation between storage and functional memory is not taken into account.’ (Brunow 2015: 199) I believe that Brunow’s notion of remediation in the context of media memory studies and my study on re-enactments work together well. The discipline of Memory Studies had provided us with innovative new concepts concerning the history of memory. Many scholars refer back to Maurice Halbwachs’s (1992) and Aleida Assmann’s (2008) memory work. The

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results of Halbwachs’s sociological research on a ‘collective memory’ provide the further direction of memory and remembrance research in the study of films. Films can change from being, what Aleida Assmann terms ‘storage memory’ or ‘dead memory’, to becoming ‘functional memory’, which implies ‘living memory’. According to Aleida Assmann, archives and their films are interventions to prevent forgetting. This is helpful for conceptualizing of cultural and social effects of digitization and for theorizing on the archive. Above all she articulates the difference between active and passive forgetting. ‘Active forgetting relates to the act of destroying and censorship and passive modes to losing, hiding, disintegrating, neglecting and abandoning.’ (Assmann 2008: 98) As a result Assmann describes the value of shifting from one context to another as ‘travelling’ with the performativity of the cultural memory and its multidirectionality. Elena Esposito’s (2002) introduction to the classification of forms of memory into different eras explains changes of concepts of memory since early advanced civilizations. At the beginning, memory was understood as a storage space; in modern times, the cultural memory was understood as an archive; and in postmodern times, the procedural memory is understood as a network. Astrid Erll sees the media as extensions or rather substitutes for memory: ‘What is not constantly represented in new, other and newly combined media has lost its function as a lieu de mémoire.’ (Erll 2011: 133) Erll also refers to Ann Rigney’s closely linked media-driven memory concept of an ‘autobiographical memory’ (Erll and Rigney 2009). I agree with Erll and Rigney who state that memory is always mediated: ‘Just as there is no cultural memory prior to mediation, there is no mediation without remediation: all representations of the past draw on available media technologies, on existent media products, on patterns of representation and medial aesthetics.’ (Erll and Rigney 2009: 4) Another concept is interesting here, Michael Rothberg’s ‘multidirectional memories’ (Rothberg 2009). Dagmar Brunow argues that: Memories are indeed multidirectional, but they are still subject to power structures either permitting them some discursive space for being articulated, or not. While memory due to its multidirectionality cannot be claimed by one specific group alone, it can open up or close discursive spaces for articulating non-hegemonic subject positions. (Brunow 2015: 52) Rothberg, together with Yasemin Yildiz, states that ‘a singular site of memory can accommodate a diversity of histories that resonate with each other instead of erasing each other’ (Rothberg and Yildiz 2011: 33).

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Similar to this concept is Annette Kuhn’s notion of ‘memory work’, since she understands memory work as ‘an active practice of remembering’. She writes, ‘Memory work can create new understandings of both past and present, while yet refusing a nostalgia, that embalms the past in a perfect, irretrievable moment.’ (Kuhn 1995: 8) Kuhn turns her attention to photographs from her own childhood and images from her shared ethnographic past, in order to trace a trajectory from the personal to collective acts of memory. Using Kuhn’s concept in connection with my case studies offers an understanding of films as catalyst for a shared memory. In this context Heike Klippel thinks, that films should not be thought of as a cultural memory, but rather as a ‘memory in motion’ (Klippel 1997: 12).

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When considering my case studies, a new concept has emerged as relevant, because it illustrates the kind of memory which describes the experience prevalent in my case studies. Sébastien Fevry calls it ‘joyful memory’ and claims, that his aim is not to underestimate the importance of traumata in our history and contemporary culture, but rather to point out that this type of memory may tend to leave aside other memorial dynamics, ‘which grant recognition a more central place.’ Fevry refers to Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, where he reinstalled recognition into the heart of the memory process. Fevry writes: In Ricoeur’s perspective, recognition is a veritable miracle, in the sense that the moment of recognition marks the triumph of memory over forgetting and permits she who remembers to assure herself of the reliability of her own memories. [...] For Ricoeur, memory is destined to be happy, not because it recalls happy moments, but because its work is always liable to be crowned by the moment of recognition, that moment when the present situation finally manages to coincide with the past trace of a remembrance. (Fevry 2015: 8) Fevry states that since no witnesses are alive who know the horror of the great tragedies of the 20th century, appropriation is needed. He refers to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory situations’ (1997), where the artists and audience members appropriate the images of a past they have not lived through, in order to integrate them into their own identity constructions. Fevry writes: In postmemory situations, faced with images without witnesses, which come from a past I have not lived in, recognition operates on a media level. It no longer strives to make a cognitive trace and a present impression coincide, but to make images of various natures, realized at different times, converge towards one sole point of identification, allowing the

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spectator to recognize the same object through the multiple prisms of a kind of visual kaleidoscope. (9) Fevry introduced this concept in Frankfurt at the conference ‘Provincializing European Memory’ (2015). The conference was organized by Astrid Erll’s initiated Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform (FMSP) and the nitmes: Network in Transnational Memory Studies. The title of the conference refers back to the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) and allows new perspectives from outside of Europe. The nitmes network studies the dynamics of transnational memory by focussing on the ‘circulation of memories across national borders, by highlighting the different scales of memory and their interrelations (the familial and the national, the local and the global, the regional and the trans­ regional etc.), and by addressing memories that represent and connect different communities.’40 In connection to cinema are significant Fevry’s work as well as Alison Landsberg’s ground-breaking concept of ‘prosthetic memory’, which relates to her notion of a haptic dimension of memory. According to Landsberg, the cinema can open up strategies to transfer collective history into personal memories. ‘Prosthetic memory’ refers to the process by which media allow people to participate in events that are not derived from their own lived experience. Landsberg claims that the cinema plays a role in the appropriation of memories beyond personal histories. She identifies the viewing of a film with the production of a new experience of a new memory: ‘What people see might affect them so significantly that the images would actually become part of their own archive of experience.’ (Landsberg 2004: 30) This ‘archive of experience’ describes the role films can play in the process of identity formation. Those concepts are suitable to understand the experience audience members have when experiencing re-enactments of Expanded Cinema or screenings of experimental films or found footage works using archival material. I believe that the concept of ‘joyful memories’ describes experiences that can be archived and activated by re-enactments of experimental films from the 1960s and 1970s.

EXPERIMENTAL FILMS AND PHILOSOPHY My case studies also show that experimental cinema and Expanded Cinema are connected to questions concerning philosophy. One example is Sherwin’s re-enactment of Man with Mirror, which lets audience members experience the philosophical question, ‘what is time’? As already mentioned, in Sherwin’s own re-enactment, a doubling, layering and repetition of time is created. One could imagine that Sherwin quoted Deleuze’s account on aesthetic

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experience ‘to stand up in an aesthetic experience, to become simultaneously younger and older within it, and to pass through all of its components and singularities’ (Deleuze 1991). With Sherwin’s work it is possible to both affectively experience a concept of time and also rationally understand it, in view of its formal structure, the patterns of movement and the experience of the live performance. Deleuze himself did not write much about experimental cinema and Expanded Cinema, but I hope I was able to highlight that Deleuze’s philosophy is not only an integral part in my analysis on fictional films of my earlier research (Siewert 2009), but can also be used when analyzing experimental cinema. In Cinema II – Time-Image Deleuze writes about experimental cinema:

