Pushed to the Limit Films and videos by John Smith

By Fred Camper

The chaotic late 60s left a mixed legacy, but on the positive side is an artistic tradition that questions "the very roots of everything," in the words of John Smith, who's been making films and videos since 1972. He challenges authority with a lighthearted spirit; his intellectually subtle works can be whimsical, even fun. Smith, who's British, was last in Chicago showing his films in 1984 -- and his works have hardly been seen here since. Now he returns with a program of nine films and videos, ranging in length from one minute to 28 minutes, at the Film Center on September 13 as well as two videos at the Onion City Film Festival, Regression on September 14 and The Kiss on September 15.

At its best, Smith's work evokes doubt not only about cultural givens but about all givens. He dismantles songs, iconic forms of architecture, and the urban landscape, investigating two themes. Rejecting structures that suggest fixed power, he celebrates ordinary things: not a tower but the discolorations of its brick wall. At a deeper level, he constructs little narratives but undermines all human structures by breaking up the sequences of images and sounds.

Smith was born in London in 1952 and lives there today. His second year in art school was seminal: his professors then had been expelled from another school where they'd conducted a sit-in in 1968. They put together a multimedia curriculum informed by "anticapitalist impulses," Smith told me. He learned early on, he says, "to question...the fundamentals of meaning -- don't trust representation, don't trust what you're told." Smith counts as key influences his teachers Guy Sherwin and Peter Gidal, and the films of Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, and Jacques Tati (for "the playfulness of his use of sound and image, explor[ing] ambiguity and alternative meanings").

Smith deconstructs a universal symbol of beauty in the single-take video The Kiss (1999, made in collaboration with Ian Bourn). A particularly beautiful lily seems to grow before our eyes, gradually changing shape; what sounds like breathing on the sound track gives it an almost human presence. Suddenly the sound and movement stop as a glass plate, invisible until now, cracks -- and it seems we've been watching, in Smith's words, "the forced development of a hothouse flower."

The effect is not only iconoclastic in the word's original sense -- image breaking -- but causes the viewer to question the degree of artifice in all "nature" today. The glass shattering converts what had appeared to be a transparent window into a barrier, reminding us of the camera lens, projection apparatus, and video screen. And because the flower and its transformation were so engaging, the shattering shatters our involvement and evokes the way in which every image we see is filtered through an individual's consciousness, a consciousness foregrounded by the video's end. Smith taped The Kiss in real time, placing a cut flower between two plates of glass that he moved slowly together with a clamp; the pressure eventually caused one plate to crack. It was originally shown looped as a gallery installation; as Smith says, there was "much more of a sense of a production line, with one flower after another being crushed."

Regression (1999) is a video version of the 1978 Smith film 7P preceded by a sequence in which Smith talks about the film. Among the problems with the original, we learn, was the fact that a slight jump at each splice tended to distract from the "subtle changes" Smith intended between shots. When he shows the video version, at first one is unsure whether it's the original -- and Smith says that part of his intent was to "tease the audience as to whether the original film did exist." And the video remake turns out to be not much different from the preceding shot of Smith talking to the camera: we just see him singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas." But he shot it singing one verse per day starting on Christmas day, then spliced in each gift in the list from the day on which it was sung, so during each verse he's differently clothed and more or less shaven. Plus Smith doesn't seem to remember the gift for the sixth day, singing "da da da" instead, and the song has 17 verses instead of 12, with more "da da da"s instead of words.

Smith acknowledges the influence of Frampton's 1970 Zorns Lemma, with its street signs organized alphabetically, but Regression pokes fun at this encyclopedic project by picking apart a popular song. Taking the different days literally and creating disjunctive cuts within the verses, Smith reveals a bit of the child's desire to question cultural assumptions: if the singer sings on the different days of Christmas, shouldn't his appearance change?

