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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Site Specific, Placeless. Reflections on the Relocation of Cinema Onto Video
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2008-10-01
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2008-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Sandra Lischi
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Università degli Studi di Pisa
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Site Specific, Placeless. Reflections on the Relocation of Cinema Onto Video
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SITE SPECIFIC, PLACELESS.
REFLECTIONS ON THE RELOCATION OF CINEMA ONTO VIDEO
Sandra Lischi, Università degli Studi di Pisa




  Film that moves onto video devices (and not only); dismantled and recomposed, recovered,
reinvented, remade, materialized: “exhibited” cinema, “installed” cinema, in all the declinations
outlined in recent studies and meetings, right up to “re-located” cinema, in particular in the theo-
retical suggestions of Francesco Casetti1. Images that migrate from the cinema screen to the TV
screen and to the ever-present screens of computers and cell phones, from the archives to video
supports and to DVDs and the internet in constant, progressive, multi-directional and often irre-
versible movement, from digital back to film, from targeted, individual distribution to the chal-
lenge of the movie theatre and collective viewing. A media landscape that leaves the concept of
re-mediation behind it, together with the now evident inadequacy of the very term medium, rede-
fined by the pervasiveness and productive-versatile-distributive effectiveness of images and
sound thanks to digital encoding. The video, in terms of TV, has for some time been the centre of
a shift from the movie theatre to the home; in terms of an “independent” electronic image, it has
for some time been the centre of re-reading, re-writing, layout of invisible footage, of extremely
private family memories as of popular and well-known films. In the last few years, however, the
video is also moving away from out of a definable medium and mostly, perhaps, into the place
where there is a mutation in the experience of moving images.


Anticipations
  In a sense, ever since the Sixties, experimentation with electronic images has centred on a
reflection about overcoming the specific medium, both through the notion, at the time ground-
breaking and fertile, of intermediality (Dick Higgins), and through that of expanded cinema (Stan
VanDerBeek and then Gene Youngblood, who also foresaw the metamediality of the computer).
Videoart in particular gave importance to multi-sensorial dynamics and play, the central role of
the viewer, the variables in exhibition and viewing, the “performance value” of the screen, the
image and the spectator, the medium as an environmental experience and the shift from the pri-
vate (from the circumscribed, the institutional) to the public, also in terms of architectonic and
urban space, recognizing these as central issues. All this in a cultural context where unease, espe-
cially in the area of the aesthetics of reception, is one of the strongest matrices of the present
“rediscovery of experience”, as was recently emphasized by Peppino Ortoleva2.
  Theoretical and practical “exhibition” intuitions that developed and enhanced the modes of
experimental, independent and militant cinema, designing different viewing spaces (the screen,
the theatre), always temporary and mutating, from the quasi-private to the radically public.

CINÉMA & CIE, no. 11, Fall 2008                                                                  23
SANDRA LISCHI

Following in the tracks of cinematographic research but also closely related to television: video
cannot be understood without TV and TV cannot be understood without video, suggest Fredric
Jameson and David Joselit in their different ways3. Suffice it to remember how the experience of
television viewing prefigures – with all the acknowledged differences (set as it is amongst a vari-
ety of other objects, with the spectator free to sit as he/she wishes, with no need to turn down the
lights and the possibility of modifying images and sound) – the installation mode, right up to its
interactive forms.
   Linked to these aspects is the role that video is increasingly taking on within the relocation of
the cinema not so much in the ways previously described (re-writing, re-mediation) as in the pre-
cise sense indicated by Casetti, i.e. as «a more or less physical shift, which leads a medium to
occupy a new place […] and to contaminate this place with its presence»4. In this sense the video
becomes a mediator, or – to stay with a territorial metaphor – a ferry, as Dubois defines it, con-
veying cinema to places other than the movie theatre. «The gradual but lasting effect of video was
to bring moving images into the places of art. And with them it brought the cinema»5. The cine-
ma – or rather the “cinema-effect” – says Dubois, also pervades the very concept of preparation,
of “setting up” the art exhibition and the route through it, inspiring its lexis and absorbing its pro-
fessions and competences.


