gr darkened rooms october 2008

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Darkened Rooms:A Genealogy of Avant-GardeFilmstrips from Man Ray

to the London Film-MakersCo-op and Back AgainNOAM M. ELCOTT

The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms.Andr Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)

I.We are witnessing the reconfiguration of twentieth-century art history as a darkpassage illuminated by intermittent projections. Most notably in Le mouvementdes images (2006), a survey exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, paintings, sculp-tures, and other material objets dart were relegated to side galleries groupedunder cinematic rubrics. The spine of the exhibition was a darkened corridorwith looped digital projections of films that traced a cinematic history of twentieth-century art: Richard Serra and Paul Sharits, Joseph Cornell and MarcelBroodthaers, Lszl Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray.1 In each instance, the invest-ment in cinema exceeded the production of films and was augmented by a rangeof works in adjacent galleries. There unfolded an immaterial passageway

surrounded by material relics. Nowhere did the division between immaterial pro-jection and material object congeal more strikingly than around a single wall onwhich was projected Man Rays Retour la raison (1923) and behind which sev-eral meters of the films rayographically inscribed 35 mm filmstrips were exhib-ited as such for the first time: laid out flat for inspection like a museologicalartifact or specimen rather than upright like a painting, as in the case of the neatlyframed filmstrips of Peter Kubelkas Arnulf Rainer(19581960), also on view. Themost attentive viewers repeatedly skirted around the dividing wall to piecetogether the different components of the work. The filmstrips reveal white formson a dark ground: tacks and pins, a coiled spring, rope, crystals, glass plates,

Grey Room 30, Winter 2008, pp. 637. 2008 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7


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photographs and other quotidian objects whose x-raylike traces span severalmeters. For these strips, Man Ray relinquished his camera andin the obscurityof his makeshift darkroomplaced objects directly on the celluloid and exposedit to light. He later recounted, I threw pins and thumbtacks at random;then turned on the white light for a second or two, as I had done for my stillRayographs.2

From Jean Cocteaus 1922 open letter to Man Ray in praise of the rayographs

through Rosalind Krausss 1977 theorization of the index, cameraless pho-tographsalso called rayographs or photogramshave epitomized the potentialimmediacy of the photographic process.3 In the conclusion to her surveyof nineteenth-century natural drawings made without a camera, Carol Armstrongasks why one should even bother with photographic self-reflexivity and answers,Because it allows us to look atthe material mode of the photograph rather thanthrough it; because it is a way of making that materiality matter.4 Yet this rayo-graphic immediacy and materiality seem to dissolve as soon as the filmstrips areprojected: meter-long strips appear on screen for barely three seconds each whenprojected at a rate of sixteen frames per second, the rough standard at the time.What is more, Man Ray ignored the frame divisions essential to the traditionalcinematic dissection and reconstitution of movement. The result is illegible con-tent or erratic motion: a snowstorm, with the flakes flying in all directionsinstead of falling and huge white pins crisscrossing and revolving in an epilep-tic dance.5 The white shadow of a serrated knife vanishes when divided intoframes and projected on screen, but a springcameralessly inscribed without theslightest movement of object, filmstrip, or light sourceis magically set intomotion when segmented and projected. The two minute and forty-eight secondmovie thus comprises a flurry of images, abstract and representational, that nevercohere into anything like a narrative: black-and-white silhouettes, points oflight revolving in every direction, artworks in motion, visual noise and fleetingblurs, a twirling egg crate, a nude torso undulating in raking light. One canonly smile when, at the start of each loop, Man Rays title appears: The Returnto Reason.

An endlessly looping digital projection and its once-upon-a-time materialsubstrate: the installation wall at the Pompidou seemed to divide a material pastfrom an immaterial presentas well as the medium-specific filmic from thepostmedium digital, and perhaps even an embodied viewer from a disembodiedone. But if the rayographic strips could not help but appear like vestiges of apredigital era and the bearers of all the originary traits we fear lost to our present,Michel Foucault reminds us that What is found at the historical beginning of

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Man Ray. Retour la raison, 1923.Film strip.


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things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of otherthings. It is disparity.6 A nonlinear genealogy of the rayographic strips of Retour la raisonfrom their recent museum debut to their 1920s oblivion via theirlate-1960s and early-1970s recuperation in the histories and practices of avant-garde filmwill demonstrate not the stability of these oppositions but a trans-valuation of these values: materiality and its attendant medium-specificity andembodiment. At its 1923 premiere, no one took note of Retours cameralessness.

The cinematic dispositifor apparatus occluded access to the filmstrips and to theintelligibility of the rayographic inscription. (In the cinema, one cannot skirt thescreen to get a peek at the strips.) The moment where the filmstrips were first leg-ible as suchin the histories, theories, and practices of structural and materialfilmmakers beginning in the late 1960scoincides with the avant-garde recon-figuration of the cinematic dispositif, in particular at the London Film-MakersCo-operative (LFMC, founded 1966). Not only is this moment chronologicallyequidistant from the reception of Retour within the historical avant-garde and itsmuseological present, but it marks an early, failed attempt to transform thecinema into a museum and the museum into a cinema. This staccato history ofRetourand its filmstrips will wind its way slowly from the present to the 1920swith stresses around 2006, 1966, and 1926but will jump frequently betweenthese dates to highlight the incongruities and peculiar continuities that abound.My argument is deceptively simple: until 2006, Retours rayographic filmstripswere referenced but never exhibited. They existed in a state of latency for overeighty years. At least twice, far-reaching attempts were ventured to make thislatency manifest: by Man Ray in the early 1920s and by avant-garde filmmakersin the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unable or unwilling to exhibit the filmstrips asan object, they were forced to reconceptualize the institution of cinema in termsno less radical, even if far less explicit, than the two-part Pompidou installationand its pronounced division of materiality and immateriality. The resultantreconceptualized cinemas frequently bordered on the world of art and now pre-sent themselves as historical models for and alternatives to the cinematizedmuseum, ones where material-immaterial divisions were much more dynamicthan a wall. This genealogy will also trace the outlines of the cinematic dispositiffrom its post-WWI rise through its 1970s decline and its current museification inthe form of the black box; it is, however, neither a history of the black box (thougha range of black and gray boxes are in play) nor a chronicle of handmade films(though such is the dominant reading of cameraless films) but a genealogy ofRetour la raison, its rayographic filmstrips and the successive dark chambersin which they unraveled.


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II.The first of these chambers was the Thtre Michel on the night of July 6, 1923.Do you remember Dada? If youve already forgotten, there are Messieurs Breton,Tzara, Aragon, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Soupault and Eluard. You thought theywere dead? Well, fine. Last night they were resurrected.7 So begins the account ofthe Soire du coeur barbe published in Comoedia, the leading art and theaterdaily in interwar Paris. The tone is light, even flippant. Dada poetry and drama

are discussed only to be dismissed. Films garner no mention. Yet it was at thisfinal dada soirecarried out amidst the tumultuous fall of Tristan Tzaras brandof dada and nearly cleared out by the police after several brawls instigated by theBreton gangthat Retour la raison had its sole interwar screening.8Jane Heapsreport in the pages of The Little Review, while more sympathetic and extensive,pays equally scant attention to the works, except to name them.9 Only LouisAragon, in a manuscript unpublished at the time, offered more than a fleetingreference to the films, and he was clearly not amused:

One saw a short film by Man Ray that displayed his mistress, Kiki, then avery beautiful unfolding spiral entitled The Return to Reason, which

provides the ornamentation of his atelier. The film is equal neither to thepainting nor to the photography of Man Ray, who was pressed by Tzara toproduce something at all costs for this spectacle. Tzara cares for nothing butnames; that the individuals create stupid works means little to him.10

No one referenced the films material substrate until Man Ray concocted adramatic and bunk account for his autobiography decades later. In a tale too oftenrepeated, Man Ray writes off the film as a dada provocation and claims that hisamateurish splicing led to frequent breakages, plunging the audience in darknessand instigating the famous brawl.11 The only corroboration that any reaction toRetouroccurred comes from Louis Tosmass review in Bonsoir:An audaciouslyentitled film, The Return to Reason, revived, by virtue of its relative clarity, theindignation of the Surdada sectarians.12

Born of an undead dada and without alliance to nascent surrealism, disownedby its creator, Retourbelonged nowhere. Articles, reviews, and artist interviewspublished in the 1920s frequently list all of Man Rays films only to omitRetour.13 Even the committed surrealist and cineaste Georges Sadoul laterclaimed to have first learned of Retoursome twenty years after the fact.14 As lateas Man Rays 1966 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, acatalog essay appraising his cinematic oeuvre erroneously claimed that Retour la raison was unfortunately lost.15 Prints survived, but the film was all but lost

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to avant-garde discourse, its rayographic base little more than a curiosity in theannals of cinema, dada, and surrealism.

