Captured, A Thesis

CAPTURED A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Digital Media in the Department of Digital Media of The Rhode Island School of Design

By Serena Kuo Rhode Island School of Design 2008 Master’s Examination Committee Approved by:

Teri Rueb, Digital + Media Associate Professor Rhode Island School of Design, Primary Advisor

John Terry, Dean of Fine Arts Rhode Island School of Design

Dietrich Neumann Professor for the History of Modern Architecture and Urban Studies, Brown University Vincent Scully Visiting Professor for the History of Architecture, Yale University Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Brown University

Amy Kravitz, Film/Animation/Video Professor Rhode Island School of Design

CAPTURED

Captured by Serena Kuo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Liscense.

The word ‘shot’ can be reserved for fixed spatial determinations, slices of space or distances in relation to the camera. […] It is then the sequence of shots which inherits the movement and the duration. But since this is not an adequately determinate notion, it is necessary to create more precise concepts to identify the unities of movement and duration. […] From our point of view for the movement, the notion of shot [plan] has sufficient unity and extension if it is given its full projective, perspectival or temporal sense. In fact a unity is always that of an act which includes as much a multiplicity of passive or acted elements. Shots, as immobile spatial determinations, are perfectly capable of being, in this sense, the multiplicity which corresponds to the unity of the shot, as mobile section or temporal perspective. The unity will vary according to the multiplicity that it contains, but will be no less the unity of this correlative multiplicity. 1

1 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image. University of Minnesota Press, 1986. PP. 25-26

TABLE OF Illustrations Abstract “Captured “ Introduction Theory



I. Experiencing Geography, Architecture & Constructed Space The Origin of Cinematic Space Objectifying the Medium Excerpt: My Visit to Pompeii II. Construction of Reality Synthesis of Science and Art Mise-en-scene & Cinematography Structural Fragmentation in Cinematic Space

Work 5/4 The Water The Bicycle Camera Transpositions Ice Apartment Body Landscapes Captured

Conclusion Bibliography

CONTENTS 00:00:00:VII 00:00:00:IX 00:00:00:X 00:00:00:01 00:00:00:05 00:00:00:07 00:00:00:08 00:00:00:12 00:00:00:15 00:00:00:17 00:00:00:18 00:00:00:22 00:00:00:23

00:00:01:10 00:00:01:11 00:00:01:17 00:00:01:23 00:00:02:03 00:00:02:07 00:00:02:09 00:00:02:13

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ILLUSTRATIONS Fig 1.

Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967.

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Fig 2.

Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger, 1975.

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Fig 3.

Sergein Eisenstein, October/Ten Days that Shook the World, 1927.

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Fig 4.

D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, 1915.

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Fig 5.

René Clair, Paris qui dort, 1915

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Fig 6.

Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929.

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Fig 7.

Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967.

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Fig 8.

Eadweard Muybridge, Galloping Horse, 1878.

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Fig 9.

F.W. Muranu, The Last Laugh, 1925.

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Fig 10.

F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, 1922.

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Fig 11.

F.W. Murnau, Sunrise, 1927.

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Fig 12.

Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, 1941.

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Fig 13.

Chris Welsby, Windmill II, 1972.

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Fig 14.

Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger, 1975.

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Fig 15.

Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window, 1954.

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Fig 16.

Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo, 1958.

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Fig 17.

Serena Kuo, Script diagram for 5/4, 2007.

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Fig 18.

Serena Kuo, Set still from 5/4, 2007.

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Fig 19.

Serena Kuo, installation vizualization for The Water, 2008.

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Fig 20.

Serena Kuo, The Water, installation view, 2008.

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Fig 21.

Serena Kuo, narrative brainstorm for The Water, 2008.

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Fig 22.

Serena Kuo, scenario maps for The Water, 2008.

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Fig 23.

Serena Kuo, Documentation of filming process, The Bicycle Camera, 2007.

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Fig 24.

Serena Kuo, sketch exploring the inverted relationship between speed and distance, The Bicycle Camera, 2007.

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Fig 25.

Serena Kuo, Transpositions: Nathaniel, 2008.

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Fig 26.

Serena Kuo, Transpositions: Lauren, 2008.

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Fig 27.

Serena Kuo, Ice Apartment, film, 2007.

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Fig 28.

Serena Kuo, Ice Apartment, installation view, 2007.

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Fig 29.

Serena Kuo, Body Landscapes, 2007.

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Fig 30.

Serena Kuo, Composition timeline and corresponding scenes, Body Landscapes, 2007.

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Fig 31.

Serena Kuo, Captured, 2008.

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Fig 32.

Serena Kuo, Captured, 2008.

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Fig 33.

Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929.

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ABSTRACT

My current work focuses specifically on the depiction of action traversing through space and creation of spatiality in cinema. Using the camera as a physical extension of the eye, the viewer is asked to bridge the conventional function of a shot with real-experiences of perceiving space as an immersive environment during the process of travel. In my body of thesis projects, this endeavor is manifested in various ways:

1. 2. 3. 4.

Referencing the traditional narrative film format in a purely two-dimensional projection, where the audience expects a beginning, middle, and end, and hence restricting the film space and temporality to one finite entity Placing the lens at the position of the eye to visually simulate the experience of moving within real space Establishing a more active spatial environment for cinematic spectatorship through a change in the placements of its projection surfaces Inverse to point 1, removing narrative and temporal finiteness to imitate the mundane and seemingly infinite nature of reality

Through the work examined in this brief thesis, my attempt is not to interrogate the allencompassing question of reality in cinema, but to articulate a body of work that both stems from and expands the medium’s conventions. With my work, I wish to facilitate a critical engagement with the medium’s process of constructing reality by using its very conventions to move outside the constraints and traditional parameters.

“CAPTURED”

In several ways, representational media such as filmΘ can be deemed non-generative. The images we see, printed or projected, are markings made by light reflecting off of preexisting objects onto chemicals and sensors. The stories we delineate from these images are altered personal experiences, adaptations, fables, and common human logic. We are handed visual and textual components, pieced together in specific fashions, that direct us to re-imagine what it is like to be within a certain real world, real place, real time, and real situation. Nothing is made from nothing. When looking at an action taking place within the letterbox of a film, we are not always addressed with what exists beyond this frame, yet two phenomena take place during our viewing experience: (1) We gather information from the characters, the set, and the story to inform what kind of a world contains this limited space presented before us, and (2) We place ourselves within this world in the role of an ally, a witness, or a passive spectator. While these are the two certain goals for any film work that engrosses the viewer, the parameters within which they occur are flexible and subject to inventiveness. This is how film is in actuality completely generative, its execution absolutely original to each maker. While film reproduces pre-existing material, it is more so the reiteration of that material as opposed to its replica. The changes that take place in a film work from the reality that originates its visual content are the result of layers of capturing – a selective process that highlights and obscures facts and emotions. The moving image captures a reality and contains it within a cinematic space, shaped by this selective process. The viewer captures a reality construed and impressed by the resulted film, and is reciprocally captured within the reality she has just created. In other words, film is the art of capturing captured-ness. As a final note, the title “Captured” is also influenced by my own obsessive indulgence with the craft of filmmaking. The empty frames of the unexposed filmstrip or a blank miniDV tape (and recently, portable hard drives that directly connect to the camera) are voids eager to be filled with a certain angle of the outside world. The camera apparatus provides the maker with access to a specifically conceived construct of reality, and simultaneously captures the physical world it photographs and the filmmaker into its mechanisms. Θ



The term “film” here encompasses all time-based photo-realistic media.

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INTRODUCTION

I create narrative and non-narrative films with altered parameters of space, time, and movement. My work questions the spatial reality constructed in traditional cinema. The basis of my work is informed by a synthesis of traditional and avant-garde films, new media, architecture, and the intrinsic symbiosis between mobility and time-based media. The thematic thread that runs through my work examines personal interactions as the product of specific spatial and temporal constraints and the emotional fragmentation that characterizes these interactions. It is my goal to reference traditional cinema in my work - to provide a familiar reference point for the viewer in order to facilitate examination of experimental elements from a reinvented context. Film as a medium constructs reality partly through the cinematic conventions employed to represent space and time. These conventions are the foundation of all categories: narrative (story or the text), mise-en-scene2 , cinematography, assemblage of shots, special effects, and space of spectatorship. For example, conventions of a narrative include genre, character, form and time. Low and high angles, close-ups and extreme wide shots, dolly, and point-of-view are some of the most frequently utilized cinematographic conventions. Assemblage of shots can be conventionalized by collisional or conflict-driven montage. Lastly, the space of spectatorship is culturally fostered into multiplexes, blackbox art house theatres, televisions, and recently, personal computers and portable media players – all of which generate different levels of social and intellectual interactions between the image and the viewer. The sense of space and time a spectator translates from a film is informed by preexisting experience and the knowledge of cinema’s structuring of time and space. Both “seeing” and “cinema” occur within a cultural context from production to reception. This is what contemporary theorists refer to as the “impression of reality 3” – it is actually an image and not the reality it appears to be – an act of signification. Upon equating the act of signification with ideology, Louis Althusser

2  3 

Francois Truffaut refers to mise-en-scene as comprised the camera position, the angle selected, the shot’s length, an actor’s gesture. In other words, at once the story that is being told and the manner of telling it. Truffaut, Francois. The Films in My Life. Da Capo Press, 1994. PP. 13-14 Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge Studies in Film). Cambridge University Press, 1997. P. 9

describes that “the effect of the impression of reality in the cinema upon the spectator was likened to the effect of language upon the individual in its ideological impact. In the case of the analysis of signification, it was necessary to turn to a distinctive use of language – literary language – in order to find a way to expose the ideological effects of language.”4 This process is central to Structuralist filmmaking, which P. Adams Sitney describes as “cinema of structure in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film.”5 JeanLouis Baudry respondsto Althusser’s theory by breaking down its effect on the spectator into three parts6: perspectival positioning, identification, and believing in the illusory world presented by film as truth. As film is a representation of a reality within which the spectator exists, it represents (and enforces) ideological assumptions about the nature of that reality. Since film is a timebased medium that is first invented with the purpose to document and examine actions – in other words, a representational medium - it reflects the nature of space and time through the synthetic application of its conventions. For instance, the progression of time in narrative is cinematographically captured by exposing the action onto the filmstrip at a specific frame rate, which is then coupled with editorial dissolves that convey a passage of time. The selective framing of an interior space, repeated from a multitude of angles, distance, is cut together to establish a specific physical environment that both reveals and obscures the action. In other words, the process of communication for the filmic medium is the organization and construction of space and time.7 This process of re-organization and reconstruction of space and time in cinema always runs along two tracks: fidelity to reality versus the desire to revolt against the very transparency of this constructed reality. This is the conflict between classical cinema’s transparent mise-en-scene and a filmmaker’s conscious effort to objectify and bring attention to the orchestrated content within the film frame. Toward the first approach of mediation, Baudry writes that “[…] cinema is ideological in its form because it is not authentic art; that is, it does not present the world to us in a manner that appears mediated by artistic form.” Whereas the latter, a conscious objectification of the medium, according to Theodore Adorno in his influential writing Culture Industry8, “elevates film to art.”