Light theatres
  Even if we consider the “standard” movie theatre phase as being circumscribed in the history
of moving images, its features have powerfully affected our experience of film. The screen, the
immobile and silent posture of the spectators, seated and facing the image, the darkness, the
design of the theatre itself, these have actually become the dominating features in the experience
of film in its most classic and widespread form – mostly coinciding, moreover, with the advent
of sound – in the need for the spectator to concentrate on complex and lengthy narrative forms6.
  In a 1994 lecture Michel Chion lamented the lack of “standard theatres” like movie cinemas for
video and for contemporary music experiences: in standard theatres, he observed, the attention is
necessarily focused on the work in question, because the context becomes invisible, being pre-
dictable and never-changing. Venues that are temporarily set up on individual occasions acquire
a power of distraction and hyper-visibility that “relativize” the work, diminish it and make view-
ing precarious and subdued7. A criticism shared by those authors who do not identify with the
poetics of fleeting uncertainty or of the open work of art and for whom the “dominant” model of
the movie theatre remains unsurpassed – indeed, should be strengthened (suffice it to think of the
theatre at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, designed by Peter Kubelka, who intensified the
darkness and separation between spectators).
  Nonetheless, far from being a “lack”, diversified, temporary space, re-organized on each occa-
sion, has been and often still is in harmony with the poetics and practices of the independent and
art video. It denotes a situation that may be “militant” (clubs, party headquarters, associations,
demonstrations, public squares) or heretically far removed from the black cube of the movie the-
atre and the ascetic white cube of the art gallery: looking out for places with a past, disused, en
plein air or in situations that recreate an apartment, a home, the chosen place. Part of this differ-
ent choice comprises the distancing that is added to the work by a temporary, disorienting con-
text; the exhibited sharing with other, clearly visible spectators; the lack of discipline for the spec-
tator-visitor, who makes choices and moves around; often there is also sound contamination

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between the works presented or between these and the environment. Like TV, the video does not
need darkness for viewing and in the Sixties, in Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-Louis Comolli was
already suggesting the affinity between the cinema of modernity and television viewing:

  For modern cinema, we need light theatres that neither absorb nor annul, as darkness does,
  the luminosity coming from the screen but do, on the contrary, make it resplendent, theatres
  that place the character and the spectator, both emerging from the shadows, right opposite
  one another on an equal footing […]. The small screen is also the only one that often looks
  out onto a light “theatre”…8.

   A gateway not into dream but into reality, not a spectator immersed in darkness but a recog-
nizable one, and the “hero of the film”, in broad daylight9.
   However, the video does not only inherit TV’s characteristic of being a luminous and ever-pres-
ent little box: it is through TV that it has established, probably, a sort of anarchical and personal-
ized posture, so that the spectator of an art video or independent video seems to be the child of
avant-garde poetics and practices and, simultaneously, of daily television viewing: rapid changes,
individual adaptation of times and positions, collages of fragments, impatience with duration. In
relation to this, Jameson speaks of the interesting experience of “aesthetic boredom”, comparing
the experimental film undergoing the ritual of the movie theatre, which cannot be interrupted, and
the free viewing of video art, generally presented heretically and able to be interrupted10. And this
leads us to reflect on the question of the intensity of viewing modes, often wrongly seen in terms
of opposites between the film experience (attention) and the television/video experience (distrac-
tion): a distinction that risks neglecting the époque-making mutations of these concepts and
media, which today often show us the opposite picture: suffice it to think, as an example, of how
distracting and disturbing the use of mobile phones is in the movie theatre or of the quick suppers
consumed in certain, specially-equipped multi-screen cinemas; and how highly concentrated, vir-
tually cinéphile forms have migrated into television viewing. Reflections on the opposition
between the gaze (the way the spectator watches at the cinema) and the glance (the way the spec-
tator watches TV or video) are not only enhanced by “a third viewing style”, that of the «multi-
centred […] attentive but at the same time divided watching»11, but also seem to arrange them-
selves today into a different pair, the freedom/constraint of the viewing mode12. In this sense, cin-
ema, relocated in video, would emerge from the disciplined and standardized condition coincid-
ing with the order imposed by the dominating structure of the movie theatre to place itself phys-
ically in a freer condition: freedom from the screen or of the screens, modification of the order of
sequences, freedom of duration and playing times but also the freedom of the spectator to start
and stop viewing at his own discretion, to watch and watch him/herself, to socialize or remain
apart, to taste, to refuse, to concentrate or be distracted.
   Yet, even in this case, with the necessary distinctions: not only because in the case of videos
many people continue to prefer the “classical” theatre form, with all that this implies, but also
because many forms of video presentation are built on the assumption of spectators with differ-
ent and sometimes contrasting attitudes: often – in particular in the case of installations – the route
is obligatory, even uncomfortable or cramped; often the viewing of individual works, concen-
trated (on monitors with headsets) and in the dark, combines with flânerie from one screen to
another and the isolated experience turns into an opportunity for meeting people and for conver-
sation13. And isn’t this also the mode of viewing a film on a DVD player at home or on a jour-
ney? Concentration, the sphere encompassing film and “viewer”, can be broken at any time, even
by the sound environment, which is often not taken into consideration, even though it is a lot