In the late 1960s, as critics, historians, and practitioners of underground orexperimental film began to search for interwar precedents, Retourslowly gaineda marginal place in alternative film histories. The film was selected in 1970 byAnthology Film Archives as part of their Essential Cinema program but wasexcluded from Parker Tylers 1969 filmography, which otherwise includes

virtually all key works stressed by the present writer as indicative, and oftenimportant, in the passage from avant-garde to Underground film.16 The film wasconsidered foundational only by those filmmakers for whom the material of filmand the processes of its production were paramount. Nowhere was this tendencystronger than within the LFMC. Malcolm Le Grice, among the leading practi-tioners and advocates of material film at the LFMC, made a case for filmic mate-riality and, with it, Man Rays rayographic film:

The earliest example of this awareness is found in Man Rays Retour laraison (1922 [sic]) through his incorporation into film of the direct pho-tography Rayogram technique. . . . Distancing the representational image

in this way draws attention to film substance and process as an elementof content.17

So powerful were the terms of this recuperation that Deke Dusinberreamongthe earliest supporters of the LFMC and the most extensive interpreter of Retourto datelabels his recent analysis of the film 1970s-style.18 Where surrealisthistories have excluded Retourand Emak Bakia (1926) from their canons in favorof Man Rays later films,19 Le Grice reversed their selection and asserted thatwhile Man Rays first two films, Retour la raison and Emak Bakia are bothclearly in, I have not been alone in the impulse to reject his subsequent films asa retrogression.20 The current essay is little concerned with canons or progress.(As Man Ray liked to say, There is no progress in art, any more than there isprogress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.)21 Thus,even as postwar German filmmaker-theorist Birgit Hein worked to construct agrand, progressive narrative of material film closely aligned with the LFMC, sheacknowledged that no continuous tradition could be forged:

With hindsight, we can establish links with artists films of the 20sandhere Man Rays Retour la Raison (as a material film) appears especiallysignificant . . . but we cannot draw a straight line from here to the 60sbecause developments of this kind did not occur after the mid 20s.22


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Instead, Retours circuitous route from the darkroom to the darkened museum viathe cinema and the film co-ops is a history that does not progress evenly but infits and starts, doubling back on itself and reversing its position, asserting rup-tures where we imagined continuities and continuities where we once assertedradical breaks.

III.

By 1926, V.I. Pudovkin was able to recapitulate nearly a decade of Russian filmtheoryin particular what Lev Kuleshov had named creative geographyinhis book Film Technique and Film Acting. Fully cognizant of the materiality ofmediation, Pudovkin contended that whereas the substance available to the the-ater director is a real and actual process that takes place in obedience to the lawsof real space and real time . . . the active raw material [of the film director] is noother than thosepieces of celluloid.23 As if in perverse adherence to Pudovkinsassertion and in strict observance of Clement Greenbergs modernist dictum onmedium-specificity, avant-garde filmmakers from America, England, and acrossthe Continent began to explore the materiality of filmstrips in the 1960s.24

Independent of one another, Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow,Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.,1966), Malcolm Le Grice (Little Dog for Roger, 1967), and Wilhelm Hein andBirgit Hein (Rohfilm, 1968) mobilized the celluloid (actually acetate) filmstrip asthe basis for the films image and structure, a tendency that would soon be desig-nated structural or, within the LFMC, material(ist).25 Heath Robinson print-ing and developing equipment, designed and largely built by Le Grice, and theacquisition of professional developing and printing equipment for the LFMCworkshops at the end of the 1960s made the otherwise marginal emphasis onmateriality into a centerpiece of Co-op production. As David Curtis chronicledin 1975, The loops and straying images of Malcolms Little Dogproved to be thebeginning of a whole genre of English film-making.26 And as Le Grice madeclear, material film generally and Little Dog for Rogerin particular should beconsidered as clarifying the direction begun by Man Ray in Retour la Raison;namely, to draw attention to the material nature of the film itself and the imageson it as a photochemical reality.27 Such an approach enabled the exploration offilm in a manner similar to the medium-specificity of modernist painting28 or,consistent with an oft-repeated slogan, the treatment of film as film.29 Paul Sharitsobserved in the early 1970s that there seem to be some general aestheticinterests shared by contemporary arts (one of which is, paradoxically self-definitionpainting as the subject of painting, etc.).30 Although film critics frowned

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upon the encroachment of Greenbergian art rhetoric into the sphere of experimen-tal cinema, the insistence on medium-specificity allowed these progeny of Retourto extend far beyond the cameraless inscription of celluloid and help, in turn, tosituate Retours rayographic strips within the broader experience of cinema.31

References in LFMC writings to the tradition of handmade filmbegun byMan Ray and continued in Len Lyes Color Box(1935), Stan Brakhages Mothlight(1963), and other filmswere eventually supplanted by a more direct attack on

the institution of cinema: not only works by Man Ray, Landow, and Le Grice, butNam June Paiks Zen for Film (19621964), composed of nothing but clear leader.32

At the same time Le Grice and others turned to Greenbergian art paradigms, theyintuitively rejected the automatically modernist experience of cinema postu-lated by Michael Fried in 1967. Fried wrote, It is the overcoming of theater thatmodernist sensibility finds most exalting and that it experiences as the hallmarkof high art in our time. There is, however, one art that, by its very nature, escapestheater entirelythe movies.33 The LFMCs interrogation of thosepieces ofcelluloid quickly opened on to the real space and real time that Fried, likePudovkin, attributed to theater and that Le Grice saw as the continuation of amaterial practice of film: The direction of my thinking and the tendencies of myfilms, keep returning me to an affirmation of the projection event as the primaryreality. In other words, the real TIME/SPACE event at projection.34 Le Gricesdirect target was not a modernist sensibility so much as the darkness of the theater,the immobility of the subject, and projection from the rearprecisely the condi-tions of reception Fried and others highlighted as guaranteeing the absorption ofthe moviegoer.35

Le Grice announced his attack on cinematic absorption with the first film hescreened in the environs of the LFMC, Castle One (1966, first screened 1968). Thework consisted of found newsreel footage of the military-industrial complexmontaged into visual and audio repetitions, occasionally interrupted by shots ofa lightbulb. Under the influence of Robert Rauschenberg, Le Grice augmented thedepicted lightbulb with a real lightbulb that hung near the screen.36 Duringthe performance of the work, the lightbulb was turned on and off, illuminating theaudience and obliterating the projected image. As Le Grice asserted in his pro-gram notes, The awareness of the audience is returned to their actual situation(viewing a film) by reference to the bulb and the perceptual problems which itsflashing creates.37 Insomuch as electric light is pure information, as MarshallMcLuhan had recently avowed, its intermittent presence here decoupled the pho-tographic images from the luminescent medium that carried them and created adialecticpowerful and primitive in equal measurebetween absorption in the


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film and awareness of ones environment.38 The action anticipated by severalyears Roland Barthess 1975 strategy of breaking the ideological fascination of themovie theater:

it is by letting myself be twice fascinated by the image and by its surroundings,as if I had two bodies at once: a narcissistic body which is looking, lost ingazing into the nearby mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not theimage, but precisely that which exceeds it: the sounds grain, the theater, the

obscure mass of other bodies, the rays of light, the entrance, the exit.39

Where the traditional movie theater insists on what Barthes called a narcissis-tic body absorbed in the image, Le Grices Castle One compelled its spectatorsto take on a second, perverse body.

At first, Le Grice envisioned that these actions would best unfold in a galleryrather than a theater. By the end of the 1970s, however, he acknowledged thatNeither the current institution surrounding cinema nor that related to the pre-sentation of the plastic arts has forms which suit such a concept of presenta-tion.40 The gallery dissolved the narcissistic body to the same degree thattraditional theaters suppressed the perverse one. This shift can be identified bestin Anthony McCalls Long Film for Ambient Light(1975)screened in NewYork independent of the LFMC but closely related to and received widely inCo-op circleswhere the simultaneous assault on the image and illumination ofspectatorial space reached its apotheosis: natural light and an electric bulb illu-minated a loft for a twenty-four hour period; the windows were covered withwhite paper; a time scheme and a two-page statement hung on the wall. Ratherthan the absorption of traditional cinema or even the dominant axis of earlierworks like McCalls Line Describing a Cone (1973), the entire space was utilizedso that there was no particular axis of attention.41 Even as scholars have identi-fied a series of metaphors and practices that bind the work to the idea of cinemawhile dispensing entirely with the materials of film, McCall did not hesitate toput the wordfilm in scare quotes to conclude his statement: I do not rule out thepossibility of continuing to make films. However, for the time being I intend to

Right: Malcolm Le Grice.

Castle One, 1966.Performance view.

