Cinema, and photography, on which it rests – as discourse, still, and as technology, historically –
are obsessively materialist media. They insist upon the presence of an object, in the world, in
time; tangible, palpable, a thing with an existence of its own, independent of, both prior to and
continuing after the image. (Yet this “before” and “after” is, of course, elided in first
photography’s and then film’s elimination of anything other than the moment and the space, the
perpetual present tense and bounded field of both media’s presentations.) In contrast to the
word, which may be wholly imaginative, substituted for some thing that was never there, or
standing in for a feeling, a sentiment that could never have a physical manifestation, not even
tears or laughter, the filmic image insists on the concrete nature of being in the world, and on
that being outside of time. How strangely then, does that materialism depend upon the
immaterial and the temporal, and at once deny and acknowledge its dependence? When the early
British photographer Fox Talbot, the inventor of the paper negative, finally stabilised an image
he wrote joyfully that “I have captured a shadow!” However, what was being played out, already,
in that early image was a dialectic of light and time. What light gave, light could take away, the
image was as ephemeral as that which it sought to establish. If the image depended on light, was
light, its fixity depended upon the elimination of light: too much light and you reduced the
exposure to pure nothingness, too much light, for too long, once you had the image rendered on
paper, and the apparently stable subject decayed before your eyes. The paradox of early
photography was that that which was made in light needed to be kept in darkness. Even if film
escaped this problem, the stability of the fixed image solved by the mid nineteenth century, the
dialectic remained at the heart of the media of the modern era, undisclosed and un-debated.
The structural filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s - with whom Elizabeth McAlpine has so often
been compared, and in whose tradition she undoubtedly works - were modernist to the core in
their overdue concern with the rhetorical properties of film as medium. There is at once an
insistence on what Roland Barthes, seeking it for photography, called the noeme, the specific
rhetorical essence of the medium, and on corroding, corrupting and blending that essence
through combination. Structural film, if it at times undertook a belated scrutiny of cinematic
language that modernism had already experimented with almost from the inception of cinema,
for the first time in the history of the medium, developed the foundational ontological paradox
until light itself assumed material form. This is why, as George Baker puts it, Structural Film
provides us with a model of cinema that “accedes to the condition of sculpture”. We see it for
example in Tony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973). Elsewhere, however, Structural Film
established a commentary on the dialectic of dissolution of the body into light and its
materialisation as image, whereby the relationship finally unravelled, as we see in the closing
section of Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma (1970). (Indeed, this “unravelling” might be the
reason for Frampton’s using of the ends of reels. It is not simply that the emulsion of the film
becomes inconsistent, and also, therefore, its capacity to record a subject, especially in the failing
light of a winter afternoon, but that the film itself is leaving both the camera and the projector.)
Mechanical time, therefore, is running out. A neglected aspect of Structural Film, in all the
subsequent critical emphasis on its materiality, is its reclamation of the infinite… Maurice
Blanchot remarked once that 'The gratifying aspect of the image is that it constitutes a limit at
the edge of the indefinite.' Structural Film sought to corrode that limit, to undermine the
domestication and comfort to be found in the fixed image of the world, and uncertainty might be
found in intangibility as much as it was to be found in the haptic.
Not only is a tangible shadow an impossible proposition, so too is the square shadow, since even
that cast by a perfectly square window frame, for example, will be distorted by the eye, even if it
fell on a perfectly flat surface. This impossibility is the conceit that underpins McAlpine’s two
new works: Square Describing a Circle and Film Stack, and it should not go un-noticed that what
is under discussion here is the concept of framing and materialisation. This degree of “failure”
within the optical regimes of modernity was the subject of critique by several artists within or
related to the post-minimalist movement in North America. Amongst photographers – where it’s
rare – one thinks of Francesca Woodman’s ‘Almost a Square’, and similar images, in her book
Some Disordered Interior Geometries (1981); amongst filmmakers, the most obvious precedent is
Richard Serra’s Frame (1969). McAlpine does something considerably more than these artists,
however, which is to firstly refer back the flawed reproduction of the object to the framing
technology of the apparatus, and therefore its history in discourses of classification, secondly, to
refer that operation – framing – to the dialectic of light and time as it concerns the
materialisation of the object, and thirdly, through projection to establish the connection between
frame as capture and lens as exhibition. She does this through an attention to the apparatus that
never featured in projects such as Serra’s; indeed, hers is an attention to, and re-imagination of
the cinematic apparatus that exceeds even that of the Expanding Cinema movement of the early
1970s. Indeed, one might say that having first made explicit, in works such as The Fly, the
cinematic noeme, the exchange between time and light, so that it becomes literally sculptural,
McAlpine is now rendering the apparatus, equally occluded in the cinematic fantasy of
transcendent, disembodied, subjectivity, equally sculptural. If, in The Fly, the immateriality of
narrative temporality becomes an external subjective property grasped in the physical
engagement and traversal of that which would otherwise traverse us, here the elided materiality
of technology and ideology, the technology of presentation, itself becomes, in perverse, selfrevealing, forms, the object of attention.
The project of Structural Film was left incomplete when experimental film as an avant-garde
movement collapsed under the welter of late capitalism’s technological innovations – first video
and then digital image-capture – and capital’s innovations in the commoditisation of culture – in
particular, first, the pre-determined reification of that which was seemingly predicated upon its
opposition to capital, and secondly, the corrosion through commercialisation of those institutions
that it created for distribution, or those in which it sheltered. The only sanctuary for the difficult
questions that the avant-garde posed, and indeed for the legacy of its practice, is now the art
world and its markets. There are no other spaces. Even academia, once the refuge for
independent filmmakers who wanted to produce work that challenged the rhetorical conventions
of cinema (and how conventional those conventions are!), is now both an adjunct of industry and
industrial in its own organisation and goals. One of the things that makes Elizabeth McAlpine a
significant artist is her continued insistence on asking, in this new context, the intractable
questions of cinema that modernism first posed in the 1910s and 1920s, and which the
“cinematic” avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s reprised; it is her attempt to redefine “cinema”
as something other than intangible, sentimental narrative; it is, then, her place in modernism’s
legacy, her refusal to accept the caesuras of history. What “cinema” is or might be is not an
irrelevant question for our time, any more than continuing to work in the modernist tradition in
a manner other than pastiche is itself irrelevant. The questioning of rhetorical forms and the
belief in the necessity of art’s contingency to history remain vital if art, as something more than
niche commodity, exclusive design and decoration, is to have any validity for modern culture.
© Chris Townsend, 2010