Expanded cinema has remained to be in a subdidiary role in various critical debates, despite the 1970s forward-thinkers' movement of making it take on a more substantial function in the teaching and theorization of film.
As early as the start of the 1960s, expanded cinema has already begun weaving its threads of history, adding theorisations and discussions over the course of this time period. This fact debunks the recent assertions that expanded cinema has not been explored enough or has become a lost part of our history.
Eugene Youngblood coined the expression "expanded cinema", which describes a unique type of presentation that utilizes mixed-media and multiple screens built around at least one film projectors. In his text,he defines "cinema being expanded" as deviating from the conventional use of a static screening setting by incorporating one or more surfaces or screens and other cinematic media to enable connections with and drawing the audience into the presentation or performance.
Because expanded cinema is notorious for being ambiguous and impalpable, and basically looked at as a transient art form, it creates some tough challenges for breakdown and analysis. For example, a performance in a live event will essentially be described as something that can never be duplicated, as it is an extraordinary moment that only the audience can discern and wholly experience. For that reason, Jackie Hatfield, a theorist and artist, stated that expanded cinema has been able to resist taxonomy. Unlike other concrete and well-defined art forms, it has successfully lingered outside historical canonization and interpretation. Also, expanded cinema has avoided commodification, a factor that bears significance influence over the many co-ops involved in sub-cultural filmmaking that popped up by the end of the 60s in different regions around the world.
It may come across as challenging, aggressive, or even offensive at times, but this characteristic of expanded cinema must not alienate people today. The practice of art has taken a different direction and has drifted away from just the production or creation of objects, as Hatfield says. Of course, there are other art forms that rely on performance events, and some of them make ephemerality the centerpiece of their works and even take advantage of it more than the rest.
Deke Dusinberre, in a 1975 issue of Studio International (the same issue that launched "Theory of Structural/Materialist Film" by Peter Gidal), discussed in a piece on expanded cinema the projects of Ron Haselden, Annabel Nicholson and William Raban, and he explores the use of physical assaults, live rephotopgraphy, and other techniques on the projector and film. He highlights the continuous transformation of the work and underlines the strong nowness exuded by the ongoing event.
Personally, I find the application of these esoteric, conjectural events to the works of artists like de Bruyn to be provocative in many different ways. The issues of teleological stances, anthropomorphization using narratives or scholarly boundary-drawings of the end of a media or arrival of a new one, in debates and aesthetic theories, arise.
Gilles Deleuze came up with a theory where time serves as the leading method in audiovisual communication, and he called it the "theory of second cinema." He describes it as a venue where the real and imaginary, objective and subjective, and actual and virtual are impossible to differentiate. This depiction actually fits what a postmodern cinema is like --- a person's mind functions like a pure cinema and creates a vague semblance using a number of images.
An essay entitled "Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema" by Barbara Filser, proposes another theory that brings up a third cinema. It talks about how a third cinema is derived from the time-image theory put forward by Deleuze through a 21st century cinema. By embedding the third cinema on the time-image theory, a virtual reality is created, a cinema exclusive to the mind, a product of the thoughts of the audience.
I would argue that Deleuze's theory is more of a postmodern cinema that shows how the movements of time creates the image. The main characters each craft a virtual construct that eventually becomes integrated to this cinema. As opposed to merely watching, this cinema that Deleuze thought about consumes the minds of the spectators and/or characters. The films represent what Deleuze posits, so they are quintessential for the interpretation and comprehension of these several different theories.
Deleuze looks into the aspects of cinema and time-image, and itt turns out that the most important mode in postmodern cinema in terms of time is assigning the mind the role of the creator. The mind and its actual and virtual circuitry should be the number one focus. Using this technique and the discovery of virtual cinema, we can come up with two good examples of Deleuze's third cinema: Solaris and Abre los ojos.
If we understand that going from linear to aeonic takes time, and we think of the brain as the projector and screen, we will realize that we are close to the cinema that Deleuze is looking for. By throwing away the sensori-motor model and using the time along memory circuit and planes model, and casting the character as both the spectator and creator, we get the time-image cinema that Deleuze is looking for. In this type of cinema, the link between movement and understanding is replaced by sonsigns and opsigns to time. Furthermore, it transforms into the crystalline image, in which the real and definite turn into virtual.
Cinema is developed from the split between the actual events and the virtual happenings, similar to how the present is between the past and the future. Modern cinema, as envisioned by Deleuze, is on its way to the status of virtual reality and postmodernism.
