Stephen Barber, Performance Projections: Film and the Body in Action

Abstract

‘Interdisciplinary’ persists as a watchword in academia, typically sought in research strategies, by funding bodies and interview panels. It is something desired for both genuine and perhaps more cynical reasons, but often obfuscated by the very institutional nature of the university. Stephen Barber announces early on that Performance Projections: Film and the Body in Action is concerned with the multiplicity of interconnections between performance and film, and thereafter he is absolutely focused on expressing the variety and complexity of their interweaving. The book is broad-ranging and ambitiously far-reaching in its scope, a genuine and impressive interdisciplinary undertaking that moves from performance art to clandestine musical performance, from Eadweard Muybridge’s precinematic experiments to smartphone footage of the Occupy movement, from 1930s Berlin to 1970s Japan. Barber’s perspectives on the intersections of performance, film and space combine aesthetics, politics, history and technology. Chapters focus on in-between sites of performance (rooftops, courtyards, underground); the multiple surfaces of and marks made by/on the body; riot and protest performance; and the impact of digital media. As a result the connections and possibilities offered go far beyond film and performance; the threads of the book’s interests link with the work of many varied disciplinary fields, such as urban landscapes (especially representations and histories of Berlin), political activism and cultural memory. Of course the study of film is in many ways inherently interdisciplinary, and in making my way through Performance Projections I was keenly reminded of Raymond Durgnat’s expression of cinema as a ‘Mongrel muse’, ‘a potpourri of art forms, sharing elements in common with each, but weaving them into a pattern of its own’.1 A determinedly interdisciplinary study such as this certainly brings out the richness of film’s connectiveness, reminding the reader of its deep entanglements in other artistic mediums and routes of inquiry, but for me there is also a question hovering over the book concerning the loss of specificity that the spread of such an approach might entail.