4  Allen. P. 9 5  Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000. Oxford University Press, USA, 2002. P. 348 6  Baudry, Jean-Louis. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. Film Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 1974-1975). PP. 39-47 7  Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, noted for his causal editing montage techniques, considers film not as photographic recordings but as purely spatial manipulation within a projective geometry. 8  Adorno, Theodor. Culture Industry (Routledge Classics). Routledge, 2001.

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Adorno uses Michelangelo Antonioni as an example of this latter methodology, where the filmmaker consciously distills the photography of the environments in The Passenger to the point that the motion that accompanies the perspective of a moving perceiver – the camera and the viewer – is entirely removed. Michael Snow’s renowned Wavelength brings attention to the function of zooming in with a camera lens, which, in contrast to walking closer to an object, elicits a more visual, less physical spatial experience. In the realm of assemblage, Vsevolod Pudovkin believes that the montage is the only way through which film can translate reality: “the isolated shot is not even a small fragment of cinema; it is only raw material, a fragment of the real world. Only by montage can one pass from photography to cinema […]. Broadly defined, montage is quite simply inseparable from the composition of the work itself.9” Whereas Pudovkin strives to manifest realism with his cuts, Sergei Eisenstein refuses to submit to any type of flow in his work, and consciously opposes descriptive realism with Kuleshov-inspired “collisional montage,” the juxtaposition of visually conflicting shots. With a minimalist approach to narrative, my work brings awareness to the filmic medium specifically through the portrayal of space and time. My methods of approach encompass various aspects of the five elements previously mentioned. The filmic medium emerges in the late 19th century when depictions of stillness no longer suffice to translate human experience with surrounding environments, when mobility by the means of automobiles is required to fulfill an expanding urban lifestyle. Drawing from this correlation, I question how our perception of space changes in accordance to our increasing freedom to traverse through diverse landscapes, and how film evolved to facilitate the articulation of these travel experiences. I also question the medium’s capacity to simulate the experience of crossing through a spatial environment: how does the medium successfully construct 9  Fig 1.

Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. University of Chicago Press, 1990. P. 32 Left, Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967.

Fig 2.

Right, Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger, 1975.



Image courtesy of http://www.greylodge.org Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

the experience of physically intersecting a three-dimensional reality through two-dimensional means? How much of the spectator’s preexisting knowledge contributes into understanding this construction? How much can be altered before this construction becomes completely incomprehensible? In ways of content and form, my work links the ideological signatures implicit in the filmic medium (such as the psychological effects of cinematographic styles, shot duration, sound perspectivization, assemblage, off-screen space, etc.) and incorporates technology/techniques in video installation and site-specific cinema. My work aims to discuss the perception and conception of action in space and time in these formats in the traditional sense, and these media’s deliberate departure from the normative. Originally educated as a filmmaker, I was once completely submerged in the content of film as a traditional medium. Through these two specific types of installation-based new media work, my goal is to generate new syntaxes as formal filtration of the content. I wish to reinvent both the spectator’s and my personal relationship with the medium.

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Fig 3.

Sergei Eisenstein, October/Ten Days that Shook the World, 1927. Image Courtesy of http://www.youtube.com

THEO

ORY 00:00:00:06

1. EXPERIENCING GEOGRAPHY, ARCHITECTURE AND CONSTRUCTED SPACE

THE ORIGIN OF CINEMATIC SPACE

The invention of the cinema comes from Eadweard Muybridge’s desire to reveal the truth about a racehorse. Animals are regarded as machines, whose close analysis requires the more acute perception of another machine, the camera. In such a way, the early function of film is scientific and revelatory; it brings its subjects to the audience for further examination. The Lumieres consider film to be no more than a “scientific curiosity,” nature caught in the act. Unnoticed by the Lumieres, stylistic visual motifs are present throughout their work that veer the films away from being purely objective observations. Around the beginning of the 20th century, countless screen tests, short films, and film experiments test the capacity of the film camera. On one end of the spectrum are observational shots of events and landscapes by technological pioneers such as Thomas Edison and W.K.L. Dickson. These films, often referencing panoramas or dioramas (that were popular in Europe in the 1800s), break away from the theatrical proscenium of-the pre-cinema screen. Panorama from Times Building, New York (Edison, 1905) exposes an expanse of cityscape using the film camera’s primitive ability to pan and tilt. Panorama of 4th St., St Joseph (A. E, Weed, 1902) uses the mobile and first person perspective of a moving vehicle to couple the experience of travel to that of exploring landscape in cinema. The marriage between cinema and mobility is instigated by the same curiosity that Muybridge possesses to see more and to be immersed in the experience of world travel. As a filmmaker strives to communicate the emotional journey of encountering a new place, film transforms from a scientific device to a medium that incites both intellectual and emotional response. This is where the technical conventions of film become essential to facilitate the expansion of the medium’s communicative capacity. This is where early filmic experimentations enter and broaden the language of the medium. In describing this social trend that forms around tourism and cinematic viewer-ship, Italian Film Theorist Giuliana Bruno comments “[film] – and the ‘house’ in which its motion dwelt – was a way of further extending this cityscape, fragmenting it, reinventing its assemblage, expanding its horizons.”10 Just as an actual site of travel is filtered through one’s subjective 00:00:00:08 perception, broken down into moments paired with personal meaning, the authorship of 10 Fig 4.



Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. Verso, 2007. P. 77 D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, 1915.

Image Courtesy of Henderson, Robert M. D. W. Griffith His Life and Work, 1972.

conveying specific ideas in experiencing space is characterized by the process of organizing the visuals to resonate with intended meaning. This process engenders progressively more methods of establishing space in cinema. On the opposite end of observational panoramic films are film experiments that explore the effect of new cutting methods, camera movements, and new compositions by D.W. Griffith, as well as the methodical approaches to creating meaning through the conflict and collision between images by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Lev Kuleshov, which are calculated to a state that can be described as mathematical. As the originator of American narrative cinema, D.W. Griffith is known for his exploration of urbanism and the country life. The increasing tempo of editing in his historical epic, Birth of a Nation (1915), endows the viewer with a sense of mobility that traverses through separate yet connected physical landscapes of America through parallel editingγ. The rhythm of editing, in this context, supplies the experience of travel with increasing emotional effect. His filmic style references the expositional structure of 19th century novels, where subplots overlap and jump back and forth through the pages, especially in his editing of parallel actions, which is one of the first attempts for cinema to tackle the notion of simultaneous actions in multiple spaces. During these two decades of proliferation, film enters into the masses as a popular medium. A series of “City Symphony” films that emerged in the 1920s used the birth of cinema to explore the medium’s intrinsic link to mobility with a revelatory agenda. French Filmmaker René Clair remarks that the main aesthetics of cinema is movement – the object’s external movement and the inner movement of the action. In Paris qui dort (1925), a laser ray accidentally freezes the entire city of Paris in time. Film theorist Annette Michelson describes Clair’s work (along with the work of Dziga Vertov) as “metacinematic11”, a conscious analysis of the film apparatus through the metaphorical use of the narrative. Thematically, the ray illustrates how the movie camera constructs the relationship between corporeality and motion. It is the instrument that translates the meanings of actions through suspending them, framing 11 γ Fig 5.

Michelson, Annette. Dr. Craze and Mr. Clair. October, Vol. 11, Essays in Honor of Jay Leyda. (Winter, 1979). PP. 30-53. A technique in film editing to suggest simultaneity of actions in separate locations by placing one action after another. René Clair, Paris qui dort, 1925. Image Courtesy of http://www.youtube.com

them in space. This is perhaps what Bruno refers to as the “perceptual interplay that exists between immobility and mobility.”12 Those that are spared by the ray maneuver through the frozen city, exploring its various corners, in a sense assembling together the staged fragments of a complete narrative.

Film’s spectatorship is thus a practice of space that it dwelt in, as in the built environment. The itinerary of such a practice is similarly drawn by the visitor to a city or its resident, who goes to the highest point – a hill, a skyscraper, a tower – to project herself onto the cityscape, and who also engages the anatomy of the streets, the city’s underbelly, as she traverses different urban configurations. Such a multiplicity of perspectives, a montage of ‘traveling’ shots with diverse viewpoints and rhythms, also guides the cinema and its way of site-seeing. Changes in the height, size, angle, and scale of the view, as well as the speed of the transport, are embedded in the very language of filmic shots, editing, and camera movements. Travel culture is written on the techniques of filmic observation.13 Dziga Vertov was the founder of the Kinopravda movement of 1920s Soviet Russia. Kinopravda (“film-truth”) describes the reality captured by a camera without artificial creative input by the screenwriter. The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) documents, with creative flair, a day in the life of a Russian city (shot in Moscow and Odessa). The sequence of the edit is chronological. There is also an absence of titles, which removes narrative specificity from the work. Vertov regards drama to be an opiate for the masses, yet stylistically, his film reflects the emotive rhythm of traveling. American Video Artist Doug Aitken describes the film as a “kaleidoscope of visual impressions” and a 00:00:00:10

12 13

Bruno. P. 55. Ibid. P. 62.

