Max Arnzen: Seeking the Future of Cinema Through Intermedia

If art is to represent the avant-garde frame of mind in human insight, then it follows that science was the advancement of this way of thinking. This is in reference to Gene Youngblood's idea of the artist as an ecologist, that is, one who deals with environmental functions. In this way, the artist, and the scientist, rearrange the environment to the advantage of society. Youngblood's principles of art and science, and how they have both advanced the idea of the avant-garde thought process, which may appear obvious to some, are: Form, Structure and Place. However, it must be noted that these three principles have evolved into five newly applied fundamentals of contemporary art: appropriation, hybridity, performance, space, and time.

To apply these ideas to the cinema, as an art form, one can argue that within the experience of going to a theater there is the space, there is the allotted time for which the film plays, and there is the performance of the actors, the cinematography, the decor, the music, and so on. However, when it comes to appropriation, this can only be seen in the subject matter of the narrative, and not in its significance within the filmic context. As for hybridity, all that is offered is the multimedia experience of audio and visuals. Of course, this is just an examination of cinema through the lens of the so-called fundamentals of contemporary art, and it must be contended that not all contemporary art utilizes these fundamentals. However, in the midst of commercial driven cinema there lies a group of artists who have evolved past the idea of cinema (entertainment) as a passive experience. These Artists are more concerned with revealing a part of the viewer's universe that was previously unrecognized, and with the personal responsibility of the viewer versus creating an object that is intended to be owned.

Youngblood calls this practice expanded cinema, in that it expands the consciousness of the viewer, and in a way recalls hominization as described by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: that in the ladder of evolution, each new generation takes the experiences of the last level and expands upon them. Yet this practice as a whole, and not just a term, could be derived from conceptualism, more so in the Ducamphian dictum that the viewer completes the work of art. (Question: If you build a sculpture in the middle of the desert, and no one sees it, does it exist?) This issue is addressed and proven in Duchamp’s functional sculptures such as Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) in 1920 where he would have viewers participate by spinning objects. Therefore, in cinema, as a flat projection wherein spectators are seated, this practice can first be seen in the avant-garde notions of such filmmakers as Stan Brakhage where more is required of the viewer, and passivity is replaced by involvement (in the interpretive process).

But how do we apply these concepts today when there is still a want for profit motivated entertainment, and the arthouse cinema is virtually non-existent? If those known as avant-garde (or experimental) filmmakers have evolved past cinema as a passive experience in the restricted and disciplinary protocols of sitting back and shutting up, then, without this underground venue, they will continue to evolve outside of the theater. It is evident that the art gallery and museum have become the new exhibition spaces for such works and those who produce such works have evolved past the flat screen and now become known as intermedia artists.

Herein lies an even larger dilemma, the filmmaker as an artist. It is common knowledge that the filmmaker will work with film to place their signature upon their creation (however, it should be noted that with digital video, Astruc's idea of camera-stylo, or camera as a pen, is frequently becoming replaced by the camera as a pencil, John Baldessari's idea), but that the artist will work with whatever means (mediums) necessary to get their idea across, hence conceptualism, or idea over object. In this way, the artist is not limiting their possibilities, but rather utilizing all of them, and the filmmaker is reliant on a specific medium, and operating only within it. Therefore, the filmmaker represents the painter or sculptor, where a new object is created to be owned, and the intermedia artist represents that revelatory moment of "previously unrecognized relationships between existing phenomena, physical and metaphysical.”

Now, this doesn't go to say that a film cannot be considered a piece of art, nor that all filmmakers are not artists in some respects (Michael Snow, being the pioneer of Structuralist film, is a painter, sculptor, as well as musician, and contests that “every visual artist should learn how to draw”). However, a film does nothing to advance the immediacy, or the living and breathing sense, of art, what could be called a Happening. In this sense, a film functions on the same level as a painting would, something that can be duplicated and distributed to the masses, and it misses a pivotal aspect of contemporary art, that of time (aside from when it ends and begins). Where films are about an experience, intermedia events are the experience. This shatters the marketable and material aspect of what once legitimized film as an art form aside from theatre, as early film theorist Hugo Munsterberg would have it, the simplicity in marketing and distributing names and faces.

