Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology 9789048527540

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction: Blind Optics
1. What Is a Movie?
2. The Becoming of Cinema
3. Projection Studies
4. Performing Medium Specificities
5. Denied Distances
Acknowledgements
Comprehensive Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Movie Circuits

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

Movie Circuits Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology

Gabriel Menotti

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.



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 Territorializing practices Aligning medium specificities Shifting paradigms

65 68 73 80

3. Projection Studies Provocative methods against elusive objects Performing material knowledge Reassembling the cinematographic field

87 89 96 102

4. Performing Medium Specificities Traditional apparatus with improper technology An anomalous cinema Fixing places, stabilizing practices Crystallizing change

109 112 117 122 127

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

From the depth of projection to the extensions of the city 155 4’22” 157 159 Horror Film 1 You and I, Horizontal (III) 161 164 Augmented Sculpture and Urban Installations 168 GRL: The Complete First Season 172 Relational Architectures 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

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Index 201



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 November 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

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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 f ilm 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

Introduc tion: Blind Optics

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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

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Gabriel Menotti, still from a knife all blade (2008). Digital video, colour, 1’43”.

a processing unit of image compression. Their appearance on-screen was not animated in postproduction, though, but was rather prompted during recording. The video was made using a mobile-phone camera with the lens covered, so that no light could reach the device’s complementary metal-oxidesemiconductor (CMOS) sensor. Still, the camera did produce some images, thanks to the digital compression that took place at the very moment of capture. Without a subject in front of its lens to inform it – a world of light to hold on to – the camera performed just like the knife in Tagore’s dictum. The pure logic of video processing went wild, producing a movie that was a trace of nothing but the machine itself. Nokia’s low-quality algorithm interpreted the complete darkness as visuals to be processed and stored, generating the grey squares out of nowhere. Thus, inasmuch as it may look like an abstract animation, a knife all blade is rather a parade of compression artefacts, which reveals one of the normally hidden formal structures underlying the digital image. To refuse figuration is a strategy not unheard of in the realm of audiovisual media. Works belonging to traditions such as structural film and video synthesis famously de-emphasize the optical input in favour of direct interventions in the image’s medium of inscription, producing rather abstract results. In his stroboscopic Arnulf Rainer (1960), Peter Kubelka achieved a sort of minimal cinema by alternating clear and black frames in the filmstrip.

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The soundtrack underscores this visual vibration with alternating white noise and silence. Steina and Woody Valsuka’s Noisefields (1974) performs a similar operation by mixing together two raw video signals. Initially indistinguishable from one another, the signals differ as they go through a colourizer and one is keyed in a circular shape. The result is a continuous flickering of static fitting the electronic medium. These works tackle the same field as the broader genre of cameraless films, which encompasses forms of animation made straight to celluloid. The term reminds us of how much the techniques employed by animators such as Norman McLaren and Len Lye build upon the photograms championed by Man Ray. Film scratching and collage, and later optical printing, are methods for the creation of moving images based less on framing the gaze than on touching the medium. As such, they advance cinematographic grammars alternative to the perspective projection inherited from the Quattrocento. But a knife all blade, along with the works by Kubelka and the Valsukas, pursue a more clearly analytical (and even agonistic) relation to the standards of audiovisual representation: they operate by short-circuiting the technological medium. By blocking the optical sensors and preventing a worldview to get into the system, they force the system to output what is already in there. What come to view are the lesser known parts of audiovisual media. Minimal difference, barely above the signal-to-noise ratio established to that system, reveals the image immanent in its processes of storage and transmission. This is the background against which Friedrich Kittler has said technological media must operate (1999: 45). Here, we encounter language as a set of material operations. Noise, frequently taken as an unwanted side effect of communication channels, ultimately provides the conditions for images to circulate. Traces must be left on the physical medium for a film text to be possible. To deny optical capture is to embrace the bare aesthetics of this writing mechanism, along with its underlying operations. Processes as collateral to filmmaking as the flickering of light, the modulation of electricity, and the computation of data are therefore revealed to be the primary underpinnings of cinematographic practices. In that sense, the reason for a knife all blade’s ‘disappearance’ seems obvious, if not expected. Bordering pure noise, a knife all blade does not look like a ‘proper’ video, but rather like a spasm of the projection infrastructure. The unprepared audience simply could not recognize it as meaningful information. It must have felt like watching an empty channel. Instead of a cameraless film, the filmless projector. Taking to heart the words of Christian Metz, for whom film ‘is brought into being by nothing other than the look’ (1982: 93), one could assume that, in that moment, a knife all blade

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literally did not exist. The phenomenology of viewing – so constitutive of cinema – simply could not ensue. It was as if media technology had been deployed not to represent the world, but to present itself. A projector running in a movie theatre during a screening session of a film festival ceased to be a cinematographic apparatus. There was nothing left to do but to shut it down. However reasonable this explanation may be, it does not fully account for the absurdity of the situation. After all, a knife all blade may not look like a movie, but it certainly is one. Had the video been left to run, the public would have realized, sooner or later, that those popping squares were not accidental. Questions about what they were watching would barely have the time to form in their heads. In less than two minutes, closing credits would have shown up on the screen, stressing that the previous images were in fact a cinematographic work. The audience’s initial dissociation from the apparatus, and their ensuing uncertainty about the medial character of those images, would thus be confronted by forced identification. The escalating conflict between the filmic content and the exhibition context would be defused by the authorial declaration implied in the closing credits. This ambiguous journey of awareness about the cinema situation could be said to constitute the primary narrative of a knife all blade. A film festival, as a setting often reliant on cinema’s conventional viewing regime, but nonetheless committed to unusual programmes, would be a most suitable environment for this narrative to unfold. The festival curators certainly had this in mind when they included the movie in one of its screening sessions. They knew that the context of exhibition allowed for a metatextual experience that was not possible in other segments of the film industry. It was not necessary to tell the audience about it beforehand; they were in for the surprise. However, the curators apparently failed to communicate that plan to the projectionist. It was this normally inconspicuous functionary who ultimately denied the condition of cinematographic work to the traces on screen. Probably uninformed about the aesthetics of a knife all blade, the projectionist could not recognize the movie as itself. Even though everything in the projection booth could have seemed to be working properly, the visual evidence told her the opposite. What appeared on the screen was a sign that mediation was lacking, akin to a DVD menu or an empty frame of light, allowing the infrastructure to come into view. Mistaking it for a damaged copy of the video, the projectionist did what was expected from her as a professional and shut the machine down. The audience, even if they had any suspicion that the compression artefacts stood for a proper movie, assumed that they did not, because the projectionist (who should have been better informed) interrupted everything.

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The performativity of media in the circuit The cascading failure of a knife all blade brings some nuance to the understanding that the audience’s imagination is the cornerstone for the film to appear. This notion dates as far back as 1916, when Hugo Münsterberg argued that the machine underpinning the cinematographic spectacle did not work on its own, but ultimately resorted to the spectators’ attention. In his opinion, the projected scenes were something ‘we believe that we see’ but in fact ‘only our imagination supplies’ (apud Langdale, 2013: 75). A similar idea informs classic apparatus theory, expressed for example in the Metzian concept of the imaginary signifier. But, as the case of the botched screening shows, the visual phenomenology of the film rests upon a more complex arrangement of elements, most of which are not immediately available. The psychophysical complicity between the public and media technology needs to be modulated by their conditions of engagement, which in turn depends on factors both external and internal to the cinema situation, such as the curators’ decisions and the projectionist’s actions. Taken together, these elements put the multilayered, performative character of the medium in relief. Challenging the understanding of film as a self-contained, selfevident, and autonomous form, they present it as something akin to a speech act uttered by the machine. The physical traces in which moving images had been inscribed must be excited and technologically enacted for the film to appear. The resulting sensorial effects must be accommodated within a discursive frame that allows for their continuing decodification as a cinematographic work. These dimensions of the medium cannot be seen isolated from one another. As Vilém Flusser has argued, discourse pervades media apparatus by the means of their programming (2000: 14). While in Flusser’s work this served as a metaphor for how technical and scientific processes are embodied in visual devices, programming has now become the literal supporting structure of a medium increasingly running on software abstractions. Audiovisual content distribution by digital networks, whether in the form of theatrical projection, video-on-demand services, or social media platforms, is largely contingent on asymmetrical client-server relations. Particular operating rules may be imposed on the screening client by the means of the same protocol infrastructure through which it receives content. Thereby, the distribution server is able to directly control in which circumstances a given film is available and under which conditions it may be accessed, according to arbitrary determinations.

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At the same time, discourse is organized around media technology by the means of its many adjacent mechanisms. Different sorts of paratexts, apparently disconnected from the communication system’s core, collaborate with it in the constitution of a meaningful media environment. Jonathan Gray remarks how fundamental these ancillary elements are to negotiate the interaction between texts, audiences, and the industry (2010: 23). Drawing from literary theorist Gerard Genette, he suggests that paratexts form a descriptive threshold without which texts cannot exist (2010: 25). Endowed with their own physical reality, paratexts contribute to the continuing performance of a movie. They promote certain readings, crystallize meanings accrued to the work after its release, and effectively draw separations between its inside and the outside where it circulates. In that sense, paratexts are integral to what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht dubbed the materiality of communication: ‘those phenomena and conditions which contribute to the production of meaning, without being meaning themselves’ (2004: 8). In a way fitting Kittler’s concept of discourse networks (1990), the interactions between media devices, films, and their paratexts provide conditions for the cinematographic work to exist. The case of a knife all blade illustrates how the phenomenological experience of cinema is underpinned by systems of notation responsible for the storage, transmission, and decodification of media. The lack of a component to indicate more clearly the movie’s beginning, such as an opening title, was partially responsible for the way it failed to stand out from the technological context of its screening. The synopsis printed on the festival’s programme, on the other hand, allowed the movie to exist in spite of its absence. Having read it, the spectators acknowledged its omission from the session, and asked each other about it upon leaving the theatre. It was also by the means of this simple external component that the occurrence became a constitutive part of a knife all blade. From then onwards, every synopsis that went along with a copy of the movie incorporated the history of its disappearance. Thereby, singular events in the trajectory of the work may feed back into it, driving the way it is perceived by the public. The myriad of elements relevant to the experience of film, both within and without the screening situation, asks for a reconsideration of the classic idea of the cinematographic apparatus. They imply an ensemble combining multiple physical realities that cannot be reduced to the technologically neutral notion of a ‘mental machinery’ (Metz, 1982: 7). The apparatus, as the metaphysical expression of an anthropocentric model for ideological propagation, is inscribed in a growing network of meta-programmes committed to one another in many other, nonhuman scales. These circumstances are

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described by Flusser as a potentially infinite stack underlying the fabrication of every media device: the camera is programmed by a photographic industry which, in turn, is programmed by the industrial complex which, in turn, is programmed by the socioeconomic complex – ‘and so on’ (2000: 29). Actual systems of geopolitical governance, policy, and legislation are likely to appear right after in the sequence. The competition between systems running on different scales prevents this hierarchy of programming to operate as a top-down chain of command. Silicon Valley-style ‘disruptive’ industries, insofar as they affect the socioeconomic status quo and challenge state sovereignty, are a compelling example of how multidirectional feedback may exist across these layers. The rhetoric of disruption was deployed by Dina Iordanova and Stuart Cunningham to encapsulate how online media has affected global film distribution in spite of the established industry (2012). These conflicts stemming from technological development manifest not only disputes for market control, but also the continuing negotiation of media standards. To our comprehensive notion of the cinematographic apparatus, the importance of standards cannot be reduced to their role as molecular gatekeeping mechanisms. As they allow for the coupling of different devices into a reflexive circuit of production, distribution, and consumption, standards bear epistemic implications. Jonathan Sterne remarks their function in the constitution of mediality not as a quality proper to any specific media device, but rather as the ‘collectively embodied process of cross-reference’ amidst different elements (2012: 9-10). According to this perspective, the boundaries of what constitutes cinema would not be set a priori, from the outside, as a fixed frontier of specificity. Rather, they would exist as a pervasive gravitational field that ‘bind[s] together “different perspectival scales, technologies, epistemologies, rhythms, and affordances”’ (Sterne, 2012: 23), ebbing and flowing according to the ecology of meta-programmes. In that sense, even when singular, the apparatus is always plural. Whether by the umbilical residues of its fabrication, whether by the deficits that allow its connections to other devices, each cinematographic apparatus implies the broader, contradictory circumstances of the technological system in which it is embedded. The systems that allow for the circulation of films are therefore the same that embody cinema as a fractal expression of its own mediality. They constitute a self-reflexive circuit underpinning not only the phenomenology of the cinematographic work, but also of cinema proper. The very notion of ‘cinema’ is an effect of material technologies. The development of these technologies performs the medium as an institution to be historicized

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inasmuch as their joint operation performs moving images as meaningful information to be experienced. Disconnected from this network of processes, media apparatus cannot exist as such, since they lose their medial characterization. The filmless projector fails even before being shut down because it is already an empty, practically isolated device: a machine that throws light onto a screen with no cinematic implications.

The reflexivity of media and medial ideology The self-reflexivity of the circuit is articulated in the relationship Jean-Louis Comolli traces between cinema and a social machine which ‘manufactures representations’ as it ‘manufactures itself from representations’ (1985: 741). The apparatus involved in this double operation are not only the more conspicuous ‘machines of the visible’, but also systems that delegate power, social imaginaries, and modes of relational behaviour. Relying on the awareness of the spectators to bring the cinematographic spectacle to completion, the circuit addresses them deliberately through all of these various instances. Factors such as the authority of film critics, the allure of movie stars, and the conventions of moviegoing cooperate in the construction of the relation between audiences and the media. Even in the absence of images on a screen, these promotional apparatus may prepare (as they prepare for) the film experience. Outlined in such a way, cinema does not resemble a fully formed system of audiovisual communication or art form. There seems to be no cohesive medium in front of which a knowing Cartesian subject may stand, ready to apprehend the reality as it is represented to her autonomous senses. Rather, cinema feels like a socio-technical assemblage in continuing formation. There is a constellation of elements of different qualities, among which we may perceive various degrees of proximity and tension. One is immersed full-body within this constellation and must engage with these elements in order to make sense of them first, before reaching for any world beyond. In this sphere of technological mediation, not even the sheer act of seeing is elemental. To watch a movie, as innate as it may feel, is a historical operation one must learn. It depends on acknowledging through which effects a particular device conveys representation; how these effects account for what is represented; and in which ways they can be told apart from other irrelevant, material contingencies of the underlying infrastructure. The anecdote about the spectators frightened by the reality of the Lumières’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) has already been disproven

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as a historical fact, but it is not entirely false. Even though it is unlikely that anyone really mistook the image for an actual train, Martin Loiperdinger and Bernd Elzer (2004) have pointed out that the spectators were nonetheless thrown off by its hyperreal quality. The moving image’s deep focus and distorted proportions were unfamiliar features that assaulted the audience, displacing the more traditional grammar of perspective representation to the background of their perception. Not surprisingly, it was these raw effects of film projection that became the major appeal of the cinématographe’s early spectacles, not the machine’s capability to represent the world (Loiperdinger and Elzer, 2004: 101-102). L’Arrivée d’un train endures as a myth about how the mediation of a given technology relies on the accustomation of the audience to the technology’s operation. The unaware spectator mistakes the underlying infrastructure of communication for the information it is meant to convey. In the case of the Lumières’ ‘invention without any future’, the elements that should constitute information were not known in advance, but the sheer material effects of projection were still impressive enough to make it into an object for commercial exploration. As years go by, increasingly sophisticated grammars are built upon the moving image, cinema grows into a fully fledged medium, and, in the not entirely dissimilar case of a knife all blade, the technological real emerges as an uninteresting banality. Cinema thus stands in accordance to the way it is codified in the public. The acknowledgement of the media infrastructure sets the parameters for an informed engagement with it. Sean Cubitt speaks about this as an isomorphism between projection and ‘audiencing’ (2004: 172). But perhaps a better way to described it is as a state in which ‘human beings function as a function of the apparatus’ (Flusser, 2010: 34). The media subject is characterized by Flusser as a functionary bound to pre-programmed possibilities; even those who master programming are ultimately prescribed by the rules of other meta-programmes (Flusser, 2010: 26, 29). This vocabulary provides a broader account of how the conjuncture between audience and projection takes place. It implies that ‘audiencing’ is not wholly contained nor automatically provoked by the singular screening device one encounters. Rather, that it is a function diffused across the many apparatus that surround and constitute a screening, both directly and indirectly. Directly, in the way these apparatus inform the audience how to acknowledge and react to projection. Indirectly, in how these apparatus condition other media subjects to perform their own functions in relation to the audience. It is possible to see these interactions operating in the micromanagement of a movie theatre. Vignettes and trailers screened before the feature, for

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instance, are often used to inform the audience of behaviour guidelines (turn off your phones, locate the exits in case of an emergency, etc.) and to persuade them to return for upcoming releases. The audience’s physical relation to the theatre screen as well as their perceived interests, on the other hand, inform filmmakers on how to prepare their works, and exhibitors on what kind of content to programme. As reductive as these examples may be, they nonetheless demonstrate how a particular cultural form we acknowledge in cinema is not essential in itself, but rather the epiphenomenon of wider metacultural articulations. The practice of moviegoing is established by the way it is addressed by surrounding discourses and has its own sphere of activity endorsed by other, counterposing practices. In that sense, the moviegoer exists in a way fitting Michael Warner’s interpretation of the public, consisting primarily of norms of behaviour and conventions that undergo circulation (2002: 91). Likewise, so do other functionaries within the cinematographic circuit: filmmakers, critics, historians, curators, projectionists, theoreticians, camera manufacturers, theatre architects, system engineers, etc. Each of these practices subscribes to the same rhetorical fiction about the medium, insofar as they acknowledge one another as complementary modalities of engagement with its technology. On her work about film cultures, Janet Harbord (2002: 3) has argued how cinema is constrained by a range of spatial practices, which are in turn affected and conditioned by infrastructures of circulation. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis about how tastes are mobilized in tensions in the social field, Harbord posits that the definition of film either as object or as experience is never fully traced in any site. Rather, that films, as parts of a system of social reproduction, go through continuing metamorphoses as they travel between text and audiences. She underscores the role of film journals, screening venues, media events, marketing, and policy in this process. Written texts are ‘a further form of institutionalization and cartography’ (Harbord, 2002: 26), supporting particular cultures of exhibition, lineages, and purposes for film. Screening sites indicate ‘modes of production, distribution, and exchange of film within different institutional frameworks’ (Harbord, 2002: 42), enforcing distinctions between avant-garde and studio productions. Film festivals ‘entwine film culture within the organization and materialization of national and regional space’ (Harbord, 2002: 61), and thus secure routes of distribution and exhibition. In these and other ways, cinema comes up as a culture that ‘extends beyond the discrete boundaries of texts into the myriad practices of everyday life’ (Harbord, 2002: 16). The circulation across many different apparatus, practices, and sites affects not only films’ cultural meaning and value. Circulation also entails contingent

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feedback processes which eventually crystallize as technical standards and ways of doing, shaping the cinematographic work’s common physical format. This mechanism can be clearly seen operating in the way regulatory agencies programme technical guidelines for the medium, particularly when new industry paradigms must be cemented. Let’s consider, for instance, the role of the North-American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in stabilizing the early 4:3 ‘academy’ aspect ratio for professional cinematography (Friedberg, 2006: 131), or the more recent work of Hollywood’s Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) in setting the 4K resolution as the benchmark for digital cinema (Kriss, 2015: 1396). The medium specification, however, takes place in an emergent fashion. Dynamic adjustments transpire in conjunction with these industrial determinations of the film format and means of operation. Even though the incremental character of these changes makes them hard to be traced, they can still be perceived and acted upon from particular places within the circuit. Connections to open-source culture, for example, made some filmmakers realize from the outset how informal file sharing and online streaming were paving the way for digital film distribution. The Brazilian Bruno Vianna was one to advance this possibility with the pioneering release of his fiction feature Cafuné on the Internet as early as 2006. Likewise, film curators are able to track from up-close the general fluctuations in film production trends, and occasionally take responsibility for them. From his work in programming the Tiradentes Film Festival, Pedro Maciel Guimarães became aware that the duration of shorts has been unmistakably driven by the time limits set by contemporary film festivals in a continuing feedback loop. ‘The filmmaker’s desire to make a longer film feeds the expansion of the festival’s time limit and vice-versa’ (Carmelo, 2016). Cases such as these demonstrate that the circuit is a network that not only provides the conditions for the existence of films, but is also an environment where these conditions are negotiated. Devices and practices programme one another according to a number of actors, institutions, and individuals. Features considered essential to the cinematographic work – such as its physical format, visual definition, means of material transmission, and temporal duration – are in fact collateral to the continuing readjustments across its apparatus. In that sense, a technical becoming underpins media’s seemingly fixed ontology. The circuit reflexivity could thus be associated with Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, according to which the individual is not the cause, but rather an effect of collective processes in a metastable environment. Simondon defined the individual technical object as ‘not this or that thing, given hic et nunc, but that of which there is genesis’ (2017: 26). The genesis

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consists of the specialization of functions achieved by growing synergies between compatible unities (Simondon, 2017: 38). This process results in the increasing concretization of the object as it becomes individuated in relation to an associated milieu (Simondon, 2017: 60). The final outcome is not the complete separation between object and milieu, but rather the organization of these elements as belonging to one another. The characteristics proper to an object would be precisely those ‘of consistency and convergence in its genesis’ (Simondon, 2017: 60); others remain contingent or accidental. Simondon’s theories reframe the operation of the medium in a way that calls for some exploration. They shed new light on how a cinematographic work stands out as a discrete object with integral boundaries, apart from the material processes of circulation and the paratexts composing it. Likewise, the notion of technical becoming could explain how cinema itself is formed as a specific field of mediation, separated not only from the myriad of practices in which it is embedded, but also from other audiovisual forms with which it interacts. The process of becoming outlines the topography of the circuit. Our very experience of cinema is reasoned according to its genesis. Some elements protrude distinctively and are recognized metonymically as expressions of the medium: the camera, the film, the screen. Others remain inconspicuous, partial to the synergies in which they are embedded. Thus, technical individuation sets the particular signal-to-noise ratio which allows the public to be aware of the spectacle. Awareness, in that case, does not simply imply telling meaningful information apart from an underlying channel. Rather, it entails identifying how the scattered elements that make the cinematographic work available account for its actual presence. Some might seem integral to the object; others, to its infrastructure of circulation. The vast majority of them, however, appear to be nothing more than environmental contingencies. Comolli has spoken of the latter in terms of an ‘invisible’ part of cinema technology: ‘black between frames, chemical processing, baths and laboratory work, negative film, cuts and joins of editing, sound track, projector, etc’ (1985: 745). To this list, one could add the discursive devices necessary to the continuing programming of apparatus. As constitutive of cinema as these elements may be, they still fall short of a certain threshold of presence which would allow us to recognize them as such. This informed ignorance lends itself to the experience of the medium. It enables the audience to cope with the radical heterogeneity of technological circumstances and entertain the particular kind of communication cinema conventionally expresses. Among the many elements supplying ‘film’, only the impression of light on the screen seems to account for it. But, paradoxically, not really. Not the flickering, the

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residual heat, the luminance, the scratches, the compression artefacts. By the means of this complex management of presences, the medium acquires phenomenological consistency. The circuit thus makes way for imaginary signifiers independent of their own technological circumstances. Individuation similarly provokes a partial understanding of the medium. Elements ingrained in certain apparatus, as well as the processes which put them in place, recede to a sort of negative space in the circuit. The camera, as the privileged entity which ‘represents, informs, and programmes the medium’, becomes a model according to which its functions are entirely reduced (Comolli, 1985: 746). Comolli suggests that critical theories about cinema cannot properly analyse this situation insofar as they subscribe to the ideology of the visible resulting from it (Comolli, 1985: 746). For him, this stems from the fact that the medium’s system of representation is bound to the hegemony of the eye and to Western logocentrism. Moreover, our very ability to grasp cinema as a distinctive medium, and thus the object of a particular history, seems compromised by its genesis. The specificities implied in the individuation of cinema obfuscate the medium’s performative operation in the name of technical objectivity. By embracing an identity for what the medium is, one is driven away from the processes that actually bring it into existence. ‘Film’ thus comes to stand as a metaphysical horizon of presence curtailing our means to perceive the circuit. In that sense, the mindset nourished within the cinematographic circuit could be better characterized as a medial ideology. Matthew Kirschenbaum coined this term to describe an ideology ‘that substitutes popular representations of a medium, socially constructed and culturally activated to perform specific kinds of work, for a more comprehensive treatment of the material particulars of a given technology’ (2008: 36). Medial ideology would be one of the reasons behind ‘the prevailing bias in new media studies toward display technologies’ (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 31). This ‘screen essentialism’, which Nick Montfort first detected in the analysis of early electronic texts (2005), clearly shapes our understanding of cinema. The fact that it seems just natural and unquestionable expresses how little importance we attribute to the circuit in the formation of every single image. The issue is not simply the way screen essentialism curbs the interpretation of cinematographic works. Rather, it is that screen essentialism often detaches cinematographic works from the material politics in which they are inevitably implicated. In a world of growing environmental imbalance and programmed infrastructures, it is imperative to foreground these connections. Thus, the task at hand for cinema studies is: how to pierce through medial ideology and reach for the medium’s technological unconscious?

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A history of cinemas Throughout the 2000s, the massive digitization of cinematographic work arrived at its final stages with the widespread of digital projection. This transformation brought some distress both to the medium and its field of studies. Suddenly, the bedrock upon which cinema rested for more than a century was undone. The very photographic ontology that distinguished cinematographic moving images disappeared. What would become of film if film was no more? In his timely analysis The Virtual Life of Film, D.N. Rodowick forecast ‘no inherent discontinuity cleaving the digital from the analogical arts’ – ‘while film disappears, cinema persists’ (Rodowick, 2007: I). Indeed, in retrospect, the situation went no further than a brief disarrangement. Cinema’s many functionaries were soon adapted to working with its new material underpinnings. The controversial bulk of technological development was cast to the medium’s negative space. Film studies, after a moment of productive uncertainty, became confident in its object once again. This case illustrates how difficult it can be to overcome medial ideology. Following the radical displacement of one element within the circuit, others tend to resettle in order to preserve their medial relations. Performing the history of cinema, researchers advance this conservative mindset insofar as they subordinate alternative technological configurations to the genesis of the medium. The question of indexicality, once considered a primary indicator of cinematographic specificity (see for instance Doane, 2007), fades into the background. After the fact, the crisis of digitization becomes normalized as another transitory stage in the narrative of film’s ultimate progress – a stepping stone in an otherwise smooth process of individuation. The handle ‘film’ lingers as a vestigial sign that this endogenous development is more relevant to the technical distinction of the medium than any external material cause. The practice of media archaeology entails a form of resistance to this kind of teleological determination by attempting to approach apparatus from the past on their own terms. Another useful tactic is the epistemological displacement achieved by practitioners who engage critically with the medium. Contemporary artists in particular occupy a position of continuing difference that makes them prone to escape the self-determination of media. Some works of avant-garde filmmakers from the 1960s and 1970s succeed in challenging the material limits of the cinema from their time, raising debates over the possibility of a cinema without film. It was a hot topic for an era when the growing popularization of video multiplied moving images without cinema. Jonathan Walley gathered these practices under the term

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paracinema: ‘an array of phenomena that are considered “cinematic” but that are not embodied in the materials of film as traditionally defined’ (2003: 18). Some of the works Walley speaks about, such as the flicker films of Paul Sharits and the film-based performances of Tony Conrad, purposefully short-circuit the medium. Their presentations show that even a filmless projector is never empty, nor disconnected. The bare machine can have cinematographic implications. Nonetheless, the extent to which practices like paracinema are able to subvert medial ideology is restrained precisely by their exceptional character as artworks. The fact that they need to be available within the circuit, engaging the actual apparatus they mean to reinterpret, can be a huge drawback. After all, they are not an easy fit for more conventional cinematographic venues. And just as media historians tend to isolate technological reconfigurations of the medium in the past, curators often bring this kind of work to very specific settings. Events such as experimental film festivals and contemporary exhibitions are much more welcoming to their presentation, besides reaching crowds better attuned to their proposal. This is in fact what transpired to a knife all blade. Some months after its failed première, the film was featured in the Les Rencontres Internationales festival at Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, during a programme entitled Dark Light. A year later, it was presented during the Glitch Festival Chicago. In these places, the screenings ensued without any trouble. Compression artefacts did not surprise the audience. On the contrary, they were very much expected – and this is where the issue lies. Harbord has already remarked on the connection between the systems through which a work circulates and the particular traditions of knowledge and taste in which it is localized (2002: 143). As the circumstances of exhibition of a knife all blade led it to specialized venues, for instance, they inscribed it in fields such as contemporary art and glitch art. This mechanism progressively establishes places where phenomena such as compression artefacts and projection performances can be seen as normal. Yet the epistemic mapping is twofold. It simultaneously excuses their removal from hegemonic cinematographic venues and thus from the more comprehensive notion of ‘film’. Insofar as these phenomena become the aesthetic shibboleth of a certain ghetto, their friction against the medium’s distinctive logic loses footing. In that sense, the whole process of localization could be seen as a form of soft management of medial ideology, reducing direct antagonisms to a mere question of positions. According to its rationale, no cinematographic poetics or means of engagement is necessarily wrong. There are, however, big chances that it might be inadequate. The conflict

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can be solved by finding or creating the proper place for it within the circuit (but often outside proper cinema). One can see this process culminating in the development of a discursive field of variations around the medium, popularly acknowledged by the notion of ‘expanded cinema’. To the extent that it seeks to accommodate works and practices not fit for conventional cinematographic circumstances, the concept of expanded cinema challenges the medium’s individuality. It must be remarked, however, how it simultaneously contributes to the medium’s individuation. As a means of accounting for variations, ‘expanded cinema’ conforms to Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement. For, while it is ‘a surplus, a plenitude enriching other plenitude’, expanded cinema is also ‘an adjunct, a subaltern instance’ (Derrida, 2016: 157). In other words, to characterize a work as an addition to cinema makes it simultaneously removed from and likely secondary to the medium. In that sense, the concept of expanded cinema actually prevents the concept of cinema to be expanded. It allows for any art form or practice which emerges from the medium’s negative space, challenging medial ideology, to be completely cast out of it. As a further stage in cinema’s individuation, this conceptual articulation (which is both discursive and curatorial) preserves the medium’s phenomenological consistency and reinforces a hegemonic understanding of its technology. From where we stand, the first thing that should be done is to reclaim cinema as an epistemic playing field. Not only the concept of cinema, but all of its sites, practices, apparatus, functionaries, and objects. In summary, all of its circuit. It is not a new idea; it is a way to embrace a fundamental indetermination others have already articulated in relation to the medium. If the underpinnings of cinema are in fact ‘discontinuous and fragmentary’ (Machado, 2002: 21), and its field of studies cannot really sustain ‘permanent claims on its disciplinary territories’ (Rodowick, 2007: 23), then any certainty we may have about it is just conventional. Indeed, even the medium’s most distinctive features are contingent on a continuing technical genesis. The circuit, as the place where this genesis unfolds, is also where we may better analyse it. In order to do so, we ought to make an effort to deindividuate cinema. We must untangle it from predefined categories and underscore the material and discursive disputes inherent to its development in opposition to other media systems and art forms. One of the categories we must sidestep right away is film. As a means to address the cinematographic work, ‘film’ creates the wrong impression of a fixed material determination. It is necessary to substitute this term with another, one that makes clear that what defines the object of cinema is in continuing negotiation. The more general idea of moving image, however, fails to grasp the institutional tension implied by this process. Furthermore,

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‘moving image’ suggests a morphological a priori which does not do justice to the sensorial multiplicity entailed by the cinematographic work. For these reasons, we should rather adopt a term that for many people might sound vulgar: movies. ‘Movies’ is a word that has always been part of cinema’s vernacular. Its use for marketing purposes has produced a degree of discursive emptiness that will come in handy for our epistemic manipulation. It allows us to speak about cinematographic objects which do not have a specific material cause and might not even be visual, but are cinematographic nonetheless. In that sense, ‘movie’ is an institutional category above anything else. All that the term implies is movement, which indeed might be their most relevant proto-characteristic. Not as moving images, but as images that move: those that circulate within cinema and across its negative spaces. This broad institutional horizon sets the ground for the first chapter of this book, What is a movie?, which attempts to examine the conditions of circulation of cinematographic works across different technological regimes. From film to video and digital computers, the chapter follows a concise history of systems of moving image storage and transmission. By evoking movies which openly engage the material negativities of cinema, the chapter means to underscore the performative character of these systems. Movies are thus shown to be not forms that circulate, but rather forms resulting from circulation. At the same time, the chapter explores how the threshold of presence of cinematographic works differs according to the multimodal developments of the circuit. As the technical means of circulation change, new categories emerge to restate the movie’s objective coherence in relation to its many constitutive traces. Circulation remains in the background. The very staging of cinema’s technological development is analysed next, in The becoming of cinema. Drawing from Simondon’s philosophy of technology, this chapter explores the constitution of the medium as a technical ensemble. It shows how aspects conventionally underpinning cinematographic specificity can be thought of as the epiphenomena of its individuation. These aspects express successive stages in cinema’s becoming, culminating in the epistemic formations particular to the medium. By the means of these epistemic formations, the circuit is underwritten to a hierarchy of presences, effectively organizing new elements within or without cinema. Following even the most radical technological changes, there is a reorganization of epistemic paradigms which advances medial ideology. Functionaries stay bound to their functions, in spite of deep rearrangements of the circuit. This effects a sort of metaphysical closure, which precludes the medium’s subject to fully grasp its becoming.

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Hands-on approaches to the medium And here we reach a methodological impasse. If disciplinary cinema studies are a by-product of the medium’s technical becoming, what is their actual capacity to deindividuate cinema? The obvious problem was already remarked by researchers including Gumbrecht (2004) and Gray (2010): interpretation and close reading, cinema’s traditional methods of objective analysis, are insufficient to understand the material and discursive constitution of movies. Even when the discipline develops means to account for the medium’s effects of presence, it nonetheless remains restricted to fixed positions within the circuit. Awareness of the medium’s material underpinnings does not allow cinema studies to perform along with them. At the same time, the discipline remains ignorant of its own discursive functions, neglecting the role it has in the processes of technical individuation. How to get around these shortcomings? Perhaps we can rely on a knife all blade one final time for some inspiration. After all, for the brief moment in which it tethered on the brink of existence, the movie undeniably provoked some disengagement from what Comolli (1985: 746) has called ‘the ideological heritage of the camera’. This is quite a feat, considering the current context of widespread simulation. Film industry’s heavy reliance on visual synthesis and digital compositing has turned even the cameraless condition into one of total compliance with the logic of perspective projection. Regardless, a knife all blade manages to achieve a sort cinematographic degree zero by withdrawing image capture from the optical systems to which it has been subsumed since the Renaissance. In doing so, the movie shows that, even blinded, cinema can be visual. When the circuit is denied external worldviews, it outputs what is already in there, highlighting the technological particulars of moving-image circulation. This sort of blind optics can be deployed as a heuristics to produce momentarily the presence of the media system (Gumbretch, 2004: xiii). It causes the spectator to face the devices at hand instead of whatever they mean to represent. One is confronted with what Richard Grusin (2015) has termed the experiential immediacy of mediation. The problem is that, as we have already seen, the spectator rarely cares. As a subject who thinks she knows what there is to see, she is not concerned with technological contingencies. In order to overcome medial ideology, one must also overcome this knowing attitude. Luckily for us, the a knife all blade anecdote also involves another character, with a very different role in what transpired. For the projectionist, the question has never been what the traces of light on the screen represented. Rather, it was whether they should

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be there or not. For the brief instant that blind optics led this functionary to doubt her function, the purported coherence of the medium faltered for her. She was made aware of the becoming of cinema against the grain, as both an arbitrary decision to be taken and a technical operation to be acted upon. In that sense, the committed position of the projectionist, deeply embedded in the machine, seems to enable an unparalleled relationship with the circuit. It could thus provide a model for displacing the knowing subject of cinema into a sphere of critical uncertainty. A major sign of the epistemic displacement proposed here is a change of the sense primarily engaged in movie analysis from the gaze to the touch. It is a change that, on the one hand, reaffirms the fundamental continuity between the world and its representations through the means of information storage and transmission. It urges us to appreciate moving images f irst as traces of the contact between different devices, all their visual information being subordinate to processes of transduction and energy transfers. Nonetheless, this sensorial change also implies approaching movies by direct manipulation, as if fumbling in the dark, unaware of what they are supposed to mean. We do not let ourselves be seduced by their obvious visual effects or by the compelling discourse networks already laid around them. Instead, we try to build awareness of the operations they require, most likely by performing these operations ourselves, in the process of re-presenting the works. It is the knowledge that comes from handling the medium. Our findings feed back into the circuit as others are invited to engage these representations and reposition themselves in relation to them. The third chapter – Projection studies – makes a case for this methodology, which could be broadly described as a curatorial approach to understanding the medium aesthetics and technology. The chapter proposes a practice-led solution to the shortcomings of more traditional film and screen studies in dealing with the technical genesis of cinema. It acknowledges the material situatedness of research practices and encourages the exercise of their inherent curatorial dimensions. For the curator, the contingencies of movie circulation are primary concerns that cannot be easily brushed off. In that sense, the curator is in a privileged position to appreciate how the presence of cinematographic works comes into being. Furthermore, the chapter underscores the advantages of an exhibition over a text as a means to share research results, pointing to the way it rearranges elements within the circuit (even if temporarily). It concludes with a call for researchers to perform critical experiments of media museography as a way to intervene in the becoming of cinema.

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The following chapters are accounts of things I have learned and shared about the cinematographic circuit using such curatorial methodologies. The fourth – Performing medium specificities – follows the history of the Brazilian film society Cine Falcatrua, from its early stages as a pirate cinema up until it was made into an artist collective (2003-2005). Cine Falcatrua’s experience shows how features deemed distinctive of the medium might be affected by alternative technological arrangements, employing personal computers and peer-to-peer networks. The case underscores the role of paratexts and ancillary practices (such as subtitling and promotion) in establishing the proper experience of cinema. Moreover, it demonstrates how the displacement within the medium might provide the knowing subject with a clearer perspective about its becoming. By taking on the position of projectionists, the participants of Cine Falcatrua got to perceive the controversies around digital cinema as an opportunity to reprogramme the medium. By following their actions, one can see how the property of cinema might be disputed, as anomalous media practices struggle with structures already established in the circuit. Finally, the fifth chapter shows how curatorial interventions may deliberately challenge medial ideology as well as propose new epistemic formations within the medium. It takes its name – Denied Distances – from a video exhibition that brought together works from different years, formats, and genres, all of which engage with the negative spaces of cinema. These pieces were organized in the screening programme according to their spatial scale of operation, going from the thickness of the screen to the density of the circuit. Therefore, the exhibition attempted to propose an alternative to the predefined categories that inscribe these works outside the cinema, suggesting a continuity between the medium and other moving image practices instead. The chapter narrates the making of this event while providing an exegesis of its programme. In doing so, it highlights the way circumstances of production and exhibition delimit the availability of works, displaying the role of material contingencies in the shaping of curatorial discourse. Strategies such as these seek to advance an ontography of cinema. They frame the medium as an entity in continuing transformation and whose technical becoming implicates us as functionaries. To the extent that this book exists within the same circuit that it addresses, it configures another one of those strategies. If the analysis it offers about media seem non-reductive and often contradictory, it is because they do not mean to prescribe an overarching interpretation of this subject. Instead, they hope to inspire readers to find their own ways of displacing themselves and taking responsibility over the making of other cinemas out of cinema.

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Bibliography / works cited Carmelo, Bruno, ‘Como são escolhidos os curtas-metragens da Mostra de Tiradentes? O curador Pedro Maciel Guimarães explica’, Adoro Cinema, 3 February 2016. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Comolli, Jean-Louis, ‘Machines of the visible’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 3rd edition, ed. G. Mast and M. Cohen (New York City: Oxford University, 1985), 741-760. Cubitt, Sean, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004). Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, corrected edition, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 2016). Doane, Mary Ann, ‘The indexical and the concept of medium specificity’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18(1) (Durham, NC: 2007), 128-152. Flusser, Vilém, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). Friedberg, Anne, The Virtual Window from Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006). Gray, Jonathan, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU, 2010). Grusin, Richard, ‘Radical Mediation’, Critical Inquiry, 42(1) (Chicago, IL: Autumn 2015), 124-148. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, 2004). Harbord, Janet, Film Cultures (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002). Iordanova, Dina and Stuart Cunningham (eds.), Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line (St. Andrews, UK: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2012). Kirschenbaum, Matthew, Mechanisms: New Media and Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008). Kittler, Friedrich, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, 1990). Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, 1999). Kriss, Michael, Handbook of Digital Imaging (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015). Langdale, Allan (ed.), Hugo Munsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (London: Routledge, 2013). Loiperdinger, Martin and Bernd Elzer, ‘Lumière’s arrival of the train: Cinema’s founding myth’, The Moving Image, 4(1) (Minneapolis, MN: 2004), 89-118. Machado, Arlindo, Pré-Cinemas e Pós-Cinemas, 2nd edition (São Paulo: Papirus, 2002). Metz, Christian, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1982).

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Montfort, Nick, ‘Continuous Paper: The Early Materiality and Workings of Electronic Literature’, Continuous Paper: MLA, January 2005. Available at . Last access 21 November 2018. Rodowick, D.N., The Virtual Life of Film (London: Harvard University, 2007). Simondon, Gilbert, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017). Sterne, Jonathan, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2012). Walley, Jonathan, ‘The material of film and the idea of cinema: Contrasting practices in sixties and seventies avant-garde film’, October, 103 (Cambridge, MA: Winter 2003), 15-30. Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York City: Zone Books, 2002). a knife all blade, Gabriel Menotti, 2008. Arnulf Rainer, Peter Kubelka, 1960. Cafuné, Bruno Vianna, 2006. L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, August and Louis Lumière, 1895. Noisefields, Steina and Woody Valsuka, 1974.

1.

What Is a Movie? Abstract This chapter examines the conditions of circulation of cinematographic works across different technological regimes. From film to video to digital computers, it follows a concise history of systems of moving-image storage and transmission. By evoking movies that openly engage the material negativities of cinema, the chapter means to underscore the performative character of these systems. Movies are shown to be not forms that circulate, but rather forms resulting from circulation. At the same time, the chapter explores how the threshold of presence of cinematographic works changes according to the multimodal developments of the movie circuit. As the technical means of circulation change, new categories emerge to restate the movie’s objective coherence in relation to its constitutive traces. Keywords: Media circulation, technologies of storage and transmission, cinematographic works, management of presence, media materiality

In order to submit her work to a festival or exhibition, a filmmaker has to fill an entry form with a number of items about the piece. The task, often assigned to a production assistant, has become much more convenient thanks to computer networks. Websites such as Shortfilmdepot, which act as submission platforms for different events simultaneously, cause the process to be much less repetitive. Word processing allows text snippets to be copied from a master document and pasted to the corresponding places in the form. The fields range from simple content descriptions (title, genre, synopsis) to technical specifications (format, running time, aspect ratio), and information about the production process (country of origin, year of release, cast and crew credits). Overall, the form seems to compile every relevant characteristic of the work, providing a concise way to describe it. This is what the movie is. The resulting identification clearly plays a role in what Jonathan Gray has termed entryway paratexts – those that ‘control and determine our

Menotti, G., Movie Circuits. Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789089648907_ch01

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entrance to the text’ (2010: 35). Some of the data collected in entry forms will make its way into programme brochures and catalogues, thus assisting the audience to navigate screening sessions. This printed material literalizes the conceptual outline proposed for the event. Its function is not purely discursive, though. The brochures also serve to spark the spectators’ interest and direct them to places and times of the screenings. Catalogues remain in circulation after the event is over, as physical tokens that inscribe it in wider historical accounts. But even before the event takes place, the forms themselves play key roles in its configuration. The organization of a festival programme is an open jigsaw puzzle that depends on many concurrent factors. After all the preview copies have been watched and debated, a lot of micromanagement must be done. In order to put the screening sessions together, curators must take into account the works’ running time as well as their content. Occasionally, they will also have to consider the need for particular exhibition conditions. By providing a shorthand that identifies all of the works’ pertinent features simultaneously, the forms thus assist the selection process itself, making the programme arrangement much more feasible. In that sense, the information in a festival entry form does more than to entice spectators and to guide their interpretation of the works on display. It also acts as an important intermediary in determining these works’ circumstances of material access and operation during the event. Beyond providing a description of the movies’ inherent characteristics, the entry form prescribes the conditions in which these characteristics can be effected. In no other instance does this become clearer than in the actual screenings, particularly if analogue projection is to be used. Equipment compatible with the movie’s format must be secured for the proper reproduction of image and sound. The aspect ratio will dictate what kind of lens is necessary to enable the visual composition that the author intended. The frame rate will determine the rhythm the mechanism must be running so that the movie has the correct speed and duration. Even though these technical adjustments are increasingly executed automatically, by increasingly protean apparatus, it does not make them any less essential. If the instructions on the form are not taken into account, it is unlikely that the movie will be screened as expected, or even at all. We are thus compelled to acknowledge that what is listed on the form is not what the movie is. Rather, they are indications about how the work should come into being. Their assistance is required because the cinematographic work is not an entirely self-evident object, similar to other art forms such as paintings, sculptures, and even novels. The movie is not fully contained

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in the discrete medium in which it has been stored – whether it is a film reel, videotape, optical disc, digital file, or encrypted hard drive. In fact, some of the work’s most defining features are predicated on the projection situation. The movement and duration designed for the image, for instance, only take place as its material traces are enacted by a playback mechanism. D.N. Rodowick has remarked how the nature of cinema, ‘as both an art of space and an art of time’ (2007: 13), leads to an ambiguous regime of existence. He has sought to explain it by referring to Nelson Goodman’s distinction between autographic and allographic arts. Autographic arts, as the name implies, are the arts of signature. This category encompasses works that are completely realized by the actions of the artist, like in most of the traditional visual arts. The autographic object is marked by its uniqueness. Even photography, as reproducible as it might be, can be understood in these terms insofar as it is ‘producing a unique record of a singular duration’ (Rodowick, 2007: 15). Allographic arts, by contrast, are those whose existence is underpinned on reproduction. The work is conceived as an informational pattern amenable to notation, independent of a specific material medium. Think of a theatre play, or a symphony. This makes them ‘two-stage arts’: the pieces, composed in a first stage, are only accomplished upon their performance on subsequent ones. Whereas cinema clearly operates under an allographic model, it is not apparent for Rodowick at which point ‘we make the division between composition and performance’ (2007: 15). Drawing from semiological understandings of film, he posits the cinematographic work as a phenomenological event that escapes notation. During each screening, the audience ‘is always in pursuit of an absent, indeed an absenting, object’ (Rodowick, 2007: 22). Thereby, it seems that the movie cannot achieve the condition of a stable, self-identical form if not virtually. Every secondary stage where it is performed advances a process of composition that is never fully inscribed. Erika Balsom (2014) has argued that this allographic nature ‘necessarily opens the [cinematographic] work to difference, fluctuation, and modification even as it remains itself’. Following on this idea, she invites us to consider the event of cinema as an instance in which the production of the work is further carried out. By highlighting familiar possibilities of authorial intervention during a screening, Balsom builds a comprehensive approach to the medium based on the paradigm of liveness. These perspectives on the performative character of cinema not only indicate that the cinematographic work needs to be continuously reenacted, but also that it cannot be entirely concluded. In that sense, any movie could be appreciated as an inadvertently open work. The meaning that Umberto

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Eco ascribes to this term accounts for artworks that are handed on to the performers ‘more or less like the components of a construction kit’ (1989: 4). This manner of deployment makes them formally multiple and variable. Even though movies might not purposefully embrace openness, they circulate in a similarly disassembled way. Different components must come together for the movie to appear. Some, shared by all cinematographic works, remain installed in the screening venue. Others, specific to each movie, arrive for the situation of projection. The former are conventionally accepted as part of the medium apparatus and the latter as constituent of individual works. The collective mobilization of these elements exceeds the event of movie exhibition. Beyond and before the performative enactment of the movie’s material traces, a number of other actions transpire to either fix components into place or move them from one location to another. The socio-technical network relevant to the construction of the movie thus permeates the whole circuit, conditioning it to the negative processes of the medium. To acknowledge the movie’s circumstantiality puts into question another of the apparently factual declarations inscribed in a festival entry form: the movie’s release date. Although it often indicates the moment when production is over and the work becomes public, the release date does not account for its effective conclusion. Janet Harbord’s socio-semiotic analysis (2002) has already shown how the meaning and value of a cinematographic work are continuously modulated as it circulates across film cultures. However, a further examination of the work’s constituents demonstrates that its very material configuration is in an uninterrupted flux even after its release. The declaration of a release date is thus instrumental to a medial ideology that underpins the work’s ontology forever outside of the technical systems in which it is embedded. By allowing movies to be recognized as self-similar in spite of their continuing rearrangements, medial ideology enables a rationale of the cinematographic work as a stable entity. To the extent that it denies cinema’s broader performative character, this objectification of the movie also implies a hierarchy of legitimate means to engage with its medium. It binds the public to a specific set of authorial and epistemic practices, preventing their access to the totality of the circuit relevant to the movie’s assemblage. The next sections shall pierce through the instruments of medial ideology in order to show how the processes of circulation cause the continuing writing of the movie. This survey will cover the main technological systems conventionally employed by cinema, evoking particular examples that welcome their ‘negative’ aspects, contingent on media operations. In

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doing so, it should become clear that neither the means of storage (which preserve a movie through time) nor the channels of transmission (which move it through space) are neutral carriers of information. In general, the ways in which technology effect the image’s physical traces as well as its discursive identity make it impossible to separate the ‘composition’ of a cinematographic work categorically from its ‘performances’. In that sense, to transport the movie is always to inform it.