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SANDRA LISCHI

more pervasive than the image: concentrated as he/she may be, and however isolated, the viewer
using these tools is unable to create an impermeable bubble excluding outside noises: the movie
theatre remains unsurpassed acoustically. It is no coincidence that important authors choose to
install their works without sound, leaving the visitor to “put words and music to” the work; at the
opposite extreme we find the sound chaos of video settings conceived as spectacular electronic
screenplay rather than as the exact presentations of “audiovisual texts”14.
   In this constant flux of exhibition settings and viewing modes, which go back and forth between
the cinematographic and the video, and the viewing experience itself, inside the same flow, it
seems to me that the only certainty is the affirmation, outside the classical movie theatre, of sub-
jective experiences of duration in viewing, with a tendency for the fragment to prevail (which, I
repeat, is not the same as distracted viewing and is compatible with the experience of complete
and lasting absorption, determined by a skill in exhibition, by the context and even more so by
the power of attraction of the work itself. For instance, the power of the long-take of labour and
birth in the midst of a little forest created in an industrial space, in Sanctuary by Bill Viola, 1989).
   These aesthetics of the fragment – with precedents and implications that we cannot go into here
– certainly have to do with consolidated (though not exclusively) television viewing habits, as
well as with many models of personalized and free viewing; at the same time they are linked to
a posture, a demand and an offer of “information” rather than narrative: when I am attracted by
my own image captured on a security camera, I stop on the spot at the station, I am magnetized
by the giant screen on the side of a building and even when I watch a film on the computer, look-
ing at my mail every now and then, or opening up new windows on the screen, to what extent
does the “cinema effect” triumph over the “information” effect, to what extent does the narrative
trend triumph over curiosity and news reports?


Separation, combination: some examples
   Perhaps this is why an author like Michael Snow has condensed his celebrated film Wavelength
(1966-67, 45’) into a modified DVD version, WVLNT. Wavelength for Those Who Don’t Have
the Time (2003, 15’). The film is all there but has been divided into three equal parts, lasting 15
minutes each, superimposed on one another. From the linear sequence of the full-length viewing
in the movie theatre with its “stressful” yet also illuminating duration for the spectator, who is led
to experience temporality (and its particular “fictional” dimension), and a viewing in which the
events are “separate and combined”15. Separation and combination seem to inspire many of cin-
ema’s relocations in video, both in the form of exhibition and in that of a single-channel work.
First of all, separation and combination of the elements used to construct the whole apparatus:
hyper-visibility and “staging” (collocation in space) of the projector, the film reel, the screen, but
also of light and darkness, which suggest the «theatrical transformation of the cinematographic
spectacle»16 but, at the same time, reveal the artefact, dissect it and place it in the limelight.
Similarly to the way the film on DVD, in its Special Features section, dissects and turns the lime-
light onto its components, from the screenplay to the acting, from the directing to the stills taken
on the set.
   In the route through the exhibition L’Île et elle (Fondation Cartier, Paris 2006, fig. 1) Agnès
Varda separates and combines the elements in her personal cinematographic experience, creating
a location that evokes the beloved island of Noirmoutier: to enter a section, you have to wait for
the low tide (in the images of a screen-threshold that the visitor will then cross); these “enforced”

