Morbid or cynical musings on the end of cinema, the death of cinema, or as Greenaway put it, on its“sterility of concept, uniformity of execution”are not in short supply among British and other European filmmakers. But when so much cinéaste ambition has had to write itself small and withdraw into the sulk corner of late-night television, Greenaway’s successes have given him a chance to choose a larger canvas. He, too, starts with a skeptical assessment:
It is too late. Cinema is a one-way traffic: the best that can be hoped is to change the street furniture and the traffic-lights in readiness for the next attempt.”
Nonetheless, a centenary is neither the worst occasion for the attempt to rein-vent the cinema, nor is Greenaway a stranger to the magic of one hundred, the figure having served him well, for instance, as the narrative architecture of Drowning by Numbers. Since then, he has taken“ Objects to Represent the World” to Vienna, “ Stairs” to Geneva and “ Projections” to Munich.
Even if in the London show the hundred is folded in half, as it were (for
logisti-cal and financial reasons, one assumes), a play of symmetry and seriality is nonetheless essential to the project.
And the idea of the “fold,” the pleat, the package and the box is not alto-gether inappropriate for a project that translates a temporal experience like the cinema into a spatial sequence and an “artifically arranged” (to cite Georges Meliès) display. The order is reversible, the steps retraceable, and this film can be rewound. What enfolds also unfolds. The labeled boxes, the white screens, the projections onto the buildings (Munich), the display tables and wall mounts (Rotterdam), the maps, the instruments of vision and dissection (Geneva) which so predominate in Greenaway’s installations so far, evoke a number of robust antinomies around removal and unpacking, storage and retrieval, inside and outside, before and after, evidence and argument, with both the cinema and the other arts alternately furnishing the mise-en-abyme into which each in turn is Chinese-boxed (or taxonomied).
On a visit to the Hayward, another comparison also came to mind. The Mu-seum of the Moving Image, that modestly boastful monument to the movies’
ubiquity, with its Zoetropes and fantasmagorias, its agit-prop trains and blue-screens, its Western set and BBC newsroom, pays permanent homage to “ex-panded cinema.” The Greenaway exhibit, so conveniently adjacent as to pro-voke the pun, might well aspire to the label“exploded cinema.” A delayed/de-ferred detonation, a freeze-frame blast, or perhaps an explosion in the technical sense, of parts pulled apart or removed for closer inspection and identification, as in a car mechanics’ manual or an engineer’s drawing, used for demonstrating the workings of a carburetor or a self-regulating servo-system.
What does the visitor see? A large space lined with steeply racked cinema seats from a disused movie house. In the middle, long wooden tables piled high with props in neatly sorted piles, evoking film genres and movie stories.
One’s path is blocked by Plexiglas trays, on which the daily newspapers accu-mulate, kept since the opening day. The smell of rotting food directs one’s gaze to dinner plates on which sauces slowly dry and mashed potatoes accumulate mold. At the far end, a series of glass showcases, as in expensive boutiques, housing live humans in rigid poses. Huge loudspeakers resonate with periodic bursts of sound-collages, rumbling through one’s solar plexus as one tried to shield one’s ears from the assault, as if an aural fireball or the call to the dead for the Last Judgment was rolling overhead.
If we view Greenaway’s installations as exploded cinema in this technical sense, then our attention must be at once on the individual parts or specified constituents, and on the fact that their arrangement is neither fixed nor arbi-trary. Rather, they move along a number of determined axes, which represent their alignment of thought, their conceptual architecture. For his London cin-ema kit, Greenaway proposed nine elements: “artificial light, actors, props,
text, illusion, audience, time, sound, changing imagery.” Some of these I would see as the “working parts,” laterally displaced, others as the imaginary axes along which they flee the center of what we normally understand by the cinema machine. The challenge is of course not to give away too soon which is which, in this deconstructionist’s graphic depiction of all-too familiar icon and objects from the cinema we grew up with– whether Mickey Mouse or Marilyn – now at once mummified and merchandized in the MOMI’s adult toy shop, but to provoke new reflections through novel juxtapositions. The props Greenaway has put together, in their profusion and surrealist incongruity also seem to nod and wink at the spectator. But despite their comforting, archetypal associations, they are more like gremlins, bent on mischief and ready to bite, or the not-quite-functioning plot parts of a melancholic Dada meta-mechanic’s dictionary of British cinema.
The reason why a gallery space seems appropriate to such an exploded view of cinema is that the installation is partly designed to render to some of these elements a new materiality, or to recall an original, resisting “corporeality,”
especially if one regards the cinema’s biggest crime as having divested the world of its physicality and substantiality.
Cinema’s low ratio of physicality and corporeality is relevant to the physical relation-ship it has towards time.
Temperature, texture or touch are aspects of bodies and objects that do not seem to“matter” to either the world of cinematic projection, or that of the commod-ity, casting its spell as sign, desire and promise: both live by the transparency of artificial light, and both are parodied by a flashing electric torch that in a gallery – as Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades have taught us – invariably is at once an
“empty” sign and a “full” object.
The second dimension, central to the cinema’s repressed other, is also pre-served or reinvented by the gallery space: that of a cinematic spectacle as live performance, and yet fundamentally different from theatre, where body and voice always have to pretend to the presence of destiny. Greenaway“explodes”
this nexus, by having actors in“showcases, vitrines and small theatres,” but as in cinema, separating body from voice, and also making sure that each day has another program. The latter recalls a crucial dimension of (early) cinema as a performance. At first, when films were bought and sold rather than exchanged or rented, the options were at once “materialist” and “conceptual”: either the same film to a different audience, or different films to the same audience, each becoming a function, or aggregate state of the other, in a more or less precisely calculable equation. If historically, the principle of “different film/same audi-ence” won the day, to the extent of creating the unique commodity that is film (whose value depends on materializing a time advantage and a location
advan-tage), Greenaway’s installation recalls that this may not be inevitable, especially if one is calling into question all the other material parameters of cinema.
Less obvious, but no less essential to the project of an exploded cinema is the materiality of time, of sound, of light, an interest central to both the American and British film avant-garde of thes.To take the case of temporality.
Film as substance gains nothing by becoming old…. It gains no patina, no craquelure, makes no valuable chemical interaction with its environment, and its requirements for preservation, like its requirements for exhibition, are demanding. But in preserva-tion it is invisible.
Greenaway’s different materialities play along the axis of absence (the photo-graphic tense of the past-praeteritum, the once-having-been-there of Roland Barthes) and presence (body-voice-space, the theatrical performance as“kairos,”
time filled with destiny), but also along the axis of decay (of food, daily chang-ing, gently rotting) and the perishable (the newspaper in a museum, daily changing, and because of it, flagrant embodiment of the obsolete by its fetishism of the instant). Both absence/presence and instant decay are at the heart of the cinema’s ambiguous inscription of temporality, its ridiculously relentless life and its terrifying un-deadness, Terminator II and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.