Opposite: Anthony McCall.Long Film for Ambient Light,

1975. Installation view.
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concentrate less on the physical process of production and more on the presup-positions behind films as an art activity.42 The material filmstrip and the processesof its production gave way to light and duration. As Dusinberre quickly noted,The very emphasis on the material nature of the cinema and of cinematic repre-sentation leads to immateriality.43 If Castle One attempted to summon advancedart in the transformation of the cinematic arena, Long Film for Ambient Lightreturned the question of cinema to the institutions and spaces of art. The material

legacy of Retour la raison at the LFMC unfolded between the lightbulb film,as Castle One came to be known, and a film composed largely of a lightbulb.Whereas Castle One and Long Film overturned the traditional cinematic expe-

rience through negation, Le Grice and his former students (who became LFMCcolleagues) confronted those conditions through the extension of production intothe realm of reception: from the treatment of film as material substance to thetreatment of: the projection situation as material event.44 No film illustrates thisconvergence better than Le Grices Little Dog for Roger. The film existed in mul-tiple versions: sound and silent, single and double projection. But already at itsOctober 1968 premier, where it was shown as part of Le Grices second paintingand film exhibition at the Arts Lab in London, Little Dog was a two-screen, loopfilm performance: one image projected at sound speed (24 fps) and the other atsilent speed (16 fps). The performative nature of the screening ensured that theoperation of the projectors was experienced as anything but automatic. In moredefinitive versionsthe work has recently been standardized as a two-screendigital installationLe Grice used a single sound track and edited the 16 fps versiondown so that the reels start and end at the same time and are repeatedly, if onlyfleetingly, aligned during the course of the film. Woven tightly into the manyloops and edits, the temporal displacement is difficult to observe. Instead, theviewer struggles to ascertain the temporal filiations and frequently submits totheir ever-modulating present. Double-screen double exposures of positive andnegative filmstrips create a field of incandescent and obscure rectangles closer toanimated abstraction than home movies. The persistent temporal displacementcreated by the two projection speeds forces the viewer into the real time of the


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situation as material event even when not performed live.In Le Grices many program notes and artists statements on the film, he invari-

ably marginalized the contentthe original material for Little Dog for Rogerisa few short sequences of 9.5 mm film rescued from the basement of a house whereI used to live. It is a home movie shot of me, my brother, mother and a dog45indeference to medium-specificity: This vaguely nostalgic material has providedan opportunity for me to play with the medium as celluloid and various kinds of

printing and processing devices.46

And yet an unavoidable nostalgia permeatesthe work at every level: the home movie, the soundtrack composed of 1950srecords that sporadically and without warning interrupt the purring of the pro-jector, and, most of all, the film stock itself.47 Released in 2006 on DVD, the filmnow appears doubly nostalgic: for a 1950s childhood and an obsolescentmedium.48 But already by the 1960s, the 9.5 mm film gauge was so near extinc-tion as to have been labeled the living corpse.49 The gauges most distinctivefeaturea single, central sprocket hole whose placement allows the format todeliver an image size comparable to 16 mm at nearly half the widthwas not thelatest technological advance so much as the first mainstream casualty of a mediasystem maintained through perpetual obsolescence. Insomuch as 9.5 mm filmand 1950s records already belonged to a departed era by the late 1960s, Little Dogis less an exploration of the timeless essence of the medium than a proclamationof the mediums historical and technological contingency.

Nevertheless, Little Dogs handling of the film materialmakes it representative of a range of LFMC practices. LeGrice transferred the original material onto 16 mm by con-tact printing under glass and by hand pulling the 9.5 mmfilm through a primitive printer that he had converted froma projector. The film is first and foremost a self-reflexiveand lyrical documentation of that transfer. For the firstminute of the roughly ten-minute-long film, a flood ofblurred images rushes down the screen, as if the shutterhad been removed from the projector (instead Le Gricedetached the film from the claw of the printer), andreminds the viewer that printers and projectors were oncecoupled with the camera as a single apparatus. In 1969,Ken Jacobs included an extended section of projection slip-page in his seminal Tom, Tom, the Pipers Son (1969).Jacobs dissected a 1905 film by refilming it off the screenand performed the analytic work of an amorous eye through
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close-ups, repetitions, slow motion, and other techniques. He brought the camera-as-eye metaphor into the darkness of the cinema, into the eye that gazes at thecinematic screen, peruses its content, its surface, its reality. In place of the

camera and screen, Le Grices projector-turned-printer anchorsLittle Dog. After a minute of printer slippage, the image of a doghaltingly appearsat times frozen, at times moving, at timesstill but pulled slowly through the printer, always framed by

the filmstrip, with its distinctive, now luminescent centralsprocket. The rest of the films short loops undergo seeminglyendless printing transformations: over- and underexposure,sharp and soft focus, positive and negative printing, upsidedown and right side up, double exposures, wandering film-strips. Sections of black and clear leader are augmented byscratches and stains. The emphasis on the printer, Le Gricesoon argued, allows physical aspects of the medium, the real-ity of celluloid, emulsion, sprockets, the nature and capabili-ties of the machinery to become the basis of experience andcontent.50 All the original material for Little Dogwas shot on acamera. The film is cameraless only insomuch as it shifts theemphasis from a world mediated by the camera to the mediationof the printer. This is how the LFMC translated the cameralesslegacy of Retour. This is how it made Retours filmstrips visible.

In her film Slides (1970), Le Grices former student AnnabelNicolson did away with the camera entirely, ran the celluloidthrough a sewing machine, wove it with thread, collagedshreds of photographic transparencies and filmstrips directlyon the celluloid and pulled it by hand through the Co-opsDebrie step printer.51 Three years later in Reel Time (1973), alive expanded-cinema piece, Nicolson ran a long film loopfrom a projector, which projected images of her at a sewingmachine, across the ceiling and down to a real sewing machinewhere she sat, sewing holes into the same loop. The loops pro-jection was tied to its perforation. The performance was repeat-edly interrupted and the audience plunged into darkness as theprojector jammed; it ended when the loop broke. Nicolson col-lapsed the sites and technologies of production and reception

highlighting the opposing (and hier-archical) gendered associations of the

Opposite, top: Ken Jacobs.Tom, Tom, the Pipers Son, 1969.Film strip.

Opposite, bottom:Malcolm Le Grice. Little Dog forRoger, 1967. Two-screen version.Frame enlargements.

Top: Malcolm Le Grice. Little Dogfor Roger, 1967. Film strip.

Bottom: Malcolm Le Grice.Little Dog for Roger, 1967.Frame enlargement.


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related technologies of projector and sewing machineand bound the immater-ial realities of the cinematic experience to the material properties of the filmstripand the processes of its fabrication. But unlike in traditional gallery or cinemaspaces, the LFMCs film workshop and theater were so proximatethat Reel Times elongated film loop could have physically con-nected the one to the other. Reel Time was a microcosm of theentire LFMC institution.

The LFMC was among the few facilities that combined pro-duction, exhibition, and distributionas if the aesthetic engage-ment with the material filmstrip spawned an entire apparatus; asif the visibility of the filmstrips required a new conception of thecinematic institution. Peter Gidal nearly said as much in 1980:Since 1966, members of the London Film-makers Co-operativehave thought it necessary to have equipment at hand in order toallow for the making of films. Participation in the constructionof a cinema, the projection of films, the writing of criticism,upkeepall these activities contributed to the machine calledthe Co-op, that apparatus of experimental film.52 At the LFMC,the film workshop and the cinema in particular were part of asingle apparatus, a machine for production and reception, wheremateriality and process permeate each stage of the cinematicexperience. Films were made, screened, edited, and rescreenedbut (like the filmstrips of Reel Time) not necessarily preservedbeyond the extended production loop that was this apparatus ofexperimental cinema. The ultimate legacy of Retour la raisonas understood by Le Grice and his circle may have been theLFMC itself: where the site of reception came to mirror the siteof production and enabled the materiality of celluloid, process,and projection to come into the light.

IV.Europeans discussed Retourat length, but its inclusion in theAnthology Film Archives cyclical Essential Cinema programensured it got more screen time there than anywhere else. In1970, the Anthology Film Archivesthe film museum foundedto promote American avant-garde film and its European prede-cessorsopened its doors to the general public. In the manifestodescribing its new theater, Anthology asserted that where early

Right: Annabel Nicolson.Slides, 1970. Film strip.

Opposite: Annabel Nicolson.Reel Time, 1973. Performanceview. Photograph by Ian Kerr.Courtesy of the artist andLUX, London.


