notes on "Expanded Cinema ..." (Weibel)

Transformation of cinema ...

1960s --
Expanded Cinema

+ material experiments: extend cinema through the means of cinema itself
- change the material character of film -- scratch, paint, process, paint the film itself
- took apart and reassemble film equipment (i.e. cameraless films ...)

greg landow http://www.ubu.com/film/landow.html



+ multiple screen experiments: radical experiments with the screen itself
- exploded and multiplied, divided into multiple images
- liberated from the "frame", the screen
- multiple and mobile, flat or curved, replaced by other materials (water, wood ...)

HPSCHD 1969 (John Cage and Lejaren Hiller)
5 hour InterMedia Event, 8000 slides, 100 films projected onto 48 windows at the University of Illinois




+ narrative experiments: multiple projections, spatialized, editing, etc...
- multiple narrative perspectives -- new approach to narration
- a reflection of the social context of the 1960s, social unrest, etc.
- these experiments with multiple screens are the beginnings of immersive environments

(7th page of the article)
"the subjective response to the world was not pressed into a constructed, falsely objective style of narration but was instead formally presented in the same diffuse and fragmentary way in which it was experienced" ...

gregory markopoulos http://www.ubu.com/film/markopoulos.html

eames: glimpses of the usa
Shown over a period of weeks to nearly three million Soviet citizens in a Buckminister Fuller-designed geodesic dome on seven screens. Each screen was 20 feet high and 32 feet wide with 2200 images (mostly slides).



+ shift time and space: extend, slow, delay, abbreviate time

+ experiment with social and sexual issues: intensely intimate, excessive individualism, uncensored

+ sound experiments: use sound to determine structure of imagery, rather than as background to the image


1970s -- video art emerged

1980s -- shut down in development of Expanded Cinema and video art due to market

1990s -- re-emergence of Expanded Cinema from the 1960s
- more focused, methodical strategies than the 1960s
- more closely oriented to social issues than the 1960s
- experiments in new approaches to narration

Sam Taylor-Wood "Third Party" 1999
The 10-minute film sequence, shot with 7 cameras simultaneously, is accompanied by an elaborate sound installation and is about the tensions and erotic entanglements arising between persons in a closed environment, with professional actors and the British rock star Marianne Faithful. The simultaneous presentation in the installation space asks the visitor to individually synthesize the scenario.




THEN:
"Narration becomes a machine, a plot-machine, an engine".

NOW:
*** Multiple monitors and screens, multiple projections and perspectives, multi-perspective narrations and plots
- possibilities for new narrative techniques on multiple large-screen projections can now be expanded extensively