Film reels The condition of the movie as an assemblage was apparent from its beginnings in celluloid film. In the filmstrip, the moving image is clearly shown to be not one single entity, but the combined effect of many individual static shots. Through the manipulation of this material, previously unrelated pieces of pro-filmic reality can be put together to form a meaningful whole. Early filmmaking theories acknowledged this composite constitution as the source of film’s aesthetic potential. In the 1920s, directors associated with the Russian avant-garde championed principles of montage to guide this process of combinatory meaning-making. Sergei Eisenstein (1949) famously compared the poetics of the cut to the form of Chinese ideogrammatic writing. From his perspective, the gaps from shot-to-shot would be as relevant as the shots themselves. Discontinuities created a place within the work for the audience’s imagination, which was able to elevate visual traces into intellectual discourse. The semiotic expression of the movie thus relied on the fine-tuning of its material constituents. Even the empty spaces between these constituents needed to be calculated with precision. Yet, montage only seems to address the composite constitution of the cinematographic work insofar as it means to solve it. Taken as the main operation underlying filmmaking, montage begs for the unification of disparate parts into a consistent whole. The well-made film is underpinned by a high degree of formal economy. It is supposed to be entirely selfcontained, premeditating even the audience’s forthcoming engagement. In that sense, the cut does not serve as a mark of caesura or an indication of the work’s internal modularity. Rather, it is the fundamental element of a narrative structure driven by what Sean Cubitt has characterized as the aesthetic of organic unity (2004: 67). The outcome of montage articulates the cinematographic work as an irreducible totality. It should neither lack nor exceed meaning. The resulting audiovisual sequence is called a final cut because any further alteration would disrupt this delicate balance.

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The term ‘final cut’ invokes the last stage of filmmaking as well as the culminating film work. It represents the moment when creative practices give way to a discrete outcome. The arrangement of the movie’s constitutive elements is made definitive and its running time is fixed with precision. This is a prerogative of authorship. In the absence of a literal score of the cinematographic work, it is the next best thing to account for a paradigm of its identity. In the early days of cinema in the United States, paper prints of a film’s frame sequence were deposited in the Library of Congress as a means to establish originality and copyright. The final cut thus stands as the source to which every movie reproduction refers. It enables the work to be detached from its production process and released in public as an autonomous entity. In this transition, the movie earns a sort of objective stability that keeps it apart from the contingencies of circulation. After the final cut, further operations to the film are considered circumstantial; traces left on its material are deemed external to the work. In his analysis of technologically reproducible media, Walter Benjamin has argued not only for their anti-auratic effect, but also for their impermeability. Benjamin has examined in particular how the novel exists in a regime of isolation, manifested in the loneliness of the author in his scriptorium, in the one-to-one relation of the reader with the text, and in the self-containment of the plot between book covers (2002). Responding to the conditions of modern industry and urban life, modes of narrative production and consumption are rigidly separated. Stories turn into mass products that are able to circulate autonomously, standing apart from the intersubjective experience occasioned by the flow of storytelling. As a form arising from a similar media environment, the final cut seems to follow the same encapsulation logic. Insofar as it allows for the commodification of film, the final cut makes moving images impervious to their own occurrence. The final cut thus promises closure, as if it constituted a membrane delineating the movie’s definitive form. By representing a frontier separating the composition of the cinematographic work from its performances, it allows for absent authorities to hold control over such work. However, there is nothing really final about the resulting film. Isolated from surrounding media operations, film stands as an insufficient container for the moving image. The arrangement of frames produced by montage hinges on the grid of movement preprogrammed in the apparatus. The resolution of movement simultaneously depends and relies on the way projectors standardize the discretization of time. Cubitt (2004: 14) borrows the concept of a pixel matrix to refer to this analogue ‘map of time’. His anachronistic metaphor grasps the procedural qualities that the moving image had even before

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the advent of computer media. It reminds us that the actual movement of images cannot be simply written down; it is an effect that must be achieved during screening. It is, in that sense, exclusive to the film’s performance. Only coupled with the projection mechanism can the final cut attempt to fulfil its promised totality. Here, one can see how the cinematographic work entails the articulation of both internal and external components. For the movie to come into being, film must operate as an interchangeable part of the projector. In each and every enactment, the movie must be reassembled. It thus remains open to the circuit. A clear separation between inscription and transmission cannot be posited. This continuing material modulation defies the integrity of the final cut. Film curator Paolo Cherchi Usai goes as far as to characterize film as ‘the art of destroying moving images’ (1999: 2). Usai underscores how the technical conditions of film are also the source of its slow degradation. Each screening is an inevitable assault on the medium: the narrow passage behind the shutter scratches the surface of film, the light of the projector washes its colours, and the friction against the sprockets tears its perforations. In this environment, the meticulous arrangement calculated by the filmmaker cannot last for long. The final cut is disrupted by the same technical means that allow its fixation. At some point, the projectionist will have to remove particularly damaged frames to prevent the reel from getting stuck in the mechanism. Only by this surgical intervention can the functionary avoid the complete collapse of the cinematographic work. Faced with film’s flawed condition, the integrity of the moving image subsists as a hypothesis. Usai frames its platonic existence within the concept of the model image (1999: 19): a totality of visual information that can never be completely grasped by the audience. Whether because the film copy is spoiled, or the viewers arrived too late to the screening, or even because the average person blinks around 15 times per minute, the model image is always already absent. Nevertheless, it stands as a horizon of stability that allows viewers to mentally separate the movie from its individual instances. Based on the assumption of an absent integrity, we are able to discern traces of circulation either as meaningful information or material circumstances. Without this reference, the movie would be entirely contingent on its situated appearance: scratches in the film would be seen as part of the work; scenes missed during a sneeze would never have existed. By establishing this parameter of difference, Usai states, the model image creates the conditions for film history (1999: 4). It is not difficult to realize how the premise of the model image plays into medial ideology. The hypothesis of a completely stable movie, forever

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preserved from the contingencies of its circulation, mirrors the belief of cinema existing beyond its technical underpinnings. Usai himself recognizes the impossibility of this situation: the only way for moving images to exist in such a perfect state is ‘if the film had never been projected, or if its matrix had never been used for its duplication into a print’ (1999: 32). In other words, if the movie was never shown – if the image never moved. Conversely, one must accept the volatility integral to the existence of moving images. In places where the conservationist bias of medial ideology can only see manifestations of entropy deconfiguring the surface of film, one should appreciate vital transformations. Chemicals unleashing unprecedented tonalities. Celluloid gently giving in to the surrounding forces. The brazen effervescence of matter does not simply undo the medium into the indiscernible noise of its empty channels. On the contrary, it renews the image, making each reproduction of the movie increasingly singular. Nam June Paik has explored this reversal of signal-to-noise ratio in Zen for Film (1964), a work freely inspired by 4’33” (1952) of his Fluxus colleague John Cage. Zen for Film consists of an unexposed 16mm filmstrip projected in an endless loop. The light goes through the medium and hits the screen almost completely unobstructed. At first, just like in Cage’s silent composition, there does not seem to be much to be noticed. But suddenly, there is a lot. The piece’s austerity leads to a shift in the audience’s perception, raising awareness to the nuances of the screening event. The many different elements ever ongoing in the background of a gallery screening come to the fore. The viewer is led to encounter subtle images made by particles floating in front of projection, and to confront her own imagination on the bare glowing rectangle. In that sense, the first lesson to be taken from Paik’s work is a corollary to the idea that the projector is never empty. But immediate impressions cannot fully account for Zen for Film’s embrace of the material temporality of the medium. A dedicated viewer, able to follow its exhibition for several days, would realize that, the more the projection repeats, the more it changes. The blank slate of the screen provides an opportunity for the recognition of the accidental writing continuously performed into film. With every running moment, the filmstrip accumulates dust and scratches, resulting in an emergent graphic pattern. In the absence of an original image to be eroded, this material deterioration is shown to be the source of new visual forms: the steady sculpting of layers upon layers of rhythm, throughout each of the work’s appearances across different times and places. Hence, insofar as the reel is not changed at every screening, the circulation of Zen for Film is always reaffirmed during the work’s experience. The public is introduced to the movie as an entity deeply embedded within its

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technical milieu, engaging in frequent exchanges of matter and energy with surrounding phenomena. Effected by these live interactions, the identity of the moving image is shown to be shared with its circumstances. The body of film records its own history. Residues are left behind and scars are carried along. Any effort to suppress these occurrences from the always already absent imaginary signifier only calls for more strata: thin coatings of chemicals, patches of tape, painted retouches. In spite of the matrix sanctioned by technological reproducibility, film must exist within this mess. It cannot be isolated from its material flows of dissemination. The situated reflexivity of oral storytelling praised by Benjamin (2002) seems somehow to subsist in the staccato of the film industry. Out of the filmmaker’s control, from editing rooms to projection booths and film archives, multiple and irregular feedback processes create in film a form not entirely self-contained, but thoroughly self-differing.

Electronic broadcast The widespread use of electronic systems provided moving images with consistent channels of circulation supplementary to f ilm. After video, movies were no longer specific to the established places and practices of cinema. They spilled into living rooms and bars, into dentist waiting rooms and hotel lounges, bringing new subjects to the screen and supplying visual media with other means to act upon the world. Art critic Rosalind Krauss remarks how, by multiplying the possibilities of visual representation, video ‘occupied a kind of discursive chaos, a heterogeneity of activities that could not be theorized as coherent or conceived of as having something like an essence or unifying core’ (1999: 31-32). Video thus proclaimed the end of medium specificity and championed the post-medium condition that seems to be fully accomplished in digital computation. Nonetheless, the exact ways in which electronic technologies reconfigure the movie bear some analysis. By reducing the technical differences between the processes of capture, transmission, and display of visual information, video further embeds moving images within the circuit. This enables an intensification of the rhythm and an amplification of the scale of circulation while simultaneously leading to a growing volatility of visual forms. An examination of video’s technological particulars may thus clarify how the technical underpinnings modulate modes of public engagement with the movie, while affecting its social uses and abilities of representation. Likewise, it may provide a telling account of how the medial boundaries of

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the cinematographic work are reaffirmed in face of emerging systems and practices that provoke its complete material reassembling. Video technology meant a drastic departure from the way film handles moving images because it eliminates the stable pictorial referent. The electronic image, as described by Arlindo Machado, ‘is the translation of a visual field into energy signals’ (1988: 40). Since this process traditionally entails some form of scanning, there can be no complete frame on display at any given moment. Just like the duration of film only takes place upon projection, the bidimensional field of video exists primarily as an effect of screening. The signal itself is one-dimensional and continuous; it is broken apart and ordered in seemingly successive pictures only by its appearance on a monitor, cleverly exploiting the shortcomings of human perception. The resulting image is constituted by interlaced fields of horizontal lines that are both captured and shown asynchronously – ever passing, ever becoming. Its low-definition, textured quality favours metonyms over clear depictions: zooms, close-ups, talking heads (Machado, 1988: 48). These formal discrepancies expose the material arbitrariness of the mediated sign. Video thus emphasizes the character of moving images as a superficial articulation of time and space contingent on the performance of underlying apparatus. Another quality of electronic media adding to the collapse of the movie into its performative occurrence is their immediacy. Until recently, one of the main features separating video from film was the former’s distinctive ability to present live images of the world. When video first appeared, this was in fact its only form of existence. Since there was no convenient way to store the video signal, electronic images had to coexist with the events they represented, lasting exclusively for the duration of transmission. In the words of Lisa Parks, the live video broadcast makes ‘a pronouncement about its own distribution, embodying in its quickly scanned surface an indication of the ways material has been transported from here to there’ (2007: 210). The organization of signal in the monitor is continuous to its reception from satellite, making the movie’s geographic distribution integral to its situated enactment. The exposure to channel feedback leaves this process highly susceptible to systemic interventions. Thanks to electronic systems’ intrinsic reversibility, the means of image production and consumption seem to come closer together. Marshal McLuhan (1962: 72) identified in these circumstances a ‘pressure of simultaneity’ that created rich possibilities for the redefinition of media practices. His statements concerning the return to ‘oral or auditory modes’ of communication in the Electronic Age (McLuhan, 1962: 72) could thus be read as more than a remark about the primary role of speech in radio and television. They also seem to underscore broadcast’s

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power to recover the regime of circulation associated with oral storytelling and deploy it in the globalized postwar world. None of this was evident on the feature films shown on TV. It fell to artists to explore video’s interactive aspects more fully. Movies that resort to satellite transmission affirmed the intersubjective, reflexive, and situated character of electronic images against their commodification by the entertainment industry. Mass media formats and infrastructure became sites of dispute in works such as Douglas Davis’s pioneering orbital performances. The piece he presented during the sixth documenta (1977) took the form of an international TV show that was transmitted live to more than 25 countries. Besides directing the participation of guest artists like Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik, Davis himself performed in the final part of the show. His segment, called The Last Nine Minutes, used up all the remaining time leased on satellite, which was abruptly interrupted along with the transmission. The fact that no recording was produced reinforces the movie’s contention to its structures of circulation. For Parks, Davis’s work ‘proclaim[s] the impossibility of separating the work of art from the mode of its distribution’ (Parks, 2007: 212). The images only existed while they were being transported. Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s famous Hole in Space (1980) attempted to push the dialogical capabilities of satellite broadcast in a more downright public direction. In an extraordinary case of video chat avant la lettre, their work created a bilateral camera feed between the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City and a department store in Los Angeles. For three consecutive nights, screens installed in the façades of these venues offered passersby an opportunity to see and communicate (in silence) with people on the other side. This public communication sculpture – which Parks classifies as ‘an embodied extension of the satellite apparatus itself’ (2007: 210) – demonstrates the degree to which the video image departs from film. Here, the model image is no longer a reasonable promise. Communication processes among the audience take clear precedence over the representation of autonomous visual phenomena. How can the cinematographic work persist within technologies derived from an ‘age of ionospheric exchange’ so antagonistic to the culture of mechanical reproduction (Parks, 2007: 212)? Serious considerations about the materiality of moving-image circulation cannot fail to address the political economy which ultimately disposes of its apparatus. Already in their time, these satellite art projects evoked a sort of failed utopia. The systems they employed were inaccessible to the general public, and not only because satellites are expensive devices. In

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most Western territories, the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum is considered a strategic resource whose use requires special concessions from the state. In order to tap into this infrastructure legally, even for a brief moment, artists have to commit to sponsoring institutions able to secure the necessary authorizations and cover the costs of technology. Largely, the precarious relationship of individuals confronting broadcast monopolies is better reflected by a project such as the Brazilian Satelliteless Movement (Movimento dos Sem-Satélite; hereafter MSST). Borrowing name and spirit from their compatriots of the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra; hereater MST), the MSST surveys tactical alternatives to the ever prevailing social inequality of the orbital media landscape. The concentrated ownership of the means of transmission provides a few big players with huge leverage over the topological articulation of the circuit. Agreements between the television networks and Hollywood studios had thus effective control on the way the emergent possibilities of video were deployed for cinematographic distribution. TV channels included old theatrical features in their primetime programme as early as the mid 1950s (Seagrave, 1999: 53). It is nonetheless hard to detect in this service any of the discursive chaos mentioned by Krauss. The material heterogeneity of video was streamlined in order to preserve the conventional form and functions of cinema. Institutional devices were put in place to make the dynamics of electronic transmission comply with the already established rhythm and scale of film exhibition. The first and most famous of these mechanisms are the release windows. In order to avoid the cannibalization of movie markets, Hollywood negotiated a delay for the domestic exhibition of cinematographic productions. The initial waiting period was eight years after theatrical release (Seagrave, 1999: 47). This arbitrary gap meant to organize the availability of the cinematographic work across different channels and prevent them from competing with one another. With time, and given the growing complexity of the domestic video ecosystem, this delay has been dramatically shortened and restructured. It has not been completely extinguished, though. Even today, in the age of high-definition, instant video-on-demand, the theatrical release traditionally maintains its chronological primacy as a promotion platform for studio productions, upholding their value in ancillary markets (Seagrave, 1999: 152). Mechanisms such as the release windows also play a significant role in film’s material singularization. The circumstantial exclusivity they enable bestows upon film a presential priority akin to originality. By doing so, they produce the impression that film’s physical properties make it a

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moving-image medium hierarchically superior to video. This epistemic fiction advances cinema’s medial coherence in three different ways. First, it subsumes electronic system’s particular means of expressions to a photographic rationale. Second, it downplays the transformations that images must go through when moving from one technological platform to another. And, finally, it naturalizes the formal strategies employed in film-to-video translation. Charles Tashiro observes how misleading the expression ‘film-to-video’ can be. Behind the seemingly neutral displacement it implies, lies a total ‘reconfiguration of the text in new terms’ (Tashiro, 1991: 8). To transfer the movie from one technological channel to another often involves a conscious attempt to ‘accentuate the similarities and minimize the differences’ between radically distinctive ways to present visual information (Tashiro, 1991: 8). The cinematographic work undergoes a complete transformation in order to be broadcasted. The rearrangement of the moving image’s physical constitution comes along with a degree of metamorphosis. The movie’s final cut must be shortened and subdivided according to the network’s programme schedule, periodically interrupted by commercial breaks. Even the theatrical, widescreen picture has to be reframed to fit the narrower aspect ratio of the TV screen. Tashiro remarks how both methods frequently employed in this process – pan-and-scan and letterboxing – each subordinate film to video in a specific way. While the more transparent pan-and-scan literally obliterates parts of the image, letterboxing makes it smaller than the TV screen, suggesting a sort of inferiority (Tashiro, 1991: 14). These formal fluctuations multiply inconsistencies across different appearances of the same movie, potentially calling into question the work’s self-identity. Even so, movies’ stability remains undisputed. Video’s ostensible multiplicity is made to substantiate a technological hierarchy of circulation instead. It stands as evidence that the electronic signal is not able to account fully for the cinematographic work. As theatrical film takes a supplementary position to the model image in movie’s metaphysics, video is indirectly subordinated to the spectre of an external totality. The many fractured renditions of a movie on TV are therefore excused as tentative versions, bound to fail from the outset. These derivative forms are normalized within the limits of what Joshua Greenberg called the edit-for-TV (2008: 134). According to its logic, the movie remains itself despite its changes because the latter result from a circumstantial framing. The material particulars of video would therefore not be positive properties enabling movie circulation, but rather channel contingencies confirming that the real movie lies elsewhere.

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Videotapes The domestic videocassette recorder (VCR) appeared in the 1970s, much later than commercial broadcast services. It was originally meant not for movie distribution, but as a time-shifting device, peripheral to live TV consumption. In the eloquent description of Greenberg, the VCR began its career as ‘a machine that would allow users to assert control of their time, liberated from the f ixed programme schedules set by television executives’ (2008: 2). In the first five years of existence of the Sony Betamax, the only prerecorded tapes available were public domain and pornographic works. Professional studios were neither interested nor aware of how to release their content on tape (Greenberg, 2008: 21). Conversely, it was the appropriation of the technology by consumers that effectively created the practices and social conditions for the circulation of movies in this format. Greenberg’s (2008) account of the progression of home video from an esoteric hobby to a major cinema outlet demonstrates the many divergent agendas affecting the circulation standards, as well as the role individuals can perform in their negotiation. It shows that the integration of the new medium into the established cinematographic circuit was enabled by the recursive production of a certain understanding about its physical characteristics. This process resulted in the simultaneous formation of new media practices and their mobilization in favour of the movie’s objective stability. At the heart of these developments is the proletarianization caused by the operational conditions of electronic systems (Tashiro, 1991: 11). The TV apparatus imbues even the banal practice of movie-watching with a degree of physical activity distinct from the traditionally passive theatrical screening. At the same time, it turns the movie into an ‘object of control’ for the audience. The time-shifting capabilities of the VCR allowed viewers not only to navigate audiovisual information randomly, but also to capture it in a physical carrier detached from the original transmission. Aware of this possibility, North American videophiles soon started employing tapes as a means for movie exchange. Films and shows recorded from TV were copied and traded by mail, in person, or even in ‘taping parties’ made for this specific purpose. These practices allowed viewers to bypass the geographical limitations of broadcast and access content that was not initially available in their area. By the end of 1977, hundreds of people in the US were involved in these activities, forming a nationwide user network (Greenberg, 2008: 21). This created the basis of a marketplace that would soon develop into video retailers and chain rental stores.

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The videophile culture not only provided the industry with an informed consumer base, though, but also with the means to conceptualize (and thus market) movie distribution on home video. The same socio-technical rationale that reframed the VCR as a playback machine turned the tape into an individual signifier of the movie. Originally considered as reusable VCR parts, tapes earned their autonomy just as this device became integrated into the infrastructure of movie circulation, therefore existing ‘in terms of the texts that [they] carried’ (Greenberg, 2008: 42). By 1978, distributors and retailers were already marketing prerecorded tapes as ‘software’ (Greenberg, 2008: 56). In that sense, tapes were made to operate less like pieces of material technology than as an objective means to provide the movie’s edit-for-TV with self-evident, tangible boundaries. In the double transformation of the VCR and the videotape, the audience oversteps its functionary position. Nevertheless, while ‘pushing their hardware beyond its manufacturers’ intentions’, they seem to remain committed to the wider medial ideology governing cinema (Greenberg, 2008: 39). Videophiles’ intervention in the system was not meant to affect the movie form, but rather to preserve it. A great deal of information was shared among the community in order to keep their activity as transparent as possible. True ‘professional’ recordings relied exclusively on broadcast sources and took care to cut out the commercial breaks, both to save time and to get as close as possible to the work’s original editing (Greenberg, 2008: 27). This practice reveals an intention to recuperate what has been lost in the edit-for-TV. By the means of further circulation, videophiles paradoxically sought to revert its effects on the movie. Greenberg finds the source of the videophiles’ anxieties in a set of expectations about the cinematographic work denoted by a socially constructed archetype that he calls The Movie. (In order to avoid misunderstandings with the concept more widely used in this book, Greenberg’s term will always be written with capitalized initials, as he originally did.) On a variation of the theme of the model image, The Movie represents ‘a Platonic form, an idealized text existing only in the abstract’ (Greenberg, 2008: 133). This transcendent notion allows the audience to separate the movie ‘as a message’ from the medium in which it is embedded, and therefore to evaluate the quality of various physical manifestations of the cinematographic work. The videophile community articulated these expectations in their shared ways of doing, educating one another by the means of oral exchanges, written explanations, and even newsletters. This grey media, circulating alongside videotapes, underpinned The Movie in the filmic tradition, envisioning its most appropriate setting in the perfect isolation of the theatrical screening.

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In this arrangement, components and practices accessory to movie circulation are shown to be responsible for disseminating the evaluation parameters of this same circulation. Not even in a Platonic form, then, does the movie seem able to escape fully the contingencies of the circuit. With this in mind, how different could the effect of video-to-cinema have been, were the instructions for tape-dubbing nonexistent – or even opposite to what they are? The video installation Pornô (2003-2004), by Graziela Kunsch and Stewart Home, provides a glimpse of this fictional world where tape-dubbing has gone wild and the parameters for The Movie are still undetermined. Their work creates a microcosm of condensed circulation for one specific movie: a 21’ static long shot of the filmmakers talking to each other and engaging intimately. The work was first presented in VHS format in a small TV alongside headphones and two VCRs. Each viewer was told to engage with this apparatus alone and perform a copy of the tape while watching it. Every new viewer was instructed to watch the copy produced by the previous one and repeat the process, until one of them found it fruitless to continue. In total, fourteen copies were made. This set of instructions meant to intensify the effects of video circulation in the moving image. In their private interactions with the VCR, viewers were invited to embrace its unrestrained results. Sheets of paper were available for them to take notes about what they were watching, prompting a reflection about the image. These texts were compiled in a ‘degeneration control’ presented in a later stage of the work. In this second exhibition, all of the tapes were shown simultaneously in a set of fourteen monitors, enabling an overview of the entire versioning process of the movie. Initially, this second stage of Pornô can be regarded as a study about the increasing degeneration of moving images across successive copies. From one picture to the other, the original figurative arrangement gives way to the bare patterns of electronic transmission. The movie seems to dissolve slowly in the white noise of its circulation. In spite of that, the degeneration control that comes along with the installation tells a more complex story. The first few viewers indeed comment on a movie’s typical features, such as its framing and verisimilitude. As the copying goes on, these remarks are progressively substituted by references to the quality of the image and to the difficulties in understanding it. After copy 8 or 9, the issue of legibility seems however to be completely overcome. The final third of the viewers raise questions concerning reality, oblivion, and ‘the prime matter of artistic language’ instead. The focus of the audience moves from the image, to channel conditions, to the representation limits. This change of

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Graziela Kunsch and Stewart Home, still from Pornô (2003-2004). VHS, colour, 21 minutes. Courtesy of the artists.

topic indicates that the understanding of the movie has been completely displaced throughout the process. In the end, the work seems to throw wide open its own possibilities of existence. Relieved from the social parameters of The Movie and exposed to almost pure circulation, viewers are made to question the medium constitution. Metaphorically, Pornô suggests that this process is positive in spite of its growing opacity. The increasing deterioration of the image, with each additional copy, amounts to the generation of the work, each one adding a monitor to the final installation. With or without predetermined parameters to guide their formation, new meanings seem to keep emerging from the circulation. Pornô takes advantage of the fact that the extrinsic parameters we call upon in the effort to resist the entropic drive of circulation are likewise articulated within circulation. By substituting our unspoken means of engagement with video by a set of counterintuitive instructions and a floating control of degeneration, the work takes part in the arbitrariness of these parameters. It therefore indicates how much of the movie, as an interplay between sensorial phenomena and discursive expectations, relies on components besides its singular medium of inscription. Word-of-mouth, written notes, and other means of description inform the public on how to understand and operate the cinematographic work properly. The form that fluctuates in the flow of electronic transmissions simultaneously coalesces

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in the accounts keeping track of its successive iterations. In traces scattered across a plurality of sites, disconnected from the main body of work, even images that have supposedly been completely obliterated – such as Davis’s The Last Nine Minutes – are still circulating. The movie subsists as a ghost: an abstract, hypothetical, but above all potential form, always ready to be recuperated in a future after the medium.

Digital versatile discs Digital media brought promises of total information control and stability – ‘identification without ambiguity, transmission without loss, repetition without originality’ (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 11). Lev Manovich (2001) remarks how the movie, turned into a computerized database disconnected from its operation interfaces, can be easily subject to real-time, non-destructive rearrangements. The messy navigation functions provided by the VCR are upgraded to a highly accurate form of random access. Compositing software advances the possibilities inaugurated by electronic keying, allowing for the complete mastery of in-frame elements at the pixel level. Images from different sources can be seamlessly combined into plausible photographic pictures, further normalizing what Manovich calls ontological montage (2001: 159). The versatility of this practice puts forward a new regime of filmmaking wholly underpinned on postproduction. Rodowick (2007: 167) cites Alexander Sokurov’s feature Russian Ark (2002) as a prominent example of this paradigm change. The movie, constituted by a single long-shot, nevertheless includes about 30,000 discrete alterations to image and sound data, standing as symbol of the industry’s transition from analogue cutting to digital compositing. The effects of digital technologies were no less expressive on the fields of movie distribution and exhibition. The fact that patterns of binary signs constituting audiovisual information could be copied with total precision from one location to another vowed to make movies practically independent from individual physical carriers and virtually immune to deterioration. As different channels were digitized and became integrated into online systems, the circulation friction should dissipate. The collapse of release windows was signalized in 2006, when director Michael Winterbottom chose to launch the indie docudrama The Road to Guantanamo in theatres, DVDs, and the Internet on the same day. It seemed that, soon, there would be no cleavage between the work and its many iterations, from the end of production to the audience in movie theatres, living rooms, galleries, or any

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other site of consumption. The same form would be available continuously and immediately, in its entirety, at all nodes of this network. But the idea that the so-called ‘digital’ would liberate the image from its physical limitations would not please everyone involved with cinema. We are well aware of the anxiety that the prospects of this ‘dematerialization’ have caused to the field of film studies, as well as to major players in the film industry. In the early 2000s, professional studios were growing wary of the free circulation of their products in informal sharing platforms run by users on the Internet (see for example Lasica, 2005). In 2002, a Hollywood consortium called Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) was formed in order to establish technical specifications that would enable digital images to have the same degree of quality provided by film. The associations of peer-to-peer networks with piracy and of digital media in general with the lower standards of video reinforced the role of cinema’s traditional places and practices as primary sites for the negotiation of movies’ meaning and value. It is very telling, for instance, that Winterbottom’s feature had an avant-premiere at the Berlin Film Festival before its simultaneous public ‘release’. By the means of these institutional articulations, technology was made to comply with the industry agenda. It thus comes as no surprise that digital technologies were initially subordinated to the sphere of home video, notably in the form of DVDs. The digital versatile discs invented in 1995 soon became a popular substitute for the videotape. Both retailers and consumers already knew very well how to trade movies in these self-contained packages. By providing a read-only medium with enough storage capacity for a high-definition feature and more, DVDs conjugated the abundance occasioned by digital technologies with the business and authorial directives already established for cinema. Computer image processing and the interactive possibilities of the medium were mobilized to deliver something more than a glorified video edit. Old movies were digitally restored in order to look like they were brand new and rereleased in ‘definitive’ versions. Any single copy of almost every work began to include extra content such as alternative dubs, different subtitles, and making-of footage, which could all be accessed at the viewers’ discretion. These novel, expanded forms in which movies were presented on DVDs were not simply the result of marketing ploys. Nathan Carroll observes that digital restoration, more than adapting old works to contemporary aesthetics and rekindling the consumers’ interest, meant to recover their ‘lost aura’ and promote their re-canonization (2005: 18-19). The release of a digital edition effectively wrote off of the circulation any previous, analogue versions of a movie. Thus, while enabling the easy access to cinema’s slippery past, a DVD release ‘functionally supplants and rewrites its shifting memory’ (Carroll,

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2005: 27). These changes are often legitimized under the imprint of a ‘director’s cut’. Appealing to the author’s moral rights, this term implies that the original version of a movie was not actually a concluded one. In other words, the final cut was not final. Restricted either by marketing interventions or by technological or budget limitations, the director was not able to deliver her vision as first intended. The digitally enhanced version is therefore presented not as a work’s restoration, but rather as that which it should have always been. The prototypical expression of this attitude is George Lucas’s disavowal of the original version of the classic Star Wars movies. On the trilogy’s 20th anniversary, upon the release of its commemorative ‘Special Edition’, Lucas publicly stated that the theatrical versions from the 1970s and 1980s should be considered but ‘earlier drafts’ of his work (Magid, 1997). The remastered versions – which had redubbed dialogue, ‘corrected’ continuity, and computer graphics effects added to almost every scene – would form the basis for the DVD releases of the episodes, consigning the original ones to increasingly inaccessible legacy media. Thereby, the Special Edition took the place of the authentic Star Wars movies (at least until the release of their Blu-Ray re-remasters in 2011). In this process, one can see how digital restoration can ‘physically [change] the content of film history’ (Carroll, 2005: 18). The high-definition, cleaned-up director’s cut thus stands as the opposite of the edit-for-TV version. While the latter constitutes a necessarily imperfect form that the channel imposes on the work, the former expresses the most indefectible rendition of the movie, defying not only its historical degradation, but also its flawed material condition. It is as if digital media made it possible to recuperate an unprecedented totality – a state that the image only had before existing. This promise is further articulated by the inclusion of extras covering the process of filmmaking in almost any retail DVD. By allowing for the endless repurposing of content, digital technologies have fostered the making-of as a dominant on-screen genre (Caldwell, 2008: 284). The presence of the making-of in the same self-contained package as the movie seems to signify that the experience of the work now incorporates even the disclosure of its production process. It is, however, a false impression. The making-of is a particularly reductive and proprietary kind of what John Thorton Caldwell calls ‘industrial self-theorizing’ (2008: 21). It stages rather than reveals the production process, reinforcing certain aspects while omitting others at the author’s discretion. In that sense, it means to guide the audience’s interpretation and their mode of engagement with the work. The aforementioned strategies suggest that digital technologies are deployed for the movies’ distribution on DVD not as the prevailing source of informational rearrangement underscored by Manovich. Rather, they operate as a

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technological positivity enabling the further closure of the cinematographic work. The industry relies on the full flexibility supplied by computerized data only until the movie’s public release. Afterwards, it is digital media’s highly precise reproduction capabilities that become more prominent, since they will ensure the stability of the moving image throughout its circulation. The new technology is thus made to advance a process of homogenization whereupon both the physical traces and contradictory meanings that the movie accumulates are considered noise that must be suppressed. By framing these circulation effects as a form of degeneration, studios mean to control them. ‘Definitive’ editions seek to exhaust variations and rewrite the movie under an unambiguous formula dictated by a central authority. Movies nonetheless seem to overflow and continue to lead multiple existences. Here, the classic Star Wars trilogy is once again an emblematic example, not only because its successive definitive versions denounce one another, but also because they never truly go away. More than a decade later, fans who are critical of George Lucas’s decision still dispute its legitimacy. For many of them, the original trilogy will always be the authentic one, in spite of the fact that it is only officially available in hard-to-find, substandard formats (Gnoll, 2004). These critics would rather embrace what Hito Steyerl (2009) has dubbed the economy of poor images than to submit to elitist parameters that write their favourite movies out of circulation. These fans’ efforts are one of the main reasons why the original versions of the Star Wars episodes have not been completely erased from film history. They are instead kept alive as a subject on Internet forums, presented during audience-organized VHS screenings, and even shared as digital files on informal peer-to-peer networks. From a traditional medial perspective, these practices seem to express mere trade-offs between moving-image quality and access. Conversely, they demonstrate how the audience engagement may collaborate in the manifold actualizations of the forever undefined cinematographic work.

Codified data Thanks to digital technologies, movies have been emancipated from specific material channels and practices. Just like other forms of media content, they are written as data that can be stored, transmitted, and accessed on any compatible device. This is, in fact, how they exist on DVDs. Provided there is a physical means to load the data, the necessary software to run it, and output interfaces for image and sound, the movie is available. These conditions are made increasingly mundane by the development of

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a pervasive, global infrastructure for general-purpose computation. By expediting the displacement of moving images across different geographical and institutional sites, digital networks turn media operations that used to be costly, cumbersome, and time-consuming into very straightforward, almost instantaneous tasks. Nowadays, with a few mouse clicks, one can rent a feature, prepare a screening programme, or submit a copy of work to a festival. Overcoming these barriers further propagates an illusion of immateriality. In the accelerating flow of information, the movie is untethered from physical media but nonetheless remains cohesive within the discrete computer file. Cinema has come a long way from film reels and videotapes: a named sequence of bits now seems to be all it takes to contain a full individual instance of the work. But the seeming intangibility of ‘the digital’ is misleading just as it is enticing. There is an indisputable materiality to computation: the systems underpinning digital media are not purely abstract apparatus, but rather a ‘messy world of matter and metal’ (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 27). Friedrich Kittler (1995) famously pointed to the fact that the bit patterns constituting information on a computer stand as signifiers of voltage differences at its core. Due to this differential character of digital inscription, data is never truly ‘stored’ on a hard drive; rather, it results from energy discharges through the device (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 95). At its most concrete level, there is nothing separating the movie from any other stuff in the machine. The digital file itself is an abstraction created by the operational system while it is running. All of the audiovisual information it supposedly contains is an effect of system activity. The work must be assembled by means of a real-time interaction with other software abstractions such as the playback application, and the audio and video drivers. The file ‘means’ nothing without a system to decode it. It barely exists. Digital video coding simultaneously intensifies and further obscures the performative character of movies. The algorithms used for this operation, called codecs, organize perceptible images and sounds according to complex spatial logics in order to optimize their storage and transmission (Mackenzie, 2008: 48). Codecs often work by means of lossy compression, which gets rid of information below a certain perception threshold in order to save memory space. DVDs have only turned into a viable medium for mass movie distribution because of the economy enabled by MPEG-2, a codec that could reduce video files’ size up to 97% without causing any noticeable loss of quality (Lasica, 2005: 88). With the progressive escalation of computer systems’ complexity and of the volume of data in circulation, codecs have become an indispensable component of digital media operation. By specifying a

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standard way for different machines and software applications to render the same audiovisual data, codecs enable a common layer of medial activities. Above this ground, users operate unaware of the materiality of digital inscription, employing interfaces that simulate traditional cinema practices, tools, and conventions. Filmmakers are allowed to do what they always have done. Their work finishes where the codecs’ begin: in the packing and unpacking of data into complex signifying arrangements. To the extent that it relies on these operational conveniences, movie circulation is conditioned by digital coding. Kittler (2008) underscores the fact that computer code is rooted in encryption systems of command and communication that operate by rearranging information according to a particular convention within the universal conventions of language. Access to the message is restricted to those who hold the cipher’s key. That is to say, a device must have the right codecs installed in order to show the movie properly. Otherwise, running the data file would just result in an empty frame or an error message. Similarly, a movie must be encoded in the proper format in order to be recognized by certain apparatus. Video DVDs require moving images to be written in H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 with a bit rate of up to 9.8 Mbit/s. The Digital Cinema Package (DCP) specified by the DCI employs different Material eXchange Format containers with video streams encoded in JPEG-2000. Since the end of 2016, the streaming platform Netflix has adopted Google’s royalty-free VP9 (profile 0) compression for downloadable content on mobile Android devices. These algorithms are constitutive of moving image’s formal and operational aspects. They do not simply govern how the work can be accessed or how it will appear on each of these platforms, though. By restricting the ways audiovisual data have to be arbitrarily arranged in order to be acknowledged as such, coding effectively functions as a criterion of belonging, in the guise of a protocol. Alexander Galloway characterizes protocol as ‘a set of recommendations and rules that outline specific technical standards’ existing at the core of network computing (2004: 6). In principle, protocol is a technology of inclusion that allows complying participants to connect to one another and form a hitherto nonexistent network. At the same time, protocol constitutes a powerful means of regulation, ingrained in the very system it enables. Insofar as it establishes the conditions of existence in and of the network, protocol cannot be confronted within its perimeters. Opposing protocol, says Galloway, ‘is like opposing gravity’ (2004: 147). Video coding specifications dictate a similar field of possibilities within the networks of digital movie apparatus. They outline the way data must be arranged in order to account for the work within standard applications and devices. These constraints

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bind the fragmented architecture of computation together into an intelligible platform of communication, continuous to established media practices. The ensuing coherence of the system enables ‘the deep, meaningful uses that people make of it everyday’ (Galloway, 2004: 64) – such as watching a movie. At the same time, it defines the object that is proper to these uses. What is not encoded as a movie, even though it may look and feel like one, will not be a movie. Editing suites would not import it, media players would not run it, and film festivals would not accept it as part of a submission. By governing these parameters, coding seems to allow for a predicate of specificity in the post-medium world. It enforces the identity of the movie even when a movie, at its most fundamental level, is no different from other bits running on universal computing networks. The seamless medial landscape created by coding is, however, neither truly stable nor everlasting. It is persistently built by the same machinic processes it seeks to obfuscate. Even error messages, however disappointing, are deliberate effects contributing to these circumstances. Deep down in the computer, there are no movies ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, only the material affordances of digital inscription. The encoding of meaningful interruptions in the system produces a semblance of integrity that conceals the arbitrariness of this distinction. It prevents the system from executing a file that it may accept as a movie, but does not look or feel like one to the viewer. This disjunction between the systemic identification of data and its resulting sensorial phenomena exposes the farce of coding. It shows that what the machine does is not inherently attached to the users’ medial expectations. The ambiguous aesthetics of compression artefacts stands as evidence. One of the most frequent video decoding ‘defects’ results from the loss of key referential frames (called I-frames), causing the system to apply to a scene a pattern of movement that should belong to another (called P-frames). Masses of pixels move disconnected from the figures they supposedly represent. The computer does not seem to be working as it should, but it is. In fact, these results can be produced intentionally and controlled with a certain degree of precision during the encoding process. Artists associated to the glitch arts scene have extensively explored image compression as the source of enticing visual effects, and many have devised scripts and tutorials in order to share their techniques with the wider community. One such initiative was Download Finished, a pioneering project created by Sven König and the !mediengruppe bitnik in 2006. It consisted of a website that invited users to participate in the appropriation of online ‘found’ footage as a form of filmmaking. By the means of this platform, the audience could search for a movie on peer-to-peer networks and automatically convert it

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!Mediengruppe Bitnik and Sven König, Download Finished (2006), Still from film [Ballet Modern] Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker – CounterPhrases.avi, downloaded by Oscar de Franco, processed by Download Finished, 20 October 2006 at 17:49. Courtesy of the artists.

into a new one. The system employed a script that messed with the movie’s frame sequence, causing a number of compression errors during the copy. Afterwards, the resulting file was made available for download on the website. The outcome looked like something definitively different from the original movie, and was presented accordingly. Thereby, similar to other found-footage practices, Download Finished interrogates the sanctioned forms of intervention in the medium, the constitution of authorship, and the limits of the cinematographic work’s identity. It relies on activities underpinning the computer apparatus as a means to disrupt the system’s medial arrangement. In doing so, it underscores the frequently hidden scientific and industrial meta-programmes underlying digital movie circulation, such as ‘[>2] the work of the mathematicians who laid the theoretical foundations for [>3] the programmers who designed the encoding software / the codec’ (König and !mediengruppe bitnik, 2007). By approximating video encoding to the transmission of data packages within peer-to-peer networks, Download Finished accentuates their similarities. In the reinterpreted footage, we get a glimpse of the alien way codecs perform moving images. They promote patterns of movement largely based on the efficient use of network resources, rather than those captured

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by linear optics or enabled by mechanical projection. The more arbitrary the correspondence between codified data and the resulting image is, the more environmental coding operations must be. In other words, at the same time it releases movies from individual physical containers, digital media further embeds them in the channels of circulation. The clear-cut conditions of property effected by coding are therefore extended to the ways cinematographic objects become liable to ownership and control. An extreme manifestation of this regime is found in the sovereignty of web sharing platforms and video-on-demand services, and expressed in their power to ban users, take down movies, and even block access from entire geographic territories (Lobato and Messe, 2016). More importantly, however, are the increasingly complex negotiations these conditions of property imply between the movie’s existence and the access to its channels of circulation. Matthew Kirschenbaum describes the fate of all digital objects as to be ‘inexorably reduced to opaque code blocks, or BLOBs, as they become detached and drift away from their native software environments’ (2008: 234). As the media ecology changes, the continuation of a digital movie’s circulation depends on the maintenance of systems able to decode its data. If this structure is no longer available and cannot be emulated in any way, the movie must be translated into new formats or else become, in the words of Usai, the equivalent to undecipherable ‘hieroglyphs’ (1999: 46). Arguing for the ‘fundamentally social’ dimension of digital objects, Kirschenbaum sees this process taking place more by the means of informal audience appropriation than by official institutional measures (2008: 21). In the multiple transcodifications performed every day by the users, as they rip optical discs, download videos from YouTube, record images from the theatre screen, change their format and resolution, hardcode subtitles, copy the files into stand-alone devices, cut scenes to share on social media etc., one can observe an erratic form of crowd-sourced preservation. In this light, the economies of the poor image described by Steyerl (2009) would not be an expression of moving-image degeneration. Rather, they are the most frequent (and often the only) means by which a movie subsists. In the ultimate horizon of these transcodifications, there are instances in which the movie seems to give in almost completely. The final cut, which used to be edited for TV and repackaged in a definitive DVD by the studio, is now dissolved in a million supplementary variations made anywhere, by anyone. Elizabeth Hills (2002) testifies to the extraordinary popularity of fan edits caused by computer networks after the early 2000s. The access to software packages similar to those used by professional studios and the possibility of forming global online communities took audience’s

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interference a step beyond 1980s videophilia. Subject to network protocols, users became free to operate within all of the possibilities these protocols enable. As Manovich observes, it is not only different contents that can be combined and rearranged, but even the ‘fundamental techniques, working methods, and ways of representation and expression’ of different media (2013: 268). Copy fidelity is the basis upon which the public appropriates movie materials and, embracing this deep remixability of software-based environments, build new versions out of them. Contra the discursive disidentification proposed by Download Finished, I invite readers to appreciate how much of a cinematographic work continues in each of its ‘hybridizations’. Reaction videos, viral excerpts, parodies, remakes, and remixes still express the ‘original’ movie somehow. Inasmuch as they reconfigure the work into new signifying structures, they provide a means to advance its circulation. It comes as no surprise that, in fact, these are the predominant forms a movie takes, interweaved in the social fabric of digital networks. From the middle ground of transmission, the movie exists less as an individual media object than as continuous flows of information. As distinctions between the operations of production and consumption collapse, more seems to be simultaneously taken from and given to the movie at each of its partial appearances. It becomes instilled with traces of audience affection, distilled to its minimum elements, stripped of its bias, reinterpreted, and rearranged. By the means of these unorthodox mediations, the movie’s self-differing identity is carried out at the same time as it changes. Under these circumstances, the movie feels less like an ever-receding totality than the product of conflicting accretions – a presence porous to the circuit, always leaking into its surroundings, always open to new affluences.

