Reviewed by: Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing by Justin Remes Cameron Moneo (bio) Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing by Justin Remes. Columbia University Press. Film and Culture Series. 2020. 264 pages. $95.00 hardcover; $28.00 paper; also available in e-book Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing is a witty, richly detailed book filled with holes, gaps, and omissions. Justin Remes asks us to look at the invisible, to listen to the inaudible, and surprises us with the strangely ample rewards of making ourselves present to an absence—which is, after all, merely "a presence in disguise," with a whole set of unique features.1 This is not the first study of absence in art, but it is the first to pay close attention to absence as a gesture in cinema, that stubbornly audiovisual art (hard emphasis on the visual). Remes's subject is avant-garde cinema, whose manifold uses of absence tend to recast theoretical assumptions about the film medium and expand its aesthetic possibilities. In this way, Absence in Cinema forms a companion volume to Remes's Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis, whose chapter on "monochrome films" already began to beckon us toward the voids we enter here.2 To ward off the infinite abyss of absence in potentia, Remes clarifies that he is dealing in absences that thwart expectation and are strongly defined by their relata. Citing Jean-Paul Sartre, Remes insists on the "real" [End Page 219] relation of absence to what it negates.3 If Yves Klein and Andy Warhol both make invisible artworks, these artworks are phenomenologically distinct from each other, despite all their (non)appearances. The medium of film would seem to present a problem for studies of absence, however, since, in theory and fact, most of what we see in a film is absent from us. Fortunately, cinema's mediated "pseudopresence" is not Remes's concern; rather, he focuses on what Timothy Walsh calls "structured absences," which draw attention to a missing something that would normally have been there.4 With these parameters in place, the ensuing chapters offer case studies of four distinct ways that avant-garde filmmakers have willfully used absence. Remes carefully traces the context, function, and effect of these absences with a methodology based on case-by-case interdisciplinary analysis (e.g., neuroscience when called for), "autobiographical and anecdotal" accounts of absence's potential effects (influenced by Vivian Sobchack's work), and "counterfactual thought experiments" to imagine what we're missing and how it might reshape our experience.5 Chapter 1 looks at—or perhaps listens to?—Walter Ruttmann's imageless film Wochenende (Weekend, 1930).6 This city-based sound collage, commissioned by the Berlin Radio Hour, is often analyzed by sound, music, and radio scholars but less so by film theorists—this despite the fact that Ruttmann exhibited Wochenende in theaters and called it a "blind film."7 (Indeed he recorded his sounds with a film camera, leaving the lens cap on.) For Remes, the conservatism of film theory is partly to blame for this inattention; when ocularcentrism predominates, the imageless film is a contradiction. While Remes heralds Wochenende as a radical work of sound art, relating it to such twentieth-century landmarks as the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo's art of noises and Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète, the larger question of the chapter is how to categorize and experience Wochenende as cinema.8 Remes argues that the "promiscuously intermedial" Wochenende poses an ontological challenge, prompting reflection on whether the construction or experience of a work determines what we call cinema.9 Remes presents a case for experience: though Wochenende was made on film, being imageless it can (and did from the start) function as a standalone audio record. Thus, we experience it as a film, per a suggestion by Michel Chion, "with reference to a frame, even if an empty one."10 But what is the function of a frame that shows nothing? Remes concludes by suggesting how Wochenende destabilizes the cinematic encounter [End Page 220] and reorients our senses: at times, the blackness of a screen may occupy one's attention; at...
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Dec 30, 2023
Anna M Spiridonova 
Open Access
