TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Introduction, by Eric Thouvenel

In the field of re-use, re-filming techniques involve relations with technical tools but also take up diverse aesthetic attitudes to the original material. In experimental cinema each project, running against the grain of prescribed uses in the film industry, brings into play to varying extents configurations which are simple only in appearance (such as re-filming right off the screen), while other configurations develop on their own much more elaborate set-ups out of the technology supplied by the industry or conceived on an ad hoc basis.

In this way, re-filming a pre-existing image involves choosing adequate tools, but also tying these choices to a conception of how to work the images. For many experimental filmmakers, doubling or repeating does not necessarily mean reproducing in identical fashion, and even then the reproduction of an image in series derives from a conception of cinema as a mechanical art in which repetition is experienced technically, formally and even politically.

In this section we will examine four major kinds of actions which, on different levels, characterize re-filming practices in experimental cinema. They do not really structure this section of the parcours, but are rather a means by which to traverse it.

Enlarge/Approach

While the canonical work carried out by Ken Jacobs with his analytical projector for Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969-71) is now well-known and documented, the work of Austrian filmmaker Dietmar Brehm is also worth examination. Since the late 1980s, Brehm has developed a system described at times as a “pumping screen.” With most Super 8 cameras, when re-filming from a screen the visual pulsation inherent to the phase difference between the shutter speed of the camera and that of the projector remains imperceptible to the viewer. Because of an oscillating mirror unique to it, the Beaulieu Super 8 camera used by Dietmar Brehm, however, is an exception. This mirror makes the visual pulsation visible, although it can be regulated with a speed modulator while re-filming. In films such as The Murder Mystery (1992) and Blicklust (1992), this synchronization “defect” in the process of doubling the images is deliberately exploited to produce a sense of an organic quality in the images – whose content is often enigmatic or dizzying – which appear to radiate on the screen and acquire a hallucinatory dimension.

Stretch/Condense

By modifying the number of images obtained while re-filming, experimental filmmakers modify and re-imagine the qualities of the original temporally. While slow motion can make it possible simply to see a quick event better, it can also – by combining it with superimposition, for example – contribute to forms of suspending the time and action depicted, as in Bill Morrison’s Light is Calling (2004). Here each photogram of a sequence from the film The Bells (James W. Horne, 1926) is quadrupled, and then the two final photograms of this series of four are superimposed on the first two photograms of the next series, and so on, producing an effect of a constant lap dissolve. In the sixth and final section of Phoenix Tapes (1999), Matthias Müller and Christoph Giradet use video to dilate a shot of Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), stretching it from several seconds to nearly five minutes in length. The tear flowing interminably down the actress’s cheek becomes a figurative event which, when slowed down, heightens both the plasticity and the emotional charge of the image.

Fragment/Combine/Reconstruct

Re-filming techniques make it possible to re-conceive the structural organization of the images and sounds in a great variety of ways. Using an optical printer, for example, makes it possible to create vignettes, in which forms of montage are produced whose images are no longer in consecutive order but rather simultaneous (Jerry Tartaglia’s Ecce Homo, 1989) or out of phase (Alexandre Larose’s Ville Marie – A, 2006-9). Our spatio-temporal and narrative understanding of a sequence can also be profoundly altered, as in Dance 22 (1993) by Raphael Montañez-Ortiz, which, out of a slapstick scene in a Marx Brothers film, creates an evolving loop; or in the deconstructions of cartoons carried out by Martin Arnold using digital software (Hydra, 2014; Haunted House, 2011; Soft Palate, 2010), which enables him to “break” the initial arrangement of the figures and their relations with the background, turning to a lexicon of elements he can manipulate, like the cels traditionally used in the animated film industry.^[1]

Pile Up/Texturize

In many re-use films, an optical printer is used to increase the number of “layers” of images beyond what is normally possible with a technique such as superimposition. Examples can be found in the work of David Rimmer (Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, 1970), in which this technical procedure echoes an examination of the mechanical and repetitive nature of the film strip and its connection to the industrial sphere, or in the films of Frédérique Devaux, who employs an optical printer on account of the great number of fragments her films are made out of, like a stained glass window.^[2]

Finally, re-filming can involve working on the image’s texture in a way directly linked to questions of intermediality. Matthias Müller (Home Stories, 1991) and Olivier Fouchard have devoted films to bodies of images initially recuperated from VHS tapes which they then re-film on Super 8 or 16 mm film, without seeking to conceal the scanning lines produced by storage on magnetic tape, which is part of their spectatorial memory.