User agreements Action and Dispersion (Ação e Dispersão, 2002) is a whimsical first-person documentary by Cezar Migliorin. It was made without a script, based on a set of instructions – an algorithm – that matches its synopsis: ‘a man and a camera, until the money runs out, never to spend two nights in the same city’. The money in question were roughly US$ 8,500 earned from a public grant sponsored by the state oil company Petrobrás, one of the main supporters of Brazilian cinema. After spending initial costs on taxes, filmmaking equipment, and fees, Migliorin embarked solo on a random journey with the main purpose of spending all of the remaining funds. The 5-minute

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Cézar Migliorin, still from Ação e Dispersão (2002). DV, colour, 6’25”. Courtesy of the artist.

short documents his travels from Rio de Janeiro to Penedo to other thirteen cities all over the world. With every shot, the director toys with taboos related to the arts’ public funding. We get brief glimpses of hotel rooms, restaurant meals, and various means of transportation, while a meter on the lower-left corner of the screen counts down the remaining money. Every scene denounces and simultaneously exalts state funding, in a constant reminder of how circumscribed filmmaking is to this financial apparatus. Migliorin thus performs a kind of structural cinema that engages with the medium beyond the immediate devices of film and projector. He seems to try to convert the pure value of the grant into images of pure meaning, but instead ends up with images that mean nothing but themselves. The rawness of certain scenes rubs their gratuity in the viewers’ faces, blurring the lines between creative gesture and the exploration of globe-trotting as a currency. These scenes seem to imply that, by setting things in motion, the sheer expenditure of energy from money, food, and fuel is enough to configure a movie. And these procedures could even be enough to win cash prizes. In 2004, Action and Dispersion earned the director a US$ 4,000 award at the VIPER Basel International Festival for Film, Video and New Media, in Switzerland. Decided to return to the next edition of the festival as a serious contender, Migliorin set half of this money aside for a new project called An Artist Without an Idea (Artista sem Ideia, 2005). He put out an open call for what

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would be his next work. In this announcement, he invited other filmmakers to submit him their completed, previously unseen movies in any format or duration. After a given deadline, Migliorin chose one of the submitted pieces to be his and paid the author US$ 1,000 in exchange for its authorship. The other US$ 1,000 was to be spent on the movie’s promotion and advertisement. According to the call, the work would remain completely unaltered, except that the line ‘a film/video by Cezar Migliorin’ would be added to its credits (Migliorin, 2005b). The chosen movie and the results of the transaction would remain secret. Migliorin’s declared intention was to criticize the ways in which calls for work drive an artist’s production. With his ambivalent proposal, he invited the audience of filmmakers to reflect upon the aesthetic effects of the circuit’s demands for movies. He exhorted them to resist the ‘fetish of the credits’ (Migliorin, 2005b), which transforms an artwork into a mere vehicle for its author’s prestige. But also, he attempted to exploit the schism between labour and authorship in order to obtain images that are not ‘contaminated by the action producing them’ (Migliorin, 2005b). A supposedly purer, curatorial subjectivity was meant to act over and in place of the filmmaker’s. The contractual framing of the call was the tool it used to seize the movie. An Artist Without an Idea’s recourse to the legal mechanisms underlying the medium not only represents another step in Migliorin’s socially cynical brand of structural cinema. It is likewise expressive of a broader trend. The growing volatility effected by digital systems has sharpened the legal apparatus controlling media. As Lawrence Lessig (2008) explains, computer software is particularly liable to copyright laws. By virtue of their architecture, digital media generates copies of every bit of code upon its transmission or enactment (Lessig, 2008: 98). Even loading a file on a local machine involves the duplication of data between its internal components, from storage to memory units. Every single engagement with a digital movie therefore triggers copyright law, and ‘must then be justified as either licensed or “fair use”’ (Lessig, 2008: 99). This juxtaposition of technological and judicial devices provides a means for the governance of movie circulation. The full range of media operations enabled by protocol is constricted by the rule of law. No matter how dispersed a movie is within the network, it remains bound by licenses, contracts, and user agreements. Instructions issued by the copyright holder may effectively function as use restrictions, occasionally implemented in the form of digital rights management systems. On these grounds, intellectual property rights seem to overtake the image as the movie’s condition of appearance. They promise to contain not only the form in which the cinematographic work is made available, but also all

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of its possible and future iterations. Some instances of a movie are allowed to exist only insofar as they yield to copyright authorities. Mechanisms of authorization legitimize the absent author’s control and ownership over the variations of a cinematographic work performed by others. They likewise ensure that these variations are mobilized to reinforce the primacy of originality instead of undermining it. One can see these mechanisms at work in some of the ways film studios incorporate the audiovisual practices advanced by digital media. Lucasfilm’s Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards, for example, provides a space for fan edits to be shown and celebrated as long as they comply with a number of content guidelines. Participation is conditioned to the cession of author rights in all media channels to Lucasfilm (Channel Star Wars, 2011). Hence, the studio both preserves the narrative integrity of its saga and exploits the value generated by its audience’s work. Following a similar logic, film companies have commissioned VJ remixes of new blockbusters from artists such as the duo Addictive TV. Published on the Internet and screened at dance parties, these pieces are aimed at advertising the movie’s theatrical release beyond its regular venues. In this way, instead of a potential deconstruction of the cinematographic work, the remix operates as a tool for its promotion. These and other similar institutional instruments tame agonistic interactions under a medial status quo. They sanction new media operations while subsuming them to the established rationale of cinema. In doing so, they also reinforce the difference between distinct iterations and components of the cinematographic work as an ontological hierarchy. By emulating the mechanisms of this economy of presence, An Artist Without an Idea seems to turn it inside out. The transparency of Migliorin’s project stimulates rather than contains the movie multiplicity. His call for works allegedly got over 100 email responses and submissions, and he has stated that it was the most laborious movie he has ever done. Going through the trouble of answering each message often made him feel like ‘a company, an organization’ (2005b). Many (if not all) of these exchanges are published in a blog sporting Blogspot’s default template: no images, white text over black background. The final post is a reprisal of – or a flashback to? – the initial proposal of An Artist Without an Idea, as it was originally sent to around 250 people connected to cinema and the visual arts. The post right before it announces the contest’s results. Video number 111 was chosen as the winner, and the transfer of rights was signed in the presence of two witnesses on 20 April 2005.

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Apart from this brief notice, it is hard to find any other concrete outcome of the project. There is no way of telling which movie number 111 is among the many of undisputed authorship in the director’s filmography. Perhaps none. Maybe the call was a farce from the beginning. Numbers were manipulated. Who can say for sure? The fact is that Migliorin went on a quest for uncontaminated images and brought back none. On the other hand, he triggered even more contaminations: layers of dialogue and controversy, columns on cultural supplements, questions, jokes, theories, and analysis like this one. But perhaps, precisely in these scattered traces without a body – paratexts without a text –, the director found the work he aspired for: ‘a movie that one doubts is a movie, so great is the strength with which it points outwards’ (Migliorin, 2005b). An object that exists not as a phenomenon of direct perception, but rather of public imagination. Being in the negative, An Artist Without an Idea makes the underlying structures of the circuit positive. Continuing circulation without a closure. Medial ideology leads us to believe that the cinematographic work has an objective, stable, and homogenous identity. However, to probe into its means of circulation reveals otherwise. The movie leads an inherently precarious existence. Its phenomenological appearance depends on the joint enactment of diverse material components, both moving and fixated. This process is partial to instructions of operation, discursive accounts, and use and copyright clauses both within and without the acknowledged media practices. The movie is therefore always in the making. It is not possible to circumscribe its production only to the activities conventionally understood as such. It is neither a one- nor a two-stage art, but rather a multiple one. Each new appearance re-accomplishes the work, retracing its genealogy from the point of discharge – the composition as inferred from its performances. Rearrangements are not only expected, but the very condition of being in the circuit. By following a linear narrative of technological development, this chapter conveniently illustrates how the intensification of circulation dissolves the movie into the underlying exchanges of information. Conversely, it conveys some of the medial forces seeking to ensure that each and every one of the work’s occasions represent the same always already absent object. Drawing from metaphysical parameters, these forces ratify authorial control. By establishing privileged forms, instances, and sites of contact with the work, they also shape the topography of apparatus around the public. Movies take place in this unceasing interplay between dispersion and containment.

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Bibliography / works cited Balsom, Erika, ‘Live and direct: Cinema as a performing art’, Artforum, September 2014. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Benjamin, Walter, ‘The storyteller – observations on the work of Nikolai Leskov’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 3: 1935-1938, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2002), 143-166. Caldwell, John Thorton, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2008). Carroll, Nathan, ‘Unwrapping archives: DVD restoration demonstrations and the marketing of authenticity’, The Velvet Light Trap, 56 (Austin, TX: Fall 2005), 18-31. Channel Star Wars, ‘Star Wars fan movie challenge – Guidelines’, Atom Comedy Central Originals, 2011. Available at . Last access 14 August 2011. Cubitt, Sean, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004). Eco, Umberto, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1989). Eisenstein, Sergei, ‘The cinematographic principle and the ideogram’, in The Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1949), 28-44. Galloway, Alexander, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004). Gnoll, ‘Why the Star Wars Special Editions suck’, Dork Droppings: Sarcastic Musings from Certifiable Geeks, 12 August 2004. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Gray, Jonathan, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU, 2010). Greenberg, Joshua, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008). Harbord, Janet, Film Cultures (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002). Hills, Elizabeth, ‘“Use them camcorder Luke:” Star Wars fan f ilms and digital moviemaking’, proceedings of the IT for Regional Culture, Media and The Arts Conference, August 2002, 176-182. Kirschenbaum, Matthew, Mechanisms: New Media and Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008). Kittler, Friedrich, ‘Code’, in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. M. Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008), 40-47. Kittler, Friedrich, ‘There is no software’, CTheory, 18 October 1995. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018.

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König, Sven and !meddiengruppe bitnik, ‘what is the characteristic structure of p2p films?’, Download Finished – FAQ, 2007. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Krauss, Rosalind, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). Kunsch, Graziela, Projeto Mutirão, unpublished MA thesis (São Paulo: ECA-USP, 2008). Lasica, J.D., Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005). Lessig, Lawrence, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). Lobato, Ramon and James Meese (eds.), Geoblocking and Global Video Culture (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2016). Machado, Arlindo, A Arte do Vídeo (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988). Mackenzie, Adrian, ‘Codecs’, in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. M. Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008), 48-54. Magid, Ron, ‘Digital and analog special effects collide in the retooled version of STAR WARS’, The American Cinematographer, February 1997. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001). Manovich, Lev, Software Takes Command (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1962). Migliorin, Cezar, ‘O resultado’, Artista sem Idéia, 11 April 2005a. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Migliorin, Cezar, ‘Projeto Artista sem Idéia’, Canal Contemporâneo, 27 January 2005b. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. MSST, MSST}Sateliteless ((==. Online. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Netflix, ‘More efficient mobile encodes for Netflix downloads’, Netflix Technology Blog, 1 December 2016. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Parks, Lisa, ‘Orbital performers and satellite translators: Media art in the age of ionospheric exchange’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24(3) (London: 2007), 207-216. Rodowick, D.N., The Virtual Life of Film (London: Harvard University, 2007).

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Seagrave, Kerry, Movies at Home: How Hollywood Came to Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). Steyerl, Hito, ‘In defense of the poor image’, e-flux, 10 (November 2009). Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Tashiro, Charles S., ‘Videophilia: What happens when you wait for it on video’, Film Quarterly, 45(1) (Berkeley, CA: Fall 1991), 7-17. Usai, Paolo Cherchi, ‘A model image, IV. Decay cinema: The art and aesthetics of moving image destruction’, Stanford Humanities Review, 7(2) (Palo Alto, CA: 1999), xiv-49. 4’33, John Cage, 1952. Ação e Dispersão, Cezar Migliorin, 2002. Artista sem Ideia, Cezar Migliorin, 2005. Download Finished, Sven König and !mediengruppe bitnik, 2006. Hole in Space, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, 1980. Pornô, Graziela Kunsch and Stewart Home, 2003-2004. Russian Ark, Alexander Sokurov, 2002. The Last Nine Minutes, Douglas Davis, 1977. The Road to Guantanamo, Michael Winterbottom, 2006 The Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition, George Lucas, 1997. Zen for Film, Nam June Paik, 1964.

2.

The Becoming of Cinema Abstract Drawing from Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology, this chapter explores the constitution of cinema as a technical ensemble. It shows how aspects conventionally underpinning cinematographic specificity can be thought of as the epiphenomena of its individuation. These aspects express successive stages in cinema’s becoming, culminating in epistemic formations particular to the medium. By the means of these epistemic formations, the circuit is underwritten to a hierarchy of presences, effectively organizing new elements within or without cinema. Following even the most radical technological changes, there is a reorganization of paradigms which advances medial ideology. This reorganization effects a sort of metaphysical closure, which precludes the medium’s subject to grasp the becoming of cinema fully. Keywords: Technical genesis, film history, expanded cinema, medium specificity, scientific paradigms, cinematographic apparatus

In 2015, when the Cinema and Audiovisual Media undergraduate course of the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) first appeared, it had already been running for five years. More than 100 people had enrolled; thousands of classes had been taught; three volumes of its peer-reviewed journal had been published. Each term, new student works were shown in a self-organized screening; some were even making the rounds in film festivals elsewhere in the country. People from the first class were about to graduate, while opening their own production companies and applying for filmmaking grants. It was a relatively successful course, given its short period of existence. However, up to this point, it did not have anything to do with cinema. Officially, at least. The course had been created bearing only Audiovisual Media in its title. It was a project by some faculty members of UFES’s Social Communications Department. As cinephiles, they had envisaged such a course for a long

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time. The opportunity arrived in 2008 with a programme by the Brazilian Ministry of Education which aimed at the restructuration and expansion of Federal Universities (Programa de Apoio a Planos de Reestruturação e Expansão das Universidades Federais, hereafter REUNI). The support from the government enabled the construction of new studios, the purchase of digital cameras and editing suites, and the hiring of specialized lecturers. Nevertheless, none of this really authorized the creation of a course in cinema, which, for Brazilian academia, is a field of specialty apart from communications, belonging to the domain of visual arts. The proponents of the UFES’s course operated within the limits they were given, adapting a curriculum originally aimed at mass media (such as television) for the research and production of documentary shorts. Not coincidentally, these were the years that consecrated cinema’s transition to digital systems. The fact that UFES’s course could effectively perform as one in filmmaking testifies to the growing technological hybridity of the medium. National curricular directives took a while to catch up with the changes, but they eventually did. That is why, in 2015, all of a sudden, UFES’s course also became one in cinema. Without it being any different, the course had earned a new title imposed by the Ministry of Education’s most recent regulations. From that moment on, both it and other similar undergraduate programmes would be in Cinema and Audiovisual Media. It makes sense when you consider the big picture. After all, while the course had not been substantially transformed in the five years since it had been opened, the world around it did. Cinema did. The medium’s practices and apparatus had shifted into a completely novel technological regime. And I dare say that undergraduate courses such as UFES’s were a granular cause as much as a consequence of this development. They most likely added to the digitization of cinema by promoting it among students who were going to be future filmmakers. This anecdote further illustrates the paradox of medium specificity in a post-media world. One thinks of cinema as an abstract category on its own, endowed with particular characteristics. Most of our ways of knowing and making the medium are informed by this categorical definition. Nevertheless, the actual features that warrant medium specificity keep slipping away. In the last few years, technological transition gave us the opportunity to follow this process closely. Even film, the element that has been intrinsically associated with cinema since the beginning, ceased to be relevant to its operations. Film production, exhibition, and distribution were taken over by systems underpinned on completely different material grounds. Devices and operations that initially seemed opposed to the medium were gradually

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incorporated into it, going from informal, amateur, and sometimes agonistic practices to the core of its professional sphere. The acceptance of these other means within the institutionalized pedagogy of cinema may be seen as the culmination of technological transition. It signifies the normalization of a new socio-technical framework under medial ideology. From this perspective, cinema stands as a thoroughly relational category. It seems to be characterized less as an immutable essence than a continuous becoming. While the concept of ‘cinema’ may be preserved in the abstract, both the phenomena to which it refers and those that uphold its distinctiveness constantly change. In this chapter, I would like to speak of this process in terms of what Gilbert Simondon (2017) has called a technical genesis. This notion explains how the growing operational synergies between disparate elements bring them together as a distinct entity, separated from the surrounding environment. What we experience as the objective coherence of cinema is an expression of the concretization effected by these developments. The genesis of the medium begets an arrangement of devices and operations which its subjects identify and engage with as a singular framework despite their heterogeneity. It does not, however, subtract these elements from other realities, nor does it completely prevent new synergies from taking place. Obsolete elements stray away; emerging connections supersede old ones. A reorganization of the medium ensues. Cinema therefore exists in an unceasing state of metastability. Discrepancies between how the medium is defined and how it is actually performed seem inevitable. Nevertheless, we are still able to recognize its unity, its individuality, and its specificity. For Simondon, these aspects are expressed precisely by those of the object’s characteristics ‘of consistency and convergence in its genesis’ (2017: 26). In this light, the history of cinema could be interpreted as a long-standing process of specification, entailing both continuous and discontinuous improvements. The cinematographic circuit is not a fixed background over which these transactions unfold, but rather the substance with which they operate. In other words, the circuit constitutes cinema’s milieu of individuation. There is no outside from where the identity of the medium is defined. Within the structures encompassing movie circulation, one can trace a diagram of the forces that preserve, negotiate, and transmute its integrity. That means to say that the identification of cinema in relation to other media bears correspondence to the separation between its common operations and the inner workings of its apparatus. Within the limits set by its standard practices, the medium feels coherent and self-contained. From the entrails of the circuit, however, it often seems prone to become something else. In its invisible side, cinema overlaps with other means

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of representation, art forms, and socio-technical practices from which it normally seems to stand apart. In between them, there are no definitive boundaries, only the surface tension emanating from medial ideology – a membrane flexible enough both to allow and to endure the vicissitudes of technical genesis.

Territorializing practices Simondon does not characterize the technical reality in opposition to culture, but as a complementary form of intermediation between humans and nature. The technical object exists in this intersection of phenomena as a relational system underpinning their articulation. It is not therefore something given hic-et-nunc, and should not be regarded as a mere assemblage of materials nor as an entirely self-sufficient robot (Simondon, 2017: 17). Conversely, the technical object is a ‘unit of coming-into-being’ simultaneously characterized by internal resonances and by its integration to an external milieu (Simondon, 2017: 50). These connections unfold in time, rendering the object progressively more concrete until it becomes firmly integrated into culture (Simondon, 2017: 21). Contrary to what one may think, this final stage is not attained by increasing automatism (which Simondon considers a ‘rather low degree of technical perfection’ (2017: 17)). Rather, it is compelled by the margin of indetermination expressed in the machine’s functioning. By making the machine sensitive to outside information, indetermination enables it to partake in meaningful exchanges with other entities. Human beings play the role of conductors to those arrangements of technical objects, becoming ‘the living interpreter of all machines among themselves’ (Simondon, 2017: 17). Individuation has a notably spatial component. The entity evolves while creating an environment around itself. In its most primitive form, a technical object is an analytical organization of elements: its theoretical and material constituents are treated as things apart, which must be actively put together in order to perform as a closed system. Because of technical requirements and economic constraints, these elements converge and adapt to one another, becoming unified by what will later be recognized as a principle of inner resonance (Simondon, 2017: 26). The gestures that used to be required for their assembly become fixed and crystallized into working structures (Simondon, 2017: 18). These developments establish what Simondon calls an associated milieu: a mediator that prevents the entity from being influenced by the external technical and natural environments (2017: 59). At the same time

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as it is formed by the entity, the associated milieu conditions its operation. This institutes a relationship of recurrent causality between the entity and its associated milieu. Within this framework, the entity acquires a larger degree of autonomy and starts to behave as an individual. The final stage of technical evolution is reached as different individuals congregate in a self-stabilized ensemble, within which their individuality is relative to one another. The ensemble stands as a network in relation of interconnection, and represents a level of progress in which technical reality becomes regulatory. In this emerging configuration, says Simondon, ‘the room is part of the complete apparatus’ (2017: 63). For him, this is the level in which the integration of technical reality into culture – ‘which is regulative in its essence’ (Simondon, 2017: 21) – has a greater chance of stability. By making the entity ‘entirely coherent within itself and entirely unified’ (Simondon, 2017: 29), technical genesis leads from an analytic to a synthetic order. The primitive, abstract object is clearly a physical translation of scientific notions and principles, focused on their applications. It may feel like a prototype. Concretization, conversely, makes the object seems natural, as if it were produced spontaneously. It no longer needs an effective exterior regulatory environment because the organization of its functioning systems effects their closure, thus enabling an increasing internal coherence (Simondon, 2017: 49). One of Simondon’s examples of choice is the modern engine, in which ‘each critical piece is so connected with the rest by reciprocal exchanges of energy that it cannot be other than it is’ (2017: 19). In other words, its different parts ‘know each other’ for what they are and work together accordingly. There is a specific place for each specific element in relation to the others. Their identities are predicated upon this system of positions. But the genesis is not always so clearly outlined. Often, it can only be grasped retroactively. Even though ‘the object is not anterior to its cominginto-being, but is present at each stage of its coming-into-being’ (Simondon, 2017: 26), it may be hard to get ahold of it before it has even reached the stage of an individual. When the Lumière brothers did the first presentations of their cinématographe in cafés, for instance, they saw it as a passing fad. Their creation was just one among the many opto-mechanical devices of their time. Like these other apparatus, the cinématographe’s individuality was partial to the context of popular entertainment in the French metropolis of the early modern era. The Lumières allegedly declared it to be ‘an invention without a future’ because they thought it would not appeal to the public for another season. But it did and, in a certain sense, it continues to appeal until today. The fact that we acknowledge the cinématographe as the origin

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of the medium of cinema means that the technical entity we conventionally recognize as cinema – the circuit underpinning our medial ideology – has evolved from the Lumières’s device, departing from what we now understand as the pre-cinematographic environment. From the vantage point of the present, it is possible to appreciate how cinema already existed in the abstract in the cinématographe. The Lumières’s device was an application of new theories at the time about perception in order to create the illusion of movement and to mesmerize the audience. Its functioning entailed a particular margin of indetermination that could explain why it unfolded in a full-fledged medium of its own, while other optical contraptions of that time did not. Similar precursors of cinema, such as Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope, often functioned as self-contained objects. This allowed them to operate frictionlessly in penny arcades, amusement fairs, and other venues dedicated to this kind of technological entertainment. The cinématographe, on the other hand, required special conditions of presentation, more fitting to a dark auditorium. Since there was no suitable place for it among the other optical toys and, initially, even less in regular theatres, it began by occupying improper venues such as cafés and old stores (Machado, 2002: 78). For the duration of film projection, the whole space around the device had to be rearranged in a particular way for it to work as intended. Both ambient lights and the flow of people through the environment had to be controlled. In the rudiments of movie theatre architecture, it is possible to see the how these operations began to crystallize in functioning structures. The projection booth configures an associated milieu continuous to the projector, enabling its uninterrupted operation as a screening apparatus. It disconnects the cinématographe from its former, makeshift circumstances and congeals it within a new environment, spawned from its own internal necessities. In the course of this process, the cinématographe is both dissociated from other moving-image systems and territorialized as a separate ensemble. Functions integral to the Lumiéres’s device – which worked as both camera and projector (Cubitt, 2004: 32) – are partitioned among many different, specialized apparatus. The output terminal is fixed in the screening venue while the input is made free to travel and capture the world. An intricate technical topography takes shape in-between and around this pair of devices: film studios, laboratories, distribution companies, and so on. Although it may seem external to the object, this topography is overall consequential to its becoming. As Simondon points out, ‘it is not the production-line that produces standardization, but rather intrinsic standardization that allows for the production-line to exist’ (2017: 29). Accordingly, functioning

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correspondences already existing in the cinématographe translate into the primitive standards governing early cinema infrastructures. The dissemination of these technical correspondences underpins the passage of the medium-to-be from a manual to an industrial regime (Simondon, 2017: 29). These operational rearrangements shape the medium’s identity by circumscribing our means of engagement with its physical substructures. This process is clearly illustrated by a pivotal moment in the history of photography. Back in 1888, Eastman Kodak Company introduced to the market the first box camera that employed roll film instead of photographic plates. This new feature made the device much more portable and practical than earlier models. Before, photographers were required to take care of developing pictures on their own. With this new system, Kodak offered to do it for them. Film costs included the development of negatives and the printing of pictures as services provided by the company. After all of the film exposures were used, customers just had to send the camera back to Kodak; a few days later, they would receive the developed pictures by mail, along with the returned camera, preloaded with new film. As a result, photographic practices assumed a different functioning logic, summarized in the slogan employed by Kodak to advertise the new apparatus: ‘you press the button, we do the rest’ (Sontag, 1979: 53). That means to say that the company undertook a series of processes pertaining to the production of photographic images, enabling photographers to focus on the emblematic point-and-shoot. The medium’s materiality is reframed accordingly: in consequence, photography was made an increasingly less chemical and progressively more scopic practice. This example shows how the concretization of a complex technical ensemble can be reified in particular objects and ways of doing. Later versions of the Kodak advertisement even used a slightly different slogan that ascribed to the roll film the total responsibility for the new operational conditions of photography (‘it does the rest’). But this is an obvious oversimplification. The film does not work alone. For it to be able to do anything, the company had to perform a complete rearrangement of the medium’s underpinnings. Besides redesigning the internal mechanism of the camera, Kodak had to deploy a large logistic infrastructure able to receive the devices from customers, process their film negatives, and send the pictures back by mail. (Not to mention the creation of advertisements meant to promote these changes without necessarily making them explicit.) In short, the roll film did not do any of the ‘rest’. The fact that it stood as a proxy of the new developments in photography is less of a cause than an effect of these same developments. Film’s metonymical individuality, insofar as it conveys the concretization of

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photography as a medial practice, is partial to the evolution of the medium as a technical entity. Something similar takes place in the becoming of cinema. New modes of operating and understanding the medium are constituted under the terms of its spatial reorganization. Systemic functions are redistributed into compatible units in order to achieve growing functional synergies, which seem like an aspect of simplification (Sontag, 1979: 38). From the presentation of the cinématographe in cafés, we move on to film projection in nickelodeons, and finally to bare moviegoing. This rearticulation of the entity in an increasingly abstract way denotes its growing separation from external environments, as effected by its associated milieu. Furthermore, it is also a sign of how the entity feels increasingly natural in the course of its genesis. The more concrete it becomes, the more cinema seems to conform to an autonomous, technical reality of its own. A medial reality. As the medium unfolds, some apparatus are foregrounded as expressive, while others are suppressed from direct engagement. The streamlining of technical operations within the associated milieu, in the same way that it delimits a field of activities particular to the medium, presents some of its physical aspects as essential or meaningful, while deeming others contingent. Lo and behold: cinema as we know it. Elements such as the screen and the camera stick out, offering themselves to our senses. Others, notably the projector, are subtracted from the contact with the general public. Contrary to what it may seem, this interplay of presences is not indicative of which parts of the ensemble are more relevant to its functioning. Rather, it is simply how the entity is organized in order to function. The capacity for action of the screen and the camera is grounded on the seeming passivity of the projector. The fact that we acknowledge the former as sites of cinematographic creativity and the latter as a neutral information carrier suggests an epistemic cleavage that bears further examination. It is as if the concretization of the medium effected a closure: while some elements are available for the public to manipulate, question, and engage with, others appear as an impassive horizon that cannot be crossed. This could very well explain the invisibility of what Jean-Louis Comolli has called the invisible side of cinema (1985: 745). The negative spaces within the circuit encompass those interactions that allow for cinema’s technical individuation but do not necessarily represent it. Even though they must be there for the medium to work as intended, they are not admitted to take part of conventional media operations. In that sense, to step into the cinema infrastructure paradoxically feels like to move out of cinema proper.

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Aligning medium specificities Even though the concretization of cinema makes it feel increasingly organic, the process leading to it only underscores the artificiality of the medium’s design. That which is conventionally understood as cinema’s essential components is not the immediate expression of these objects’ physical attributes, but rather their engineered functions. The material aggregate of cinema presents itself to its public in the guise of apparatus consistent with its becoming. When we refer to the materiality of the medium, we often speak of those technological affordances that are instrumental to the established media operations. For example, the capacity of film to capture light, or that of the blinking shutter to produce the illusion of movement. We rarely consider other features of the same devices that, as characteristic as they may be, do not serve the medium’s technical functioning in any obvious way. More importantly, we overlook where those affordances come from and how they actually circumscribe the meaning and value of cinematographic practices. Colour film is a poignant case. The chemical reactions that enable it to work are not readily available in nature, nor could they be directly appropriated from colour photography. Brian Winston (1996) reports that their invention was a deliberate effort that took almost four decades. Film studios spent all those years not simply looking for a solution that would enable colour film to operate under the short exposure time of the cinematographic camera, they were also seeking a means to capture and reproduce Caucasian skin tones in particular. The culminating release of Kodachrome film stock in 1935 accomplished this objective, crystallizing Hollywood’s racial bias in the medium. Once it came into being, the film was a material fact conditioning cinematographic work. The reasons behind its creation became part of a technological unconscious underlying the programme of filmmaking apparatus. Filmmakers were not in the position to manipulate the standards that colour film embodied directly. They had to deal with these standards within the limits provided by their professional devices. That does not mean to say that it was impossible to dispute the material conditions of filmmaking practices. Only that, for filmmakers, it would be un-cinematographic to do so. Aware of the medium´s shortcomings, they could even attempt a boycott of the industry, or try to devise alternative chemical development processes themselves. These solutions would, however, get them involved with supposedly menial tasks, from which they had been relieved by the evolution of motion-picture technologies. It was a state of affairs going against the grain of cinema’s individuation. In doing

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so, filmmakers would essentially be refusing the autonomy accrued by the practice of filmmaking within the technical organization of the medium. In his analysis of digital inscription, Matthew Kirschenbaum makes a distinction between formal and forensic materiality. These are modes of characterizing the constitution of a system respectively as a product and as a process. Formal materiality is ‘an abstract projection supported and sustained by its capacity to propagate the illusion (or call it a working model) of behaviour’ (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 11). In other words, it is how material the system feels during its operation. Forensic materiality, on the other hand, is that which ‘rests upon the potential for individualization inherent in matter’ (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 11). It is therefore a way of addressing the system’s actual physical substance. By establishing objective means for the medium to respond to our pre-programmed operations, the technical topography of cinema seems to provide common denominators for its formal materiality. From the conventional perspective allowed by the medium’s individuation, this is the materiality that matters. It is the one against which the filmmakers attempt when overstepping the place assigned for them within the medial apparatus. The fact that this formal materiality cannot be trusted as an inherent indicator of medium specif icity does not signify that the limits that it represents are any less real. Attempts to engage with the medium on a forensic level are never completely free of restraints. Stan Brakhage is one of the best known artists to reject film’s capacity for capturing optical information and to use it as a flat surface for the deposition of solids instead. In his famous Mothlight (1963), he sticks real insect bodies and dried leaves directly onto the filmstrip. The result looks like an abstract animation of painterly qualities, which at once subverts the formal organization of the medium and foregrounds some of its suppressed affordances. Yet, one cannot ignore the fact that the work must still be enacted in order to appear. It is the projector mechanism that subdivides the continuous mass of plastered detritus into a sequence of frames and presents them in the guise of a movie. In that sense, no matter how far the filmmaker may stray from medial operations, she must nevertheless conform to the circuit on some standard level. Otherwise, the work will not be able to circulate. When D. N. Rodowick (2007) speaks of the virtual life of film, he refers to the way the medium may subsist due to the reincarnation of its (formal) materiality into another (forensic) body. His explanation relies on the concept of automatisms first devised by Stanley Cavell. Automatisms are the operations that ‘circumscribe practice, setting the conditions for creative agency and the artistic process’ (Cavell, 1979: 43). For Cavell, any medium is

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a collection of automatisms in continuous self-transformation. New operations arise from one another, as creative acts are serialized and integrated into a set. Together, automatisms cement the tradition which underpins the medium and provides the context for cinematographic works to exist. Everything that is made through a medium’s automatisms ‘is assured of a place in that tradition’, regardless of any other factors – including, one can suppose, its physical constitution (Cavell, 1979: 104). The virtual life of f ilm describes cinema functioning less as based on individual elements than on the processes mobilizing them. Medial practices such as ‘filmmaking’ seem to trace lines of continuity across different reorganizations of the medium. From this perspective, technical concretization feels like the refinement of particular signifying strategies. The development of cinema technology, built upon automatisms inherited from previous photographic and projective devices, allows for improved modes of sensorial, narrative, and metalinguistic expression. New operations arise in order to advance traditional practices while conforming them to the emerging technical configurations. In the course of this process, the engagement with actual physical components becomes increasingly formalized. Embedded in automatisms, film is turned into an operational abstraction. It is something filmmakers can affect without even having to come close to the physical medium, by the means of a complex chain of command going through human and nonhuman actors. Filmmaking therefore develops into a largely notational undertaking, whose technical actualization may be entirely delegated to subaltern functionaries, be they employees or machines. Spectatorship has been subjected to a similar specialization. We have come a long way from the experience of the cinématographe. In light of the multiple modalities of movie consumption available in the 21st century, the spectacle of the Lumiéres’s device seems rather rudimentary. All it entailed was direct contact with the mechanism. The cinématographe was its own special effect – the medium was more literally the message. Its novelty was enough of a driver for the audience’s diffuse attention. Throughout cinema’s individuation, however, user operations have been increasingly sophisticated. Contemporary moviegoing is a highly codified behaviour. On the one hand, a series of learned bodily transactions is required to abide by cinema’s particular display conditions. To watch even the most superficial blockbuster, the public must master a range of cultural techniques. Activities such as turning off mobile phones and locating the emergency exits may score low on this hierarchy, but they are still theoretically required for accessing the medium. A correspondingly intricate cognitive regime comes

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along with these transformations. To discern the singularities of the work from the commonalities of the underlying mechanisms depends upon an awareness going beyond the immediate apparatus. The public needs to apprehend genre, format, and channel conventions in order to cope with the material formalization of the medium. Otherwise, it is impossible to decipher the symbolic implications of certain physical procedures properly. The examination of these medial practices shows how, even before having been superseded by digital imaging, film already led a virtual life. By systematizing the medium in a set of formal conventions, technical concretization displaces it from a specific substance. ‘Film’ therefore represents less the physical imperative of the cinematographic work than a particular mode of appearance and engagement with the moving image, which both affects and is affected by other technical systems. This relational condition is emphasized by the existence of alternative technological configurations for the movie. When commercial TV first appeared in the USA, in the 1950s, it seized some of the features defining film, notably the image aspect ratio. By that time, studio productions almost exclusively employed a 4:3 frame. This format had been popular since the silent film era, and became a standard under the North-American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in the early 1930s. Its translation into the new medium gestured towards the prospect of rearranging cinema on different material underpinnings. It had, however, a contradictory effect. As the academy aspect ratio spread through domestic settings, film was turned into a site marked by other characteristics. Early competition with the TV intensified some of the features that would later be considered intrinsic to cinema (Greenberg, 2008: 138). Aspects such as collective viewing, higher fidelity, larger scale, and earlier access became the basis upon which the medium distanced and defined itself in relation to video. Thereupon, the film industry adopted increasingly wide-screen formats, which intensified spatial immersion and realism (Friedberg, 2006: 133). A work such as Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight fits the category of ‘film’ not simply by virtue of being made with actual film, but mostly because, in spite of its exotic manufacture, it largely complies with the formal conventions of cinema. These conventions become clearer upon the examination of other similarly experimental movies that are not equally amenable to the standards of film circulation. Paul Sharits’s Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976), for instance, is filmic in many ways that Mothlight is not. It is not, however, able to pass through the bottleneck of automatisms comprising the medium with the same ease as Mothlight. For this work, Sharits appropriated 16mm black-and-white footage from medical studies depicting two patients suffering from epileptic convulsions. Using an optical printer, he interweaved

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these scenes with patterns of rapidly flashing colours, which were meant to reproduce the rhythm of the patients’ brainwaves and provide the viewers with an impression of the convulsive experience in their own bodies. The movie is split in two simultaneous projections, one above the other, on a narrow, cornered screen. The surrounding walls are covered in reflective paint in order to amplify the flickering effect. From this description, it should be clear where Epileptic Seizure Comparison deviates from the cinematographic tradition. Even though Sharits’s work draws on some of the most basic filmic operations, it also employs others that do not quite fit the medium. The way it mobilizes projection requires a disarrangement of the functional synergies that constitute the associated milieu of film screening. The work cannot therefore appear within the places left in the circuit for any one movie; it must create a particular place for itself. In doing so, it provokes a situation incompatible with other cinematographic works, dividing the medium against itself. This agonistic condition partially dissociates Epileptic Seizure Comparison from cinema and inscribes it in a broader field of art installations. Unable to cause a complete rearrangement of the medium, the very work must be rearranged in order to belong. When it is screened in traditional cinematographic settings, the two reels of Epileptic Seizure Comparison are usually projected in sequence, one after the other. A title screen shown beforehand clarifies the fact that this is but a single-channel version of the piece. Mothlight is an example of how new creative acts might add to the medium’s tradition, broadening its potential f ield of expression. Brakhage’s experimental film stands not only as a reference to a filmmaking technique, but also as a prescription for other similar movies to circulate within cinematographic settings. Epileptic Seizure Comparison, on the other hand, better demonstrates how automatisms deriving from a medium may originate another (Rodowick, 2007: 45). Being unable to expand cinema, the work becomes in itself a form of expanded cinema. In this rather generic category, it joins other pieces that employ multiple projections and are more likely to be shown in a museum or art gallery than in a movie theatre. An agnostic perspective of media technology calls for an examination of this separation between emerging medial practices. Cinema seems, at first, opposite to both of them, since both equally interfere with the synergetic group of functions constituting the systems of movie circulation. The reason why some processes can be incorporated into the medium while others are cast aside can be associated with the ways they align with the infrastructures resulting from technical individuation. The mobile f ilmstrip, singular to each work, is accessible and compliant in ways that a fixed projector,

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common to all of them, is not. Practices that operate within the filmstrip are therefore easier to accommodate in the medium’s tradition than those that reach beyond it and mess with projection. The specificities of cinema thus develop in a differential way. Technical individuation entails the distribution of automatisms either within or without the medium. The former amplify its functioning; the latter constitute opposing fields that absorb agonistic operations, thereby preventing the medium from dissociating from itself. The resulting set of formal conventions dictates both what cinema is and what cinema is not. Transformations of shared media infrastructure transpires in a similar, albeit simultaneously more radical and nuanced form. Most fall within what Simondon denominates the minor and continuous improvements of technical progress (2017: 40). These changes facilitate the connection among the different units constituting the object without necessarily reorganizing the way these units interrelate. As an example, Simondon mentions the development of self-lubricating bearings that reduced the friction between different parts of an engine, making it run smoothly (2017: 42). In cinema, a similar improvement would consist less of the creation of new medial practices than of upgraded devices. Faster lenses, higher-resolution sensors, and more efficient codecs that can substitute already existing mechanisms without changing their functions relative to one another. They lubricate movie circulation in the sense that they unblock and accelerate the inscription, transmission, and display of visual information, while largely preserving the formal conventions of the medium. This might be the moment to undo the impression that the becoming is a teleological process, through which cinema turns into what it was always meant to be. The formal coherence streamlining cinematographic operations was not outset by the cinématographe. Rather, it continuously emerges from the development of the functioning synergies that individuate the medium as a technical entity. While abstract, the entity ‘comes after knowledge, and cannot teach anything’ (Simondon, 2017: 49). The more concrete it gets, however, the more it becomes a source of knowledge in itself. The stage of technical concretization currently attained by cinema entails a substantial discursive dimension through which its subjects make sense of the medium. Its historical density, with parameters both past and future, likewise stems from this development. To speak in terms of ‘pre-cinematographic’ and ‘post-cinematographic’ media means to recognize cinema not only as a set of norms for the evaluation and design of its own elements, but also as a criterion of identity so stable it can be cast into other systems. Cinema is not simply the world viewed, but also a worldview.

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In that context, the cinématographe stands less as an engine still driving cinema individuation onwards than as a paradigm to which the medium’s discursive field repeatedly resorts. ‘Paradigm’ is used here in the epistemic sense given by Thomas Kuhn. In his work about the structure of scientific revolutions, Kuhn defines paradigms as ‘universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners’ (1996: x). In short, paradigms consist of successful historical experiments that become a frame of reference for understanding how the world works. As a self-centred practice often confined to laboratories, science needs such models to gain a solid footing in reality. A paradigm gives shape to a scientific community by establishing a set of shared rules and values that govern its routines as well as by informing its worldview (Kuhn, 1996: 10). In that sense, to adhere to a professional sphere of science and to employ its particular methodological toolbox means to be tied to certain metaphysics inferred from its paradigm. While performing everyday tasks, science professionals must commit to a number of assumptions sustaining their field of work, concerning topics such as what sort of entities the universe contains and what the fundamental explanations about it should be like (Kuhn, 1996: 41). Whether consciously or not, normal science both benefits from and substantiates this ontological stability. Much of its success comes from the efforts of professional scientists to protect the worldview inferred from the paradigm (Kuhn, 1996: 5). Elements such as the cinématographe, film, and even the projection screen perform a similar connection between the pragmatics of media technology and the metaphysics of medial ideology. The formalization of material conventions may allow for the processes of cinematographic production, distribution, and exhibition to forgo these elements. Nevertheless, the idea of them lingers and takes a central role within the meta-apparatus that manages the growing complexity of the technical ensemble. Paradigms supply common parameters for equipment companies, regulatory agencies, and schooling institutions. They inform the creation of new cinematographic devices, the updating of old ones, and the training of functionaries such as filmmakers and critics in their professional affairs. Through them, the medium is articulated in a disciplinary field meant to preserve and reproduce its basic functioning. The workings of this epistemological machine, bred from the technical evolution of cinema, are not restricted to film and screen courses and the grey literature concerning the medium. They impregnate everyday practices, at once enabling the engagement with cinema and constraining its continuing specification. Emerging features and operations, regardless of how efficient they may be, remain ‘unrelated and unrelatable’

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to the field unless they are consistent with the paradigm (Kuhn, 1996: 35). Any interaction that strays too far from these determinations is ‘rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline, or sometimes too problematic to be worth the time’ (Kuhn, 1996: 37). Thereby, paradigms finetune the alignment between technical synergies and medium specificities, normalizing the differential character of cinema.

