Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology M attempts to grasp media in the making. It delves into the under- o m belly of cinema in order to explore how images circulate and v ed ie Movie Circuits ia apparatus crystallize across different material formations. m C a Tphroev iinddeiss cai pmlienaanrsy teox psuesrpieenncde torfa cduitriaotnoarls fi alnmd s pturodjieecst aionndi setnsg age irc tters u with the medium as it happens, as a continuing, self-differing mess. it Curatorial Approaches From contemporary art exhibitions to pirate screenings, research s and practice come together in a vibrant form of media scholarship, to Cinema Technology built from the angle of cinema’s functionaries – a call to reinvent the medium from within. gabriel menotti is a lecturer in Film and Multimedia at UFES (Brazil). He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths (University of London). “Cinema is in crisis – again – but movies multiply across new platforms, festivals and distribution circuits. Concentrating on what sits before, behind, beside and beyond the film as defining instance of the movies as medium, Menotti rewrites film theory for these multifarious practices and institutions, redefining the thing we should be interested in and opening new ways to be interested in it.” – Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television, Goldsmiths University of London “Movie Circuits is about the medium – literally the in-between – of cinema. With sharp analysis, Menotti takes us through practices and theories of cinema in a way that allows us to fully appreciate how cinema is a mediating force, a mechanism that produces new g knowledge and circuits of exchange, to ‘exceed itself’, as he a b describes it.” r – Joasia Krysa, Professor of Exhibition Research, Liverpool John ie l Moores University & Liverpool Biennial m e n ISBN 978-90-896-4890-7 o t t i Amsterdam AUP.nl University gabriel menotti 9 789089 648907 Press Amsterdam University Press Movie Circuits Amsterdam University Press MediaMatters is a series published by Amsterdam University Press on current debates about media technology and practices. International scholars critically analyze and theorize the materiality and performativity, as well as spatial practices of screen media in contributions that engage with today’s (digital) media culture. For more information about the series, please visit www.aup.nl Amsterdam University Press Movie Circuits Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology Gabriel Menotti Amsterdam University Press Amsterdam University Press Cover illustration: Polliana Dalla Barba (2018) Cover design: Suzan Beijer Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 90 8964 890 7 e-isbn 978 90 4852 754 0 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789089648907 nur 670 © G. Menotti / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Amsterdam University Press Table of Contents Introduction: Blind Optics 7 1. What Is a Movie? 31 Film reels 35 Electronic broadcast 39 Videotapes 44 Digital versatile discs 48 Codified data 51 User agreements 57 2. The Becoming of Cinema 65 Territorializing practices 68 Aligning medium specificities 73 Shifting paradigms 80 3. Projection Studies 87 Provocative methods against elusive objects 89 Performing material knowledge 96 Reassembling the cinematographic field 102 4. Performing Medium Specificities 109 Traditional apparatus with improper technology 112 An anomalous cinema 117 Fixing places, stabilizing practices 122 Crystallizing change 127 5. Denied Distances 133 The thickness of the screen 138 WVLNT: WAVELENGTH for Those Who Don’t Have the Time: Originally 45 minutes, Now 15! 139 A Man. A Road. A River. 143 Flatland 145 I’ve Got a Guy Running 147 The Girl Chewing Gum 149 Three Transitions 151 Paper Landscape #1 153 Amsterdam University Press From the depth of projection to the extensions of the city 155 4’22” 157 Horror Film 1 159 You and I, Horizontal (III) 161 Augmented Sculpture and Urban Installations 164 GRL: The Complete First Season 168 Relational Architectures 172 The density of the circuit 176 The movie that wasn’t: Pirated Copy 178 The movie that was: Steal this Film 180 The transience of time 184 Acknowledgements 191 Comprehensive Bibliography 193 Index 201 Amsterdam University Press Introduction: Blind Optics Abstract A movie disappears right in front of the audience’s eyes. What could be happening? By drawing inspiration from the unsuccessful première of the movie a knife all blade, this book acknowledges a new critical way of engaging with cinema. It champions hands-on approaches as a means to pierce through medial ideology and access the invisible side of the medium, where the bulk of technological development is accumulated and suppressed. Through the work of mediators such as projectionists and curators, the inconsistencies of the medium are therefore presented as partial but powerful keys for grasping its material reality. Keywords: Cameraless films, discourse networks, film cultures, medial ideology As the credits roll, one can feel the hustle of people moving around, impatient bodies readjusting in their seats. But the service lights have not gone on yet. There is still a final short to be screened in that noon session of the XV Vitória Cine-Video Festival. With the dim light of their mobile phones, some spectators check the name and duration of the piece in the printed programme they got from a pile outside the theatre. It is an experimental video entitled a knife all blade, one minute and fifty-seven seconds long. This was the first time it was going to be shown to the public. It is still open to question, though, whether it was watched at that same moment or not. The theatre was far from empty – in fact, all of its 240 seats were filled, and there were people crowding the aisles, all over the floor. That 25 No- vember 2008 was a day as busy as ever for the local film festival, which was in its heyday. Nevertheless, no one seemed to notice when a knife all blade started to be projected. Perhaps more surprisingly, no one took issue when, within about ten seconds, the projection was cut short. The screen went blank and the lights instantly turned on. The show was over. One by one, spectators stood up, rubbed their eyes, stretched their legs, and calmly Menotti, G., Movie Circuits. Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789089648907_intro Amsterdam University Press 8 Movie CirCuits started to leave. It was probably a relief to most of them that the last video seemed to be cut out of the session. A plain description of what happened cannot explain what had gone wrong, if anything. Did a mechanical malfunction make the projector halt? Had some obstruction to the light precluded the image formation? The boring truth is that neither of these theories is true. The devices were all in place, working as intended, resulting in the most accurate reproduction of the piece. The movie nevertheless went unperceived, as did its sudden interruption. Considering the audience’s indifference, one would think that it was no accident. In fact, one would assume that nothing had happened at all. Despite having been right in front of their eyes, it was as if a knife all blade had never existed. A virtual non-occurrence, which becomes apprehensible only as one steps away from the situation and examines it from a certain distance. But why would we do that? The conspicuous invisibility of a knife all blade makes for a curious incident, but it does not seem special in any meaningful way. It is barely passable as a tale to entertain one’s co-workers, as it lacks a proper punch line. What place could it have in a book purportedly about cinema technology? It is not cinema, after all, but rather its failure. It does not express any significant information about the medium, but rather noise apart from it. Singular and inconsequential, the incident does not appear to provide any contribution to a general theory of the cinematographic work. It is the kind of anomaly any barely competent film scholar would remove from her analysis of the movie. Particularly at the time of the screening, when film and screen studies were going through the apex of the crisis effected by the digitization of film, the event seemed completely beside the point. The grand narrative of film history is made clearer through the suppression of this and other similar oddities. With the future of the medium under threat, there is no time to lose ruminating on its operational inconsistencies. Right? This book is based on a disagreement with this statement. It posits that, on the contrary, the particularities of that ‘nonoccurrence’ do offer a partial but powerful key for grasping the material reality of the medium. They may even provide a quick fix for the epistemic crisis provoked by ‘the digital’. By dwelling on these particularities, one comes to realize that operational inconsistencies are not a rare exception, but are rather commonplace in cinema. The cinematographic work does not have an intrinsic cohesion, nor is its apparatus technologically neutral. The awareness of this material restlessness comes almost instinctively from the engagement with the medium’s underbelly. After years working as a curator, chiefly in informal Amsterdam University Press introduCtion: Blind optiCs 9 and often experimental capacities, it seems impossible for me to look past it. Without the support of institutional networks, movies’ self-evident objectivity is shown to be largely fictional. Every movie leads a contrived existence, always on the brink of falling apart. It requires a continuing investment – of labour, of energy, of attention – in order to present itself anew. In the exchanges entailed by these processes, the work ebbs and flows, porous to its surroundings. The tentative methods here outlined seek to provide ways of accessing cinema by the means of its inconsistencies. These methods take inspiration from the work of those committed to the in-betweens of the medium: not its traditional scholars, nor even its usual practitioners, but rather its mediators. This results in film and screen studies as if the discipline was created not by those who analyse or produce movies, but rather by those who move them around and make them present. While this description could fit a wide range of both human and nonhuman agents, the main proxies in our endeavour are the complementary figures of the projectionist and the curator. Through their skewed perspective, simultaneously removed and closely bound to the medium, minor singularities can reveal deeper material and political realities. Their idiosyncratic sensibilities can be mobilized in order to supplement the paradigmatic cinema scholarship, calling attention to the actual technological and epistemic arrangements of the medium. This approach leads to the exploration of the negative spaces and practices that are systematically denied from our understanding of the medium – in other words, the work that disappears right under our eyes. Cameraless films and the filmless projector In hindsight, one might consider elements that were not immediately available – starting from the video itself. a knife all blade is an exceedingly simple piece. Its title is inspired by one of Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore’s most famous sayings: ‘A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes bleed the hand that uses it.’ There is no soundtrack whatsoever. No opening credits. No dramatic curve. As soon as the video starts playing, the darkness of the screen is filled with dozens of popping grey squares of similar size. Here and there, the squares seem to bleed into straight lines of a murky green or red colour. But it is hard to tell, since they do not stop pulsating, eluding the gaze. In spite of the random rhythms, one can recognize a certain order to their positions, implying a grid. Indeed, each square corresponds to a macroblock, a group of pixels constituting Amsterdam University Press