A 16mm film projector with no take-up reel, which
unspools discarded, de-accessioned celluloid onto the ground, in a pile that
grows steadily over the course of the exhibition – Light Spill evokes an abandoned cinema, a projectionist who has
fled her station, and an analogue technology that has been left to fend for
itself, mutatis mutandis. Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder stage the scene
of film as orphaned object through the temporal labour of moving image
installation. Collaborators since 2000, Gibson and Recoder unite the rich traditions
of the experimental film (particularly its structuralist and materialist
strands) and the multi-modal sensibility of expanded cinema that emerged in the
1960s, in which the moving image was woven into the labile space of
performance, sound and audience interaction. Their larger body of work explores
this interstice between avant-garde film practice and the incorporation of
moving images and time-based media into the museum and art gallery.
Light
Spill’s contemporaneity, its currency, is one that insists on the surplus
value of the medium’s mechanical and materialist base, made all the more
poignant in the wake of cinema’s evanescence. For the past fifteen years, if
not longer, the ‘death of cinema’ has been announced, debated and contended
with in the film industry, film culture and film criticism/theory.
Pragmatically as well as rhetorically, this declension is dependent on changes
in the economics of theatrical exhibition and distribution, on the onerous fate
of film preservation, and perhaps, most visibly, in the eclipse of an analogue
medium with the arrival of digital formats. Film’s indexicality, we are told,
gives way to the moving image’s new status as information and data.
Counterfactually, Gibson and Recoder posit cinema's much-mourned decay as
coincident with the resolute, stubborn recalcitrance of the film object's
materiality. Their work reminds us
that film, even as it draws ever closer to the vagaries of the art gallery and
its attendant market, bears both a museological gravity and a radically
contemporary weight, in the ‘becoming cinema of art’.
Distinguishing between cinema (as institutional
practice, ideological frame, immaterial idea) and film (the material object
which gives cinema its life, provides its substrate), Gibson and Recoder
confront the moving image’s historicity through a reassembly of its physical
components. With the surgical clarity of vivisection, film’s organs – screen,
projector, celluloid – are broken down into ever more discrete mechanisms and
processes. A series of displacements and relays unfold. A take-up reel is
replaced by the floor, converting the film strip into a contingently wending,
looping, tangled sculptural form. The institutional location and necessary
darkness of the cinema theatre is exchanged for the light of the gallery space,
a light that overlaps with an image tendered through an unfocused lens, through
which the projection of dispossessed films, image fragments, produces a
painterly, unfixed, aleatory frame. In place of theatre seats, we have a bare
space, in which the viewer is free to wander in the round, to pause on
whichever detail most compels them amidst the mechanical dramaturgy of the act
of projection. The film screen, historically the object of an indubitably
immersive spectatorial attention, is both diminished and expanded, substituted
with the gallery wall.
Thus, the representational contents
of the projected image and, as a consequence, a history of encounter with and a
way of relating to that image, is subordinated to the refurbished
processes and technical strategies that summon it forth. The de-realised screen
pulls us backwards, anachronistically, against teleology, towards another
swelling tide. Gibson and Recoder’s modified apparatus and installation-performance
unveils the ‘back end’ of projection, made suddenly organic, corporeal –
another material substrate exposed. The film strip itself is stripped,
slipping, spilling from its previously seamless embrace of the technology which
housed it, provided its conventions of exhibition and reception, and once gave
it a coherent shape, a distinct place. The spectacle’s motility is reallocated,
slithering in reverse towards film’s disposal and disposability. Film: now a pile of snaking, swirling,
luminescent entrails, so much waste matter spit out from the corpus of cinema’s
invisible archive. Nevertheless, a vibrant refuse that
refuses to remain dead.
Light, an essential element of motion picture
production and projection, is multiplied and refracted, illuminating
film as the vital remains of a vanishing cinematic ideal. Light cannot contain
film, but spills out, through film
and beyond it. If film spilling entails loss – the nightmare of film
preservationists’ Sisyphean struggle against the ravages of time on an unfathomable
body of unknown films – light spilling invokes an expanded arena of diffusion
and admixture, an elasticity regarding what this thing called film, after cinema’s end, might become. Light, in this
sense, can give film new contours, another shape, an alternate flesh. Beyond
cinema: an other space opens up, of seeing, feeling,
approaching film as ineffable object
– organic and inorganic, obsolete and obdurate.
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