Expanded Cinema: Film as Spectacle, Event and Performance presents an international survey of works that transcend the traditional modes of projection.

Film as Spectacle: Expanded Cinema can fill our field our vision as an environment of light-beams or with large, integrated multi-panel projections.

Film as Event: Expanded Cinema works are unique temporal experiences, different every time they are projected and distinct from film installations.

Film as Performance: Expanded Cinema often incorporates live performative actions of the artist-filmmaker, either behind the projector or in front of the screen.

DEFINING ‘EXPANDED CINEMA’

‘Expanded Cinema’ is the term used to describe works that do not conform to the traditional single-screen cinema format. Expanded cinema is not a movement; it is a format of presentation that can be used for films or performances made for a wide variety of aesthetic, personal and political reasons. The only common link between them is that they do not adhere to the ‘standard’ mode of presentation of a single, continuous film projected onto a screen in front of an audience. Projectors are often placed in the room with the audience (not hidden away in a booth at the back) and become part of the overall, participatory event.

Expanded cinema can widen our field of vision. With two (or more) projections side-by-side or vertically aligned, individually images may act in harmony, dialogue or counterpoint with each other. Real time may be measured against itself, exaggerated or contracted; abstraction can be further abstracted. Expanded cinema also explores the transience of the medium – with these works, no two projections are ever the same.

The work often questions the role of the spectator and sometimes what happens across the room is more important than what is on the screen. Expanded cinema can take place in the traditional theatre environment, but a flat, open room with no fixed seating offers filmmakers wider freedom to experiment with projection. Expanded cinema includes films that incorporate live performances, and even light pieces that do not use any film at all.

In his epochal book Expanded Cinema (Studio Vista, 1970), American media theorist Gene Youngblood defines the term in a different way, stating that “When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness”. His hypothesis concerns the moving image in a general utopian sense, is not limited to film technology, and discusses the expansion of cinematic possibilities that was made possible by the invention and integration of the then new technologies of video, computers and holograms at the end of the 1960s. Youngblood covers inter-media events and environments that present an ‘expanded field’ of visual or sensory stimulation.

The range of work that may be called ‘expanded cinema’ is extremely broad, encompassing the multi-media spectacles seen at expos and world fairs, along with the use of film in happenings, light shows, intermedia performances, gallery installations, public actions (which may reference cinema but use none of its technology) and absurdist events that attack the theatrical situation.

Expanded cinema and the projected image has recently been the focus of three major international exhibitions – Into the Light (Whitney Museum, New York, 2001), Future Cinema (ZKM Karlsruhe, 2002), X-Screen (MuMoK, Vienna, 2003) – which have taken significant steps to embrace expanded cinema within the historical framework of contemporary art. Each has importantly included the work of filmmakers from the avant-garde (film co-op) tradition with established visual artists from the art world. But as gallery-based exhibitions presenting continuous installations, or photo and text documentation, they have limited in their ability to demonstrate the vitality of expanded cinema as a performative and variable live event.

Expanded Cinema: Film as Spectacle, Event and Performance is an attempt to redress this imbalance, particularly concentrating on works which developed, more of less, within the tradition of avant-garde and formal filmmaking.

In that context, Expanded Cinema was in many ways an elaboration of the concept of ‘film as film’ pursued by the structural/materialist filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s. It extends their inquiry into the unique properties of the film strip, and the raw physicality of the medium, into the moment of projection.

This hands-on presentation of the work also takes the film avant-garde’s idea of a ‘personal cinema’ back to the home movie that is projected by the family member that shot the film. Performances of expanded cinema often require the presence of the artist-filmmaker, who must physically manipulate the projector in order to present the work completely. The machinery is not hidden away in a projection booth, as is usually the case at a public screening, but is located in the room alongside, or behind, the audience, where it can easily be seen.

Here, the projector, and very moment of projection, becomes analogous to the camera as a mechanism by which the work is physically created and reproduced. With such fundamental forms of cinema, not only the camera, but also the initial impulse or concept, the exposure of the film stock, the methods of printing and processing the film strip, the moment and style of projection, and also the discourse that is built up around the work, contributes to the overall construction of each piece.

With all these aspects vital to a total work, the act of filmmaking becomes extremely artisan. The filmmaker is usually involved with all stages of production and presentation, if not directly executing every phase themselves. Given these conditions it becomes essential to consider these works as having developed from a visual art tradition rather than the more industrialised cinematic approach, and as such there are more direct and visible links between these works and advances in fine art (from abstraction through minimalism and conceptual art), than in the most auteur or independent strains of commercial cinema.

Expanded cinema, like traditional painting and sculpture, is precarious and unstable. Projectors may be turned on at the wrong time to be immediately abandoned and restarted. They may drift out of sync, lamps can blow and films may break. These are rare occurrences, but they keep it real and act as a reminder of the medium and its transient conditions.

Just as old-fashioned, acoustic musical instruments sound warmer and more pleasurable than their digital equivalents, so film retains its unique qualities that make it a richer and more sensual medium than video or new technologies in the moving image. The reassuring clatter and whirr of a mechanical projector and the nerve-wracking moment of projection is a life affirming moment.

In the film underground of the 1960s, many artist-filmmakers began to experiment with different formats of projection, using multiple film projectors, or combining film projectors with other media, sometimes making cinematic shadow plays with only a simple light source. Such activity continues today, with many artists still making the aesthetic choice to use film instead of cheaper, more easily accessible video technology. One day (some believe this is coming soon) it will not be possible to see these works in their original form, with the guiding hands of their creators. Not only are the pioneering filmmakers getting old, but the technology of projectors and also film itself is in danger of becoming obsolete.

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