What does ‘Cinema’ mean today? In the aftermath of its one hundredth birthday the field of cinema seems to be expanding further and further, split up into countless media and modalities, based on wide-ranging technologies and motives. Now that the analogue image is being quickly replaced by the digital one, beyond the materiality of video and film, more is being produced and distributed than ever before, but at the same time the way we watch, listen and experience cinema is being severely fragmented and individualized. Cinema no longer holds a specific place of its own; it is everywhere, intertwined with and integrated into other cultural forms. Within that context we today witness a significant renewal in the ways of approaching cinema and the audiovisual arts, not only in the work of a great number of artists, but also on an institutional level. The familiar opposition between the ‘black box’ and the ‘white cube’, between cinema culture and museum culture, can no longer be sustained, and the call for new models resounds more and more. What kind of shifts in meaning do these evolutions and contaminations entail in the way we look at and reflect on art and film? Do visual arts provide filmmakers with a free zone, where they can finally fulfil their most radical promises, or is it more like a transit zone, an intermediate stage in the re-thinking of the cinema project?
12 October 2007, Argos Brussels
Philippe-Alain Michaud
Le lieu du film
“Sous l’effet simultané de la numérisation généralisée de la culture visuelle et de l’irruption du film sur la scène artistique, la désintégration récente du modèle de la black box nous oblige à repenser le lieu du film autrement, à la croisée des arts visuels et des arts de la scène.”
Art historian and curator Philippe-Alain Michaud (FR, 1961) is responsible for the audiovisual collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris. Based on the collection he put together the exhibition Le Mouvement des images – Art et Cinéma in 2006, presenting a new take on the 20th century, through the history of cinema. He particularly investigates the twilight zones and frictions between the visual arts and cinema, among others with Hollywood Déconstruit : remontages, remises en scène, resucées (2004), a film programme exploring the way how experimental filmmakers and visual artists (re)interpret the world of Hollywood cinema. He published the books Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement (1998), Le peuple des images (2002) and Sketches. Histoire de l’art, cinéma (2006), in which he points out, among other things, that the representation of movement is by no means a privilege of cinema.
19 October 2007, Argos Brussels
Mark Nash
Between Cinema and a Hard Place: dilemmas of the moving image as post-medium
Mark Nash (UK, 1947) heads the department ‘Curating Contemporary Art’ at the Royal College of Art in London. He published globally on various types of cinema and audiovisual art (including the likes of Screen magazine) and he is considered one of the foremost British film theoreticians and critics. Over the past years he has also been active as a curator, including Documenta 11 (2002), the film section of the Berlin Biennale (2004) and the exhibition Experiments with Truth (2004-5), for which he explored the documentary tendency in contemporary film and video. As a scenarist and producer he has worked with Isaac Julien, for instance, on the acclaimed Franz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (1996). One aspect of his current research entails the role of audiovisual art in the museum and the gallery, and the broader meaning of the moving image in contemporary art.
26 October 2007, Argos Brussels
Laura Mulvey
Filmmaker and critic Laura Mulvey (UK, 1941) is professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her work as a critic during the 1970s, particularly her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), is considered to be one of the main foundations of feminist film theory. During the period 1974–1982 she produced numerous theoretical films with her husband Peter Wollen, touching areas in the discourse of feminism, semiotics, psychoanalysis and left-wing politics. Later she also produced the film Disgraced Monuments (1993) together with Mark Lewis. Her recent book Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006) offers a number of reflections on the impact of new technologies on the cinema experience. Particularly with regards to the relationship between the moving and the static image, since the possibilities to decelerate the image, repeat and freeze it, creates a shift from a voyeuristic to a more fetishist relationship with the cinematographic object.
9 November 2007, Argos Brussels
Jean-Christophe Royoux
“De l’écran unique aux dispositifs d’images : pourquoi (au moins) deux plutôt que un ? Pourquoi le multiple ?”
Starting from the example of Time Square, Jean-Christophe Royoux showed how multi-projection is one of the exemplary forms of the exhibition paradigm, which has been for a very long time, as was shown by numerous authors, poets, philosophers and architects since the middle of the 19th century, the paradigm of the modern city. Only since 2006 this has become the most widely spread way of life for a majority of people here on earth. The experience of multi-projection is quite simply a highly concentrated experience of the world we live in. Once this urban genealogy is recontextualized and put into perspective, Royoux focussed on the pivotal question, recurrent, typical of any image installation, of any type of exhibition cinema – the question about association, about the nature of a relationship between one and the other, which in fact amounts to the question of what common means, and what community is all about. In that sense the “at least two” of multi-projection is echoed, as was expertly shown by Jean-Luc Godard in Numéro Deux, in the typical contemporary concern of knowing the circumstances under which we can coexist.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, art historian, critic and curator Jean-Christophe Royoux (FR, 1961) explores the in-between areas between cinema and the visual arts. This has resulted in numerous essays and artist monographs, on artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe and Tacita Dean, as well as exhibitions, such as Multipistes (2005, Argos), focusing on a number of young French artists presenting post-cinematographic forms in their work, deconstructions or alterations of the familiar notions of projection and identification. Royoux sees this “Cinéma d’Exposition” mainly as a catalyst for new narrative modalities, which make it possible to define the work of art as an intermediary between the author and the viewer, a structure for activating reading and experience of the processes of thought and memory.