Smith's 1987 film The Black Tower is perhaps his most entertaining work. In a voice-over he talks about how he was surprised one day by a mysterious black tower he hadn't noticed before. Then he sees it again someplace else. Soon the tower is everywhere -- inside some prison grounds, next to a factory, as if pursuing him. He has a dream that he's imprisoned in it -- and when one of the towers seems to have disappeared he begins to doubt his sanity until a newspaper vendor explains that it had recently been demolished. When he realizes later that the vendor had been talking about the demolition of an apartment tower, Smith is flummoxed, saying, "It seems as though I would have to stay at home from now on." Eating only ice cream, spending his time staring "downward" out of his windows so he won't see any towers, he eventually gets carted off to the nuthouse, where he's "not surprised by the architecture" -- another tower. Months later he's come to understand that "the tower had existed only in my mind," but when he goes to the country to continue his recovery, he encounters another tower.

The tower's dark top, shaped like a small house but windowless, is a bit goofy looking but might also induce paranoia. Adding to its peculiar power is the fact that towers have long been symbols of authority, secular and religious, and that this tower is of unknown origin. But the tower is also a metaphor for human subjectivity. In a way Smith's madness is just an extreme version of what we all do, a way of exploring the borderline between personal vision and hallucination.

The Black Tower also seems concerned with urban change: the tower's appearances and disappearances recall the way that a much loved city can seem defaced by the demolition of familiar buildings and by the construction of new ones, a process over which the individual has little or no control. At one point when the protagonist is troubled by a tower's disappearance, the film cuts back and forth between two versions of the same nondescript landscape; in one version an apartment tower fills the sky and in the other it's missing. Then an image of the building being demolished by explosives makes it clear that Smith has been intercutting "before" and "after" views; later we learn that this is the tower the newspaper vendor was talking about. Here Smith draws a parallel between cinematic effects and changes to the urban landscape, reminding us that the images we see are always the result of human choices.

"Most of my works are made around places I've lived most of my life," Smith says, and in fact The Black Tower was inspired when he first saw the tower itself (yes, there's only one -- he simply filmed it from different angles). Looking out the window of a new apartment he saw the top, painted in nonreflective paint, looking like "a hole cut out of the sky -- and I thought, what the hell is that?" It turns out it was a water tower, disguised by a "house." Near the end of the film, when he finds the tower in the country, he approaches it and says he notices "signs of age and decay." We see a number of closer shots of the bricks, with areas of discoloration, and suddenly this forbidding icon takes its place in the physical world, where everything is impermanent.

The theme of fragmentation and decay is taken up by my favorite work here, the video Lost Sound (2001), made in collaboration with a friend, sound artist Graeme Miller, who suggested to Smith that someone should "make a film that's to do with the sound on audiocassette tape found in the street." Smith replied, "I wish I'd had that idea," so they collaborated on the videotaping and sound recording, though Smith did the editing.

Divided into short sections titled by location, Lost Sound shows discarded audiotapes around London -- strands clinging to a fence, trapped in the crevices of a tree trunk, intertwined with weeds. The sound track combines the voices and songs on the found audiotapes with ambient sounds recorded on location. Visually the audiotapes tell us almost nothing; they must be "decoded" by the equipment that put them on the sound track. But we come to see that the signs, cars, and pedestrians in the videotape pose similar "decoding" problems: what do they mean, where do they come from, who are they? A city that at first seems comprehensible is revealed as a layering of mysteries; we know no more about the passing humans from their images than we do about what's on the crumpled tapes, a point made through contrast when we see tape fluttering forlornly from barbed wire and hear a syrupy song ("Join in the music!").

Smith reinforces his ideas about the importance of context through simple but apt editing. The opening section of Lost Sound begins with the strands of tape in close-up, and only a few shots later do we see the urban setting. Another sequence begins with pedestrians seen from the waist down, then closer -- only their legs and feet. Next is a shot of a tiny piece of tape with pedestrians' shadows passing over it; after that we get a view of the whole street. Each section charts a different relationship between tape and urban scene, taking the viewer on a little unpredictable journey. Finally, as happens so often in Smith's work, the representational structure itself seems to break down. Titles and images are flipped left to right, undermining the readability of words, and men loading boxes onto a truck are seen in a repeated loop, foregrounding the arbitrariness of cinematic time as well as commenting on the repetitiousness of manual labor. Lost in an indecipherable maze whose rules change constantly, we see the city as a network of unpredictably shifting relationships and come to doubt even the sounds encoded in the tape fragments.