“rapid-fire montage of city life in split screens, freeze frames, double exposures, and dissolves.”14Furthermore, the movie theatre contextualizes the viewing of the meta-film, which begins with the parting of the theatre curtains and the unfolding of theatre chairs. The journey of the cameraman/camera through the city in turn carries the movie audience through the cityscape. In addition to The Man with a Movie Camera, and Paris qui dort, numerous other city symphony films establish the intimate association between cinema and urban travel on both a documentary and an emotional level. Mobility also becomes a necessary part of reinstating reality, whether it is in the staging or in the production. Motion, first introduced to realistically render the gesture of moving in space, becomes a creative element used to simulate the physical sensation of movements, grand or minute. “The technically mature film ‘subjective’ movements – movements, that is, which the spectator is invited to execute – constantly compete with objective ones,” states Bruno. “The spectator may have to identify himself with a tilting, panning, or traveling camera which insists on bringing motionless as well as moving objects to his attention. Or an appropriate arrangement of shots may rush the audience through vast expanses of time and/or space so as to make it witness, almost simultaneously, events in different periods and places.”15 Soon, as the movie camera becomes portable, the camera’s movement through space also gains the added freedom to simulate any mode of travel. Once bound to a car or a train, the camera is now handheld and organically expressive. The camera’s course of action transforms from framing the audience into its spatial construction to becoming the extension of the eye. Its very presence within the film’s physical environment facilitates the telepresence of the viewer’s body. Traversing through the filmic space, the viewer becomes immersed and informed by the perspective and configuration of the environment. As a result of this propagation of visuality, the engagement between the screen and the viewer becomes progressively more experientially immersive. 14 15 Fig 6.

Aitken, Doug. Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative. D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc, 2005. P. 287 Bruno. P. 34. Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. Image Courtesy of Kino Video.

OBJECTIFYING THE MEDIUM

German Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer qualifies films that are regarded as art as those that “organize the raw material to which they resort into some self-sufficient composition instead of accepting it as an element in its own right,” that “their underlying formative impulses are so strong that they defeat the cinematic approach∋ with its concern for camera-reality.”16 Art in the form of film, or any other medium that exemplifies the science of film, or metacinema, is the deliberation of formative filmic techniques. Using the conventions of cinema – its staging, its cinematography, and the phenomenology of cinema spectatorship – artists frequently explore the perception and construction of spatiality by borrowing from our familiarity with popular films. Michael Snow’s work builds heavily from the process of filmic objectification, the spotlighting of cinematographic conventions (camera zooms, actions occurring out of frame) to imply the existence of a narrative that is actually rarely present. Snow’s work often relies the on viewer’s analysis of the process and mechanisms involved in the making of the work. In his filmic work, Back and Forth (1968-1969), a camera swings back and forth in the path of a pendulum within a room. Primarily, the work emphasizes the presence of the camera as a traveling object within the space. Its route is concrete and predictable; its limited view of the room does not construct the space of the room any more than the viewer is capable of placing the motion within the actual space within which the footage is filmed. “The distension, repetition, and aggressive use of movement […] is an attempt to force discursive and analytic functions from the mind, thus creating a timelessness within a temporal structure, or more exactly, a temporality ground in the perception of space rather than in narrative.”17 In La région centrale (1970-1971), Snow once again highlights the movements of the camera by revealing compositions of a Quebec landscape unperceivable by the human eye. The camera, 00:00:00:12 moving along various axes at different speeds, transforms the framing of the space into abstract ∋

16  17

Kracauer describes two ways of cinematically constructing reality: motion and staging. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film. Princeton University Press, 1997. Taubin, Amy. “Double Visions” in Michael Snow Almost Cover to Cover. Black Dog, 2000.

shapes. With no narrative center to focus on, the interaction between the image and its frame becomes the film’s most accentuated action. Unlike city symphony films, Snow’s work seeks to separate the first-person immersion within the filmic space, but nevertheless imparts on the viewer the sensation of experiencing the physical friction of movements through space. Film and video installation artist Doug Aitken references traditional cinema primarily through the filmically aestheticized rendition of his subject matters. One of his earliest works, Inflection (1992), displays the footage shot from a 16mm film camera mounted onto a rocket roaming over the landscape of a Californian suburb. The work strives to communicate an imagined point of view, unable to be directly experienced by the human eye – much like La région centrale. Aitken consistently looks to filmic technology as an enabler of alternative perspectives. A later work, Diamond Sea (1997), contains the world’s oldest desert, only referred to as Diamond Areas 1 and 2. Shot on film, scored with orchestral music, the three-channel video installation juxtaposes the grandeur of vast landscape in film with the sensation of social desolation. The deserted natural space also contrasts the installation’s overt display of technology. Aitken’s design for Diamond Sea calls attention to role of camera as both a revelatory instrument and a bridge between the out-of-reach and the accessible space within the museum. Aitken’s multi-channel video work challenges the temporal and spatial linearity of traditional film by both inheriting the look of cinema and breaking apart the frame into multiple facets. This is not unlike a new iteration of Griffith’s cross-cutting of simultaneous actions, or Eisenstein’s purposeful collisional montage. A body of installation work, including Electric Earth (1999), I Am Into You (2000), Blow Debris (2000), and New Ocean (2001), conveys change and transformation in the form of narrative, character, and landscape. To access and capture the reality of these installations, the viewer is either

Fig 7.

Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967.

Image courtesy of http://www.greylodge.com

engulfed by a panorama of the film, or confronted by an array of screens, together forming a field of fragmented imageries, while individually segregating elements from the whole of the film to induce unpredictable rhythmic change. In writing about his work, Aitken makes a direct correlation between the linearity of a filmstrip, its implication on temporality, and his desire for a “broken screen.” Film and video structure our experience in a linear way simply because they’re moving images on a strip of emulsion or tape. They create a story out of everything because it’s inherent to the medium and to the structure of the montage. But of course, we experience time in a much more complex way. The question for me is, “how can I break through this idea, which is reinforced constantly? How can I make time somehow collapse or expand, so it no longer unfolds in this one narrow form?18

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18

Birnbaum, Daniel. Doug Aitken (Contemporary Artists Series). Phaidon Press, 2001. p. 51

MY VISIT TO POMPEII

Walter Benjamin’s description of the theatrical character of the townscape of Naples is an exact picture of the combined stage and auditorium in Rear Window: Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are the same time stage and boxes.19 The field of vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of an archeological excavation. 20 I have always harbored a deep passion for architectural cross-sections. For as long as I can remember, their aesthetics and design have mesmerized me. It’s a very specific interest for which I previously had no rationale. In July of 2007, I traveled from through Italy, from North to South, with a close friend, Heather McPherson, who is a painter. We began to discuss the reasons behind specific aspects of our artistic passions. These discussions eventually led to an important personal discovery… I was walking in the ruins of Pompeii, Naples. It was late in July, during a shade-less afternoon. Pompeii was one of the last destinations of my Italy trip. I was glad that all the artifacts were either excavated or looted, because the bareness of the architecture was honest and un-staged. Moving past the roofless walls, down a kilometer of streets that were simultaneously anonymous and specific, layers of rooms, common halls, and courtyards shifted past me. I witnessed multiples at the same time, a strange clash of vacancy and society. The rectangles and squares in the walls formed infinite configurations of filmic compositions. It was the highlight of my year.

19 20

Pallasmaa: “Geometry of Terror” p. 147 Virilio, Paul. L’horizon Negatif: Essai De Dromoscopie (Debats). Editions Galilee, 1984. p. 1

The next day, I began to investigate precisely why I was so moved. I listed several topics that have always fascinated me and driven me to self-expression. I wrote this response in my sketchbook:

This real-life cross-section of an entire society is something that has fascinated me since childhood. I was perpetually drawn to it with unexplainable force. As I aged, this attraction did not subside. If anything, it grew stronger and more complex. Even now, I am fixated on exploring space, breaks and continuums in space, simultaneous actions within and around spaces – the visible and invisible sense of space. I fully recognize my passion, but rarely asked why. It’s been with me for so long. Standing against the ruins, I suddenly began to wonder – it was the first time I have been immersed within a dreamscape-like arena where my usual sense of spatiality was challenged. It has never happened before…where I could so clearly see multiple planes of divisions simultaneously. I could visualize the people that used to possess these spaces moving about, all together, in one continuous web of interspersed strings. The story of the place suddenly becomes about the inter-relationships, the energ y of transitions, as opposed to any singular object. The simultaneity of actions performed by multiple people is a form of calm rhythm. - July 7, 2007, on the train to Cefalu After this reflection, projects that I have never considered personal have become quiet intimate. My film work attempts to describe the conflict between isolation and coexistence. The situation is often mundane, or at least nothing “happens.” The dramatic tension in the narrative exists not in the subjects, but in the physical void between them. To build a theoretical map of an architectonics as mobile as that of motion pictures, one must use a traveling lens and make room for the sensory spatiality of film, for our apprehension of space, including filmic space, occurs through an engagement with touch and movement. Our site-seeing tour follows this intimate path of mobilized visual space, “erring21” from architectural and artistic sites to moving pictures. Haptically driven, the atlas finds a design for filmic space within the delicate cartography of emotion, that sentient place that exists between the map, the wall, and the screen. 22 00:00:00:16 21 22

Bruno refers to erring as straying from a path. Bruno. P. 16

2. CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY

SYNTHESIS OF SCIENCE AND ART

One shouldn’t be astonished that the cinema has always felt the natural, unavoidable necessity to insert a ‘story’ in the reality to make it exciting and ‘spectacular.’ All the same, it is clear that such a method evades a direct approach to everyday reality, and suggests that it cannot be portrayed without the intervention of fantasy or artifice. 23 When film was first invented as a practical technology, it observed reality through one angle and one composition. It was conceived as a machine that more acutely reveals truths in the world unperceived by the human eye. Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope dissects motion into individual moments as to offer scientific evidence for the moment when the horse’s four legs are suspended in midair. Right from the start, film is regarded not just as a medium that sustains movement, but as one that generates movement from the assemblage of single moments. This concept is the springboard for decades of filmic styles to come – the methodical and scientific assignment of images onto a continuous timeline conveys premeditated thoughts and triggers planned sensations. At its birth, the film camera’s role as a spectator simulates that of a theatre audience. In theatre, actions are pantomimed and speech is exaggerated for practicality’s sake, so that the audience member sitting at the further rows away from the stage can still understand the gesture and the message. In a sense, the narrative is communicated through symbolic and mimetic means. Familiarity with theatrical arts allows the audience to filter out the exaggerations and extract the intent of these gestures, then assemble them into a story. Beginning cinema sought to do the same. Film theorist Noel Burch calls this mode of presentation in cinema primitivism, where the bare-bone construction of filmic reality functions when the spectator is centered within the illusory picture at crucial moments of action. This immersion, as defined by Burch, is “of a single space-time continuum and of

23

Zavattini, Cesare. “Some Ideas on the Cinema.” MacCann, Richard Dyer, ed. Film: A Montage of Theories, 216-228. New York, Dutton, 1966.

