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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Film Forum, XXV International Film Studies Conference Exposing the Moving Image: The Cinematic Medium across World Fairs, Art Museums, and Cultural Exhibition
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2018-10-01
2021-09-03
2018-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Diego Baratto
2018/10/01
Università Iulm, Milano
2036-461X
31
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Film Forum, XXV International Film Studies Conference Exposing the Moving Image: The Cinematic Medium across World Fairs, Art Museums, and Cultural Exhibition
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16223/16944
19
FilmForum, XXV International Film Studies Conference
Exposing the Moving Image: The Cinematic Medium across
World Fairs, Art Museums, and Cultural Exhibition
Organisers: Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto, Andrea Mariani, Leonardo
Quaresima, Simone Venturini
Gorizia/Udine/Pordenone (February 28th – March 7th 2018)




   The Film Forum, organized by the University of Udine-Gorizia since 1996,
made well known effort to find new horizons to rethink the approaches to moving
images, within the three-year research project A History of Cinema without
Names. As Leonardo Quaresima has argued, the original aim is to dealing with
the unbalanced relations between the current mediascape and those theoretical
perspectives that have grown increasingly over the years.1 Therefore, the last
three editions correspond to three different phases of work, from a sort of pars
destruens, guided by an aim to overcome traditional notions such as ‘authorship’
and ‘genre’, to a comparison of various proposals about methods, subjects and
interdisciplinary tools, and finally to achieve a collective theoretical model.
On this basis, it is natural that the 2018 Film Forum, devoted to the cinematic
medium across World Fairs, Art Museums and Cultural Exhibitions, picked a
‘specific’ subject, albeit many-sided, just to evaluate the practical applications of
the resources provided by the previous editions. The conference’s large amount
of themes and issues has been deployed following broadly these research lines: a)
carrying out a media archaeological study — from the beginning of the Universal
Exposition experience to contemporary examples — which seeks to interrogate
the turning point, discontinuity, prefiguration and resurgence throughout
history of moving images apparatuses, screens and displays; b) pinpointing the
intermedial exchanges within certain contexts — such as architectural space,
cultural dimensions, social institution and ‘atmospheres’ — that are intersected
by audio-visual flow; c) illuminating the role played by ‘exposed moving images’
in visual culture and how they work. Overall, interweaving the operative analysis
of a given case with theoretical-methodological self-reflection seemed to be the
prevailing tendency. In this review, we are going to trace a partial overview of the
Film Forum program, touching some of the numerous topics tackled.
   Mauro Carbone opened his lecture with a proposal for an anthropology of
screens, in the wake of Hans Belting’s anthropology of images, in order to link the


1
 Leonardo Quaresima, ‘Names and Forms’, in A History of Cinema Without Names/2, ed. by
Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto, Leonardo Quaresima (Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2017), pp. 261-
273.

                                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 31, Fall 2018
                                  Reviews / Comptes-rendus


past and present of screen life without any restrictions to contemporary age and
teleological leanings. This provides an essential perspective, in Carbone’s view,
that can avoid the risks encountered by screenology,2 as well as screen genealogy.3
The first step for this task could be the adoption of the key-concept of arché-
screen described in his essay Philosophie-écran:4 a heuristic tool through which one
can investigate, over the course of history, the various transmutations of human
experiences of screens. These surfaces must be considered as ‘objects’ that show
and conceal simultaneously — a setting that seems to recall the Heideggerian
formulation of alètheia — and this ontological ambiguity (the coexistence of
negative and positive screens) entails that if the shadow gains a status of proto-
image, consequently the body can be seen as a proto-screen. Papers devoted
to ‘Skin and Exposition of Moving Images’ moved in the same area, providing
analysis of specific cases. Barbara Grespi illustrated the conceptual and cultural
relationship between the tattoo and moving images, starting from demonstration
of the way the skin of a living body turns into a motion surface for a picture, thanks
to muscular activity. Assuming the tattoo as a display, she outlined the modern
idea of the merging of image and screen, as well as the process of signification with
which the body’s visibility is underlined through these kinds of ‘skin writings’.
Sara Damiani adopted Jean-Luc Nancy’s effective notion of expeausition5 to
explore visual and scientific imaginary about skins, from ancient ritual of flaying
to contemporary transplant surgery, from anthropological to cinematographic
examples. Approaching Alejandro Iñárritu’s virtual reality installation Carne Y
Arena (2017), Simona Pezzano focused the body perception inside an immersive
experience that turns on a dialectic between haptic and optical stimulation and
puts the ‘visitor’ (spect-actor?) in a sort of plenitude witness condition in respect
of the political theme about immigrants and refugees.
   The role played by cinematic forms in botany and at the natural history museum
was at the centre of Teresa Castro’s talk, which shed light on a paradigm that
seems to emerge from a series of scientific films — categorized as a Cinematic
Herbaria — that aimed to reveal the imperceptible life of plants, especially
through time-lapses and close-ups. Film such as F. Percy Smith’s The Birth of
Flower (1923) and Jean Comandon’s La Croissance des végétaux (1929) have given
different view of the ‘taxidermic model’ of early ethnographical cinema, as they
used cinema to restore the movement of non-human lives, and, consequently,
to show the medium’s capacity to re-light so-called ‘primitive’ thought. Indeed,
Cinematic Herbaria seems to undermine the dualism subject/object, a feature on
which is based the taxidermic paradigm.