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The difference between experimental cinema and the other cinema is that the former experiments, whilst the other discovers, by virtue of a different necessity from that of the filmic process. In experimental c­ inema, sometimes the process mounts the camera on the everyday body; these are Warhol’s famous essays, six and half hours on the man asleep in a fixed shot, three quarter of an hour on the man eating a mushroom (Sleep, Eat). Sometimes, on the contrary, this cinema of the body mounts a ceremony, takes an initiatory and liturgical aspect, and attempts to summon all the metallic and liquid powers of the sacred body, to the point of honour or revulsion, as in the essays of the Vienna school, Brus, Müehl and Nitsch. (1989: 184) In this context, Deleuze’s observations are also applicable my case studies on Expanded Cinema performances. Some experimental filmmakers refer directly to the philosophy of Deleuze. Thom Andersen, for example, did not only teach about Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema for more than 20 years at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), he also made a film, called The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015), which takes the form of a conversation und unfolds as a running dialogue between himself and Deleuze, alongside voices from film characters, actors, filmmakers, theorists, singers and songwriters, writers, and poets. Using found footage excerpts from fictional films by different directors are interwoven with quotations from Deleuze that appear onscreen. Likewise, other experimental filmmakers work with Deleuze’s philosophical ideas, such as Angela Melitopoulos, in her already mentioned Expanded Cinema work The Realm of Possibilities. She refers directly to Deleuze’s writings on the ‘new archivist’:

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The new archivist proclaims that henceforth he will deal only with statements. He will not concern himself with what previous archivists have treated in a thousand different ways: propositions and phrases. He will ignore both the vertical hierarchy of propositions which are stacked on top of one another, and the horizontal relationship established between phrases in which each seems to respond to another. Instead he will remain mobile, skimming along in a kind of diagonal line that allows him to read what could not be apprehended before, namely statements.41 Another component of philosophy are ethics. As I already mentioned, archivists have to ask themselves ethical questions or follow codes of ethics in order to be recognized as part of the FIAF. These ethical aspects connect back to the meaning of curare, which means in this context: taking care of the films, filmmakers and audience members. Not only archivists but also curators and programmers as ‘ethical presenters’ (Marks 2004) are constantly negotiating ethical questions. To sum up, some experimental works raise philosophical questions on aesthetics, epistemology, phenomenology, philosophy of mind and ethics, others make philosophical questions indirectly palpable.

NOTES 1

J. Huizinga, 1948, p. 566.

2

A good overview gives Bernhard Groß, 2016.

3

Allen 1985. 

4

Translation by the author from an interview in June 2013.

5

Living Archive Catalogue, p. 128-131, English translation. Programme Berlinale 2012. Selected films: Hunger in Waldenburg, Piel Jutzi, Deutschland/Germany 1929, 35mm; La Terra Trema, Luchino Visconti, Italien/Italy 1948, 35mm Chircales (Die Ziegelarbeiter), Marta Rodrigues, Jorge Silva, Kolumbien/Colombia 1972, 16mm; Chunko Kuo – China, Michelangelo Antonioni, VR China/PR China 1972, 35mm; Zorns Lemma, Hollis Frampton, USA 1970, 16mm; Newsreel Collective: Break and Enter, USA 1970, 16mm; Newsreel Collective: Janie’s Janie, Geri Ashur, USA 1970, 16mm; A and B in Ontario, Joyce Wieland/Hollis Frampton, USA 1966-1984, 16mm.

6

Living Archive Catalogue, p. 128-131, English translation. Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the New Archivist: ‘The new archivist proclaims that henceforth he will deal only with statements. He will not concern himself with what previous archivists have treated in a thousand different ways: propositions and phrases. He will ignore both the vertical hierarchy of propositions which are stacked on top of one anoth-

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er, and the horizontal relationship established between phrases in which each seems to respond to another. Instead he will remain mobile, skimming along in a kind of diagonal line that allows him to read what could not be apprehended before, namely statements.’ Gilles Deleuze, ‘A new archivist (The archaeology of knowledge),’ in: Deleuze, 1999. 7

Living Archive Catalogue, p. 128-131, English translation.

8

I gave a talk on this topic at the Visible Evidence XX conference in Stockholm, ­Sweden in 2013. Compare to: Russell 1999; Cowie 2011.

9

https://www.julia-stoschek-collection.net/en/exhibitions/past/number-onedestroy-she-said.html accessed: 1 January 2018.

10 All digital recording methods are dependent on this framework. (compact disk (CD), digital recording (DR), Digital Audio Tape (DAT)). When it comes to sampling, the rights of use of the material, its authorship, copyright, and quotation must be requested.

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11 From an interview conducted during the 2010 festival, with students from my seminar on ‘Media Art Institutions and Promotion’ (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, summer semester 2010). In the interviews, various film directors and organizers noticed that music videos are increasingly less associated with television and more often with visual art. Other important festivals in this context are the European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), transmediale (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), Internationales Bochumer Videofestival, and the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (various locations). 12 Lazzarato, 2002. In contrast to music video clips, there are a lot of theoretical publications about the related video art, from Nam June Paik, Stephen Beck, Andy Warhol, Bill Viola or Matthew Barney, for instance. 13 See Cytowic, 2002; Weibel 1987. Paik’s background in music theory, and the influence of John Cage, are part of the context for his avant-garde musical practices and his attempts to break with Western musical conventions and representations, such as the live performances in which Paik destroyed a piano. 14 I published a similar article on these case studies before: ‘Across the Territories: Exhibiting Music Video’ Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013b. 15 Further artists whose works were shown include Dara Birnbaum, Peter Callas, Ingo Günther, Mariko Mori, Joe Pytka, Jo Sedelmaier, Tarsem Singh, Klaus vom Bruch, Ridley Scott, Traktor, Sophie Muller, and Rotraut Pape. 16 Other comparable exhibitions include: ‘Exposition of Music Electronic Television,’ Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal (1963); ‘Art of Music Video,’ Long Beach Art Museum (1989 + 1999); ‘What a Wonderful World – Music Video in Architecture,’ Groningen Museum (1990); ‘Visual Music,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2004); ‘Sons & Lumières,’ Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004); ‘The Art of

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Pop,’ Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Cologne (2011). Another platform for music videos is DVDs, especially DVD collections of the work of individual music video directors, which have a wide potential audience: music fans, music video enthusiasts, as well as art aficionados. They buy these DVDS, which are also offered for sale in the gift shops of most contemporary art museums. To name just a few examples: The Work of Director Chris Cunningham, The Work of Michael Gondry, The Work of Director Spike Jonze, The Work of Director Anton Corbin, The Work of Stephane Sednaoui, The Work of Mark Romanek and The Work of Jonathan Glazer, Various Artists – Music Video Art (all released by EMI between 2003–2005). 17 Gondry directed the videos for Human Behaviour (1993), Army of Me (1995), Isobel (1995), Hyperballad (1996), Jóga (1997), and Bachelorette (1997). 18 Serpentine Dances (France/USA c. 1896-1898), 60m, 3’, 35mm, color, from the archive of the Cineteca di Bologna. The film programme was curated by Eric de Kuyper and Mariann Lewinsky. 19 The jury members were Laurie Anderson, Animal Collective, Darren Aronofsky, Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Stefan Sagmeister, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Nancy Spector. 20 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1458; https://www.vam.ac.uk/­ collections/david-bowie accessed: 1 January 2018. 21 In what follows I refer back to my publication: Siewert, 2013b. An example of this mentioned approach is Goodwin (1992). 22 Dubois 2013. 23 I previously published about this case study in an earlier version on NECSUS: https://necsus-ejms.org/fassbinder-frankfurt/ accessed: 1 January 2018. The exhibition travelled a year later to the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin (2015). 24 Dillmann 2013: 11. 25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUvK_8aLg8Q accessed: 1 January 2018. 26 The cameraman Michael Ballhaus is acknowledged as contributing artists. 27 Noordegraaf 2013, p. 411. Different exhibitions and conservation practises are analyzed in the book Preserving and Exhibiting Media. The book was developed during a long-standing co-operation with a group of international film scholars, I am part of. I devised a chapter about showing media art. 28 After this exhibition a Fassbinder Archive and Study Center was founded as part of the DFF. ‘The aim of the DFF’s collection activities is to preserve bequests and film-related materials for science and future generations as evidence of cultural history. In addition, our collections form an essential basis for the conception and presentation of special exhibitions.’ https://www.dff.film/en/erkunden/ archives/fassbinder-center/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 29 ‘[U]nsere Filme müssen erhalten werden, gerade auch in digitalen Zeiten. Es gilt, die Filmarchive zu stärken und durch die Einrichtung eines dauerhaften Fonds die Digitalisierung der Filme zu fördern.’ (2013) http://www.change.org/de/

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Petitionen/unser-filmerbe-ist-in-gefahr. Started by Klaus Kreimeier. Since then a website has been created about the recent changes in funding for digitization in Germany: https://www.filmerbe-in-gefahr.de/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 30 http://www.change.org/de/Petitionen/unser-filmerbe-ist-in-gefahr accessed: 1 January 2018. https://www.ffa.de/index.php?analyse-filmisches-erbe accessed: 1 January 2018. 31 Against this backdrop, the George Eastman Museum’s Nitrate Picture Show (2016) in Rochester, NY is an exception that enables the viewer to experience the aesthetic of nitrate films in modern times. 32 https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/archival-spaces/2019/05/10/FIAF-­ symposium-ethics-practices. 33 With my colleague Erica Carter, I co-wrote an abstract on the idea of an ‘expanded heritage’ in Europe and a plan for further research. The following paragraphs stems from this collaboration (unpublished 2017).