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the spectator as a unified subject of vision who moves from one vantage point to another within the continuum is created by the many converging codes of representation: linear perspective, camera ubiquity, camera movement, eye-line matching […] and so on.”24 During the period that Burch describes as primitivism – namely before the introduction of sound film in the late 1920s, or movable camera (by dolly tracks and then by hand) – the framing of a scene generally resembles a theatrical stage, where the film audience is placed in front row center. In order to maintain the time-space continuum of the action, this stationary shot persists, sometimes with small degrees of panning on a tripod, until an important plot point in the narrative calls for the insertion of other information, such as a text-card or a close-up. After this insert, the composition returns to the original “master shot” as the story succinctly ends. Beginning in the 1910s with Kuleshov, Eisenstein, and Griffith, cinema was soon able to realize that the fixed distance and viewing perspective between the subject and the audience can be abolished. This is where mise-en-scene takes a front seat in creatively controlling the visual content through spatial organization, design, orientation, and fragmentation. “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera,” Walter Benjamin comments on the shift toward the use of cinematic technology to break up the carefully maintained temporal and spatial continuum in early cinema. “[C]onsequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.”25

24 25   Fig 8.

Burch, Noel. N.d. Correction Please – or How We Got into Pictures.(Pamphlet accompanying film of same name.) ____. 1978 – 1979. “Porter, or Ambivalence.” Screen 19, no. 4: 19-105. Benjamin, Water. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken, 1969. P. 228. Eadweard Muybridge, Galloping Horse, 1878. Image courtesy of http://www.digitaljournalist.org

Before diving into the techniques that accompany this shift away from cinematic primitivism, one must keep in mind that the role that reality plays in different genres and movements of film. In his seminal essay, written in 1967, Andre Bazin26 opposes two kinds of filmmakers in the orchestration of the cinematic image: those that put faith in the image, such as Russian Constructivists, and German Expressionists, Hitchcock, and filmmakers of the French New Wave; and those that put faith in reality, such as Renoir, Antonioni, Murnau, and Angelopoulos. In the first grouping, the image is assembled jarringly and manipulated to communicate an intellectual and emotional message. In the second grouping, the cinema is used to, as commented by David Bordwell, “capture the concrete relations of people and objects knit into the seamless fabric of reality…which conveys the filmmaker’s unique conceptions of the world.”27 Yet the two groupings of filmmaking are not polar opposites, within the tension-packed visual compositions by Eisenstein, imageries and rhythms reference instances of reality – and the collision resulted by each abrupt cut certainly recalls some type of real emotional experience. Likewise, within the canvas of seamless portrayals of reality, aberrant elements occur to set things awry in order to direct the viewer’s attention toward specific visual and narrative threads. This following chapter is dedicated to addressing the primary methods through which cinema references and constructs reality with an emphasis on spatiality and temporality. The discussion will be broken down into the production components of mise-en-scene, cinematography, and assemblage. The second part of this chapter investigates the reality within the narrative context as created by these components and the message that the spectator receives.

00:00:00:20 26 27  

Bazin, Andre. “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1. University of California Press, 2004. Bordwell, David. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. University of California Press, 2005. P. 11

Mise-en-scene Expanding from François Truffaut’s definition, Bordwell outlines “mise-en-scene” as setting, lighting, costume, makeup and performance within the shot.28 These elements when combined form the visual style of the film. They serve four main purposes:

1. To denote a fictional or non-fictional realm of actions, agents, and circumstances (the narrative) 2. To generate expressive qualities – to “infect viewers with strong feelings”29 3. To yield more abstract, conceptual meanings – symbolism 4. To work somewhat on its own – functioning decoratively

Together, the elements within a frame construct the “world” of the film. While it is most likely referential of reality in appearance – for example: earthy landscapes, identifiable architecture, illuminations that imply sunlight or practical lighting, class-appropriate clothing, non-pantomimic acting, and so on – it is also a completely believable unique entity. An extreme example is Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), where every visual element of the film helps to establish a culture very removed from an ordinary life on earth. Right from the start, the film announces that it takes place “in a galaxy far, far away.” This statement not only sets the fantastic tone for the trilogy, but also immediately suspends the audience’s belief in establishing that the visual uniqueness throughout the film is not unusual or artificial to the civilization it seeks to create. Hence, the visual content within the film is compatible with the parameters set for the reality within the film. In addition, while this faraway galaxy is a departure from life on earth, the behavior and sociality of its inhabitants, as shown through the performance, is significantly comparable to that of earth. Uniformity of the mise-en-scene is what ultimately makes this separation possible.

28  29 

Ibid. P. 16 Ibid. P. 34

This is what Bordwell means by his first point. It is also easy to see that the four functions of successful mise-en-scene work hand-in-hand with one another. In other words, narrative emotes, symbolism reinforces narrative (as it does in literature), and aesthetics incites specific sensational responses. Eisenstein’s meticulous study of montage is partnered with his detailed analysis of cinematography, which he calls “mise-en-cadre,” or “mise-en-shot.” “Art is always conflict, according to its methodology” and “cinematography is, first and foremost, montage.”30 The conflict, which Eisenstein extensively breaks up into several categories (which will be addressed later in this chapter) entail the relationship formed between images, or frames of a film. Instead of seeing each image as placed laterally in relation to one another, Eisenstein perceives one as on top of the other. Motion emerges from this juxtaposition. By motion, Eisenstein does not simply mean the physical act of moving through space, but also emotional and intellectual movements, which establish the tonality and narrative content of the film. These movements, working symbiotically within the film frame, construct reality in all aspects that relate to the human experience. This is “the reason for the phenomenon of spatial depth, in the optical superimposition of two planes [...]. From the superimposition of two elements of the same dimension always arises a new, higher dimension.”31 The content within the frame is analyzed in both a painterly (form-oriented) and intellectual (content-oriented) fashion.

30   31 Fig 9.

Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Harvest Books, 1969. Ibid. P. 49 Left, F.W. Murnau, The Last Laugh, 1924.

Fig 10.

Center, F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, 1922.



Fig 11.

Image courtesy of Kino Video. Image courtesy of Kino Video.

Right, F.W. Murnau, Sunrise, 1927.

Image courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

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Cinematography There are two important qualities that define cinematography: 1. Subconsciously or consciously, it is a decision 2. It is motivated by the text of the film. Cinematography is the visual framework through which the filmmaker interprets and expresses events, which, unless it is a purely abstract idea, possesses temporal, spatial, and emotional continuity. It is clear why the movement of a camera, the granularity of the film stock, and the depiction of the image through the choice of lens and focal length – all the attributes that make up cinematography – work to create motion and spatiality in the same fashion, if not collaboratively, with assemblage or montage. To more closely investigate how mise-en-scene and cinematography contribute to the construction of reality, whether it is spatial, textual, social, or aesthetic, I will identify their function within several stylistically distinctive films that heavily employ space as either a metaphor or a direct component of their text. This theoretical analysis serves to explicate both the referential aspect and the point of departure in my own work. Two entirely different directions of filmmaking surfaced in Germany during the 1920s, particularly in relation to their dissimilarities in mise-en-scene. Robert Wiene’s most notable work, Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), is characterized by sets painted with shadows, corridors, and light. In conjunction with its stylistic title cards and cryptic storyline, Caligari’s mise-en-scene is overtly fabricated and non-representational. While there is no spatial realism in Caligari, the film implies depth and apertures on blatantly flat planes, a process that calls attention to the artifice of film as a two-dimensional projection.

Fig 12.

Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, 1941. Image courtesy of Warner Home Video.

After Nosferatu (1922), F.W. Murnau’s films, albeit remaining expressive and surreal, take a realistic turn. The success of The Last Laugh (1924) – which will be discussed further for its cinematographic significance – leads to Sunrise (1927), a film that visually articulates the experience of travel through the imitation of realistic rural and urban landscapes. During a dramatic narrative sequence, the film’s protagonists transition from a rural town into the city center via a train. The moving vehicle enables continuous visibility of changing exterior – a trope from beginning cinema, and undoubtedly resonant with the urban movement mentality of its time. With this staging, Murnau not only addresses the spatial reality and the world of Sunrise, but also juxtaposes the character development with the setting, emphasizing the importance of this architectural shift in the narrative. This is how visual information is both passive and active: the landscapes around the train serve both as background information and analogize the emotional change that the characters are about to experience in Sunrise’s narrative arc. Going back to The Last Laugh, the relationship between mise-en-scene and cinematography plays a crucial part in the film’s narrative. The affluent city of Berlin rises over its protagonist, glorifying his role as a proud hotel porter and diminishing his status when he is emotionally devastated by his demotion to a janitor. To communicate the diminutive spatiality that accompanies the character’s psychological low point, two shots take place: 1. 2.

The physical gesture of buildings falling over the porter, as if they are anthropomorphized to the role of villains. This is what Eisenstein refers to as conflict between matter and its spatial nature – which is achieved by the distortion of the lens. The placement of the porter to the lower right corner of the frame – the least noticeable area of the composition – removes his power over the situation.

