Darkened Rooms: A Genealogy of Avant-Garde Filmstrips from Man Ray to the London Film-Makers' Co-op and Back Again

Abstract

The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms. —Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) I. We are witnessing the reconfiguration of twentieth-century art history as a dark passage illuminated by intermittent projections. Most notably in “Le mouvement des images” (2006), a survey exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, paintings, sculptures, and other material objets d’art were relegated to side galleries grouped under cinematic rubrics. The spine of the exhibition was a darkened corridor with looped digital projections of films that traced a cinematic history of twentiethcentury art: Richard Serra and Paul Sharits, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Broodthaers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. 1 In each instance, the investment in cinema exceeded the production of films and was augmented by a range of works in adjacent galleries. There unfolded an “immaterial” passageway surrounded by material relics. Nowhere did the division between immaterial projection and material object congeal more strikingly than around a single wall on which was projected Man Ray’s Retour a la raison (1923) and behind which several meters of the film’s rayographically inscribed 35 mm filmstrips were exhibited as such for the first time: laid out flat for inspection like a museological artifact or specimen rather than upright like a painting, as in the case of the neatly framed filmstrips of Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1958‐1960), also on view. The most attentive viewers repeatedly skirted around the dividing wall to piece together the different components of the work. The filmstrips reveal white forms on a dark ground: tacks and pins, a coiled spring, rope, crystals, glass plates,