American Movies: Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000)

Directed by
Lewis Klahr

By Fred Camper

Lewis Klahr begins the description of his new series, "Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000)," with a quote from the iconic Hollywood director Douglas Sirk: "The word `melodrama' has rather lost its meaning nowadays: people tend to lose the `melos' in it, the music." And though Klahr sets his animated cutouts of characters and rooms to popular songs, there's more than music connecting his work to the 50s melodramas of Sirk and Vincente Minnelli.

Addressing a common theme in melodrama -- the individual's struggle for autonomy in the face of social strictures -- Sirk and Minnelli tend to express confinement in terms of the surrounding decor, which is often overwhelming in its sensual excess. In Sirk's Written on the Wind, the opulent surroundings chosen by the oil family seem to affect the characters' actions, just as in Minnelli's Some Came Running, the symmetrical arrangement of the furniture in Gwen's bedroom seems to dictate her self-repression when she rejects Dave.

It takes the genius of a Sirk or a Minnelli to make the viewer feel that a lamp can influence a living being, but the cutout animator faces a different challenge. Klahr's characters, many appropriated from magazines and comic books, are flat still images on the same visual plane as the objects he uses. Both people and objects move with the same jerky, stop-start rhythm (to achieve the jagged animated movements he favors, Klahr places his cutouts by hand on a table or floor). To give his characters some kind of life, he creates visually seductive stories mysterious enough to engage the viewer.

Klahr's superb visual sense is very much in evidence here, where his seductive environments -- sensuous interiors, suggestive objects -- threaten to overwhelm his people, who are even more passive than the characters in 50s melodramas. Drifting through a pop-culture fever dream of hypnotic music and entranced spaces, a kind of inventory of wonders, a comic book cutout can take on the powers of a magician even as he fails to understand what's happening to him or why. Indeed, while many artists have engaged with mass culture, few have rendered its mix of seduction, imaginative stimulation, and destructive smoothness as elegantly and precisely as Klahr does here.

"Engram Sepals" (which Klahr will present Friday only at Chicago Filmmakers) consists of seven short films, three of which have been exhibited previously in Chicago. Though the parts can be shown on their own, Klahr writes that the whole "traces a trajectory of American intoxication -- both sexually and substance wise -- from the second world war into the 1970's." References in the films to drugs and alcohol and to the intoxicating effects of romance and sex underscore the characters' search for authenticity.

Klahr told me that some viewers have decoded his highly enigmatic narratives on their own, but I couldn't untangle all of the six-minute Engram Sepals (2000) even after he outlined the plot for me. Second in the series, it's about a scientist who cheats on his wife with a mistress who steals some sort of secret formula from him, as a result of which he commits suicide. The film does begin with a corpse lying on the floor and ends with an implied suicide, suggesting the rest is the scientist's memory. And there are two women and a laboratorylike building, but the only evidence I saw of a secret formula was a grid of mysterious numbered buttons -- which Klahr says are just the elevator buttons in the mistress's apartment building. And why one of the women repeatedly brushes her teeth is never clear.

No matter, because the real power of Klahr's figures is their mix of sensuality and insubstantiality, which not only allows the viewer to bring his own experiences to the action but makes Klahr's key point about pop culture. Even though this stylish, provocative film, alone among the seven, is in black and white and uses the high-art music of Morton Feldman rather than pop, it makes the stuff of mass culture thoroughly alluring. The discontinuous overall design, inspired by 40s film noir, creates the sense of an incomprehensible labyrinth, and the depiction of some figures in white line drawings on black, Klahr says, was inspired in part by magazine graphics of the 40s and 50s, "where the whites against blacks are so luminous that they have a kind of eternity in them." The figures' insubstantiality suggests both universality and diminution: these are quite a bit less than flesh-and-blood humans. No character seems in control, and the viewer's difficulty in threading his way through the narrative underscores the characters' loss of autonomy.

Indeed, throughout the series the characters hover between existence as individuals and as gutless media creations. Pony Glass (1997) shows Jimmy Olsen with three Superman figures tattooed on his body -- the individual as repository for received imagery. Suddenly one of the tattoos is covered by a bra Jimmy's wearing, suggesting that the film's environment has feminized him. But this isn't altogether a bad thing: Jimmy's bra is seductive visually, showing the intoxicating power not of alcohol, drugs, love, or sex but of imagery alone.