Shifting paradigms The technical genesis of cinema simultaneously streamlines its functioning and consolidates its identity. Growing technical synergies create an associated milieu enabling the medium to perform unaffected by external circumstances. This process unfolds into an operational topography that formalizes cinema’s material conventions, supplying it with increasing organicity. The ensuing media configuration, which can be more clearly appreciated from particular normative instances, is actualized in every engagement with the medium. Emerging technologies are continuously aligned in accordance to this structure, depurating the ‘cinematographic’ apart from other cultural systems. But technical evolution is not entirely straightforward. In spite of the buffer created by the associated milieu, the medium cannot exist in complete, self-driven isolation. The contact with other systems may disrupt the terms of its individuation, as exemplified by the transformation of cinema standards caused by the competition with video. These rearrangements do not fall under the category of minor and continuous improvements mentioned before. According to Simondon, minor improvements merely diminish the harmful effects of residual oppositions within the system, preserving its overall organization (2017: 42). They therefore do not alter the entity’s unity, individuality, or specificity in any substantial way. On the contrary, by masking the technical object’s ‘true imperfections’, minor improvements actually prevent further synergetic couplings and deter its concretization (Simondon, 2017: 42). The evidences of the system’s shortcomings bring about another kind of advancement, which Simondon characterizes as major and discontinuous. Major, because it ultimately increases the object’s functioning synergies in an essential manner. Discontinuous, because it is based on an interruption of those same synergies in the first place. For a major and discontinuous improvement to take place, ‘what was once an obstacle must become the means of realization’ (Simondon, 2017: 32-33). Video, a technology that could have entirely subsumed film’s capacity for

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capturing and reproducing moving images, becomes another instrument for cinema. Instead of taking over the primary channels of movie circulation, video is integrated into the medium as a set of supplementary enhancement systems. Devices such as the video assist, the chroma key, and the home tape grant increased control over cinematographic works (Machado, 1988). A greater stratification of the circuit allows for the accommodation of these new mechanisms within medial operations, resulting in a more precise and economic functioning of the medium. Initial antagonisms are resolved by rearranging the boundaries among process of production, distribution, and exhibition. Once the emerging technology is firmly localized in relation to legacy operations, what used to feel like an ontological tension turns into the march of historical progress. Through the epistemological mechanisms of the improved ensemble, the discontinuity caused by video is made coherent. Cinema consequently achieves further concretization. In hindsight, it may be difficult to grasp the idea that electronic video, with its low resolution and poor luminance, may pose any threat to the expressive order constituted by cinema. As a weaker medium, it is natural for video to perform secondary roles in the processes of movie circulation. The ancillary forms it takes within the cinematographic circuit seem therefore appropriate. However, it must be noted how partial this perspective is to technological development. The terms of comparison upon which it is based are not universal, but historical. They derive from the cinema we now have, in which film has prevailed. That means to say that we are reasoning the medium with a mind-set likewise produced by its individuation. Video feels naturally ‘weaker’, in spite of the many ways in which it excels over film, because that is how our understanding of both has been wired a posteriori. On the brink of a major and discontinuous improvement, however, cinema does not seem so consistent. A sensation of ontological uncertainty permeates recent memories concerning the digitization of film. Kuhn’s approach to scientific progress enables us to take a step back and understand the crisis in which computational media simultaneously cast cinematographic practices and the field of film and screen studies. Normal science, he says, is a puzzlesolving enterprise; experiments always depend on ‘the assured existence of a solution’ (Kuhn, 1996: 37). Bound to the directives of a paradigm, science ‘does not aim on novelties’ and ‘when successful, it finds none’ (Kuhn, 1996: 52). Everyday medial operations are the same. Even the most inventive functionaries must work within the limits set by their apparatus. They do not seek to improve on the formal conventions of the medium. Conversely, they rely on these conventions in order to perform their work. And just like normal science drives professional scientists from questioning their field’s

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paradigm, so the minor improvements resulting from this technological state of affairs prevent the medium from any fundamental transformation. Both normal science and medial practices entail a self-absorbing loop that can only be breached by a total rearrangement of systemic possibilities. In terms of scientific progress, the equivalent of a major and discontinuous improvement would be a revolution, which causes the complete transition from one paradigm to another (Kuhn, 1996: 12). A revolution has a critical effect on a scientific field: it simultaneously modifies how the field understands itself, transforms the perception of its own history, and rebuilds the professional commitments of its participants. The examination of this process may indicate how the discontinuity of cinema’s evolution feels from the standpoint of its users. Contrary to what the myth of scientific discovery says, a paradigm shift does not happen at once, in a fleeting ‘eureka moment’. It is rather a long-term development effected by the slow accumulation of anomalies. Anomalies consist of unintended results of scientific experiments that violate the expectations ‘implicit in the design and interpretation of established procedures’ (Kuhn, 1996: 59). In doing so, they contradict edicts stemming from the paradigm and therefore expose its shortcomings. A similar violation of medial ideology is caused by emerging interactions that enable a more efficient performance of the medium’s formal conventions. The early use of peer-to-peer file sharing for film distribution, for example, demonstrated already in the 2000s how computer networks could supply a better means for movie circulation than the established apparatus. Such displacement of the elements encapsulated within cinema’s associated milieu discloses the arbitrary character of the medium’s technological configuration. Recurring anomalies lead to a crisis: a situation in which ‘the existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created’ (Kuhn, 1996: 92). The scientific community can no longer preserve the norms upon which it is based, and the legitimacy of normal practices is put into question. This epistemic disarray opens space for a wide range of ‘speculation and tentative hypothesis’ in search of a new paradigm able to conform anomalies and rehabilitate the field (Kuhn, 1996: 61). In order to acknowledge fully the disorder of this transition in the medium, one has to look beyond official initiatives seeking to define ‘digital film’. Apparatus such as the film industry and academia represent the last bastion of resistance of cinematographic conventions. Their role is mostly reactive. The crisis of medial ideology begins within everyday practices. Unconventional ways to perform movie circulation enter into competition with the authorized channels. Their procreation establishes

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oppositional arrangements within the circuit, challenging traditional aspects of medium specificity. Ultimately, the dispute between viable paradigms takes place in a discursive sphere. From a latent hegemonic perspective, these new technological arrangements do not belong in cinema. They rather consist of interventions of another order. The example of peer-to-peer file sharing is once again illustrative. Before it is even possible to consider it as a proper means of film distribution, one must deal with file sharing in the condition of piracy – a degeneration of the medium in the aesthetic, economic, and even moral sense. A more considerate approach to these anomalous operations could draw from Michael Warner’s work on counterpublics. In any given public sphere, counterpublics are those collective subjects whose ‘exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to power’ (Warner, 2002: 56). Counterpublics are thus defined by their tension in relation to the predominant public. Emerging counter-apparatus distend the medium in a similar manner. Even though they operate against the technological hierarchies underpinning the cinematographic status quo, they do not refuse to take part in the medium. Quite the contrary: insofar as they seek to displace medial norms in order to accommodate new technologies, counterapparatus are essentially propositional. In that sense, pirate cinemas could be seen as more than illegal reactions to the socioeconomic constraints of film distribution. They express an attempt at another cinema. The multiplication of such initiatives characterizes the crisis as a highly inconsistent occasion. Just as normal science must first be fractured in order to accept anomalies, so the cinematographic circuit must be thoroughly disarranged in order to assimilate emerging interactions. Apparatus must be liquefied before crystallizing anew. The normally suppressed processes of specification come to the fore, exposing the invisible side of the medium. It is as if cinema has been deindividuated. The medium’s conventional means of understanding, equally subject to this process, lack reliable parameters to make sense of it. In these transitional states of birth and decay, Walter Benjamin believed that social forms and technological processes would come closer to their Messianic dimension (apud Krauss, 1999: 41). The moment when a medium first appears, as well as when it is about to come to an end, are the moments when all of its capacities are conceivable. We are briefly allowed a double focus that ‘illuminates both industrial nature’s utopian potential and, simultaneously, the betrayal of that potential’ (Buck-Morss, 1991: 245). But it suffices for a new paradigm to prevail for the system to coalesce again. In the aftermath of a revolution, a new epistemic order emerges as the natural heir of the outdated one. Anomalies that once put the medium at

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risk become fully integrated into the circuit. The time of crisis is rationalized within the march of progress. Every cinema that seemed possible is now seen as a stepping stone that had to be overcome for the ultimate concretization of an improved medium. Retroactively, the use of file sharing for film distribution is regarded as a primitive way to improvise operations that only could be fully realized by platforms such as video-on-demand. After the fact, digital cinema becomes a redundancy. Once computer networks are properly localized within the medium, all that is left is cinema, the same as before. The film may no longer be, and yet it persists. Such is the prerogative of history. As soon as the messianic promise of a revolution is accomplished, it is promptly secularized, ‘marking human time without fulfilling it’ (Buck-Morss, 1991: 242). The extraordinary possibilities that were once available during the ‘revolutionary now-time’ become lost. On the surface, the medium seems to have barely changed. The formal conventions governing the public engagement with movie circulation are mostly the same, and the old apparatus can be recognized without any difficulty. Tradition eases different stages of technical evolution in a consistent narrative of becoming. Past an initial period of technological amazement, filmmakers and critics are back to their habitual tasks. But cinema is indeed other, even though it may not appear. Most disparities are secluded within the machine, hidden in the associated milieus we hardly access. The absence of film is disguised by the streamlining of processes performing the screening. Computer servers run smoothly in the projection booth. Rich audiovisual data arrives via an encrypted Internet connection or hard drive, and is deployed through high-resolution outputs. Trained functionaries oversee all of these operations so that the movie appears intact. Most of the audience will never know that DCP projectors run on operational systems similar to the ones they use on their own personal computers (De Luca, 2005: 159). It is very telling that, more than three decades after Comolli’s essay, the visible cinema remains pretty much identical. Apart from the growing attention given to spatial compositing and special effects (see, for instance, Rodowick, 2007: 6), cameras and screens are still the main devices that represent cinematographic practices. In the meantime, a lot has been added to the invisible cinema, in the form of a robust and multifaceted circulation infrastructure. Ancillary channels, release windows, copyright licenses, data encryption, video codecs, and promotional campaigns are some of the elements comprising this ecosystem. These components dictate important aspects of the movie business and are invariably considered relevant to the medium. Regardless, they are not considered relevant as the medium.

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Technical genesis removes them from the cinematographic public’s direct concerns. Conventional operations are preserved at the expense of such displacements. Cinematographic apparatus, including those pertaining to the film industry and academia at large, are as much of a cause as a continuing consequence of this systematization of processes. Throughout the medium’s concretization, its invisible side absorbs the bulk of technological transformations. While cinema becomes increasingly homogenous, its infrastructural underbelly grows in complexity and diversity. So-called ‘multimedia’ and ‘transmedia’ processes take place within the circuit and even predate the single medium. They exist prior to the individuation separating dynamics of specification from accessible medial operations. What do not exist are epistemic parameters enabling their classification one way or another. The becoming of cinema is the production of such discursive framework. Before ‘proper’ digital cinema, there were peer-to-peer networks, codec packs, subtitling communities, and so on and so forth. Afterwards, there is only film distribution and exhibition, which must comply with the appropriate standards. The suppressed technologies are deemed circumstantial: a structural burden that must abide by the formal conventions governing cinematographic works. Any particular expressive potential they could have is denied within the medium and must be cast into other fields. The becoming of cinema as a technical entity is exclusive as it is cumulative. The fractal boundaries of the circuit rationalize technological change simultaneously within and without the medium. The entitled positions and modes of knowing circumscribed by cinema’s individuation cannot take this differential constitution completely into account. In order to grasp the medium in its entirety, one must refuse its categorical separation from other fields and seek to understand it ‘in the light of the openness promised by early film’ (Krauss, 1999: 44). Some of the processes underpinning movie circulation can only be appreciated from sites apparently external to it. An unbound exploration of the invisible side of the cinematographic work may take us through government agencies, software companies, darknet forums, courts of law, and university yards. In these negatives spaces, the movie is put under the perspective of the vulgar components that have been left out of it. Therefore, the medium may reconcile with all of its alternative configurations – the cinemas that have been despised, forgotten, or isolated in ‘expanded’ fields of their own.

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Bibliography / works cited Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991). Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (London: Harvard University, 1979). Comolli, Jean-Louis, ‘Machines of the visible’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 3rd edition, ed. G. Mast and M. Cohen (New York City: Oxford University, 1985), 741-760. De Luca, Luiz, Cinema Digital: Um Novo Cinema? (São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial, 2005). Friedberg, Anne, The Virtual Window from Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006). Greenberg, Joshua, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008). Kirschenbaum, Matthew, Mechanisms: New Media and Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008). Krauss, Rosalind, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1996). Machado, Arlindo, Pré-Cinemas e Pós-Cinemas, 2nd edition (São Paulo: Papirus, 2002). Rodowick, D.N., The Virtual Life of Film (London: Harvard University, 2007). Simondon, Gilbert, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2017). Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York City: Zone Books, 2002). Winston, Brian, Technologies of Seeing: Photograph, Cinematography and Television (London: BFI, 1996). Epileptic Seizure Comparison, Paul Sharits, 1976. Mothlight, Stan Brakhage, 1963.

3.

Projection Studies Abstract This chapter proposes a practice-based solution to the shortcomings of more traditional screen studies in dealing with the technical genesis of cinema. It acknowledges the material situatedness of research practices and encourages the exercise of their inherent curatorial dimensions. Furthermore, the chapter underscores the advantages of an exhibition over a text as a means to share research results, pointing to the way it rearranges elements within the circuit (even if temporarily). It concludes with a call for researchers to perform critical experiments of media museography as a way to intervene in the becoming of cinema. Keywords: Practice-led research, curatorial knowledge, ontography, anecdotal evidence, media museography

The negative spaces within the circuit comprise a considerable part of the socio-technical processes relevant to movie circulation. They also constitute an associated milieu that makes room for the continuing individuation of cinema. By accommodating the bulk of technological development, they allow for the preservation of the formal conventions of the medium in spite of its physical transformations. Nevertheless, they remain largely excluded from the concerns of film and screen studies. They constitute an invisible side of cinema precisely because they are blind spots in our conventional ways of understanding the medium. Similar to other medial frameworks, the body of disciplines traditionally dedicated to the critical analysis of cinema occupies a fixed position within its circuit. The stratification of the medium defines a field of activities for them just as it does for other practices. Research is therefore circumscribed to the boundaries of its own apparatus, shying away from any deeper engagement with the topography of the medium. As such, it not only takes the technical synergies of the circuit for granted, but also contributes to

Menotti, G., Movie Circuits. Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789089648907_ch03

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their reinforcement. Most parts of the cinematographic work that it can illuminate are those already under the light. The digitization of film threw film and screen studies into a crisis not only because it obliterated its object; it also provoked the complete disarrangement of the technical ensemble from which the discipline borrowed its coherence and legitimacy. In doing so, it made the discipline’s epistemological deficiencies too apparent. However, that moment of vulnerability did not last. The scientific revolution, once resolved, erases its traces (Kuhn, 1996: 137) and establishes conventions anew (Kuhn, 1996: 144). The discipline that survived the discontinuous improvement of the circuit is precisely the one that complied with it, readjusting itself to the new medial paradigms. It changed along with its object so that its shortcomings could not be perceived. Its object could therefore remain film and screen, even though it had never literally been either of them. It is very telling that the projection mechanisms that intermediate these two components go unmentioned in the name of the discipline. It implies that the channels in-between moving image inputs and outputs are removed from film and screen studies’ main concerns. As Matthew Kirschenbaum already remarked, screen essentialism is a ‘logical consequence of a medial ideology that shuns the inscriptive act’ (2008: 43). The prevailing bias towards display technologies afflicting the medium reduces the appearance of the image to an abstract phenomenon (‘the imaginary signifier’), making the denial of the projector integral to research as it is for the cinematographic experience. It is as if the movie circulated unaffected by its physical circumstances, and should be interpreted in spite of them, as a metaphysical text. The hermeneutic depth allowed by the close reading of this film text stands in sharp contrast to the shallow attention this reading dedicates to the movie’s performative materiality. Movie circuits do not open themselves up to the means of understanding promoted by its institutionalized disciplines. The conventional methodologies dealing with cinema preserve rather than challenge the formal conventions obfuscating the medium’s genesis. They are concerned not with the underlying processes of circulation, but with what Friedrich Kittler (1999: 1) has called the ‘surface effects’ of media. Even the most rigorous responses to the emergence of digital cinema from film and screen studies could not easily escape these constraints. On one hand, there are authorial premises seeking to delineate and improve movie production as an autonomous practice; on the other, there are critical theories addressing media apparatus as a fixed landscape of consumption, external to both its public and its materials. In-between them, there is clearly missing a framework able to

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engage with movie circuits and circulation. A discipline metaphorically based neither upon the optical film nor the visual screen, but rather upon the mechanical projector. In order to see through medial ideology, one has to overcome the dichotomy between cinema’s epistemic order and the inner workings of its technology. Theory making has to be recognized as an embodied medial practice. In this chapter, I propose doing so by simultaneously infiltrating cinema’s infrastructure and sidestepping its paradigms. This twofold movement means to provoke forms of sudden encounter with the medium’s apparatus, bordering the accidental, as well as to encourage a contentious relation with its established disciplines. The ambivalent position of the projectionist, cinema’s quintessential functionary, becomes a cornerstone for modes of inquiry that are at the same time situated, materially engaged, and reflexive. This position urges us to exchange hermeneutic depth by systemic depth. To be a projectionist is to engage not in interpretations that will resolve the cinematographic work, but rather in interactions that might disclose its complexity.

Provocative methods against elusive objects Cinema’s conventional apparatus provides an insufficient horizon for the understanding of the medium’s technical reality. Inasmuch as it may seem like an external condition enabling the flows of circulation, the apparatus is likewise an effect of these flows. It emerges from the phenomenological experience of cinema along with the movie: an abstract presence asserted in the background, at the expense of many others. It is a notion bound to the same medial mind-set that denies the actual circumstances of engagement with the circuit. The apparatus’ physical constitution is understood primarily in terms of what it is programmed to do. In that sense, it exists not as the cause, but rather as a by-product of technical genesis, subordinated to the modulation between visible and invisible processes within the medium. In order to get into the negative spaces of cinema, it is necessary to overcome this medial notion of apparatus and reach into its underlying circumstances. Our comprehensive approach to the cinematographic circuit could profit from Siegfried Zielinski’s earlier attempt to situate modern media in the broad history of audiovisions (1999). His work pioneered in integrating different forms of audiovisual expression under the same framework regardless of their material underpinnings. In order to account fully for the complexity of apparatus, Zielinski turns to the French term dispositif,

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as originally employed by Michel Foucault. In doing so, he seeks to move beyond isolated devices and encompass the total culture-industrial arrangements in which audiovisual discourses are reified. For Zielinski, a dispositif represents the historical concretion of ‘the entire range of praxes in which […] the illusion of the perception of movement […] is planned, produced, commented on, and appreciated’ (1999: 18). In his book from 1999, he identified four such constellations: the heterogeneous ensemble of picture machines (commonly regarded as pre-cinematic devices); cinema; television; and the complex construction kit of ‘advanced audiovision’ (gesturing towards computer-based media). Even though these examples might suggest a chronological progression based on purely technological determinations, what Zielinski meant to achieve was precisely the opposite. Instead of accepting the dominant formations of audiovision for granted, he aimed at demonstrating how they are shaped on equal terms by cultural, technical, and subjective influences. Their infrastructures do not consist of self-sufficient systems isolated from a broader reality, but rather ones that ‘[overlap] with other specialist discourses and partial praxes of society’ (Zielinski, 1999: 19). By trading the apparatus for the dispositif, our analysis exchanges Vilém Flusser’s hierarchy of meta-programmes for a more fluid network between cinema and other spheres of human and nonhuman activity. This heuristic sleight of hand brings us closer to the medium’s deindividuated condition. We get a glimpse of what cinema is when and where it is not fully discernible from areas such as architecture, transportation, the avant-garde, or whatever. In this rudimentary state, operations and devices conventionally contained within one field mingle indiscriminately with those of others. By putting their relations before their identities – multimedia interactions before medium specificities –, we subvert the conventional hierarchy of epistemological categories. For the lack of proper words to decipher this mess, we must first address the way it takes place before us, engaging in a sort of holistic survey. Zielinski sees this as an opportunity to seek fractures and fissures in hegemonic arrangements of audiovision in order to ‘bring out private relations which led to this type of hegemony’ (1999: 20). This flat approach could be similarly useful for navigating the fractality of the cinematographic circuit. Instead of being conditioned by generic notions about what concerns the movie, one may seek to unpack the cinematographic work’s actual constitution from the circumstances of its encounter. All of the processes relevant to the work continuing circulation should be traced whether or not they coincide with the expected medial operations. Having done so,

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one can identify to what extent the object is embedded in the common structures of the circuit as well as how it differs from them. This may serve as an indicator of the movie’s technical originality. Also, it might reveal how a work participates in the genesis of the medium. By the means of a symbiotic relationship with established apparatus, the movie crystallizes their mutual cinematographic identity. Conversely, by reaching outward and mobilizing devices without cinema’s conventional boundaries, it advances their incorporation into the circuit. In paying attention to these developments, one can observe the role played by cinematographic works in the localization of new technologies. The notion of dispositifs represents an effort to make palpable the interactions from which the medium emerges and through which its apparatus differ from other partial practices of society. Current research attempts that examine the materiality of media may serve as useful models for this investigation. They make up for media studies’ insufficiency in dealing with technical realities by either devising new concepts and methods or borrowing them from other disciplines. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s exploration of digital data, for example, resorts to strategies originally belonging to the field of computer forensics (2008). The inspection of ‘behaviours and physical properties of various computational storage media’ provides the researcher with a way to circumvent the screen essentialism of new media studies (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 45). By examining data configurations on inscrutable hard drives, Kirschenbaum discloses how ‘what appears to be homogeneous at conceptual level are compounds at logical and even physical levels’ (2008: 4). The labour underpinning ‘immaterial’ software comes to the fore: ‘inscription, mechanism, sweat of brow (or its mechanical equivalent steam), and cramp of the hand’ (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 39). Eventually, this approach will take Kirschenbaum to ‘the fundamentally social, rather than the solely technical mechanisms of electronic textual transmission’ (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 21). Lisa Parks’s study on satellite transmission (2007) accomplishes a similar reversal, putting media’s surface effects under the perspective of their negative spaces. Borrowing from curator Amelie Hastie, Parks identifies satellites as one among many ‘obscure objects’ within representational and time-based media. This obscure condition makes them especially valuable for the study of social and economic circuits of exchange. By being ‘a symptom of a complex institutional history and imperceptible signal traffic’ (Parks, 2007), satellites suggest lines of force between transnational political powers, global media economy, technological zones, and flows of information. Interested in this epistemological potential, Parks calls for a

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materialist history of satellite technologies, which would involve ‘shifting some critical attention beyond the screen’ and ‘taking distribution seriously as a site of media history and criticism’ (2007). Both authors remark on a similar challenge in their exploitation of invisible media infrastructures. The means of circulation remain withdrawn not simply because of formal determinations. On the contrary, their concealment is primarily functional. In order to work properly, hard drives must be enclosed within the computer, protected from residues, and satellites must be orbiting the Earth, out of humans’ reach. Taken from their original sites and dragged into a laboratory, they lose their main defining features. Displaced and revealed, they are no longer points of access connecting the visible apparatus to the encompassing dispositif. They are just machines. The researcher must therefore find a way to get closer to these obscure objects and move along with them, instead of bursting them open under a spotlight. Matthew Fuller’s poststructuralist take on media ecologies calls for a similarly active demeanour. For Fuller, the acute awareness of the environmental conditions of media – whether it is a pirate radio, a photograph series, or a website – relies on a form of co-performance. ‘The only way to find things out about what happens when complex objects such as media systems interact’, states Fuller, ‘is to carry out such interactions’ (2005: 1). This approach owes to Felix Guattari’s expansion of the notion of ecology, which in turn was inspired by Guattari’s involvement in the Italian free radio movement during the 1970s. Referring to such counterpublic practices, Fuller’s idea of media ecology openly flirts with the otherwise controversial political agendas behind scientific research. According to Michael Goddard, this results in a framework more closely related to ecological movements than to mere environmentalism (2011: 7). The researcher’s intervention would therefore have activist overtones, as it takes advantage of oppositional strategies in order to produce awareness and advocate for change. Kirschenbaum makes it clear that his methods cannot break away from this propositional aspect. Forensics entails not only the gathering of evidence, but also the ‘construction of a rhetorical argument’ (Kirschenbaum, 2008: 21, emphasis mine). After finding neglected traces of inscription in code, the researcher must rebuild the conditions in which this process transpired, reenacting it in a new material arrangement (often, a textual account). Regardless of how rigorous and ambivalent the conjectures providing meaning to these traces may be, it does not make them less of a subjective invention aimed at persuading the reader. For Parks, the detached objectivity expected from science is even more of a challenge. On the principle that satellites are inaccessible, ‘ephemeral forms of culture that move through

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and vanish in the air’ (Parks, 2007), she maintains that their operation can never be truly apprehended, it can only be inferred. The visibility of satellites as media objects must therefore be produced in the research process. To begin with, Parks proposes to make charts of signal distribution based on publicly available data about the satellites’ geographic footprints and lists of carried signals. Ultimately, she aims to create dynamic visualizations of signal traffic, able to extrapolate the static data and account for the live condition of technological mediation (2007). Enclosed in its booth, the projector heavily resembles the elusive objects studied by Kirschenbaum and Parks. Just like them, it functions by means of occlusion. The site where the mechanism operates is not the same where its medial effects must be felt. An effective spatial dissociation crystallizes projection as what Zielinski calls a ‘media strategy located between proof of truth and illusioning’ (2006: 81). The projector is made invisible so that the evidence it produces can be better administered. In that sense, the withdrawal of the mechanism is instrumental for both the appearance and the preservation of the movie. As soon as it is taken from isolation, the projector exposes the film carrier and no longer enables a proper screening. Displaced, technology seems to protrude from the smooth topography of the cinematographic work like an abscess. Disengaged from the processes of circulation, the apparatus cannot be an effective gateway into the underbelly of the circuit. Now, if the researcher is willing to move into the sites of projection and to make an effort to apprehend its devices without inhibiting their functioning, she may earn a better appreciation of the live socio-technical dynamics permeating the movie. But this does not mean to turn projectors into the ultimate goal of our inquiry. Just like satellites and signal exchanges do for Parks, projectors and projections should serve us as ‘objects to think with in a way that may expand possibilities for historical and critical research in media studies’ (2007). In that context, they come to represent sources of disquietude about the seeming neutrality of media technology. As such, they become points of departure from which one is able to advance a multifaceted understanding of the cinematographic circuit. Any sort of ‘projection studies’ based upon these premises should not seek to substitute the current film and screen disciplines with another object-centred, autonomous field of investigation. Paraphrasing Parks yet again, I would say that our methods must configure ‘an attempt to generate critical spaces for exploring other obscure objects’ rather than ‘a positivist gesture to see, know and master’ (2007). To disclose the operational continuity between apparatus means to tackle the relations between systems

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of knowledge and the systems to be known. In the process of exploring the negative spaces of cinema, projection studies would have to address both the epistemic dimension of the medium (in the way it materializes scientific discourse) and the medial character of scientific practice (in the way it employs technologies of representation in order to articulate truth and evidence). Some inspiration could be drawn from Bruno Latour’s sociology of science (1988), which would later inform his contributions to actor-network theory. Departing from Latour’s work, one may ascertain a correspondence between scientific paradigms and the apparatus’ programmes. Having examined scientific laboratories with a keen ethnographic eye, Latour posits that all of their basic dogmas were, at some point in history, subjects of dispute – the effect of anomalies, as Kuhn would say. Scientific concepts and artefacts are only made unequivocal as they are embedded in normal techno-scientific practices and therefore turned into black boxes. From that point onward, ‘no matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count’ (Latour, 1988: 3). In face of these circumstances, Latour upholds a study of science in the making, ‘leaving aside all the prejudices about what distinguishes the context in which knowledge is embedded and the knowledge itself’ (Latour, 1988: 6). As if taking Flusser to its last consequences, he suggests the possibility of penetrating a black box by ‘moving in time and space until one finds the controversial topic’ that has led to its closure (Latour, 1988: 4). By analogy, a similar investigation of cinema could begin with the rejection of distinctions between the structures through which a movie circulates and the movie itself. Even the analytical accounts built around a cinematographic work should be scrutinized. In pursuing such an agenda, projection studies stands as a reflexive tool supplementary to the normal film and screen paradigms. It takes the form of a loose cartography able to fill in the gaps left by more structured means of survey. In this framework, ‘projections’ are used to indicate the atomic elements in which we can decompose movie circulation for study purposes. Employed in such a broad way, the term comes to represent any form of displacement that a cinematographic work might go through, whatever the scale. ‘Projectors’, in turn, signify the ensembles simultaneously modulating the threshold between signal and noise within the circuit and the boundaries between cinema and other media without it. To track projections would entail unpacking the multiple exchanges of energy and matter that enable a given medial situation, in an attempt to identify which particular

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interactions are relevant to the phenomenon in question. To do so could allow us to underscore the meaningful processes of information entangled in the underlying means of transport. Moreover, it could provide a feeling of how the systems at hand participate in larger dispositifs. But why limit ourselves to the passive examination of the medium, carefully chasing after established projections, when we could be running along with or even anticipating them? Once the academic apparatus has been acknowledged as partial to the circuit and disauthorized as a distinguished site of knowledge about it, researchers should no longer accept their exclusive role as its functionaries. On the contrary, they should feel encouraged to codify their own devices to produce, systematize, and share critical appreciations of cinema. This speculative dimension of projection studies owes to the oppositional facet of Zielinski’s work, expressed in notions such as variantology and anarcheology. Variantology configures a resistance to academic disciplinarity and to the ‘programmatic standardisation’ of research trends (Zielinski and Wagnermaier, 2006: 2). Zielinski and Silvia Wagnermaier adapt the term from the musical genre of ‘variations’, which is characterized by progressively diverging interpretations of a main melodic theme. Inspired by the format, they call for everyday research praxis in which ‘phenomena that are diametrically opposed […] congregate beneath a provisional roof in such a manner that at any time they are able to drift apart again and operate autonomously’ (Zielinski and Wagnermaier, 2006: 2). The methods of variantology are marked by lightness and ease. They entail curiosity about other disciplines ‘above any immediate points of contact with one’s own subject’ (Zielinski and Wagnermaier, 2006: 3). More importantly, they promote a kind of epistemological agnosticism, under which ‘longestablished concepts should be generously thrown open for re-consideration’ (Zielinski and Wagnermaier, 2006: 4). On top of that, Zielinski introduces a tactics against the almost transcendental authority of History (2008). His anarcheological framework is built around fortuitous finds and the figure of the heretic. Instead of philosophical meditations, it aims to achieve a ‘collection of curiosities’ (Zielinski, 2008: 34). Anarcheologists would not seek to identify ‘a standardized object of an original experience’ in the traces of the past. In face of material concretions, whether deliberate or accidental, they would struggle to keep open a sense of possibility, ‘[attaching] no more importance to what is than to what is not’ (Zielinski, 2008: 27-28). The mistrust in the conventions embodied in the circuit leads to the exploration of other modes of technological awareness. As their commitments to normal scientific practices unwind, researchers must take on a proactive role, engaging in the programming of new apparatus of knowledge. Rather

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than simply tracing projections, they must intentionally perform them. One way to resist the closure imposed by paradigms is to aim at provoking anomalies. Zielinski calls for radical experiments, ‘which aim to push the limits of what can be formalized as far as possible in the direction of the incalculable’ (2008: 10). Exercises that purposefully rearrange the circuit might accelerate our understanding of its inner workings by bringing its core conflicts to the surface. In place of asking what is cinema, perhaps we should be wondering what if cinema…? The reverse engineering of media infrastructures could profit from this productive misplacement of its obscure objects, as it makes them manifest by operating otherwise.

Performing material knowledge To engage in projection studies is to come closer to what is commonly called practice-based research. Practice-based approaches have been used in many disciplines in Europe and Australia since the 1990s. Graeme Sullivan (2010) traces their application in the fields of visual arts and design in the United Kingdom from a tradition underpinned on the work of health care and educational professionals. In both instances, the knowledge created by researchers in the course of their professional activities is mobilized to offset evidence produced by laboratorial experiments. The commitment to working ethics – the forms of care entailed by professional practice – would counteract the reductionism of scientific rationalism (Sullivan, 2010: 6970). By the means of data gathered from her situated experience, even if informally, the practitioner would achieve an understanding of the object more attentive to its totality than by treating it as a controlled phenomenon with measurable outcomes. This model originating from the social sciences, which associates research to a form of creative work, authorizes the new insights and awareness stemming from other creative practices. It therefore allows within academia different forms of studio inquiry in which the participant directly engages with the expressive medium she investigates. It does not, however, provide any clear means for the accommodation of this process’ primary outcomes within traditional research environments. Sullivan remarks how practice-based investigation often struggle with ‘the requirements to measure research outcomes used to profile, and in many cases fund, research in the universities’ (2010: 75). No matter how purposeful and systematic the critical engagement with a medium may be, it is invariably bottlenecked by the academic milieu. In order to comply with these circumstances,

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practitioners must relinquish their practice and abide by another: the writing of textual accounts. Writing is not simply academia’s preferred discursive form, but also how the researcher’s work is conventionally embedded in the circuit. Textual accounts, states Bruno Latour, ‘are the social scientist’s laboratory’ (2007: 127). That means to say that ‘experiments’ belonging in the social sciences tradition take place primarily through the logos. For an object to be analysed in this context, its physical components must be first translated into textual bits susceptible to the rules of language. In this process, the object is detached from its assemblies and stripped from its contradictions. The set of discoveries, interpretations, and conclusions resulting from critical inquiry must likewise be materialized in a body of text. Otherwise, they cannot be articulated within academia’s conventional apparatus – PhD evaluations, peer-reviewed journals, monographs, and so on and so forth. Text therefore becomes a device circumscribing what can be known. Anything the researcher wants to add to her object’s state-of-affairs must pass through this intermediary (Latour, 2007: 148). The textual imperative reinforces a semblance of separation between the academic and the cinematographic work. Such disconnection of scientific discourses from the movie they address adds to the economy of presences already ingrained in the circuit. It positions research practices as if they were exempt modes of knowledge about an object independent from them. This purported autonomy simultaneously downplays the role of paratexts in the performance of movie circulation, as mentioned in the first chapter, and the epistemic dimension already articulated through media technology. Even though they are rarely recognized, cinema entails sophisticated means to reflect about itself. Volker Pantenburg (2006) makes a case for ‘film as theory’ based on the movies of Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki. These filmmakers’ works demonstrate how the medium can stage sophisticated forms of self-knowledge and critically address its own regimes of representation in ways that a text cannot. Digital platforms seem to allow for the wider promotion and easier assimilation of this use of audiovisual discourse in media analysis. Online spin-offs of traditional academic journals, such as Screenworks and [in]Transition, attest to its growth. But to overcome the categorical distinction between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ cinema does more than to multiply our tools for unpacking the medium. It also taps into the interdisciplinary capacity of the arts ‘to challenge our conceptual understanding and change our perception’ (Sullivan, 2010: 84). To the extent that it disarranges the conventional separation between academic and cinematographic work, practical investigations provide a feeling of

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the material continuities across seemingly distinct medial processes. To stimulate these reactions can inspire a renewed understanding of the circuit. In that sense, we might profit from stepping beyond practice-based into practice-led methodologies. These are the approaches in which artistic projects take a more active role directing the investigation (Sullivan, 2010: 78). They consider the value of research not only about or with art and design, but also through them. The theorizing intrinsic to the practice is taken into account, with its specific outcomes accepted as forms of embodied knowledge. By circumventing the logos, practice-led research accelerates the incorporation of unsolicited data and, most likely, of scientific anomalies. Its speculative drive might thus be an effective antidote against the myopia of normal science. Even if practice-led research does not enable us to see the medium in a completely new light, it at least allows us to feel its complexity beyond the frame of established paradigms. The role of the projectionist suits these methods because the projectionist cannot simply evade the realities of circulation. For projectionists, the sheer appearance of a movie implies deliberate activity. From their perspective, what for most of the public are matters of fact about the workings of cinema become professional matters of concern, which require deliberate efforts and are open to challenge and dispute (Latour, 2008: 39). While both the filmmaker and the film critic may hold a passive, largely unproblematic relationship with the screening, projectionists ought to engage in its operation. In doing so, they are allowed a glimpse of the deindivituated medium. They get to know cinema when there is no singular movie or individual apparatus, only a bunch of scattered elements that must come together during projection. The fact that projectionists have to personally execute and oversee different manifestations of the cinematographic work as the same sensorial phenomena makes them particularly sensible to the technological idiosyncrasies of this process. For the researcher of movie circuits, the projectionist’s position is a privileged one. Not only because, as acting functionaries of the film industry, projectionists may achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the moving image. To engage in practices of projection is to perform a purposeful occupation of the negative spaces of cinema. Within the working apparatus, the deep interactions connecting medial operations to their contingent processes are more clearly traceable. From the projection booth, one may grasp how cinema’s formal conventions endure in spite of the medium’s constant material changes. And, more importantly, one may attempt to overcome them. In the same way that they are devoted to the maintenance of medial apparatus, projectionists are in the position to subvert them and

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programme new ones. Their capacity to do so can be mobilized as the basis for a technologically committed form of curatorial research, aware of both the cinemas that are and those that could be. In recent years, curatorship has been increasingly recognized as a field of activity and critical inquiry on its own. Paul O’Neill (2012) identifies the emergence of curatorial discourse in the early 20th century, stemming from new forms of installation art and museum displays that put into question both art’s autonomy and institutions. These phenomena reconfigured exhibition venues as extensions of the world by embracing the relational character of artistic practices. In the 1960s, the rising awareness of the process of exhibition making, coupled with the ‘dematerialization’ of the artwork and the growing importance of the viewer as participant, accentuated the role of the curator as a creator. A new understanding of information theory began to frame mediators as proactive agents responsible to ‘keep things moving’ (O’Neill, 2012: 25). Curatorship’s particular modes of expression would earn further prominence within post-Fordist, networked societies. Joasia Krysa (2006) underscores curatorial outputs as a form of immaterial production fitting cognitive capitalism. Thanks to the conditions enabled by the development of computational media, curatorial operations expanded their scope and reach. The postmodern interface culture, as argued by Steve Dietz (1998), dilutes the traditional curators’ authority at the same time it spreads their practice as filter feeders far and wide, to other social and technological actors. The supervisibility of contemporary curatorship owes much to the emergence of the independent exhibition maker, a figure often represented by names such as Harald Szeemann and Seth Siegelaub. Operating counter to the museum tradition, these professionals were instrumental in turning exhibitions into sites for ‘an extended organizational and discursive practice’ (O’Neill, 2012: 22). Their pioneering projects paved the way for the opaque gestures of current curator-celebrities. Initially, however, the growing self-consciousness of the curator as an influential intermediary triggered not authorship, but reflexivity. Independent curatorial agency largely aimed to expose the processes that enabled artistic practices. Siegelaub spoke of curatorship’s demystifying function (O’Neill, 2012: 32). For example, O’Neill mentions Lucy Lippard’s exhibition 557,087 (1969), whose peculiar catalogue consisted of a set of index cards designed by both Lippard and the participating artists. Rather than simply describing the works shown, the cards also commented on their conditions of production and presentation. Therefore, the usually hidden ‘absences, mistakes, and misunderstandings’ occurring through the circulation of art were made public along with the final exhibition (O’Neill, 2012: 15).

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Curatorial strategies such as Lippard’s destabilize ‘the narrative of perfection and neutrality’ crystallizing the artwork and conversely affirm its connections to the messiness of life (O’Neill, 2012: 15). O’Neill identifies their outcomes as ‘a successful hybrid of artistic research and exhibition aesthetics’ (2012: 18). Their epistemic performance seems related to the placement of individual apparatus in the perspective of their encompassing dispositif. By emphasizing the effect of nuances and idiosyncrasies such as personal choices in the appearance of the artwork, curators resort to the anecdotal as a kind of deindividuating mechanism. Anecdotes, as remarked by Sean Cubitt, can be mobilized as a complementary form of evidence aimed at resisting statistical truths and archival equivalence (2013). Anecdotes refuse to corroborate with the ‘systemic foundations of knowledge’ (Cubitt, 2013). Cubitt (2013) observes their utility as a ‘partner in dialogue’ against large disciplinary hypotheses. Calling upon the unique qualities of experience that are usually brushed off by scientific generalization, the anecdote allows for an extreme awareness of ecological particularities. The tentative, often precarious connections resulting from this awareness can pierce through medial ideology as they make evident the nonidentity of the actual objects. Curatorship is privileged among other practice-led methodologies because it already entails an accepted relationship to research. O’Neill and Mick Wilson list multiple ways in which this interaction can take place: from the trivial ‘research within the exhibition-making process’, to ‘active forms of knowledge production’ and ‘ways of contesting established epistemic schemata’ (2015: 12, 17). Curatorial research should therefore be regarded as more than a provisional step leading to the informed presentation of artistic practices. It is rather a speculative endeavour that continues through the exhibition, which becomes itself a means of inquiry about the works on display. The exhibition enables a laboratory for scholarly investigation comparable to the textual account. It has the additional capacity of engaging with a wide range of modes of existence instead of forcing objects to be readjusted into textual forms. This affordance makes the exhibition particularly fit as an ontographical tool. Ian Bogost (2012) names carpentry the practice of constructing artefacts as a philosophical exercise. Carpentry entails ‘making things that explain how things make their world’ (Bogost, 2012: 93). One of its goals is to multiply the opportunities of accessing the ‘nonsemiotic dimensions’ of the object ‘on their own terms’ (Bogost, 2012: 90). This frequently happens in the making of an exhibition. The act of putting an artwork on public view has nothing to do with the purported autonomy we have come to expect from the object. It requires dealing in the many transactions necessary

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for staging the work as an individual entity for the duration of the show. It is a feat of legal, financial, and technical endurance. As such, it leads the curator through an understanding of the object that is simultaneously ‘unburdened by theoretical affectation’ (Bogost, 2012: 109) and ‘contending with the material resistance of his or her chosen form’ (Bogost, 2012: 93). The resulting display expands on these epistemic conditions. Contingencies can never be completely externalized from curatorial discourse. By bringing its objects to express their own presence, the system is always at risk of othering itself. To put up an exhibition provides a testing ground for the becoming of media. Art critic Frederico Morais was one to resort to the material arrangements of the exhibition as a vehicle for analytical discourse. In the 1970s, his pursuit of a new criticism led him to experiment with forms of poetic creation. Morais felt that the formalist criteria adopted by the critical status quo in Brazil could not account for the work of young contemporary artists. To borrow from artistic strategies was a way for the critic to overcome text’s semblance of relative autonomy and get into an affective dialogue with the artworks (Neves, 2017). Morais’s response to Cildo Meirelles’s iconic Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos: Projeto Coca-Cola (Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project) provides a conspicuous example of this dynamic. Meirelles’s piece is one of the best known works of Brazilian conceptual art. The artist screen-printed anti-imperialist slogans in returnable Coca-Cola bottles, hijacking the product’s distribution chain as a system for countercommunication. Following an invitation from Morais, he presented it as a small set of bottles during a weeklong exhibition at a gallery in Rio de Janeiro. The show was part of a series of three called Agnus Dei, the others involving artists Guilherme Vaz and Thereza Simões. After all were over, Morais organized an exhibition of his own, displaying in the same space interventions that commented on the artists’ works. One of them was a ‘carpet’ made of 15,000 Coca-Cola bottles covering the whole gallery floor. A hanging sign informed visitors that all the bottles were provided by the Coca-Cola Company itself. The way this installation reflects on Meirelles’s piece can easily be put into words. What it earns in clarity, however, it loses in strength. At its specific situation, Morais’s gesture enabled a feeling of this ‘ideological circuit’ into which the Coca-Cola Project meant to be inserted that no textual description can provide. In doing so, it placed the artist’s conceptual proposal under the perspective of concrete market operations. The exceptional condition of the gallery as a neutral envelope for the existence of art was briefly suspended. The massive volume of thousands of bottles calls attention to the gallery’s

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reality as a site of physical trades. There is nothing ready-made about this work (just as there is not about any other, really). In order to achieve it, the critic had to step beyond his position, reach towards other actors, and request their logistic collaboration. If we are to underscore the material character of the action, we must assume that it was authored by Coca-Cola perhaps more than it was by Morais. This final example goes to show that the making of an exhibition is not the equivalent of providing an abstract statement about something. Curatorial discourse performs rearrangements both within and without the relevant objects in order to actualize them for the circumstances of their appearance. Things have to be moved around and their connections remade. In doing so, curators take deliberate part in the politics of ontology. By committing to exhibitionary practices, they solicit the company of strangers to get realities done (Law, 2011). Objects are ultimately allowed to speak for themselves, instead of having their voice stolen, subsumed by the logos.

Reassembling the cinematographic field In the field of cinema, the notion of curatorship is normally associated with the domain of film archives and museums. Curators are the specialists responsible for setting the criteria governing institutional collections. They select moving image works to be preserved and define how these artefacts should be organized and presented. In doing so, they mean to supply rigorous interpretations of the medium as a cultural entity. The description of the profession provided by Paolo Cherchi Usai, David Francis, Alexander Horwath, and Michael Loebenstein (2008) highlights its canonizing function. In a self-reflexive effort prompted by digital technologies, these practitioners proposed to identify f ilm curatorship as ‘the art of interpreting the aesthetics, history and technology of cinema through the selective collection, preservation and documentation of films and their exhibition in archival presentations’ (Usai, Francis et al., 2008: 231). It is a description fitting curatorship as an institutional practice characterized by what Loebenstein dubs ‘the scrupulous attention to the historical artefact’ (Usai, Francis et al., 2008: 229). For our methodological purposes, however, this understanding of curatorship is quite limited. Both variantological and anecdotal economies of knowledge production could better profit from other modalities of curatorship occurring in the fields of contemporary arts and culture. In particular, from the idea of the curator as an hybrid professional, responsible for dealing with ‘a constellation of activities whose precise

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definitions and objectives are intentionally allowed to remain somewhat elusive’ (O’Neill and Wilson, 2015: 14). The cinematographic equivalent of the independent exhibition-maker would be the specialists who operate in an ad hoc way, detached from any specific film collection. Instead of accounting for a singular institutional framework, they turn towards the world at large. They are curators of their own age; their concern is less to preserve historical artefacts than to promote timely agendas and cultural trends. Their work is therefore allowed a large degree of propositional freedom, being less scrupulous than exploratory. It draws from a number of sources and deploys public presentations as its main devices. This kind of curator is the one most often responsible for programming screening sessions and putting together gallery shows. Their sphere of activity is less the museum and the archive than places of projection like the theatre, the film society, and the festival, in which the movie meets an audience. They define which works should be presented and in what order, how to display them and where they should be installed. This set of activities stresses the function of curatorship as a particularly legitimate form of cultural gatekeeping. Curators, as agents of the cultural industry, have authority over the content shown in particular media outlets (Bosma, 2015: 6). This power not only implies a degree of control over the conditions of access to any given product, it also allows for sophisticated discursive articulations of the cinematographic work. The curatorial gesture is, if not categorical, categorizing. By assigning substance to a given channel, curators may configure highly informed patterns of circulation. A playlist can be a tactical operation of embodiment by the means of assemblage, enabling the concretization of abstract concepts and the validation of alleged zeitgeists. The alignment of selected movies to one another within specific circumstances of display weighs in their constitution as individual entities, likely affecting future projections. As their specialist knowledge is deployed to streamline what will be both preserved to posterity and presented to contemporary audiences, curators purposefully engage in the management of presences within the circuit. To modulate the availability of cinematographic works means to act as catalysts within the network of intermediaries constituting circulation (Bosma, 2015: 33). To programme a screening requires curators to take part in complex decision chains operating across legal, material, and discursive spheres. Some of the steps necessary for setting up a projection include, but are not limited to: securing sponsorships, inviting participants, approaching distributors, clearing exhibition rights, covering artist fees, arranging insurance and transportation logistics, booking a venue, leasing equipment, designing

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promotional material, writing a curatorial text, sending press releases, installing and connecting output devices, loading the movie carrier, turning off the lights, and pressing play. The list could be extended ad absurdum. Even though curators themselves do not necessarily have to perform every one of these tasks, the curatorial function is distributed across all of them. The convergence here attempted between the projectionist and the curator answers to the ambitions of softening distinctions between thinking and doing cinema. It relies on the fluidity of roles between functionaries and programmers in order to underscore the fact that the activities they perform are two sides of the same coin. Curatorship cannot claim complete sovereignty over technique. The ‘master’s’ decisions about what is meant to be available are conditioned by the ‘slave’s’ operations engaged in actually making it so. To affirm this correspondence constitutes an effort to account for the full range of processes both logical and physical that come together in order to enable the movie apparatus. To highlight the role of projectionists and curators among these processes fits our methodological purposes. The intersectional position that these professionals occupy makes them particularly sensible to – when not active proponents of – the disputed becoming of cinema. The technical know-how of the former and the raw expertise of the latter complement each other in the configuration of an acute awareness of movie circuits. The commitment to select content, just like the responsibility of performing projections, requires curators to deal with cinema in its unfiltered totality. Ideally, they should confront all of the available proposals and possibilities before making any assertion about what is to appear. This process can be particularly convoluted when it involves more than one professional with divergent positions. Their final decision will invariably actualize the principles gauging the medium, telling movies apart from one another and even from other media modalities. For that reason, curators are the first ones to know how arbitrary this medial segregation can be. Curatorial discourse must balance concurrent dimensions of the movie simultaneously. The possibility of incorporating a work in a screening not only depends on how it contributes to the meaning of the programme. Not rarely, movies are left out because they are too long for the remaining screen time, or the compatible equipment is not accessible, or the required licenses could not be afforded, or because the sponsors said so. What is shown is rarely a clear-cut choice, but a continuing negotiation with the circumstances. Curators realize this not simply because they have a privileged viewpoint over these negotiations, but rather because they take an active part in them. I therefore contend that curatorial sensibility is not simply an awareness of

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the material dimensions of the medium, which could be easily detached from its technologies and translated into words. It is a material awareness instead, which finds no other means of expression than through the medium itself. On that note, I would like to conclude with some remarks about the potential of projection studies for intervening in movie circuits. So far, this chapter has supported the idea that research should begin by outstepping itself. By causing a provisional disorganization of our disciplinary grounds, and going through the epistemological effort of setting them anew, we can feel how partial ‘film and screen studies’ are to the becoming of media. The end of this adventure should not cause a retreat behind academic apparatus, though. Practice-led research can only go so far if it keeps coming back to textual reports. Instead of reinstating the separation between theoretical frameworks, fields of practice, and scientific laboratories, we should strive for ways of keeping their borders porous. Projection studies should be mobilized through strategic forms of media museography that could prevent the closure of the research process from happening. Every point to which our survey projects should also be a point from which other cinemas are projected. By the means of projection, curatorship’s categorizing proceedings are fulfilled as ontographic gestures. Exhibitions are after all sites where ‘information and ideas about art are performed, stored, and passed on’ (O’Neill, 2012: 43). To tap into that potential can be a way to accomplish meaningful media ecologies: more than surveying the environment, provoking its transformation. At least because projections may be useful for propagating research outcomes. What projections lose to more traditional channels of academic communication in terms of descriptive capacity, they earn in terms of immediacy and reach. A movie exhibition, whatever form it takes, generally appeals to a public much larger than the meagre readership of academic journals. It might therefore get ahold of a critical mass of users, inspiring political and epistemic changes across the circuit. Beyond that, exhibitions are already a device for movie circulation. They can take the cinematographic work to new places and potentially reframe (or deframe) it in a number of different ways. The act of presenting research objects ‘themselves’, instead of accounting for them, brings a singular contribution to speculative methodologies. Exhibitions, as stated by Latour (2005: 31), ‘can explore new possibilities with a much greater degree of freedom’ than other academic platforms. Our conjectures about the cinematographic work do not need to be resolved and reported in a final form. Rather, they may unfold and even multiply through their connection to others. Contradictions can be assumed and responsibilities can be taken. Direct contact enables the public to sense movies in ways

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other than those normally endorsed by the medium. Exhibitions thereby constitute a privileged site not only for thought experiments, as Latour proposes, but also for foreign feelings. As they allow for the incoherence of the cinematographic work to become manifest, they likewise welcome the unpredictable developments of movie circuits. Ultimately, exhibitions could serve as engines of emergence aimed at redesigning the medium. By making room for the displacement of apparatus, exhibitions enable variations in the technological project governing cinema. For exhibitionary purposes, media devices can be arranged in strange configurations, taken apart, and connected otherwise. Even if temporarily, these possibilities may be used to rehearse transversal or oppositional interactions within the established dispositifs. Changes in practice may eventually give rise to innovative concepts and lead to reforms in medial ideology at large. The next chapters mean to show how these processes correspond to critical events disputing ontological determinations. We will see cases in which projections are deployed to modulate thresholds of objective presence as well as to perform alternative taxonomies of the cinematographic work. In doing so, they attempt to reconfigure the range of operations available as media practices and the dominant separations between cinema and other fields. In summary, I would like to propose practice-led methodologies as a way to offset the shortcomings of the logocentric film and screen studies discipline in dealing with the elusiveness of its objects. Intermediary practices such as projection and curatorship enable a direct engagement with movie circulation in all its systemic complexity. To make use of workshops, conferences, installations, and exhibitions as research operations entails an incursion in the negative spaces of cinema. From its underbelly, we are led to experiment with the medium as a deindividuated, technologically scattered, and semiotically impure ensemble. It is up to the researcher to make its object consistent again. Here, material labour doubles as a sort of cognitive tactic. It renders sensible how seemingly insignificant elements, across a wide range of apparatus, can be conducive of a given cinematographic situation. In that sense, projection studies also contribute to epistemic reflexivity. Firstly, as they foreground the researcher as a practitioner likewise committed to the performance of the medium. Secondly, as they underscore the situatedness of knowledge within the circuit, which is a socio-technical ensemble that produces cinema as much as a discourse network that enables our understanding of it. The resulting projections are a form to think with others as much as they are a form to think out loud. They provide the researcher with mechanisms to share her experiences of displacement, thus creating points of inflexion in the becoming of the medium.

