Issue 7: Summer 2011
Wishful Thinking
Claire Healy
The last 16mm print facility in the UK, Soho Film Lab in London, was recently taken over by US Company Deluxe. Renamed Deluxe Soho, the company announced that 16mm production was no longer a commercial priority and they would no longer provide the service. Artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean wrote an article for the Guardian newspaper in February 2011 in defence of the medium and a campaign was started shortly afterwards to save the facility until ceding defeat when, days later, Deluxe Soho confirmed their decision. As Dean lamented, against the commercial feature film industry, ‘art is voiceless and insignificant.’ Dean professed that contrary to commercial interests, there has been an impressive revival of interest in 16mm film among young artists in the past 10 years, becoming a medium of choice for many despite its relative inconvenience and high production cost. This growing trend begs the question: what is it about 16mm that deserves this use and attention?
Roman Ondak
A number of projects have tried to represent this tendency of contemporary artists’ attraction to 16mm film. One example is 'Wishful Thinking'; a touring programme of 16mm artists film, initiated by the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork. The project travelled to various small-scale venues across Ireland, setting up projector and sound equipment in spaces that might not usually accommodate film screenings. It featured leading international artists, among them artists who often work in mediums other than film, including Luke Fowler, Jaki Irvine, Roman Ondák, Barbara Stratman, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Ursula Mayer, Rosalind Nashashibi, Moira Tierney and Ben Rivers. The project demonstrates an interest in 16mm film that could be applied to other projects of its kind that function to foreground the materiality of film. This tendency provokes an articulation of our present perceptions of technology and time. Physically, the tactility and fragility of an analogue medium such as 16mm film makes it susceptible to wear and tear. The film bears marks and traces of the hand, incisions, punctures, fissures; wounds that come with age, but also signs of endurance and perseverance. This physicality also points to the affects of time in film that fracture the boundaries and identity of the subject. This association understands film as a form of representation which can bring awareness to the paradoxical relationship between time and self. As, according to Walter Benjamin, film is the unfolding result of ‘all the forms of perception, the tempos, the rhythms, which lie preformed in today’s machines.’(1)
With this in mind, it would be simplistic to presume that the artists using analogue technology, such as those participating in the 'Wishful Thinking' project, are suffering from a kind of nostalgia due to their interest in a dying medium. Their medium choice can instead be viewed as an act of experimental backwardness, and a rearticulation of the possibilities of looking. Contemporary artists working in 16mm film may not share a sentimentality of age-old technology, but rather a kind of confidence, hope and renewal in ambiguous time. Writer and philosopher Peter Osborne is quoted in the project catalogue saying that the decision for artists to work in such terminal technologies ‘has less to do with any “revolutionary energy of the outmoded,” than with a more general experimental rearticulation and refunctioning of technologies of perception.’ (2) This idea of hopeful activation of experiences informs the title of the programme, 'Wishful Thinking', which borrows from its common usage as a phrase that describes an optimistic outlook; a stretching of the boundaries of reality towards what it could be. One could argue that in fact nostalgia, not essentially sentimental, is a fundamental characteristic of film itself, and an artist can choose to either fight against this or not. Effectively, I would argue that nostalgia is imbued within these films but that it is used to facilitate more mutable thinking on time and states of perception. In line with this, I find that Osborne’s ‘rearticulation’ is that which one constantly practices in reality anyway. Here I am thinking about an evolving notion of time rather than a accurate referencing of a specific time.
Before demonstrating this idea of evolving time, I think it is interesting to note that the word nostalgia carries rather negative associations; it signifies that which is contrary to contemporary art’s aims and directives. The word nostalgia first came into usage in reference to Swiss mercenaries in France and Italy. It was used to describe those sickly young men who were unsettled by the war and longed to return home. At first, nostalgia was thought to be a curable disease, akin to the common cold, rectified perhaps by a visit home. As well as this, the word was used in a derogative and dismissive manner. Indeed, even today, any of the listed artists would regret their work to be associated with nostalgia as it can imply a wasting and excess of time spent on conservation and reflection; a weakness and an unaffordable luxury for the contemporary artist. For example, nostalgia can signify an abdication of personal responsibility, in a way a guiltless and ‘ethical and aesthetic failure.’ (3) For historian Michael Kammen, ‘Nostalgia...is essentially history without guilt. Heritage is something that suffuses us with pride rather than shame.’ (4) The word is blackened, inducing a fear, common to many including artists, that looking back might turn one into ‘a pitiful monument to your own grief and the futility of departure.’ (5) There is shame and backwardness in looking back in a nostalgic manner, an uneasy position for a contemporary artist to be associated with.
Etymologically, nostalgia itself comes from nostos meaning return home, and algia meaning longing. However, we can understand nostalgia to mean a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed, and also feeling sick of home, or rather feeling oppressed to some degree by the conventional confines of time and space. In other words, nostalgia can manifest itself as a result of a pervasive teleology of progress. An alternative to this end- directed, progressive conception of time and space, is that proposed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson.
Bergson argued for the severance of time from its representation in spatial terms; a divorce from this nonessential conceptual dependence on space. Time, according to Bergson in his Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), when conceived as existent within spatial form is ‘some spurious concept, due to the trespassing of the idea of space upon the field of pure consciousness.’ This instance is what he deems to be ‘nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness.’ Reliance on representation of time in spatial terms is contrasted to pure duration which he proposes as ‘succession without distinction.’ In other words, duration is a form of temporal continuity that is concerned with qualitative differentiation, without quantitative measure. As Bergson elaborates: ‘the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from former states.’ (6) In this way, we allow more possibilities of experience when we divorce time from space and acknowledge and exist within a multiplicity of conscious states that succeed themselves without division. This theory of time allows for a blurring of past, present and future in that looking back does not situate the subject in a past state but instead does not situate the subject specifically; the ego ‘refrains from separating its present state from former states.’