Born in New York City in 1956, Klahr was raised in Great Neck, an upper-middle-class suburb on Long Island, and "grew up on pop culture," he says. His first major creative effort, at about age ten, was a comic book. That interest may have had a significant effect. Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics points out that, unlike cinema, comics of necessity contain significant gaps between panels, forcing the artist to choose what to omit. Likewise Klahr's cutout animation doesn't even approach the illusion of continuous movement or the realistic spaces of a live-action movie:we never get a whole view of the elevator that includes those mysterious buttons. Instead Klahr offers a collagelike ensemble of objects that the viewer connects, almost as if responding to a surrealist painting.

The Hollywood movies Klahr watched on television were another key influence: the intimacy of the home setting, he says, has affected his films -- "the idea of private address." But his biggest influence was Joseph Cornell, whose work he discovered at the 1980 Museum of Modern Art retrospective; Klahr attended five times, overwhelmed by "the emotion, the color, and by everyday things leading to a sense of eternity." Amore recent influence is the technical skill, among other things, of his wife, filmmaker-theater artist Janie Geiser.

One can see how Cornell is a more important influence for Klahr than most other cutout animators. Yet there are crucial differences between Klahr's films and Cornell's boxes and collages. Cornell's enjambment of jarringly disparate forms, such as a wine glass and a map of the solar system, suggests the mind's limitlessness. And Klahr says he was deeply moved by a Cornell box with a birdcage reference when he realized that "the bird had escaped."

There are some Cornell-like astronomy references in the series's first film, Altair (1994) -- but Klahr's characters never escape. The mundane fragment of a liquor bottle floating through Altair is quite unlike Cornell, who tended to avoid mass-manufactured objects. Indeed, Klahr's Muzak-like worlds of prefab interiors and slow, repetitive songs are made up of objects and surfaces at once seductive and alienating, elevating and enervating. Klahr gets the peculiar power of American mass culture exactly right: sensually engaging, it destroys autonomy; brimming with implied gratification, it both allures and sickens.

Considering their surroundings, it's not surprising that Klahr's characters seem so at sea. Elsa Kirk (1999) -- inspired by some 1963 contact sheets of a model apparently named Elsa Kirk -- repeatedly shows Kirk in a curtained doorway as objects and images float by. Though Klahr hints at a crime story -- he includes an empty safe, for example -- the focus is on Kirk standing as if on a theater stage, barely able to move on her own, almost a victim of the images drifting around her. Characters throughout the series are often subjected to the phallic aggressiveness of objects, buildings, and interiors. The richly sensual colors of the intoxicating environments in Pony Glass, Downs Are Feminine (1994), and A Failed Cardigan Maneuver (1999) magnify this effect. In the face of Klahr's collaged onslaught, his characters become curiously passive, even sexually vulnerable -- males are penetrated by other males, for example.

The series is also haunted by references to time: clocks and clock hands occur throughout, and a calendar appears in Elsa Kirk. These combine with the retro objects and decors of various decades, the frozen look of the cutout figures, the stop-start movements, and the halting, ambiguous narratives to suggest the ambivalence inherent in nostalgia: our wish to enter the past is coupled with an awareness of the impossibility of doing so.

One aspect of melodrama that Klahr takes even further than Minnelli or Sirk is the way characters' fates seem determined by the sound track. This is not at all akin to a music video, which subordinates the images to the music; Klahr's characters seem to have some will, but their potential for self-determination is undermined by the way they seem forced to act out the songs. Frank Sinatra's two numbers about broken affairs in A Failed Cardigan Maneuver are matched by fragmented images -- a lone cocktail shaker, an inventory of magazine pictures of women -- that separate characters from one another and from objects, and the many figures in Govinda (1999) seem automatons slowed by the droning sound of the opening song, produced by George Harrison.