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Bibliography / works cited Bogost, Ian, Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2012). Bosma, Peter, Film Programming – Curating for Cinemas, Festivals, Archives (New York City: Columbia University, 2015). Cubitt, Sean, ‘Anecdotal evidence’, NECSUS, 3 (Spring 2013). Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Dietz, Steve, ‘Curating (on) the web’, Museums and the Web, 26 March 1998. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Fuller, Matthew, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005). Goddard, Michael, ‘Towards an archaeology of media ecologies: “Media ecology”, political subjectivation and free radios’, Fibreculture, 17 (April 2011). Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Kirschenbaum, Matthew, Mechanisms: New Media and Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008). Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, 1999). Krysa, Joasia, Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems (New York: Autonomedia, 2006). Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1996). Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York City: Oxford University, 2007). Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (London: Harvard University, 1988). Latour, Bruno, What is the Style of Matters of Concern? Two lectures in empirical philosophy (Assen, The Netherlands: Royal van Gorcum, 2008). Law, John, ‘Collateral realities’, in The Politics of Knowledge, ed. F. Dominguez Rubio and P. Baert (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 156–178. Neves, Galciani, Exercícios Críticos: Gestos e Procedimentos de Invenção (São Paulo: Educ, 2017). O’Neill, Paul, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2012). O’Neill, Paul and Mick Wilson, Curating Research (London: Open Editions / de Appel, 2015).

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Pantenburg, Volker, Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University, 2015). Parks, Lisa, ‘Obscure objects of media studies: Echo, Hotbird, Ikonos’, Mediascape, 1(3) (Los Angeles: Fall 2007). Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Sullivan, Graeme, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts, 2nd edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010). Usai, Paolo Cherchi, David Francis, Alexander Horwarth, and Michael Loebenstein, Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace (Vienna: SYNEMA, 2008). Zielinski, Siegfried, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999). Zielinski, Siegfried, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008). Zielinski, Siegfried, ‘Show and hide: Projection as a media strategy located between proof of truth and ilusioning’, in Variantology 1: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies, ed. S. Zielinski and S. Wagnermaier (Cologne: Walther König, 2006), 81-100. Zielinski, Siegfried and Silvia Wagnermaier, Variantology 1: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies (Cologne: Walther König, 2006). 557,087, Lucy Lippard, 1969. Agnus Dei, Frederico Morais, 1971. Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos: Projeto Coca-Cola, Cildo Meirelles, 1970.

4. Performing Medium Specificities Abstract This chapter follows the history of the Brazilian film society Cine Falcatrua from its early stages as a pirate cinema (2003-2005). Cine Falcatrua’s experience shows how features deemed distinctive of the medium might be effected by alternative technological arrangements, employing personal computers and peer-to-peer networks. By following their actions, one can see how the property of cinema might be disputed, as anomalous media practices struggle with structures already established in the circuit. The case underscores the role of paratexts and ancillary practices (such as subtitling and promotion) in promoting the proper experience of cinema. Moreover, it demonstrates how the displacement within the medium might provide the knowing subject with a clearer perspective of its becoming. Keywords: Film piracy, pirate modernity, scientific anomalies, medium specificities

To watch a movie had never been so laborious. The projection should have started more than two hours ago. It is the third or fourth time that the audience has to find new places to sit. Everyone is growing weary, a little hopeless. It is now unlikely that the screening will be over before the night buses stop circulating. But still, people endure. Sunken costs fallacy. One by one, they do their best to get comfortable in a large patch of grass, rubbing shoulders as they get closer to the ground. There is barely enough space to accommodate that many bodies. Some hesitate, suspicious that this will not be the last time that they will have to move around. The screen does not seem to be in a definitive position yet. It is made of some sort of white-painted hardboard that is difficult to hold still without proper support. Tonight, it has already been displaced three or four times, leading the procession of spectators from one site to another. The first movement was a departure from the auditorium, a few minutes before the hour scheduled for the screening. As soon as people realized

Menotti, G., Movie Circuits. Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789089648907_ch04

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that there would not be enough space for everyone that came to watch the movie, a group volunteered to take the screen to the yard. Ever since, they have been walking across the university greens, while trying to find an appropriate location. The audience tagged along. The place had to be large enough for all of them – a record attendance, somewhere around 600. It also had to be protected from the lampposts, since the cheap digital projector could not compete with their brightness. And it had to be within reasonable distance of the building, so that electricity could be accessed with the available power extensions. That vacant patch of grass ticked all the boxes. When the screen finally stood up, the relief of the audience was almost tangible. Everything seemed to fall into place. That is when two guys showed up pushing people aside, trying to make way for a folding metal table and a desktop computer cabinet. In the rush and commotion, no one had remembered to save some space for the projection system. That evening, I did not get to enjoy the feature. When the projection finally began, I could not bring myself to focus on the screen. Even so, it was one of the strongest cinematographic experiences of my life. I had never felt the substance of the medium so distinctly – the weight of the apparatus and the space they occupy; their reliance on energy sources, on supporting structures, and on an empty line of sight; their capacity to direct bodies in space. It was a movie screening and I was there with some friends. Nowadays, it subsists more as a personal anecdote than as a proper historical fact. One cannot precisely determine when the event took place, since most of the official records about it have been erased. The photocopied posters we deployed to advertise the screening were ephemeral to begin with. And any promotional material that was preserved as memorabilia must have been destroyed afterwards, since it became incriminating evidence. Even online flyers were deleted. All that I am sure is that it was early 2004, and probably a Wednesday. That is the day of the week when the Cine Falcatrua’s unauthorized movie sessions were normally held. This chapter means to share experiences that I retroactively acknowledge as an attempt at projection studies. The accidental proposal of Cine Falcatrua was to push the established limits of movie circulation, renegotiating medial boundaries by trial and error. Most people would not describe it in such an ambitious way, though. Lately, activities such as those performed by the group have come to fall under the category of pirate cinema. In the case of Cine Falcatrua, that basically meant a group of people that screened movies downloaded from the Internet in free public sessions. In a time when there

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were almost no digital projections systems working in Brazil, the group’s participants jokingly proclaimed it to be the first digital cinema in its state. Of course, this claim is entirely up to dispute. How could Cine Falcatrua compare to a proper movie theatre, if its screenings only took place once a week, if they took place at all? If its location could change without any warning, sometimes to places totally incompatible with film projection? If the audience often had to sit on the floor? The technology it employed did not seem very cinematographic, at least at the time. Home personal computers were used as playback devices and peer-to-peer networks as its main curatorial sources. Movies came as ripped video files of unverifiable origin. Subtitles were made by the participants themselves, and very rarely checked for typos. Was that a digital cinema? Was it any cinema at all? Questions of piracy normally relate to copyright circumvention and alternative modes of access. In a precarious cultural market such as Brazil’s, piracy is often employed to make up for the shortcomings of business models unable to supply the goods in demand (Mizukami et al., 2011). As such, piracy enables audiences to take further control over the character of the content they are allowed to consume and even to influence the established media channels. Virginia Crisp (2015) remarks how the informal actors engaged in pirate practices often collaborate in the constitution of a complex global ecology of film distribution. The case of Cine Falcatrua can be partially examined under that light. As a digital film society, the group embodied the same ‘new model of cinephilia’ that Jasmine Trice identified in Quiapo, a district in the Philippines, where the trade of pirate DVDs came to provide ‘a resource for world cinema that was previously unavailable in the country’, thereby fuelling the local movie-going culture (2010: 534). But also, the case of Cine Falcatrua demonstrates the role of unauthorized circulation in the renewal of cinematographic practices. It stands as an example of piracy as a force of technological emergence – one which, according to Ramon Lobato, ‘opens up a space for whole new economies, new forms of cultural production, new possibilities’ (2007: 119). Taking place in the outskirts of the circuit, Cine Falcatrua’s screening sessions testify to the constant flux of cinema infrastructures, forever reaching towards other fields. They could be said to constitute a Brazilian instance of the pirate modernity that Ravi Sundaram (2010) identified in the postcolonial development of Delhi, India. For Sundaram, piracy is not only a modality of media access, but also a means to build social territories. Pirate modernity refers to the urban arrangements existing outside of the sphere of the law, particularly within informal technological markets. These arrangements create ‘radical conditions of possibility for subaltern populations in the city’

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by providing them with ‘a key interface between media technologies and larger urban infrastructures’ (Sundaram, 2010: 12-13). Unbound from conventional apparatus, piracy may give rise to new configurations of media, better adapted to local circumstances. The thriving film industry of Nigeria, whose distribution networks grew out of pirate operations, is a telling example of this process. Brian Larkin, who did extensive research on the case, urges us to think about piracy beyond legal terms, and understand it as a mode of infrastructure that ‘imposes particular conditions on the recording, transmission, and retrieval of data’ (2008: 14). By taking that into consideration, one could regard pirate cinemas not as deficient means of accessing a monolithic medium, but rather as its actual redesigns as a fluid technical entity. To the extent that it decouples media systems from a specific technology, piracy makes us free to entertain other possibilities for their concretization. It is cinema, as if it were comprised by a different set of operational and aesthetic parameters. Anomalies gesturing towards a medial revolution. Dwelling on what Lobato calls the ‘material foundation’ of piracy, this chapter examines the practice of Cine Falcatrua as an alternative becoming of media. Here, loose curatorial intervention is shown to displace already existing apparatus and propose new synergies across them. It therefore enables cinema to operate under adverse material settings, while proposing other modes of public engagement with the cinematographic work. In this narrative, aspects of medium specificity do not appear as its inherent characteristics. Rather, they are effects of technological performances that could as well take other shapes. They are liable to be recreated from scratch or completely circumvented at any given situation. It follows that not only should Cine Falcatrua be considered part of the continuum of normal cinema, but also that the very normality of this continuum should be called into question.

Traditional apparatus with improper technology Cine Falcatrua began as a small film society hosted at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), in the city of Vitória, in the southeast region of Brazil. Even though it was officially registered as a grassroots project convened by the Social Communications Department, the film society operated in an almost completely autonomous way. The support of the Department was perfunctory: an institutional clearance authorizing the use of college equipment (such as digital projectors) and spaces (such as auditoriums).

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The screenings were planned and organized by the students themselves, constituting a loose group formed by half a dozen Journalism, Psychology, and Visual Arts undergrads. It is impossible to be precise about the number and identity of the participants because they fluctuated a lot over time. As in any typical grassroots activity, the division of roles between the organizers and the audience was constantly shifting. It was not unusual for people unrelated to the core group to help setting up projection or to spontaneously bring their own movies to be screened. Sometimes, these people would stick around for the film society’s next planning meeting, whereas old participants would disappear completely, drawn away by course deadlines or other perils of student life. Altogether, it was a very dynamic and heterogeneous group. Perhaps its only unifying characteristic is that it did not include anyone directly involved with film or video production, study, and criticism. At that time, the Department had not yet opened its Audiovisual Media undergraduate course. Thus, in the matters of actual cinema, the participants could all be considered amateurs, consumers, uneducated laymen. Not that it matters too much. The spirit animating the group was not cinephilic to begin with. Cine Falcatrua resulted from a convergence of opportunities: of space, of equipment, of media. In the second half of 2003, a student occupation took over UFES’s old theatre, which the university management was planning to turn into a classroom building. If that were to happen, the academic community would have lost not only one of its cultural spaces, but also a part of its living history. In the 1970s, the theatre was home to Cineclube Metrópolis, a film society central to the articulation of the nationwide cineclubist movement as well as to the cultural resistance against the Brazilian military regime. During the occupation, the students were trying to keep the theatre up and running as much as possible. A number of events were deployed to call attention to the management decision and stir up public debate. This opened the space for all sorts of activities. Not long before the occupation, many departments at UFES had received brand new digital video projectors. This equipment was reasonably expensive at that time; a luxury to have in a public institution in Brazil. Nevertheless, the projectors were essentially being used for slideshow presentations in regular classes. Some faculty and students from the Journalism course saw this as a waste of the devices’ potential. They believed that the projectors could be better employed in movie exhibitions, thereby fostering f ilm studies at the university. This practice could give body to a discipline that was virtually nonexistent in their course. And the projectors were certainly available for film screenings. All that was necessary was to frame this

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activity as a proper academic project, in order to appease the institutional bureaucracy. Supplementing these two factors, a third, global one must be added to the list of causes that led to the film society: the popularization of peer-topeer networks. By 2003, given the increase in domestic bandwidth and the creation of more efficient video codecs, the quality and variety of movies available in online file sharing platforms had surpassed the bar set by many DVD catalogues and even commercial venues. Therefore, regardless of the unfavourable position occupied by Brazil in the global chains of film distribution (whether mainstream or alternative), countless movies could be accessed in the national territory. By the means of the Internet, from the comfort of their homes, media-savvy users could get almost any movie, from unreleased blockbusters to long-forgotten video art pieces and foreign documentaries. And the university students could certainly be counted among these users. Not surprisingly, the old theatre became a pirate hub during the occupation. Camped in the college building, the students brought their own personal desktop computers along. They had been using the university connection – considerably faster than their domestic ones – to download movies around the clock. Eventually, this routine led to some improvised, collective viewing sessions. However, since their computers did not have a composite video output or a DVD recorder, the students had no means to show the movies on a conventional TV set. They had to watch everything they downloaded crammed in front of the machines’ 15’ CRT monitor (sporting a standard SVGA resolution of 800x600 pixels). For all these reasons, the creation of Cine Falcatrua seemed to be, if not expected, at least favoured. Pirate cinema represented a regular activity to be held during the occupation, and it put the university’s projectors to good use. Moreover, it brought the students’ p2p habits closer to a traditional cinematographic experience, by enabling them to watch the downloaded movies in a theatrical scale more appropriate for a collective audience. In doing so, the film society provided the structure for a geographically situated, face-to-face dimension of file sharing culture. The students would henceforth be able to ‘share’ movies not only with anonymous peers on the Internet, but also with one another and the local community. In doing so, they would be involuntarily raised from the position of media consumers to that of projectionists and curators. In the official project submitted to the Department of Social Communications, the film society was initially dubbed Videoclube Digital Metrópolis. The title was meant as an homage to its predecessor, even though there were no direct relations between the two groups. The project aimed to promote

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weekly screenings of cinematographic works, pertaining to different genres, in order to supplement regular classes. In the first session, the movie was a Brazilian underground feature from 1969. A cult classic. Very few people came – as far as I remember, around 20. For the second one, something completely different was scheduled. It was the first instalment of an action blockbuster that had just premiered in the USA. The movie would not be officially released in Brazil for the next two months, but high-quality files were already available on torrent websites. Subtitles in Portuguese could likewise be found online with ease. The popular title attracted a wider audience, and most of the seats of the theatre were taken. It seemed enough for the project to garnish some reputation. People were excited for the next screening, regardless of what would be shown. However, when they came back the following week, the screening was nowhere to be found. The theatre was closed, its auditorium had been stripped bare and it was already on the way to reformation. The student occupation was over. The project took so long to be approved that it failed to catch the political momentum. Having barely staked out its territory, the Videoclube Digital already lost it. From that point on, the film society existed in permanently provisional circumstances. Every week, it had to f ind a new place. Projections had to be adapted to the most diverse situations. The programme went through constant changes that could not be communicated to the audience in advance. The meagre credibility that the project had gained quickly dissipated. With the seminomadic condition, it earned a popular nickname that disclosed the seeming disorganization in which it thrived: ‘falcatrua’ is a word that in Portuguese means scam or fraud. In Brazil, it is normally used to address forms of political corruption. The new alias reflected the ambiguous medial character of the materials deployed by the film society. Instead of normal cinematographic apparatus, Cine Falcatrua used ‘Frankenstein’ computers, digital video projectors, old mono speakers, and makeshift screens. And this equipment was not seamlessly incorporated into the architecture of the exhibition space, as one would expect from a standard movie theatre. Before every session, each device had to be put in place and connected to the others. Infrastructures that should be a given required an active effort, done in front of the arriving audience. After everything was assembled, the projector would often be found in a vulnerable position amidst the auditorium. Sound and power cables would be spread all over the floor. Someone had to keep an eye on the equipment during the whole screening to prevent people from tripping on it. Even so, problems occurred every now and then. A personal computer was a very unstable movie player back in these days.

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Cine Falcatrua (2004): public and projection devices coming together in the same space. Photograph by Gilbertinho Cineasta.

A similar semblance of cinema took place on the screen. Since the film society’s programme was almost entirely comprised by works found on the Internet, on disputed or unauthorized sources, who could assure their legitimacy? Granted, most copies shown during a Cine Falcatrua screening seemed no different from a movie’s final cut converted to standard-resolution digital video. However, some were a long way from the stuff one can find on DVDs. This was particularly the case with new features that did not have official domestic releases from which a proper digital file could be ripped. These bootleg copies included cams and screeners. Cams are versions of a movie illegally recorded from a theatrical screening by someone in the audience. Screeners are promotional copies distributed in advance to the press or potential exhibitors (NS/VCDQ, 2010). To this day, both kinds proliferate on file sharing networks. They are not particularly suitable for a public exhibition, though. Self-biographical, cams and screeners tell a story that is not only the movie’s, but also their own. Cams sport an organic image, particular of film reprocessed through digital video without much care. Their colours, framing, and frame rate seem a little off. Their soundtrack is often muffled or overlaid by extraneous noises. They are little more than movies of a movie, in fact, made in precarious

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conditions – conditions that resurface every time the image goes out of focus or is interrupted by the silhouette of a spectator participating in the original exhibition. Screeners, on the other hand, display high technical quality. Still, their content is almost never definitive. Some have not yet gone through all the stages of postproduction, and thus lack colour correction, sound mixing, or even special effects. Others include watermarks that identify their extra-commercial condition. I have seen on-screen warnings and recurring sequences of black-and-white image in an otherwise colour film. Elements such as these make the displacement of the cinematographic work evident in its appearance. The image on the screen overtly affirms that it should not be there. It belongs elsewhere. By resorting to these improper devices, Cine Falcatrua screening sessions denied their own medial character while assuming a technical reality. In their shortcomings, the individual actors that brought the projection together became exposed. Traces of circulation, otherwise suppressed from the cinematographic work, were turned into part of its experience. Medial negativity was made positive again. Even when the movie had pristine image and sound, subtitles were frequently done in a hurry, by the very members of the film society, and presented typos which revealed human intervention. Every work was presented as its irreducible screening, foregrounding the context that made it possible. Noise was shown to be a constitutive part of the signal. And this instability seemed to invite participation. The audience witnessing the constitution of the cinematographic apparatus often got involved in the process, taking into their own hands the task of setting up projection. Cine Falcatrua’s screening sessions thus entailed a mode of cinematographic engagement that eluded the logic of pure representation and emphasized aspects of media as a form of socio-technical assemblage. More than a place to watch movies, they were a place for people and machines to come together as media.

An anomalous cinema In all its mess, Cine Falcatrua illustrates how the (formal) materiality of cinema can be reincarnated in another (forensic) body. The film society championed a translation of analogue film practices into digital technologies that was unprecedented at the time. The Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) would only release its first document outlining the official characteristics of the medium in 2005. This document stipulated standard image and sound specifications to distinguish cinema from other forms of digital media (De

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Luca, 2005: 149). Cine Falcatrua’s pirate screenings, however, evince a very different parameter of interpretation about what constitutes the medium. While the DCI’s official framework focus on film’s high audiovisual definition as cinema’s defining material attribute, the film society’s activities seemed to favour film’s conditions of access and experience instead. In order to understand Cine Falcatrua’s take on cinema materiality, it is important to look at the cinematographic circuit at the turn of the 21st century. The DVD aftermarket had considerably reduced the quality gap between home video and theatrical exhibition. Even though DVDs sported much less audiovisual definition, they were watched in correspondingly smaller screens, resulting in a satisfactory resolution. Since their popularization, what seemed to make film stand out among other instances of the cinematographic work was not, for the public at large, a superior visual quality. Rather, it was the (likewise physical) circumstances of film’s availability in the marketplace. Film constituted the means through which a movie was presented first, in the big screens of collective spaces. Film’s privileged condition was publicly attested to by the fact that virtually all professional film festivals at that time restricted the participation of works distributed in video formats. Meanwhile, Internet piracy was making it possible to circumvent release windows and access studio features even before they were completed. Digital video projectors enabled relatively cheap, large-scale exhibitions of audiovisual content. Cine Falcatrua brought both apparatus together in the form of a collective experience mimicking theatrical screening. By appropriating online platforms as rich curatorial resources and connecting computer terminals to video projectors, the film society short-circuited private media consumption and the cinematographic tradition. According to another definition of cinema, it is not difficult to regard this practice as a proper expression of the medium. Even though Cine Falcatrua’s screenings were arranged in a different way, they amounted to the same basic effects as the regular theatres of that time. What could be (forensically) described as the projection of poorly codified audiovisual data, running on personal computers installed in precarious conditions, was (formally) abstracted as a privileged means of accessing movies in a particular way that, in the early 2000s, only film could have made possible. Detached from the core of the cinematographic circuit, Cine Falcatrua was free to explore the potentials of computer networks for movie circulation. From mere functionaries of medial apparatus, its participants became its programmers, devising highly diverse and efficient operations. More than once, the film society had been able to show works to an audience of hundreds

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Cine Falcatrua (2004) setting up projection among the spectators. Photograph by Gilbertinho Cineasta.

months before their official release dates in Brazil. It likewise exhibited dozens of independent features that had been either censored or forgotten, or simply were not interesting (i.e. profitable) enough for the local distributors. The case described in the beginning of this chapter is exemplary of Cine Falcatrua’s flexibility. The extraordinary attendance was due to the fact that the movie to be screened on that evening was a Brazilian erotic drama whose distribution was practically prohibited in the country. That could never be afforded in a conventional movie theatre. Firstly, because the venue’s programme would have been under the close scrutiny of legal regulating bodies, but also because the last-minute rearrangements that allowed for the exhibition to happen would be nearly impossible to accomplish. In a conventional movie theatre, the apparatus would have been integrated into the architecture and bound to a very strict working schedule. The same technical milieu that facilitated their regular operation made them unmovable, useless for anything else. Cine Falcatrua’s lack of medial resources, on the other hand, made it paradoxically resourceful. To the same extent that it was demanding, the film society was prone to change and improvisation. Albeit similar in effect, the kind of cinema practiced by Cine Falcatrua entailed contingencies very different from a conventional theatrical projection.

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Whereas the scarcity and wearing of film were no longer a problem, the installation of apparatus certainly was. Most public places are not fit for a movie screening. At that time, nor even the university auditoriums were prepared for projection. It was necessary to create space for the screen, projector, and speakers; find enough power sources for all the equipment; connect one to another with the right cables; secure the ineffable distance between projector and screen; and create and maintain the right amount of darkness throughout the whole session. None of these activities were automated, and each constituted a weak spot in the performance of the medium. I lost count of how many sessions were severely delayed because no one remembered to bring a minijack-to-jack adapter, necessary to connect the computer’s audio output to amplified speakers. In order to go along with the medium’s renewed materiality, the film society participants had to devise new ‘cinematographic’ operations. Most of them were borrowed from other fields and made to replace cinema’s traditional automatisms, emulating minor processes of movie distribution, promotion, and exhibition. It involved learning the right sites to find movies of certain kinds; the shortcuts used to update subtitle timecodes in bulk; the places in which sessions could be advertised for free; quick fixes for when the computer crashed mid screening; and never to forget the audio adapters. By combining and serializing these operations, the film society progressively built a tradition of its own. This occurred at the same time as the university got used to its activities. After a few initial weeks, the college employees were already familiar with some of Cine Falcatrua’s core members, making it easier for them to borrow equipment and book auditoriums. The group thus optimized the transactions required for the screenings to work, building connections to the surrounding apparatus and establishing a new, and rather localized, medial practice. In doing so, the film society created a technical milieu that allowed for its increasing concretization. In about four months, Cine Falcatrua was able to programme a calendar of screenings in advance and secure a more-or-less stable location for them, in the auditorium of a building belonging to the Department of Design. It had thus become an institutionalized part of the university life. Here, it should be noted that the film society operated in ways opposite to an expanded cinema piece. While works such as Paul Sharits’s previously mentioned Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976) depart from the medium’s tradition and inaugurate a field of their own, Cine Falcatrua came from the outside of cinema proper and put itself in its place. With a couple of rather crude automatisms, the film society was able to take over operations that required more than a century to be streamlined. The more Cine Falcatrua

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claimed a position in cinema’s tradition, though, the more resistance it faced from the conventions ingrained in the circuit. Initially, this resistance did not constitute any form of active contention, but rather a sort of inertia. The elements already in place refused to connect and move along with the film society. One of the biggest obstacles to its activity was the audience’s expectations. As they began to recognize Cine Falcatrua as a proper exhibition setting, the public became unwilling to cooperate with any structural improvisation. They started to behave as regular patrons – a mass of passive consumers waiting to have the movie delivered for them. After all, that is what spectators are supposed to do, and not to carry projectors around or put up with lousy film copies. This goes to show that cinema’s tradition is not a straightforward sedimentation of automatisms based on an inherent scale of efficiency. It is rather a principle of organization that defines how technological change feeds back into the medium. The localization of new elements is executed from within the circuit. It must therefore comply with the circuit’s rhythm and match its scale; above all, it must follow the circuit’s conventions. The primary opposition against emerging interactions comes from a network of positive reinforcements, which foster the reproduction of compatible operations, apparatus, and formats. Elements that cannot easily couple with this network have a hard time competing with others that do. According to its criteria of compatibility, automatisms are evaluated even before they come into being. Both historical and historicizing, these criteria predefine the medium’s availability to change. What strays too far from its underlying epistemology is either cast onto other fields or ruled out as illegitimate. Sufficient modes of engagement with already available technology are suppressed simply because they have been made unthinkable. This situation leads to minor and continuous improvements of the medium as a technical entity. The circuit incorporates new technologies in ways that reinforce existing synergies. Digital computers are integrated into projection not to make it more dynamic, but rather to strengthen the control of central authorities (De Luca, 2005: 49). In 2004, many years before the widespread of video-on-demand, when not even YouTube had been founded, the use of the Internet for film distribution seemed implausible. Hollywood studios were keen on fighting against it, typecasting any of its possible instances as breaches of copyright. A similar discredit was spread throughout the circuit. Blinded by their traditional understanding of the medium, the public at large could not consider file sharing to be an actual cinematographic operation, even when they were directly involved with it. At most, it was a provisory solution for accessing cinematographic works.

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In that sense, it seems relevant that the Cine Falcatrua’s participants were complete amateurs. Their rather flimsy allegiance to cinema’s tradition made them able to think of the medium otherwise, breaking with the established paradigms of circulation and embracing oppositional automatisms. At that time, a professional projectionist probably would have refused to exhibit a movie straight from a personal computer, as the film society used to do. Instead of relying on a device that she was not trained to use, she would have expected to have at least a copy of the movie on DVD. This would require a series of extra steps between the download and the screening. The movie file would have to be converted to the MPEG-2 format in order to be made compatible with DVD technology. Afterwards, it would have to be burned on the disc, using special software that organized audiovisual data according to the file structure required by DVD video, along with the available subtitles. These intermediate procedures would have made Cine Falcatrua’s work impracticable. The only computers to which the film society had access were not powerful, and they would have taken days to convert the videos, with no guarantee of success. Besides, even though DVD recording software could be obtained at no extra costs, the hardware was still an expensive peripheral outside of the students’ financial means. Consequently, had the participants of Cine Falcatrua been trained as projectionists, the film society would most likely never have existed. They would have become paralyzed by the lack of traditional conditions, and would not have considered engaging with the technologies at hand. Conversely, precisely because they were not actual functionaries of the established projection apparatus, they were able to become the programmers of a different one. Their lack of specialization in cinema allowed them to constitute the medium in a movement similar to what Felix Guattari saw in the Italian free radios of the 1970s: as ‘collective assemblages of enunciation that absorb or traverse specialties’ (Goddard, 2011: 11). Cinema by the means of its anomalies.

Fixing places, stabilizing practices The increasing stability of the interactions between Cine Falcatrua and formal university bodies greatly facilitated the film society’s regular activities. Nevertheless, even though they enabled the group to operate ‘as cinema’ at a local level, these relationships did not ultimately result in a redefinition of medial paradigms able to accommodate its practice. Every time the film society reached out to the wider cinematographic circuit, in an attempt to

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expand the technical milieu that allowed for its individuation, it faced strong resistance. This resistance, as mentioned before, was mostly passive and epistemic. In the broad context of the medium, Cine Falcatrua’s exceptional character made it an experiment better fitting a contemporary arts festival or, more appropriately, the laboratorial context of the university. The general population understood it as a form of social activism rather than cinema in the making. The film society’s discourse therefore remained circumscribed to economic or political spheres. That prevented its particular modality of cinema to propagate through the established cinematographic structures. Traditional media outlets covering cinema, for example, would not advertise any of Cine Falcatrua’s activities. The film society screenings were never included in the local newspapers’ weekly movie schedules. The press releases it sent were largely ignored by the few film critics working in the city. If these facts seem only natural to us, it is precisely because our expectations are based on a certain medial paradigm. However, there is no reason why a public movie schedule should only consider what is running at commercial venues, or in sessions that repeat every weekday at a fixed location. These are just conventions, which do not even represent all possible configurations of the theatrical screening. Unable to adjust itself to these conventions, though, Cine Falcatrua had to devise tactics to allow for its own sustainability and propagation. In other words, it had to create its own apparatus of publicity. Here, the f ilm society once again resorted to systems appropriated from other cultural practices. Within the college campus, it employed a medium used by students for advertising their gigs and parties: xeroxed A4 sheets, posted all over the university buildings. The f ilm society participants did the design themselves. It was a cheap method that they could afford with the help of some voluntary donations collected during the screening sessions. Eventually, the film society also received support from a local copy shop. Coupled with word of mouth, this tactic secured an attendance of around 40 people every week for the initial months of the project. Not surprisingly, this audience consisted mostly of UFES’s students and staff. The posters did not reach potential spectators from outside the university, even though the campus was located right beside a lively residential neighbourhood. In order to overcome this geographic barrier, the film society made a pioneering use of social media platforms, chiefly Orkut (orkut.com) and Fotolog (fotolog.net). Even though the first is currently deactivated and the second has lost most of its popularity, by 2004, they were both prominent in Brazil. Fotolog in particular was a craze among Vitória’s youth. In its

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first iteration, it consisted of an image-blogging platform with incipient social media features. Free accounts enabled users to post one picture per day and receive 20 comments per picture. Every user page had a ‘feed’ showing its contacts’ latest posts on the right side. The real-time updates of these feeds caused new information to spread quickly. In order to allow further interactions, users devised ways to exploit the system’s limitations. A popular technique was to copy all of the comments made on one picture once its limit had been reached, delete them, and post all again as one sole comment, thus opening space for nineteen new ones. Cine Falcatrua created accounts on these websites and used them to publish electronic flyers of its weekly sessions. The posts were spread by the means of comments on other pages with the help of special scripts and the goodwill of the user community. This method of publicity was particularly successful because it allowed information about the screenings to be changed at the last minute, as it was often necessary. In case the session had to be moved to a new location, one only needed to post an update in order to communicate it to the audience. A comparison could be made between the way the film society got into these online platforms and the way the cinématographe was deployed in the Parisian cafés. Both meant to appropriate the local public as their own. Whereas the Lumières were looking for a bourgeois audience, Cine Falcatrua aimed at the locals who regularly employed the Internet to share information about the city’s nightlife and cultural activities with their friends. The social media tactics were highly effective. The first session to make use of them gathered around 300 spectators. Certainly, the screening that night was particularly appealing. It was a double bill that included the sequel of a feature that had just been released in Brazil. Nevertheless, thenceforth, Cine Falcatrua’s sessions had an average of 150 people, many of them from outside of the university. Senior students from a high school located in front of UFES became its habitués. The film society seemed to have overcome the academic bubble and become able to connect to the city’s broader cultural scene. Still, the growing audience only seemed interested in watching movies for free. They did not expect to participate in setting up projections, and even less in curating and hosting their own screenings afterwards. Even though social media allowed Cine Falcatrua to advertise itself as an exhibition project, they did not immediately promote the movie circulation alternatives championed by the film society. An actual transformation of the public’s mentality towards cinematographic works required a deeper intervention in the circuit. In order to fulfil this agenda, the film society

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sought to incorporate a pedagogic dimension to its ordinary practices. One could say that the primary means for it to happen was through example. By performing the setup of apparatus in front of the audience, the film society at once disclosed the technical reality of movie circulation and urged the public to take control of it. Later, this ‘training’ would be outlined in a series of small fanzines distributed for free during the screenings. These publications consisted of an A5 page printed on both sides and folded in half. They were photocopied together with the posters, and had an average edition of 80 copies each. A total of eleven issues were issued between March and July 2004. Each fanzine contained 1) a synopsis of the movie of the week; 2) a review of the one shown at the previous session; and 3) a short do-it-yourself tutorial, addressing themes such as ‘assembling your own movie theatre’. The fanzines supplemented the film society’s screenings with a discursive platform. On the one hand, they allowed for exercises in film criticism, legitimizing Cine Falcatrua’s within the cinematographic tradition. On the other, they enabled a schooling apparatus that dismissed medial ideology while proposing an agnostic relationship to movie circulation. The included tutorials provide a good idea of the skillset that the group meant to spread among the audience. The first one instructed how to obtain movies for a public exhibition. It compared the range and diversity of titles available on file sharing networks with those on a video rental store, still operating at the time, and suggested websites and applications useful for finding audiovisual content online. Another tutorial explained how to get, play, and edit subtitle files on a computer. The following one, how to set up projections, advocating for the use of collective spaces and whatever ‘projector’ was available (even a TV). By proposing these ‘alternative’ technologies as viable solutions within cinema’s tradition, Cine Falcatrua challenged commonsensical views of the medium’s constitution. There was a particular effort to defuse popular discourses idealizing online file sharing for either good or bad. In the tutorial published in the first week of July 2004, it reads: ‘[the conflict around file sharing] is not a dispute between copyright and piracy; between majors and indies; between liberalism and communism. It is just the industry going through internal disagreements, a sort of latent puberty’. This statement indicates a displacement of the technology issue from medial paradigms. The counter-apparatus is reframed as the expression of an all-inclusive systemic transformation. The conflict between established actors is made secondary to the major and discontinuous improvement of cinema as a complex technical ensemble (‘the industry’).

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The film society took a further step in its pedagogical endeavours as it began to coordinate workshops. These activities often took place in events such as film festivals, academic seminars, and exhibitions to which Cine Falcatrua was invited. Most of them aspired to teach participants to appropriate readily available technologies in order to short-circuit movie circulation. The Digital Film Societies workshop, held during the 2nd Caparaó Environmental Video Exhibition (in July 2005), for example, supported the inhabitants of the town of Irupi, which had no movie theatres, to devise screening tactics of their own. Self-Sustainable Cinema, at the 3rd Mercosul Young Filmmakers Festival (in September 2007), promoted peer-to-peer film distribution among young filmmakers, demonstrating how they could convert their works to digital files, subtitle them, and upload the results to file sharing websites. Living Along a Free Cinema, held in many different venues between 2006 and 2007, revolved around the many ways people can engage with movies through computer networks. While most of Cine Falcatrua’s workshops primarily addressed the political economy of movie circulation, others meant to explore the negative spaces separating cinema from other media, movies from apparatus, and media practices from one another. Examples here include Introduction to Creative Emulation (SESC Pompéia, July 2006), Hacking the Film Projector (UFES, November 2007), and the Porn Screenwriting Laboratory (Mariantônia Cultural Centre, May 2008). Their titles demonstrate the multiple directions towards which the film society wanted to push cinema. The fact that these later workshops found a place in the contemporary art world rather than in more traditional cinema events is very telling of how elements of pirate cinema would ultimately be normalized within the circuit. Cine Falcatrua’s attempt to constitute a technical milieu appropriate for its practice provides us with an opportunity to grasp the ontographic flows of media. In order to rematerialize cinema, the film society had not only to achieve film’s formal effects but also to cope with the way the medium was traditionally understood. It was not enough to emulate the ‘primary’ apparatus of circulation, which allow for the phenomenological existence of the cinematographic work. It was likewise necessary to account for the ‘secondary’ ones, which naturalize medial existence as such. The film society’s xeroxed posters, social-networking profiles, fanzines, and workshops can be seen as propaganda apparatus providing it with epistemic conditions of reproduction. They connected Cine Falcatrua with regular cinematographic audiences and created the conditions for its counter-practices to propagate among them. As such, these apparatus allowed the film society to navigate across the arbitrary distinction between movie circulation and reinventing cinema anew.

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Crystallizing change Up to this point, the history of Cine Falcatrua may seem like a successful hack of medium specificities. As the film society strived for concreteness, though, it increasing came into conflict with the conventions ingrained in the circuit. The initial inertia, embodied in the audience’s conforming attitude and in the institution’s neglect, was supplanted by deliberate suppression, enacted through judicial means. The official certification of Cine Falcatrua as some kind of cinema came in the form of an interdiction disapproving its activities. For the legal authorities, the film society should not be excused for doing any sort of academic experiment in media ontologies. It was, first and foremost, committing copyright crime. The increasing resistance of the circuit was, to some extent, a response to Cine Falcatrua’s growing popularity. By the end of the first half of 2004, the film society’s infamy had earned it some press coverage. Even though its screening sessions still did not show up on the newspapers’ weekly movie schedule, on special occasions they would be listed among other cultural activities. Additionally, the film society had been the subject of some local newspaper and TV reports, which portrayed it in a positive light, as part of the students’ cultural movement. In July, this coverage reached a national peak, as Cine Falcatrua drew the attention of Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest daily newspapers. A Folha reporter, looking on the Internet for sources to interview about Video CDs, stumbled upon the film society’s community in Orkut and decided to do a short piece about it. The two-column text was published on 29 July 2004, under a provocative headline that translates as ‘University decrees fraud on cinema’ (a play on words of the film society’s name). The news piece presented Cine Falcatrua within a discursive frame very different from the one upheld by its participants. The film society was highlighted as a player in a crude narrative of economic disruption underpinned by the conflict between copyright holders and free culture advocates. It was an approach sympathetic to the students’ ingenuity, but rather condescending. The text quoted the students explaining how the project enabled experiments with actual movie exhibition in the context of the university. These statements were, however, juxtaposed with a declaration from an official representative of the Brazilian Association of Copyright Defence (ADEPI), who outright condemned their activities as illegal. The expressed opposition downplayed the film society’s curatorial and speculative dimensions, reducing the group to its piracy aspect. In doing so, it reinforced an established medial dichotomy that Cine Falcatrua aimed to overcome.

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Beyond this discursive effect, the news piece had other, more concrete repercussions. Alerted to Cine Falcatrua’s activities, ADEPI immediately filled a criminal complaint against the participating student and faculty members. Less than two weeks after the publication, UFES, as the official convener of the project, was sued by Brazilian film distributors whose work had allegedly been exhibited by the film society. They claimed the sum of R$ 480,000 (about US$ 200,000 at the time) in damages for reasons of ‘unfair competition’. As ludicrous as it may seem, this allegation could be considered a certificate of legitimacy for Cine Falcatrua. It implied an acknowledgement that the film society’s activities amounted to the same effect as the film distributors’. In other words, that what Cine Falcatrua performed was (a criminally eff icient means of) film distribution and exhibition. Nevertheless, by affirming the film society’s practices medial character, the lawsuit simultaneously meant to seize control over them. From the point that it was legally called into question, Cine Falcatrua could no longer explore movie circulation without restrictions. It had to make a case for the legitimacy of its actions. Here, one can see how legal apparatus impose themselves as the ultimate gatekeepers of media properties. A court of law has the power to arbitrate both what is specific to the medium and to whom it belongs, subsuming material and cultural interactions to the codified traditions. Emerging technological operations cannot thereby be established if they cannot be properly justified. The students were summoned and interrogated by the police. The time and resources that they had to spend on their defence upset Cine Falcatrua’s regular screenings. The multiple reactions to the process fragmented the film society, evincing its internal contradictions. Civil society groups, such as the local Documentary Filmmakers Association (Associação Brasileira de Documentaristas, hereafter ABD-ES), supported the project on the basis of the universal human right to cultural access. UFES’s faculty and students largely did the same, for understanding that academia should be a legitimate space for the experimental exploration of the social uses of new technologies. The university management, conversely, meant to attribute full responsibility to the project members, as though they had not only broken the law, but also betrayed institutional trust. Each of these arguments denotes a partial interpretation of the film society’s practice and its broader medial implications. None of them, as expected, do complete justice to Cine Falcatrua’s embrace of the cinematographic work as a self-differing technological performance. That would have been a perplexing appeal to present in court, anyway. The lawsuit commanded an unambiguous explanation for a practice that hitherto

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attempted to remain fluid, ever-receding. In order to justify itself, Cine Falcatrua had to thin out its internal contradictions and commit to a decisive ontographic gesture. The outcomes of this legal quarrel configured a critical step in the concretization of many of its entailed elements and operations. The case was settled in November 2007, with UFES sentenced to pay the distributors a compensation of about 1% of the originally requested sum. At that point, Cine Falcatrua no longer existed in the same manner as it did before. Its practices, however, had found their way into the formal Brazilian exhibition circuit. By influence of the national film society movement, digital technologies had been incorporated into the official means of film distribution sponsored by the federal government. This development can be traced back to Cine Falcatrua’s lawsuit and correlated to the project’s collapse. The legal controversy had put film societies back in the public spotlight and stirred the Brazilian Federation of Film Societies, a civil society group that had been virtually inactive since the 1980s. The defence of Cine Falcatrua brought old and new members of the Federation together, becoming pivotal for their contemporary reorganization. The lawsuit was one the most debated topics at their first conference, also in 2004, resulting in an open letter supporting the group. At that time, the Brazilian film society movement was likewise very traditional. Many of its strongest political figures could not fathom any format for the practice other than 16mm film. The participation of Cine Falcatrua in the Federation plenaries weighted for their acceptance of digital media as a proper means of film exhibition. The ensuing articulation gave film societies leverage within the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, at that time largely favourable to the open culture paradigm. In the same year that UFES was convicted because of Cine Falcatrua, the Ministry also launched a public funding programme aimed at creating hundreds of so-called ‘digital diffusion hotspots’ in the country, by providing them with equipment and content for free movie exhibitions. Besides film societies, the programme targeted institutions such as community centres and artist collectives. It was paired with Programadora Brasil (‘Brazilian Distributor’), a state initiative for the distribution of Brazilian features freely licensed for nonprofit screenings. Every digital hotspot received a kit consisting of a DVD player, a digital video projector, an amplified speaker, a large foldable screen, and a package of movies in DVD format. From 2007 to 2013, the Programadora released yearly packages of new movies to its associates, allowing them to show a constantly fresh programme.

