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| Standard Gauge (1984) | |
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| Standard Gauge (1984) | |
Standard Gauge is an autobiographical account of a few years in the film career of its maker. Such, at least, is its ostensible form and purpose. The material from which the film is composed is pieces of 35mm motion picture film, a width known in former times as standard gauge, that its maker collected while working in and around the commercial motion picture industry. The pieces are a miscellaneous assortment, and include narrative features, trailers, newsreels, commercials, and pieces of head and tail leader.
The method of the film, which was shot in 16mm,is to show these pieces one after the other in an extreme close-up that is one continuous shot lasting thirty-two minutes. This is virtually the maximum length of a scene in 16mm, and is longer by far than 35mm is capable of. The body of the film is this single continuous scene, and it is preceded by an extended written text, presented by means of a crawl, that synopsizes the historical origin of 35mm as the gauge of the motion picture industry. As each piece of film is shown—there are about thirty in all—a narration spoken by the maker describes some point related to it: the circumstances under which it was collected, for example, or a technical aspect of the image, such as the process by which it was produced. So Standard Gauge is a kind of collage or foundfootage film. But instead of being spliced together and projected, and so brought to life, as in the films of Bruce Conner, the pieces of film in Standard Gauge remain separate, and are presented one after the other for inspection by the audience as inert pieces of film, translucent objects made of celluloid. They are thus experienced as they would be by someone, such as an editor or a negative cutter, who handles and organizes the material of film.
Although the film is one continuous shot, each piece of film fills the frame and so inflects the embracing shot, creating within it the affect of a succession of shots. So the film combines two conventions usually held to be mutually exclusive, or even antagonistic: editing—the construction of a film through montage—and the long take, the impassive recording of a scene that has been arranged with some purpose in mind. Just as Standard Gauge amalgamates the two great conventions of film composition, it also brings together narrative and non-narrative filmmaking. By examining the shards of the industry frame by frame, it discovers some of the means and themes of experimental film living, so to speak, in Hollywood. And at the same time, the film engulfs and usurps the material of the commercial motion picture industry, turning it into its subject. Thus Standard Gauge proposes a kind of mutuality or interdependence between two kinds of filmmaking that by conventional standards are thought to be divided by an unbridgeable chasm. By means of a mutual interrogation between 35mm, the gauge of the industry, and 16mm, the gauge of the independent and amateur, Standard Gauge proposes to unify film of every kind. (MF)
Duchamp said that a tube of paint, because it is manufactured, is a readymade, and so a painting, because it combines readymades, is itself a readymade. Production Stills combines two manufactured objects, a roll of motion picture film and a pack of Polaroid film, and so is a readymade too. In the same passage, Duchamp said that a readymade is a work of art without an artist to make it. Production Stills is a film that almost makes itself, and so fulfills Duchamp’s prescription almost literally. He proposes the possibility-utopian and profoundly subversive in its implications-that there can be art without artists. I certainly had as little to do with the making of Production Stills as I possibly could.
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| Production Stills (1970) | ||
The Photogenic Drawings are tracings of advertisements from U.S. Camera Annual for 1952, 1953, and 1954. The title Photogenic Drawings is meant to recall the moment when Henry Fox Talbot was moved to invent his version of photography, which he developed in England in the 1830s as Daguerre was developing his process in France.
Talbot, a gentleman scientist, used a camera lucida to record picturesque scenes when he traveled, for example, views of Lake Como. A camera lucida is an instrument that when directed at a scene produces a virtual image of the scene that to the person looking into the instrument appears to fall on a piece of paper. The viewer follows the delineations of this image with a pencil and so produces on the paper an image of the scene. It is a matter of running the pencil over the lines that constitute an image that appears to be already there on the paper. In other words, a drawing made with a camera lucida is in principle a tracing.
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| Photogenic Drawings (2002) | ||||
Talbot was dissatisfied with his efforts (his wife did better camera lucida drawings), so he was led to develop a process that would do the drawing, the tracing, for him. The version of photography that he invented became the classic process. Talbot called his process “photogenic drawing,” or drawing produced by light. In giving it this name Talbot showed that in his conception photography was the fulfillment of drawing with a camera lucida, drawing of such a peculiar kind that it is most accurately called tracing, because it doubles an image that is already there on the plane of the paper. This image that is already there is the guarantor of the value of the attempt to reinscribe it. Talbot’s photogenic drawing was automatic tracing, tracing by optical and chemical means without the nuisance and liability to error and clumsiness when human agency has to perform the labor of wielding a pencil.
Talbot’s conception of photography as drawing was further reflected in the title he gave to a book that he published as a series of portfolios beginning in June 1844. The title of this work was The Pencil of Nature. It was the first book of photographs, and the images were actual photographic prints. To put it polemically, even if Talbot recognized what an extraordinary thing photography was, how far beyond drawing it went, it was in his mind a continuation of drawing of a kind that can only be called tracing. Tracing was already photography, photography remained tracing. To simplify, there was a moment when tracing and photography were two different forms of the same thing.
The ads I have traced embody the ascendance of photography in its classical form. They appeared at a moment when photography eleven decades after its invention had secured its identity and was confident of its place. By coincidence, this was also the moment when as a child I became aware of photography. It was unthinkable to me that the brands and processes that made up the landscape of photography when I came to know it would ever be any different. It would go on forever without change, not just the products that were being advertised, but what photography was at the time the ads appeared. The future that photography then imagined for itself, the optimism, the confidence, the sense of having arrived at a stable identity, has now of course disappeared, along with many of the companies and products that these ads are for. Flexichome disappeared long ago and Kodachrome is barely alive, but Kodak survives, even though it is engaged in the urgent project of self-transformation to adopt to the digital age. The disappearance of so many companies, disappearances that I almost want to call extinctions, creates for me the most heartrending pathos, not just at the loss of things that were once familiar and that I imagined as permanent, but because they are a displaced reflection of the passage into oblivion of the identity of photography that seemed so utterly secure at the time these ads appeared.
The Photogenic Drawings use tracing, Talbot’s conception of what photography was at the beginning of its first epoch, to inscribe a moment that came toward its end. This epoch may have ended only a few decades ago, but from the vantage point of the present it seems as remote from us as classical antiquity. Tracing is the sign of the wish to act on the power that an image has for you. It’s a kind of devotional exercise, an homage. You trace the image for which you have tender feelings, or love, or adoration, or veneration, or fascination, or obsession. Tracing is a way of trying making something yours. It is a kind of incantation in the form of manual labor. There is an intimacy in tracing, or at least an attempt at intimacy. The paper on which you are tracing lies on the surface you are tracing from. But despite the physical contact between the tracing and its original, the tracing is always separate, always at a remove. When Talbot made a camera lucida drawing, the scene he inscribed was there in front of him. He didn’t work from an image, he worked from the three-dimensional space of life. When you work not from life but from something that is already an image, like a photograph or an advertisement, it is a record not of the world in front of you but of a moment that has already occurred, perhaps a long time ago. Whether that moment is near or far, it is already irretrievable. The moment that created the photograph or the ad may have disappeared into the past, but by tracing the image you act out your wish to overcome the distance between you and what has forever vanished. Tracing is the wish to bring back the irrecoverable. (MF)