Coming Attraction / X Characters (In Search of an Author)

I. Identities: Coming Attractions

The subject of Future Cinema's exhibition framework is to consider what the century old apparatus of cinema offers at the entrance into the 21st century as a future language, and within which kind of operating system it is imagined and projected. The original primeval image at work in the early OS of modernist cinema linked the camera with the eye, understood motion as life, and developed the then new technique of editing over time into a language that camouflaged the machinery behind the seemingly seamIess visual narrative. This "body" of cinema encapsulates the notion of a dynamo founded on the technology of the 19th century, a mechanics of governors and gears, that ushered in a 20th century ideology of modernity. It emerged with and corresponded to the new science of psychoanalysis that was concerned with developing ways of "governing" the (fernale) psyche. These psychoanalytical models - like the psychological conditions they were trying to analyse - were conceptually suspended between the notions of attraction and repulsion. They operated as desire machines situated between a repulsive past (containing the traumatic event to be unearthed) and a nameless, mysterious future shaded by still-to-come desires and promises of libidinal fulfilment. The condition of the psychoanalytical subject was thus always nostalgic for a past that never had been, and a future that would never take place. From early on, modernist cinema's identity reflected these obsessive economies of desire, often located within the terminology of the mechanical.

The project Coming Attraction tries to outline a contemporary interpretation as well as continuation of a theory and practice of this modernist apparatus. A possible "future" cinema is encapsulated in the complex identity of a cinema shifting from "apparatus" to "operation". Thus, cinema is being transformed into an operating system founded on contemporary concepts of programs, codes and new forms of scripting(1). It deals with the cinematic spectacle's past, and its narratives grounded in either a subjective (auteur) perspective or institutionalized (Hollywood) tale. The future of cinema (endowed with all forms of nostalgia generated by the utopian spectacle) evolves around the indelible imprints of its own apparatus left on the memory of the viewers as a sign, or a marker. Not only are these contours transmuting into templates that develop a life of their own, but they suggest a new and coming inscription of voices emerging from forms of radicalized scripts, setting in motion new narrations on subjects, different points of identification, perspective and visions (opposed to the stereotypic convention of "artistic vision").

What became visible within a whole range of artistic strategies in the past decade(s) was a desire for the history of the relation between modernism and cinema to be safely interred within a "cinema nostalgia". These practices were focusing only on a safe look back on the subjects of cinema history, widely ignoring (academic) discourses on the play and conflict of the forces at work between spectator and screen. An uncritical longing for the past appeared in the re-institutionalization of cinema as instrument of power within the art context. Subsequently, the point of departure was often located at a "Degree zero" of cinematic production that would not take into account the established discourse between modernist cinema and avant-garde practice: the then "Coming Attractions" of a century, which by now already belongs to a cinematic past. This project attempts to shape a new ground for future "Coming Attractions" drawn from a wide range of fragmentary instances from scripts (2) of all kinds (cinema, the web ... ). Within the specific condition of Future Cinema, the mechanical apparatus fuses with the textual, language-only based script.

This fusion also marks the turn from the "script " (on which a film might be based) understood to be a homogenous entity and self-contained work of narration, towards interpreting it as a text that belongs to a wide field of texts, writings, scripts and sub-scripts outside of one specific production (one script, one film). Through a strategy of re-reading, re-writing and re-shooting, Coming Attraction deals with the process of the production of meaning through the identity of the cinema apparatus now linked to contemporary media. The fusion of and dialogue between scripts thus constitutes the identity of a New Cinema that is constructed within a spatial arrangement of different historical and contemporary media, and built on the very imprint of the cinematic apparatus.

II. Coming Attraction: Spatial Configuration

Installation floorplan, Coming Attraction: X Characters (In Search of an Author)

The character for Coming Attraction's new spaces of relations develops out of the old model of cinematic "identity" - the projector. The architectural space defines an area, a perceptual cosmos grounded on its mechanics, and joins together different scripts by taking its blueprint from these components of cinema usually hidden away from the dark box of cinema space. The projector reels and the synchronization of light, shutters and sprockets are converted into a spatial analysis of patterns of communication models turned inside out and through themselves. The reels embody notions of past and future, and as mechanical templates leave gaps and openings for "Coming Attractions" which channel and process words, lines, dialogues, actions. Coming Attraction is laid out to be a contemporary projection room not to hide the apparatus. but to combine together cinema and web into the form of a ride (3), that can be understood to be an "Auteur" versus the "Hollywood" ride.