As early as the start of the 1960s, expanded cinema has already begun weaving its threads of history, adding theorisations and discussions over the course of this time period. This fact debunks the recent assertions that expanded cinema has not been explored enough or has become a lost part of our history.
Eugene Youngblood coined the expression "expanded cinema", which describes a unique type of presentation that utilizes mixed-media and multiple screens built around at least one film projectors. In his text,he defines "cinema being expanded" as deviating from the conventional use of a static screening setting by incorporating one or more surfaces or screens and other cinematic media to enable connections with and drawing the audience into the presentation or performance.
Because expanded cinema is notorious for being ambiguous and impalpable, and basically looked at as a transient art form, it creates some tough challenges for breakdown and analysis. For example, a performance in a live event will essentially be described as something that can never be duplicated, as it is an extraordinary moment that only the audience can discern and wholly experience. For that reason, Jackie Hatfield, a theorist and artist, stated that expanded cinema has been able to resist taxonomy. Unlike other concrete and well-defined art forms, it has successfully lingered outside historical canonization and interpretation. Also, expanded cinema has avoided commodification, a factor that bears significance influence over the many co-ops involved in sub-cultural filmmaking that popped up by the end of the 60s in different regions around the world.
It may come across as challenging, aggressive, or even offensive at times, but this characteristic of expanded cinema must not alienate people today. The practice of art has taken a different direction and has drifted away from just the production or creation of objects, as Hatfield says. Of course, there are other art forms that rely on performance events, and some of them make ephemerality the centerpiece of their works and even take advantage of it more than the rest.
Deke Dusinberre, in a 1975 issue of Studio International (the same issue that launched "Theory of Structural/Materialist Film" by Peter Gidal), discussed in a piece on expanded cinema the projects of Ron Haselden, Annabel Nicholson and William Raban, and he explores the use of physical assaults, live rephotopgraphy, and other techniques on the projector and film. He highlights the continuous transformation of the work and underlines the strong nowness exuded by the ongoing event.
Personally, I find the application of these esoteric, conjectural events to the works of artists like de Bruyn to be provocative in many different ways. The issues of teleological stances, anthropomorphization using narratives or scholarly boundary-drawings of the end of a media or arrival of a new one, in debates and aesthetic theories, arise.
Gilles Deleuze came up with a theory where time serves as the leading method in audiovisual communication, and he called it the "theory of second cinema." He describes it as a venue where the real and imaginary, objective and subjective, and actual and virtual are impossible to differentiate. This depiction actually fits what a postmodern cinema is like --- a person's mind functions like a pure cinema and creates a vague semblance using a number of images.
An essay entitled "Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema" by Barbara Filser, proposes another theory that brings up a third cinema. It talks about how a third cinema is derived from the time-image theory put forward by Deleuze through a 21st century cinema. By embedding the third cinema on the time-image theory, a virtual reality is created, a cinema exclusive to the mind, a product of the thoughts of the audience.
I would argue that Deleuze's theory is more of a postmodern cinema that shows how the movements of time creates the image. The main characters each craft a virtual construct that eventually becomes integrated to this cinema. As opposed to merely watching, this cinema that Deleuze thought about consumes the minds of the spectators and/or characters. The films represent what Deleuze posits, so they are quintessential for the interpretation and comprehension of these several different theories.
Deleuze looks into the aspects of cinema and time-image, and itt turns out that the most important mode in postmodern cinema in terms of time is assigning the mind the role of the creator. The mind and its actual and virtual circuitry should be the number one focus. Using this technique and the discovery of virtual cinema, we can come up with two good examples of Deleuze's third cinema: Solaris and Abre los ojos.
If we understand that going from linear to aeonic takes time, and we think of the brain as the projector and screen, we will realize that we are close to the cinema that Deleuze is looking for. By throwing away the sensori-motor model and using the time along memory circuit and planes model, and casting the character as both the spectator and creator, we get the time-image cinema that Deleuze is looking for. In this type of cinema, the link between movement and understanding is replaced by sonsigns and opsigns to time. Furthermore, it transforms into the crystalline image, in which the real and definite turn into virtual.
Cinema is developed from the split between the actual events and the virtual happenings, similar to how the present is between the past and the future. Modern cinema, as envisioned by Deleuze, is on its way to the status of virtual reality and postmodernism.
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