TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Introduction, by André Habib

While montage, whether of the same film or of several sources, is a primary aspect of re-use cinema, another approach consists in acting directly on the base material of the images. These images can undergo mechanical transformation or chemical transformation, in the case of film stock, or transformation via computer in the case of intervening in the signal, structure or code of video or digital image files. The purpose of these interventions is often to break the image’s referential quality, to render the material of the image opaque by transforming its legibility. The important thing in these cases is no longer so much what is depicted, but the relations between the depicted thing and the modification it has undergone – the dialectic between the image and its material. In the process, often what are brought out by these interventions are the material properties of the image: the surface of the film stock, the photochemical composition of the emulsion, the structure of the compression algorithms. This practice of ciselure, decomposing or destroying the images offers a powerful indication of the material that the filmmaker has in hand. And it is precisely because the reading or unfolding of the images is broken or choppy that the materiality of the base (film stock, video signal, pixels) becomes manifest.

These three forms of intervention also correspond to precise technical actions. Mechanical transformations include scratching, scraping and rubbing; or stripping, perforating and cutting up/reassembling. Photochemical transformations include burying, melting, boiling and decomposing. Finally, interventions in the signal (in particular in the case discussed here, datamoshing), lead to corruption (of the file), playing (with the code) and destroying (data) to generate glitch effects, each different from the others.

As the Encyclopedia’s parcours “Ruins, Accident, Glitch” demonstrates, we should undoubtedly see in the rise of experimental practices (and re-use in particular) which valorize accidents, destruction and glitches an aesthetic configuration which synthesizes a poetics of the modern ruin with the destructive forces of the avant-gardes; the latter would transform – and this is particularly apparent in Lettrist cinema – the act of destruction (of art, cinema, language) into a poetic and political force. In the same way, the idea of repurposing the “correct functioning” of an object or medium (a musical instrument, television set, camera, urinal, cinema images, popular cinema), of making it do something for which it was not designed, or of valorizing that which proper use of it condemns (scratches, dust, burns, distortions)^[1], is profoundly tied to the history of artistic modernity to which experimental film and video succeeded.