The projector's machinery becomes the foundation where the mechanical transforms into an informational model, into a "system of signs". The zone where the transmission reels intersect bridges the space from self-contained work (a film, an artwork) to a text that remains open. It is from this zone, which mutually outlines the eye of apparatus and viewer that the concept of subjective perception emerges. It renders a spatial configuration that refers to the early "cinematic eye" as identity and communication model encapsulated in the camera's subjective perspective, where the notions of "vision" and "perspective" were understood to be central to identity formation. This cinematic "eye" was joined to the market demographic eye of identifying brands, superseding the cinematic spectacle of the past by the Hollywood system's branding strategies and forms of identity production (as every studio represented a specific market identity in terms of subjects, style, actors, production design ...) — an economy which in its early layout already anticipated the structure of the web.

The architectural space of Coming Attraction allows for seeing these structures, links, and areas of intersection that belong to a contemporary understanding of cinema as the embodiment of modernism's economies and techniques. Here, the 19th century models of cybernetics and projectors intertwine with present day communication networks, synthesized through a 21st century scripting and mapping technique, a spatial analysis of desires and relations operating between and within (mass) media. Coming Attraction deals with the zones of translation from modernist cinema through video and computer to web. The architectural signifier collapses with what it signifies. It bridges and renders the space between the reels of a projector: a space that is shaped by the bending and twisting movements of the film strip running through the mechanical guides. lt investigates contemporary forms of distortions that affect visual and textual information and codes passing through the fiber optical cables of the big networks. Thus, the space of Coming Attraction is set out to be a "filmless" set joining the past to the present. The mechanics of the projector and what it projects are understood to equal body and psyche as well: a translation machine suspended between analog and digital worlds, a tenuous construction of tensions and weights bridging and connecting the past with possible future scenarios.

III. X Characters in Search of an Author -- Production Model

Coming Attraction constitutes the environment for the production X Characters in Search of an Author that will begin to unfold over the duration of "Future Cinema" and beyond.

As an art practice, Coming Attraction illuminates cinema operating in terms of its subject(s), and not just as screens enlarging "life". Cinema is a code-breaking and code-making synthesis engine. It has the ability to format different scripting devices, assemblages of diverse labors, aesthetic practices, technologies, architectural, temporal and spatial paradigms - all expressed in a tenuous unity set within languages of montage and performance. While cinema's patterns of identification reveal symptoms rooted in the scopic regime, its identity can be seen clearly configured through a history of programming languages. These are based on various source codes from which Coming Attraction as environment and X Characters ... as its program draw on directly. The production model for X Characters ... synthesizes the mainstream cinema syntax to script, character, and immersive (movie) ride. In order to re-circulate "cinema" inside a new economy of contemporary media logic, it disassociates, re-codes and reconstitutes the basic elements linked to the identity of a movie. The emphasis is on characters "on the verge", agents in a moment of synthesis, thus shifting attention from the realm of the scopic onto scripting languages: not to mechanics but towards transforming identities, not to formulate canons or a nostalgia for "new media" or cinema, but to continue discovery of and desire for the new scripts initially embedded within these technologies.

Therefore, the navigational space of Coming Attraction is a computer-based storyboarding device that develops in linkage with a process of the realization of a performative space, which in turn feeds back to the navigational script. This sense of a continuity produced through a staging of movements, both physical and emotional, is oriented along the basic principles constituting the movie ride. The rules of this ride have been applied to a computer-based web navigational device. This new ride becomes visible on the computer screen, as a guideline whose scripted flow repeats the form and motion of one specific actual movie camera path. This navigational thread routes through filmless sets and character-defined spaces.