In relation to film, the use of 16mm, given its current state of frailty and extinction, signifies a type of looking backwards, but the artists’ practice is not one of retrieval of that which is lost, but a reforming of ideas, based on the past. They revive a past medium to highlight the ambiguities of our present. Effectively I find these films, through their choice of medium and their loose thematic content concerned with the possibilities of reality, try to resist what Bergson calls ‘the cinematographical mechanism of thought;’ a mechanism which allows the concept of nostalgia to exist. (7)
By the cinematographic, Bergson means that commonly, ‘Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becomings of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality...’ (8) This practice of the episodic division of time is false in that reality exists as fluid and constant and so to measure it is to immobilize it. The practice of retrieval implicit in nostalgia involves a categorization of time at odds with Bergson’s notion of continuous, coexistent time. Brian Massumi elaborates on Bergson’s theory on Zeno’s paradoxes of movement saying:
We stop it [the arrow] in thought when we construe its movement to be divisible into position. Bergson’s idea is that space itself is retrospective construct of this kind. When we think of space as “extensive,” as being measurable, divisible, and composed of points plotting possible positions that objects may occupy, we are stopping the world in though. We are thinking away its dynamic unity, the continuity of its movements. We are looking at only one dimension of reality. (9)
This idea of retrospectivity is helpful when understanding the position these films might take, in that nostalgia is just one form of all thought positions, all of which are retro-formed. When one thinks, one does so in a backwards way, in that to use the intellect is to stop time itself in motion.
Bergson was interested in the idea of the contemporaneousness of the past and the present, (10) and it is with this formation that the resistance of episodic, ‘cinematographical’ mechanisms of thought remove the issue of before and after (and also depth theory in general). Contemporaneous time theories confuse conventional notions of time in a way that makes nostalgic thought patterns ineffective; enabling a more fluid notion of presentness, in a way attempting to defy film’s durational condition.
This defiance is made apparent in the 'Wishful Thinking' project through the use of the terminal 16mm medium itself as well as overlapping thematic ideas and devices. Comparative concerns include perception, observation and behaviour; the aesthetics and symbolism of traces of hand processing; the idea of lasting presentness; tradition and strength in the face of failure; enchantment; magic; juxtaposition of young and old; mixed time; investment in the future; signs of abandonment; reference to historical periods, other worlds, myth and stars; wishes, dreams, possibilities; and the frailty of pre-given structures. Together, the films subtly reference an alternative reality where nostalgia is hinted at but made irrelevant. The possibilities of time are stretched beyond their standard boundaries, and alternative states are realised.
Further to this, resisting nostalgia is resisting the plotting of time, and also the anticipation of time to come, as for Massumi, the backformation of time, or the reading of a sequence after it has happened, is a mapping of a trajectory in anticipation of its repetition. In this way, ‘The backformation of a path is not only a “retrospection.” It is a “retroduction”: a production, by feedback, of new movements.’ (11) Thus, there is futurity in the plotting of what has gone before; an anticipation in the future of a repetition of what has already been. Hence, retrospective ordering and meditation on the past is a kind of preparation for the future; a looking forward in looking back. As writer Svetlan Boym explains: ‘The past is not made in the image of the present or seen as foreboding of some present disaster; rather, the past opens up a multitude of potentials, nonteleological possibilities of historic development.’ (12)
The experience of 16mm film invariably conjures memories of a past time, and a past medium; it is a positive mnemonic device of particular qualities associated with specific times and spaces. But its pastness thrown into the present renders it simultaneously unfamiliar. One experiences false associations with time-past, a kind of fictitious flashback to strangely unknown happenings. In this way, memory is a kind of artifice, and any remembering can be understo o d as false remembering. This phenomenon was realised by Marcel Proust who was obsessed by the imperfection of the present moment and demonstrated the invention of the past. He warns his reader that ‘It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture memory: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile...’ (13) His writings evidence a concurrence with Bergsonian notions of coexistent time, and the permeability of memory and virtual realities. For instance, according to Bergson, the past ‘might act and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality.’ (14) In this way, remembrance, memory, and nostalgia are not bound to the past tense, as these experiences are more recomposed than remembered; we can hence understand narrative as fiction and timeless. The experience of 16mm film is strangely familiar, reminiscent of time-past, however it is more prospective than retrospective, more futurely than past, and more false than true remembrance. The artists in the 'Wishful Thinking' project focus on the mutability and possibilities of time, resistant to ideas of nostalgia. Their approach could have resonance with other projects of its kind that concern film, by which they demonstrate the coexistence of states and the fiction of narrative practice. Time is represented as elusive and fleeting, so that nostalgia is in some way essential to the experience of reality, but to draw attention to the past, to remind the subject of lost time is effectively and paradoxically to attend to the ineffectuality of nostalgic thought patterns. Instead, artists using analogue film can attend to the contemporaneity of time, the resulting experience of self, and question what their practice can mean and how it can function given its frailty in near extinction.
Claire Healy is a freelance writer, practising critic, musician, curator, and current co-programmer for Treignac Projet, France.