Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 50, December 2003
Edward S. Small
Beyond Abstract Film:
Malcolm Le Grice's _Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age_
Malcolm Le
Grice _Experimental
Cinema in the Digital Age_ London: British Film
Institute, 2001 ISBN 0-85170-872-0 (pb)
0-85170-873-0 (hb) 330 pp. Malcolm Le Grice's 1977
book, _Abstract Film and Beyond_, was an outstanding history
of that major genre of motion pictures typically termed
'experimental', in opposition to more common
fictive-features and documentaries. That is to say, these
experimental productions are comparatively acollaborative,
economically independent, briefer, and greatly devoted to
exploring structures beyond the fictive narrative, which is
still motion picture's royal-road. [1] In the years
following the publication of _Abstract Film and Beyond_ Le
Grice continued his exploration of experimental productions
(cinematic and electronic) in a body of articles from which
the British Film Institute selected 25 for publication in
2001 under the title _Experimental Cinema in the Digital
Age_. As I set out to review
this, his second major publication, I should point out that
Malcolm Le Grice is an artist, with a film/videography
listing almost 50 works produced between 1965 and 2001, as
well as an academic, with a job as Professor and Head of
Research at Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design
in London, England. [2] Personally, I have found Le
Grice's writings to be extremely important to my
understanding of the international aspect of experimental
film and video, which began in the European avant garde but
then flourished in the United States after the Great
Depression and World War II. For the few scholars whose
books progressively allowed this major genre to be accepted
within US academe (e.g. Sheldon Renan in 1967, Gene
Youngblood in 1970, David Curtis in 1971, and P. Adams
Sitney in 1974) the extant, implicit historiography was, to
coin a term, Amercentric. Almost all of Le Grice's writings
are designed to mitigate this weakness: 'My main work on the
history of experimental film in general is contained in
_Abstract Film and Beyond_ . . . The articles selected
[for _Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age_] are
not a description of historical events but instead reflect
on a cultural context in which the avant-garde or
experimental film developed in the UK and more generally in
Europe.' (3) Equally important is Le
Grice's ability to relate 'art practice to research'.
[3] His book begins with the succinct assertion: 'I
am an artist rather than a scholar.' (1) Personally, I tend
to see his oeuvre as a blend of written theory and what I
like to call 'direct-theory'. [4] Few experimental
artists write about theory (the late Stan Brakhage is an
outstanding exception), but Le Grice does. However, he does
not seem to share my concept of direct-theory when he writes
that his involvement in the discourses of theory: 'has run parallel to that
of film practice itself and has been pursued as a
film-maker/theorist rather than as a critic -- the
theoretical ideas have been imported where they have
stimulated practice but I have always been wary of expecting
any direct link -- the theory does not explain the films nor
the films demonstrate the theory' (2). Still, this major genre is
the most marginal and least understood. Only recently have
select artists' works become even somewhat available on VHS
or DVD. Indeed, my having seen a few examples of Le Grice's
own productions has only served to help me understand his
written theory. [5] In my own book, _Direct
Theory: Experimental Film/Video as Major Genre_, I have
argued that this marginal (and, as a result, heuristic) type
of motion picture -- which Le Grice likes to label as
'experimental, independent, avant-garde', to touch all bases
-- has by its very nature (and quintessential reflexivity)
constituted a special mode of theory that supercedes the
limited (logocentric) semiotic system of written/spoken
language. This special mode is the intrinsic stuff and
substance of reflexive film. To varying degrees, they do not
tell stories or entertain or make money or embody 'themes'.
Further, they greatly evidence an historiographic
term/concept which I call 'technostructure', [6] and
which contends that there are no 'mere' technical changes;
rather all such changes are structurally consequential. As
motion pictures moved from mechano-chemical technologies to
the more electronic technologies of (first) television and
then video, the resulting structural differences were at
least as pronounced as the differences between oil and water
colors in painting. Furthermore, as I write this our
civilization is on the cusp of what will likely prove to be
the greatest technological change in the entire history of
motion pictures: the digital revolution. While the book's opening
chapters come from a period preceding our digital age (the
1998 essay on the work of the Japanese experimental film
artist, Takahiko Iimura, is the singular exception), the
book's final section on 'Digital Theory' is so concerned
with this technostructural phenomenon that, for me, it
constitutes the most significant part of the book. Le
Grice's '1994' essay, 'The Implications of Digital Systems
for Experimental Film Theory', is exemplary here, especially
if we recall that what we today call the World Wide Web did
not exist before 1991 (indeed, only as recently as 1992 was
the expression 'surfing the internet' actually coined). In
it, Le Grice sets out the 'theoretical context' for the
paper (namely Peter Gidal's 'materialist film'), including
three 'key features of the theoretical position', which Le
Grice had 'come to hold' (235). I found myself especially
drawn to the last: 'The attempt to stress the material
conditions of production and viewing of works both as a
creative basis of practice and as a strategy for the
counteraction of narrative identification' (235). Let me
quote Le Grice's elaboration of this third 'key
feature': 'It is in relationship to
the last of these [features] that the attitude
towards technology needs to be clarified. Consistent with a
fundamental 'tenet' of twentieth-century art, evident in the
plastic arts and music but rarely in mainstream film, is the
concept that there can be no convenient separation between
the material 'means' of a work and its meaning -- that
meanings derive from the working of the material. This is a
concept similar to that of semiologists, that there can be
no separation between the production of a thought and the
operations of language' (235). This single paragraph at
once confirms Ferdinand de Saussure's classic semiotic
premise of the inextricable unity that bonds signifier and
signified, and Raymond Fielding's more contemporary insight
into the dynamic interrelationships between technical and
structural changes ('technostructure'). Compare the
following quotation from Fielding's Introduction to _A
Technological History of Motion Pictures and
Television_: 'There is a temptation for
film historians in particular to interpret the development
of the motion picture teleologically, as if each generation
of works had sketched out the future of the art in advance
of the technology required for its realization. In fact,
however, the artistic evolution of the film has always been
intimately associated with technological change, just as it
has, in less noticeable fashion, in the older arts. Just as
the painter's art has changed with the introduction of
different media and processes, just as the forms of
symphonic music have developed with the appearance of new
kinds of instruments, so has the elaboration and refinement
of film style followed from the introduction of more
sophisticated machinery. The contribution of a Porter, Ince,
or Griffith followed as much from the availability of
portable cameras and improved emulsions as it did from their
individual vision and talent. Similarly, the cinema verite
movement . . . could not possibly have appeared and
prospered . . . prior to the miniaturization of camera and
sound equipment, and with dramatic improvements in film
stocks. If the artistic and historical development of film
and television are to be understood, then so must the
peculiar marriage of art and technology which prevails in
their operations.' [7] Raymond Fielding was/is my
mentor, and I am quite certain that he remains unaware of Le
Grice's writings. Nor is there any evidence that Le Grice,
especially at his European remove, has ever read Fielding.