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34 Brickell and Datta, 2011. 35 UNESCO 1992, 2000; Edmondson 2004; European Council 2014; European Commission 2014. 36 http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu accessed: 1 January 2018. https://www.­ europeana.eu/portal/de accessed: 1 January 2018. Knight, 2012, Jones, 2012; about the meta-archive: Uhrich, 2012; regarding films and museums: Fowler 2012; curation: Beckstette 2012; restoration: Lipman 2012; the film in the digital age: Ruggero 2012 and the digital database: Chapman 2012. 37 Balázs 1924, 1930, 1952; Kracauer 1995; Williams 1954 & 1977; Bourdieu 1987; Rancière 2004; Kappelhoff 2004, 2008; Hagener & Elsaesser 2009; Shaviro 2010. 38 Bergfelder 2005a, 2005b; Erll 2011a, 20011b; Rigney 2012b. 39 Other concepts of film and memory are taken under consideration (Deleuze 1985; Klippel 1997; Kuhn 2002; Landsberg 2004; Elsaesser 2007; Russell 2018), as well as concepts of media archaeology (Huhtamo 2011; Ernst 2013; Parrika 2015; Elsaesser 2016) and recent research on the history and culture of remembering, performing cultural memory, the memory industry, memory agents and cultural heritage (Taylor 2003; Hirsch 2008; Brunow 2015; Fevry 2015), and discourses on the preservation of films and videos (Fossati 2009; Frick 2011; Bohn 2012; Noordegraaf et al. 2013; Serexhe 2013; Fossati and v. Oever 2016). 40 Quote from https://nitmes.wp.hum.uu.nl/ accessed: 1 January 2018. NITMES conferences were a. o.: ‘Memory without Borders’ (Utrecht 2013), ‘Diasporic Memory’ (Urbana Champaign 2013), ‘Memory Transfers and Transformations’ (Konstanz June 2014), ‘Scales of Memory’ (Canberra 2014), and ‘Memory Practices and the Making of Europe’ (Lund 2015). In 2016 I gave a presentation at a conference in Dublin ISTME – Locating and Dis-Locating Memory: In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe aimed to investigate the transcultural dynamics of memory in Europe today.

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41 Gilles Deleuze, ‘A new archivist (The archaeology of knowledge),’ in: Deleuze, 1999.

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(2012). Körber, Martin. ‘‘Das ist dummes Zeug!’ Warum Digitalisierung Filme nicht rettet’, n-tv, 06. Februar 2014, accessed 10.08.2018. Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Eds and trans. Thomas Levin. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kracauer, Siegfried. Von Caligari zu Hitler: Eine psychologische Geschichte des deutschen Films. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. Kuhn, Annette. An Everyday Magic, Cinema and Cultural Memory. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002. Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso, 1995. Kusters, Paul. ‘New Film History. Grundzüge einer neuen Filmgeschichtswissenschaft.’ montage/av 5.1 (1996): 9-60. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Landy, Marcia. Cinema and Counter-History, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Videophilosophie, Zeitwahrnehmung im Postfordismus. Berlin: b-books, 2002. Lee, Kevin B. ‘Critique, Protest, Activism, and the Video Essay.’ Necsus, European Journal of Media studies: #True (Spring 2017): accessed 10.08.2018. Lindeperg, Sylvie. ‘Spuren, Dokumente, Monumente. Filmische Verwendungen von Geschichte, historische Verwendungen des Films.’ In: Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit. Dokumentarfilm, Fernsehen, Geschichte. Eva Hohenberger and Judith Keilbach (Eds.). Berlin: Vorwerk8, 2003. 65-81.

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Lipman, Ross. ‘The Gray Zone: A Restorationist’s Travel Guide’. The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 9.2 (2009) Lipman, Ross. ‘Conservation at the Crossroads’. Artforum October 2013. Marks, Laura. ‘The Ethical Presenter, or How to Have Good Arguments over Dinner’. The Moving Image 4.1 (2004): 34-47. Noordegraaf, Julia, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba, eds. Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Poschard, Ulf. Look at me, Video – 25 Jahre Videoästhetik. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2003. Rancière, Jacques. Ist Kunst widerständig? Berlin: Merve, 2004. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum, 2004. Rancière, Jacques. ‘Die Geschichtlichkeit des Films’, Das Streit-Bild. Film, Geschichte und Politik bei Jacques Rancière. Eds. Drehli Robnik, Thomas Hüberl and Siegfried Mattl. Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010. 213-231. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Rigney, Anne. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012a. Rigney, Anne. ‘Reconciliation and Remembering: (How) Does it Work?’ Memory Studies 5.3 (2012b): 251-258. Rigney, Anne. ‘Transforming Memory and the European Project.’ New Literary History 43.4 (2012c): 607-628. Rosen, Phil. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Rothberg, Michael and Yasemin Yildiz. ‘Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany’. parallax, London: Taylor & Francis, 2011. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Ruggero, Eugeni. ‘Feeling together: Cinema and Pratices of Sociability in the Post Media Condition’, in Film in the Post-Media Age. Ed. Agnes Pethö. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. 293-308. Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography. The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Russell, Catherine. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Schulte Strathaus, Stefanie, Uli Ziemons. Eds. Living Archive: Archivarbeit als künstlerische und kuratorische Praxis der Gegenwart/Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice. Berlin: b-books, 2013.

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Serexhe, Bernhard, ed. Digital Art Conservation (English). Vienna: Ambra V, 2013. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993. Shaviro, Steven. ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.’ Film-Philosophy 14 (2010): 1-102. Siewert, Senta. Fassbinder und Deleuze – Körper, Leiden, Entgrenzung. Marburg. Tectum, 2009. Siewert, Senta. ‘Re-enactment of Music-Video Clips in Feature Films’. Extended Cinema, Le cinéma gagne du terrain. Eds. Philippe Dubois, Frédéric Monvoisin, Elena Biserna. Milan: Campanotto Editore, 2010. 136-142. Siewert, Senta. ‘Ein krisenhaftes Bewusstsein’. Prekäre Obsession. Minoritäten bei Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Eds. Nicole Colin, Franziska Schößler, Nike Thurn. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. 241-268. Siewert, Senta. ‘Soundtracks of Double Occupancy: Sampling Sounds and Cultures in Fatih Akin’s Head On’. Eds. Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters, Wanda Strauven, Mind