Here, the construction of space goes beyond addressing the certain cultural or geographical identity of Berlin. The film’s spatiality is not just the architecture that contains actions, but the active tension between the environment and character. Mise-en-scene and the camera activate this psychology. The four-minute opening shot in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) is a signature example of how the realist director “dramatizes film space.”32 As a wideshot, the moving composition explores the US-Mexico border with deep focus and clarity. The space is depicted concretely,33 since geographies of both the border and the town play important parts in the narrative. Within the space framed by this shot, layers of actions take place, some setting cultural 00:00:01:00

32  33

Bordwell. P. 172 In fact, Welles demands that the film be shot in a “real space” as opposed to a film set.

context, some the noir aesthetics that resonates throughout Welles’ work, some establishing moral identification for the male protagonist, and some building up the narrative plot point that is about to take place – the explosion that interrupts the shot. Actions are framed within and outside of the film frame; the continuity of the shot reinforces the idea that narrative extends beyond the visible realm. The motion of the camera describes Eisenstein’s third conflict of motives: the projection of conflict into space, a zig-zag movement traveling through space. While the camera work orients the viewer within the world of Touch of Evil, the mise-en-scene implies the presence of facts yet to be revealed, i.e., a lurking danger that sets the world off-balance, a common theme of Film Noir. As the audience, we are now keyed into the multi-layering of action and space. Welles employs deep focus shots constantly to fill his framing with information. The slow dolly-ing back from the snow in Citizen Kane (1941) is another famous example. A young Charles Foster Kane playing in the snow is framed by the window, placed center screen to emphasize his importance and entrapment, the bleak interior of the Foster residence counterbalances the blissful child’s play, while the actual dialogue exchange takes place in the foreground. In one shot, Welles collapses three spaces into one in order to create conflict. The emotional experience of moving through this film space also increases in tension. The works of Italian Neorealistic (and later) New Wave Director, Michelangelo Antonioni, challenge the way of seeing the environment by stripping away dramatic elements, cinematic style, and the artifice of studio films. La Notte (1961), for example, is filmed with documentary aesthetics. The visual tension is subtly conveyed through one’s prolonged observation of the mise-en-scene. Blowup (1966) takes an alternate approach through using the photographic medium as a metaphor for the cinematic construction of spatial reality, which also translates into the construction of truth in the narrative. After all, what is

Fig 13.

Chris Welsby, Windmill II, 1973. Image courtesy British Film Institute.

revealed by the camera is what informs the reality of the situation; what is hidden is only inferred by the visible, and is otherwise non-existent, as if it never happened. Antonioni describes that his goal for Blowup is to “question ‘the reality of our experience,’” and that one of the film’s main themes is “to see or not to see the correct value of things.”34 Events hidden from the eye of a camera are either non-existent or presumed to have taken place in an unexplored space, which is nevertheless existent within the spatial reality of the film. In other words, what Antinioni means by questioning the reality of experience is for the viewer to decide between these two possibilities implied by this act of obscuring. Three scenes in Blowup demonstrate the method of its spatial construction. In the park, when Thomas the photographer first encounters a man and a woman having an affair, his visual perception is driven by the couple’s actions. With the couple situated in the center of his line of vision, he captures the moment with his camera, casting both the couple’s behaviors and the physical structure of the park into the mise-en-scene. In the second scene, these fragmented images are printed and arranged to recreate the physical reality of the park. What is noteworthy of this assemblage is the motion that motivates Thomas to begin this endeavor – the woman’s eyeline. Her gaze extends the space beyond the camera that frames her in a two-dimensional plane. This framing informs the photographer (and the film viewer) of a counter-action that occurs opposite her gaze. This is the Eisensteinian “conflict between viewpoints,” which is directed by camera angles35. A frequently used convention is the “shot-reverse-shot,” which constructs a causal relationship between shot A and B purely by placing one after another in editing. Before revealing the subject of her gaze, space is constructed outside of the frame. Antonioni asks us to have faith in our speculation about a reality that is more often deduced than revealed. This is what the film’s final scene is about: believing in a reality separate from the norm through piecing together dialogical actions.

34 35 

“E nato a Londra ma non e un film ingelese,” from Corriere della Sera, 12 February 1982. Translated by Allison Cooper. Eisenstein. P. 54.

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Film and video artist Chris Welsby, often described as a British Structuralist filmmaker, illustrates this shot-reverse-shot causal effect with Windmill (1973). In Windmill, a mirrorized windmill is placed in close proximity to a 16mm film camera. The camera is set on a tripod situated in a park. As the windmill rotates in response to wind flow, three layers of spaces are recorded by the film: the deep space beyond the windmill (the park), the space behind the camera reflected by the mirrors, and the in-between space, the visual plane that appears as a merging of the abstract flashes of colors and light captured by the quick movements of windmill, acting almost as a camera shutter that both obscures and reveals. The work is a manifestation of the editing process and its function to cohere and construct spatiality.

Being, says Heidegger, is being-in-the-world. When David senses the end (although probably not even he himself is sure of it), he is no longer in the world. The world is outside the window.36 – Michelangelo Antonioni, in response to the end shot of The Passenger. The last shot of The Passenger (1975) is one of most theorized moments in Antonioni’s work. Spanning seven minutes, the shot begins from within protagonist David Locke’s hotel room, moves steadily out the gated window, pans over that empty arena outside the hotel, and finally turns around so that the window is now in its view and we are now looking inside at Locke, dead. This is done in one long take with no edits. Like his other work, The Passenger unravels slowly and naturally, without dramatic high points, music, or even extensive dialogue. Natural and man-made architectures, which demarcate the expanse and confines of physical space, are heavily explored by the camera. In slow, wide compositions, Antonioni prolongs the process of staging, forcing the audience to speculate on the scene’s purpose. The architectural mise-en-scene, in this context, removes visual cues indicative of drama by obscuring the actions – to “dedramatize” the situation, as Bordwell puts it. What is significant about this seven-minute shot is its preservation of temporal continuity, and in turn spatial continuity. Throughout the entire film, Locke is a character out of place, yet shaped by his foreign environment. By integrating the interior of Locke’s world with the exterior environment with which he cannot connect, Antonioni stresses the multilayered nature of space.

36

“Il mondo e fuori dalla finestra,” in Filmcritica 252, March 1975. Translated by Dana Renga.

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Fig 14.



Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger, 1975.

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

STRUCTURAL FRAGMENTATION IN CINEMATIC SPACE: CINEMATOGRAPHY & MONTAGE The isolated shot is not even a small fragment of cinema; it is only raw material, a fragment of the real world. Only by montage can one pass from photography to cinema, from slavish copy to art. Broadly defined, montage is quite simply inseparable from the composition of the work itself.37 Drawing from the beginning of this thesis, Gilles Deleuze expresses in his writing “Cinema 1: The Movement-Image” that cinema depicts motion as a unity of multiplicity. Not only does sequence of shots describe an action, it places us, the audience, within motion to provide a sense of perspective and time. Deleuze goes on to describe two types of mobility: the mobility of the action, and the mobility of the camera, which are both embedded into the nature of shots. As previously discussed in this chapter, shots are placed within the mise-en-scene, which is given form by editing and by cinematography. Yet, it is the assemblage of shots that orients the action. In other words, visual editing is capable of fragmenting and reconfiguring filmed or staged physical space into a new space that conveys a deliberate emotional and intellectual message. In his influential writing, “The Production of Space,” French philosopher Henri Lefebvre describes that space is socially constructed in a fashion comparable to Eisenstein’s explanation of the role conflict and Deleuze’s emphasis on multiplicity. “The form of social space is encounter, assembly, simultaneity.38” Lefebvre includes everything there is in space as what creates space, objects, movements, and signs. “Natural space juxtaposes – and thus disperses: it puts places and that which occupies them side by side. It particularizes. By contrast, social space implies actual or potential assembly at a single point, or around that point.” In this light, the process of assembling fragments of space as captured by film into a sequence, providing an implicit movement and convergence of perspectives, accumulates and transforms the natural space into a social space. 37  38 

R. Barthes. In Communications, no. 4, 1964 (special issue: “Recherches semiologiques”). p. 47 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1991. p. 101

Motion exists in space. As it drives through space, it possesses a certain kind of rhythm, a temporality. This driving force is the mobility of the action within the mise-en-scene. Since montage is the superimposition of one image onto the next, a second motion arises out of the change between the two images. “The concept of the moving (time-consuming) image arises from the superimposition – or counterpoint – of two differing immobile images.”39 This is a phenomenological projection of motion. Above and beyond creating emotional undertones and addressing the orientation of one’s movement through film space, the rhythm formed by visual conflict is, at its best, an intellectual montage. “Composition takes the structural elements of the portrayed phenomena and from these composes its canon for building the containing work...In doing this composition actually takes such elements, first of all, from the structure of the emotional behavior of man, joined with the experienced content of this or that portrayed phenomenon.”40 The intellectual message of this type of montage is integral to the narrative. Instead of directly addressing the textual components and hard facts of the story, the phenomenological approach of intellectual montage is to reference the mental experience simulated by the design of an assemblage of shots, as to contextualize the actual narrative. Through this contextualization, the relationship between space and its subjects becomes more complex. A quick illustration: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) uses interspersed cutting of expositional visuals and stylized graphics to weave together a simultaneously anxious and narrative experience. This is how the film appears at a glance. Upon deeper examination, one can easily identify the thematic and structural emphasis on the staircase of the church – where the “accidental” fall of the female protagonist proceeds to haunt James Stewart’s Detective Ferguson for the rest of the film – as a space whose presence resonates throughout 00:00:01:06

39  40  Fig 15.

Eisenstein. P. 53. Eisenstein. P. 151. Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window, 1954.

Image courtesy of Universal Home Entertainment.

the entire film. Vertigo’s main graphic, spiraling out of control, is a good example where Hitchcock uses collisional montage to infer the desired phenomenological experience associated with the staircase (its association with vertigo, repetition and transition), and in turn situates the audience in a certain direction of narrative. We know that the staircase is physically threatening to the protagonist, who has vertigo. We understand that the act of looking down the staircase induces neurosis as it recalls tragic memories, triggering conflict between matter and its spatial nature (the distortion of the lens when the character looks downward41), but most significantly, we also, through Hitchcock’s rather abstract assemblage and production of spatiality, expect the staircase to be a vital part of the resolution. From this case, we can see how the symbiotic connection between assemblage/ editing, cinematography, and mise-en-scene is crucial to what, in my introduction, JeanLouis Baudry referred to as “the impression of reality”.