Thus, I suggest that what we witness here are examples of T.
S. Kuhn's famous concept of a 'paradigm shift'. Allow me to
quote from Le Grice's twentieth chapter, 'The Chronos
Project' (1995), on 'Questions of Art and Technology', to
make this clearer: 'The most important issues
remain the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical
questions which the [Chronos Project] raises. These
are difficult to approach directly, especially for the
artist who has made the work. Choosing to start from
questions of technology is due partly to the simpler
approach to some of the artistic issues which this offers.
But it is also because the artistic choices and
opportunities in this project are fundamentally tied in with
technological matters. I have always contended that form (or
language), content and technology are inseparable'
(251). _Experimental Cinema in
the Digital Age_ consists of 25 chapters of which the last
is dated 1999 and entitled 'Digital Cinema and Experimental
Film -- Continuities and Discontinuities'. In it, Le Grice
begins with an explicit framing of what might be called the
modernist ethos: 'Definition of the intrinsic
characteristics of a medium has been a major component of
the modernist enterprise' (310). He then goes on to compare
and contrast modernism with postmodernism, especially with
regard to motion pictures and the digital age. 'The
modernist approach', he writes, 'lost theoretical
credibility to the concepts of post-modernism for a number
of reasons. One was a confusion by both artists and critics
of the phenomenological concepts of art with notions of a
pure essence of medium' (311). In this, his concluding
essay, Le Grice lists six 'Fundamental Characteristics of
Digital Systems': digitization, analysis, synthesis,
transformation, algorithmic programmability, and arbitrary
access (i.e. RAM). This latter characteristic, he points
out, 'has little to do with randomization or
chance': 'all address locations are
conceptually equidistant. The computer does not walk past
house numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 to get from 1 to 6 -- number 1
is as close to number 1000 as it is to number 2 . . . This
form of storage is known as Random Access Memory. The use of
the term 'random' here is confusing as it has little to do
with randomization or chance. The term 'arbitrary' in its
classical sense of 'chosen' expresses this concept better.
Whatever terms are used to describe this, if seen as an
intrinsic property of digital media it has radical
implications for art, structures of aesthetic expression and
representation. The principles on which data, information or
fragments of the represented world may be combined are only
limited by the systems which can be defined for creating
links, and these systems are clearly not confined to simple
linearity' (315-316). The title of this book
thus links up with Le Grice's earlier book, _Abstract Film
and Beyond_, in a remarkable way. The 'beyond' of abstract
film proves to be the 'digital age' of experimental cinema.
So pronounced is the technostructural leap from analog to
digital motion picture technologies that the difference is
not one of degree but of kind. Furthermore, even gifted
theorists like Le Grice can only begin to glimpse the
perhaps currently ineffable changes that future art,
artists, and society will witness long, long beyond our
little life-spans. I found _Experimental Cinema in the
Digital Age_ to be a wonderful work; indeed, I think I will
use it as a required text in my next doctoral seminar on
film theory. Its maturity, sophistication, and, I believe,
prescience, demand an equally mature and sophisticated
audience. University of
Kansas Lawrence, Kansas,
USA Notes 1. These characteristics
(and others) are detailed in my first book _Direct Theory:
Experimental Film/Video as a Major Genre_ (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994). 2. See Le Grice's
homepage: <http://www.research.linst.ac.uk/filmcentre/le_grice.htm>. 3. Ibid. 4. Direct Theory's thesis
is that experimental film/video's remarkable reflexivity
allows this major genre to function as a type of theory,
which bypasses the limiting intervention of separate
semiotic systems -- especially spoken or written
language. 5. For those in the US
both his work and the works of most of the artists discussed
in _Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age_ are thankfully
available through Film-maker's Cooperative, 175 Lexington
Avenue, New York, New York, 10016. 6. As I will explain, my
concept of 'technostructure' derives from the publications
and teaching of Dean Raymond Fielding, who has just retired
from Florida State University. 7. Raymond Fielding,
Introduction, in Fielding, ed., _A Technological History of
Motion Pictures and Television: An Anthology from the Pages
of the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and
Television Engineers_ (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967), p. 4. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Edward S. Small, 'Beyond
Abstract Film: Malcolm Le Grice's _Experimental Cinema in
the Digital Age_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 50,
December 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n50small>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
are published. here
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615)
PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England
Contact: editor@film-philosophy.com
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