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the Screen. Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. 198-208. Siewert, Senta, and Barbara Le Maître. ‘Introduction to Exhibition Strategies’ Pre­ serving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013a. 309-310. Siewert, Senta. ‘Across the Territories: Exhibiting Music Video’ Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook. Eds. Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Barbara Le Maître, Consetta Saba. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013b. 346-351. Siewert, Senta. ‘An der Peripherie des Kinos. Experimentelle Bewegtbilder’. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (zfm) 09.2 (2013c). Siewert, Senta. ‘Programmgestalten und Kuratieren von Experimentalfilmen’. Augenblick. Konstanzer Hefte der Medienwissenschaft 56/57 2013e: 64-70. Siewert, Senta. Entgrenzungsfilme – Jugend, Musik, Affekt, Gedächtnis. Eine pragmatische Poetik zeitgenössischer europäischer Filme. Marburg: Schüren, 2013f. Siewert, Senta with Carolyn Birdsall.’Of Sound Mind: Mental Distress and Sound in Twentieth-Century Media Culture.’ Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 16.1 (2013g): 27-45. Siewert, Senta. ‘Fassbinder. Frankfurt.’ Traces, NECSUS #5 (Spring 2014). www.necsusejms.org/fassbinder-frankfurt/ accessed 10.08.2018. Siewert, Senta. ‘Entgrenzungsfilme. Fassbinder, Akin, Roehler und die Medienkunst.’ Text und Kritik. Rainer Werner Fassbinder 103.2 (2015): 23-30. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Uhrich, Andy. ‘Pressed into the Service of Cinema: Issues in Preserving the Software of Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab.’ The Moving Image 12.1 (2012). Wickberg, Daniel. ‘What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and

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New. ‘ The American Historical Review 112.3 (2007): 677. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Williams, Raymond. A Preface to Film, with Michael Orrom. London: Film Drama, 1954. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Windhausen, Federico. ‘Assimilating Video.’ OCTOBER 137 (Summer 2011). Wood, David. ‘Film and the Archive: Nation, Heritage, Resistance.’ Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 6.2 (2010): 162-174.

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Outlook

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Not surprisingly, the creative approaches to the presentation, preservation, and re-use of experimental films from the 1960s and 1970s comprise a dynamic field of study. In recent years many initiatives contributed to the further expansion of this field. In the German context, for instance, Arsenal’s Living Archive project received its first funding in 2011 and for the first three years, the project became more visible to the public. This is especially so after the month-long Living Archive Festival in 2013 and its well-designed and informative catalogue, which documented and gave value to the works and people involved. Afterwards, Living Archive organizers received further funding, which supported the continuation of the project albeit with new agendas, up until the present day. The success of the first period of the Living Archive project has proven that when curators, scholars, and archivists decide to select films or Expanded Cinema works for cinemas, cinémathèques, and festivals, this engagement can provide archives with a better justification for the necessity of funding their digitizations, restorations and screening efforts.1 As a result, films can be saved from decay, can be shown to the public, and, therefore, remain in the collective memory. In this study I conceived of the collective memory as a ‘performative practice’ of film history. The workshop I gave with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus at the German Screen Studies Network (GSSN) ‘Living Pasts, Moving Present’ at King’s College in London (2016), showed that working internationally with

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scholars and curators on such topics increases the knowledge of my project and fosters further initiatives and co-operations. During the workshop, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus raised questions on how The Living Archive started collaborations with, in a positive sense, ‘minor archives’ in Egypt, South Africa, Sudan, Guinea-Bissau, and Nigeria. On their website the Arsenal writes: ‘Archives are laboratories for critical reflection in the ‘heritage’ category, e.g. in relation to a past of colonialism and immigration or to political and aesthetic movements. Apart from yielding returns with regard to film history and theory, the project intends to contribute to the development of new prospects in cultural policy concerning film.’2 But Schulte Strathaus and Didi Cheeka discussed their collaborations not only during the GSSN conference in London, but also in 2018 during ‘Think:Film No. 6 – Archival Constellations’ in Berlin. Cheeka is the co-founder and curator of Lagos Film Society and the initiator of ‘Reclaiming History, Unveiling Memory’, an archive-based project of Lagos Film Society to restore, digitize, and provide curatorial context for rediscovered films from Nigeria’s Colonial Film Unit. He does research in Nigeria in the cities of Lagos and Jos. Strathaus and Cheeka mentioned the temporarily lost film Shaihu Umar by Adamu Halilu (1976). On their website at the Arsenal they write ‘[...] a film rediscovered is a new film. [...] The discovery and first publication of the holdings of any national film archive, which in this case contains never before seen documentary footage of the country, can be considered a major event not just for film culture, but for historiography broadly speaking. This certainly is the case with the National Film Archive in Jos.’3 Similarly to this collaboration, some of Arsenal’s national ventures are also promising, such as ‘re-selected’ (2018) at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen. This initiative aims to write film history in the postanalogue age and ‘will devote itself to select films from the Short Film Festival’s analogue stock and examine film history as a history of individual film prints.’4 ‘Re-selected’ discusses films which seem to turn against the power of the archive while still residing within it (for example films by Abigail Child). On their website the Arsenal describe those films as ‘counterstories and in the most cases as HERstories’.5 In the case of Berlin, another positive effect has been the fusion of different storage spaces under one roof at the silent green kulturquartier in 2016. Research at editing tables allows instant access to films, which would otherwise have to be ordered and viewed in a lengthy process, removing spontaneity and a certain joy from working with the material. The beautiful rooms of the former crematorium also offer exhibition spaces for showcasing the collection’s works. Artists have been able to create inspiring new works in this creative atmosphere. Curators and programmers have also benefited from this new-found freedom.

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In addition, the Arsenal Cinema at Potsdamer Platz screens new and old films and continues to promote the experimental films from the 1960s and 1970s, such as during the Berlin Film Festival. The huge number of announcements of programmes and events, listed on their website,6 are efforts to preserve and share its growing collection with audiences as part of an on-going negotiation of what constitutes a shared cultural heritage of cinema. Arsenal is also highly engaged in educational initiatives, such as sharing their knowledge, in summer schools, the cooperation with Free University and Goethe University, to mention only a few. Not only has the Arsenal moved its collection in recent years to make it more accessible for education, but also LUX in London moved to a bigger space,7 and likewise the UCLA archive moved to Santa Clarita, where all the films are under one roof now, rather than in different vaults all over Los Angeles. Thankfully in recent years more funding has become available also for other innovative ventures that have grown from the success of the initial well-conceived projects. One may have good hope, I believe, that these developments are sustainable. Martin Körber from the Kinemathek in Berlin told me in an interview that the archive is looking for new forms of usability apart from the renting system, since artists and broadcasting companies are searching more often at Kinemathek for special visuals and sounds in order to integrate them in their experimental or documentary works. Körber said: ‘The situation leads then onto another one, so that the money that a production leaves behind, can be used to digitize a few films or even sometimes restore them.’8 Daniel Meil­ ler from the Kinemathek shared with me also interesting insights on trying to map out where the films were shown in the 1960s and 1970s (Electric Cinema in Amsterdam, XSCREEN in Cologne, Knokke etc.) Moreover, the Kinemathek hosted recently some interesting events, such as Film:ReStored_02. At the Film Heritage Festival questions on copyrights were discussed amongst an international audience: Where do the objectives and means of archives and license holders overlap during the digitalization of film heritage? The integration of living copyright holders and authors (for example directors and camera crews) into the digitalization process can be extremely valuable for treatment that is true to the original, but it can also produce areas of friction. The desire for a creative revision, for instance, may be opposed to scholarly or archivist standards. Then again, making different versions could also be a way to do justice to divergent requirements.9 On the whole, a positive development is noticeable: heritage institutions are increasingly collaborating with film scholars and curators. For example, in

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Amsterdam, the Eye Film Museum works together with many institutions, especially with the Masters degree programme in ‘Presentation and Preservation of the Moving Image’ at the University of Amsterdam.10 From the academic year of 2020-2021 onwards, the programme will collaborate closely with the programme in Archival and Information Studies, allowing shared expertise. Inspiring is the group ‘Moving Images: Preservation, Curation, Exhibition’ I joined, which is organized by Eye and the UvA. In 2018, the ‘Eye International Conference: Activating the Archive’ asked how we can turn audio-visual archives into ‘communal’ resources. In the programme the organizers Giovanni Fossati and Eef Masson wrote:

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In this era of expansive datafication, the ownership of information, including also its life cycle, is becoming increasingly contested. For audio-visual archives, debates centering on the entanglement of custodianship and power are hardly new, but in light of such developments, they are regaining momentum. The ease with which we can produce and disseminate moving images today, paired with the relative complexity of preserving them for the long term, puts increasing pressure on (institutional) archives to reconsider their decision-making process.11 These new sets of challenges opened discussions on power and diversity, ‘countercultural collections’, ‘community archiving’, ‘archival activism’, ‘the ethics of reuse’, ‘indigenous media and the archival imaginary’, and ‘activating audio collections’. These discussions underline the urgency of some topics. During the conference, on their annual Collection Day, the organizers of the conference also opened their Eye Collection Center and presented recent archiving and restoration projects. Recently, The Eye Collection Center created the EYE-D digital platform ‘automating the archival and delivery process of digital and digitized film. EYE-D’s player allows users to view and order films in virtually every desirable format using the FFmpeg library.’12 In the Netherlands, another relevant event on archiving is ‘The Winter School for Audiovisual Archiving’ held at Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, which focuses on digital archiving. Their keynote talks are available to the public online and inform about new best practice examples, including the Eye, Tate Modern, and the Irish Film Archive.13 Another inspiring Dutch initiative is a recent publication, ‘Gender and Archiving: past Present Future’ (2017), ‘which focuses on the meaning and potential of archiving for enhancing gender equality and the position of women worldwide. [...] Besides investigating the feminist potential of the archive, it also examines questions of erasure and forgetting. While archives may have emancipatory or democratizing potential, practices of discarding equally shape the histo-

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ries that can be written, and the stories that can be told.’14 In context of preserving, archiving, and digitizing installation art since my collaboration with Julia Noordegraaf in a workshop at the Spring School in Gorizia in 2011 with the title ‘Cinema and Contemporary Visual Arts’ and the subsequent publication Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: A Handbook (2013) a lot of interesting research projects started. Since then Noordegraaf leads the digital humanities research programme Creative Amsterdam (create) that studies the history of urban creativity using digital data and methods. All these changes in moving image culture are promising. Therefore, it is important to pursue vibrant film cultural studies programmes that are active beyond the university, initiating events in which moving images can be experienced and discussed. In my own teaching practice, for example, I seek to always entangle theory with practice. For example, the assignments for students include writing essays, a blog post, various photo series, audio-visual essays, and short documentary films about the excursions undertaken during course work. In the case of some of my courses, such student works were then shown on TV, on festivals, as part of a video art installation, and presented in non-university public establishments. These creative and academic works are part of a multi-media research and lean on the poetical experimental practice of found footage, the compilation film, and the mash-up-video. They enable a new performative form of critical reflexion and activism.15 Festivals and archives become more and more important for students, that is why I not only arranged seminars that integrate excursions to festivals and museums, I also co-organized the first Oberhausen Seminar (2014), with festival director Lars Gass, Ben Cook from LUX (London), Chi-hui Yang from The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar (New York) and Hilde Hoffmann from the Ruhr-University (Bochum). In pursuance of starting this new annual section during the festival, it was important for the festival to guarantee that participants will attend, which is why we developed the idea to include some of my students from the Goethe-University, Frankfurt, and the Ruhr-University (Bochum) and generate funding from the respective institutions. Together with other funding, the first Oberhausen Seminar began, and my students had the opportunity to meet with and learn from international established artists, film makers, academics and curators in daily meetings, discussions, and the shared experience of the screenings and performances. It was fortunate timing, as the festival’s main thematic programme in that year was Memories Can’t Wait, which presented Expanded Cinema (see Case Study in Chapter 2).16 Furthermore, the new programme segment is an experimental course exploring contemporary artists’ moving image practice in the context of a renowned international film festival. Led by the curator Federico Windhausen, on the last day of the festival, the seminar group had a podium discussion, which was

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open to the public. We discussed how can such a seminar, which is comprised of a heterogeneous group of people and seems to exist both within and outside of the festival, could make a unique contribution to the festival. During these discussions it became clear that the people in the room refer back to independent histories, theories, practices and economies, which exist due to the differing artistic places of education (art schools and film schools) and academic disciplines (art history and film studies). That is why festivals and art fairs organize those discussion platforms, where they can strive for a better understanding of the different production realities. Moreover, I advocate seminars in film theory but also in film practice, namely film making and film curating, where students can make their own films, blogs, programmes and exhibitions. In the course of my investigations, it became apparent that not only curators and archivists are important in the process of accessing films from the archive, but that a complex network of agents contribute to films being shown and maintained. As long as the films in the archive are accessible, visible, and taken notice of, the chance to obtain funds for a professional digitization, or even a restoration, and the possibility that film copies ensue, or that later presentation in a cinema or in the museum could be organized, is far greater. Films can be shown in museums or alternative locations, alongside the cinema. There is a need for film, media, and art scholars to study sites like this for the significance of archival reconstruction in producing a ‘performative practice’ of film history.

NOTES 1

This is important since before official funding to archives for restorations and digitizations has often been restricted due to government budget cuts.

2

https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/living-archive/news/single/article/7087/3082. html accessed: 1 January 2018.

3 https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/berlinale-forum/program-forum-expanded/ forum-expanded-think-film-no-6/unpacking-histories-film-archives-and-theirconsequences.html accessed: 1 January 2018. 4

https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/living-archive/news/single/article/7248/3082. html accessed: 1 January 2018.

5

https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/living-archive/news/single/article/7482/3082. html accessed: 1 January 2018.

6

https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/living-archive/news.html accessed: 1 January 2018.

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7

https://lux.org.uk/about-us. Lux in cooperation with Tate https://www.tate.org.uk/ about-us/projects/tate-st-ives-artists-programme-0/organisations-lux accessed: 1 January 2018.

8

Translation by the author from an interview in June 2016.

9

https://www.avanet.nl/agenda/filmrestored-film-heritage-festival/ accessed: 1 January 2018.

10 A good overview on the current university programmes can be found in a recent edition of the online-magazine Synoptique: http://synoptique.hybrid.concordia. ca/index.php/main/issue/view/12/showToc. One of the earliest programmes is ‘The Master of Arts degree program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP)’, which is situated within New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies, part of the Kanbar Institute of Film & Television in the acclaimed Tisch School of the Arts. http://remu.tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/miap. Also important is UCLA’s’ Moving Image Archive Studies (MIAS)’ MA degree programme, which is the first degree-granting graduate programme in North America to offer specialized training in audio-visual preservation. During my research in Los Angeles I had a chance to get an insight to this programme. https://mias.gseis.ucla. edu/overview/ accessed: 1 January 2018. 11 Quoted from the programme given at the conference. 12 Conference brochure of the 5th Eye International Conference‚’The 10th Women and Silent Screen Conference’, 2019, p.32. 13 https://www.beeldengeluid.nl/en/visit/events/winter-school-audiovisualarchiving-2018 accessed: 1 January 2018. 14 https://verloren.nl/boeken/2086/250/6647/onderwijs-en-wetenschap/gender-andarchiving:-past,-present,-future accessed: 1 January 2018. Inspiring in this context is Carolyn Birdsall’s article: ‘Divisions of Labour: Radio Archiving as Gendered Work in Wartime Britain and Germany’. 15 Compare to Lee 2017. 16 In 2013, during the ‘Blowing’ Free Festival’, together with Hilde Hoffmann we organized an Expanded Cinema event, which we discussed with the artists, our students from the Ruhr-University Bochum and other audience members. The event was a re-enactment of a 1980s performance by Lichtkontrolle (Robert Bosshart, Tom Briele, Peter Simon) Die Geschichte der Agenten. Von der Bude gegenüber von Tor 1 von Krupp Rheinhausen 1981-2006 during Emscherkunst in Duisburg.

