John Abrams
Swept Away
February 7 - March 1, 2008
Panel Title:
About Film, Painting, and how the Arts are Merging
Paper Title:
Film is Dead! / Film is Alive!
I’ve titled this paper “Film is Dead! / Film is Alive.” And I’ve put a slash between the two parts of the title because I want to suggest that they are concurrent. I’ll begin by talking about the paint splotches in the Contempt series, as a way to enter into an elaboration on my title. Because I think Abrams’s work produces a wonderfully complex and inspirational simultaneity of a cinema dead and a cinema thriving. The splotches suggest that the film contexts or sites that Abrams imagines are inhabited, interrupted, or invaded by paint. Splotches blur the edges of bodies and hair, they exceed facial boundaries, and they splatter sky and ground. In addition, they transgress the heavy borders of black that run horizontally in each painting, borders that may try to contain film in its frame, but perhaps fail to do so with the interruption of the splatter dots. In the painting with the “technicolour” suits, the gaffer to the right appears to be trying to escape the paint invasion. In the bed painting, the bed seems to be marked by an explosion of paint as if these female and figures are separated by some monstrous, gender-dichotomy blot. And the woman appears to be almost disintegrating into splotches away from her companion/lover.
In the painting with the woman in the chair, the dots of paint are so prevalent that the work echoes a pointillism method. The Contempt series underscores the idea of film as painterly and painting as cinematographic. However, given that the series captures scenes within film, or scenes of making film, the splotches seem to function as a form of invasion, a virus of sorts that does not simply shift the terrain of film but actually re-creates it as a new visuality. Moreover, this invasion of film suggests that it is neither inviolate nor immortal. The filmic image is, in fact, vulnerable, dissipating, crumbling: in other words, “Film is dead!” However, with their lively and colourful dottedness, the splotches simultaneously caress and enhance the filmic image. They are points of contact and connection pointing to the aliveness of film, and therefore, they emphasize that “Film is Alive!”
In their edited collection, The End of Cinema as We Know it, the authors examine the decline of film culture. Generally, I find discussions of the beginning and end of cultural practices not particularly productive. For example, the “new” media / “old” media dichotomy doesn’t make much sense to me. Rather, I would argue that it’s more useful to consider how various cultural practices are being mobilized, for what intents, by whom, and for whose benefit. And what particular social and historical conditions are operative to support particular developments at any given time. Nevertheless, in this book about the end of cinema, including a chapter entitled “Twenty-Five Reasons Why it’s all Over,” there are some interesting discussions that relate to this exhibit.
For one, Godard, whose films Abrams mobilizes, is noted as positing the end of cinema in 1963.
The author of this chapter also observes that “We (the audience) no longer believe in images, since computer-generated images make any effect possible.” Abrams’s work plays with this debatable idea, exploring and interrogating how we believe in images, how they resonate, which images carry on over time, and what constitutes spectacle and reality. He interrogates the representational surface and the idea of representation itself. Debates about digital culture developments are embedded with questions about the future of images and their production. In the Hollywood-driven film industry, computer-generated images are prevalent, and many films are created entirely in digital mode. In terms of these questions about belief in images, this exhibit problematizes the idea of the moving image and its spectatorial reception, and it surfaces the relationship of historical and contemporary image production.
The book chapter, “Twenty-Five Reasons Why it’s all Over,” also suggests: “Classical film production methodology has collapsed.” With this point, the author references the quote/unquote “obsolete” production methods of studio films, and mentions Truffaut’s film Day for Night. The cinematic evocations of this exhibit – Betty Blue, Swept Away, Breathless, and Contempt - might also be thought of as studio films and as obsolete in method. And again, Abrams asks us to consider the shifts in visual culture practices as we remember that sound transfers, editing machines, human-controlled cranes, film stock, and laboratory designed optical effects are no longer with us. However, while these methods are obsolete, the star system, whether by way of actors or auteur directors continues to thrive. Certainly, Wertmuller, Godard and Beineix, the directors Abrams references in this exhibit, could be understood as auteurs and as stars within a canon of filmmaking. However, they are certainly not stars within a history of popular and Hollywood cinema. And today, I doubt if more than a handful of my students would recognize the films or filmmakers. Neither the films nor their makers could be considered “popular” within contemporary terms of popular culture. Nevertheless, many histories of auteurship in film culture would acknowledge the three filmmakers of Abrams’s paintings. So once again I see Abrams’s work wrestling with an interesting question or dilemma. This time, about how individual films and filmmakers achieve iconic and canonic status, how spectators come to “know” what and who is important in the filmic arts, and how, as individual and collective spectators, we become invested in particular images, image makers, and image-making practices.
One of my research interests involves the study of women who produce short film and video, particularly work that offers social and cultural critique. I want to share with you some work by some Canadian based artists who, like Abrams, utilize established visual images to produce new visions. For film or video, this is often described as “montage” practice, involving the selection and altering of existing images. So, given that part of the title of this panel is “how the arts are merging,” I thought I’d share some excerpts from three different works of video art. I screen this material to surface how I encounter Abrams’s paintings, what other forms of production they bring to mind for me, and what communities of artistic practice are evoked. There’s much more at stake in Abrams’s work than an interrogation of visual culture practices, which is what I’ve focused on tonight, but for me, this feature of the exhibit is a particular delight. Abrams’s work has enriched my understanding of how artists mobilize images from visual culture to produce radical ways of looking. I appreciate how Abrams re-historicizes and re-members.
In the first work, My Life in Five Minutes, Allyson Mitchell, alters photographs through animation and editing, and inserts self-portrait paintings to underscore practices of witnessing and confrontations of histories and memories.
In this second video, Anwolek Regatta City, Dana Claxton, a Lakota interdisciplinary artist, deploys and manipulates archival footage from the 1950s of Kelowna, BC. Produced for the city’s centenary, the video remembers the tourist and corporate interests and white cultural practices that shape the violent Canadian histories of colonization.
Johanna Householder and b. h. Yael, like Abrams, hijack codes and ways of seeing. Their video, December 31, 2000, produced in response to 2001: A Space Odyssey, is part of a series they call “approximations.” And I think this term and how they explain it has an interesting connection to Abrams’s work. Householder and Yael note: “They’re not recreations or homages. They’re not trying to recapture a kind of verisimilitude. They are about, in a sense, almost the minimum that it takes to convince us of the fact that we are in those scenes again.”