00:00:01:08 41 Fig 16.

The shot is achieved by a simultaneous zooming in and moving away from the object, so that the relative sizes of the foreground object and the background constantly change – achieving a frenzied, dream-like visual effect. Often referred to as the “Vertigo Shot.” Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo, 1958. Image courtesy of Universal Home Entertainment.

WO

ORK

5/4 Moving along with the history of space, cinema defines itself as an architectural practice. It is an art form of the street, an agent in the building of city views. The landscape of the city ends up interacting closely with filmic representations, and to this extent, the streetscape is as much a filmic ‘construction’ as it is an architectural one.42 5/4 43 uses an infinitely rising staircase to demarcate and map a physical continuum. From a visual stance, each flight of stairs is as nondescript as the next. During the six-minute loop, the central character continuously walks upstairs to imply that the path is infinite. While her uninterrupted motion cuts through this spiraling physical construct, actions around her take place in loops with varying lengths. For example, a man waits next to his fiancée’s door every four flights of stairs on a loop. Another woman taking her dog for a walk descends in a five-flight loop, thus intersecting with the man at different points of her descent during each loop. Each character occupies separate temporal continuums like different durations of melodic ostinatos in a musical composition44. Their spatial occupation, in turn, become individualized and isolated, despite the sharing of the stairwell. This work visualizes the multi-layered quality of time as defined by actions in space using film and architecture as means of organization into a logical narrative. This work is first conceived to take place in a circular corridor. Soon, because of the natural spiraling architecture of a staircase, the narrative and characters are designed to fit its structure instead. The metaphorical connection between the different layers of temporalities and the narrative makes the construction of a linear script difficult. To clarify the visual dynamic of the screen space (to facilitate storyboarding), a chart is constructed to display where any character is at any time – with minutes spanning the x-axis, and flights of steps (20 being the end of one loop) spanning of y-axis. 42 43  44

Bruno. P. 27. Denotes the musical time signature that is five beats per measure, one beat being one quarter note. Sets of continuous variations in a musical composition.

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In this chart, the sociality within the film space is excavated from what the camera does not reveal, as continuity of space and time is assured. From a secondary glance, it is apparent how the structure of the work takes after a musical composition, where multiple partials of frequencies and melodic components are assembled in changing but ordered fashion. The finished composition is usually not overtly structural, but its elements repeat enough to convey their own sets of behaviors. The single diagonal that travels up to the upper right corner indicate both the protagonist’s presence and the eye of the camera. The dog and its owner, demarcated by downward-pointing diagonal lines, are deliberately arranged to occupy five flights of stairs, as to generate varied interactions with the camera (protagonist) each time in passing. With this scientific blueprint of a rather abstract conceit, my intended central intellectual experience of viewing 5/4 is the mental act of piecing together spatiality and narrative through implicative cinematic and performed gestures. The framing of each shot provides visual cues to aid to this endeavor. In 5/4, the organization of space and action is also likened to the metric montage of organization discussed by Eisenstein, in that the “realization is in the repetition of formula-driven measures.”45 Metric montage, according to Eisenstein, differs from rhythmic montage in its adherence to concrete mathematical divisions of time. The musical composition is written so that each chord change coincides with the crossing of one more flight of steps. Despite the different durations of each chord, the implied temporal organization of a musical score reinforces a deliberated mathematical method of spatial organization. The objectification of both the physical environment and the fleeting intersections between paths of motion accentuate the scientific methodology behind the process of making the work, emphasizing its formative aspects, removing it from the representational cinematic approach defined by Kracauer. We exist in separate layers of reality, prescribed by our own sense of space, time, and thus actions. To say that we perceive our coexistence because we occupy the same physical space is negligent of the social interactions that signify the intersection of our actions. The changing manners of interactions between the protagonist and the surrounding characters demonstrates the multilayered quality of time and space theoretically discussed above. On a surface level, the loop structure forms permutations of intersecting actions. Taking advantage of the spectator’s familiarity of film narrative tropes, these intersections generate escalating expectations, investment in characters, and build an ascending story arc that takes after traditional cinema. From a metaphysical angle, 5/4 questions the social nature of our lifestyles as dictated by routines – a built-in, programmed personal sense of time – our unique metronomes. 00:00:01:14

45   Fig 17. Fig 18.

Eisenstein. P. 72 Script, 5/4, 2007. Next spread, sequential shots, 5/4, 2007.

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THE WATER The Water is a video installation that comprises of three simultaneous video projections onto three surfaces within an unlit, empty room. The central projection occupies the width of the room and faces the other two projections, laid out side by side on the opposite wall. Between these two projections is a five-foot gap that accommodates entrance into the viewing space. Together, the videos convey a looped narrative of a character’s exploration of this physical space, full of straying paths, visual motifs, and sounds that “dimensionalize” this projected environment. The two walls that accommodate the side projections are placed diagonally. As the viewer walks past the initial five-foot gap, the walls part to suggest of entrance into physical space separate from the rest of the exhibition. The space is consciously configured this way to bring awareness to the gap’s transitional characteristics, that it is a conflux of ingress and egress. In other words, it both invites the viewer to step into an alternate cinematic space and calls upon the film’s character to exit the cinematic space within which she exists. Lastly, the inability to perceive all three projections simultaneously – where the film is constantly experienced both directly and in periphery – induces a sense of visual fragmentation and ambiguity also present within the narrative. In the central screen, filmed cinematically widescreen, the protagonist is shown walking toward the viewer, although her eyes never cross the lens. She is motivated by the sound of water, which grows louder as she steps downhill. The water, as indicated also by the title, is the narrative goal and her final destination. The sound distribution and music are designed to reinforce the thematic link between the cinematic space and the narrative. The sound of water is positioned at the entrance point, which is situated behind the viewer as she walks into the space, and beyond the character’s reach. Ambient and footstep sounds pan across the viewing space, transforming the movement-image into action in space. The two projections facing the central image display what appears to be the character’s point-of-view, inferring to film’s function as a revelatory medium. As she traverses through

the forest, this set of moving images informs her of her location, but simultaneously disorients her with their frantic movements and disjunction. At a glance, the whole of the piece seems straightforward – but it is precisely the impression of realism that is used to confuse the understanding of the work’s spatiality. When juxtaposing the film’s natural space into the natural space of the installation, the positioning of the three projections also implies that the character is walking toward the gap that leads to the outside world. The character uses the woods’ architectural makeup (as provided by the surrounding projections) as visual cues in an endless attempt to solve the labyrinth. The term labyrinth is used here to imply both some type of organized structure inherent in the forest and the motion of traveling in circles. What the viewer does not notice at first is that the three projections loop seamlessly at different intervals, hence creating new spaces as the character wanders on, desperately trying to break the labyrinth. Through her journey, forest’s anonymity instigates confusion and struggle. As we the viewer experience the installation, we too constantly question our construction of the forest’s geometry. After some period of disorientation, the character’s implied goal changes from trying to find the water to trying to locate herself within the infrastructure of the environment constructed by the assemblage of shots amongst the three screens. This constant second-guessing challenges the traditional sense of film space shown on a solely two-dimensional plane. With two additional moving images protruding toward and wrapping around the spectator, the physical relationship between the projection and the receptor is reconsidered. In terms of referencing the conventions of cinema, The Water draws from the impression of space in filmic projection and the idea of duration in filmic narrative. Revealing visual clues that strive to complete the construction of physical space, in a way “sculpting space,” the jumpy editing amongst the three screens, as well as within each screen, sculpts time to bring awareness to the extended temporality that accompanies the experience of being lost. This deliberate emphasis on editorial structure parallels Stan Douglas’ execution in Win, Place or Show (1998) and Suspiria (2002-2003) where, through carefully programmed durations of edits, intellectual impressions that contextualize the event as well as frame the emotional experience, are materialized in spectatorship. The work also aesthetically echoes Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s filmic installation, The Wind (2006), where the narrative is broken down into fragmented segments, and as a result distort time and causal relationship from one action to the next. The work aims to dispute the viewer’s impression of the three-dimensional space as implied by the various conventions in traditional cinema. In a subconscious and 00:00:01:18 automatic effort to orient oneself within the work’s constructed real space, an ideological and physical exchange takes place between the viewer and the screen(s), much akin to that of cinematic spectatorship, which is constantly immersive.

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Fig 19.

The Water, installation visualization 2008.

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Fig 20. Fig 21. Fig 22.

Left top, installation views, The Water, 2008. Left bottom, narrative brainstorm, The Water, 2008. Above, scenario maps, The Water, 2008.