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Conclusion

Siewert, S., Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462985834_concl

To conclude, in order to understand this ‘performative practice’ I included different aspects of access and reconstructions in my analysis. As part of a ‘pragmatic poetic’, both the economic and the aesthetic were taken into consideration. As a second step, I studied the specific aesthetic experience of those selected experimental films, Expanded Cinema, video installations, and music videos in their different dispositifs. Since these experiences often emerge from the combination of visual and sonic sensations, I also emphasized the necessity of analyzing the affectivity of the music alongside the more common analysis of the visual. That is why I introduced the concept of ‘sensual pleasure’, which describes a combination of ‘visual pleasure’ and ‘sonic pleasure’. As a third step, I asked how this aesthetic experience allows an understanding for ‘historical sensations’ and ‘joyful memory’ triggered by rescreenings or re-enactments. And finally, I analyzed strategies of keeping this ‘expanded heritage’ alive. When talking about archive, aesthetic experience, and memory, some concepts of innovative scholars should be mentioned again. Landberg’s descriptions of films being part of the ‘archive of experience’ and Fevry’s notion of memory as a ‘visual kaleidoscope’ describe the recognition of a past that is not necessarily one’s own. In connection to music Even’s notion of ‘paradox of remembering’, where ‘the whole past is compressed into the present moment’ is also a way of describing those experiences.

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I believe, that out of curiosity audience members have ‘sensual pleasure’ from the experience of the re-showings of experimental films, re-enactments of Expanded Cinema works and found footage films. This was often addressed in discussions with audience members after the screening, when they shared their heightened emotional aesthetic experience. All these events that were showcased in my case studies made a special experience palpable, due to their usages of visuals, sound, and music, which, I believe, evoked this ‘sensual pleasure’. Moreover, the films form a community by creating a reference system. They become space and time vehicles, in which actual and virtual, fantasy and reality become blurred. On the basis of the boundary crossing qualities of the music can put one in another world or in another state of consciousness. These aesthetic experiences, which seem to be part of one’s own ‘archive of experience’, provide a wonderful subversive nudge in times of wars, discussions on ‘fake news’ and other contemporary topics, because these works are uplifting, provocative, beautiful, often electrifying, and expansive to our consciousness. In this context, I hope that this book offers new avenues for thinking about the relation of the audio-visual archive to experience, memory, and belonging. Through the course of my research, it became clear that a knowledge of film history is significant within an expanded analytical frame of studying contemporary moving image culture. Archivists, curators, and academics perform crucial roles in describing and defining archival stock, and producing ‘content’ through selection, classification, and categorization. Together with artists, who re-enact films or work with found footage, they all can be seen as performative agents that play a crucial role in forming historical knowledge, educating different generations of audiences, producing heritage, and cultural memory. Therefore, the experience of these exciting artistic works during events in cinemas, museums, galleries, and festivals, allows a deepened comprehension and understanding of the history, the present, and the impulses of the future.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank everyone I worked with in the archives, collections, cinemas, museums, galleries, festivals, universities, and libraries, and most of all my heartful thanks to all filmmakers, artists, programmers, curators, students, audience members, publishers, family and friends and especially to my parents Waltraud and Harald Siewert who supported me from the beginning and introduced me to the love for film, film making, performances, and archiving. I thank Thom Andersen, Harun Farocki, Guy Sherwin, Carolyn Birdsall, Simona Monizza, Nicole Stuckenberger, Stefanie Knauer, Bronwyn Birdsall, Ulrike Hanstein, Erica Carter, Dagmar Brunow, Astrid Erll, Bernhard Gross, Christoph Dreher, Lars Gass, Hilde Hoffmann, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Angela Melitopoulos, Constanze Ruhm, Thomas Weber, Ursula v. Keitz, Floris Paalman, Julia Noordegraaf, Giovanna Fossati, Xavier Garcia Bardon, Ben Cook, Martin Körber, Daniel Meiller, Karola Gramann, Markus Ruff, Nicole Wolf, Snowden Becker, Ross Lipman, Mark Toscano, Haden Guest, Steve Anker, Ed Halter, Mark McElatten, Christophe Guérin, Helga Fanderl, Jonas Mekas, Ian White, Michael Snow, Cesar Oiticica Filho, Barbara LeMaître, Hermann Kappelhoff, Vinzenz Hediger, Francesco Cassetti, Claudia Dillmann, Christina Schöpper, Mareile Kröplin, Sybille Wolf, Saskia Frank, Tina Mersmann, Ona Eribenne, Nicola Suthor, Shona Donaldson, Diana Hägele, Claudia Althaus, Stefanie Röper, Carmen Yousefian, Detlef Siewert, Erasmus Noeske, Annkathrin Klestil, Sebastian Altmeyer and Ben Dowden. Last but not least I am thankful to Thomas Elsaesser for our discussions since 2005, when I started working at his department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and received my PhD under his supervision in 2009 and for our exchanges up until 2019. I would also like to thank the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the DFG research network ‘Cinema as Experi-

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ence Space’, the Ruhr-University Bochum for letting me develop my project idea, the Goethe-University Frankfurt for hosting my project, Eye’s academic book series ‘Framing Film’ in collaboration with Amsterdam University Press (AUP), Maryse Elliott, Mike Sanders, Chantal Nicolaes, Sarah de Waard and the anonymous peer reviewers from Amsterdam University Press (AUP), and to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG/German Research Foundation) for the funding of the project.

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All stills are from --- ------(aka The Rock ’n’ Roll Film) (1966-1967) by Thom Andersen and Malcolm Brodwick © Thom Andersen

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Expanded Cinema by Guy Sherwin’s Man with Mirror (2009/1979) © Guy Sherwin, Ben Dowden

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ACCESS, Diamond, Enter, Fin... Archival Viewing Acts Live-Performance by Angela Melitopoulos and Constanze Ruhm, Berlin Film Festival, Forum Expanded 2012, © melitopoulos

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Siewert, Senta. ‘An der Peripherie des Kinos. Experimentelle Bewegtbilder’. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (zfm) 09.2 (2013c). Siewert, Senta. ‘Born to be alive’. Living Archive: Archivarbeit als künstlerische und kuratorische Praxis der Gegenwart/Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice. Eds. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Uli Ziemons. Berlin: b-books, 2013d. 196-197. Siewert, Senta. ‘Programmgestalten und Kuratieren von Experimentalfilmen’. Augenblick. Konstanzer Hefte der Medienwissenschaft 56/57 2013e: 64-70. Siewert, Senta. Entgrenzungsfilme – Jugend, Musik, Affekt, Gedächtnis. Eine pragmatische Poetik zeitgenössischer europäischer Filme. Marburg: Schüren, 2013f. Siewert, Senta with Carolyn Birdsall.’Of Sound Mind: Mental Distress and Sound in Twentieth-Century Media Culture.’ Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 16.1 (2013g): 27-45. Siewert, Senta. ‘Musik, Affektivität, Erinnerung und Vermarktung bei Trainspotting’, in: Carsten Heinze, Laura Niebling, Eds., Populäre Musikkulturen im Film (Film und Bewegtbild in Kultur und Gesellschaft). Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016. 267287. Siewert, Senta. ‘Affektive und partizipative Erfahrung bei Expanded-CinemaAufführungen auf Filmfestivals’. Eds. Florian Mundhenke, Thomas Weber. Kinoerfahrungen. Theorien, Geschichte, Perspektiven. Hamburg: Avinius, 2017. 233-246. Siewert, Senta. „Am Puls der Zeit’, in: Ursula v. Keitz, Ed., ‚Alles dreht sich ... und bewegt sich’. Der Tanz und das Kino. Marburg: Schüren, 2017. 46-54. Siewert, Senta. ‘Ein krisenhaftes Bewusstsein’. Prekäre Obsession. Minoritäten bei Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Eds. Nicole Colin, Franziska Schößler, Nike Thurn. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. 241-268. Siewert, Senta. ‘Fassbinder. Frankfurt.’ Traces, NECSUS #5 (Spring 2014). www.necsusejms.org/fassbinder-frankfurt/ accessed 10.08.2018. Siewert, Senta. ‘Entgrenzungsfilme. Fassbinder, Akin, Roehler und die Medienkunst.’ Text und Kritik. Rainer Werner Fassbinder 103.2 (2015): 23-30. Sobshack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004. Sitton, Robert. Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Spieker, Sven. The big archive – art from bureaucracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Uhrich, Andy. ‘Pressed into the Service of Cinema: Issues in Preserving the Software of Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab.’ The Moving Image 12.1 (2012). Vanderbeek, Stan. ‘Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto’, Film Culture 40, 1966: 15-18. Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. London: Distributed Art Pub, 1974.

