Materials, Materiality, New Materialism
The arguments made in this book relate primarily to a mode of experimental film practice commonly referred to as ‘materialist’, that is, works that draw attention to the material of the filmstrip through tactile intervention and obscure vision by creating
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Materials, Materiality, New Materialism
The arguments made in this book relate primarily to a mode of experimental film practice commonly referred to as ‘materialist’, that is, works that draw attention to the material of the filmstrip through tactile intervention and obscure vision by creating multiple layers, tangible surfaces, proximal views and haptic images. In this chapter, I sketch out a foundation for thinking about materials, materiality and materialism in a contemporary context, finding new points of connection between film aesthetics and current political concerns that demand new ways of seeing, sensing and experiencing our physical world. I navigate overlapping avenues of thought that relate to the value of photochemical film as an artistic tool capable of communicating across multiple materialities: bodily, earthly, human and non-human. I emphasise materiality, therefore, as both aesthetics and politics, necessarily framed by film’s obsolete status, which, as I outlined in the introduction, bestows on it a critical and oppositional force and allows it to articulate alternative subject positions. That the demise of celluloid film as a commercial medium coincides with both a rising awareness of the finite physicality of the planet and a wave of scholarly discourse calling for a more attuned material sensibility suggests that the time is ripe for a reassessment of materialist film’s radical potential and theoretical implications. Far from looking backwards into film’s glorious past, artists working photochemical resources are, I argue, resolutely focused on present-day issues and future challenges. Accordingly,
© The Author(s) 2020 K. Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44309-2_2
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new theoretical paradigms are mobilised here to take into account this cutting-edge position. However, no contemporary phenomenon exists in a vacuum, and only by returning at times to the historical context will the current situation be effectively unfolded and more concretely understood. To a large extent, materialist film has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, with the establishment of the London Filmmakers Co-op and the emergence of a set of theorisations—notably through the filmmaker-critic Peter Gidal and his ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’ of 1975—in which interrogating the physical substrate and laying bare the means of production were framed as anti-representational political gestures in opposition to the illusionism of narrative cinema.1 As I will outline throughout the current and subsequent chapters, there are some key resonances between this period and the contemporary moment, particularly in terms of the reappropriation of industrial equipment for fine art purposes, the emphasis on artistic autonomy and the exploration of material processes that bear the trace of the artist’s hand. But although the 1960s and ‘70s might be considered the origin of the first systematic examina
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