This effect is especially striking because Govinda is not only the longest work in the series (at 23 minutes), it's also the only live-action film. Using rephotographed Super-8 movies as well as exploitation and porn videos he filmed directly off the tube, Klahr constructs what he calls "a coming-of-age story for a countercultural person, but not one single character," contrasting this film with those in the series set before the mid-60s. Klahr's 1966 (1984) was filled with longing for that paradigmatic countercultural year, which he was too young to have experienced as an adult. And Govinda, he says, is in part about whether someone who's stepped way outside social norms can ever fully rejoin the mainstream. Early portions of Govinda depict countercultural youth, including 60s or 70s footage of shirtless kids in an alternative high school apparently engaged in drug-induced carousing. The middle section is made up of exploitation films, and the final one shows the 1979 wedding of Klahr's hippieish older brother (who had in fact shocked the family by returning from college with long hair in 1966).

Klahr's choice of material -- porn distanced by being filmed off a TV screen and the weirdly alienated wedding footage, which includes sections freighted with black and purple due to a lab mistake -- creates an almost palpable feeling of loss. None of the characters in Govinda, or indeed any of the films, is free in the way Cornell's imagined bird is. Seeming to bounce around to the stop-start rhythms of Klahr's clocks, his characters resemble spastic marionettes playing out a devolution that acknowledges, as does much of Klahr's work, that the 70s represent an incredible diminution of the aspirations of the 60s. But many different periods of American culture are reflected in his characters' failed quests, their simultaneous entrapment and continued hope, looking for a revelation that never quite comes.

THE TROUBLE WITH VIDEO

By Fred Camper

1.

Several years ago, in a lecture, Peter Kubelka advocated that each media-form should utilize its own unique properties, rather than try to imitate other media. In film, one works with its rapid succession of individual, still frames: "Cinema is not movement." Kubelka went on to add that he does not like the idea that diverse media can be seen as expressing themselves similarly, or that works can translate from one medium to another, "so that literature translates into theater, theater translates into cinema, cinema translates into video, and video translates into hamburgers."

In early 1985, "The NYC Experimental Video and Film Festival" advertised itself as "...an organization which seeks to unify video and film art despite establishment taboos.... The festival is in a video format; films must be transferred."

2.

In recent years, there has been frequent animosity between the independent film and video communities. Video artists sometimes feel that filmmakers have no respect for them or their medium; filmmakers are often afraid that video will completely take over, and make it impossible to work in their chosen medium. Certainly it has been a shock for film artists who were working on the technological forefront less than a decade ago, in a medium in which new cameras, film stocks, and processes were constantly being introduced, to now come to see cinema as the nineteenth-century, mechanical and chemical process that it is.

My purpose here is not to attack video, a medium with its own unique properties and potentials, but rather, to address filmmakers and the film community on attitudes such as that of "The NYC Experimental Video and Film Festival," and on the more general question of whether a film can survive the transfer to tape, and whether film should be even viewed on video at all. With filmmakers increasingly tempted by the exhibition possibilities of video distribution and cable TV, some reflections on the differences between the two media, and particularly between film projection and the standard TV monitor that now exists, are in order.

The Box. A film image is generally projected on a screen, and viewed in darkness. This image exists in a kind of virtual space. The distance between the viewer and the screen in a darkened room has none of the tangible measurability of distances in a normally-lit living room. The image hovers before one almost as if an image in the imagination. A TV image emanates from a box, which is itself a piece of furniture which occupies a particular place in the interior architecture of a room. Its inevitable materiality and objectness is in stark contrast to the film image's utter ethereality. (It is interesting to note how in contemporary interior decorating schemes the television has come to replace the fireplace as the focal point of a "family room.") Further, TVs are often viewed with some ambient light, which further places the image in a definite setting. Even when viewed in darkness, the curved rather than rectangular image borders and the convex glass of the screen tend to project the image out into and all about the room, whereas the flat rectangle of the film image can fill a room only via its reflected light, so that the internal structure of the image, if such is at all complex, remains entirely on the screen. To make an "environmental" film, one in which the imagery does its work partly in the way in which the film light illuminates the entire room, filmmakers generally must choose images without much internal structure, such as the pure blacks and whites of Tony Conrad's The Flicker and Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer, or the single line of Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone. The architecture and placement of a TV set, by contrast, encourage one to see the image as blending into, and even occupying, the room. Its small size is surely a factor here too: rapid movements tend to bleed off the edges into the surrounding space. I am convinced that part of the illusionistic power of commercial TV results from the way in which the imagery tends to seize the surround.