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These institutional arrangements indicate a possible course of localization for digital exhibition within the cinematographic circuit through public policies. The new technology was initially codified in the media tradition through fringe practices whose inherent disarray made them less resistant to change. This process was followed by the creation of substructures aimed at providing the technology with resources for reproduction and propagation. These substructures simultaneously set parameters of operation, thereby crystallizing change. The Ministry of Culture programme implied this crystallization via the standardization of equipment, content, and activities. Directly connected to organs of the state apparatus, the digital diffusion hotspots did not enjoy the same freedom that Cine Falcatrua once had. In order to qualify for the programme, a group had to meet certain predefined criteria. The movies provided by the Ministry prescribed what they were able to show. Contractual obligations informed their activities, setting a minimum number of screenings per month and explicitly forbidding them to show unauthorized works. All of their sessions had to be periodically reported to the state. In case the venue did not comply with these clauses, it could have its equipment confiscated. The historical perspective makes Cine Falcatrua’s practice paradigmatic of Brazilian digital film societies. As for the group itself, it ultimately led a different objective existence. Right after the lawsuit, many participants stopped attending the screenings. The remaining ones had to commit further to the organization of the project, resulting in a more centralized operational core. The legal disaggregation thus seemed to foster the film society’s crystallization as well, as it individuated some group members from a general audience. Their increasing dedication to technical rearrangements of the cinematographic work eventually displaced them into the field of contemporary arts. Thus, while cinema institutions condemned the group’s activities as criminal, the art world welcomed them wholeheartedly, as part of new aesthetic trends. In this context, the legitimization of Cine Falcatrua came by the means of its selection in the 2005-2006 edition of Rumos Artes Visuais (‘Visual Arts Pathways’), an influential biennial cartography of young Brazilian artists. What was left of the film society was thereby fleshed out as an artist collective operating within the frame of art institutions, which were better able to accommodate and provide the necessary resources for their highly heterogeneous practice. Up until 2008, when it disbanded, the group participated in collective art exhibitions and festivals at a number of traditional museums and galleries in Brazil, such as the Itaú Cultural Institute (São Paulo), Paço Imperial (Rio de Janeiro), and Museu Vale (Vila Velha). The new context called for clearer

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conceptual gestures, which may be read as enquiries into the audiovisual event as a socio-technical art form in itself. At each venue, Cine Falcatrua proposed a sort of film festival to be presented, exploring different audiovisual genres, dynamics of projection, and modes of public interaction. Therefore, negative aspects of movie circulation were mobilized as sources of creative engagement. To a large extent, these proposals represented a continuation of the group’s exhibitionary practices. Many of them entailed open calls, inviting other people to show their works within Cine Falcatrua’s. In spite of their operational similarities, though, there was a clear departure from what the group did before. In the art world, their screenings were reframed from a mode of curating cinema into a mode of producing artworks. The self-containment of each exhibition reinforced projections to be less a continuing performance of medium specificities than objective pieces of performance art. Piracy, which used to be a method for the former, became a distinct subject of the later, explicitly adding to the value and meaning to be extracted from what the group made. It is open to question whether pirate cinema, expelled from the cinematographic tradition, can maintain its oppositional vitality when captured by the commodifying apparatus of contemporary art. The curatorial interventions of Cine Falcatrua probed the role that seemingly irrelevant apparatus have for the socio-technical constitution of cinema. The account of its collapse as a film society as well as its metamorphosis into an artist collective materializes different forms through which emerging technological interactions are reified within the circuit. On the one hand, by their codification in the medium’s tradition, these interactions renovate the set of available medial operations. On the other, by their concretization as self-evident entities, they generate ‘expanded’ cinemas that thrive in fields apart. This dual development shows the distinction between normal and ‘revolutionary’ apparatus to be superficial, secondary to the expression of the medium’s genesis. These two states are not mutually exclusive, but are rather complementary and in constant flux. The outcome of competing paradigms seems to be an overall refinement of network operations. Initial ‘disruption’ of the encompassing dispositif is resolved in additional stratifications of the status quo. The technical deindividuation effected by the multiplication of anomalies creates room for the accommodation of new synergies, leading to major and discontinuous improvements of the medium. In the course of this long-standing iteration, technology becomes fixed, used, and understood as cinematographic.

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Bibliography / works cited Assis, Diego, ‘Liminar impede sessões do Cinefalcatrua’, Folha de São Paulo, São Paulo, 12 August 2004. Assis, Diego, ‘Universidade federal em Vitória decreta “falcatrua” no cinema’, Folha de São Paulo, São Paulo, 29 July 2004. Crisp, Virginia, Film Distribution in the Digital Age: Pirates and Professionals (Basingstoke, UK: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). De Luca, Luiz, Cinema Digital: Um Novo Cinema? (São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial, 2005). Goddard, Michael, ‘Towards an archaeology of media ecologies: “Media ecology”, political subjectivation and free radios’, Fibreculture, 17 (April 2011). Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Larkin, Brian, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2008). Lobato, Ramon, ‘Subcinema: Theorizing marginal film distribution’, Limina, 13 (Perth, Australia: 2007), 113-120. Lobato, Ramon and James Meese (eds.), Geoblocking and Global Video Culture (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2016). Mizukami, Pedro N., Oona Castro, Luiz Fernando Moncau, and Ronaldo Lemos, ‘Brazil’, in Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, ed. Joe Karaganis (New York City: Social Science Research Council, 2011), 219-304. NS/VCDQ, ‘FAQ – Video sources’, VCDQ, 2010. Available at . Last access 14 August 2011. Sundaram, Ravi, Pirate Modernity – Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2010). Trice, Jasmine Nadua, ‘The Quiapo cinémathèque – transnational DVDs and alternative modernities in the heart of Manila’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 13(5) (Thousand Oaks, CA: September 2010), 531-550. Cine Falcatrua, 2003-2008. Epileptic Seizure Comparison, Paul Sharits, 1976.

5.

Denied Distances Abstract This chapter demonstrates how curatorial interventions may deliberately challenge medial ideology and propose new epistemic formations within the medium. It takes its name – Denied Distances – from a video exhibition that brought together works from different years, formats, and genres, all of which engage with the negative spaces of cinema. These pieces were organized in the screening programme according to their spatial scale of operation, from the thickness of the screen to the density of the circuit. The chapter narrates the making of this event while providing an exegesis of its programme. In doing so, it highlights the way circumstances of production and exhibition delimit the availability of works, displaying the role of material contingencies in the shaping of curatorial discourse. Keywords: Curatorial discourse, video exhibition, intermedial translation, material contingencies, media technology

We end where we began: in a fairly typical movie theatre. In fact, the exact same one where the audience had briefly stared at a knife all blade without really watching it. This time it is not for a film festival, though, but for another special kind of screening. It is 2009, and the venue is hosting the Mostravídeo project, a monthly series of video programmes proposed by guest curators. I had put together a three-day cycle called Denied Distances, which encompasses audiovisual works pertaining to different genres. Some of them could be called video art, others expanded cinema, and others audiovisual performances. There are even a couple of documentaries thrown in the mix. What these works have in common is the fact that all of them mobilize the negative spaces of cinema in a significant way. The programme has a historical character, but not the corresponding linearity. Instead of following a clear chronological progression, the works are shown in a topological order, going from the most immediate scales of the circuit to the broader ones. Sessions took place once each week.

Menotti, G., Movie Circuits. Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789089648907_ch05

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Denied Distances was designed to be a critical platform within its given circumstances. It was based on the curatorial gamble that certain works, by virtue of their joint presentation, could speak of the configuration of cinema technology and against its conventionality. It departed from the idea that the camera apparatus, by abstracting the depth of the world in order to generate its flat representation, could automatically produce images, yet it could not produce a movie – at least not by itself. The phenomenology of cinema requires the architecture of projection to deliberately remove an equivalent dimension from the audience’s perception. ‘The depth of projection is denied so that the depth of field may exist’, as stated in the exhibition’s introductory text. This dimensional offset would constitute the medium’s primary principle of operation. ‘It is in the seemingly empty gap between the [projector’s] lamp and the [screen’s] frame,’ the introduction continues, ‘that cinema takes place.’ A space simultaneously occupied by the beam of light and by the audience’s body. Decoupling filmmaking from exhibition, Denied Distances called attention to the flow of images between these practices. Vast and largely ignored territories emerge among their devices. These are the denied distances to which the title of the exhibition refers. Not only the spatial dimensions are abstracted in the production of a technical image, but the corresponding technical dimensions are also abstracted in the production of a medial presence. Denied distances encompass the sites where the invisible processes of information – such as film projection, digital codification, and electronic transmission – are performed. Sites in which the bulk of technological development is accumulated. Sites which, inasmuch as one may need to occupy them, remain unavailable for any sort of cinematographic rearrangement. If the proper experience of the medium is to be achieved, one’s body better not interrupt the beam of light, after all. Four such dimensions were highlighted in the exhibition programme: the thickness of the screen, the depth of projection, the extensions of the city, and the density of the circuit. Each was initially assigned to one of the screening sessions. The selected works activated those dimensions in deliberate ways, affirming spatial dynamics whose existence is normally suppressed from the cinematographic experience. They came from fields more or less outside conventional cinema; fields in which they were considered fairly conventional themselves. Each of them employed techniques and devices not entirely strange to the medium. However, they did it in a seemingly wrong way – without or even against the explicit purpose of movie circulation. Screens were torn apart; projections cut short or displaced; video signal artificially swollen; the editing betrayed; and even unauthorized

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distribution was promoted. The resulting images did not seem to constitute the cinematographic work’s intended outcome so much as its leftovers, collateral to any of these multiple desecrations of medial apparatus. To navigate across the different layers of Denied Distances provides us with an opportunity to consider how the ecological approach of projection studies unfolds in a more formal curatorial setting. Different from the loose association of devices that gave rise to Cine Falcatrua, Mostravideo consisted of a medial context enabled by a highly integrated chain of apparatus. The project was coordinated by the Itaú Cultural Institute, an organization managed by the Brazilian bank Itaú, and sponsored by the federal government by means of tax exemption. It had been running since 1997, with the stated goal of ‘showcasing the most instigating and inventive works of video artists, new media and experimental cinema’ (Mostravídeo, 2010). Since its beginning, Mostravídeo meant to address the shortcomings of movie circulation in the country, by disseminating contemporary audiovisual media production in places other than the main Brazilian metropolises (namely, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro). Every year, the project took residence in art-house cinemas at two other state capitals. In 2009, one of the chosen cities was my hometown, which I suspect is the main reason why I was invited to suggest a programme. It certainly added some local colour to the project. The hosting venues had assigned an empty slot in their weekly schedules for the Mostravídeo screenings, and took responsibility for all the technical operations behind them. Itaú provided production assistance for negotiating with distributors, an undisclosed budget for paying screening fees, and promotional material both printed and online. The full-colour brochure included images and synopses of each work, and a thousand-word-long curatorial statement. It was a fairly comfortable structure to work with, which left me free to reflect on which movies to show without having to worry about how they would actually come into place. However, insofar as it enabled curatorial work, Mostravídeo also restricted it. The project relied on historical commitments to other institutions that preset many of the exhibition elements. The architecture and schedule of the projection venues could not be changed. No work could be included if not expressly authorized by the distributor. I had a clear-cut frame to work with: four theatrical screenings, including an introductory one of 60 minutes and three others of about 90 minutes. This format was stipulated by contract, making me legally bound to it. There was little room to move things around. I was not able to set new apparatus or to propose different configurations of projection. All I could do was to define a theme for the exhibition and choose the appropriate content for its programme. Modes of

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public engagement had to comply with the tradition, and cinematographic works had to be expressed through the established means of circulation. That means to say, they would be presented in a format fitting theatrical projection: single-channel moving image streams with a stereo soundtrack, running straight from a DVD player. This last restriction, which in another situation would barely be acknowledged, was highly significant in the context of Denied Distances. My intention, after all, was to show works that disclosed the negative spaces of the circuit. They were not made to fit within the medium. Borrowed from other media, these works employ cinema’s structural processes (such as light projection, digital codification, and electronic transmission) as explicit features in their poetic strategies. Many of them were purposefully designed to be incompatible with conventional cinematographic apparatus. Their mere screening in a theatrical setting depended on their translation into a video edit. The ensuing rearrangements – a double denial of the medial tradition – created interesting circumstances for the examination of the vicissitudes of the cinematographic work. For 16mm films, this translation implied a simple telecine; for performances, unedited recorded documentations; for installations, whole new movies that addressed them as their subject matter; and so on. The works were therefore shown as their own derivatives, making it impossible to hold any claims of originality for what was presented. This fact subtly foregrounds their reproduction as a differential process, leading to new instances at each exhibition. The video edit became a common denominator through which the movies were mobilized together, as discursive units, within the system of equivalences entailed by the exhibition. Individually, the selected works testify, each in its own way, to the technological complexity of cinema, exposing its juxtapositions with other media. Their joint articulation within the screening programme, in turn, provokes yet other readings. The approximation of works within an exhibition, as noticed by curator Moacir dos Anjos, prompts us to understand one through the others, producing new meanings for the overall set (2015: 18). It is a taxonomical exercise, which allows one to ‘rebuild, over new grounds, the relations between seemingly separated categories’ (Moacir, 2015: 22). In the case of Denied Distances, this taxonomical exercise meant to uncover the material contiguities binding together distinct forms of audiovisual media. The particular position of a movie in the screening programme accentuated its capacity to intermediate or even contain others. The resulting arrangement suggested spatial connections cutting across different technological regimes. In place of the prevailing categorical dissociation between film, video, and

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computer images, the exhibition therefore described a continuum within which images, mechanisms, and architectures would constantly shift into one another. This fluid territoriality could be understood as a paradigm supplementary to the chronological positivism more traditionally employed to analyse the development of cinema. Against any criticism of curatorial instrumentalization, it is important to remark on the extent to which the rhetoric conveyed by Denied Distances was contingent on the possibility of drawing the works together. The fact that the exhibition employed the medium to speak of itself created further layers of commitment. Academic writing, as regulated as it may be, is usually subordinated to the logos but not to the circuit. In Denied Distances, the opposite happened. The metadiscursive quality of the exhibition prevented anything it expressed to be disconnected from its objects. Discourse had to be materialized within the organization of the medium. Its making therefore required a direct engagement with processes of circulation, conditioning the articulation of theory to the available socio-technical components. Just as it made me the programmer of the exhibition, the role of curator made me the functionary of other substructures of the medium. My actions were restricted by manifold contingencies, from the limited availability of screening copies and screen time to the contractual demands of the Mostravídeo project and the difficulties of getting in contact with film distributors. These obstacles effected different changes in the initial exhibition program, reshaping any discourse I might have originally planned. Due to the unexpected unavailability of space in one of the screening venues, for example, the number of sessions in Denied Distances had to be reduced by one. This in turn forced the combination of previously distinct topics, messing with the conceptual outline of the exhibition. What could otherwise be taken as a sign of taxonomical degeneration, I argue to be a legitimate expression of the medium’s fluid structure, adding to the complexity of whatever is represented by the momentary congealment of Denied Distances. The circumstances of Denied Distances make clear the situated and situational condition of discourse. What the exhibition expresses is not an outsider’s perspective on cinema, but rather an attempt to organize the medium from within. In order to account for its reflexivity as a tool for media studies, this chapter proposes to address three interconnected layers simultaneously. On a more superficial level, the chapter considers each of the works presented in Denied Distances individually, both as entities with particular cultural histories and networks performing different rearrangements of the cinematographic apparatus. On top of that, the chapter analyses the works’ joint articulation in the screening programme,

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as the embodiment of a curatorial diagram that affects their individual meaning and value while producing new readings of the ensemble. Finally, the chapter provides some insights in the making of the exhibition, thereby exposing the work required to draw movies together and revealing part of what was left out of the final programme. Combined, these perspectives attempt to demonstrate the fractal and essentially irreducible character of the cinematographic circuit manifested in the exhibition.

The thickness of the screen The first apparatus examined within Denied Distances is also the first to be abstracted from the experience of any image. The screen is the ultimate threshold of movie circulation. To watch a movie means to overlook the screen, even though it must be right in front of our eyes – and, in fact, the screen is what makes the movie watchable in the first place. Screens are usually treated as planar containers, abstract frames consisting of pure height and width. One talks about their area, their aspect ratio, and their resolution, as if these features were all that was to a screen. Clement Greenberg famously declared flatness to be the key element conditioning the pictorial arts (1960). However, to be able to hold an image, the screen must be dense – and in order to be dense, the screen must be thick. To the extent that it implies solidity and opacity, the thickness of the screen accounts for its more material aspects. It is an ambiguous medial property, which evokes the device’s origins in the ornamented folding screens and fire screens employed to delimit physical spaces (Huhtamo, 2004). It is the thickness that ensures that, when placed in a different configuration, the screen will actually safeguard the body and contain the view. In the context of Denied Distances, the concept of thickness was explored in a manifold way. Firstly, in a literal sense, to indicate the presence of the actual physical surface upon which the image appears. Secondly, figuratively, to address the spaces contained within the image. On the one hand, there is the medium of inscription, of which the visual trace is a metonym. On the other, the pro-filmic reality, metaphorized within the frame. In a completely analogue cinematographic circuit, these three meanings of thickness corresponded to clearly distinct elements: respectively, the screen, the film reel, and the filmed setting. However, already with electronic transmission, and even more with digital codification, these territories mingle in complex ways. Technological acceleration tends to compress scattered infrastructures together in the sheer manifestation of the image. During a live television

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broadcast, for instance, signal flows continuously from the setting, through antennae, satellite, and cathode ray tube, until it rests on the glass surfaces of multiple monitors. The works presented in this first session sought, each in its own way, to confront this immediate materiality of the movie appearance. With the notable exception of Guy Sherwin’s performance, their use of strategies such as queer camera movements and post-processing serves to unpack the images’ constitutive operations. The dissociation between visual traces and their medium of inscription is made evident. Pro-filmic settings are decoupled from the frame. Bodies that have been flattened recover their necessary volume.

WVLNT: WAVELENGTH for Those Who Don’t Have the Time: Originally 45 minutes, Now 15! Denied Distances began with a derivative work. WVLNT: WAVELENGTH for Those Who Don’t Have the Time: Originally 45 minutes, Now 15! (Canada, 1966-1967/2003, 15’) (hereafter WVLNT) is the video recording of a film. More precisely, it is a recording of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (Canada, 1966-1967, 45’), a work considered by many as a masterpiece of structural cinema. The first screening of Snow’s film was celebrated by Jonas Mekas as ‘a landmark event’ in the history of the medium (Enright, 2007). In an online catalogue published elsewhere, the piece has been called ‘the Citizen Kane of experimental cinema’ (Totaro, 2002). The work excels in its seeming simplicity. Filmed on 16mm film stock, Wavelength is described by P. Addams Sitney as ‘a forward zoom for forty-five minutes, halting occasionally, and fixed during several different times so that day changes to night within the motion’ (2002: 352). This long scene starts with an open view of a seemingly residential loft and ends in a close-up of a photograph of sea waves pinned to the room’s opposite wall. These initial and final framings correspond respectively to the wider and narrower zoom settings of the camera lens. The whole trajectory is followed by a sine wave that goes from a very low to a very high pitch – the film’s eponymous wavelength. As the camera eye pierces through space and inexorably concentrates on a distant corner, a series of small events take place. People enter and leave the room; they mess with some objects; a man falls dead on the floor; a woman phones to report this incident. At the same time, things happen to the film itself, which goes through different colour filters. Neither series of occurrences seem to constitute the actual ‘plot’ of Wavelength, though.

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An attentive spectator, after watching the whole film in the confines of a movie theatre, would probably say that the main action going on is the camera’s. The zoom represents a methodical crossing that ignores every other thing around and about it. In that sense, Wavelength produces a gaze similar to that of close-circuit television, avant la lettre: a mechanical and almost involuntary surveillance of space. A gaze that is, at the same time, introspective, which seems driven less by the need to focus on anything in particular than by the continuing rearrangement of the camera’s internal mechanisms. The camera’s sluggish movement causes an increasing tension in the spectators – a tension that, according to Annette Michelson, ‘grows in direct ratio to the reduction of the [visual] field’ (1987: 175). The zoom suggests a threshold, a culminating horizon, which competes with the drama taking place in the room. Where is the camera leading us? Why does it avoid to focus on ‘what is going on’? Questions such as these cross the mind of the spectators, making them slowly aware of the dissociation between their own perception and the mobile virtual gaze provided by the cinematographic work. Anne Friedberg defines the mobile virtual gaze as a form of ‘received perception mediated through representation’ (1993: 2). It normally operates in favour of the movie´s narrative, leading the audience from each one of its relevant events to another. In Wavelength, however, the disembodied gaze only moves forward, completely indifferent to what is happening on-screen. Instead of skipping inconsequential occurrences and going after the characters’ meaningful actions, the camera just zooms, as if it were what it effectively is: a machine exercising its own inhuman logic. Wavelength’s excruciating slowness is forced upon the theatrical viewers, testing their concentration. The perception that the audience receives from the movie is not the one it desires. The attempt to follow the actions on the screen can be a fatiguing experience, leading them to reject the diegetic involvement altogether. For Sitney, the concurrence of things taking place ‘in the room of Wavelength’ and those happening ‘to the film of the room’ causes the public to experience a constant shift between ‘cinematic illusion and anti-illusion’ (2002: 353-354). One could imagine a regular spectator in that situation. Betrayed by the apparatus, she shifts her attention from the image as a whole to the individual elements in the film; then to the limits of the frame; and finally to herself and her surroundings. She therefore becomes self-aware, as though she has been cast out of the image. Instead of just watching the movie, the spectator comes to examine the circumstances in which she is present: the hic-et-nunc of projection. She realizes that things are also taking place in the room in which Wavelength is being screened, and

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one of those things is cinema. The ending of the movie, when the photograph of the sea fills the whole frame, acts as a confirmation that the screen is not a window into a different reality, but rather another spatial boundary to this one. We are confined. Wavelength displaces our engagement with cinema technology: from the gaze at the screen to the body in the theatre, one’s experience of the medium is transformed into another. Michelson says that, in doing so, the movie entails a paradigmatic convergence between epistemological inquiry and cinematic experience (1987: 173), since it switches from cinema as a mode of consciousness to the consciousness of cinema itself. It must be stressed, however, that Wavelength does not provoke this effect alone. As much as it results from the movie’s particular imagery, the shift in the audience’s perception relies on a depletion of the traditional cinema situation. For it to happen, Wavelength must be shown in very specific conditions – namely, those of a standard theatrical screening. Any other display arrangement (in which the public can be easily distracted, change channels, or advance the film) makes this effect unattainable. It is no wonder that Michael Snow considers that those who have watched Wavelength on YouTube ‘had not actually seen the film at all’ (Williamson, 2011: 211). Thought of as a dispositif, Wavelength cannot be separated from the theatrical context that makes its experience so extenuating. In that sense, it seems to operate as a site-specific piece, which can never truly exist in any other technological setting. Video would allow Wavelength to be divorced from the highly controlled situation of projection, putting its duration under the spectators’ command. The movie’s reliance on a certain architecture of exhibition is subtly reinforced by the fact that Wavelength is only officially available in 16mm format, which radically restricts its possibilities of circulation. For that reason, it could not be presented within Denied Distances, whose screening venues lacked the proper projection mechanisms. WVLNT, the movie that was included in the exhibition instead, is noticeably different from the one described above. It was made by capturing the footage of the original film in video and splitting it into three segments of equal duration. These segments were set to an equivalent amount of transparency and placed on top of one another without any further editing. The resulting fifteen-minute audiovisual loop consists of a three-layer audiovisual ‘sandwich’ containing the whole Wavelength in a package much easier to trade. As the title indicates, this work is more accessible than Snow’s original film not only because it is available in a more familiar format, but the shorter duration also makes it appealing to a larger, busier audience (‘those who don’t have the time’).

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Michael Snow, WVLNT: WAVELENGTH for those who don’t have the time: Originally 45 minutes, Now 15! (2003). DVD video, colour, 15 minutes. Released as a multiple edition in 2003 with Art Metropole, Toronto. Courtesy of the artist.

Despite the conspicuous differences between both movies, one can entertain the idea that WVLNT is not a mere alternative to Wavelength. The subtitle hints at it as the exact same piece in a different iteration. In other words, as the form that Snow’s work would take under certain conditions of access. It is therefore a supplement which simultaneously substitutes and preserves the characteristics of the movie in a technological configuration different from its original one. Just as the suppression of letters in the work’s title alludes to the compression of its running time, so its abnormal release date (1966-1967/2003) reflects this ontological accumulation. In that sense, the author’s rather intriguing strategy to adjust Wavelength’s duration could be recognized as an interpretation of what he considers the work’s core features. The obvious solution of accelerating the film, while preserving the movie’s visual appearance and singular continuity, would completely ruin its rhythm. A higher projection speed would mess with the pacing of the actions on screen and with the tonal qualities of the soundtrack. Any frames above the system’s frame rate would be lost. By folding time instead of abbreviating it, Snow reaffirms how irrelevant the stream of causality is to Wavelength. He simultaneously ensures that all the information contained

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in the film can be present in its electronic translation, if the spectator is able to parse it. In WVLNT, the flatness of the pictorial plane (to which the ending of Wavelength seems to affirm film can always be reduced) is analysed and folded into itself. The soundtrack doubles this transformation as the conversion of a single continuous tone into a slightly dissonant, three-note chord. The depth of field and the optical filters of the cinematographic footage are diluted within the flows of electronic modulation. In their place, we are presented a transition that never ends nor begins, exposing operational differences between photographic and video images and their modes of appearance. The spectator is once again made to observe the gaze, but now there are many, concurrent ones. Albeit free from the constraints of the movie theatre, she must force herself into a focused mode of attention in order to dissect the image and devise what is being shown. Thus exaggerated, movie versioning challenges technological neutrality, overstating how circulation over different platforms transforms the work.

A Man. A Road. A River. WVLNT’s washed-out picture of sea waves, overlaid by indoor architectural features, gives way to an organic aggregate of moving-image artefacts. The image is black-and-white with hints of electronic colour. Soon the camera starts to zoom out and the spectators realize that what they are seeing is another body of water from up close. Thus begins A Man. A Road. A River. (Brazil, 2004, 10’), a video by artist Marcellvs L. Its thematic correspondences to Snow’s work, as well as the differences between their technologies of inscription, emerge more clearly when they are put one after another in a screening programme. Both movies adopt a very systematic framing mechanism, gliding across the depth of the scene. While WVLNT completely ignores human action, however, A Man. A Road. A River. seems obsessively driven by it. The movie is the recording of a man crossing what appears to be a river on foot. The man follows a road that ends in the river, enters the waters without reducing his pace, and gets out on the other side. The camcorder is set on a tripod opposite to him, organizing the scene from a skewed frontal perspective. As the man undergoes this crossing, he approaches the recording mechanism. However, the framing is modulated in such a way that he never seems to move forward. The video begins with the zoom in its narrower setting, and slowly opens up as the man gets closer to the camera, almost

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Marcellvs L, still from A Man. A Road. A River (2004). DV, colour, 10 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

as if trying to contain his body within the scene or to keep it distant. The paradoxical result is that, no matter how much the man moves, he remains more or less fixed in the middle of the frame. One might get the impression that it is the landscape that is traversing the man, until the zoom reaches its wider setting, establishing the ultimate boundaries of the scene in the physical position of the camera. Therefore, the apparatus is no longer able to contain him. He passes besides the camera and disappears from view. All that is left in the frame is the rural site he has just crossed. The path of the anonymous man is not the only one recorded by Marcellvs’s movie. There is also a trajectory through the threshold of analogue representation, which took place at the time of recording, within the camcorder itself. The most extreme setting of zoom, employed in the beginning of the movie, is not optical, effected by the variational convergence of light through a set of moveable lenses, but rather digital. These two operations, inasmuch as they may seem to produce equivalent results, entail completely different constitutive processes. Digital zoom is a form of cropping that enlarges a portion of the scene at the expense of its resolution. Pushed to its limits, it reveals the discontinuous organization of the image. The result is not simply an enlargement of the represented figure, but also an analysis of its underlying structure. While approximating our view to the

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recorded subject, digital zoom also brings us closer to the system of visual inscription. The beginning of A Man. A Road. A River. discloses video as an abstract grid of electronic information. As it zooms out, this material texture progressively becomes meaningful text. The synthesis of a high-definition photographic semblance takes place slowly, lagging in front of our eyes, as if it did not come naturally to the medium. With its minimal choreography between man and camera, the movie takes the audience from one boundary of image production to another. The first are the mechanisms of visual inscription, suggested by the accumulation of digital artefacts that opens the video. The other is the actual physical location of the camera within the pro-filmic setting, which can be inferred by the disappearance of the subject onto the extra-frame at the very end of the piece. A Man. A Road. A River. thus gestures towards two realities conventionally abstracted from the image: the inner workings of media technology and the world beyond the frame. The rearrangement of the recording situation coincides with a transformation of the phenomenological experience of mediation. The initial confusion about what is shown on the screen translates into the frustration of losing the man from sight forever, right before his features can be clearly distinguished.

Flatland The next work to appear in Denied Distances concludes the transition from one figurative thickness of the screen to another. While WVLNT exhaustively describes one physical setting, and A Man. A Road. A River. takes the audience from inside of the camera to the territories outside of the image, Flatland (Brazil, 2003, 8’) seems to present an almost pure landscape of the mechanism. The movie, made by artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, consists of a series of eight short animations of multicoloured horizontal lines. Each line is one-pixel height, for a total of 480, stacked from the bottom to the top of a standard-definition digital video (DV) frame. Their constantly changing hues, coupled with a soundscape teeming with natural noises, produce the impression of slow movements across the vertical axis of the screen. The images constituting Flatland, although they seem to be completely synthetic, are actually built upon a photographic basis. More crucially, despite their abstract appearance, they aim to form an accurate picture of a very specific place: the Mekong River in Vietnam, where the duo had an artist residency in 2003. It is therefore another movie entailing the visual

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Detanico Lain, still from Flatland (2003). DV, colour, 8 minutes. Courtesy of the artists.

representation of a large body of water. Here, however, instead of going into the liquid or withdrawing from it, the camera goes along with it. The artists had spent several days travelling the river on boat, recording what they saw. Later, deeming the images unable to express the monotonous flatness they had experienced, Detanico and Lain decided to resort to a radical operation of post-processing. They selected eight individual frames of the raw footage and, in a photo-editing software, separated each of them into columns of pixels. The columns were then stretched to the width of full frames. By these means, each frame was converted into 720 new ones, which were lined up in video sequences and synchronized with sounds from the raw footage. The resulting animation is a kind of transversal ‘zoom’ cutting across the video frame, going from one side of the image to another. By rearranging frames, Flatland unfolds the duration contained within the photographic still, approximating phenomenological and procedural times. It is as if the spectators could observe the computer aligning one set of pixels after another. The fact that this is not how digital images are conventionally codified, though, makes the movie more of a staging than an actual disclosure of the inner workings of media technology. In that sense, while acknowledging its constitutive processes, Flatland choses to re-present them by the means of calculated surface effects. The audience

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may be metaphorically brought inside the image, but they nevertheless remain against the screen. Flatland’s cyclical character, aimed to express the monotony of the landscape, makes it difficult for the movie to provoke, by its visuals alone, any displacement of the cinematographic experience. The previous works shown in Denied Distances modulate the spectator’s perception across a clear dramatic arc, moving her from one understanding of mediated representation to another along the way. The Flatland video, however, never completely reveals its other side. Only the soundtrack hints at the pro-filmic realities that have been abstracted from view. The reflexive punch line must be articulated apart from the images, either before or after the screening, in one of the many discursive instances informing the public about the work. Perhaps not surprisingly, all the times I had previously watched Flatland, the movie was introduced by the artists’ presentation. In a gallery setting, their oral exposition could be easily substituted by explanatory wall labels, cooperating with the projection mechanism. In Denied Distances, it was included in the exhibition brochure as a text detailing the making of the work. Hence, in order to really get into Flatland, the audience first had to go outside of the movie theatre, where there was enough light to read this synopsis.

I’ve Got a Guy Running The heavy use of post-processing connects Flatland to the following piece, Jonathon Kirk’s I’ve Got a Guy Running (USA, 2006, 7’). Here, digital interventions are made over footage appropriated by the artist from the Internet. The original video was a recording of military combat from the first Gulf War, in 1990, publicly released by the U.S. Department of Defence. The images are in inverted monochromatic tones characteristic of night vision. They depict two trucks meeting in the middle of an open field. The camera pans from one side to the other, slowly following the movement of the figures that climb out of the vehicles. A crosshair in the middle of the frame suggests that we are looking through the threatening gaze of their unseen enemy, from up above. Muffled narration describes the actions taking place on the screen, which the gunner reports to a distant authority. It looks like some kind of arms dealing negotiation. The titular running guy carries a long object and proceeds to drop it on the other side of the field. A third truck enters the scene, parking close to the object, and its driver comes out to get it. Once the deal seems to have been sealed, the order to fire comes. The result is immediate: the people and the trucks blow up in clouds of machine-gun fire.

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Jonathon Kirk, still from I’ve Got a Guy Running (2006). DV, colour, 7 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

In Kirk’s movie, however, none of these elements can be initially recognized. The Department of Defence’s official footage has gone through an edge detection filter that transformed it into a series of moving rectangles. Throughout the video, the filter’s parameters are tweaked in one way or another, changing some aspects of this geometric pattern. The accompanying soundtrack is an ominous melodic composition with occasional bursts of the original radio dialogue. As time goes by, the amount of filtering is progressively reduced, allowing the viewers to identify the crosshair and some low-resolution silhouettes, up to the point when the whole scene is finally unveiled – a scene of which some spectators might have caught a glimpse of before, on some late-night TV news report. The revelation happens just in time for the climatic shooting. Thus, whereas Flatland keeps the effects of post-processing uniform throughout its whole sequence, I’ve Got a Guy Running mobilizes them narratively. In that sense, Kirk’s work operates more similarly to A Man. A Road. A River., with the crucial difference that its subjects do not manage to escape from the cinematographic gaze, but are rather killed on its watch. Or should we say by it? After all, the place to which I’ve Got a Guy Running takes us is not yet another typical threshold of visual representation. The movie does not simply reveal the existence and position of the camera as a passive framing device, but also testifies to its participation in a highly complex socio-technical network effecting the very destruction that it

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records. Elements such as the crosshair and the radio dialogue confirm to the audience that this gaze cannot possibly be theirs. In fact, it is no cinematographic gaze at all, but an appendage of mechanisms of surveillance and control, which produces images as the collateral effect of its sensing operations. The scene comes from a video with preset cultural values, one that has already been deployed elsewhere and can be easily found online by those who know the right keywords. Just as WVLNT versions Michael Snow’s classic 16mm film, so I’ve Got a Guy Running subverts this piece of propaganda, thereby allowing the spectators to see through the dehumanizing eyes of the military complex. By taking these images into an arts and entertainment context, the movie hints at the continuity between the cinematographic industry and technological warfare, exposing the connections that have been previously explored in the works of critical thinkers like Paul Virilio (1989) and Kittler (1999).

The Girl Chewing Gum At first, John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum (United Kingdom, 1976, 12’) seems like the raw footage of some fictional movie. There is a street, and we can hear an unseen director giving orders to the passersby, as though they were a cast of extras in a very complicated choreography. ‘Now the mother and the two boys!’ he shouts. ‘I want the smaller boy to point to the right and now pass the glass behind you.’ The work thus promises to reveal the very operations putting the scene together – residual traces of pro-filmic reality that should have been cut off from film during editing. However, before the public starts to believe in the candid character of the work, the controlling voice becomes its own parody, as it begins to direct the movements of the world itself: Now I want everything to sink slowly down as the five boys come by. Stop. Good. I want the clock to move jerkily towards me. Stop. I want the long hand to move to the right revolution every hour, and the short hand to move to the right revolution every twelve hours. Now, two pigeons fly across and everything comes up again until the girl chewing gun walks across from the left.

Each of these commands is immediately followed by its on-screen performance. Of course, it is not the pro-filmic reality that metamorphoses under the director’s orders. The cinematographic audience should be well aware

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John Smith, still image from The Girl Chewing Gum (1976). 16mm film, black and white, 12 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

that most of these occurrences are either visual impressions produced by the camera movements or contingencies beyond the filmmaker’s control. They soon come to realize that the supposed director had not really been choreographing the elements on set, but was rather describing previously documented actions. Estranged by this reversal of cause and effect, the audience is urged to observe the network of mechanisms framing the world. Similar to the f ilters applied by Kirk to the military video, Smith’s narration does not come before, but rather after filming, as a means of making sense of seemingly random images caught on camera. It is not a staging device that should have been suppressed from cinematographic representation, but rather another layer of meaning deliberately added to it. The all-powerful ‘voice of God’, able to ascribe reality to facts that cannot be visible on screen, such as the occupation and future destination of some of the passersby (‘the dentist continues on his way to the bank’) and the socio-geographic context in which the film was made (‘[the restaurant] Steele’s is situated in an area with a high immigrant population, dominantly West-Indian and Greek’). Here, the omniscient narration acts as a stand-in for the technological arrangements that simultaneously produce and are abstracted from view.

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In a crescendo of revelations, the narration concludes by uncovering its subjective character and describing the situation of its own recording: ‘I am shouting into a microphone on the edge of a field near Letchmore Heath, about 15 miles from the building you are looking at.’ The miles separating the pro-filmic setting from this place seem to be crossed at the end of the movie, which cuts from the long-shot of the street to a view of the aforementioned field. This cut hints at one of the longest distances commonly denied from within the screen, encompassing the many different processes taking place between filming and editing. In its final scene, The Girl Chewing Gum seems to affirm how far images must travel before a movie even begins to circulate officially. In the empty field near Letchmore Heath, however, the filmmaker is still nowhere to be seen. His voice remains disembodied, reminding the audience that this voice also constitutes a form of representation. The unseen ‘director’ is, after all, just another character, holding no real power over the construction of the movie. Anything he reveals cannot be more than the proxy of a revelation. He himself is a surface effect of media technology, caused by the controlled modulation of sound. Somewhere else, the real authority lies secluded.

Three Transitions While The Girl Chewing Gum comments on what is abstracted between the making and the screening of a film, Three Transitions (USA, 1973, 3’) plays with the extra-frame boundaries in the live situation of closed-circuit video. As implied in its title, this work by Peter Campus consists of three exercises in video transition, exploring the possibilities of compositing images by means of electronic signal modulation. In the first one, Campus cuts through a yellow paper panel and crosses to the other side. This action is simultaneously recorded by two opposite cameras, one in the front and another in the back of the panel, both of which are superimposed in the final image. The resulting impression is that, as he goes into the panel, Campus simultaneously passes through his own back and comes to face the spectator. The following scene resorts to chroma-keying, an operation that substitutes parts of an image of a particular colour by elements from another image. In it, Campus covers his face with some sort of coloured ointment using his fingers. As his skin disappears under this substance, it becomes the screen for another, prerecorded image of his face. The sequence finishes with the artist trying to match the contours of his features with those of

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Peter Campus, still from Three Transitions (1973). Video, colour, 3 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Cristin Tierney.

their incrusted representations. The last exercise is based on a variation of the same technique. Campus, outside of the frame, holds a piece of coloured paper that plays the role of a screen-within-the-screen – or, better yet, a mirror, in which his face can be seen. He uses a match to set this material on fire. As the flames destroy the paper, they also appear within the image it displays, revealing the continuity between what is inside and what is outside its boundaries. Campus’s movie operates by the means of reversing the frame inside out. This was made possible thanks to devices able to combine signals from two different sources into the same image. The ensuing visuals sport the ‘stratified thickness’ that Philippe Dubois (1998) deems characteristic of video technology. Instead of clear cuts completely substituting one shot for another, there are palimpsests and juxtapositions blending them together (a technological difference that likewise informs the versioning of Wavelength into WVLNT). Beyond that, Campus resorts to the intensification of circulation effected by electronic systems. The appearance of cinematographic work on film traditionally depended on the displacement of the medium from the filmed setting to the photographic laboratory and finally to the editing room. Video encapsulates all of these locations into apparatus that can be

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chained to one another within the space of a single room and monitored in real-time. Campus’s fleeting gaze towards the extra-frame suggests the presence of an external screen where the artist had been watching the live camera feed during its recording, in order to perform accordingly. Video therefore turns the director into a subject of his own devices. Following the hint given by the voiceover narration in The Girl Chewing Gum, the body of the filmmaker is finally put on display. It does not appear in the guise of a fictional character, though, but as a concrete part of the medial apparatus with which it cooperates. Three Transitions relies on the transformation of this body first into image and then into frame. As an artefact of the history of media technology, Campus’s work reminds us of how the widespread of video further entangled the public within movie circuits. The portability of the camcorder and the flexibility of electronic signals made the limits of cinematographic work definitively porous. The illusory separation between the sites of representation and the sites they represented could no longer be sustained. Screens became tools for sensing the present (watching the news), our personal lives were made part of movie production, and the condition of being a filmmaker merged with that of being audience. Subjects came to occupy increasingly subaltern positions within the media-industrial complex. These emerging circumstances are underscored by the placement of Three Transitions within the Denied Distances programme: between the work of a filmmaker pretending to control the making of the world, and that of a performer who, after laboriously putting the representation apparatus together, proceeds to tear it apart.

Paper Landscape #1 The actions of the f ilmmaker f inally made themselves present in Guy Sherwin’s performance Paper Landscape #1 (United Kingdom, 1975, 10’), whose video documentation concluded the first session of Denied Distances. Among all the movies presented so far, Sherwin’s is the only one to engage with the literal thickness of the screen. The setup of the work entails the projection of a super8 film onto a transparent screen. The artist is positioned behind this apparatus, and paints it white from the bottom to the top while the film is being projected. His activity echoes the one performed in the film by a much younger Sherwin, positioned behind a white paper screen that occupies the whole frame. The filmed Sherwin slowly rips pieces from the filmed screen, from the bottom to the top, revealing himself and the landscape behind him as he does so.

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Guy Sherwin, Paper Landscape #1 (1975/2007). Courtesy of the artist.

At the beginning, the projection consists of pure white light cast over the performer. He seems to be attempting to protect himself from the projected image, as he paints the transparent screen precisely where the filmed one is being ripped off by his younger counterpart. Hence, every part of the landscape that is revealed comes to rest upon the screen’s surface, as if the act of painting was a form of analogue chroma-keying, in which further opacity creates transparency. When the filmed screen is completely ripped off, filmed Sherwin turns back and walks towards the horizon, disappearing into the distance. The present Sherwin then diligently cuts the physical screen with a pair of scissors, passes through the frame, walks towards the projector – his body progressively obstructing the image as he approaches this mechanism – and shuts it down. By creating density for the light to rest upon and appear as moving images, Sherwin performs the arrangement of the screening apparatus, only to destroy it afterwards. The projected image and the screen, conflating into one and the same landscape as they come into being, are finally ruined by the artist’s decisive gesture. As Sherwin’s body comes through the frame, crossing the material threshold of representation, it becomes itself the screen, acting as the main recipient of projector’s light and the central focus of the audience’s attention. However, instead of being compressed within another

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frame, like Campus’s face was within the video monitor, Sherwin’s body is free to move along the depth of projection. By approaching the source of light, it turns from one kind of screen into another. Instead of a platform enabling the encounter between the film and the gaze, it becomes a wall preventing them from meeting each other. Considering the concrete implication of this architectural displacement, one should not regard the conclusion of the performance as a mere symbolic gesture, but rather as an actual annihilation of the possibilities of cinema by cutting off its power source. By being present both as an image and as a body, filmic subject and technological performer, Sherwin calls attention to the growing difference between the world and its representations. In the documentation screened during Denied Distances, from a presentation of Paper Landscape #1 of that same year, one cannot help but realize how much time has passed since the work was first made. Confronting a forever-young Sherwin with his ageing double, the performance highlights the years that separate the f ilmed activity from the current projection. At each of the movie’s iterations, the contrast between the artist and his past self becomes increasingly visible, expressing the impossibility of congealing the work in a definitive form. It is as if Paper Landscape #1 counted its own existential duration. More than an illustration of passing time, it becomes its result; more than belonging to a certain year, it is a vehicle for this year to belong to the present – and to other, possible futures. The audience is invited to reflect on how, without changing, the movie always changes. Even if the physical medium is safeguarded from decay by the continuing intervention of conservationists, the world around it does not stop moving. The technological networks required for its enactment become obsolete, the sociocultural context in which it makes sense is superseded, and the bodies associated with its making are undone. Against any discursive articulation upholding the movie’s immutable eternity and static identity, the prevalence of Sherwin’s real body over its visual simulacrum expresses a liberating vector pointing outside of the medium. In every scar it sustains, the thickness of the screen flaunts similar traces of bare life taking place across movie circuits.

From the depth of projection to the extensions of the city Most of the works shown in the f irst programme of Denied Distances, although they mobilize cinema technology in a number of unconventional ways, were made to be compatible with a traditional cine-projection. Their meaningful surface effects fit perfectly within the frame of any standard

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screen available in a movie theatre. Once they have been compressed into the proper means of circulation, all of the years between the making of Wavelength and its digitization – the kilometres separating the Mekong River and wherever Flatland was put together – can be easily contained by this thin amalgam of cloth and light. Inasmuch as they may turn the screening space upside-down in the minds of the audience, these movies preserve its integrity as a physical site. The only work in the programme to truly disrupt theatrical boundaries is Paper Landscape #1. By tearing the screen apart and getting in the way of projection, Sherwin affirms his bodily presence along with the audience’s own. The negative space they occupy is therefore made positive again. At the same time, Sherwin’s disruptive gesture made it impossible to enact his actual performance within Denied Distances. In its originating arrangement, Paper Landscape #1 requires a degree of infrastructural access that was unavailable at Mostravídeo. Moreover, there was no funding to bring the artist to Brazil, hire a super8 projector, or build a screen that he could destroy during the show. The work therefore had to be presented by means of a recording made from a previous presentation. By flattening the three-dimensional configuration of the performance into a single-channel video sequence, this documentation enabled Paper Landscape #1 to be incorporated in the fairly conventional situation of Denied Distances. This means of circulation had an unintended (but expected) side effect on the work, however. It crystallized some of its main elements, such as its duration, along with contingencies existing at that particular instance. The silhouette of a couple attendees, for example, became fixed in the lower half of the screen, obstacles forever covering part of the projected landscape. Due to their particular modalities, all of the works taking part in the second programme of Denied Distances had to go through similar adaptations. Stemming from what is normally considered forms of installation art and performance, these movies operate on dimensions that are impossible to contain within the theatrical situation. In fact, most of them deliberately destabilize the vector organizing the architecture of projection across its depth. As I have mentioned before, this is the primary distance underpinning the traditional cinematographic experience. Even though cinema only carries in its name the Greek term for movement, the use of projection has been equally defining of the medium’s particular phenomenology. It was by the means of this operation that the Lumières’s cinématographe departed from other moving-picture devices of its time and established a technical milieu of its own. To affirm the depth of projection is to raise awareness of the complex interplay of temporal and spatial regimes resulting in a

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screening. The installations and performances that do so put into question the technological neutrality of movie architectures.