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movie houses grew out of vaudeville and were hardly appropriate for the art offilm, the aptly named Invisible Cinema, conceived by Peter Kubelka in 1958, wasa machine for viewing in which stadium seating, hooded seats, complete dark-ness, single-source sound equipment, and strict decorum ensured that the viewerwould not have any sense of the presence of walls or the size of the auditorium.He should have only the white screen, isolated in darkness, as his guide to scaleand distance.53 Kubelkas Invisible Cinema attempted to purge anything that

exceeded the imageeven exit signs were a reluctant concession to fire codes.While Invisible Cinema was lauded as the first true cinema54 and a projectiveand spectatorial dispositif, generated by [the American avant-garde] movementsradical revision of the cinematic institution and apparatus,55 Kubelka was unam-biguous: The concept of Invisible Cinema has nothing to do with the specialaims of Anthology Film Archives.56 In 1970, with various forms of expandedcinema raging from the West Coast across the European continent, InvisibleCinema was less an avant-garde reconfiguration of the classical cinema than abulwark against its avant-garde corruption. Where Paul Sharits argued that onemay find it necessary to construct systems involving either no projector at all ormore than one projector and more than one flat screen, and more than one volu-metric space between them,57 Kubelka insisted This kind of cinema is not formulti-media, multi-screen, multiple speakers or for action mixed with film. . . .There is nothing really radical in this project, this is a normal cinema.58

Realized in 1970 but conceived in 1958, Invisible Cinemas design and principlestook form long before expanded cinema coalesced into a conspicuous force.Kubelkas primary rival was television. From the moment the theater opened itsdoors to the public Kubelka asserted, This . . . is normal cinema. If it looksdifferent, its because other theaters are abnormal. They are like living roomsequipped with huge television sets.59 Although it is beyond the scope of thisessay, Invisible Cinema was conceived and implemented as a buffer against thetelevisualization of movies, not as an extension of an avant-garde project.60

Rather than see Invisible Cinema as the realization of a uniquely avant-gardedispositif, one must emphasize a certain incongruity, conceptual and historical,at play in the Anthology Film Archives theater: on the one hand, a film program


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aimed at consolidating a particular vision of advanced experimental filmLandow,Sharits, Jacobs, and others; on the other hand, a cinema that worked to shore upthe conditions of reception taken more or less for granted since the 1920s andnow threatened by multimedia and expanded cinema within the ranks of the filmavant-garde and by the increasingly dominant televisual distribution of moviesin society at large. Indeed, the name Invisible Cinema is something of a retronym:only in the half-light of television and multimedia must one champion the invis-

ibility of classical cinema.That invisibility first became entrenched after World War I and was widelytheorized and debated by the 1920s. In his 1926 treatise Philosophie des Films,Rudolf Harms argued that spaceless darkness (raumlose Dunkelheit) reignedinside the cinema.61 Anthologys manifesto skips over the decades between earlycinema and the presentthat is, the years of normative cinematic invisibilitysuch that its description of Invisible Cinema is nearly identical to the accounts ofirate critics from the 1910s: The auditorium is so dark that we are unable to rec-ognize our immediate neighbor. We only perceive the luminous rectangle on thewall opposite us.62 In each case, the setting disappears so that the spectator canbe more fully absorbed in the projected image. As one early visitor to InvisibleCinema put it, I was so shaken up by the picture that the novelty of the theaterwore off. . . . Maybe thats how it should be.63 Thats largely how it had been fordecades. Like the educator as posited by Nietzsche, the movie theaters greatesttask, according to Harms, resides in rendering itself superfluous. The cinemashould guarantee the highest degree of bodily detachedness and seek to alleviatethe shortcomings of the individuals fixed and local bondedness.64 The turns ofphrase are quite nearly Kubelkas. Already in 1925, Jean Goudal gave voice to theconditions that would later prevail at Invisible Cinema:

Lets go into a cinema where the perforated celluloid is purring in the darkness.

On entering, our gaze is guided by the luminous ray to the screen where fortwo hours it will remain fixed. . . . Our problems evaporate, our neighborsdisappear. Our body itself submits to a sort of temporary depersonalizationwhich takes away the feeling of its own existence. We are nothing but twoeyes riveted to ten square meters of white canvas. . . . The darkness of the


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auditorium destroys the rivalry of real images that would contradict theones on the screen.65

In Goudals cinematic experience, the purring in the darkness induces a conscioushallucination.66 The spectatorial experience of Invisible Cinema, in the wordsof one reviewer, was rather like floating in a vast, benign space, looking at arectangular-shaped hallucination of almost drug-induced clarity.67 In its most

important aspects, then, Invisible Cinema was a classical cinema.But the cinema at Anthology was a two-pronged apparatus: Invisible Cinema(a theater) and Essential Cinema (a film canon). As announced in Anthologysmanifesto:

What are the essentials of the film experience? Which films embody theheights of the art of cinema? The creation of Anthology Film Archives hasbeen an ambitious attempt to provide answers to these questions; the firstof which is physicalto construct a theater in which films can be seenunder the best conditions; and the second criticalto define the art of filmin terms of selected works which indicate its essence and its perimeters.68

Essential Cinema, which numbered Retouramong its rank and file, was a cyclicalprogram of several hundred films arranged alphabetically according to authorand screened as an extended loop.69 Although no postwar European avant-gardefilms were included, excepting those by Peter Kubelka, there was a strong empha-sis on the formal and the recently emergent structural film: if not Le Grice and theHeins, then Landow, Sharits, and Jacobs.70

Situated within this discursive, even museological contextwith its sharpemphasis on the visibility of the celluloid, looking atrather than looking throughfilmthe filmstrips of Retour la raison could come into view. As Eric de Bruynargues in relation to the physical and discursive institution that was Anthology,The spectator was transported to another world, but this world coincided withthe surface of the film itself that was subjected to the critical judgment of thespectator.71 In sum, the theater was not an avant-garde cinematic apparatus tocomplement the avant-garde film program but an invisible cinema for the exhi-bition of visible film. The incongruity of this juxtaposition cannot be overstated.Anne Friedberg has characterized the phenomenological tangletwin para-doxesin which the spectator/viewer/user is generally caught when facing thescreen: of mobility and immobility (the mobility of images; the immobility ofthe spectator) and of materiality and immateriality (the material space of thetheater, domicile, or office and immateriality of the cinematic, televisual, or

Invisible Cinema atAnthology Film Archives, 1971.


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computer image).72 Invisible Cinema immobilized its viewers forcefully, butcombined with a heavily structuralist avant-garde film programlargelyreversed the material-immaterial opposition asserted by Friedberg: the strangevirtuality of Invisible Cinema was composed of a space that insisted on its imma-teriality and images that, however fleeting, maintained their own materiality noless adamantly.

V.More than anyone, Man Ray wrestled with the visibility of his rayographic strips.From 1923 to 1926, Man Ray experimented with various forms of cameraless filmand alternative projection, none of which was satisfactory and of which merefragments survive.73 The inclusion of a few short rayographic sequences fromRetour at the opening of Emak Bakia (1926)their cameralessness largelyunheeded in the widespread reviews of the filmmarks the close of a phase ofaesthetic exploration rather than its apex. Yet as late as 1929that is, after therelease of his last official filmMan Ray shared his beau rve with an inter-viewer for Cina-Cin pour tous:The dream would be to do away with the cameraand treat the film directly though chemical means. This is a question that excitesme.74 It was a question that had excited him ever since the 1923 Soire du coeur barbe, but one that met with little success. Instead, Man Ray borrowed thephrase to do away with the camera from an interview he gave earlier in 1929,where it was used to describe his rayographs and their cinematic qualities.75

From very beginningand then time and time againthe rayographs weregranted cinematic traits in the words of critics and through their placement in artand cinema journals. As Jean Cocteau announced in his public letter to Man Rayupon the 1922 introduction of the rayographs: you have just opened up on trea-sures, cinematographic among others.76 The nature of this cinematographictreasure, however, was never clarified: not by Man Ray, not by his critics, not byrecent scholarship. Even less so the relationship between the rayographic stripsof Retourand the rayographs proper: not only because cameraless films and pho-tographs are now separated by the disciplinary divisions imposed by cinemastudies and art history but because Retours cinematic cameralessness wasquickly forgotten and so existed in a state of latency, at or beyond the limits ofperception, just outside avant-garde discourse. In the balance of this essay, I willproposeeven as I cannot possibly present the extensive historical record thatprovesthat the rayographs, rather than the filmstrips, were the most successfulvenue for Man Rays exploration of cameralessness and cinema.