The Image. It is well-known that a standard video image lacks the sharpness and definition of even 8mm film. There are other, and in my view even more important, differences as well. In video, the range of darks and lights, the differences between the blackest black possible and the whitest white, is far narrower than in film. As a consequence, there are fewer intermediate shadings possible. Video colors lack the fullness and saturation of pure film colors; they are less intense. I am not speaking so much of the measurable purity of the light as of the fact that video green seems somehow less different from video red than a film green is from a film red. The video image is thus less differentiated in its internal structure than the film image. Similarly, far less of an illusion of depth is possible on video than in film. One has only to see the extreme deep-focus wide angle compositions of an Orson Welles film on TV to appreciate all these differences. In a Welles image, one senses the physical solidity of each object, but one also feels that the space between objects has the same palpable sensuality. A space is created, all pieces of which are in measurable and articulate relationships with each other. In video, this sense of physical space, of a felt distance between foreground and background, is largely lost. It is as if cinema needs its spatial isolation from its surround to permit its imagery to contain articulate distinctions within, while TV's more integrated relation with its surround muddies its images' internal structure. Indeed, it is no accident that a major use of video by artists has been in sculptural and performance installation pieces.

The Light. The most serious difference between the two media is the differences between the two kinds of light. Cinema light is absolute: it is a succession, rapidly-projected, of still images. On a modern projector, one might see each frame projected three or more times, for 1/144th of a second each, with three 1/144th-of-a-second intervals of darkness following. The key word here is absolute. There is no movement in cinema; that illusion is produced in the brain. With film one has a series of utterly separate, complete-in-themselves, elements, the frames, to work with. In video, there is also a succession of separate images, but these are not presented with the independence of the on-and-off flashes of film. Rather, the scanning mechanism gradually traces an image over the screen; the image then disappears and is replaced by another. As a result "frames" are presented not instantaneously but over time. The intervening darkness may seem like less of a break between images, because the images themselves become visible on the screen more gradually than the instantaneous apparition of the cinema image. While this process occurs far too quickly for the eye to differentiate it, it produces a very different quality of light from cinema's, just as, though one cannot see the individual 1/144th-of-a-second or less intervals of darkness in film projection, one can readily see the difference between movie-projector light and the uninterrupted beam of a slide projector. An important result of this difference is that the transition between adjacent frames is less absolute than in film; thus the differences between separate frames, and the strong contrasts between frames at the point of a cut, are elided. Video light is itself continually alive, continually vibrating; each image is constantly, at every moment, changing; new image areas are burned into the screen as the old image decays; there is nothing as stable as a single film grain on the video screen. Indeed, this sense of constant movement places video firmly in the electronic age, as a medium appropriate to a world populated with myriad electronic devices containing vast stores of information in the form of tiny electrical charges, and in which the constant movement of electrons has become the major transmitter of knowledge. Cinema, by contrast, is like a series of images carved in stone. Stan Brakhage has called video light "hypnotic," an insight I prefer to use descriptively rather than pejoratively. The light is hypnotic, in the way its continual tiny changes constantly lure one's attention, one's eye. One might argue that the flicker of cinema is "hypnotic" compared to the unchanging image of a painting or sculpture, and perhaps we are only speaking of degrees here: but film light also does leave the viewer a certain freedom. The tiny intervals of darkness, and the fixed and unchanging nature of each projected frame, may produce powerful illusions but ultimately leave the mind with those tiny spaces, even if only 1/144th of a second long, that it needs to make its own decisions about what it sees. Video, by contrast, is surely the most persuasive medium ever devised, as its commercial and political uses have made apparent, and I believe the reasons for this are to be found in the quality of its light, and in the way in which the light and imagery, emanating from the furniture-box, fill the room with their presence.

Movement. Movement, either of the camera or of the objects depicted therein, is rendered very differently by film and video. In film, the camera's movement through space can have a radical, even vertiginous effect on the viewer. The absoluteness of film representation gives the viewer a sense of seeking a space with fixed, defined coordinates; motion, then, alters the very dimensions of the perceived world. In video, since the light itself is constantly moving, any motion of the subject-matter is merely additional; a quantitative rather than qualitative change, and is not at all like the change from stasis to movement one gets in film, for in video there is no true stasis. This change, this difference, between movement and stillness in film is only one of the many contrasts which form the very basis of film art and which video radically effaces.

