Process and Perception
In his overview of the artisanal film movement, Chris Gehman argues that experimental cinema has always been defined by its emphasis on alternative models of production, favouring individual, hands-on approaches to the large-scale industrial processes of
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Process and Perception
In his overview of the artisanal film movement, Chris Gehman argues that experimental cinema has always been defined by its emphasis on alternative models of production, favouring individual, hands-on approaches to the large-scale industrial processes of commercial cinema. We have already seen how films like Man Ray’s Le Retour à la raison (1923), as well as the many other early examples of creative rebellion, embraced the radical perceptual possibilities of the material substrate. As Gehman notes, however, the period between the late 1980s and 1990s marks a shift in these practices, with a move towards hand-processing and printing— stages which, up to that point, were still largely undertaken by professional labs. Experiments into different chemical treatments and biochemical decay also emerged, with filmmakers such as Jürgen Reble in Germany, Phil Solomon in the USA and Carl Brown in Canada producing works that emphasised, as the title of Reble’s 1995 film Instabile Materie suggests, the instability and organic fluidity of the celluloid material. This historical emphasis allows Gehman to counter recent arguments that locate the artisanal impetus within a wider reaction to the ubiquity of digital technology and its increasing threat to photochemical modes of working. Thus, ‘by the mid-1990s, long before digital cinema systems created significant practical issues for filmmakers, a definite movement towards a highly material-oriented artisanal approach to filmmaking
© 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_3
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was underway’.1 Gehman states that the more recent embrace of handmade photochemical practices should be seen as emerging from this earlier period, which ‘could be characterised as anticipatory, and motivated by aesthetic and philosophical concerns rather than reactionary, and motivated primarily by practical and technical concerns or naïve cultural allegiances’.2 The naivety of which he speaks relates to the overemphasising of the ‘natural’ and of ‘hand work’ by both filmmakers and theorists, a tendency that seems, from Gehman’s perspective, to put artisanal film in a backward-looking, ahistorical position. Two key issues arise from this account that relate specifically to the arguments developed in this book. The first is that an emphasis on the contemporary cultural framing does not preclude an acknowledgement of historical lineage; that is, it is entirely possible to discuss artisanal film practice in the context of the recent turn to the digital whilst acknowledging at the same time that these practices have their roots in the aesthetic and philosophical interrogations of the pre-digital era. The rich history of material engagements in experimental cinema is not in doubt when one concentrates on contemporary developments. Secondly, although several academic accounts of photochemical film culture have emphasised digital anxiety as a motiv
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