Although the film Retour la raison quickly faded from memory, a photograph


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of the same name was an instant classic. As with a number of Man Rays cine-matic images (and increasingly more often as the decade progressed), a still fromRetours final sequencesKikis nude torso undulating in raking lightwasreproduced as a photograph in the pages of La rvolution surraliste (no. 1, 1924).From the inaugural issue of this first full-fledged surrealist mainstay, the imagebecame an icon of the movement in the pages of Das Kunstblatt(1926), Lartvivant(1929), and as the introductory nude in the summation of Man Rays 1920s

photographic work, Photographs by Man Ray, Paris, 19201934 (1934), producedby James Soby. The title Retour la raison quickly came to denote this photo-graph of Kiki rather than the film from which it was culleda tendency that hasbeen reinforced through brilliant recent scholarship that, however, pays littleattention to the film.77 Instead, the films cameralessness was first impliedthrough the subsequent rayographic inscription of its celluloid strips. Placeddirectly on photosensitive paper and exposed to light, Retours Kiki-emblazonedfilmstrip yielded a stunning rayograph that was not only selected for Sobys 1934catalog but adorned the 1926 cover of Hans Richters special double-issue of G.dedicated to cinema. Retours filmstrips were disseminated most widely notthrough projection but through their rayographic inscription. In other words, therayographs rather than the cinema were Man Rays preferred medium for the dis-semination of Retours filmstrips. Accordingly, if there was any resolutionbetween Retours material filmstrips and the immaterial experience of cinema inthe 1920s, it was legible only in the rayographs. A second rayograph, likely createdfrom the filmstrips of Retour,begins to articulate the materiality of cinematic andphotographic mediation.78 Man Ray placed shards from a shattered glass plate

portrait of Kiki directly onto thephotosensitive paper. Bands of cel-luloid soar above the glass. Here, thematerial support of photography(glass plates) and film (celluloidstrips) are juxtaposed in a singleimage. The content of the filmstrip isindiscernible, but an upside-downKiki clearly stares out from the bot-tom left-hand corner. Her image isfractured into at least three pieces.Several shards cast bright, whiteshadowsthe clearest indication oftheir materiality and depth. Like the

Man Ray. Retour la raison, 1923.Frame enlargement. Detail.


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image of Kiki, bound to the glass plate at the surface of the paper yet hovering ina fathomless space, the ribbons of luminous celluloid appear at times materialand at times like a play of light and shadows whose support has disappeared,as a critic once described Man Rays abstract films.79 Rather than emphasize mate-riality or medium-specificity, the editors of Cahiers du mois, where the rayographfirst appeared in print, likened the effect to the experience of cinema:

We publish here photographs by M. Man Ray, who miraculously was able

to provoke on photo-sensitive paper the illusions and revelations . . . thatevoke in us a type of emotion that one would be tempted to call cinematicand which seems a priori paradoxical for the desire to obtain a static image.80

This paradoxrepeated variously in countless descriptions of rayographsthroughout the 1920scannot be explained without recourse to the images con-ditions of production. The synthesis of Retours material filmstrips and theimmaterial experience of cinema put forth by Man Ray was not a rejection of theclassical cinema in favor of medium specificity and material reality (as wasrepeatedly claimed about Retourby material filmmakers in the 1970s) but thetransposition of a cinematic experience into another medium: photography,

Right: Front cover of G.

Material zur elementarenGestaltung 56 (1926).

Opposite: Front cover of G.Material zur elementaren

Gestaltung 56 (1926). Detail.


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specifically the rayographs.As Le Grice argued, Man Rays Retour, like his own Little Dog, inscribes the

process of production into the filmstrips themselves. But where Le Grice createdhis cameraless film Little Dogon his homemade printing equipment, Man Raycreated his rayographic strips in the darkroom. The difference is essential. In asense, Man Rays cameraless films and photographs are not cameraless at all;instead, they substitute for the photographic camera the camera or chamber of

the darkroom (camera obscura). The importance of this chamber, in turn, cannotbe overstated for a critical history of avant-garde photograms, because its usemarks a fundamental break with previous cameraless photographs, nearly all ofwhich were created outdoors or in daylight.81 Christian Schads earlier camera-less photographs (later called schadographs) were executed in daylight, on print-out paper and are most closely related to dada collage. Lszl Moholy-Nagysearliest photograms, also made in daylight, on printout paper, most resemble con-temporaneous constructivist painting.82 But even before Moholy-Nagy switchedto developing paper, he hinted at the possibility that photosensitive paper couldbe treated like a screen and the darkroom transformed into a miniature butexpanded cinema. In his earliest discussions of cameraless photography, the


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as-yet-unnamed photograms are but a subcategory of light projected onto screens:

Instead of having a plate which is sensitiveto light react mechanically to its environ-ment through the reflection or absorption oflight, I have attempted to controlits actionsby means of lenses and mirrors. . . . Thismeans that the filtered, reflected, or refracted

light is directed upon a screen and then pho-tographed. Or again, the light-effect can bethrown directly on the sensitive plate itself,instead of upon a screen. (Photography with-out apparatus.)83

For Moholy-Nagy, this practice inevitably led tofilm: Since these light effects almost alwaysshow themselves in motion, it is clear that theprocess reaches its highest development in thefilm.84 But whereas Moholy-Nagy stressedmultiple, moving light sources in the produc-tion of his photograms (and his various lightdisplays, films and props), Man Ray invariablyemployed a single, stationary light source: asolitary lightbulb.

Although never acknowledged as such, theopening of Retouris legible as an illustration ofits own production. The film commences witha near-perfect distribution of granular noisearayographically prepared salt-and-pepper roast,

as Man Ray later described it.85 A peripatetictack quickly appears in positive (dark forms ona light ground) followed by positive pins.Less perfectly distributed noisea snowstorm,with the flakes flying in all directions instead offallingis followed by gray frames and somefleeting, illegible words. (Direct inspection ofthe filmstrip reveals Man Ray tirer 5 fois.)The tack returnsnow in the original negative:white on black ground as in X-ray films

Top: Christian Schad.Schadograph No. 2, 1919. 2008Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Bottom: Lszl Moholy-Nagy.Untitled photogram, 1922. 2008

Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Opposite, left: Man Ray. Retour la raison, 1923. Film strip.

Opposite, right: Man Ray.Retour la raison, 1923.Frame enlargement.


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followed by huge white pins crisscrossing and revolving in an epileptic dance.All this in a mere twenty seconds. More visual noise. Then the first camera-basedimage: an approximately two-second shot of a luminous lightbulb in a completelydark space. The discernible objects of the opening sequence, in sum, are pins,tacks, and a two-second shot of a lightbulb. Man Ray later described the produc-tion of Retourin almost identical terms: I threw pins and thumbtacks at random;then turned on the white light for a second or two, as I had done for my still

Rayographs. This lightbulb is the precise inverse of the lightbulb in Le GricesCastle One. Where the bulb in Castle One (literally) obliterates the projectedimage and illuminates the spectatorial space of the cinema, Retours bulb (figu-ratively) creates the rayographic images just projected in the dark space of thetheater. (In his later, admittedly dubious account, Man Ray underscores the dark-ness of the theater no less than three times.) For the two or three seconds the light-bulb is on screenthe only source of illuminationthe theater is structurallyanalogous to the darkroom during the creation of a rayograph. If Castle One cameto be known as the lightbulb film, Retour la raison should be called the dark-room film. Where Le Grice attempted to subvert the classical experience ofcinema, Man Ray was able to re-create it: a dark room illuminated by a solitaryelectric light projected on a screen. Rather than create an apparatus of experi-mental film where the reception mirrors the production (Le Grice and the LFMC),Man Ray and his critics came to understand implicitly that the rayographs con-ditions of production mirror cinemas conditions of reception and that they werethus able to transpose the cinematic experience onto photosensitive paper. Afterthe Soire du coeur a barbe, Man Ray did not screen or even mention Retourforthe duration of the interwar period. His next few ventures in cinema wentnowhere. Instead, Man Ray found cinematic success in his darkroom. This is thecinematic treasure unearthed in the rayographs.

Surely, the transposition from the cinema to the rayographs was not exact. Norwas it ever named outright. But in lieu of a thorough historical demonstration, letus conclude by entering Man Rays darkroom-turned-cinema via one of his cam-eraless photographsand let us do so with the eyes and words of GeorgesRibemont-Dessaignes, the most consistent and insightful champion of the rayo-graphs in the 1920s. The image in question is the eighth of twelve untitled rayo-graphs compiled in Champs dlicieux(1922), the first limited-edition folio of


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avant-garde cameraless photographs, introduced by Tristan Tzaras short text LaPhotographie lenvers. As with nearly all rayographs, the image is composedof a dark ground that at once insists on its own flatness and conjures a vast, darkspace. Of the depicted objects, the spring is the most easily discernible; it clearlywinds its way from the lower left-hand corner toward the upper right of theimage. This spring anticipates the rayographic strips of Retour, where a similarform will be inscribed uninterruptedly and in its full length on the celluloid and

set into motion exclusively through the action of the projector (when camera-lessly exposed, neither the spring nor the film nor the light source moved at all).Retours spring is suspended between the static materiality of the filmstrips andthe erratic immateriality of projection. The spring in the Champs dlicieuximageis also suspended: between the materiality of the paper image and the immateri-ality of the space it projects. The rest of the image is not so easily explicable.Nebulous shapes seem to hover in the distance. A perfect circle rests at the sur-face. The image can be deciphered only when we shift our perspective from thevertical to the horizontal axis: we are not looking out a window but up, as if frombeneath a glass table. Suddenly, the perfect circle is legible as the base of a wine-glass; the spring snakes around its stem; its empty bulb stands at an angle (theclearest indication of the direction of the light source).