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182 |

Wright, Robb. ‘Score vs. Song: Art, Commerce, and the H Factor in Film and Television Music.’ Popular Music and Film. Ed. Ian Inglis. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.

PERFORMING MOVING IMAGES

INDEX 24 Hour Psycho 56

Association of German Film

a

artists’ film/cinema/moving

Archives 23 image  8-10, 60, 63, 153

Abstract Film 40 Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles  8, 40, 87-94

Assmann, Aleida  12, 132-133 Austrian Film Museum, Vienna  40, 61, 118

access  8-12, 19-33, 44, 54-55, 59, 65, 68-71

avant-garde  9, 19-25, 38, 59-61, 85-89, 116, 123

affect  11-13, 24-25, 31-33, 54, 72, 74-83, 94, 96-97, 114, 123, 126, 135, 157 Altman, Rick  77 Andersen, Thom  8, 28, 40, 60, 63, 87-89, 92-93, 117, 136, 161-168 Anger, Kenneth  32-33, 58-59, 63, 95 Anthology Film Archives, New York  9, 60-61

b

Balázs, Béla  74 Balsom, Erica  11, 59 Baron, Jaimie  11-12, 43-44, 117 Barry, Iris  21, 55 Bazin, André  56, 109-110

Arabesque for Kenneth Anger  32, 95

Belson, Jordan  35, 37

archival impulse  43, 131, 158

Benjamin, Walter  56, 109-110

archiving  9, 16-24, 31-33, 67-72, 116,

Berlin Film Festival  9, 22, 37-39, 62,

129-139, 152-153 archive effect  43-44, 117

112, 151 Beydler, Gary  8, 87, 91-92

archive fever  44, 108, 117

black box  11, 54-55, 118-128

archiveology 19

Block Experiments in Cosmococa (CC) 38

Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video

Björk 121-122

Art, Berlin  9, 18, 22, 31-32, 37-38,

Bohn, Anna  12, 130-131

43, 61-68, 83, 94, 112-114, 149-151

Bold, Alf  32-33

| 183

Bolter, David; Grusin, Richard  12, 110, 132 Bonvicini, Monica  117, 121

Cubitt, Sean  110-111 curare  24-26, 72, 137 curating  9-33, 60, 72, 87, 130, 154

Bosma, Peter  26, 29 Bowie, David  122

d

Bozar, The Centre for Fine Arts,

David Bowie Is   122

Brussels  9, 42 British National Archive (BFI), London  20, 22, 40, 60, 72 Brunow, Dagmar  11-12, 44, 132-133

death of cinema  11, 17, 55-56, 111, 123 decay  31, 71, 129, 149 déjà-entendu 82-83 Deleuze, Gilles  12, 73, 79, 114, 127-128,

By the Sea 91

135-136 Deichtorhallen, Hamburg  120-121

184 |

c

Derrida, Jacques  11,19, 44

Casetti, Francesco  11, 57-58

Destroy She Said  117

Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum (DFF), Frankfurt  124

(ZKM) 34 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris  40, 42, 62, 64 celluloid  31, 34, 41, 62, 71, 130

digital turn  20, 110 digital rollout  20, 44 digitization  8, 10, 23, 44, 59, 71-72, 129-133, 149, 154

Cheeka, Didi  150 Cherchi Usai, Paolo  10-11, 20-26

distribution  10, 20-23, 41, 44, 55, 59-60, 63-64

Chion, Michel  76 cinémathèque  23

document  20, 27, 40, 69, 110, 114-117, 125, 130,

Cinémathèque Française, Paris  20-22, 28, 40, 64, 72

Documenta, Kassel  26, 62, 66

Cinémathèque Royale, Brussels  20

Doing, Karel  31

Cinémathèque Suisse, Zurich   130

Dubois, Phillipe  11, 56, 123

cinema effect – music video effect  123 cinematic  11, 37, 43, 62, 65, 74, 86-89, 96, 110-111

e

Eat Fear  126

cinematic apparatus  41, 56, 58

Edmondson, Ray   20

cinematic musical codes  77

Elsaesser, Thomas  11, 57-58, 110, 129

connoisseurship  27, 60

ephemeral  40, 69-70, 111, 114-115, 131

consciousness   35, 54, 74, 81, 85, 95-97,

Erll, Astrid  12, 133-135

117, 123-124, 158

ethical presenter  25, 137

Conrad, Tony  35-36, 85

ethics  20, 22, 72, 130, 137, 152

Conner, Bruce   28, 32, 59, 63, 81, 94-95,

Evens, Aden  78-79,

117-118

Export, Valie  39-40, 63

Cook, Ben  63, 93, 153

Eye Collection Center   150

copyright  10, 44, 151

Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam  9, 23,

counter-history 111

PERFORMING MOVING IMAGES

31, 40, 42, 68-73, 152

Eye International Conference Activating

Fragments of Seeing - Recovering the Los Angeles avant-garde 87-89

the Archive  152 Eye on Art  68

Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform (FMSP)   135

excess  79, 82 Expanded Cinema definition 35

Francis, David  24, 113

Expanded Cinema history 33-37

Frick, Caroline  10, 23-24

experience

Frith, Simon  78-79

–

Frohne, Ursula  125, 128

aesthetic experience  8-12, 32-34, 54-58, 83-97, 108, 135, 157-158

–

experience of music  78-80, 96-97

g

–

experience of time  40, 69-74,

gallery film  125-128

78-80, 96-97, 110, 124

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and

–

haptic experience   43

–

transmedial experience  57

exhibition  7, 11, 13, 23, 26-29, 42, 54-86, 108, 111, 115-129, 150-154

Museums (GLAM)  27 Gass, Lars Henrik  11, 59-60, 119, 153

| 185

Geens, Tom  124, 126-127 German Screen Studies Network

Exploding Plastic Inevitable 87

(GSSN)  30, 149-150 Glass Face  8

f

Gorbman, Claudia  77-78

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner  119, 124-129 Fassbinder – NOW: Film and Video

Gordon, Douglas  55-56, 121, 125 Gregor, Ulrich   22, 112 Guggenheim Museum, New York, Berlin, Venice, Bilbao   120, 122

Art  124-129 Farocki, Harun   28, 65-68, 111-112 FES (Fund for the Reinforcement of Economic Structure)  71

h

Hagener, Malte  21, 24

Fevry, Sébastien  12, 134- 135, 157

Hand Held Day  8, 92

FIAF see International Federation of

Halbwachs, Maurice  132

Film Archives

Hanstein, Ulrike  11, 116

Filmforum, Los Angeles  9, 63-64

haptic visuality  75-76

film heritage see heritage

Harun Farocki Institute (HaFI),

Film:ReStored_02  150

Berlin 68

Fisher, Morgan  40, 91-91

Hell’s Angels 39

Forum Expanded  37-39, 112

Her Mona  32, 95

Fossati, Giovanna  10-11, 23-24, 152

HERstories 150

Foster, Hal  11, 43

heritage

Foucault, Michel  11, 19, 113

–

film heritage  10-12, 19-23, 26, 44,

–

audio-visual heritage  11-12, 44,

found footage   7, 12, 28, 31, 39, 43-44, 90, 108, 117-118, 123-124, 135-136,

6, 72, 110, 125, 129-132, 150-151

153

109-110, 129-132 –

cultural heritage  10, 12, 125, 151

inde x

– –

expanded heritage  12, 131-135,

Klippel, Heike  12, 25, 134,

157

Kracauer, Siegfried  24, 109-110

national heritage  21-23

Kubelka, Peter   60-61, 63

historical knowledge  30, 108-110, 158

Kuhn, Annette   75, 133-134

historical sensation  12, 24, 108-110,

Kustom Kar Kommandos  32, 95

129, 157

Kunstwerke gallery in Berlin (KW)  9,

historiography, film  9, 11, 24, 44,

18, 114

109-111, 131, 150 Horak, Chris  24, 130-131

l

Horror Film 70-71

LaborBerlin 63-64

Huizinga, Johan  108

Labyrinth  32, 96 Langlois, Henri  21-22, 28

i

Landsberg, Alison  12, 135

Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen/ I Thought

186 |

I was seeing Convicts 66 Ihlein, Lucas; Curham, Louise   69-70, 116 Iles, Chrissie  55

