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FORMAL EXPERIMENTS
Artists and experimental filmmakers have been investigating the
visual language for a long time. One method have been to isolate artistic
elements at work in filmic form, in the 1960`s the term ”Structural
Film” was established to describe this specific form of artfilm.
One filmmaker active in this context is Hollis Frampton, the work nostalghia
(Frampton 1971) are constructed in 12 sequences, in each of these a filmic
still image slowly burns up and melts. On the soundtrack 12 stories are
told, all connected to a specific image, but the image and story are disengaged,
consciously freed from each other.
A
formal experiment like Frampton´s are based on the idea of fragmentization
and irrational cut (to use Deleuze term) as artistic method. The traditional
narrative form of creating an illusion are exchanged with an element of
dissociation, creating an awareness of the ability of seeing.
Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker / artist, have consistently explored the
structural possibilities in filmmedia. In his feature Drowning by Numbers
(Greenaway 1988) no overall, aristotelian storyline are used, the narrative
are constructed by separate, nonconnected scenes stringed together by
our mathematical system, by the use of numbers. Another of his features,
ZOO, life beauty death (Greenaway 1986), uses a narration inspired by
the process of putrefaction of living organisms.
A TV Dante (Greenaway 1988) was based on The Divine Comedy by Dante, a
literary text Greenaway used as a backdrop for a multilayered narrative
were several different context are developed simultaneously; the poetic
text are confronted with visual enactments of death and theoretical descriptions
of the actual physical facts in the process.
When technology
made the analog video accessible, the interest for using the moving image
among artists evolved rapidly, the experimental tradition from the 1970´s
have its successors in digital videoart. Today artists working with videoart
are the forerunners in the development of the moving image as artform.
An exploration of the narrative elements at work, form a basis for videoartist
Bill Viola. In the essay ”Video Black” he formulates a conceptual
way of working with the moving image:
”The
emphasis of the term `moving image´ is somewhat misleading, since
the images themselves aren´t really moving and the art of cinema
lies more in the combination of image sequences in time (montage) than
it does in making the image move.
Exactly what is this movement in the moving image? Clearly it is more
than the frenetic animation of bodies. Hollis Frampton, described it
as `the mimesis, incarnation, and bodying forth of the movement of human
consciousness itself.´ …
A thought is a function of time, a pattern of growth, and not the `thing´
that the lens of the printed word seems to objectify. Duration is the
medium that makes thought possible, therefore duration is to consciousness
as light is to the eye. Time itself has become the `materia prima´
of the art of the moving image.” (1)
Viola have
put this awareness of time as a narrative element at work in several video
installations. Using projected video that creates a room of images, Viola
often works with repetitive elements. In exchancing the linear with the
loop, by screening a scene over and over again, the focus of the observers
are directed from the narrative towards the rhytm, a musical movement
is created.
A similar reflection are made by the artcritic Jean-Christophe Royoux
on the canadian filmmaker Stan Douglas´ work Overture 1996 ( a five
hour piece ) : ”the principle of the loop is to circumscribe
an empty space through the repetition of the same movement, creating a
stage that at times absorbs`s the viewers presence and then again maintains
a distance, as in the infinite reciprocity of conversation.”
(2)
This room created by the loop, Royoux describes as a scene where the film
acts as the substance, but the content of that filmic narration are created
in the mind of the observer. A communicative interplay takes place, similar
to a conversation. A narrative context like this have a lot in common
with the evolving digital narrative and the changable fields created when
staging an interactive narrative.
(1) Viola,
Bill ”Video Black” Illuminationg Video s242, edited by Doug
Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (Aperture Foundation, Inc in association with
BAVC, the Bay Area Video Coalition, New York and San Fransisco, 1998)
(2) Royoux, Jean-Christophe Conflict of Communications Stan Douglas s59
(Editions Centre Pompidou 1993).
THORE
SONESON 2001
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