By the time Ribemont-Dessaignes came to describe this image, he had alreadyarticulated the effects of the rayographs: Man Ray invents a new world and pho-tographs it to prove it exists, a world composed from the relativity of time andof space where one belongs to many fields of gravitation at the same time,where causality hardly touches the spirit.86 This 1923 description is reminis-cent of Hugo Mnsterbergs inaugural theorization of the dominant aestheticsensation that undergirds cinematic pleasurelater repeated by countless othersin Man Rays direct circlenamely, The massive outer world has lost its weight,it has been freed from space, time, and causality.87 Unsurprisingly, Ribemont-Dessaignes describes the eighth image from Champs dlicieuxand the space itengenders in profoundly cinematic terms:

And in fact, in a spacewe have the obligation to speak of space, whateverthat might meanin a space where sound appears not to propagate, it seemsthat we have discovered many ways to move, and to go from extraordinaryfloating clouds high above in the sky to a crystal glass. We feel that we nolonger have the same dimensions as those which preside over our ownbodywhen it moves in the form of the gaze along a spiraled spring thatrecalls familiar shapes.88


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This spacewhere silence prevails and we are freed from the dimension whichnormally preside over our body, a body that now moves as a gazeis the space ofthe movie theater when the spectator is absorbed in the experience of cinema.Ribemont-Dessaignes aligns the dark spacewhatever that might meanof therayographs with the spaceless darkness of the cinema. This spaceless darknessis what the LFMC worked so hard to subvert and Kubelka so hard to preserve.

The obscurity of the darkroom, the cinema, and the rayographs are aligned.

But because a 24

18 cm photograph is so utterly different from a ninety-seattheater, the eighth rayograph from Champs dlicieuxinverts the terms of InvisibleCinema when screening a film like Retour la raison:rather than the dark spaceof the cinema inducing a sense of floating in a vast, benign space, looking at arectangular-shaped hallucination, the absorption in the rectangular-shaped, two-dimensional rayograph enables us to move in the form of a gaze, freed from bod-ily constraints. Rather than an immaterial space in which one is confronted byimages that insist on their own materiality, the rayographs offer material imagesthat open onto an immaterial space. In an assertion oft repeated (and issued byothers already in the 1920s), Roland Barthes claimed that

the photograph must be related to a pure spectatorial consciousness and notto the more projective, more magical fictional consciousness on whichfilm by and large depends. This would lend authority to the view thatthe distinction between film and photograph is not a simple difference ofdegree but a radical opposition. Film can no longer be seen as animatedphotographs: the having-been-there gives way before a being-there of thething.89

The rayographs instantiate neither a photographic having-been-there nor acinematic being-there of the thing but the not-being-there of the moviegoer. Theycollapse the radical opposition between photography and film through thedepersonalized body of the cinematic spectator and the absorption of the rayo-graphic viewereach of whom floats in a spaceless darkness anchored in pho-tography and realized in a darkened room. Avant-garde cameraless photographsbelong neither on the back side of the Pompidou installation, to a bygone eraof materiality and immediacy, nor to past futures of immaterial distance but atthe boundary that divides immaterial cinema from material film and questions thevery viability of that division.


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Notes

The impetus for this essay was the fortieth anniversary of the London Film-Makers Co-op and thefilm programs and DVD, Shoot Shoot Shoot(2006), curated by Marc Webber. A review of the DVD

by Federico Windhausen is published in this issue as part of Grey Matter.I would like to thank Branden Joseph for the impetus to extend a dissertation chapter from the

1920s through to the present and for shepherding my efforts to completion. Thanks also to KarenBeckman for insisting on a feminist critique of avant-garde film still underrepresented in this andother essays. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1. Philippe-Alain Michaud, ed., Le Mouvement des images/The Movement of Images, exh. cat.(Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006).

2. Man Ray, Self Portrait(1963; reprint, Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1998), 212. Patrick de Haas hasdemonstrated that the placement of the thumbtacks was anything but random. He was also the firstto discover photographs of naked body parts contact-printed onto the celluloid. See Patrick deHaas, Cinma intgral(Paris: Transdition, 1985), esp. 108111. A great deal can and must be saidabout the content of the film and the filmstrips, especially in relation to the female body, but spacerestrictions limit my discussion to the material strips and their projection. I address these ques-tions at length in my forthcoming dissertation, Into the Dark Chamber: Avant-Garde Photogramsand the Cinematic Imaginary(Princeton University, 2008).

3. See Jean Cocteau, An Open Letter to M. Man Ray, American Photographer (1922), inPhotography in the Modern Era, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art;Aperture, 1989), 2; and Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index: Part 1, in The Originality of theAvant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).

4. Carol Armstrong, Cameraless: From Natural Illustrations and Nature Prints to Manual andPhotogenic Drawings and Other Botanographs, in Ocean Flowers, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherinede Zegher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 163; emphasis in original.

5. Man Ray, Self Portrait, 212.6. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory,

Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142.7. Raymond Cogniat, La soire du Coeur Barbe, Comoedia, 8 July 1923, 2.8. The best account of the evening remains Michel Sanouillet, Dada Paris (Paris: Jean-Jacques

Pauvert, 1965), 380387.9. Jane Heap, Soire coeur barbe, The Little Review9, no. 3 (1923): 2729.10. Louis Aragon, Soire du coeur barbe, (1923) in Projet dhistoire littraire contemporaine,

ed. Marc Dachy (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 132.11. Man Ray, Self Portrait, 21213. This fictitious description has served as the basis of innu-

merable accounts up to the present.12. Louis Tosmas, La bataille des dadastes au thtre Michel, Bonsoir, 8 July 1923, n.p.13. Georges Charensols passing reference to Retourquickly dismissed as having but demon-

strative valueis surely the exception that proves the rule. Georges Charensol, Le film abstrait,Les cahiers du mois, no. 16/17 (1925): 83.

14. Georges Sadoul, Souvenirs dun tmoin, tudes cinmatographiques, no. 3839 (1965): 17.


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15. Carl I. Belz, The Film Poetry of Man Ray, in Man Ray Retrospective of the Los AngelesCounty Museum of Art, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1966), 43. Theessay was first published in Criticism (Spring 1965). In point of fact, Iris Barry acquired a copy forthe Museum of Modern Arts film library in 1935, the first year of its existence, and the film wasscreened at the first international festival for experimental and poetic film at Knokke-Le-Zoute(Belgium) in 1949. Retour garnered a mention in Alfred Barrs 1936 catalog for Cubism andAbstract Art,but only as the poor predecessor of Emak Bakia. Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and AbstractArt, exh. cat. (1936; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986), 167.

16. See P. Adams Sitney, Introduction, in The Essential Cinema, ed. P. Adams Sitney (NewYork: Anthology Film Archives/New York University Press, 1975); and Parker Tyler, UndergroundFilm: A Critical History(New York: Grove Press, 1969), 241. Both Tyler and Anthology includedMan Rays next two films, Emak Bakia and Letoile de mer.

17. Malcolm Le Grice, Material, Materiality, Materialism (1978), in Experimental Cinema inthe Digital Age (London: BFI, 2001), 165.

18. Deke Dusinberre, Le Retour la raison: Hidden Meanings, in Unseen Cinema, ed. BrucePosner (New York: Black Thistle Press/Anthology Film Archives, 2001), 66.

19. See, among many examples, tudes cinmatographiques, no. 3839 (1965); and Ado Kyrou,Le Surralisme au cinma (1952; reprint, Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1963), 174178.

20. Malcolm Le Grice, The History We Need (1979), in Experimental Cinema in the Digital

Age, 31. He continues, Man Rays case illustrates this borderline which represents the basis of themajor and most contentious exclusion made by this version of experimental film history.21. Man Ray, To Be Continued Unnoticed (1948), in Man Ray Retrospective, exh. cat., 24.22. Birgit Hein, The Structural Film, in Film as Film, ed. Phillip Drummond (London: Arts

Council of Great Britain, 1979), 94. Hein first made this argument in Birgit Hein, Film ber Film,in Documenta 6, vol. 2, exh. cat. (Kassel: Paul Dierichs KG, 1977), 255. I have made minor typo-graphical corrections to the English text.

23. V.I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting(1926), ed. and trans. Ivor Montagu (NewYork: Grove Press, 1960), 83, 84; emphasis in original.

24. Even as his most dogmatic assertion of medium-specificity had only recently become widelyavailable, Greenbergs conception of modernism was well known throughout avant-garde circles.See Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, in The New Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York:E.P. Dutton & Co., 1966).

