Jeffrey Shaw & Peter Weibel (eds),
Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film.
ZKM, Karlsruhe; MIT Press, Cambridge MA. 2003.
ISBN: 0 262 69286 4
600pp
US$39.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by MIT Press)

What a lovely book! When it arrived in my department, it seemed no-one could keep their hands off it. Fat, bound in a shiny aluminised cover, crowded with fascinating illustrations, and on Amazon at least amazingly low-priced for the quality of printing and the sheer size of the thing, this is the catalogue of a major exhibition at ZKM, the Zentrum für Kunstmedien at Karlsruhe in Germany, where Jeffrey Shaw and peter Weibel, the co-editors, have been responsible for the artistic and intellectual direction not only of the centre but of half of Europe’s new media arts through Weibel’s additional tenure at ars electronica. That the volume presents the view from central Europe is not necessarily a weakness: there is a significant presence of eastern European (especially and justifiably Czech) work addressed: the North Americans are perfectly capable of blowing their own trumpets, and the rest of us will have to set about writing our own histories with as much vigour and imagination.

There is a slight oddity, it has to be said, in the project of the book. Weibel’s Preface, and to a lesser extent Shaw’s Introduction, hammer the theme of the ideological concentration of the traditional cinema on the system of the camera and projector and the darkened hall. Curious because the key references are to the radical semiotics of the 1970s, especially to apparatus theory, a school of film studies influenced by Panofsky’s work on perspective that analysed the structure of cinema technology as itself, prior to any actual content, a signifying machine that subordinated the viewer to the screen. Odd, because not only have Panofsky’s ideas been deeply and radically critiqued by Hubert Damisch, but because to all intents and purposes, this line of enquiry, so deeply associated in English with the work of the journal Screen in the 1970s, is now unfashionable and its findings disputed at every turn. Yet it was a moment at which the cutting edge of critical theory was entirely associated with the development of a radical film practice, of the structural-materialist avant-garde, the early video art movement chronicled in Screen by Stuart Marshall, and the experiments in political cinema of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen among others. To find these unfashionably politicised ideas at the instigation of what otherwise appears at first as a coffee-table book for theWired generation is momentarily disorienting.

Less so perhaps for those who have followed the development of the European discourse about new media arts is the range and depth of the historical writings that have been gathered into the book. The inside front cover has a manifesto from Guy Debord on situationist anti-cinema, the inside back an excerpt from Deleuze’s “Letter to Serge Daney”, between are reprints and translations from Luis Buñuel, André Bazin (on Cinemascope), Richard Hamilton (British pop artist and remaker of Duchamp’s Large Glass) on film technologies of the 1950s, a montage of Josef Svoboda’s Polyvision. And throughout are essays by scholars familiar – Bill Wees on the optical origins of avant-garde cinema, Edwin Heathcote on cinema architecture -and unfamiliar – Michael Bielicky and Vit Havranek on histories of optical magic and Czech modernism, Randall Packer on the Pepsi Pavilion at Osaka – on aspects of the archaeology of cinema. Linking these essays with the writings of and on individual exhibiting artists is the theme of alternative cinemas and alternatives to cinema. An ungrateful criticism might be that in all this vast tome there is very little address to those other technologies of vision that have fed into and on computing, from cartography to astronomy, spreadsheets to databases, and perhaps most strangely the histories of scientific imaging and mathematical visualisations. But even in a book of this reach and ambition, some things just have to be left out.

What’s left in is a collection of writings by some of the more remarkable of contemporary scholars – Raymond Bellour, Vivian Sobchack (the lovely essay on Quick Time reprinted from Millennium Film Journal), Timothy Druckrey, Weibel himself, Gene Youngblood, Anne-Marie Duguet, and Australia’s own Scott McQuire and Michelle Pierson, on artists ranging from pioneers like Steina and Woody Vasulka, Werner Nekes, Michael Snow and Jon Jost, through to contemporary legends like Perry Hoberman and Caspar Stracke, not to mention two short but blistering accounts of Zbigniew Rybczynski by Paul Virilio and Siegfried Zielinski. There are recuperations of such nearly-lost figures as Stefan Themerson and Stan VanDerBeek, a celebration of Dan Graham and, not quite so out of place as at first might sound, a fascinating extrapolation from Deleuze by Barbara Filser proposing a Cinema 3 to succeed the movement-image and the time-image, a code-image of a new order. In between are slotted artist’s statements and catalogue essays gathered from a decade of work, all accompanied by smart screen-shots, installation views and technical drawings, for the most part with decent accounts of the technologies in play in each work and the conceptual problems as well as the aesthetic issues involved in their realisation. Something that demarcates the world of new media, in general, is the level of craft which it demands, when compared to so many contemporary blocks of wood attacked with chainsaws and popped on a plinth. As a result there is a detailed “theory” of new media which involves, in addition to the theory every photographer needs concerning colour temperatures and focal lengths, a language of code, software, hardware solutions, attempts and kludges. In other words, there is something to talk about. And this anthology talks about it. Perhaps not in the geekish detail that some other artists and many visitors might like, but neither pushed off to the archive, as in so many museums and galleries, as if the raw materiality of art was an offence against the curator’s sensibilities.

On the contrary, it is the materiality of the cinematic alternatives to cinema that makes them alternative. The overall vision of the show and the book is that there is an art which can only come about through disrupting the technological infrastructure of cinema. If there is a remnant of an older technological determinism here, it is one entirely in tune with the art that’s curated: Chris Hale’s intimate, almost Victorian touchscreen cinema, for example, at once impossibly ethereal and anchored to the floor in a cast-iron stand, screening his fraught interactive miniatures of urban angst. Bazin’s tirade against the commercial imperatives driving the introduction of cinemascope – tempered as ever with his connoisseurship of the rarer moments of its realist success, and with the telling anecdote about Clouzot being “furious” that he completed The Wages of Fear (France/Italy, 1953)before the new technology became available – is part and parcel of this imagination of cinema according to what else it might have become, and what else it has been and is becoming. Surround screens, immersion and navigation feature heavily, and there are telling details to the design, like two stills from Godard’s fable of cine-commercialism Le Mépris (France/Italy, 1963) where the Lumiere’s infamous pronouncement, “Cinema is an invention without a future”, appears on the proscenium of a preview cinema translated into Italian. Though this reviewer missed a sense of the realist mission of digital (post) cinema, its ability to seize the world as data and to visualise it or make it audible, there is huge food for thought here as well as images and artist’s accounts to marvel at. What in the end makes the jaw drop is not just what’s been achieved, but how rigorously unambitious so much of cinema has remained. And in amongst it all, there are jewels like Richard Hamilton’s opening paragraph, where he confesses to the power of cheap films before embarking on a meticulously scholarly critique of the paucity of its technical development. Yes, a lovely book, one that makes you long to see the art you haven’t had a chance to see, or to make your own art. Of the crop of new anthologies mixing substantial historical scholarship with impressive theoretical sophistication, Future Cinema stands out for its commitment to putting that history to work in the interests of a renewed cinema for the 21st century. Far more legible than its unfortunately designed sister net.condition, edited by Timothy Druckrey for an earlier ZKM / MIT Press collaborative catalogue, and in many ways more convincing as a book, this is the kind of text you will be browsing through for a decade, before it too becomes a landmark in the history of new media.

Sean Cubitt
University of Waikato, New Zealand.
seanc@waikato.ac.nz
Created on: Wednesday, 20 July 2005 | Last Updated: 20-Jul-05