Introduction
Introduction, by Éric Thouvenel
Beginning in the 1920s, there arose a series of counter-propositions to the gradual implantation of rules governing the cinematic experience (isolation, darkness, immobility, silence). These counter-propositions sought to rethink this experience in order to shift or contest its terms. Man Ray and Le Miller projected images onto the bodies of guests at the Bal blanc given by Countess Pecci-Blunt in 1930.
The Lettrists imagined forms of cinema which would be “supertemporal,” “hypertemporal” or “anti-supertemporal” and would deregulate the cinematic experience in order to rearrange its elements, disjoint uses of it, rethink its functions and reinvent its potential.[1] And, at the dawn of the 1970s, Gene Youngblood prophesized an age in which “through the art and technology of expanded cinema we shall create heaven right here on earth.”[2]
For Dominique Noguez, “expanded cinema includes any spectacle which exceeds or modifies on any particular point the cinematic ritual, strictly defined as projection onto a screen before seated viewers of an image obtained by a pulling a strip of film through a projector.”[3] In this respect, the strategies adopted by filmmakers to interrogate and get around the rigidity of film projection norms are diverse and varied. One can increase the number of projectors; expand, shrink or distort the screen; project everywhere in the screening room (or outside it) or on fixed or moving materials (water, fabric, flesh, metal); and even, like the Lettrists, collectively imagine a film which would exist only in the minds of the audience.
In the work of some filmmakers, this desire to contest the norms governing projection has evolved over the course of transformations in this highly ritualized social experience, but also in the technologies which make it possible both to define this experience and to explore its potential. The case of Ken Jacobs is exemplary in this respect, in that since the late 1960s he has been a representative of a systematic endeavour to draw the viewer’s attention to the conditions in which our experience of film images is negotiated. By employing a bricolage approach and patching together devices which make it possible to encounter fixed images projected at breakneck speed within a shifting consciousness, for the past sixty years he has also carried out an aesthetic, political and anthropological inquiry into the nature and meaning of imaginary transactions in which, through each image, we are engaged.