25. In 1969, P. Adam Sitney famously announced the emergence of structural film. Landow, PaulSharits, and other American filmmakers are discussed at length, but with the exception of PeterKubelka, then active in New York, Sitney makes no mention of European filmmakers. In opposi-tion to Sitney, Peter Gidal introduced the term Structural/Materialist film or simply materialistfilm. Although politically committed, Le Grice avoided the direct Marxist connotations of Gidalsterm and preferred material film, partly in line with an early-twentieth-century awareness ofmedium-specificity in painting. See P. Adams Sitney, Structural Film (1969), in Film CultureReader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970); Peter Gidal, Theory and Definition ofStructural/Materialist Film, in Structural Film Anthology, ed. Peter Gidal (London: BFI, 1976);Peter Gidal, Materialist Film (London: Routledge, 1989); Le Grice, Material, Materiality, Materialism;


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and Malcolm Le Grice and P. Adams Sitney, Narrative Illusion vs. Structural Realism (1977), inExperimental Cinema in the Digital Age, 134.

26. David Curtis, English Avant-Garde Film: An Early Chronology, Studio International190,no. 978 (1975): 181.

27. Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 118, 35. In bothinstances, Le Grice refers specifically to the rayographic sections of Retour.

28. Le Grice wrote in one of his earliest published pieces (and reaffirmed throughout thedecade), In some respects this development is parallel to a development in twentieth-century art,

particularly painting, where the physical properties of the material become the basis of the lan-guage, counteracting, contexting or denying the associative and illusory nature of the image.Malcolm Le Grice, Thoughts on Recent Underground Film (1972), in Experimental Cinema inthe Digital Age, 16.

29. The termfilm as film has a long and complicated history in LFMC circles. David Curtis andPeter Gidal used the term as early as 1971. (Gidal later regretted its essentialist connotations.) Theterm became the title of two major European avant-garde film exhibitions that, in retrospect, markthe end rather than the zenith of structural film and expanded cinema. See David Curtis,Experimental Cinema (New York: Universe Books, 1971), 157; Peter Gidal, Film as Film (1972), inA Perspective on English Avant-Garde Film, ed. David Curtis and Deke Dusinberre (London: ArtsCouncil of Great Britain, 1978); Gidal, Materialist Film, 20; Birgit Hein and Wulf Herzogenrath,

eds., Film als Film (Cologne: Klnischer Kunstverein, 1977); and Phillip Drummond, ed., Film asFilm (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979).30. Paul Sharits, Words Per Page, Afterimage, no. 4 (1972): 27. Later in the same essay, Sharits

highlights the importance of the rayographic sections of Retour.31. For Peter Wollen, this insistence on the ontological autonomy of film, typified a dis-

placement of concerns from the art world to the film world rather than an extension. Peter Wollen,The Two Avant-Gardes, Studio International190, no. 978 (1975): 172. P. Adams Sitney singledout Greenbergism in his attack on Le Grice and the LFMC. Le Grice distanced himself fromGreenberg on ideological and political but not aesthetic grounds. Le Grice and Sitney, NarrativeIllusion vs. Structural Realism, 145. More recently, David James has harshly characterized struc-tural film, in particular the theories of Peter Gidal, as establishing the film medium as a transhis-torical absolute that reconstituted a Greenbergian medium-specific essentialism. David E. James,

Allegories of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 278279.32. See Le Grice, Material, Materiality, Materialism, 165; and Hein, The Structural Film, 9596.

33. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (1967), in Art and Objecthood(Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1998), 164.

34. Malcolm Le Grice, Real TIME/SPACE (1972), in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, 156.35. By the mid- to late 1970s, as texts became available in English, direct links began to emerge

between members of the LFMCespecially Le Grice and fellow LFMC spokesman Peter Gidaland critics associated with apparatus theory in France and England. See, for instance, Malcolm LeGrice, Problematising the Spectators Placement in Film (1978), in Experimental Cinema in theDigital Age, 178; and Stephen Heath, Repetition Time: Notes around Structuralist/MaterialistFilm (1977), in The British Avant-Garde Film: 1926 to 1995, ed. Michael OPray (London: Arts


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Council of Great Britain, 1996).36. Le Grice had recently completed seven years of art training at the Slade School of Fine Arts,

where he constructed canvases with events in front of them, like tape recorders and other time-based objects. See Maxa Zoller and Malcolm Le Grice, Interview, in X-Screen, ed. MatthiasMichalka (Cologne: Walther Knig, 2004), 136137. See also Malcolm Le Grice, Reflections on MyPractice and Media Specificity, in Experimental Film and Video, ed. Jackie Hatfield (Eastleigh,UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2006), 220.

37. Curtis, English Avant-Garde Film, 178. Le Grice repeated this assertion in future program

notes.38. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 8.

Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the content of the other, obscur-ing the operation of both (52). Not surprisingly, the lightbulb was a favorite subject of avant-gardefilmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic. Compare Hollis Framptons description of his film Information(1966): hypothetical first film for a synthetic tradition constructed from scratch on reasonableprinciples, given: (1) camera; (2) raw stock; (3) a single bare light bulb. Hollis Frampton, New YorkFilm-Makers Cooperative Catalogue (1975): 88, quoted in James, Allegories of Cinema, 254.

39. Roland Barthes, Upon Leaving the Movie Theater (1975), in Apparatus, ed. Theresa HakKyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 4.

40. Le Grice, The History We Need, 37.

41. Anthony McCall, Two Statements (1974/1975), in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader ofTheory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 253.42. McCall, Two Statements, 254. Le Grice republished McCalls Notes in Duration in full as

part of his film reviews for Studio International190, no. 978 (November/December 1975): 226227.43. Deke Dusinberre, On Expanding Cinema, Studio International190, no. 978 (1975): 224.

For recent scholarship, see Jonathan Walley, The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema:Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film, October103 (2003); Branden W.

Joseph, Sparring with the Spectacle, in Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and RelatedWorks, ed. Christopher Eamon (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 9497; andGeorge Baker, Film Beyond Its Limits, Grey Room 25 (2006): 116119.

44. Le Grice, Material, Materiality, Materialism, 167; emphasis in original. Le Grice trainedmany future LFMC membersincluding William Raban, Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicolson, and

Marilyn Halfordat Saint Martins School of Art, where he taught. Until the LFMC set up its ownworkshop at the Robert Street Arts Lab (IRAT, Institute for Research and Technology) in late 1969,Le Grices homemade equipment was the primary access point for alternative printing. Le Grice,Raban, Nicolson, and Eatherley became a loose performance collective that adopted the nameFilmaktion after a 1972 expanded cinema exhibition at the Liverpool Walker Art Gallery of thesame name.

45. Malcolm Le Grice, Artist Statement, in A Perspective on English Avant-Garde Film, ed.Curtis and Dusinberre, 69.

46. P.A.P. Filme (Munich: P.A.P. Filmgalerie, 1972), n.p.47. Le Grice now seems of two minds concerning the nostalgic content. He recently avowed,

the images of family have been distanced from any nostalgic function by the formal structure of


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the film. Le Grice, Reflections on My Practice, 228. Yet at the same time, he wrote in programnotes for a recent screening in Germany (and relayed to me via e-mail on 20 December 2006):WellI thought it was about film as a medium and materialscratches, sprocket holes, dirt, slip-page in the projector, blank screen, gaps in the sound-trackI forgot that one of the boys was me,the other was my brother, the young woman was my mothernow deadand behind the camerawas my fathernow deadsee the cyclopsthe dog was minenothing to do with Rogerthatis another story.

48. A single-screen version is available as part of the DVD curated by Marc Webber, Shoot Shoot

Shoot: British Avant-Garde Film of the 1960s and 1970s (London: LUX; Paris: Re:Voir, 2006).Malcolm Le Grice generously made a DVD of the two-screen version available to me for this article.

49. The 9.5 mm gauge, introduced by Path in 1922, lost a format war with Kodaks less eco-nomical but better marketed 8 mm film stock. See Lenny Lipton, Independent Filmmaking(London: Studio Vista, 1974). Le Grice wrote the postscript to the British edition.

50. Le Grice, Real TIME/SPACE, 158.51. Slides is also available on the Shoot Shoot Shoot DVD. If the materiality of the celluloid film

gives way to the immaterial code of the digital video disca difference apparent less in projectionthan when the physical reel or DVD is grasped in handthat same code enables the viewer topause the movie and extend those moments where Nicolson arrests the flood of images and allowsthe literally threaded filmstrip to appear still on the screen. These momentsinfrequent but essential

to the filminvoke a tactile relationship to the filmstrip and the cinematic experience, a relation-ship that ironically is enhanced by the capabilities of digitalization. On the digital freeze frame, seeLaura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), 30.

52. Peter Gidal, Technology and Ideology in/through/and Avant-Garde Film: An Instance, inThe Cinematic Apparatus, ed. T. de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martins Press,1980), 151, 55. Gidal warned against the fetishization of process but defended its central position atthe Co-op.

53. See Sitney, Introduction, viiviii. This explication of Invisible Cinema was first publishedas part of the manifesto issued by Anthology Film Archives at its opening on November 30, 1970.See Kubelkas first articulation of the idea in a letter republished in Peter Kubelka, InvisibleCinema (1959), in Avantgardistischer Film 19511971: Theorie, ed. Gottfried Schlemmer (Munich:Carl Hanser Verlag, 1973), 4041.

