Expanded Cinema - Text 2
In the 1950s and 60s, art and technology prepared the ground (one need think only of widescreen cinema) for what would be called expanded cinema. In the early 1950s, the Lettrist Maurice Lemaître created Le film a déjà commencé? (1951) as a “film screening” involving a series of events at the movie theatre’s entrance, in the hall and on screen (where the eponymous film would be projected). He proposed the concepts syncinéma and synfilm to define these multi-sensorial and typically avant-garde experiments. From this point of view, the emergence of the “happening” in the 1950s was a paradigm perfectly suited for understanding some of the forms of expanded cinema, in particular its performative and hard to recreate aspect (in contrast with industrial cinema practices). In the United States, numerous examples foretold expanded cinema: in the late 1950s, Jordan Belson collaborated with the musician Henry Jacobs on the Vortex Concerts, a series of audiovisual concerts in the San Francisco planetarium. Stan VanDerBeek, alongside his “environmental situations” (based on multi-screen projections), worked during the same period on developing and then constructing the Movie-Drome, a projection system which today would be described as immersive: a spherical construction in aluminum inspired by the architecture of the architect and art theorist Richard Buckminster Fuller, under whom he studied at Black Mountain College, inside of which the audience was plunged into an environment of images (a turning platform in the centre made it possible to move the projectors about). For VanDerBeek, this structure was like a kind of giant (human or artificial) brain, but also like the biosphere, or even the entire cosmos. At the same time, in his films and videos VanDerBeek practised collage and continued his work on the interaction of media and hybrid technology: expanding the medium was not confined to cinema.
In the mid-1960s, the term expanded cinema was a way of identifying contemporary experimental cinema (particularly in several programs of the day) while at the same time bringing cinema into dialogue with the art world, which itself was in the midst of a far-reaching redefinition. Involved on the one hand with the performative arts (such as the “happening”) and on the other hand with the practice of “intermedia,” launched in the mid-1960s, expanded cinema cast the entire apparatus of the move theatre into crisis. In 1966, issue 43 of the magazine Film Culture was dedicated to the “expanded arts,” which included everything from games of Antiquity, the circus, modern-day world fairs and multimedia spectacles. In this issue, the Fluxus artist George Maiunas presented a diagram of the expanded arts, in which expanded cinema is seen to derive from a three-fold connection: sensationalism (“exhibitionism, sadism, perversion, sex, etc.,” in the work of Andy Warhol, for example); spectacular “pseudo-technology” (Walt Disney); and the use of all sorts of refuse (tied to the tradition of collage, junk art and syncretism). In fact sometimes art worked hand in glove with large-scale spectacle; there was for example the film by Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid, To Be Alive!, which screened at the New York World’s Fair in 1964-65 and also won an Academy Award for best documentary short film in 1965. Expanded cinema explored new technology (video, multi-screen projection, computers) in the era of cybernetics, but was not identified with an ensemble of technologies. Rather, it brought about a process of expanding people’s consciousness through these technologies. As Youngblood wrote, “Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light or spherical projections.”[4]
A unique, original and staggering perceptive and cognitive experience, expanded cinema took many forms in the broad range of countries in which it arose: to remain in the 1960s and 70s, it ranged from the live actions of Valie Export or Guy Sherwin to the performances of the KwieKulik collective, and from the video experiments of Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini to screening of The Gospel According to Matthew on the body of Pasolini (Fabio Mauri’s performance Intelletuale).