At this point, there needs to be clarification of what intermedia is, and what constitutes an intermedia event. Although Dick Higgins appears to have coined the term, intermedia in 1966, a group of artists under the name USCO also pioneered the development of multimedia performances in the 1960's. They joined forces with a group of behavioral scientists at Harvard University to form what is called the Intermedia Systems Corporation, whose views were pivoted towards entertainment as education. They described intermedia as:

The simultaneous use of various media to create a total environmental experience for the audience. Meaning is communicated not by coding ideas into abstract literary language, but by creating an emotionally real experience through the use of audiovisual technology. Originally conceived in the realm of art rather than in science or engineering, the principles on which intermedia is based are grounded in the fields of psychology, information theory, and communication theory.

An early example of an intermedia experience is the ONCE Group's Unmarked Interchange (1965), where live performers interacted against a large projection of Fred Astaire's Top Hat. Through doors in the bottom and top of the wall the film was projected on, the performers would dine by candlelight, read from erotic novels, and even casually hurl pies at each other, proving itself just as outrageous as any Astaire affair (although this may be better classified as intermedia theatre, it is the earliest example of a filmic installation I could find, aside from Warhol’s dull video parties). Later on, in 1969, musician John Cage and intermedia artist Ronald Nameth put together an astounding intermedia environment known as HPSCHD, in which seven amplified harpsichords, fifty-two loudspeakers, 8,000 slides, 100 films, and eleven-hundred-foot-wide screens, that wrapped around the audience, pitted the audience in an architectural analogue of the planetary system. Youngblood says, "intermedia environments turn the participant inward upon himself, providing a matrix for psychic exploration, perceptual, sensorial, and intellectual awareness.”

So, where do these ideas of spectator as an active participant (interpreter) and intermedia fit in with current cinema? If the avant-garde filmmakers of the past could force the viewer to create, along with the film, and to interpret, for themselves, what they were watching in the theater, then same is true for the intermedia artists to incorporate the cinema into their installations in the art galleries. As Chrissie Iles notes, film and video installation has evolved, through its history since the 1960's, in three phases, each semi-representative of its decade. These are the phenomenological and performative, the sculptural, and, currently, the cinematic.

As digital technology advances the dense textures previously associated only with film become available in digital formats. And, as the verb "to film" has now become the term to describe the many methods in which the moving image is created, the line has become blurred as to what is considered filming and what is videotaping. This is even more disorienting as some projects are filmed and then transferred to digital video for projection, and vice versa, hence the term filmic. In the intermedia projects of the last decade, filmic installations and interactive cinema have become synonymous with these practices, and thus, what may be the future of, what was once considered to be dead, the avant-garde (and possibly mainstream) cinema, is coming into shape.

Artist team Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller may have epitomized the idea of cinema within the art gallery with their piece Paradise Institute (2002). This filmic installation is comprised of a small wooden theater, in the gallery space, which holds about seventeen in velvet seats on a red carpet. Audience members are given the screen, which depicts the "visual film," a narrative composed of elements from film-noir, sci-fi, thriller, and, above all, experimental film, and headphones, which depict the "aural film," a supposed audience. This "aural film" breaks the idea of isolation one might feel while wearing the headphones for a cell phone may go off, someone might whisper intimately, and soon reality and fiction become intertwined; absorption in the film is suspended as other realities flow in.

The idea of installation art, the modification of a space to enhance its experience and the space as a means to convey ideas, when combined with filmic art immediately casts the spectator in an active role. This even works when the narrative is not of experimental qualities, however, the experience may be, which is the normal intent. In Eija-Liisa Ahtila's Anne, Aki, and God (1998), the installation, in which the spectator (participant) sees the narrative, is a theatrical setting consisting of an empty bed, a reading lamp, and five projections. It is split into two parts: the active and the passive. This "apartment" is the home of a man, Aki, who slowly descends into schizophrenia and is unable to leave his home as a projection of two people playing God advance the narrative from above. Aside from this, Ahtila incorporates a live element. A woman performs as Anne, who provides the lively part of this self-brooding installation. Many of these filmic installations deal with the thin line between imagination, insanity, hallucination, and reality.

These artists, among many others, have broken free from the limitations of cinema as a single screen, passive experience, all while still incorporating the very elements that comprise an enjoyable moment at the multiplex. With this filmmakers are now becoming artists. They exercise their power to utilize all possibilities in their creative works and even, consciously or not, exhibit the fundamentals of what is considered to be contemporary art.