THE BICYCLE CAMERA Part 1

To examine the communicative nature and intricate balance between realistic portrayal and emotive interpretation of action in space, my work, The Bicycle Camera, borrows the spectator’s preexisting visual impression of the road as viewed from a moving bicycle as a basis for contrast to a manipulated film that depicts the action. (We all have a fixed impression of how quickly our surroundings pass us by as we bike down a street.) To briefly describe the conceived technical construction of the central mechanism, a gear is positioned next to the front wheel of the bicycle as well as a 16mm film camera mounted directly on top of the wheel. As the wheel rotates, its spokes drive the gear forward, which in turn flicks the shutter of the camera, one frame at a time. The faster the wheel rotates, the more frames per second is exposed onto the film. Playback of this footage reverses the speed of travel during filming - as portions where the bicycle moves at a faster pace are slowed down by the higher number frames exposed, and slow portions quickened by the lack of frames. The relationship between the speed and action of biking is inverted. In a sense, the physical continuum of the path traveled becomes the only constant in dictating film’s visual component. No matter how fast or slow the bicycle moves, the same amount of imagery is recorded. Additionally, only surrounding actions can reveal this distortion of time and space, since otherwise it only seems that the revolution per second remains unchanged. When we enter an environment, we cut into it with momentum and force. While we do not make direct contact with the objects around us, a frictional impulse emerges between our surrounding objects (and life forms) and ourselves. I wish to document a variety of urban and rural landscapes with this mechanism, and as a result both accentuate and

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mediate this universally physical and psychological response. As film originates as a contemporary to and a product of industrialization and mobility, it is the most effective format for generating discussion of the two topics. The material chosen to create this work is celluloid film for two main reasons. One, I want to emphasize the direct linkage between the motion that characterizes the film medium and the application of transportation. The two technologies exist hand in hand, and it is most appropriate to have one quite literally drive the other. Two, the filmstrip, too, is a path, an unbroken continuum that maps out a space. The film belongs in the genre of a “city symphony,” and like films by Dziga Vertov, René Clair, Walter Ruttman, Sheeler, and Strand, simulates our experience within a physical space by mimicking the visual transformation of the city landscape during travel. Perhaps more significantly, like Russian Constructivist and Propaganda films, this work approaches the documentary of reality with the attitude to emote and challenge. My perpetration is enabled by a change of the camera motor technology as opposed to a scripted narrative. The narrative takes place in the city of Providence, Rhode Island, where a diverse group of cityscapes are lumped together into close proximity. Within the span of twenty minutes, a bicyclist is likely to encounter rich suburbs, universities, local town stores, grand hotels, shopping malls, boutiques, bridges and waterways, an abandoned downtown, and industrial developments. Such anthropological variance offers opportunities for a dramatic arch, which furthers my endeavor to embed emotional meaning into the activity of travel through the film medium. Obviously, the reality of the work is loyally representational of its counterpart reality outside of film. As a result, the spectator is invited to project her understanding of that physical reality back at the film in order to comprehend its narrative. The spectator’s projection ultimately leads to my attempt to reinstate physical significance into the transient film medium. The distance between architectural organization of space and Fig 23.

Documentation of filming process, The Bicycle Camera, 2007.

time becomes distorted (inverted relationship to speed during playback) cinematic organization of space can be removed through this return from projected form to physical form. If the spectator is able to project significance of physical space onto film’s ephemeral space, what level of physical detail is retained or added? In regards to both the architecturally or geographically defined and the more abstract, what is the difference between spectatorial spatial reality – which exists solely in the mind – and the spatial reality represented by the film in selected bits and parts as images?

Part II

To seek an answer to the question of the reinstatement of the physical, The Bicycle Camera sprouts into its second phase. After filming the physical space of Providence with the modified camera, the footage is projected back onto the road via a bicycle-driven projector. The projector is wired to the bicycle similarly to the camera, and all the increments are carried over from the first to the second phase. Since the physical continuum of the path traveled is the constant, a continuously moving and changing cityscape is projected back onto three-dimensional architecture in the appearance of its original presence. In a sense, one physical space is translated, through the mode of film, onto another physical space. This phase signifies my gesture of physical reinstatement through a quite literal means of projecting back, and more extensively explores the multilayered quality of physical and social space. The actual action exerted for this projecting back also conveys the active effort exerted by the spectator while creating meaning from a film. The documentary reference in this work invites the spectator to project her understanding of that physical reality back at the film in order to comprehend its narrative. The spectator’s projection ultimately leads to my attempt to reinstate physical significance into the transient filmic medium. The distance between architectural organization of space and cinematic organization of space can be removed through this return from 00:00:02:02 projected form to physical form.

Fig 24.

Sketch exploring the inverted relationship between speed and distance for The Bicycle Camera, 2007.

“At the moment I’m fully conscious of my every step being recorded by the camera and the fact that I need to speak of my steps. These first maybe ten steps are in complete camera consciousness. I think at this pothole here I’m ready to switch into just walking and not acting…so for the next ten steps to this series of cracks on the road and this breeze of wind against my face I’ll recognize that the house next to you is for rent.” He crosses Brown Street and approaches the fence that outlines a field.

“I’m gonna cross this fence now that allows entry to Hope High School… and it surprisingly looks more like a fall day today than a spring day. I remember when we played football here…I remember that there’s an entrance in the fence right here, here it is.” He crawls in.

“And here I am…at the home plate. And you know, I don’t think I’ve played baseball in my entire life…I’ve never actually stood on a baseball diamond. I’m not even sure where one’d stand in relation to the base. And the ball would come like this, and I’d swing and hit. That was not a very good one. That was a foul ball, maybe? Not growing up in this country it was not part of my experience.. Like, growing up playing baseball, little league, maybe? I don’t even know what to do. I think right-handed is more sure-footed, right?” He stands over the diamond, pretends a ball is coming. He swings. His body spins around fully.

“And the pitch is coming, and I’m an ATHLETE!!”

Fig 25.

Transpositions: Nathaniel, 2008.

TRANSPOSITIONS

Transpositions is a one-channel video that presents the journey of four people walking through an open field. Each walk is filmed in one continuous hand-held shot to reinforce its spatial and temporal continuity. Instead of implementing a script, each person is given three simple directions that vaguely structure the performance: 1. Your goal is to traverse from one end of the field to the other. 2. You should speak instructively and descriptively about your walk, as anything you say will inform the following walker of the right course of action during their travel. 3. You should not consciously ignore the presence of the camera. As in, you are allowed to acknowledge the gaze of the lens and make visual interactions with it. After the first walk, the audio information of the recorded footage is passed onto the following walker, who is told to “respond” to what is said about the journey. The deliberate choice of the transitive verb “respond” leaves room to explore the relationship between the performers, who are familiar with one another on a personal basis. The performers are given the freedom to connect the fragments of verbal information with the various impressions associated with the instructor, whether it is a specific past experience or an assumption based on personality. The title of the piece is derived from the process of translating one space to another, one movement to another, and one impression to another. The repeating element from one segment to the next is the action of traversing an unchanging space. As the route of the travel transforms based on a performer’s biased interpretation of instructions, the spatial reality that is understood by the previous traveler becomes reconfigured. In this sense, the spatiality that is formed by movement becomes an extended metaphor for the reconfigured “narrative,” and vice versa. From a Structuralist standpoint, this work is my attempt to address the infinite amount of angles one can use to perceive and interact with a natural 00:00:02:04 space. Through the cross-examination between each film segment, not only does the space become more explored, but also the interrelationships between the four travelers.

“I guess I’m supposed to respond to Nathaniel, though. He talked about Art, and he talked about baseball, and he talked about leaves and seasons. But the thing that was more striking when I was listening to him were the things that were happening around.” “This bench is missing a seat. But I guess you can sit on it.” She sits down. It’s cold. She tucks in her hands.

“How do I know when I’m done. How do I know when I got there?”

Fig 26.

Transpositions: Nathaniel, 2008.

Merging the genres of documentary and improvisational performance, the characters are not directed to act as someone else, although a transformation from a non-actor to a performer takes place during filming, as the individual is subject to both the examination of the camera and the next traveler. Utterances are made with the intent of a specific listener, personal details are mediated both by the consciousness of a public audience and tailored for a familiar individual with certain predispositions. As the four performers are not formerly trained in acting, their transformation is unnatural and conspicuous. This, too, adds to the suspicion of artifice when constructing truth in film spectatorship – a salient topic of discussion in the documentary genre.

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Fig 27. Fig 28.

Top, Ice Apartment, Film, 2007. Bottom, Ice Apartment, Installation View, 2007.

ICE APARTMENT In The Ice Apartment, the counterbalance between the mundane and the dramatic once again enters my filmic exploration. The installation conveys a situation between four co-inhabitants of a square room. These four figures, three women and one man, are aware of one another’s physical presence, but do not commit themselves to any true communicative exchange. As if they exist in separate spaces, they are distilled within self-centered motions that repeat for an indefinite amount of time. This situation is shot from four different angles to establish the physical presence of the room. The four-sided video is then translated via projection onto a four-sided miniature room made of ice walls. In the dark, this ice room is illuminated by the blue-green light emitted by the projectors. Depending on the surface texture of each ice wall, the video image either floats on the outside, or appears trapped within the 5-inch thick material. The video playback is looped to express the unchanging dynamic of the characters’ relationships, as well as the tension that lies dormant under their lack of interaction. It is my intent to incorporate the material and thematic attributes of ice into the mise-enscene of the film. As a physical object, the ice serves both as a projection surface and as a substantial three-dimensional object that seemingly contains the visual content (which provides it with palpability). Aesthetically, its refractions and luminosity spotlight the mundane event. Tonally, its temperature and inconsistency become a metaphor for the fragile and unstable relationships present within the environment. The four faces of the ice room simulate theatrical staging – flat, uni-planer perspectives where the characters are placed so that their actions are completely visible to the viewer. When juxtaposed onto the ice, however, the images are partially obscured by material incongruousness, which forces the viewer to constantly seek a better angle at understanding what is going on. This interactive element of the work adds complexity to the spatiality within the film, drawing emphasis to the fact that space is created through motion, or the motion created 00:00:02:08 by the association between images.

BODY LANDSCAPES In The Ice Apartment, the counterbalance between the mundane and the dramatic once again enters my filmic exploration. The installation conveys a situation between four co-inhabitants of a square room. These four figures, three women and one man, are aware of one another’s physical presence, but do not commit themselves to any true communicative exchange. As if they exist in separate spaces, they are distilled within self-centered motions that repeat for an indefinite amount of time. This situation is shot from four different angles to establish the physical presence of the room. The four-sided video is then translated via projection onto a four-sided miniature room made of ice walls. In the dark, this ice room is illuminated by the blue-green light emitted by the projectors. Depending on the surface texture of each ice wall, the video image either floats on the outside, or appears trapped within the 5-inch thick material. The video playback is looped to express the unchanging dynamic of the characters’ relationships, as well as the tension that lies dormant under their lack of interaction. It is my intent to incorporate the material and thematic attributes of ice into the mise-enscene of the film. As a physical object, the ice serves both as a projection surface and as a substantial three-dimensional object that seemingly contains the visual content (which provides it with palpability). Aesthetically, its refractions and luminosity spotlight the mundane event. Tonally, its temperature and inconsistency become a metaphor for the fragile and unstable relationships present within the environment. The four faces of the ice room simulate theatrical staging – flat, uni-planer perspectives where the characters are placed so that their actions are completely visible to the viewer. When juxtaposed onto the ice, however, the images are partially obscured by material incongruousness, which forces the viewer to constantly seek a better angle at understanding what is going on. This interactive element of the work adds complexity to the spatiality within the film, drawing emphasis to the fact that space is created through motion, or the motion created by the association between images.