This scripted space X Characters in Search of an Author develops a performative site between cinematic and new media that is character-driven. It is situated through an array of iconic female characters joined together as a gang of fellow travelers in a cosmos of shifting identities. They are selected from different film scripts, spanning eras from auteur through modernist to post-modern cinema. They were chosen not according to conventional qualities and values formulated in cinema history, but as signifiers, icons, outlines that might enable the shaping of new dialogs. What the original movie scripts avoid making evident in the characters' psyches are omissions that X Characters ... takes as openings to begin routing through the new narratives.The plot of X Characters ... does not pertain to the realm of narrative, therefore, but instead is concerned with the development of the character. As opposed to a story about a character and her experience, X Characters in Search of an Author scripts the "character's story" as ongoing production.

IV. Production

First Chat with seven participants, Screenshot of chatroom window

X Characters in Search of an Author releases a set of female characters (4) from the film scripts through which they were originally developed. In the framework of the project, each character is providing one initial profile to be transformed over a number of "movements", first through a performance-oriented project, followed by scripts and the final realization process.

In the first project movement, these profiles are being reconfigured by invited actor/operators in performance-based formats. The participants come from different fields in the realm of cultural production. Their script is to reconfigure and adapt the original profile of the character's script, operating essentially in a gap between their own fantasies and the character's desires. The actor/operators each play one character, meeting on a virtual media stage for improvisational performance "workshops" on set dates. Thus, the accent is on the improvisational and live interaction and on the characteristics of the specific medial situation. Instead of one scriptwriter there are characters who each follow their own logic, structuring a manifold dialog while being recorded. These documents of the live "workshop" interactions with the environment develop a set of possible situations and materials by which new sets of dialogs and scripts can be established. The results obtained with this first performative movement are transformed through scriptwriter and director intervention -- the realization of a script to chart the development of both the characters' passage and the rites of the story in the second movement, the realization and shooting in the third.

The use of media forums (from digital chat rooms to analog radio call-in programs through the reality of workshop meetings) suggests the notion of different communities of interests at work. The project's focus on identity-interaction and groups supporting new discussion formats in inter-communicative and interactive environments is an important feature of its foundation in media. X Characters ... is a work between research and practice, suggesting that the selected character icons of cinema modernity function as "re-links" to a cinema informed by critical feminist practice. This ranges from the discourse on authors and "authorless" worlds to an essential discussion of feminist research into cinema and representation, indexed to a re-reading of gendered dialogs and continuing onto emerging cyber-fields. This foundation sets the project within the fields of cinema, language and identity. The script and production of X Characters ... is a process that converts the character templates into projection screens, channels of desire that constitute a switchboard for networking sets of communicative signals.

Endnotes

(1) The installation space of Coming Attraction is an environment scripted to negotiate the past and a future. This space draws on the earlier project A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight (2001) as well as on the forthcoming production X Characters in Search of an Author (2002/3).

A Memory ... is already built on the subjects of character, script, and movie ride that are substantial to Coming Attraction and X Characters. It provides a shared focus point, their foundation and source code. As a "prequel" of the solo movement and narration of one voice, it now expands to register a range of motions and enunciations - of female characters' voices, of movements through spaces and scripts - as the coded sources developed in A Memory ... are turned into operating principles used as guidelines for subsequent productions. A Memory ... re-scripts a Hollywood film (Eyes of Laura Mars, Irvin Kershner, USA 1978) as a digital and spatial interpretation. The film itself represents a characteristic late-1970s trope. It consists of a sequence of digital architectures, virtual reconstructions based on sets from the original movie. The relation between the digital structures built on filmic spaces and the camera movement is oriented along a voice-over narration. Eyes of Laura Mars is re-engineered into a new script situated between a text and a space. It becomes a system to speak through, not about.

It scripts the desires embodied within the condensed format of a trailer through the analytical logic of a synopsis. The project is shaped by the force of emotions and passions contained in the anatomy of narrative structures. These structures are translated into a different story in order to articulate a contemporary moment whose syntax is constructed through the specific template of the agency of a film. The film's fictitious construction is inserted into a different fiction format (a written narration, an off-screen voice-over, a script). A Memory ... is not an investigation of the real, but an attempt to explore the imaginary embedded in mainstream modes of narrative production, as these represent antagonistic configurations and reflective reservoirs of reality.