2
  Erkki Huhtamo, ‘Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen’, in ICONICS:
International Studies of the Modern Image, 7 (Tokyo: The Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences,
2004), pp. 31-82.
3
  Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), p. 99.
4
  See Mauro Carbone, Philosophie-écran. Du cinéma à la révolution numérique (Paris: Vrin, 2016).
5
  Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Éditions Métailié, 2000), pp. 31-34.

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   In the context of Multimedia Environment, Antonio Somaini offered a rich
analysis of the unrealized project of László Moholy-Nagy Raum der Gegenwart
(Room of Present), commissioned by Alexander Dorner in 1930 and set up only
recently in two different exhibitions. It would have been ‘the first multimedia
museum space of the XX century’, as well as the first occasion on which a
‘permanent museum would have exhibited film excerpts and other technological
media in combination with history of art’. Somaini demonstrated the intersections
between several features of Moholy-Nagy’s theoretical framework and Dorner’s
approach to museum displays, which flowed into Raum der Gegenwart. The
former studied ‘new vision’, which emerged within 1920s ‘optical culture’, which
was enable by technological innovations and worked on the concept of light as
a medium; the latter developed an idea of ‘atmosphere room’, namely a way
to create a different experience of space, which aims to sum up the tone, the
emotional perception of a given epoch. Thus, argued Somaini, this unrealized
project was based on the belief that the Stimmung, the atmosphere of present,
was a dimension in which art forms were turning to the configuration of light,
producing new types of dematerialization of concrete objects. Light dynamism
had a relevant role also in Eline Grignard’s presentation, on the modern
sensibility expressed by electric shows, the coloured light plays of Loie Fuller’s
dance and early cinema at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. Drawing on the
field of Media Atmospheres, Riccardo Venturi discussed ‘steam’ as a medium,
lingering on Joan Brigham’s and Stan VanDerBeek’s installation performance
Steam Screens (1979). He described how the medium of steam overturns the
traditional audience approaches and the notion of art-as-object, adding, at the
end of the talk, a brief genealogical overview on steam screens from figurative
appearances on impressionist paintings to contemporary artist installation.
   In the panel devoted to exhibiting cinema in museum complex et similia,
Dominique Païni explained the planning and the ambitions of his latest
exhibition, Picasso-Godard-Collage(s), tacking again the main issues raised in
his essay Le temps exposé: Le Cinéma de la salle au musée (2002). For him, the
wide spectrum of applications offered by the Foucaultian notion of analogie6 was
essential to thinking through the juxtaposition of Godard and Picasso’s works
and, above all, advancing the hypothesis of the possibility to understand the
latter through the former and vice versa. At the same time, Païni also followed
the idea of collage, which he considers the most evident feature shared by the
filmmaker and the artist, in order to enlighten not only their search for unusual
relations and interest in multilayered images, but also to ‘emulate’ their practical
creative processes.
   The Magic of Images: Hammershøi / Dreyer and its considerably different
arrangements, respectively at Ordrupgaard (Copenaghen) and CCCB
(Barcelona) museums, was central to the presentation by Casper Tybjerg, who co-

6
 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris : Éditions
Gallimard, 1966), pp. 36-38.

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                                 Reviews / Comptes-rendus


curated the exhibition. After having explained the influences of Hammershoi’s
paintings on some of Dreyer’s films, he stressed the David Summers’ concept
of facture as a way to rethink some aspects of art and film history, as well as its
strategies of exposition. With this view, he placed priority on the examination
and reconstruction of concrete forms of ‘making’ rather than interpretation, in
order to emphasize artistic and cultural production in a specific period. Hence,
considering a film in terms of facture means seeing it as ‘a record of its own
having been made’, namely to scrutinize the network of technology, industry,
commerce and the artist will and agency.
   The topics chosen for the 2018 Film Forum turned out to be decisive
dimensions through which to grasp the work of moving images on various levels
— such as its interplay with epistemological, cultural and political contexts.
They also helped to devise a visual culture map (embracing modernity and
postmodernity) that sheds light on many recurrences of early cinematic forms in
the current mediascape, and consequently rethink the ‘origin’. This recalls some
aspects of Benjamin’s idea of origin:

        Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless,
    nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe
    the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which
    emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the
    stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process
    of genesis. […] Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual
    findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development.7

                                             [Diego Baratto, Università Iulm, Milano]




7
 Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, trans. by John Osborne (New York: Verso
Books, 1998), pp. 45-46.

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