4’22” The second programme of Denied Distances began by reflecting on the processes of documenting media performances as modes of intermediation themselves, which displace the meaning and value of the artist’s gestures while reinscribing them within the circuit. These processes reach their absurd consummation in the mise en abyme of William Raban’s 4’22” (United Kingdom, 2008, 4’30). Just as WVLNT, 4’22 updates a classic work in the expanded cinema genre using contemporary audiovisual technologies. In this case, the originating performance is Raban’s historical 2’45” (1975): In this piece, a 16mm projector, not loaded with f ilm, projects white light onto the screen, for the amount of time specified in the title. This was the standard length of a 100ft reel of film. The artist announces the piece from the front of the room, and a film camera next to the projector records the entire event, including the screen, and the audience, and any sounds they might make. The following evening the process is repeated, with the film shot the previous night (which has been rapidly developed) being projected, and so on. Every time the event occurs, the film shown is a record of every previous showing (Curham and Ihlein, 2007).

The outcome of this procedure is a fractal composition in which each screening is contained inside the one that came after it. The colours are reversed from one to another, clearly identifying them as superimposed layers. The visual result is very similar to that of a video feedback loop because it derives from the same operation, performed within the technical conditions allowed by film. At each iteration of the performance, the reel had to be removed from the projector, taken to a photographic lab, developed overnight, and brought back to the screening room on the following day. This loop accumulated in a growing palimpsest of information, including not only Raban’s repeated announcement, but also the silhouettes and reactions of each day’s audience. New layers of representation therefore became incorporated into the image, making it progressively less of a movie and more of cinema. With 2’45”, Raban aimed at pure circulation, planning to achieve what the synopsis describes as ‘a film which IS its showing, different each time,

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William Raban, still from 4’22” (2008). DVD video, colour, 4’22”. Courtesy of the artist.

always the sum total of its past screenings’. According to this paratext, the performance should result in a work that ‘begins and ends with the period of its own making’. In that sense, 4’22” acts as a supplement enabling the programme of 2’45” to be detached from its original cycle of screenings and subsist in other platforms. It was commissioned for the Expanded Cinema, The Live Record seminar, held at the British Film Institute Southbank (BFI), in London, on 6 December 2008 (McIver, 2008). For the event, Raban reenacted 2’45” by employing 35mm film reels, producing a version of the work that complies with this format’s exact duration (hence its name). The performance went through five private iterations in the week that preceded the BFI seminar, all in the same movie theatre in which the event was going to take place. During the seminar, a public presentation of the piece was finally held. It was final not only because it concluded that specific cycle of screenings of the work, but also because it resulted in a DVD version that has since become the primary means through which 4’22” (and therefore 2’45”) circulates elsewhere. This is the piece that was presented in Denied Distances, as well as in the 22nd International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam later in 2009. The one that will likely be shown in every future screening of the work. Positioned among the audience, the camera simultaneously emulates a generic viewer’s gaze and produces a calculated tableau. After Raban’s final announcement, following some hesitation of the unseen audience, enthusiastic applause can be heard. The ambiguity of the recording, which repeats the procedure originating the work, is disconcerting. The video

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plays for half a minute or so more, the scene unchanged. The void that follows seems to contain a mute affirmation of the hic-et-nunc of the ongoing screening. Anyone could occupy the place left by the artist and speak it out loud. In the silence of the projection, there is a call for the work to continue on its own, as if it could expand over the traces crystallized on DVD, going beyond the form authorized to circulate, its programme undertaken by some random kid in the audience with a personal camcorder, precarious movie piracy turned into avant-garde cinema practice.

Horror Film 1 It is the documentation of Malcolm Le Grice’s performance Horror Film 1 (United Kingdom, 1971, 8’) that finally introduces traditional cinematographic montage in the context of Denied Distances. With the flagrant exception of The Girl Chewing Gum, sporting its decisive cut at the very ending, all of the works presented so far employ uninterrupted image sequences. Some of them, like The Girl Chewing Gum itself, seem to do so as a means to stress the complexity of their constitutive processes. For others, like the preceding performance recordings, it seems to be a way to underwrite their gestural authenticity. Le Grice, on the other hand, employs a different narrative strategy for his work. Instead of using a fixed continuous shot, which captures a particular instance of the performance from beginning to end, he combines scenes from many presentations taken from different points of view. The resulting documentation seems to aim at a more comprehensive (a literally multiple) display of Horror Film 1. The continuity of the performance is recreated by the means of a mobile virtual gaze, enabling the audience to access its most relevant angles while avoiding visual monotony. In doing so, the documentation reveals itself as another discursive layer operating within movie circuits, which takes full advantage of the available media devices in the attempt to reproduce the totality of the work as a phenomenon. Le Grice’s performance employs three 16mm projectors loaded with filmstrips of randomly coloured frame sequences. An approaching thunderstorm can be heard in the soundtrack. All three machines point towards the same screen, so that their projected lights coincide with one another. They are nevertheless positioned at different angles in relation to the frame: one is directly opposite to it, while the others are set in slightly perpendicular orientations. The performance begins with a fully naked Le Grice standing close to the screen, his back to the audience. In this position, his body is

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Malcolm Le Grice, Horror Film 1 (1971). Courtesy of the artist.

illuminated by the flashing lights as if he were an actor on a stage. He slowly moves his arms and hands, in a choreography that could be decoded as a description either of the proportions of the screen or of the way they correspond to the projected lights. Without interrupting these gestures, the artists steps away from the frame. As he takes distance, the gap between the projectors is made evident in the way his shadow multiplies. The further he goes, the more distinct these shadows get from one another. Body drama is therefore modulated into a complex shadow play, which translates the depth of projection under the stroboscopic rhythm of coloured film. The title of Horror Film 1 implies a reduction of this particular cinematographic genre to its blueprint: dread ambience, threatening silhouettes, and bodily metamorphosis. Under these minimal conditions, the public is exposed to the interconnection between the many different elements engaged in the continuing appearance of the movie. The images we see are not autonomous. By moving across the axis of projection, Le Grice goes from a sovereign subject to a visual medium. The artist’s increasingly extra planar presence translates into the progressive dehumanization of his representation. As he ‘exits the stage’, the shadows he casts progressively depart not only from one another, but also from the person they are a projection of. This trajectory demonstrates that the medial capacities of a body rely upon the position it occupies within a delicate architectural balance. At any moment the arrangement of apparatus may change, reshaping their conditions of operation and their relative role. Surfaces become obstructions, signals become noise, and functionaries become programmers.

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The work’s subversion of traditional cinema technology seems nevertheless circumscribed to another medium’s thresholds of presence. From the perspective of performance art, no real transformation takes place within Le Grice’s body. When Horror Film 1 begins, this body is already encoded as a medial stereotype, familiar to the audience as a cultural trope. ‘Le Grice’ operates as a diagram, often compared to Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man. The artist once stated, half joking, that he was looking for someone younger to substitute for him in the piece, since he did not feel comfortable about performing it in his current physical shape. His jest articulates the fuzzy desire of disconnecting the body from its own substance. Any form of radical metamorphosis is therefore denied from the work. Instead of being welcomed within the piece, exogenous energies able to affect its arrangement are kept under control by the continuing substitution of components.

You and I, Horizontal (III) Following the compression of Raban’s semblance within the screen, the escape of Le Grice’s body from the space of projection meant to call the audience’s attention to the very place they occupied during Denied Distances. That would have been the perfect spot in the programme to present Line Describing a Cone (USA, 1973), Anthony McCall’s pioneering ‘solid light film’. The film is visible on the screen first as a white dot on a black ground. This dot grows into a line, which arcs around to form a circle. Over the duration of the film, all that is visible on the screen is the slow drawing of this circle. Meanwhile, between the screen and the projector, the beam of light is visible as a gradually growing cone, made visible as particles in the air are illuminated by the projector. For the viewer, therefore, there is no one point of focus: they can watch the growing circle on the screen, or the growing cone between screen and projector, or move their eyes between the two. More importantly, they can move their bodies: the space is empty of any seating, and this means that the viewer can also decide to ‘break’ the cone by inserting themselves between the projector and the screen. This dimension of viewing becomes more intriguing when more than one viewer sees the work at the same time – as each person decides whether a particular kind of behaviour in the space will affect the other’s experience (Godfrey and McCall, 2007).

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McCall’s minimalist animation speaks of the basic dimensional abstraction underpinning cine-projection. In physical terms, it is the cone of light that produces the line on the screen. This effect is nevertheless denied by the cinematographic apparatus, which isolates the projector out of sight and presents the movie as an autonomous phenomenon. Its underlying arrangement only becomes apparent by mistake, for example when someone oversteps the light. By making the beam of projection a more eventful site than the animation on the screen, Line Describing a Cone defers this medial logic, placing it under the perspective of its technical becoming. The audience is invited to explore the movie’s constitutive spatiality, engaging with the flows of energy and matter that inform its surface effects. The negative depth of projection is thereby made positive again. To include Line Describing a Cone within the Denied Distances programme was not that straightforward, however. For starters, there was the same issue of format incompatibility as with Wavelength. A digital version of McCall’s work would only be released in 2010. At the time of Denied Distances, it was only available in 16mm film. Yet, even more critical than that was the lack of the appropriate spatial configuration that the piece required. Even though it does not entail any specific performer or choreography, Line Describing a Cone heavily relies on the possibility of movement of the audience across the projection space. The absence of seats makes the placement of their bodies an issue to be factored in the work’s experience. Without fixed positions, viewers are not driven to look away from the apparatus or to stay out of the light beam. They are free to engage with the sculptural qualities of light as a tridimensional presence. In this situation, the screen and the projector stand as residual elements of cinema technology, the cone of light existing between them simultaneously as a process of information and a form in itself. To show Line Describing a Cone in a conventional theatrical setting, where the audience had to remain still, did not seem enough to enable the work’s particular fluctuation in and out of cinema (even with the impromptu inclusion of a haze machine). To make things worse, none of the available documentation of its previous screenings seemed to suffice at representing its effects either. All of the pieces I had found were fixed-camera recordings of the whole duration of projection, overlooking either the animation on the screen or the light cone. Different from other video documentations shown so far during Denied Distances, these could hardly count even as poor simulations of the original audience’s gaze, since they did not provide any impression of the possibilities of spatial exploration that the work made available. They emulated a static gaze, while Line Describing a Cone invited a moving, embodied one.

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Anthony McCall, You and I, Horizontal (III) (2007). Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2007-2008. Photograph by Sylvain Deleu. Courtesy of the artist.

In the end, Line Describing a Cone got into the programme by the means of a double intermediation. Thanks to a happy coincidence, McCall had just participated in another event sponsored by the same institution commissioning Denied Distances. His installation You and I, Horizontal (III) (USA, 2007) was shown at Cinema Sim – Narrativas e Projeções (roughly translated from Portuguese as Cinema Indeed – Narratives and Projections), an exhibition taking place in the headquarters of Itaú Cultural in 2008. You and I, Horizontal (III) is exemplary of how automatisms that are not absorbed by the medium can thrive in experimental fields without it, where they find proper conditions to circulate. The piece is part of a gallery series that McCall has been developing since 2003 by following the same operational principles as Line Describing a Cone, but using digital video instead of film. It seemed therefore to enable the indirect presence of the originating work, not as a substitute but as a compensation, adding additional layers to its circulation. Itaú Cultural had produced a feature documentary about Cinema Sim that included a three-minute interview with McCall along with some moving shots of the You and I, Horizontal (III) installation. This excerpt was perfect to be shown after the documentation of Horror Film 1, and not only because of its immediate availability. The fact that the interview was conducted within the installation demonstrates the freedom with which this space could

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be occupied. During the interview, McCall describes the concept behind his solid light films and the anxieties that first led to the creation of Line Describing a Cone, as a reaction to the pure recording of performance art. While he talks, You and I, Horizontal (III) is shown through different angles, with some people interacting with the light projection. McCall’s explanation, at the same time that it reveals an authorial interpretation of the work, reinforces the fact that what we are watching is not its totality. Different from other, more ambiguous recordings, this is clearly a paratext departing from the main piece. It is therefore a way of presenting You and I, Horizontal (III) (and Line Describing a Cone along with it) not by the means of its sensorial effects, but rather of its conceptual description and analysis. The documentation simultaneously removes the audience from the work’s phenomenological experience and brings them closer to an understanding of its formal configuration.

Augmented Sculpture and Urban Installations The 30-year leap from one of McCall’s works to another brought Denied Distances to the contemporary context. The following pieces that were shown employ computer systems and digital interfaces, engaging with the field popularly known as new media arts. Even with these technological changes, there are no great departures from the architectural explorations initiated by the expanded cinema pioneers. This continuity hints at the relative stability of the western sites of movie exhibition throughout these three decades, in spite of the complete reorganization of their material underpinnings. The critical disclosure of the depth of projection gives way to the strategic articulation of the forces therein, generating increasingly diversified applications of audiovisual devices. In Pablo Valbuena’s Augmented Sculpture (2007), for instance, projection is mobilized as the source of a new automatism, building upon the tradition of tridimensional art forms. Instead of emphasizing the volume of controlled light, Valbuena’s work employs it in order to animate the volume of other objects. The piece consists of a stack of rectangular solids, faintly evoking a model city skyline. They glow and change colour in complex patterns, giving the impression that they are illuminated from the inside. Contrary to what it seems, however, the animation does not come from the solids. It is laid upon them from a fixed Digital Light Processing (DLP) source by means of a technique called video mapping. This technique relies on the prior deformation and masking of the projected image so that it matches the shapes of any irregular surface upon which it is shown.

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Pablo Valbuena, Augmented Sculpture (2007). Courtesy of the artist.

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The resulting effect resembles a self-contained, physical object made of video. It is actually more of a site-specific video installation, however. Made in a time when there were no prepackaged solutions for video mapping, Augmented Sculpture needed to be planned well in advance. Its proper operation depended on an undisturbed technical milieu, requiring its components to comply with a very strict system of positions. Different from McCall’s solid light films, Valbuena’s work did not afford the audience complete freedom of movement. The projection beam always had to be kept unobstructed, so that the sculpture’s illusory ‘augmentation’, as a media channel able to display dynamic visual data, could subsist as such. The Augmented Sculpture’s documentation, which was shown during Denied Distances, enhances this semblance of autonomy. The video focuses from beginning to end on the solids, displaying excerpts of the full range of animations they embodied. It is not unreasonable to assume that standard corrections of brightness and saturation were used to hide even further the frame of projection underlying this effect. The solids’ real augmentation, into a technical ensemble encompassing exogenous mechanisms, goes therefore largely unexamined. Projection falls once again under the threshold of medial presence, obfuscated by the surface effects it means to provoke. In that sense, Augmented Sculpture differs from works such as those of McCall, which disclose the technical realities of movie circulation. Delving into the black boxes left open by his predecessors, Valbuena has cultivated, debugged, and specified new apparatus of medial representation built upon projection. The resulting automatisms are prone to be localized and developed within the circuit, whether for the generation of new works or, less likely, the disintegration of cemented ones. Valbuena himself improved on them with a series of Urban Installations, made a year later. Now dubbed by the author Para-polis, these pieces employ the video mapping techniques established in Augmented Sculptures on large-scale structures such as buildings and squares. N 520437 E 041900 (Netherlands, 2008), commissioned by the TodaysArt Festival, in The Hague, for instance, took over an entire façade of the local city hall. Besides tracing the edges of the building with light, the projection creates moving trompe l’oeils that provoke the impression that its architecture is being physically transformed. Panels slide and extrude, walls collapse, and appendices burst from its smooth exterior. Valbuena’s work has likely contributed to the crystallization of video mapping as a technique and a form within the field of new media. The style of visual deconstruction employed by Urban Installations soon became a popular trope in public projection spectacles, repeated ad nauseam over many different institutional buildings in the works of other artists. This

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Pablo Valbuena, Para-polis [the hague] (2008). (Originally N 520437 E 041900). Courtesy of the artist.

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translation of his personal practice into the set of common operations available for media artists can be traced through the curatorial mechanisms aimed at managing the circuit. In 2009, Valbuena was one of the leading figures in Light, Space, and Perception, a workshop organized by the Medialab Prado, in Madrid (an institution that had previously commissioned his works). It was one of the first events open to the general public to address and promote the production of media façades. By means of this and similar devices, the legitimated artist is led to a position of pedagogical authority, invited to share his techniques, and directly inform the work of others. With Valbuena’s work, the audience of Denied Distances is also taken from the first half of the exhibition to the second. This sequence of video documentations signalizes a transition between the depth of projection and the extensions of the city. As mentioned before, these two categories conflated in the same programme due to an unavailability of space in one of the exhibition venues, causing Denied Distances to be cut short by one day. The decision to place Valbuena’s work at this fulcrum was an attempt to strategically mobilize the material reorganization of discursive underpinnings. By effecting the displacement of a particular projection technique from the inside of a gallery to an open urban site, Valbuena brings audiovisual media’s negative dimensions closer to one another, reaffirming their simultaneously taxonomical and physical continuity.

GRL: The Complete First Season Cinema’s socio-technical constitution is largely contingent on its geographic territorialization. The routes leading to a cinematographic event conspicuously frame audience engagement, thereby informing the work’s experience. This association is reiterated on an infrastructural level, as the medium’s technical milieu crosses the boundaries of its particular spaces, extending into its surroundings. In this layer of the circuit, media industries negotiate their agenda with the projects of local governments and other, more spontaneous forms of urban development. The fixation of sites for movie production and consumption enables the connection of medial apparatus to platforms providing physical shelter, public access, energy, and other resources necessary for their continuing operation. The history of movie theatre architecture, from old storefront nickelodeons to shopping mall multiplexes, expresses a reorganization of cinematographic exhibition in relation to the emergence of new modes of trade and transportation that transform these material networks.

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Graffiti Research Lag, L.A.S.E.R. Tag (2007), still from GRL: The Complete First Season (2008). Digital video, colour, 51 minutes. Courtesy of the artists.

Displaced into the open, the operation of movie projection is therefore compromised. This disassembled condition, however, creates possibilities for reestablishing media in different configurations. It is an opportunity to recreate cinema anew. The work of the Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), shown next on Denied Distances, provides a demonstration of how this rearrangement of apparatus may take place. The GRL was a loose collective formed by ‘cells’ based in cities all over the world. Its founders and core members were media artists Evan Roth and James Powderly, who started collaborating during a fellowship at the Eyebeam OpenLab, in New York City. The group was very active between 2006 and 2009, releasing a number of free tools for urban communication, simultaneously inspired by street art and open-source cultures. The documentary GRL: The Complete First Season (USA, 2008, 51’) compiles video documentation of their first projects with explanatory narration by its cofounders. The main characteristics of the GRL work are shown in L.A.S.E.R. Tag, one of their flagship projects. The humour, to begin with: the name is an acronym of nothing in particular, making a pun on the word used to designate a graffiti writer’s personalized signature. Likewise, the project demonstrates GRL’s savvy use of digital technologies. L.A.S.E.R. Tag consists of a mobile

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system that enables users to make huge drawings on building walls using a high-power, green laser pointer. The effect results from an interactive projection covering the targeted surface, building upon the logics of video feedback. A security camera with a powerful zoom, set next to the projector, captures the pointer’s position and sends this data to a computer, which draws lines in its exact location. The visuals are rendered with an effect of dripping paint, simulating ‘analogue’ graffiti. The full assemblage includes portable energy generators and is packed to be transported in a vehicle, enabling it to operate anywhere. The core devices employed by L.A.S.E.R. Tag are essentially the same of Valbuena’s Urban Installations, as well as of most digital projection system, including those used in commercial movie theatres. Any of these mechanisms could technically be made to perform the functions of the others, provided that it was supplied with the necessary software applications and peripherals. From a material perspective, they differ less in terms of physical affordances than in the ways they are advertised by the means of promotional paratexts. GRL’s work is ostensibly represented not as a piece of installation art, but as a sort of creative tool. It is not meant to reproduce images for passive consumption, but rather to enable the audience to generate their own. It is a way for the public to inscribe itself into the medium, echoing Three Transitions and 4’22”. Instead of being fixed to a specific site or event, it can be deployed anywhere. Besides, its underlying mechanisms are not suppressed from medial experience. The L.A.S.E.R. Tag system can be clearly seen in the video documentation as well as in other promotional pictures, either mounted inside of a van, on a parking lot, or in the front of cargo bikes. Just as there are scenes of people using the lasers to draw over building façades, there are others showing them installing the projection equipment and interacting directly with it. L.A.S.E.R. Tag’s assemblage extends through the Web. Open-source dynamics are integral its socio-technical articulation. The GRL has made the software for the projection system freely available online, along with the list of equipment and step-by-step instructions required for its setup (Watson, 2007). The audience is therefore invited to use and analyse the work, in addition to being given specific information needed to reproduce it for their own purposes. This could be seen as another strategy for the work to feed back into the circuit at large. Thereby, the GRL stimulates the reconfiguration of public media ecosystems. Even though a piece such as L.A.S.E.R. Tag circulates much more easily under the umbrella of a media arts festival, where it gets full legal and infrastructural support, it is made so that it can be mobilized in unauthorized situations, by virtually anyone.

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Its relatively crude visuals, in comparison with other video mapping pieces, can be said to reflect this ad hoc condition. Being unable to assure the system’s territorial occupation, or even predict in which surface it will project, one can hardly obtain the same degree of formal sophistication shown in Valbuena’s Urban Installations. In a similar vein to traditional graffiti, GRL’s operations dispute the limits of the use of city space and directly engage with the mechanisms of its continuing privatization. The group’s appeal for spontaneous projections stands in defiance of the civil institutions regulating urban media protocols. Insofar as they sanction the distribution of access to public resources, including space, these institutions occupy a crucial position in the political economy of movie circuits. By calling for action regardless of permission, the GRL affirms anybody’s power over the specification of audiovisual practices, challenging the sovereignty of actors seemingly external to this process. The violence of the law is at issue. Stripped from the legal fiction of their authority, government bodies are shown to be apparatus of representation equally circumscribed to the circuit, with no inherent privileges over the negotiation of its standards. The suspension of regulations brings the organization of media ecologies down to its most immediate, concrete layers. GRL’s contention with advertisement, which feels likewise inherited from the street art world, seems exemplary of this reality. Advertisement is another practice that does not refrain from exploiting the grey zones of the everyday. Creative agencies are known to appropriate oppositional aesthetics and technologies and turn them into marketing devices. Corporations’ large economic resources give them an upper hand in these unregulated situations. In spite of GRL’s refusal to participate, many digital graffiti techniques that they developed were soon mobilized for corporate branding. The solution, states the narrator at some point in The Complete First Season, rather than legalizing graffiti, would be to ‘make advertisement illegal also’. One scene in the documentary brings this conflict to light. It depicts the moment when the GRL catches a mobile projection unit screening promo videos onto a building gable right next to their lab. Upset, the artists go up on the roof and point their own projector to the same wall, messing up the professional-looking motion graphics with some L.A.S.E.R. Tag-generated doodles. As this does not seem enough to scare the advertisers away, the artists bring the raw computer interface into view. On a full-screen text editor, in huge black letters, they write stay off our wall and ‘as many swear words as possible’. The white window of the application delineates the skewed square of light, detaching the visuals from their architectural framing. At this

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point, the projection seems to have gone beyond the limits of proper medial expression and turned into a physical assault against the very possibility of this expression. After ‘talking trash for about fifteen minutes’, the artists finally make the advertisers shut down. It feels like a victory, they say.

Relational Architectures In conclusion, the extensions of the city appear as a dimension for the encounter between global movies and local bodies, digital computers and shadow play, the technological performance of civic identity and the spontaneous practices of everyday life. Through Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture series, Denied Distances once again displaced the focus of medial engagement from its surrounding surfaces to the spaces between them. More than spectacles requesting the audience’s attention, these works stand as communication devices allowing for expression and play. The artist defines them as ‘large-scale interactive events that transform emblematic buildings through new technological interfaces’ (Lozano-Hemmer, 2000). In their operation, Relational Architectures illustrate how audiovisual systems, as contingent on environmental conditions as they are, can also be powerful conditioning agents themselves, driving the flows of information across public arenas. Two works from the Relational Architectures series were shown: Vectorial Elevation (Relational Architecture number 4) and Body Movies (number 6). The video documentations, produced by Lozano-Hemmer’s studio, provide a comprehensive description of each piece’s context of installation, inspiration, underlying structure, and modes of operation. Besides the predictable recordings of live audience interaction, the videos also include digital production sketches and views from different elements that are not normally available to the public. The complexity of the systems presented makes it clear that, contrary to projects such as GRL’s L.A.S.E.R. Tag, Relational Architectures demand a high degree of institutional compliance in order to work properly. Not only do they operate on a monumental scale, but they also require precise calibration. They could hardly perform in a public space for as long as they do without the continuing support of local authorities to provide them with material resources and security. Particularly because the urban structures they occupy are, as the artist has put it, emblematic – in the case of the two works shown, highly busy public squares. It should therefore come as no surprise that Relation Architectures play into narratives of civic identity, serving these same local authorities as a

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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation, Relational Architecture 4 (1999). Zocalo Square, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo by: Martin Vargas. Courtesy of the artist.

means to update representations of the city both to its inhabitants and to a global audience. Even though they later come to circulate mainly through media arts festivals and exhibitions, the creation of the Relational Architecture pieces seems consistently tied to state-sponsored, official events, catalysing international projects of city branding. The first installation of Vectorial Elevation, for example, was commissioned for the new millennium celebrations, back in 1999, by the Mexican National Council for Culture and the Arts. Body Movies, on the other hand, premiered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 2001, when the city was the designated Capital of Culture for the Europe Union. In spite of their large dimensions and computational complexity, the Relational Architectures presented within Denied Distances rely on forms of light projection even more basic than the one conventionally employed for movie exhibition. Vectorial Elevation uses a set of 18 robotic searchlights as a means to create ephemeral light sculptures that can be seen from kilometres away. Lozano-Hemmer locates the work in a long-standing tradition of drawings made according to artist’s instructions communicated through technological channels. The devices were positioned around the Zócalo, the main square in central Mexico City, and connected to a website that allowed anyone in the world to control them for brief instants. Through this online interface, the audience could preview the configuration of the

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searchlights and visually design their own, leaving textual commentaries about it. The system operated freely, without any form of censorship, for the two weeks in which Vectorial Elevation took place. Hundreds of thousands of people participated, contributing with messages as diverse as political slogans and marriage proposals. Through this extensive apparatus, Vectorial Elevation embeds the public within the unceasing appearance of movies. The audience can probe the multiple processes permeating the materialization of an audiovisual phenomenon. They are not limited, however, to engaging with adjacent transfers, such as in Line Describing a Cone or LA.S.E.R. Tag. Rather, they get to experiment with the massive telecommunication infrastructures spread across the urban space. The arrangement underlying Vectorial Elevation makes the most of the geographic dilation of information feedback systems enabled by digital telematics, compressing exchanges between locations physically apart from one another. One cannot pretend to absorb the totality of the work at once. The configuration of the system is constantly changing. There is no obvious screen for the light to rest. In a time before the widespread of mobile Internet devices, in order to access the website and be able to programme the searchlights, the audience had to be removed from its immediate experience on the square. The apprehension of the work is therefore always fractured and intermediated, doing justice to its continuous becoming. Vectorial Elevation only seems to reveal itself wholly in obvious representations such as the video documentation or this very account. Body Movies similarly approximates new media strategies to more traditional art forms, providing the former with some historical ballast. The reference in this case plays more directly into a civic agenda. LozanoHemmer claims to have drawn inspiration from an engraving made by Samuel van Hoogstraten, an artist from the XVII century born in Rotterdam, who was famous for his work with optical illusions. The engraving, named The Shadow Dance (1675), portrays a number of people in front of a single light source. Their shadows, projected in various sizes on the opposite walls, assume either angelic or demonic features (Antimodular Research, 2011). This image is translated into the configuration of Body Movies as a shadow play arena superimposed on interactive projections. The video narration describes it as such: The piece entails projection onto the façade of the Pathé Cinema, which is 9m long by 22m tall. Projectors with robotic scrollers are placed on two high towers facing the building, to show over one thousand portraits taken on the streets of Rotterdam, Madrid, Mexico and Montreal. However, the

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portraits are completely washed out by bright light coming from two 7,000 watts xenon lamp sources placed at ground level. As soon as people walk on the square, their shadows are projected, and the portraits are revealed within them. People can match or embody a portrait by walking around the square and changing the scale of their shadow. A camera-based tracking system monitors the location of the shadows; when the shadows match all of the portraits in a given scene, the control computer changes the scene to a new set of portraits.

The fact that this first installation of Body Movies took place outside of a movie theatre seems rather symbolic. The way the piece articulates projection in the public space stands in stark contrast with the traditional mode of engagement delimited by movie theatre architecture. By the means of using two different sets of equipment, Lozano-Hemmer’s work separates the positive from the negative aspects of projection, proposing two correspondingly different applications. The positive projection shows remote information from a digital database, seemingly expressive of the trajectory of the artist as a cosmopolitan globe-trotter, who captures pictures along the way. The negative one drives the engagement of the public with the work through its local components. The flow of the passersby across the square spontaneously includes them in the negative projection, raising awareness of their position within this technological arrangement. In the video recordings of audience participation, one can see that they largely ignore the ‘game’ preprogrammed in the system. The rotation of portraits seems to be activated mostly by accident, while people experiment with the possibilities of controlling the light directly with their bodies. The audience plays with the size and shape of their shadows. The projected images become a meeting point not only for their gazes, but also for their actions. As their silhouettes congregate on the wall, they stage various whimsical interactions. Bodies merge and fuse together, compelling their owners to acknowledge one another and establish some sort of relation. In the words of one of the passersby that was interviewed for the video documentation, ‘everybody is together but separate’, allowing for ‘a real special kind of communication’. The resulting spectacle could be seen as a metaphor of the messy constitution of a body politic within the public sphere, to which the positive projection of digital portraits stands as a pale reference. Shadows, which in Horror Film 1 appeared as a sign of the dehumanization carried out by apparatus, are shown in Body Movies to be fleeting traces of subjective intervention – ghosts in the machine. Wrapping up the second programme

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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6 (2001). Hong Kong, China, 2006. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist.

of Denied Distances, this work reiterates a narrative pointing towards audience emancipation over medial devices. The screening, which began with 4’22”’s recurring assertion of authorial traces, culminates in Relational Architectures’s expansion of the horizons of interpersonal communication through projection. This order of exhibition goes in a direction opposite to the forces aimed at constraining movie circulation. There is an obvious irony in the fact that the audience had to follow it from their fixed seats in the theatre, engaged with one of the most authoritative arrangements of cinematographic apparatus.

The density of the circuit The final session of Denied Distances was an exercise in hubris, as it meant to deal with the cinematographic circuit as a whole. The density of the circuit refers to the physical substance of the networks enabling movies to circulate. It reminds us that the apparatus of distribution are a burden, taking space alongside the movie terminals we usually engage, coextensive to input and output devices. Density is a measure of how firmly these parts come together, in spite of their polymorphous design. The more solid their couplings are,

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the more they seem to operate as an organic whole – a medium endowed with a singular identity. The higher the density, the more coherence medial practices imply to one another; the clearer the thresholds separating signals from noise are. This translates into the relative consistency of borders within and without the medium or, in other words, how concrete the ensemble presents itself as a technical entity. In that sense, the density can also be seen as a measure of the systems’ impermeability to difference and change. The circuit must be dense enough to enable the flow of information, but not so much that it obstructs its passage. The participating works should therefore be expressive of the massive infrastructures of transportation that disseminate movies’ across the world. They also had to gesture towards the territorializing character of the circuit as an epistemic dispositif, continually engaged in the production of geographic borders, material differences, formal outlines, and presence thresholds. In doing so, the works would have to strive to frame the unframeable – cinema in its most slippery aspects, announcing the imminence of other media to come. They could have been movies deeply embedded in their own circulation, such as Paik’s Zen for Film or Galloway and Rabinowitz’s Hole in Space. Movies that, because of nontransferable formal particulars, paradoxically render opaque the contingencies of distribution. Otherwise, they could have been movies that openly speak of the political economy of channel conditions, such as Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s Television Delivers People (USA, 1973). White text, scrolling over a blue electronic background to the sound of tacky muzak, directly accosts the viewers with a revelation of their subordinate position within the circuit: ‘you are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer.’ It seemed important, however, to move away from the experimental aesthetics largely employed by works shown in the f irst programme. The proto-pedagogical character of Denied Distances called for a clearer representation of its curatorial outline for the benefit of the audience. A solution was found in the cinematographic treatments given to the issue of film piracy. The dissemination of pirate networks, taken as one of the strongest side effects of the digitization of movie circuits, had been a growing subject of both moral panic and social commentary. It soon found its way into filmic drama. Stories about piracy could be shown as a means to stage the economic, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of movie distribution. They could make the density of the circuit intelligible by fitting it into a narrative arc, while giving it a particular visual identity in the context of the exhibition.

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The movie that wasn’t: Pirated Copy The work to be first selected for the final programme of Denied Distances was Pirated Copy (Man Yan, China, 2004, 89’), by Chinese director He Jianjun. It was also meant to be the only one, since it is a feature that takes up the whole time available for the screening. Pirated Copy performs what could be called a fictional ethnography of informal movie distribution, by following the stories of different people engaged with the illegal DVD markets in China. Some of its characters are a street seller connected to the local mafia, an unemployed man obsessed with the violence of Quentin Tarantino, and a college teacher looking for the works of Pedro Almodóvar to show in her course. These personalities embody the plurality of the pirate public. Pirated Copy enables the audience to look at cinematographic works from the very material perspective of their trade. The first scene of the movie already establishes this premise. It shows the street seller harassing a potential costumer into buying a DVD, any DVD. The seller indiscriminately offers ‘an art flick’, the Hollywood blockbuster The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002), the Chinese martial arts movie Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002), and a couple other titles. All of these works, which, in formal circumstances, would be treated as intrinsically different entities, are shown in this scene to be interchangeable commodities of equal value. Pirated Copy therefore illustrates how piracy, by displacing movies from their proper means of circulation, strips them down to their most banal materiality. They do not charge distinct licensing fees nor deserve specific marketing strategies. Disconnected from the discourse networks governing their meaning and value, movies are discriminated according to what they immediately appear to be. In a later scene, a police officer accuses the seller to be dealing in pornography, a serious criminal offense, due to the possession of Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (France/ Japan, 1976). Despite the seller’s pleas that ‘it’s a film about human nature – it’s art’, there is no definitive way to convince the policeman. Both men’s eagerness to pin down the identity of the movie cannot be completely satisfied (nor frustrated) by the explicit imagery shown on the DVD cover (or even in any of the movie’s scenes). There is nothing self-evident therein either as a transgression of law or as a higher form of human creative expression. Both conditions rely on their non-mutually exclusive codification within broader critical apparatus. If the movie was being shown in a recognized art-house theatre, its artistic condition would be upheld by the venue’s authority. Unable to access such devices, there was little that the seller could do against the immediate judgment of the law enforcer.

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The informality of piracy does not forcefully lead to medial interactions that are uninformed, rudimentary, or superficial, though. Pirated Copy shows that, if anything, the affective presence of the cinematographic work takes on multiple dimensions within the everyday. Movies are its central plot devices; the objects that supply characters with means for self-actualization, social rearrangement, and reimagining the world. The imaginary signifier is as abundant as ever. The unemployed man’s fantasies about Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (USA, 1994) drive him out of his apathy; the movie inspires him to commit a bank robbery and to take action to prevent a sexual assault attempt. The college teacher’s quest for specific movies (to be shown in a class about sexuality, no less) leads her to engage in an affair with a film dealer. Without the boundaries of property, cinematographic trades are shown to be embedded in the ambiguous, bodily economies of identity and desire. By providing picturesque demonstrations of the sociocultural aspects of film piracy, while moving the focus of its debate past sheer copyright issues, onto material and affective ones, Pirated Copy seemed like the perfect piece to account for the density of the circuit. These things considered, it is a shame that the movie could not be included in the exhibition programme. This time, however, it was not due to physical incompatibilities with the available equipment or architectural conditions. On the contrary, Pirated Copy was a proper fit for the theatrical setting of Denied Distances. Ironically, what ultimately prevented its presentation were the cultural and legal barriers. The movie had always had a contentious relationship with its country of production. Film critic Jay Weissberg (2004) suggests that the only reason why Pirated Copy got to bypass the strict censorship imposed by the Chinese government was because it was made in digital video. The same format that gave the movie its faux documentary look also made it largely independent from the standard facilities used by filmmakers in mainland China, enabling its production to fly under the state’s radar. Its international distribution, however, could not count on the same discretion. Even a single DVD, sent as a personal package from the producer to Brazil, would be under close scrutiny of the country’s prohibitive customs. Professor Chris Berry, a specialist in Chinese cinema who, at that time, worked in the Media Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, provided invaluable support in the process of acquiring Pirated Copy for Denied Distances. Berry mediated my contact with film producer Zhu Rikun, whose language I could not speak, and kindly offered to lend his own copy of the movie for the exhibition, foreseeing the complications involved in its global transit. Not that it would have been difficult to get ahold of the

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movie, though: at that time, it could be easily found in peer-to-peer networks, already with English subtitles. However, even though the movie was physically available through a number of different channels, it was not enough to consummate its proper circulation. The formal screening circumstances entailed by Denied Distances made it mandatory for all works to be licensed. There was a standard contract prepared by the Itaú Cultural Institute’s legal department that the producer had to sign in order to complete this transaction. In spite of Berry’s support, though, the Institute never received a reply from Zhu Rikun. He did not return any of the email or fax messages sent by the Mostravídeo producers. Perhaps the problem was the lack of a common language between them. Perhaps Zhu Rikun did not want to commit himself with the screening in any legal way. It is still impossible to know why he never responded. The producers had no way to confirm that they were even contacting the right addresses. A week from the day when the exhibition programme had to be settled, the Mostravídeo producers contacted me stating that Pirated Copy was not yet licensed. They could not risk screening it during the exhibition. I urgently needed to find an alternative to complete Denied Distances.

The movie that was: Steal this Film The tight deadline would have made it nearly impossible to substitute Pirated Copy through conventional means. The time it takes to research and assemble an alternative set of movies, plus to negotiate exhibition rights, plus to make arrangements for their transportation to Brazil, would have left me largely behind the exhibition production schedule. Luckily for me, I could still resort to the grey zones of cinema. A reasonable substitute for Pirated Copy would be found there, in the two parts of Steal this Film (The League of Noble Peers, Germany/UK, 2006-2007). This pair of ‘digitally native’ documentaries was produced by a group of free-culture activists, which take an open stance against intellectual property. Both dealt with the subject of movie piracy, and together had about the same duration as Pirated Copy. They could therefore occupy the place left by the Chinese feature in Denied Distance’s playlist, representing neither a conceptual nor a physical loss to the constitution of the exhibition programme. What made Steal this Film such an appropriate work for a last-minute substitution, however, did not have to do with the documentaries’ ‘content’. Rather, it was the way in which they were made publicly available. Complying

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with the ethos of free digital culture, Steal this Film is to be found gratis on the Internet. The primary means of acquisition for these movie files are through peer-to-peer networks. Their official website has BitTorrent links for downloading different versions of both instalments along with subtitles for them in many languages. It also includes a repository containing the raw footage of the interviews made for part two, completely transcribed and timecoded, licensed for the public to use in their own projects (‘remix, redistribute, rejoice’). Steal this Film therefore embraces the collaborative reality of cinema allowed by computer networks. Its producers acknowledge the contribution of the audience to movie circulation, and seek to foster curatorial autonomy. They actively refuse to comply with more traditional dynamics of distribution, favouring those better adapted to their precarious working conditions. Made in a time before Shortfilmdepot, when most exhibition copies circulated on physical media formats, Steal this Film’s official Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page already read: Q. I want to show [Steal this Film] (1 or 2) at my film festival: can you send me a DVD / Beta Tape / Laserdisc / VHS / 12” record… A. We’d really, really, rather not. It’s not that we don’t respect your festival, and we WOULD love it if you show the film, and it’s not that we think we’re special, and we really appreciate your attention. It’s just that we don’t have an office, and we don’t have a Beta deck, and you CAN just download the film from our site and it IS HD quality and really, isn’t it TIME you learned how to use Bittorrent anyway? (The League of Noble Peers, 2007).

This virtual dialog hints at some pedagogical aspirations behind the movie’s mode of release. In a way similar to Wavelength, Steal this Film’s restricted availability seems to be aimed at informing certain socio-spatial articulations required for its proper experience. In its case, these articulations do not entail particular conditions of viewing, but rather of access. Steal this Film is a movie not necessarily made for theatrical projection or mobile screens; it is certainly, however, a movie made to be downloaded. Its primary mode of consumption involves connecting to peer-to-peer networks in order to syphon the movie’s data from other, equally connected users. By urging the audience to ‘learn how to use BitTorrent’, the producers invite them to engage directly with this process of digital distribution, making the experience of the work inseparable from it. This activity, as trivial as it seems, draws the public into the technical underpinnings of the medium

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and thereby plays into a broader agenda of making them responsible for circulation. More than the mastery of a set of instrumental skills, this process aims at an epistemic rearrangement, overcoming the dynamics of property inscribed within the circuit. It is relevant to point out that Steal this Film, paradoxically, was not published under any sort of ‘copyleft’ license that would allow for its free distribution and exhibition. The files are just sitting there, within easy reach of the audience. Many countries’ intellectual property laws would default their unlicensed reproduction to a contravention. The film producers are well aware of that, as they tongue-in-cheekily explain in the first FAQ question: Q. Why is your film copyrighted? A. So that you can steal it. Of course there’s more to say about this, but we’re sure you can figure it out (The League of Noble Peers, 2007).

Copyright is set as a condition for the dare made by the movie’s title to be relevant: steal this film. Permission is not granted; it must be taken. The producers’ intention certainly was not to prevent the work from circulating, but rather to charge this operation with meaning, sensitizing the audience to the technologies it entails. By taking this bait, the public upgrades their status from functionaries of the medial apparatus to accomplices in the cinematographic work. The seemingly passive operation of downloading video files is foregrounded as an active, potentially subversive decision, involving elements of risk. Thereby, Steal This Film makes its first statement ahead of showing its first scene. In order to watch the movie, the audience must commit to an act of piracy themselves. Before engaging with the opinions of the experts interviewed for the documentary on the subject of informal distribution, they have to feel the experience of it. The rest is for them to ‘figure it out’. As an offspring of Internet sharing culture, Steal this Film could be transported with no great difficulties into the institutional circumstances of Denied Distances. The producers were easy to reach online. In fact, I had previously been in contact with them to arrange for exhibitions of the movie in free software and arts events. They were prompt to reply to Itaú Cultural’s emails and quickly agreed to the licensing terms. The highdefinition version of the documentaries were downloaded and burned to a disc in a matter of hours. As a bonus, the movies already came with subtitles in Portuguese, which had been spontaneously made by the audience. This fact was extremely convenient for the organization of the exhibition, which

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otherwise would have had to spend considerable time and resources on the translation. For all these reasons, Steal this Film may seem like a much better fit for Denied Distances than Pirated Copy. But this is precisely why it was our second option. The documentaries make themselves much more critically engaging because of the resistances expressed in their peer-to-peer distribution. The sheer screening attenuates the rough edges of their circulation, highlighting conventional features. Without the tension articulated by the devices of Steal this Film’s online presence, the distributed agency of the cinematographic work was likely overshadowed by the brilliant contributions of the experts it interviews to the copyright debate. In these circumstances, the obviously foreign Pirated Copy seemed to serve better the purposes of the exhibition. By providing Brazilian audiences with relatable situations, the movie demonstrated how their everyday practices were playing into the global circuits of cinematographic trade, regardless of authorized narratives. (In addition, I must confess that I personally favoured the idea of seizing institutional resources to exhibit a work previously unseen in the country, instead of one that was freely available on the Internet.) This emphasis on the elements that were left out of Denied Distances may give the impression that the resulting exhibition has been a source of frustration. That its programme was a last-minute hack unable to properly actualize a perfect curatorial vision. Quite the contrary; it is not my intention to bemoan or apologize. Things are as they are, and what I mean is that they are an effect of contingencies. Do not get me wrong: things are always a hack. By recuperating here what has been removed from view, I want to try to dispel, yet again, any impression of the contrary. I want to draw the reader, while following this perfectly logical sequence of words on a page, to the material mess from which discourse arises and within which it invariably thrives. Unsanitized curatorial research does not resemble any ideal thought process. It is a way of thinking through things, along with other beings, openly dealing in disagreements and shortcomings. The curator is not standing from a vantage point over the circuit. Rather, they are embedded, and must articulate signs from within. The production of presence requires physical effort. To ruminate on what it is missing from this process is not an attempt to grasp totality, but a reminder of the medium’s epistemic insufficiency. It is impossible to account for everything. Meaning always differs and matter is constantly being disordered. Cinematographic works are not reproduced so much as distributed and transformed, crystallizing in ephemeral arrangements. The affirmation of every component one cannot

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mobilize – the incompatible pieces, the overflowing forms, the unauthorized texts – call our attention to the fact that there is more otherness than a single individual can reasonably conceive. In this vast ocean of negativity against which our categories impudently stand, the circuit presents itself at its most dense; cinema is pregnant of promises of self-differing.