Fig 29.

Body Landscapes, 2007.

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Fig 30.

Composition timeline and corresponding scenes, Body Landscapes, 2007.

Fig 31, 32. Left & Above,Captured, 2008.

CAPTURED Looking at my body of work, I regard Captured, my most recent one-channel video, as a point of change. For the first time, I place myself within the frame of this fifteen-minute film as the one and only character. In doing so, I consciously pluck myself away from the symbiosis that I usually maintain with the camera mechanism. My role within the work shifts from being synonymous with the camera to the opposition and the subject of examination. The set of actions in Captured is simple: I, the filmmaker/film artist/video artist, box the camera as an equally capable opponent. As I attack my opponent, I am also on my guard, anticipating a return. Eventually, I am enervated by my actions and physically forced to stop the match. The idea for Captured sprouts from a brief conversation about particularly grotesque (yet simultaneously beautiful) sports photography of boxing matches. The camera’s capacity to distill incredibly imperceptible details in fast movements astounds the spectator, despite the reality of the movements always being present. This connects back to my discussion about film as a revelatory medium at the time of its first proliferation. Yet this ability to reveal reality beyond what the human eye can see is also frequently used to dramatize an event – to bring forth all the “gory details,” the strange moments within an act that appear awkward, out of context, and doubly bizarre because it is real. These surreal moments become spectacles not only captured, but generated by the camera. For them to exist, one would have to assume the presence of a camera in the same setting. The image and the lens are in conflux and conflict with each other. Originally, my plan was to hire a professional boxer to carry out the previously mentioned set of actions. My goal was to make a film that firstly provides a constant stream of this said confrontation. The boxer regards the lens as not necessarily a receptor of substance, but a force that projects outwards its target. The camera is not so much anthropomorphized 00:00:02:14 as it is viewed as sitting on the same organic and free-willed hierarchy as the boxer. Secondly, the punches’ physical impact against the lens calls attention to the object-ness of the camera, that it does not simply replace the eye of the spectator, but stands between the subject and the spectator as a physical filter.

After some consideration, it becomes clear that my intimacy with the camera is a very salient point in the conception of the project, which results in my taking the role of the boxer. Working as a cinematographer, I perceive the camera as both the container of a physical reality and a weapon toward that reality. By hitting the lens repeatedly until I am exhausted to the ground, I wish to not only address my original goals for the piece, but to illustrate my emotional relationship with and regard for the powerful mechanism.

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CONCLUSION

My relationship with film originates from aesthetic appreciation, especially in the area of cinematography. The re-contextualization of my work through the New Media genre is my effort to consciously re-examine the medium – and all the constructs around the camera – as a technology that engages in ideological and experiential exchange with various bodies of spectators. Through my epiphany in Pompeii, I am able to rationalize the correlation between the central elements that recur in all of my past work: cinematography, routine actions, moving through space, and architecture. Amidst current discussions about film being a “dying medium,” I seek to heighten the awareness of its actual prevalence in contemporary art. While film as a physical substance is perhaps no longer the most desirable choice of format for reasons of economy and efficiency, the connectedness between its form and the theories focused in New Media is as strong as it has always been with other emerging methods of creative expression. Form, as I have briefly summarized in my theoretical writing, encompasses ideas such as the creation and reinstatement of a movement-image, to the compounding and collision between the lens and its subject, the screen and the spectator, and the spectator and the physical space generated in the decoding of that projection. The interaction that takes place prescribed by this formalist study is not so much an action-response relationship that is sometimes archetypal of New Media and Digital Media, but an initially invisible ideological exchange that is eventually rendered physical and spatial. My view that the lens enables such interaction describes the impact and effect, as well as the engagement with other media it subsumes. This is the mode of cinema that I wish to investigate. This cinema resonates with the type of intellectual dialogue present in New Media, where the roles of receiver and the giver are constantly shifting and being reevaluated, where the definition of interaction is complex and dynamic, where the meaning of the image is equally important as, if not governed, by the technology that frames it. In the end, my relationship with this cinema exists on a personal level beyond intellectual articulation. I feel welded onto the mechanism and ingrained into the movement it captures. It is not an agent for escape, but a tool of dispersion and multiplication. It satisfies my desire, and perhaps greed, to be physically in touch with all the layers of preexisting and fabricated space and time. During my two years of studies at RISD, my love for the structuralism and formalism in the medium grew increasingly more prominent and demanding of direct address. This urged an elaboration, hence the emergence of Captured (the work as well as the title of this thesis). It is my hope to create a new body of work – extending from where this one takes off – where my love for the camera and my physical presence within the camera become the subject of close examination.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Writings Adorno, Theodor. Culture Industry (Routledge Classics) (Routledge Classics). Routledge, 2001. Aitken, Doug. Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative. D.A.P./ Distributed Art Publishers, Inc, 2005. Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge Studies in Film). Cambridge University Press, 1997. Antonioni, Michelangelo. “Il mondo e fuori dalla finestra,” in Filmcritica 252, March 1975. Translated by Dana Renga. Antonioni, Michelangelo. In Communications, no. 4, 1964 (special issue: “Recherches semiologiques”). Bazin, Andre. “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1. University of California Press, 2004. Benjamin, Water. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken, 1969. Birnbaum, Daniel. Doug Aitken (Contemporary Artists Series). Phaidon Press, 2001. Bordwell, David. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. University of California Press, 2005.

Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. Verso, 2007. Burch, Noel. N.d. Correction Please – or How We Got into Pictures. (Pamphlet accompanying film of same name.). 1978 – 1979. “Porter, or Ambivalence.” Screen 19, no. 4: 19-105. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image, University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film. Princeton University Press, 1997. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1991. Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. University Of Chicago Press, 1990. Michelson, Annette. “Dr. Craze and Mr. Clair.” October, Vol. 11, Essays in Honor of Jay Leyda. (Winter, 1979). Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000. Oxford University Press, USA, 2002. Taubin, Amy. “Double Visions” in Michael Snow Almost Cover to Cover. Black Dog, 2000. Truffaut, Francois. The Films in My Life. Da Capo Press, 1994. Virilio, Paul. L’horizon Negatif: Essai De Dromoscopie (Debats). Editions Galilee, 1984. Zavattini, Cesare. “Some Ideas on the Cinema.” MacCann, Richard Dyer, ed. Film: A Montage of Theories, 216-228. New York, Dutton, 1966, 1966. “Il mondo e fuori dalla finestra,” in Filmcritica 252, March 1975. Translated by Dana Renga. “E nato a Londra ma non e un film ingelese,” from Corriere della Sera, 12 February 1982. Translated by Allison Cooper. R. Barthes. In Communications, no. 4, 1964 (special issue: “Recherches semiologiques”). Pallasmaa, Juhani. “The Geometry of Terror”. Available from http://www.safa.fi/ark/ark4_97/hitchcoche1.html. 1997.

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Work Ahtila, Eija-Liisa. The Wind. 2006. Aitken, Doug and others. Blow Debris. 2000. Aitken, Doug and others. Diamond Sea. 1997. Aitken, Doug and others. Electric Earth. 1999. Aitken, Doug and others. I Am Into You. 2000. Aitken, Doug and others. Inflections. 1992. Aitken, Doug and others. New Ocean. 2001. Antonioni, Michelangelo and others. 1961. La Notte. 1 DVD (122 min.) videorecording. Fox Lorber. Antonioni, Michelangelo and others. Blowup. 1966. 1 DVD (111 min.) videorecording. Warner Home Video. Antonioni, Michelangelo and others. The Passenger. 1975. 1 DVD (126 min.) videorecording. Sony Pictures. Clair, René and others. Paris qui dort. 1925. 1 DVD (35 min.) videorecording. Home Vision Entertainment. Douglas, Stan. Win, Place or Show. 1998. Douglas, Stan. Suspiria. 2002-2003. Edison, Thomas and others. Panorama from Times Building, New York. Griffith, D.W. and others. Birth of a Nation. 1915. 1 DVD (187 min.) videorecording. Image Entertainment. Hitchcock, Alfred and others. Rear Window. 1954. 1 DVD (115 min.) videorecording. Universal.

Hitchcock, Alfred and others. Vertigo. 1958. 1 DVD (129 min.) videorecording. Universal. Lucas, George and others. Star Wars. 1977. 1 DVD (125 min.) videorecording. 20th Century Fox. Murnau, F.W. and others. Nosferatu. 1922. 1 DVD (94 min.) videorecording. Kino Video. Murnau, F.W. and others. Sunrise. 1926. 1 DVD (95 min.) videorecording. Eureka. Murnau, F.W. and others. The Last Laugh. 1924. 1 DVD (90 min.) videorecording. Kino Video. Snow, Michael and others. Back and Forth. 1969. 16mm Film (52 min.) Snow, Michael and others. La région centrale. 1971. 16 mm Film (180 min.) Snow, Michael and others. Wavelength. 1967. 16mm Film (45 min.) Vertov, Dziga and others. The Man With A Movie Camera. 1929. 1 DVD (68 min.) videorecording. Image Entertainment. Weed, A.E. and others. Panorama of 4th St., St Joseph. Welles, Orson and others. Citizen Kane. 1941. 1 DVD (119 min.) videorecording. Warner Home Video. Welles, Orson and others. Touch of Evil. 1958. 1 DVD (111 min.) videorecording. Universal. Welsby, Chris and others. Windmill. 1973. 16 mm Film (8 min.) Wiene, Robert and others. The Cabinet of Doctor Caligri. 1920. 1 DVD (75 min.) videorecording. Image Entertainment.

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“We are the twenty-story tower high above the Soviet streets –

We are the camera – We are the film – We are the viewer – We are the lens – We are the subject – We are the lights – We are the chemistry – We are the audience –

We watch ourselves – We reflect ourselves – We fragment ourselves –

We are the camera – We cannot be stopped – We are here to stay!” 46



46 Fig 33.

`

- Doug Aitken on The Man With a Movie Camera

Aitken. P. 287 Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929.