Process, Trance, Ritual - An Overview of the Centre Pompidou's Film Collections

Program presented by Philippe-Alain Michaud, Director of Collections

Before it became, in the first decade of the last century, a reflection of the world—its immaterial double or its fiction—cinema appeared, fleetingly, as a purveyor of unreality: for Étienne-Jules Marey, who revisited the question of substance and reconstructed a cosmology based on the hypothesis of motion; for the Lumière brothers, who were still compiling, all around the globe, an endless catalog of moving objects (parades, ships being unloaded, trains arriving at and departing from stations…), reality was not the subject of cinema, but a crystal in which it saw its own powers reflected.

Experimental cinema has preserved this original conception of film and, by shutting itself off from the outside world, has continually revisited its constituent elements in a loop, thereby becoming aware of its own past and of its place in the history of images. When Gordon Matta-Clark, in *Fresh Kill*, destroys his van at the Staten Island landfill, through the process of destruction he re-inscribes film within the history of Abstract Expressionism and creates a Pollock expanded to the dimensions of a landscape; when Jack Smith, in *Flaming Creatures*, ecstatically reenacts the cross-dressing ghosts of the Hollywood universe and transforms its sets into pure decorative clusters, he liberates moving images from any objective content, making repetition (the “remake”) their principle of intelligibility, while cinematic invention becomes an interpretive or critical device. Film is not an extension of photography into movement and time: photography is merely one of its powers, just as painting, sculpture, or drawing are; the screen is not a window through which the world or the reflection of the world extends into depth, but a surface of inscription upon which effects play out—effects that art history, more than the history of cinema, has taught us to recognize as a material surface.

By dissociating, shifting, or rearranging the properties of film, experimental cinema reveals its essentially plastic dimension: it teaches us to see in the unfolding of the film, the projection, or the editing not the tools for constructing an illusory world, but rather arrangements of surfaces. From now on, the history of cinema appears to us as a local history that, in order to regain its true scope and, so to speak, its opacity, must be reconsidered from the perspective of its own limits. Process, trance, ritual: this means animating surfaces, producing unreal causalities, organizing the transformation of images into bodies and of bodies into images, and making figures appear and disappear. Freed from their reflective function, cinematic images—unfixed and fragmentary—appear for what they are: unstable determinations aimed not at reproducing reality, but at transforming it. Philippe-Alain Michaud

PROGRAM

Monday, January 14: Processus (total running time: 73′) *Splitting* (USA/1974) by Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Fiore (16mm, 11′) *Conical Intersect* (USA/1975) by Gordon Matta-Clark (16mm, 18′) *Fresh Kill* (USA/1972) by Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Fiore (16mm, 12′) *Spiral Jetty* (USA/1970) by Robert Smithson and Robert Fiore (16mm, 32′) with Italian subtitles

Tuesday, January 15: Transe (total running time: 55′) *Flaming Creatures* (USA/1963) by Jack Smith (16mm, 41′) Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (USA/1966) by Ronald Nameth (16mm, 14′)

Wednesday, January 16: Ritual (total running time: 58′) *Kustom Kar Kommandos* (USA/1965) by Kenneth Anger (16mm, 3′) *Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome* (USA/1954–1978) by Kenneth Anger (16mm, 39′) *Quimeira* (Brazil/2004) by Tunga and Erick Rocha (35mm, 16′)