Materiality and Meaning in Recent Projection Performance

Abstract

The Velvet Light Trap, Number 70, Fall 2012 DOI: 10.7560/VLT7003 ©2012 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 nyone paying attention to experimental cinema in the past fifteen years or so will have noticed that an aesthetic of materiality and medium specificity has returned. Despite (perhaps even because of) the everdecreasing availability of analog film brought about by digital media, film’s unique properties and possibilities have become the central subjects of experimental cinema to an extent not seen since the 1960s and 1970s. This development is particularly evident in the spate of films produced using nontraditional production methods that leave visible traces of themselves in the finished work, thereby reflexively calling a viewer’s attention to film’s distinct physical properties. These methods tend to involve a more direct, tactile involvement with film stock on the part of the maker, hence an increasing number of handmade films—films scratched, drawn upon, sewn, punctured, buried in earth, covered with foreign objects, and hand-processed using unpredictable alternative chemicals and methods. Also predominant are flicker effects, filmstrips displayed as objects, worked-over found footage, and “mistakes” arising from the contingencies of mechanical filmmaking at such a grass-roots, artisanal level—flares, chemical burns, and inconsistencies of color and exposure caused by hand-processing. All these features signal a renewed obsession with the stuff of analog, “celluloid” film and a celebration of its special qualities.1 But if medium specificity is back with a vengeance, it is also back with a difference. This difference—the nature of contemporary manifestations of medium specificity in experimental cinema—is what I shall explore here. As a case study, I will examine recent film projection performance, which involves the live manipulation of film projectors. The use of film projection in live performance can be traced back to the first generation of European modernists, including the surrealists and the artists afMateriality and Meaning in Recent Projection Performance jonaThan waLLey