Film Outside Cinema

Cinema and film are terms that have been inextricably linked since the Lumiere brothers showed their first motion picture Workers Leaving The Lumiere 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 Andre 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.