Perhaps the most important reason, though, why for Greenaway it seems the (European) cinema has to pass through the art gallery if it is to“reinvent” itself is that constant irritant, the “rigour of cinema’s insistence on the rectangular frame, and that frame’s fixed aspect ratio.”Something must surely give:
The ever decreasing choice imposed by commercial and industrial standards has tigh- tened the frame-ratio to such a point that it must– in the same way as other tighten- ing strictures have operated in other fields– explode. Painting, as always, has set the pace ... the last three decades have seen [the heavily framed painted image] largely evaporate.”
Interestingly enough, it was Bazin in the already-quoted essay who provided one of the most often commented on distinctions between the cinematic and the pictorial frame.Bazin uses a rather traditional account of the picture frame to argue his well-known view that the outer edges of the cinema screen are not strictly speaking comparable to a frame at all, but instead function as a“piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality ... part of something prolonged
indefinitely into the universe.” But he then goes on to say that “a frame is cen- tripetal, a screen is centrifugal,” thus bringing us not only back to the idea of the “exploded cinema” of Greenaway, but also leaving open the possibility that modern painting (having abandoned the“centripetal” frame Bazin mounts his argument on) can indeed redeem the cinema, if only to the extent of restoring to it the function Bazin claims for it:“Thanks to the cinema and to the psychologi- cal properties of the screen, what is symbolic and abstract takes on the solid reality of a piece of ore.”
Here we have the “materiality” Greenaway misses in cinema, although its source of value is not anchored in the economic metaphor of Bazin’s realism, emerging as it does instead from any object’s status as “work,” once placed in the gallery space, the latter now performing in its institutional role as the gilded frame. Precisely insofar as it is the cinema’s ubiquity that makes it invisible, the question of the frame, now in the sense in which it has been problematized by post-Duchamp art and the gallery space, becomes central to the future of the cinema, even though the way in which these problems may be worked out can- not be those of modern art.
Greenaway contests and tests the frame in a number of ways. One of the most interesting moves is what I see as the shift from“wall-oriented, frontal-parallel- perpendicular” projection and display, to a horizontal plane (the table tops, as “screens” that need a different bodily engagement), and multi-dimensional screens“behind” screens, showing not an image but the cone which cinematic lighting cuts into space. The installation at once suggests the complex geometry of the cinematic apparatus, and acts as a projection-in-waiting where the up- right screen becomes a“box” to be filled rather than a surface to reflect an im- age and absorb a viewer. The glass vitrines, on the other hand, become cubic/ cubist screens, on which the actors’ roles – all the adulterers or kings they have played– unfold and are enfolded. This means a whole film in a box which is also a screen, without losing that ambiguity of objects/living things behind glass:“don’t touch, I’m valuable,” and “don’t touch, I’m dangerous.” Here, too, we may have come full circle from the time when Orson Welles compared American filmmaking unfavorably to European cinema, by saying that Holly- wood treats the cinema picture like a shop window behind glass, always stuffed to bursting.
The thematics of tilting the image, of renegotiating the relation of horizontal to vertical around the issue of the frame is as old as the cinema, and a crucial feature of early cinema. It is a preoccupation that I think, one also finds in Greenaway’s film, both literally (Vertical Features Remake) and metaphori- cally. Almost too insistently, from The Draughtsman’s Contract and Drow- ing by Numbersto A Zed and Two Noughts and Prospero’s Books, the sus- taining fiction turns out to be paranoid“fictions within a fiction,” passageways
to salvation or self-advancement become trapdoors to the ontological void, his heroes invariably“framers framed” by some fearful symmetry. The Belly of an Architect, for instance, is a good example of such radical dislodging the frame, since the problem of both Kracklite and his hero Boullée, is precisely one of“framing,” of sorting out the different time-frames and scale-frames, deciding in the end to take the plunge ...
The question of dislodging the frame in the cinema, however, seems urgent not so much because of the realist/illusionist problematic of Bazin, or the mate- rialist preoccupations of the modernist avant-garde, but because it opens up that other dimension, perhaps the most crucial for Greenaway, that of the audi- ence. His worry about the frame as a function of the size and proportion of the screen, which at first glance looks like the familiar grumble about cinema hav- ing given in to television’s aspect ratio, may well touch the nub of his enterprise, because the question of the frame implies scale, and via scale, the issue of cin- ema as architecture, as public art.
The European art cinema began, historically, in a defensive move, claiming “film” had to aspire to the status of art, in order to reclaim the purity of its modernist forms. If now, according to Greenaway,“all art aspires to the condi- tion of film,” the paradox is that this seems to happen at just the moment of the art cinema’s historical demise. What went wrong? We hear that it is the audi- ences who deserted the cinema. But this is manifestly not the case. We know how the American cinema gathers its audiences, even in Europe, especially in Europe. The economic arguments are strong, but they do not altogether explain why audiences have deserted the European film. Might this have something to do with the fact that European cinema has a rather traumatized relation to the notion of audiences, just as European democracies have a traumatized relation to the notion of a public art (say, architecture– but also advertising)? The histor- ical experiences of totalitarian regimes– experts at both the cinema and public art– have made discussing the issue doubly difficult, with the avant-garde able to claim the moral as well as the aesthetic high ground. My sense is that Greenaway seems prepared to engage in a debate about what could be a public art, and what could be its audiences, just as postmodernism on a broader front has reopened the discussion around the spectacular in art.