54. Sitney, Introduction, viii.55. Annette Michelson, Gnosis and Iconoclasm, October83 (Winter 1998): 35.56. Peter Kubelka, Invisible Cinema, Design Quarterly, no. 93 (1974): 35.57. Sharits, Words Per Page, 42.58. Kubelka, Invisible Cinema, 3435.59. Vincent Canby, Now You Can See Invisible Cinema, New York Times, 29 November 1970, 38.60. Between the 1958 conception and the 1970 realization of Invisible Cinema, the dominant

site of movie reception had become realliving rooms: [Invisible Cinema] emerged at a time whenthe movie theater was in its death throes, at a time whenin many countriestelevision beganto play the dominant role in the distribution of films. Werner Jehle, Geschichte der Kino-Architektur, Cinema, no. 4 (1979): 16. For data concerning the rise of the televised film and the


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made-for-TV movie, see Cobbett S. Steinberg, Reel Facts (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 2936.Kubelkas original conception of Invisible Cinema coincided with the major studios initial releaseof their films for televisual distribution in the late 1950s. Equally important, Kubelka excludednearly all the 1950s film industry innovationswidescreen, stereo magnetic sound, 3D, and soonintended to win back their audience from television. These technologies of realism, as JohnBelton argues, engender a kind of excess that was often packaged as spectacle (surround sound tothe point of distraction, etc.), thereby violating the technological invisibility essential to InvisibleCinema. See John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992),

202216. Additionally, the desperation of the film industry was palpable in several reviews ofInvisible Cinema, in large part because American cinema attendance reached its nadir in 1971. Forannual figures on American cinema attendance and their underlying causes, see Steinberg, ReelFacts, 46; and Belton, Widescreen Cinema, esp. 6984.

61. Rudolf Harms, Philosophie des Films (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1926; reprint, 1970), 58. Harmsdescribes the cinema in similar terms in his introductory overview (iii).

62. Konrad Lange, Die Kunst des Lichtspieltheaters (1913), in Geschichte der Filmtheorie,ed. Helmut H. Diederichs (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 83. Lange was a leading reactionary criticin the 1910s.

63. Howard Thompson, Silence Says a Lot for Film Archives, The New York Times, 4 December1970, 4. Thompson is quoting Roger Mignon.

64. Harms, Philosophie des Films, 60.65. Jean Goudal, Surrealism and Cinema (1925), in French Film Theory and Criticism, 19071939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 355356. Translation slightlymodified.

66. Goudal, Surrealism and Cinema, 355. Emphasis in original.67. Canby, Now You Can See Invisible Cinema, 38.68. Sitney, Introduction, vi.69. Sitney, Introduction, vi. Annette Michelson notes that this principle of the loop as the

ideal form of the canons exhibition was highly indebted to Kubelka, who, earlier, had foundedthe sterreichisches Film Museum. Michelson, Gnosis and Iconoclasm, 7.

70. Kubelka was on the selection committee for Essential Cinema and avidly expressed his disdainfor contemporary European experimental film. That same committee, moreover, was composed of

six men (five after Brakhage resigned) and not a single womana fact all too poignantly reflected inthe selection.

71. Eric de Bruyn, The Expanded Field of Cinema, or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square,inX-Screen, ed. Michalka, 165. Michelson and de Bruyn offer strong interpretations of the radicalproject that was Anthology Films Archives only to subsume Invisible Cinema within it.

72. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 150.73. The remarkable scope of Man Rays film activities was first revealed in Jean Michel Bouhours

and Patrick de Haas, eds., Man Ray: Directeur du mauvais movies (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou,1997). Until this catalog, Man Ray had largely thrown historians off the scent of his hybrid endeav-ors with fallacious accounts such as the one of his failed collaboration with Comte Etienne deBeaumont and Henri Chomette: A young cinaste who directed the film introduced shots of


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revolving crystals, abstract optical effects similar to my Rayographs, but I would have nothing todo with such a hybrid production. Man Ray, Self Portrait, 132. More on these connections is in myforthcoming dissertation.

74. Andr Gain, Un entretien avec Man Ray, Cina-Cin pour tous, no. 144 (1929): 27.75. Jean Gallotti, La photographie est-elle un art? Man Ray, Lart vivant, no. 103 (1929): 282.76. Cocteau, An Open Letter to M. Man Ray, 2.77. See especially Rosalind Krauss, Corpus Delicti, in LAmour Fou (New York: Abbeville,

1985), 74; and Hal Foster, Violation and Veiling in Surrealist Photography: Woman as Fetish, as

Shattered Object, as Phalus, in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2002), 217. The female nude is perhaps the central motif in Man Raysoeuvre and is a site of subjugation and freedom that I address at length in my forthcoming disser-tation but which lies beyond the scope of the current essay. For a curiously sympathetic reading ofMan Rays nudes, see Whitney Chadwick, Lee Millers Two Bodies, in Emmanuel Radnitsky, ed.Leif Wigh (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2004). The issue was treated with the utmost urgency inLFMC circles. Peter Gidal, for example, all but abstained from the representation of the female formon screen.

78. The rayograph, now located at the Getty, is signed and dated 1922. Man Ray often backdatedrayographs, and this imagelike the more famous Museum of Modern Art rayograph just dis-cussedis more likely composed of filmstrips from Retour. In any event, the image was certainly

made between 1922, the year of his first rayograph, and 1925, the year this rayograph was first pub-lished (unsigned and undated), and so is closely related to the cinematic experimentation sur-rounding Retour. The Man Ray Estate denied the reproduction of this and other rayographs in anyfuture electronic format that the print version would later take. The image can be found, however,at: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=53362.

79. Gallotti, La photographie est-elle un art? Man Ray, 282.80. Introduction to Second tape, Les cahiers du mois, no. 16/17 (1925): 85.81. Man Ray later reflected, I remember when I was a boy, placing fern leaves in a printing

frame with proof paper, expositing it to sunlight, and obtaining a white negative of the leaves. Thiswas the same idea, but with an added three-dimensional quality and tone graduation. Man Ray,Self Portrait, 106.

82. On Christian Schads cameraless photographs, see Nikolaus Schad and Anna Auer, eds.,

Schadographien (Passau, Germany: Dietmar Klinger, 1999). On Moholy-Nagys photograms, seethe superlative catalog by Renate Heyne, Floris M. Neusss, and Herbert Molderings, eds., LaszloMoholy-Nagy: Fotogramme 19221943 (Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 1995).

83. Lszl Moholy-Nagy, LightA Medium of Plastic Expression, Broom 4, no. 4 (1923): 284;emphasis in original. That Moholy-Nagy does not immediately grasp the full implications of hisinsight is clear from the changes made between the two editions of his mid-decade classic, PaintingPhotography Film (1925/1927). In both editions, he largely repeats the definition of the photogramfrom Broom. But he changes the parenthetical elucidation of photography without apparatusfrom an architectural blueprint or Lichtpause to a sophisticated play of light and shadow.Where the latter allows for a three-dimensional projection environment, the former is resolutelytwo-dimensional. Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Photographie Film (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925),


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25; and Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotografie Film (1927; reprint, ed. Hans M. Wingler Berlin:Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1986), 30.

84. Moholy-Nagy, LightA Medium of Plastic Expression, 284. Photogram scholars havedownplayed the relationship to film. Film and media scholars have echoed Moholy-Nagys teleo-logical rhetoric in order to argue that photograms were merely an intermediate stage in the history ofcreation with light [Lichtgestaltung], a history whose telos is the kinetic light display [Lichtspiel].Anne Hoormann, Lichtspiele (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 153.

85. This and further descriptions come from Man Ray, Self Portrait, 212213. A 1970s-style

analysis might liken this first sequence to the grain of the film.86. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Dada Painting or The Oil-Eye, The Little Review9, no. 4

(Autumn/Winter 19231924): 1112.87. Hugo Mnsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study(1916; reprint, New York: Dover, 1970),

95; emphasis in original. Miriam Hansen notes, It is no coincidence that the first systematicattempt to theorize spectatorship was published in 1916 when the techniques (primarily of conti-nuity editing) that supported this transformation were being established as rules in production:Hugo Mnsterberg, The Photoplay. Miriam Hansen, Early Cinema: Whose Public Sphere? inEarly Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 243, n. 14.

88. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Man Ray, Les feuilles libres, no. 40 (1925): 268. Ribemont-Dessaignes cited his 1925 discussion of rayographs in its entirety in his 1930 monograph on Man

Ray, the very first, and declared, I dont recant a word. See Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, ManRay(Paris: Gallimard, 1930), 46.89. Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image (1964), in ImageMusicText, ed. Stephen Heath

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 45; emphasis in original. Barthes later admitted, I decided Iliked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it.Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 3;emphasis in original.

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