Learn German with Petra von Kant  126 Le Grice, Malcolm  70-71, 75 lieu de mémoire  133 Lightcone 64 Light Industry  9, 63-64

In a Year with 13 Moons  126-127

Lights  32, 95

installation  7-8, 12, 29, 34, 38, 41, 46,

Lindgren, Ernest  22

56-75, 85, 114-132, 153, 157 Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), London 29

Line Describing a Cone  41-43, 86 Lipman, Ross  29-30, 59, Liquidator 31

Invisible Cinema  61

liquid projections 86

International Federation of Film

Living Archive Project   18-19, 30-33, 44, 65, 94, 114, 117, 149-151

Archives (FIAF)  20-21, 72, 130, 137 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)   7, 86-89

Living Pasts, Moving Present  30, 149 Locating and Dis-Locating Memory – In Search of Transcultural Memory in

International Short Film Festival

Europe 30

Oberhausen  9, 28, 39-41, 59-60, 64, 119, 122, 150, 153 Irish Film Archive, Dublin  24, 152

Looking For Mushrooms  32, 81, 94 LUX, London  63-64, 93, 151, 153

Islam, Runa  124, 126 I want to see how you see  120-121

m

Mandarin Ducks 126 j

Man with Mirror  68-74, 135, 169

James, David E.  8-9, 33, 63, 86-95

Marks, Laura  11, 25, 29, 72, 137 Mekas, Jonas  60-63, 71

k

Kalinak, Kathryn  76 Kinemathek, Deutsche, Berlin  22-23, 151

PERFORMING MOVING IMAGES

Melitopoulos, Angela; Ruhm, Constanze  112-114, 136, 170

memory  7-8, 11-12, 19-25, 30, 33, 43, 56, 71, 77-78, 108-137, 149-150,

Noordegraaf, Julia   128, 153 NRW Forum, Düsseldorf  120

157-158 –

autobiographical memory  133

o

–

cultural memory  12, 19, 33, 78,

Oiticica, Hélio  38-39

111, 125, 133-134

Olivia’s Place  92

–

collective memory  19, 23-24, 71,

O’Neil, Pat  91, 93

132, 134 p

–

functional memory  132-133

–

joyful memory  12, 134-135, 157

Paik, Nam June  37, 119

–

memory in motion  134

performative  9, 27-29, 58, 74, 84,

–

multidirectional memories  133

–

postmemory situations  134

performativity    11, 133

–

prosthetic memory  135

philosophy  73, 114-116, 128, 135-137

–

transcultural memory   30

Pie Pellicane Jesu Dominae – And After

–

travelling memory  133

111-115, 128, 154-158

Several Rapid Strokes of Their

Memories Can’t Wait  39-40, 153

Wings 84

memory work   133

pragmatic poetics  12, 30-31, 59, 79

Menken, Marie  32, 95

Pragmatic Poetics of the Archive  59

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  75

preservation  10, 18, 20, 23, 26, 29, 31,

minor cinema  8

40, 59, 61, 64, 72, 109, 130- 131,

Mongoloid  32, 63, 95, 117 Monizza, Simona  31, 68-72

149, 152 projector  10, 32-36, 40-42, 56-58, 68-75,

McCall, Anthony  41-43, 55, 63, 86, 121 McClure, Bruce  84-85

84-87 programming  9, 11, 19-34, 57, 71-72,

Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)  20- 21, 55, 60, 62, 122 Museum Ostwall, U, Dortmund  42, 62

94, 113-114, 120 Provincializing European Memory 135 PS1, New York   58, 62

Mulvey, Laura   25-28, 83, 125

psychedelic  86, 93-95, 117, 123

musicandum 79

Putrih, Tobias  40

music video clip  11, 118-124 music video effect – cinema effect  123

r

My Name is Oona  32, 95

re-enactment  12, 33-43, 67-76, 96,

MTV 120-121

112-118, 124-128, 132, 157-158 Reclaiming History, Unveiling

n

Memory  150

Negative Inspection 40

reconstruction  9-13, 107, 154

Nelson, Gunvor  32, 63, 95

remediation  12, 110, 117, 132-133

New York Film Festival  9, 25

remixing  19, 31, 117

NITMES  Network in Transnational

restoration  8-10, 20, 31, 59, 87-89, 130,

Memory Studies  135

149, 152-154

inde x

| 187

Renan, Sheldon  9, 35

Telscher, Klaus  32, 95

repository  23, 131

The Association of Moving Image Archivists’ (AMIA)  72

Rhodes, Liz  63, 75, 84-85 Rigney, Ann  133

The Beatles  80-81, 88-89, 94-95

Rolling Stones   38, 81

The Flicker 35

Rothberg, Michael  133

The London Film- Makers’ Cooperative 63

Rancière, Jacques  109-111, 126-128 Russell, Catherine  11, 19, 75, 111

The Poetics of Space  84 flicker effect  36, 54, 75-76, 88, 97

s

Think:Film – International Experimental Cinema Congress,

sampling  12-13, 87-89, 108, 117-118,

Berlin 93

127 Schulte Strathaus, Stefanie  19, 30-31,

Think:Film No. 6 – Archival Constellations, Berlin  150

112, 149-150

188 |

Schmidt Jr., Ernst  39

Tomorrow never knows  81, 94

Schnittstelle/Interface  65, 112

Toscano, Marc  7-8, 40, 87-93

Scratch 64

The Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany 18

sensual pleasure  12, 54, 81-83, 96, 157-158 Sharits, Paul  55, 63, 84

Federal Archive-Film Archive   22 The Realm of Possibilities 4 – Access Diamonds, Enter, Fin  112, 170

Sherwin, Guy  63, 68-74, 116, 135-136, 169

The Rock ’n’ Roll Film; or: --- ------- (aka

Shift  85

The Rock ’n’ Roll Film)  8, 63, 87-89,

Signals Regained 89

117, 161-168

Sobchack, Vivian  75

The Velvet Underground  87

somatic  74-75, 84

trance  33, 82, 95

Sonic Act Festival  9, 42, 83-86

Tuin 126

soundtrack  31-32, 75, 80, 90-91, 95, 127-128

u

Spellbound – Art and Film 55

UCLA, Los Angeles  24, 59, 151

Siewert, Senta   12-13, 20, 54, 76, 127,

underground film  8-9, 34-38, 61, 119

136

UPIC Diffusion Session 85-86

Stilleben/Still life 66 storage  8, 18-19, 36, 68, 132, 133, 150 Synesthesia 122

v

Vanderbeek, Stan  36-37 vault  8, 12, 18, 30, 35, 108, 151

t

Venice Pier  8, 91

Taanila, Mika  39-40

VJ 83-85

Tate Gallery, London  9, 42, 64, 75-76,

Vogel, Amos  9, 25, 95

81 Taylor, Diana  11, 115-116

PERFORMING MOVING IMAGES

video: 25 years of video aesthetics  120 visceral experience  8, 42, 54, 84- 86, 97

visual pleasure  83 Visser, Martin  32, 96 w

Walden 62 Wanderlust  121 Warhol, Andy  62, 81, 87, 121, 136 Weibel, Peter  34, 85 When I was Young  118 white cube  11, 54-56, 118 (Wo)Man With Mirror 69 Wong, Ming  124, 126 y

| 189

You’re the Stranger Here  126-127 Youngblood, Gene  9, 35-36, 57, 125 youthquake 81 YouTube  63, 70-71, 75, 116, 119-122 YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video  120, 122   z

ZKM see Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe Zum Vergleich/In Comparison 65

inde x