The Frame. Perhaps the most fundamental contrast within cinema is that between the flat rectangle of each projected frame and the implied larger world of which that frame is but a part. It is at the borders of the image that the filmmaker makes much of his statement, because there it is revealed what he has selected, and what he has excluded, from the implied larger setting that spread out before his camera's eye. In the darkness of projection these borders stand for absolute differences: for that opposition on which the art of film lives or dies, the distinction between the undifferentiated and unanalyzed chaos of reality as a whole and the filmmaker's selective act of framing. Video reduces the effect of the frame's borders from cinema's firm and absolute edge to that of an indistinct blur, because of the natures of "the box," of its presence in the room, of the light, and of the monitor screen, whose curved shape tends to efface the image's boundary-line. (Of course, on a simpler level the TV screen does not even reproduce all of the film image; much is eliminated by the curved shape. Modern camera viewfinders are inscribed with inner frames in the shape of a TV screen called "TV safe action areas," presumably indicating that the aesthetic of the framing of at least commercial film has also been affected by video.) It is no accident, but rather a testament to the nature of video and video light, that TV is often viewed in a lit room, while film almost never is, even though film projection is fully bright enough to allow this.

3.

If one accepts my description of the differences between film and video it should be immediately apparent that those qualities most important to cinema will simply not translate to video. Cinema, when it functions as art, depends upon the precise articulations made between different frames, and between different areas of light within the frame. Video, by effacing the differences upon which cinema depends, renders the rich complexity of a film masterwork as an inarticulate haze. A film realizes itself in the gaps between frames, and in the contrasts between light and dark, one color and another, foreground and background, movement and stillness, that it mobilizes towards its expressive ends. In video, those gaps are blurred and bridged, producing an ever-vibrating, ever-alive continuum.

The matters discussed herein are not narrow formal issues that should be of concern only to filmmakers and a narrow group of aesthetes. I have tried to show that the form of the medium a communication is presented in is a crucial part of that communication, and a part of its statement as well. Any work makes its statement not merely by its subject matter or "message" but by the relationship it defines, via its form, between itself and its recipient. If Leni Riefenstahl had made Triumph of the Will about a 1936 Democratic Party rally in the U.S. that was supporting the reelection of Roosevelt, it would still be a fascist film, and an evil one as well. One person can declare to another "I love you" by writing a letter, by sending flowers, by telephoning, by visiting, through a series of carefully selected gifts, by deep attentions to the loved one, or by a crude and uninvited seduction attempt, and the "medium" chosen for this communication helps to define the very meaning that the word "love" has in the implicit or explicit underlying "sentence." All of the differences described above are not merely technical issues, but epistemological and ethical ones as well.

The aesthetic and moral implications of the mechanism of cinema have been explored by several generations of filmmakers and film theoreticians, in a rich series of films and writings stretching from Eisenstein to Epstein, Dreyer to Deren, Bresson to Brakhage, Bazin to Baudry. Video is a comparatively new form. While my description of it may be taken negatively by some, I do not wish to condemn a medium that neither I, nor (I suspect) most of us fully understand. Certainly there is work by video artists that is more than promising in its attempts to utilize video's own properties. But it needs to be said that just as many filmmakers mistakenly transfer their work to video, so a lot of video art flounders by trying to imitate film effects in ways that video cannot.

Filmmakers need to take the strongest possible stance in defense of their medium. It is an appalling sign of the utter corruption and anti-art stance present in the academic establishment that many film classes are now taught with the showing of films on video. Film teachers must insist on adequate budgets for film rental and projection. Filmmakers must not dare to hope that some of one's film's qualities will survive the transfer to video. Film viewers must remember to view films, not TV. With schools increasingly exhibiting films on TV, and with new video exhibition possibilities opening up as opposed to a stagnation or even diminution of the number of venues showing independent film, and with supposedly serious "film buffs" increasingly viewing all types of films on cable TV and VCRs, it is all the more urgent to remain true to one's medium. Independent filmmakers are the only group that has pursued the medium's highest possibilities without compromise; to surrender now on this most fundamental of issues would be to literally give up the art.