Cinema and film are terms that have been inextricably linked since the Lumière
brothers showed their first motion picture Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in
Lyon in 1895. It is difficult to conceive of one without the other. According to film
theorist Jonathan Walley, the vanguards of ‘paracinema’ (such as Anthony McCall
and Tony Conrad) have tried to release cinema from the medium specificity of film
with works that prioritise time and light, arguing for a cinema without film. The
question this project proposes is: can film exist outside cinema?
This MPhil by project is led by a direct approach to creating the film image using
experimental filmmaking techniques. A series of experiments will look at subject
(time, motion, representational imagery) and context (location, site of the pro-filmic).
The studio outcomes will lead to a critical and philosophical inquiry into theories of
time, duration and movement through Henri Bergson and Mary-Ann Doane,
assessing how this relates to the notion of what cinema is via André Bazin. A series
of installations will demonstrate the tension between the visible and invisible by
capturing motion using lensless apparatuses, against a desire to see simultaneous
moments of time all at once with a material that divides and segments time. Using
expanded cinema strategies, these works will be presented to see how and to what
effect film, when presented as projection, object, and as a component of sculptural
installation, communicates ideas of movement, space and time.
The thesis analyses Jonathan Walley’s three pivotal essays on paracinema
comparing the concept and practice to expanded cinema. The filmstrip will be
explored through simultaneous exposure, site-specificity of the pro-filmic and
installation, printing, projection and hand processing. This will form the basis of a
critical analysis of how the lensless apparatus presents the nature of the film image,
movement and duration, against forms of paracinema.