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viewing times are accompanied by free and subjective times for moving around: from the real
editing table to a hut whose walls are made out of strips of Varda’s film Les Créatures (1966).
Film as walls, as home. «Free and oriented deambulation», as Raymond Bellour17 defines it,
amidst cinema equipment, video projections, photographs, objects, animations, crosses between
videos and painting, and the “exhibited editing” of Le Tryptique de Noirmoutier with its three
screens, on which the linear succession of events is replaced by simultaneousness: «The specta-
tor-wanderer is spared the harshness of the movie theatre. He is not a prisoner of the filmmaker’s
sovereign editing. He does his own editing»18. An experience that gives the private (Agnès
Varda’s life) a shape and a stage and also brings the public work of the cinema back to the pri-
vacy and intimacy of “home” (the hut, the island).




             Fig. 1 – Agnès Varda, exhibition L’Île et elle (Fondation Cartier, Paris 2006).

   Separating and combining, (re)mantling and constructing a space defined by the cinema and
remodelled thanks to video: as recently done by Jonas Mekas, when exhibiting his films in Lucca
(figs. 2-3): on the one side enlarged stills, which become pictures, portraits conserving the trace
of the cinematographic sequence (of the celluloid itself); on the other, video projections of
sequences; as well as a sort of “house” of memories built of monitors arranged in a circle, on
which scenes from his film diaries appear. The spectator, at the centre, does his own editing, yet
at the same time is admitted into an intimate and circumscribed space, in a little theatre of mem-
ory, in a room belonging to the affections19. Once again, here as in other examples, the relation-
ship with sound, noise, words, should be treated more thoroughly; as in the “cinema effect” in
public places, from the security videos (around which Michael Klier built a fictional hypothesis
of “gaze” in his admirable Der Riese, 1983) to the huge panels present in public spaces. Viewing
that is often acoustically amputated: the sound which is absent or incomprehensible or submerged
by other, louder sounds (traffic, announcements over loudspeakers): the spectator is asked to
build up narratives starting from a single image or to contaminate them with an asynchronic, sep-
arate, casual, often absurd soundtrack which would have been the joy of the surrealists – but at
home, too, the TV may well be on with the volume turned down, or used just as a radio, separat-
ing the two, audio and visual, elements.
   And if video is television, television is home. We were reminded of this in 1984 by one of the
masters of research in electronic images, Vito Acconci, who, together with Antoni Muntadas, was

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SANDRA LISCHI




                   Fig. 2 – Jonas Mekas, exhibition 6 opere di Jonas Mekas
                   (Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca 2008).




                      Fig. 3 – Jonas Mekas, exhibition 6 opere di Jonas Mekas
                      (Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca 2008).

amongst those most sensitive to artistic practice in public spaces «where there are people»20.
Videoinstallations, he writes, are a combination of two opposites: the collocation in a specific
place of a placeless element like video: they stop time because they pin down the placelessness
and immateriality typical of the electronic (and today digital) image. The installation of moving
images in public places also seems to be characterized by this combination, and the environment
– Acconci continues – seems to disappear in favour of the “point” (in this case, back in the
Eighties, it was still the monitor). This is why:


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    The conventional location for a television-set is in the home; when it is come upon elsewhere,
    whether inside a gallery/museum or outside, in a store-window or a supermarket, the viewer
    is stopped in his/her tracks: the situation is like that of a visitor from another planet hap-
    pening upon a TV set – only in this case it is the “other planet” (the home, the living room)
    that comes upon the viewer, out of the privacy of his/her home and in public. The viewer, see-
    ing the TV set, is brought back home...21.

   Is this still the case, perhaps? Or else is the equation TV = home disappearing, like that of cin-
ema = movie theatre? Does cinema at the movie theatre lead us towards the extraordinary whilst
the cinema effect re-located in other parts of the city is to re-create an ordinary experience?
   The cinema effect that becomes TV effect/home effect in the chaos of the city? And the bound-
less city of images, the planetary city of the cinema that instead becomes home, hut, hearth, “bub-
ble”, a private sphere, a little theatre of memory on the individual (and personalized) devices of
audiovision as in a multitude of cinema experiences “exhibited” on video in artistic venues?
   In any event, an experience of orientation, of searching and the recognition of traces which at
this stage – and perhaps forever – is far removed from the realms of classical narration, self-iden-
tification and the suspension of disbelief.