(2) A script is an unpredictable play of forces always in development as performative operating system. Scripts develop sets and characters, spatial identities and psychological subjects whose operating principles are often rooted in subconscious and repressed materials. In a scene from the film Klute, a male character (an urban police psychologist) describes to another male character (a small-town detective) the features of the female lead - a high-class call girl. The film scene as mîse-en-abyme turns the mechanism of scripting into a brief tautological gesture: it joins one character to one profile, but here as inversion of conventional scripting rules, which establish a profile as an outline to be inhabited by the actress to render it into her unique, three-dimensional character. In Klute, the profile serves within a process of observation to flatten the complexity of an individual into a recognizable pattern stereotype. Modernist female character templates fashioned by male authors oscillate between different forms of modernity - often, they are barely even minimal types, sometimes they are turned into baroque composites of different scripts in order to satisfy all logics required. In the film, the call-girl character combines three forms of acting, each one a different sub-script to the film: prostitute, aspiring actress, and subject, barely held together in the metascript of her weekly psychoanalytical sessions.

A script is an unpredictable play of forces always in development as a performative operating system. Scripts develop sets and characters, spatial identities and psychological subjects whose operating principles are often rooted in subconscious and repressed materials. The scripting process not only translates between narrative and visual forms of representation. It generates spatial narratives through and on architectures, characters and subjects rendered as synthetic constructions. In this variable world of many possible endings, it is always the author's desire that establishes the cosmic order of the plot. In a film script, these authorial desires are refracted through their characters' features.

(3) In the synergetic 1980s, a direct corporate Hollywood spin-off was the development of the "movie ride". A ride is understood to be condensation, compression and foreshortening of the film economy in the form of an extended Special Effect, a program that translates cinema's intense subjective experiences into distinct consumer formats. A movie ride produces a special kind of visual and acoustic architecture, and is based on the grammar of consumer models of representation. It restages and reruns the visual experience of the original film, but is also grounded on the notion of continuous movement, sound effect, and an intensified sense of artificiality.

It operates only through the symbolic, unmediated by language, condensing a dreamlike experience in which the subject is overwhelmed by vision. In this condensation, the ride re-enacts the movie as oneric experience. It foregoes all actors, taking the main film sets and the film's underlying mechanics to turn them not just into characters, but into stars - the set and the script become the attraction, a characterless psyche belonging to no one but the cinematic apparatus.

With its essential focus on sensation and spectacle of motion, the ride suggests a kind of inverse movement back to the future by returning to essentially pre-institutionalized syntax forms of early cinema. It embarks on a skewed history of cinema, and travels alongside spectacular scenes, through fields of orientations and special effects, always in relation to contemporary philosophies of consumer navigators and open source networks. Here, cinema is revealed to still be an assemblage of agencies and effects, narratives, and scripting devices that is measured in degrees ranging from experience to immersion.

The economy of a ride condenses cinema to the essence of postmodern desires. A ride does not convey a sense of fulfillment or release, but a feeling of anticipation. It is a trip that structures along a temporal as well as spatial iconography of media fiction. As a last form of contemporary longing, it speaks of an oddly inverted passion for the real. It orientates along a path that separates "writing" from "riding", illusion from hallucination. Thus, the ride is a passage linking cinematic to psychic apparatus.

(4) A set of female characters is drawn from films belonging to, and set in, different time periods. Thus they establish a range of specific moments in postwar cinema history. They represent icons bridging from 1960s modernist cinema onto the borderline of the postmodern 1980s. In this universe of female characters, they are both lead and supporting actors at the same moment. They slip in and out of their roles, as the scriptwriter demands that they embody the notion of "woman as symptom", and at the same time they are required to maintain what is expected from a lead character. Moreover are they all entangled in a specific relationship with the terminal - being murdered, suicidal, sacrificial, non-human, extra-terrestrial, or simply walking dead women.

These characters suggest a societal and cultural transformation occurring within the modernist paradigm represented in cinematic discourse, which did not manage to free up a female-character potential outside the conventional modernist canon. The characters are sent into even more fragmentary states of bodies and minds. As the author's agencies of narrative, they are transported to his main fixation, flowing outwards and inscribing a fundamental condition of anxiety and distress into a modernist universe defined by internal discord, psychological conflicts and the breakdown of communication.

And then the fiction ends. Still, these unfulfilled characters remain in the memories of some of us, suggesting the possibility of return in a different manner.

Project Website

http://www.zkm.de/~ruhm/coming_attraction/