TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

To what extent do technical accidents, decomposition and ruins make it possible to bring to light a singular dimension of experimental cinema? To what extent does this appeal of dysfunction, noise, destruction, jamming and the glitch make it possible to bring out the technical or technological nature of cinema or video and, at the same time, an essential element of the aesthetic history of this other cinema?

No doubt one must see in the rise of experimental practices which valorize accidents, destruction and glitches an aesthetic configuration which brings into play eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetics of the ruin and the logic of the tabula rasa specific to avant-gardes, which would transform (as seen in Dada, and then Lettrist cinema, Fluxus, etc.) these acts of destruction (of art, cinema, language) into poetic and political forces. In the same way, the idea of repurposing the “proper functioning” of an object or medium (a musical instrument, television set, camera, urinal) to make it do something for which it was not designed, or to valorize what “good practice” prohibits (noise, dissonance, scratches, burning, distortion, warping, decomposition), has profound ties with the history of artistic modernity to which experimental film and video are the heirs.

The singular beauty associated with the ruins of film stock, with the erratic, uncontrolled forms in which the corrosive work of nature seizes what was fashioned by human hands in order to refashion it for its own purposes, finds diverse expressions in avant-garde cinema of the 1980s and 90s. But this aesthetic of the ruin is not completely foreign to certain video explorations or to the search for new plastic forms arising from signal interference or the synthesized distortion of images and sounds. In each case, we could say that “noise,” the accident, the image of destruction, become the aesthetic working element which, at the same time, reveals or makes it possible to glimpse the material, technical or technological dimension of the support, something a normative or classical conception of art has always sought to make disappear. To show the paint qua paint (and no longer as the representation of a figure) is to make the specificity of the medium and the creative process the material of the artwork. Unlike the approach set out by Clement Greenberg, however, in avant-garde cinema practices this specificity of the medium is revealed through dysfunction and breakdown, on the basis of the principle that an image (or a sound) appears in its materiality by becoming a ruin, by being damaged, by being absent, or by incorporating the unforeseen and the accidental. To ruin, repurpose or derail the “normal” functioning of images and sounds consists in showing a video as a video signal; in showing a film as emulsion, film stock, material, light, dust; in showing the digital image as pixels, compression algorithms, blocks of colours.

Multiple manifestations of accidents and destruction will be explored throughout this parcours, and by means of a variety of singular examples which, as idiosyncratic as they may be, make it possible to shine a light more generally on the technical and aesthetic issues they raise. The first section will explore the (technical and aesthetic) figure of the image that burns, in fiction cinema and particularly in experimental cinema. The second section will examine scratches, tears and dust; the third will probe the abundant tradition of “deliberate” photochemical alteration and destruction; the fourth will study the history of videographic “noise” and the jammed signal; and the fifth, finally, will explore the history and practice of the digital glitch.