                                                                       (Translation by Patricia Hampton)




1    Francesco Casetti, “L’esperienza filmica e la ri-locazione del cinema”, in Fata Morgana, Esperienza,
     no. 4, January-April 2008, pp. 23-40; I also refer to papers by Casetti himself, by Carmelo Marabello,
     Cristina Tosatto, Miriam De Rosa, at the Paris Spring School on “Cinema, Contemporary Art, Heritage:
     Contemporary practices of the image and museum policies” (Paris, 21–30 April 2008). Amongst the
     many texts devoted by Philippe Dubois to the forms of exhibited cinema, I would quote “Un ‘effet ciné-
     ma’ dans l’art contemporain”, in Cinéma & Cie, no. 8, Fall 2006, pp. 15-26.
2    Peppino Ortoleva, “L’esperienza dell’esperienza”, in Fata Morgana, Esperienza, cit., pp. 117-133.
3    Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University, Durham
     1991; David Joselit, Feedback. Television against Democracy, MIT, Cambridge MA 2007. I wish to
     thank Francesco Casetti for having brought the latter text to my attention.
4    Francesco Casetti, “L’esperienza filmica e la ri-locazione del cinema”, cit., p. 29 (my translation).
5    Philippe Dubois, Improbable Movements. The Cinema Effect in Contemporary Art, in Sandra Lischi,
     Elena Marcheschi (eds.), Realtà sospese. Video e cinema oltre/Suspended realities. Exhibition of Video
     and Cinema Beyond, Mimesis, Milano 2006, p. 23.
6    Mariagrazia Fanchi, Spettatore, Il Castoro, Milano 2005; Gabriele Pedullà, In piena luce. I nuovi spet-
     tatori e il sistema delle arti, Bompiani, Milano 2008. See also: Lev Manovich, The Language of New
     Media, MIT, Cambridge MA 2001.
7    Michel Chion, Seminar at the University of Pisa, 4 February 1998.
8    Jean-Louis Comolli, “Salles obscures, salles claires. Notes sur le nouveau spectateur”, in Cahiers du
     Cinéma, no. 177, April 1966 (my translation).
9    Ibidem.
10   Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, cit. It should be remembered that these reflections date back to 1991:
     the cinematographic practice of theatrical video projection had not yet been perfected as it is today.
11   Mariagrazia Fanchi, Spettatore, cit., p. 43 (my translation).
12   Gabriele Pedullà, In piena luce, cit., p. 137.
13   See the reflections on this issue by authors, critics and curators in Sandra Lischi (ed.), Le forme dello
     sguardo. Video d’arte e ricerca, Charta, Milano 1997 and showings such as the recent exhibition Worlds
     on Video, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, September-November 2008.

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SANDRA LISCHI

14 See the recent exhibition Dans la nuit des images, Grand Palais, Paris, December 2008.
15 Vittorio Fagone (ed.), Michael Snow. Cinema, installazioni, video e arti visuali, Fondazione Ragghianti,
   Lucca 2007, p. 41.
16 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Le Mouvement des images, Centre Pompidou, Paris 2006, p. 18.
17 Raymond Bellour, Le Passage du Gois, in AA.VV., Agnès Varda. L’Île et elle. Regards sur l’exposi-
   tion, Fondation Cartier, Paris 2006, p. 19 (my translation).
18 Dominique Païni, Le Tryptique de Noirmoutier, in AA.VV., Agnès Varda, cit., p. 34 (my translation).
19 Exhibition 6 opere di Jonas Mekas, Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca, October 2008.
20 Vito Acconci, “Intorno all’arte e agli artisti,” interview by Lynn Blumenthal, Kate Horsfield, in
   Valentina Valentini (ed.), Dissensi tra film, video, televisione, Sellerio, Palermo 1991, p. 36. Original
   text “Vito Acconci”, in Profile, no. 4, Summer 1984.
21 But a house without the comforting assurance of well-known objects: «The land of the numb/the still/the
   dead». Vito Acconci, Television, Furniture & Sculpture: The Room with the American View, in Drine
   Mignot (ed.), Het Lumineuze Beld/The Luminous Image, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1984, p. 21.




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