The transience of time It would be dishonest to conclude this chapter without evoking a final distance denied from the medium; one that was not explicitly addressed in the exhibition, but nevertheless haunts its entire programme. One that seems fundamental for the understanding of how this late textual meditation relates to the original event: the transience of time. It is therefore necessary to do it, as it might as well serve us in the manner of a general conclusion. Cinema is often referred to as a time-based art because duration is one of the movie’s defining characteristics in contrast to other visual forms, notably photography. Nevertheless, time is expressed in many other ways during a movie exhibition. There is of course the complementary duration of the screening sessions, which stands as a sort of framing container against the movies’ chronological volume. There are the schedules of production and exhibition, setting the pace of operation for every one of its constituting actors. There are the historical undercurrents expressed by certain pieces and aspired by the curatorial outline as a whole. But the event also conveys a much more subtle shading of cinematographic time. Something of the fleeting Kairos that Zielinski (2008: 30) contrasted to the chronological regularity of technological media. Not time that can be inscribed and repeated, but rather its exact opposite. Time as that which, to our everyday consciousness, never comes back again. The radically irreproducible circumstances delimiting even the most perfect system of technical reproducibility. A fuzzy measure of the continuing loss of opportunity, as we zero in on the unavoidable. In spite of any impression this chapter might have given, Denied Distances was never meant to be a framework forever binding certain movies to a set of fixed positions. It entailed a brief articulation of these pieces in an occasional encounter, synchronized with the rhythm of other occurrences big and small. It was a conjuncture of trajectories made to pass. When we look at what remains of it, we see the equivalent of a picture of a group that just met at a party, and is likely never to meet again. The snapshot of a loose community brought together by the circumstances. The moment is now

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lost. Each individual went its own way, missing connections. Some might even have gone forever. Their appearance is certainly changed. The picture is lagging behind, and can tell us nothing of their current whereabouts or conditions. Ever since Denied Distances, many things have passed to its constituting elements. Let some credits roll: Steal this Film’s director Jamie King has largely set filmmaking projects aside and has focused his creative energy as an executive producer. In the same year as the exhibition, he had released a platform for online content called VODO. The pay-what-you-want model it offered meant to catalyze indie productions funded by donations and cement the use of the BitTorrent protocol as a default for media distribution. King currently hosts the podcast Steal this Show, where he conducts interviews on topics such as copyright, cryptography, and file sharing. The civic purposes of Vectorial Elevation were reiterated by its inclusion in the cultural programme of the 2010 Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, Canada. Lozano-Hemmer later produced other versions of his interactive searchlight installation for the cities of Montreal, Canada (Articulated Intersect, 2012) and Philadelphia, USA (Open Air, 2012). Each work drew certain operational details from the cultural and urban particularities of their location. Both deployed novel ways for users to command the lighting infrastructure, such as lever-controllers and a voice messaging app. On a future iteration of the piece, Lozano-Hemmer might perhaps choose another interface solution for it. The Graffiti Research Lab, which was already virtually disbanded by the time of the exhibition, consummated its transformation in the Internetbased Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab). The emerging collective operated in many ways similar to its predecessor, albeit with a much broader scope. It was likewise shut down in August 2015, following a glum, public acknowledgment that the war for the free and open Internet had been lost. Their website remains online as an archive of accomplished and doit-yourself projects. Many of F.A.T. Lab’s former members continue leading relatively successful careers, moving across new media, Internet art, and contemporary art scenes, and even the industry. (James Powderly is at present the Director of User Interaction and Experience of the prominent augmented reality company Magic Leap.) Line Describing a Cone was finally shown in Brazil, not once but twice, including during the 2017 Besides the Screen conference, thanks to the generosity of one of its delegates. The screening took place in an academic project space whose exterior glass walls had to be covered with the repurposed event’s banners in order to reduce light pollution. The haze machine

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used on occasion, borrowed from one of the volunteers’ father, had a strong fruity scent and could not provide enough smoke to fill the whole room. The audience had to come really close to the projection in order to discern its tridimensional effect, forming a corridor along the light beam. Partial recordings of the movie made from their smartphones were instantly posted on social media, where these recordings still circulate. Last but certainly not least, it is now possible to find the full reproduction of Wavelength on YouTube, although I am sure that it was not uploaded by Michael Snow himself. There are in fact two versions available, both with the exact same duration, published with a little more than a year between them. A watermark in the upper right corner of the videos suggests that they have been appropriated from the same source (or perhaps from one another): likely an old broadcast from the public Italian network Rai 3. The version first uploaded, whose whole description consists of a link to the work’s entry on the Internet Movie Database, has user comments disabled and, as of this writing, counts more than 175,000 views. The other has accrued less than a tenth of that. Comments reveal dissatisfied users left and right. One laments the fact that watching the movie on the computer screen minimizes its impact. Another complains that their teacher made them watch the movie in its entirety and discuss it during class. The top liked one suggests ‘THIS WOULD BE WAY BETTER WITH FAKE LAUGHTER UNDERNEATH IT AT RANDOM MOMENTS’. The components that once came together as Denied Distances have thus been rearticulated, in themselves and across other entities. Artists have changed careers. Movies have changed formats. The public has changed interests. Cinematographic works take on other arrangements by the continuing engagement of individuals and communities. Things are earned as much as they are lost. The awareness of passing time invites us to breach through the physical objectivity of the works’ immediate appearance. Their existences could perhaps be appreciated in a way f itting Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics (1978), who speaks of actual entities as events extended across time and space. Transience provides movies with room to unravel in circulation instead of reaching a terminal resolution. Every occasion of experience, as insignificant as it may seem, can be conducive to media reconfigurations, an inflection in the circuit expressive of the vital ephemerality of cinema. The Lumières, as filmmakers-entrepreneurs, were perhaps satisfied with an invention without any future, to be exploited for the duration of a year or so. Curators, on the other hand, have to cope with a system that is ever present, and must in each and every moment be recreated anew. Their

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professional burden entails a privileged access to the material exchanges that underpin cinema, revealing the transience of time not as a counterpoint to film history, but as its actual meat. As it happens, the medium exceeds itself, dissolving into other forms of representation, cultural practices, and technological assemblages. It thus lends itself to its constituting differences. A curatorial approach to cinema – an approach chiefly informed by exercises of caring, if we are to take the origins of the word to heart – has to commit to this fugitive disposition. Beyond enabling a more nuanced grasp of cinematographic works, which welcomes all the mess and contradictions that the logos refuses to accommodate, the curator´s role as an intermediary should prompt our responsibility in performing knowledge and fabricating the cinemas to come – if any.

Bibliography / works cited Antimodular Research, ‘Body Movies ‒ Relational Architecture 6,’ in Rafael LozanoHemmer, 2011. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Curham, Louise and Lucas Ihlein, ‘Six minutes’, Teaching and Learning Cinema (2007). Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Dos Anjos, Moacir, ‘Entre o local e o global: O menor como resistência possível’, in Arte em Deslocamento – Trânsitos Geopoéticos, ed. Priscila Arantes (São Paulo: Paço das Artes: 2015). Dubois, Phillipe, ‘La question vidéo face au cinéma: Deplacements esthétiques’, in Cinéma et dernières technologies, ed. F. Beau, P. Dubois and G. Leblanc (Paris / Brussels: De Boeck-Université, 1998), 189-207. Enright, Robert, ‘The lord of missed rules: An interview with Michael Snow,’ Border Crossing, 102 (May 2007). Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkley, CA: University of California, 1993). Godfrey, Mark and Anthony McCall, ‘Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone’, Tate Papers, 8 (Autumn 2007). Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Greenberg, Clement, ‘Modernist painting’, in Forum Lectures (Washington, D.C.: Voice of America, 1960).

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Huhtamo, Erkki, ‘Elements of screenology: Toward an archaeology of the screen’, ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image, 7 (Tokyo: 2004), 31-82. Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, 1999). McIver, Gillian, ‘Expanded Cinema, The Live Record (Review)’, Interface, 6 December 2008. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Michelson, Annette ‘Towards Snow’, in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York City: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), 172-183. Mostravídeo, ‘Sobre’, Blog Mostravídeo Itaú Cultural, 2010. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Sitney, P. Adams, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3rd edition (New York City: Oxford University, 2002). The League of Noble Peers, ‘FAQ’, Steal This Film, 2010. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Totaro, Donato, ‘Wavelength revisited’, Offscreen, 6(11), November 2002. Avaliable at . Last access 25 August 2018. Virilio, Paul, War and Cinema: the Logistics of Perception (New York City: Verso, 1989). Watson, Theodore, ‘GRL Laser Tag Rotterdam – how to and source code’, Muonics, 20 February 2007. Avaliable at . Last access 25 August 2018. Weissberg, Jay, ‘Pirated Copy’, Variety Film Reviews, 16 February 2004. Online. Available at . Whitehead, Alfred Noth, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York City: The Free Press, 1978). Williamson, Matthew, ‘Degeneracy in online video platforms’, in Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube, ed. G. Lovink and R. Somers-Miles (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011), 211-217. Zielinski, Siegfried, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008). 2’45”, William Raban, 1975. 4’22”, William Raban, 2008. A Man. A Road. A River., Marcellvs L., 2004. Augmented Sculpture, Pablo Valbuena, 2007. Body Movies (Relational Architecture 6), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 2001. Flatland, Detanico Lain, 2003. GRL: The Complete First Season, Graffiti Research Lab, 2008. Horror Film 1, Malcolm Le Grice, 1971. I’ve Got a Guy Running, Jonathon Kirk, 2006.

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L.A.S.E.R. Tag, Graffiti Research Lab, 2007. Line Describing a Cone, Anthony McCall, 1973. N 520437 E 041900 (Para-polis [the hague]), Pablo Valbuena, 2008. Paper Landscape #1, Guy Sherwin, 1975/2007. Pirated Copy (Man Yan), He Jianjun, 2004. Steal this Film, The League of Noble Peers, 2006-2007. Television Delivers People, Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, 1973. The Girl Chewing Gum, John Smith, 1976. Three Transitions, Peter Campus, 1973. Vectorial Elevation (Relational Architecture 4), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 1999. Wavelength, Michael Snow, 1966-67. WVLNT: WAVELENGTH for those who don’t have the time: Originally 45 minutes, Now 15!, Michael Snow, 1966-67/2003. You and I, Horizontal (III), Anthony McCall, 2007.

Acknowledgements The making of this monograph intersects with my time as a PhD candidate in the Media and Communications Department of Goldsmiths, University of London, from 2008 to 2011. It is a work deeply indebted to the guidance of Rachel Moore and to a scholarship provided by the Leverhulme Trust, but no less to the support, inspiration, and friendship of the community I found there. In practice, however, Movie Circuits stretches much beyond these postgraduate years, both in the future and in the past. As the reader might have noticed, an important part of the work has been articulated through curatorial activities that began as early as 2003. By the same means, it is a project still in development, outside of the film and screen scholarship, as a form of embedded knowledge. It could only be accomplished – and in fact it only exists – through the participation of others. Besides the people explicitly referenced throughout the text, a nonexhaustive list of human beings to whom this book is owed includes: Isabella Altoé, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Alexandra Antonopoulou, Júlia Borges Arana, Lucas Bambozzi, Beatriz de Barros, Marcus Bastos, Giselle Beiguelman, Chris Berry, Agnes Borges, Angela Borges, Nelson Brissac, Ignez Capovilla, Luiza Carstens, Ana Carvalho, Vinícius Castro, Yachi Chen, Geoff Cox, Paola Crespi, Virginia Crisp, Roberto Cruz, Sean Cubitt, Alexandre Curtiss, Sérgio Denicoli, Kay Dickinson, Guilherme Duque, Maryse Elliott, Matthew Fuller, Michael Goddard, Andrew Goffey, José Irmo Gonring, Marcela Gonring, Vitor Graize, Richard Grusin, Adnan Hadzi, Janet Harbord, Stefania Haritou, Julian Henriques, Janis Jefferies, Erly Vieira Jr., Harshini Karunaratne, Zlatan Krajina, Joasia Krysa, Graziela Kunsch, Maria Isabel Lamim, Eleftheria Lekakis, Rodrigo Melo, Neusa Mendes, Marina Miglio, Rossana Miglio, André Mintz, Patrícia Moran, Fernanda Neves, Fabrício Noronha, German Alfonso Nunez, Paloma Oliveira, Jussi Parikka, Benedito Pinto, Fred Roseiro, Hervan Rossi, Cecília Salles, Clara Sampaio, Maria Schiffler, José Carlos Silvestre, Gavin Singleton, Miro Soares, Jeroen Sondervan, Ezen Tavares, Rafael Trindade, Pasi Valiaho, Fernando Velázquez, Tamara Witschge, and Su-Anne Yeo. I thank you all, and I can’t thank you enough. Earlier drafts of some chapters have been published elsewhere. A much shorter version of the introduction appeared in APRJA 1.2: In/compatible Research, in 2012. Chapter 2, The Becoming of Cinema, is a revised and expanded version of an essay included in the book Digital Communication Policies in the Information Society Promotion Stage (Braga: Universidade do Minho, 2012). Chapter 4, Performing Medium Specificities, is derived,

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in part, from an article published in Third Text on March 2014, available online: . The final manuscript was completed during a visiting scholarship at the Center for 21st Century Studies of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I’m extremely grateful to the Social Communications Department of UFES for the research leave that allowed me to pursue this activity and to the Fulbright Commission for supporting it. I am likewise grateful to the artists who not only created the works that give life to this monograph, but were also generous enough to provide pictures to illustrate it.



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Watson, Theodore, ‘GRL Laser Tag Rotterdam – how to and source code’, Muonics, 20 February 2007. Avaliable at . Last access 25 August 2018. Weissberg, Jay, ‘Pirated Copy’, Variety Film Reviews, 16 February 2004. Online. Available at . Welles, Orson, ‘The War of the Worlds (transcript)’, Columbia Broadcasting System, 1938. Available at . Last access 25 August 2018. Whitehead, Alfred Noth, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York City: The Free Press, 1978). Williamson, Matthew, ‘Degeneracy in online video platforms’, in Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube, ed. G. Lovink and R. Somers-Miles (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011), 211-217. Winston, Brian, Technologies of Seeing: Photograph, Cinematography and Television (London: BFI, 1996). Youngblood, Gene, Expanded Cinema (New York City: Dutton & Co, 1970). Zielinski, Siegfried, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999). Zielinski, Siegfried, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008). Zielinski, Siegfried, ‘Show and hide: Projection as a media strategy located between proof of truth and ilusioning’, in Variantology 1: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies, ed. S. Zielinski and S. Wagnermaier (Cologne: Walther König, 2006), 81-100. Zielinski, Siegfried and Silvia Wagnermaier, Variantology 1: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies (Cologne: Walther König, 2006).

Index !mediengruppe bitnik: 54-5 [in]Transition: 97 2’45”: 157-8 4’22”: 157-9, 170, 176 557,087: 99 a knife all blade: 7-14, 17, 23, 26, 133 A Man. A Road. A River.: 143-5, 148 ABD-ES: 128 academia: 66, 82, 85, 96-7, 128 Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences: 19, 76 act, speech: 13 activism: 123 Brazilian cineclubes: 113 Italian free radio movement: 92 actor-network theory: 94 Ação e Dispersão: 57-8 Addictive TV: 60 ADEPI: 127-8 advertisements: 59, 71, 171 affordances: 15, 54, 73-4, 100, 170 agenda, civic: 174 Agnus Dei (exhibition): 101 algorithms: 10, 52-3, 57 amateurs, amateurism: 67, 113, 122 anarchaeology: 95 anecdotes: 16, 26, 66, 100, 110 anomalies: 82-3, 94, 96, 98, 112, 122, 131 apparatus: 17, 32, 36, 40-1, 46 academic: see research apparatus camera: 71, 134 cinematographic: 8, 12-5, 34, 67, 69-70, 85, 89, 98, 104, 112, 115, 117, 136-7, 162, 176, 118-23, 125-6, 136-7, 175-6 counter-: 83, 125 computer: 53, 55 distribution: 176 financial: 58 legal: 59, 128 media: 13, 15-24, 61, 72-4, 76, 81-5, 88, 91-5, 106, 110, 131, 135, 152, 160, 166, 168-9, 171, 174, 182 meta-: 79 promotional: 16 propaganda: 126 research: 87, 95, 97, 105 satellite: 41 schooling: 125 screening: 70, 154 state: 130 technical: 69, 72-4 television: 44 theory: 13 appropriation: 44, 54, 56

architecture: 90, 137, 166 digital media: 59 movie theatre: 70, 115, 119, 141, 168, 175 of computation: 54 of projection; 134-5, 156-7 Relational Architectures: 172-3, 176 archaeology, media: 22 Arnulf Rainer: 10 arts allographic: 33 apparatus: 131 artistic practices: 99-100 autographic: 33 conceptual: 101 criticism, new: 101 exhibition: see exhibition gallery: 38, 77, 101, 103, 147, 163, 168 glitch: 23, 54 installation: 46-7, 77, 99, 101, 106, 120, 136, 156-7, 163, 166, 170, 172-3, 175, 185 documentation: see performance arts documentation new media: 135, 164, 166, 174, 185 performance: 23, 131, 133, 139, 155-9, 161, 164 documentation: 136, 153, 155-6, 159, 162-4, 166, 168-70, 172, 174-5 orbital: 41 pictorial: 138, 143 sculptures: 41, 164-6 site-specific: 141, 166 street: 169, 171 time-based: 184 artists: 33, 41-2, 59-60, 74, 135, 154-7, 166, 175 body: 153, 160-1 fees: 103 collectives: 28, 129-31, contemporary: 22, 101 glitch art: 54 media: 168-9 Artista sem Ideia: 58-61 artworks: 23, 34, 59, 100-1, 131 dematerialization of: 99 open: 33-4 aspect ratio: 31-2, 43, 138 academy: 19, 76 assemblages: 122, 187 audiences: 7, 11-4, 16-8, 32-3, 103, 109, 111, 126-7, 141, 178, 181-3 audiencing: 17 body: 134, 138, 141, 156, 175-6 expectations: 121 participation: see audiences work work: 44-5, 51, 54, 56, 60, 113, 116-7, 161-2, 170, 172, 175-6 audiovisions: 89-90

202  Augmented Sculpture: 164-6 aura anti-auratic effect: 36 recovery: 49 automatisms: 74-8, 120-2, 163-4, 166 authorial control: 61 authorship: 36, 55, 59, 61, 99 avant-garde: 18, 22, 35, 90, 159 awards: 58, 60 becoming, technical: 19-20, 25-8, 40, 67-70, 72-3, 78, 84-5, 162, 174 becoming, of media: 101, 105-6, 112 Besides the Screen: 185 Beuys, Joseph: 41 bias: 21, 38, 57, 73, 88 BitTorrent: 115, 181, 185 black boxes: 94, 166 blind optics: 26-7 Blu-Ray: 50 Body Movies: 172-6 boundaries, medial: 39, 110 Brakhage, Stan: 74, 76 Brazil: 111-3, 127 cinema: 57, 115, 119 conceptual art: 101 Federation of Film Societies: 129 film distribution, film distributors: 114-5, 119, 124, 128-30 federal government: 66, 129, 135 military regime: 113 Ministry of Education: 66, 129 British Film Institute: 158 broadcasts: 39-45, 139, 186 brochures, exhibition: 32, 135, 147 Cafuné: 19 Cage, John: 38 call for works: 58, 60 cameras: 15, 20-1, 26, 70, 72-3, 84, 134, 143-8, 158, 162 box: 71 digital: 66 eye: 139-40 feed: 41, 151, 153 film: 157 lenses: 10, 78, 139, 144 manufacturers: 18 mobile phone: 10 movements: 139, 150 security: 170 tracking: 175 video: 151 Campus, Peter: 151-3, 155 Caparaó Environmental Video Exhibition: 126 capitalism, cognitive: 99 carpentry: 100 catalogue, exhibition: 32, 99, 139 categories, epistemological: 90

Movie Circuits

Centre Georges Pompidou: 23 channels: 11, 20, 43, 51, 88, 105, 173, 180 ancillary: 84 authorized: 82 conditions: 38, 46, 177 conventions: 76 media: 60, 111, 166 of circulation: 35, 39, 48, 50, 56, 81 of transmission: see channels of circulation TV: 42 chroma key: 48, 81, 151, 154, see also video compositing Cine Falcatrua: 28, 109-31, 135 lawsuit: 128-30 Cineclube Metrópolis: 113 cinema anomalous: 117-21 cinematic experience: 141 cinematographic works: 8, 12, 13-5, 19-21, 22, 24-5, 27, 32-7, 40-3, 45, 47, 51, 55, 57, 59-61, 75-7, 81, 85, 88-91, 93-4, 97-8, 103, 105-6, 112, 115, 117-8, 121, 124, 126, 128, 130, 135-6, 140, 152-3, 178-9, 182-3, 186-7, see also movies digital: 19, 28, 84-5, 88, 111 expanded: 24, 77, 120, 131, 133, 157, 164 grassroots: 112-3 individuation of: 21-2, 24, 67-72, 73-5, 79-81, 85, 87, 123 invisible part of: 20, 67, 72, 83-5, 87, 89, 93, 134, see also Denied Distances liveness: 33 paracinema: 23 pirate: 28, 83, 110-2, 114, 118, 124, 126, 131 pre-cinema: 70, 78, 90 situation: 12, 23 structural: 58-9, 139, studies: see film and screen studies Cinema Sim – Narrativas e Projeções: 163 Cinématographe: 17, 69-72, 75, 78-9, 124, 156 cinephilia, cinephiles: 65, 111, 113 circuits: 15-6, 19-21, 22-8, 34, 37, 39, 42, 44, 46, 57, 59, 61, 67, 70, 72, 74, 77, 81, 83-5, 87-91, 93-8, 103-6, 111, 118, 121-2, 124, 126-7, 129-31, 133, 137-8, 153, 155, 157, 159, 166, 168, 170-1, 182-4, 186 density of: 28, 134, 176-7, 179 ideological: 101 negative spaces of: see negative spaces, see also Denied Distances short-circuit: 11, 23, 118, 126 topography: 20, 61, 70, 74, 80, 84, 87, 93 circulation: 15, 18, 20, 25, 27, 32, 34, 39, 43, 44-9, 51-3, 59, 76-8, 81-2, 85, 87-8, 90, 92-4, 97-8, 105-6, 122, 137, 141, 152, 157, 163, 180, 182-3 contingencies: 16, 20, 26-8, 36, 38, 43, 46, 99, 101, 119, 137, 156, 177, 183 digital: 55-7 infrastructures: 18, 20, 41, 67, 84

Index

means of: 25, 61, 136, 156 regime of: 41 traces of: 37, 117 unauthorized: 111 city, extensions of: 134, 168, 172 client-server: 13 close circuit television, closed-circuit video: 140, 151 closure, metaphysical: 25, 51, 61, 69, 72, 94, 96, 105 codecs: 52-3, 55, 78, 84-5 114 complex, military: 149 computer: 54-5, 120, 181 code: 53, 56, 59 files: see digital files forensics: 91 graphics: 50, 137 image processing: 49, 146 interfaces: 171 media: 37, 164 networks: 31, 56, 82, 84, 118, 126, 181 personal: 28, 84, 110, 111, 114-5, 118, 122 screens: 186 scripts: 54-5, 124 servers: 84 software: 59, see also software system, operational: 52, 84 concretization, technical: 20, 67, 71-3, 75-6, 78, 80-1, 84-5, 103, 112, 120, 129, 131, see also becoming, technical Conrad, Tony: 23 contracts, contractual: 59, 130, 135, 137, 180 controversies: 28, 61, 129 conventions, formal: 76, 78, 81-2, 84-5, 87-8, 98 copyright: 36, 59-61, 84, 111, 121, 125, 127, 179, 182-3, 185 copyleft: 182 fair use: 59 intellectual property: 59, 180, 182 license, licensing: 59, 84, 104, 129, 178, 180-2 moral rights: 50 public domain: 44 culture, open source: 19, 169-70 curating: see curatorship curator, curatorial: 8, 9, 12-3, 19, 23-4, 27-8, 37, 59, 91, 99, 101-4, 112, 114, 127, 131, 134, 136-8, 168, 177, 181, 183-4, 187 discourse: 28, 99, 101-2, 104 research: 99, 100, 183 sources: 111, 118 statement: 135 curatorship: 99-100, 102-6, 124, 131 cut, director’s: 50 cut, final: 35-7, 43, 50, 56, 116 data: 11, 32, 93, 96, 98, 166 audiovisual: 48, 84, 118, 122, 181 codified, codification: 51-6, 59, 170 databases: 48, 175

203 digital: 91 encryption: 56, 84 transmission: 55, 57, 59, 112 Davis, Douglas: 41, 48 deindividuation: 24, 26, 83, 90, 100, 106, 131 dematerialization of film: 49 of the artwork: 99 Denied Distances: 28, 133-9, 141, 145, 147, 153, 155-9, 161-9, 172-3, 176-80, 182-6 depth hermeneutic: 88-9 of field: 134, 143 of projection: 134, 155, 156, 160, 162, 164, 168 of the scene: 143 Detanico Lain: 145-6 development, technological: 15, 22, 25, 61, 81, 87, 134, see also technical genesis Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI): 19, 49, 53, 117-8 digital rights management (DRM): 59 discourse: 13-4, 18, 35, 90, 101, 123, 125, 137, 183 audiovisual: 90, 97 curatorial: 28, 99, 101-2, 104 discursive platform: 125 networks: see discourse networks scientific: 94, 97 Digital Cinema Package (DCP): 53, 84 Digital Light Processing (DLP): 164, see also digital projector dimension, messianic: 83 displacement, epistemic: 27 display: 78 conditions: 75 electronic: 39-40 exhibition: 32, 99, 101, 103, 141 museum: see exhibition display technologies: 21, 88 dispositif: 89-92, 95, 100, 106, 131, 141, 177 documenta: 41 Download Finished: 54-5, 57 DVDs: 12, 48-53, 56, 116, 118, 122, 129, 136, 178-9 catalogues: 114 extras: 49-50 piracy: 111, 178 recorder: 114 version: 158-9 Eastman Kodak Company: 71 Edison, Thomas: 70 editing: 20, 39, 45, 134, 141, 149, 151-2 software, suite: 54, 66, 146 elements (technical): 68-72 emulation: 56, 126, 158, 162 ensemble, technical: 25, 69-72, 79, 81, 88, 94, 106, 125, 138, 166, 177 Epileptic Seizure Comparison: 76-7, 120 event: 28, 32, 110, 131, 158, 163 phenomenological: 33-5, 184

204  exhibition: 18, 23, 27, 31, 99-102, 105-6, 115, 117-31, 163, 173, 176 conditions: 32, domestic: 42 exhibition maker, independent: 99, 103 production: 180-3 programme: 7, 12, 14, 23, 28, 32, 62, 103-4, 115-6, 119, 129, 133-8, 143, 153, 155, 156-9, 161-3, 168, 175-80, 183-5 video: 28, 126-7, 134-8, 168 Expanded Cinema, The Live Record: 158 Eyebeam OpenLab: 169 façades: 41, 166, 168, 170, 174 fans: 51 edits: 56, 60 fanzines: 125-6 Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards: 60 Farocki, Harun: 97 F.A.T. Lab: 185 feedback, information: 15, 19, 39-40, 174 feedback, video: 157, 170 fiction, epistemic: 43 file-sharing: 19, 82, 83-4, 114, 116, 121, 125-6, 185 files digital: 33, 51-6, 59, 111, 115-6, 122, 126, 181-2 structure: 122 subtitle: 125 film and screen studies: 8-9, 21, 26-7, 81, 87-8, 105-6 film 16mm: 38, 76, 129, 136, 139, 141, 149, 157, 159, 162 35mm: 158 archives: 39, 102 cams: 116 cameraless: 9, 11, 26 celluloid: 11, 35, 38 criticism: 125 colour: 73, 177 copy: 14, 37, 46-7, 48, 52, 55-7, 122 cultures: 18, 34 documentary: 57, 66, 128, 158, 163, 169, 171, 179, 182 exhibition: 12, 34, 38, 42, 66, 81, 85, 129 feature: 17, 19, 41-2, 48-9, 52, 110, 115-6, 124, 129 film-to-video translation: 43 flicker: 23 found footage: 54-5 history: 8, 37, 50-1, 187 independent: 119 Kodachrome: 73 making of: 49-50 market, marketing: 15, 18, 25, 45, 49-50, 111, 171, 178 montage: 35-6, 159 ontological: 48 on TV: 41-3

Movie Circuits

premières: 23, 49, 115, 173 projection: 17, 70, 72, 111, 134 reel: 33, 35-9, 52, 138, 157-8 remakes: 57 remasters: 50 restoration 39, 49-50 roll (photo): 71 screeners: 116-7 screening session: 12, 32, 103, 111, 117, 123, 127, 134, 184 shorts: 19, 66 society: 28, 103, 111-31 solid light: 161, 164, 166 studios: 42, 44, 49, 51, 56, 60, 66, 70, 73, 121 studio productions: 18, 42, 76, 118 subtitle, subtitling: 28, 49, 56, 85, 111, 115, 117, 120, 122, 125-6, 180-2 super8: 153, 156 title screen: 14, 77 film distribution: 15, 82-5, 114, 128-9 digital: 19, 121, 126 distributor: 45, 103, 119, 128-9, 135, 137 informal: 82, 111 release date: 34, 119, 142 release windows: 42, 48, 84, 118 online release: 19, 38-9 theatrical release: 42, 60 film festivals: 12, 18-9, 23, 54, 65, 118, 126, 131, 133, 181 Berlinale: 49 entry form: 31-2, 34 Festival de Tiradentes: 19 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam: 158 Les Rencontres Internationales: 23 Mercosul Young Filmmakers Festival: 126 VIPER Basel International Festival for Film, Video and New Media: 58 Vitória Cine-Video: 9 filmmaking: 11, 35-6, 48, 50, 54, 57-8, 73-5, 77, 134, 185 courses: 66 grants: 57-8, 65 laboratories: 20, 70 post-processing: 139, 146-8 postproduction: 10, 48, 117 film promotion: 28, 59-60, 84, 97, 120 flyers: 110, 124 posters: 110, 123, 125-6 promotional apparatus: 16 promotional material: 104, 110, 116, 135 promotional platform: 42, 48 trailers: 17 filters: 99, 139, 143, 148, 150 Flatland: 145-8, 156 Folha de São Paulo: 127 form, platonic: 45-6 formation, epistemic: 25, 28 Fotolog: 123

205

Index

frames damaged: 37 extra: 145, 151-3 i-frames: 54 p-frames: 54 rate: 32, 116, 142 sequence: 36, 55, 159 functionaries: 12, 17-8, 22, 24-5 27-8, 37, 45, 75, 79, 81, 84, 89, 95, 98, 104, 118, 122, 137, 160, 182 Galloway, Kit: 41, 177 gatekeeper, gatekeeping: 15, 103, 128 gaze audience: 9-11, 141, 143, 149, 155, 158, 162, 175 mobile virtual: 140, 159 genesis (technical): 19-22, 24, 27, 67-9, see also becoming (technical) Girl Chewing Gum, The: 149-51, 159 Glitch Festival Chicago: 23 Godard, Jean-Luc: 97 Graffiti Research Lab: 168-72, 185 GRL: see Graffiti Research Lab GRL: The Complete First Season: 168-72 Guimarães, Pedro Maciel: 19 Hole in space: 41, 177 Home, Stewart: 46-7 Horror Film 1: 159-61, 163, 175 I’ve Got a Guy Running: 147-9 identity, civic: 172 ideology, medial: 21-6, 28, 34, 37-8, 45, 61, 67-8, 70, 79, 82, 88-9, 100, 106, 125 image compression: 10, see also codecs artefacts: 10, 12, 21, 23, 54-5 lossy: 52-3 macroblock: 9-10 error: see image compression artefacts high definition: 42, 49-50, 145 model: 37, 41, 43, 45 moving: 24-5, 36-8, see also movies poor: 51, 56 resolution: 19, 56, 78, 81, 84, 114, 116, 118, 138, 144, 148 immateriality, illusion of: 52 improvements, minor and continuous (technical): 78, 80, 121 improvements, major and discontinuous (technical): 80-2, 125, 131 indexicality: 22 individual, individuality (technical): 19, 24, 67, 69, 71, 74, 80, 98, 100-1, 103 individuation, technical: 19-22, 24-6, 67-8, 72-5, 77-81, 85, 123, see also concretization, technical industries, disruptive: 15 indetermination, margin of (technical): 68, 70

information: 12, 16-7, 20, 35, 37, 39, 43-4, 48, 53, 61, 68, 74, 78, 142, 157, 177 carrier: 72 electronic: 145 flows of: 52, 57, 91, 172, 177 patterns: 33 processes: 95, 134, 162 storage: 49, 59, 91 storage and transmission: 11, 14, 25, 27, 35, 52 systems: 174 theory: 99 transmission: 19, 37, 39, 78 inscription: 37, 78, 91, 143, 145 digital: 52-4, 74 medium of: 10, 47, 138-9 traces of: 92 Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos: Projeto Coca-Cola: 101 institutions art: 130 civil: 171 government: 66, 85, 168, 171, 179, see also Brazil federal government schooling: 79 instructions: 32, 46-7, 57, 59, 61, 170, 173 Internet: 49, 60, 84, 110, 114, 116, 118, 124, 127, 147 film distribution: 19, 48, 121, 180-1 forums: 51, 85 websites: 31, 54-5, 115, 124-6, 173-4, 181, 185 Itaú Cultural Institute: 130, 135, 163, 180, 182 Jianjun, He: 178 journal, academic: 18, 97, 105 JPEG-2000: 53 keying: see chroma key kinetoscope: 70 King, Jamie: 185 Kirk, Jonathon: 147 knowledge, embodied: 98 König, Sven: 54-5 Kulbeka, Peter: 10-1 Kunsch, Graziela: 46-7 L., Marcellvs: 143-5 L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat: 16-7 landscape, medial: 54 L.A.S.E.R. Tag: 169-72 Last Nine Minutes, The: 41, 48 League of Noble Peers, The: 180-2 Le Grice, Malcolm: 159-61 Library of Congress, USA: 36 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts: 41 Line Describing a Cone: 161-4, 174, 185 Lippard, Lucy: 99-100 logos: 97-8, 102, 137, 187 long-shot: 48, 151 loop: 19, 38, 82, 141 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael: 172-6, 185

206  Lucas, George: 50-1 Lucasfilm: 60 Lumières (brothers): 16-7, 69-70, 75, 124, 156, 186 Lye, Len: 11 material, materiality: 15, 139, 178 conventions: 79, 80 forensic: 74 formal: 74, 117 of communication: 14 of computation: 52 of media: 53, 71, 73, 91, 118, 120 of moving-image: 41 performative: 88 matrix, pixel: 36 McCall, Anthony: 161-4, 166 McLaren, Norman: 11 media ancillary practices: 28 archaeology: 22 digital: 48-52, 56, 59-60, 117, 129 ecology: 56, 92 environment: 14, 36 façades: 41, 166, 174 format: 19, 31-2, 44, 46, 53, 56, 59, 76, 122, 129, 136, 141, 162, 179, 181 grey: 45 immediacy: 26, 40, 105 industries: 168 infrastructure: 17, 78, 92, 96 mediality: 15 mediation: 12, 16-7, 20, 26, 57, 93, 145 multimedia: 85, 90 museography: 27, 105 ontology: 19, 22, 34, 102 orbital: 42 performative character of: 13, 25, 33-4, 52 post-medium condition: 39 property: 28, 56, 138, 179, 182, see also copyright, intellectual property specification: 19, 67, 79, 83, 85, 171 specificities: 21, 73, 78, 80, 90, 127, 131 standards: 15, 53, 73-4, 76, 80, 117, 171, 179 studies: 21, 91, 93, 137 obscure objects: 91-3, 96 surface effects: 88, 91, 146, 151, 155, 162, 166 time-base: 91 tradition: 75, 77-8, 84, 118, 120-2, 125, 130-1, 136 transmedia: 85 Medialab Prado: 168 Meirelles, Cildo: 101 meta-programme; 14-5, 17, 55, 90 metaphysics, process: 186 metastability: 67 Migliorin, Cezar: 57-61 milieu, associated: 20, 68-70, 72, 77, 80, 82, 84, 87 milieu, technical: 39, 119-20, 123, 126, 156, 166, 168, see also associated milieu

Movie Circuits

modernity, modern era: 36, 69 Morais, Frederico: 101 Mostravídeo: 133, 135, 137, 156, 180 Mothlight: 74, 76-7 Movie, The: 45-7 movies: 9, 25-6, 31-61, 105, 116 circulation: 27, 43, 45-6, 53, 55, 59, 67, 76-8, 81-5, 87, 94, 97, 105-6, 110, 118, 124-6, 128, 131, 134-5, 138, 166, 176-7, 181, 186 moviegoing: 16, 18, 72, 75 movie theatre: 12, 17, 48, 70, 77, 111, 115, 119, 125-6, 133, 140, 143, 147, 156, 158, 168, 170, 175 Movimento dos Sem-Satélite (MSST): 42 MPEG: 52-3, 122 multiplexes: 168 museums: 77, 99, 102-3, 130 N 520437 E 041900: 166 Netflix: 53 networks, digital: 13, 52, 57 networks, discourse: 14, 27, 178 networks, peer-to-peer: 28, 49, 51, 54-5, 82-3, 85, 111, 126, 180-1, 183 nickelodeons: 72, 168 noise: 8, 11, 38, 46, 51, 94, 117, 160, 177, see also signal-to-noise ratio opaque code blocks (BLOBs): 56 Noisefields: 11 notation: 14, 33, 75, see also inscription newspapers: 123, 127 objects, digital: 56 objects, technical: 19, 21, 68, 80 ontography: 28, 100, 105, 126, 129 operations, medial: 74, 81, 85, 90, 98, 131, see also medial practices Orbital performances: 41 order, epistemic: 83, 89 Orkut: 123, 127 Paik, Nam June: 38, 41, 177 Paper Landscape #1: 153-6 Para-polis: 166-7 paradigm, medial: 88, 122-3, 125, see also scientific paradigm paratexts: 14, 20, 28, 61, 97, 158, 164, 170 entryway: 31 promotional: 170 parodies: 57, 149 pedagogy: 67, 125-6, 168, 181 Petrobrás: 57 phenomena, sensorial: 47, 54, 98 photograms: 11 photography: 33, 71-3, 184 piracy: 49, 83, 111-2, 118, 125, 127, 131, 159, 177-82 modernity, pirate: 111 Pirated Copy: 178-80, 183 pixels: 9, 48, 54, 145-6 matrix: 36

Index

playlists: 103, 180 platforms, online: 13, 31, 49, 53-4, 56, 84, 97, 114, 118, 123-4, 185 policies: 15, 18, 130 porn, pornography: 44, 126, 178 Pornô: 46-7 practices, medial: 75-8, 82, 177, see also normal science presences: 26, 57, 89, 101, 106, 138, 153, 156, 160 economy of: 60, 72, 97 hierarchy of: 25 management of: 21, 103 production of: 27, 134, 183 threshold of: 20, 25, 106, 161, 166, 177 printer, optical: 76 prize: see award production, immaterial: 99 Programadora Brasil: 129 programmes apparatus: 19, 21, 73, 94, 99 course: 66 institutional: 66, 129-30 schedule: 43-4, 123, 127, 135 exhibition: 7, 12, 14, 23, 28, 32, 62, 103-4, 115-6, 119, 129, 133-8, 143, 153, 155-9, 161-3, 168, 175-80, 183-5 TV: 42-4 programmer: 55, 104, 118, 122, 137, 160 projection: 17, 38, 40, 72, 78, 93, 98, 109-11, 135-6, 140, 156, 159, 164, 166, 186, see also projector analogue: 32, 153-5 booth: 12, 39, 70, 84, 93, 98 cine-: 155, 162 depth of: 134, 155-6, 160, 162, 164, 168 digital: 22, 111, 120-2, 170, 175 light: 136, 162-4, 173 studies: 27, 94-6, 105-6, 110, 135 mechanism: 37, 56, 88, 141, 147, see also projector mobile: 171 negative: 175 performance: 23 perspective: 11, 26 public: 166, 169-70, 175, setting up: 103, 113, 117, 124-5 situation of: 34 theatrical: 13, 119, 136, 181, see also screenings projectionists: 9, 12-3, 18, 26-8, 37, 89, 98, 104, 114, 122 projectors: 8, 12, 20, 36-7, 58, 70, 72, 74, 77, 88, 93-4, 120-1, 125, 154, 161-2 digital video: 84, 110, 112-5, 118, 129, 161, 170-1, 174 film: 89, 156-7, 159-60 filmless: 9, 11, 16, 23, 38 lamp: 134 lens: 32 protocol: 13, 53, 57, 59

207 public: 13-4, 17-8, 20, 34, 47, 57, 61, 75, 83-5, 88, 118, 121, 124-5, 170, 172, 181-2 counterpublics: 83, 92, 178 sphere: 83, 175 Raban, William: 157-8, 161 Rabinowitz, Sherrie: 41, 177 ratio, signal-to-noise: 11, 20, 38, 94, 160, 177 Ray, Man: 11 reflexivity: 16, 19, 39, 106, 137 Relational Architectures: 172-6 remix: 57, 60, 181 remixability, deep: 57 research, practice-based: 96, 98 research, practice-led: 27, 98, 100, 105-6, see also practice-based research resonance, internal: 68 REUNI: 66 Road to Guantanamo, The: 48 Rumos Artes Visuais: 130 Russian Ark: 48 satellite: 40-2, 91-3, 139 art: 40-2 signal: 91, 93, 139 transmission: 91 scene, cultural: 124 schoolman, Carlota Fay: 177 science: 92 accounts, textual: 97 normal: 79, 81-2, 98 scientific anomalies: see anomalies crisis:82 provoking anomalies: 96 scientific communities: 79, 82 scientific disciplines: 9, 26, 80, 87-89, 91, 93, 95-6, 106, 113 scientific laboratories: 79, 92, 94, 96-7, 100, 105, 123 scientific paradigms: 79-80, 81-3, 94, 96, 98, 122, 131, 137 scientific revolutions: 79, 82-4, 88 social: 96-7 sociology of: 94 screens: 20, 38, 41, 58, 72, 77, 84, 89, 92, 118, 134, 138, 141, 145, 147, 151, 153, 155-6, 159-62, 174 computer: 186 essentialism: 21, 88, 91 foldable: 129 makeshift: 109-10, 115, 120 mobile: 181 ornamental: 138 projection: 7, 79 standards: 76 studies: see film and screen studies television: 43 title: 77 theatre: 18, 56, 156 thickness of: 28, 134, 138-9, 145, 153, 155

208  transparent: 153-4 wide-: 76 screenings: 8, 12-4, 17, 23, 32-3, 37-8, 40, 84, 93, 98, 111, 113, 115, 120, 126-7, 130, 134-5, 151, 156-9, 162, 180, 183-4 botched: 12-3 Cine Falcatrua: 109-11, 115-7, 122-5, 128, 130-1 Fees: 135 gallery: 38, 185 non-profit: 129 pirate: 118 programme: 28, 52, 103-4, 136-7, 143, 147, 176, 178, see also exhibition programmes space: 156 student: 70 theatrical: 44-5, 116, 118, 123, 133, 135-6, 141 venues: 18, 34, 70, 137, 141, see also movie theatre VHS: 51 Screenworks: 97 sensor, CMOS: 10 Serra, Richard: 177 Shadow Dance, The: 174 shadow play: 160, 172, 174 Sharits, Paul: 23, 76-7, 120 Sherwin, Guy: 139, 153-5, 156 Shortfilmdepot: 31, 181 Siegelaub, Seth: 99 signal, electronic: see video signal, satellite signal signifier, imaginary: 13, 21, 39, 88, 179 simultaneity, pressure of: 40 Smith, John: 149 Snow, Michael: 139-42, 149, 186 social media: 13, 56, 123-4, 186 software: 45, 51, 55, 91 abstractions: 13, 52 applications: 48, 53, 56, 122, 146, 170 companies: 85 environment: 56-7 free: 182, see also open-source culture Sokurov, Aleksander: 48 soundtrack: 9, 11, 116, 136, 142-3, 147-9 spaces, negative: 9, 21-2, 24-5, 28, 72, 87, 89, 91, 94, 98, 106, 126, 133, 136, 156, see also invisible part of cinema spectatorship: 75 spectrum, electromagnetic: 42, see also satellite signal standards: 11, 19, 53, 76 of circulation: 44 practices: 67 technical: 19, 53, 67, 71, 85, 117 standardization research: 95, see also normal science technical: 70, 130, see also technical concretization Star Wars: 50-1, 60 Steal this Film: 180-3, 185

Movie Circuits

storytelling, oral: 36, 39, 41 subject, cartesian: 16 synergies (technical): 20, 67, 72, 77-8, 80, 87, 112, 121, 131 synopsis: 14, 31, 57, 125, 147, 157 Szeemann, Harald: 99 Tagore, Rabinadrath: 9-10 television: 40, 66, 76 apparatus: 44, 90 live broadcast: 41, 44, 138 closed-circuit: 140, 151 live: 39-41, 44, 138, 151, 153 networks: 42 edit-for-TV: 43, 45, 50 monitor: 40, 46-7, 139, 153, 155 screen: 43 signal: see video signal, satellite signal Television Delivers People: 177 Three Transitions: 151-3, 170 TodaysArt Festival: 166 torrents: see BitTorrent transduction: 27 transmission, satellite: 40-2, 44, 46-7, 91, 134, 136, 138 tutorials: 54, 125 TV: see television uncertainty, critical: 27 understanding, means of: 83, 88, see also scientific paradigm Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES): 65-6, 112-3, 123-4, 128-9 Cinema and Audiovisual Media course: 65-6 Urban Installations: 166, 170-1 U.S. Department of Defence: 147 Valbuena, Pablo: 164-8, 170-1 Valsuka, Steina and Woody: 11 van Hoogstraten, Samuel: 174 variantology: 95 Vectorial Elevation: 172-4, 185 Vianna, Bruno: 19 video: 22, 25, 39-44, 76, 80-1, 141, 143, 145-6, 152-3 art: 114, 133, 135 assist: 81 CD: 127 coding: 10, 52-5, see also codecs, image compression compositing: 26, 48, 84, 151 compression: see image compression digital: 116-8, 163, 179 documentation: 136, 153, 162, 168-70, 172, 174-5 edit: see video documentation exhibition: 28, 126 feedback: 157 files: 111, 182

209

Index

home: 44-5, 49, 118, see also videotapes installation: 46, 166 mapping: 164-6, 171 mobile phone: 10 monitor: see television monitor letterboxing: 43 on-demand: 13, 42, 56, 84, 121 pan-and-scan: 43 reaction: 57 rental stores: 44-5, 125 signal: 11, 40, 43, 134, 139, 151-3 streaming: 19, 53 synthesis: 10, 26, 145 viral: 57 videocassete recorder (VCR): 44-6, 48 as time-shifting device: 44 videotapes: 33, 44-6, 49, 52 as software: 45 dubbing: 46 taping parties: 44 Sony Betamax: 44 VHS: 46, 51, 181

videophiles, videophilia: 44-5, 57 viewing, phenomenology of: 12 visible, ideology of: 21 VJ: 60 VODO: 85 Wavelength: 139-43, 152, 156, 162, 181, 186 Winterbottom, Michael: 48-9 word-of-mouth: 47, 123 worldview: 11, 26, 78-9 workshops: 106, 126, 168 WVLNT: WAVELENGTH for Those Who Don’t Have the Time: Originally 45 minutes, Now 15!: 139-43, 145, 149, 152, 157 You and I, Horizontal (III): 161-4 YouTube: 56, 121, 141, 186 Zen for Film: 38, 177 zoom: 40, 139-40, 146, 170 digital: 143-5