Film Art
Phenomena
by Nicky Hamlyn
British Film Institute, London, 2003
224 pp., illus. Trade, £48.00; paper,
£16.99
ISBN: 0-85170-971-0; ISBN: 0-85170-972-9.
Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney, Australia
mike.leggett@uts.edu.au
Most artists and their audiences regard
the film medium as both an industrial
tool, delivering distraction to the local
multiplex, and an art tool, delivering
big luscious moving images and sounds
to the local city gallery. Except that
in the gallery and apart from art celebrities
like Matthew Barney, its not film
but electronically mediated images and
sounds we encounter. Some artists
engagement with technology amounts to
little more than changing the script and
the performers. Film Art is something
apart and certainly has nothing to do
with art film (as I once explained at
length to a customs official).
The Phenomena of the title
emerges from the three section headings:
Media, Apparatus and Aesthetics, and takes
a muscular approach to discussing recent
artists approaches to the phenomena
of the film medium (and a bit of video).
There is no separation of description
suggested by these headings as the writer
moves quite freely through the polemics
of issues, mainly on representation, that
he and others have developed over the
last 40 years.
This volume adds to the growing literature
arising from the work of a group of artists
centred on the London Film-makers Co-operative
(LFMC). Established in 1967 to distribute
the emerging underground cinema of the
time, in 1969 it expanded into becoming
a co-operative workshop, probably the
first run by visual artists, to control
every aspect of film production, from
shooting, processing, editing and printing
film, its exhibition and distribution.
It embraced the technology of film in
its totality without trying to mimic the
practices of the television industry,
which in the 60s relied largely on 16mm
and 35mm film mediums for recording purposes.
Whilst artists in other countries utilised
cameras and editing gear, additionally
in London obsolete equipment from televisions
laboratories was readily re-purposed,
from the inside out. It was a process,
more recently recognised in the academy
as practice-based research, where filmmaking,
reflection, peer-group evaluation and
theoretical discourse were conducted within
collective and individual frameworks.
Hamlyn correctly holds that as a result
of this phenomena, the films and the discourse
generated by the filmmakers and the subsequent
effect it had on a wider debate within
the international fine art and cinema
communities was significant. His contribution
to the literature brings to some half
dozen the book titles specifically addressing
the interventions made by the British
group, which included a series of public
international events in London. Along
with film artists from North America and
Europe, the international discourse generated
defined and invigorated the mainstream
cultures of visual art and cinema.
Later in the mid-80s in Britain, it would
slip into an academe in flux, and re-emerge
as a branch of the catch-all subject area
of media studies. Unlike earlier writers,
Hamlyn is not averse to making occasional
reference to mainstays of cinema studies
such as Hitchcock, Coppola, Kubrick and
Godard.
His focus however, is on aspects of the
analytical approach to filmic representationthe
Frame, the Hand-held Camera, Point of
Viewand are covered in detail but
always through Hamlyns descriptions
of a selected range of the film-makers
work. This can be characterised as a film
practice that, through foregrounding the
phenomena of the encounter for the viewer,
actively engages perception and cognition
as the means to bring the filmic experience
into consciousness.
With acknowledgement to the earlier chroniclers
and polemicistsLegrice and Gidal
in particularHamlyns approach
is to record his responses to and subsequent
thoughts about the filmmakers work associated
with the LFMC, either made or exhibited
there, or distributed from the huge international
collection of prints accumulated up to
the end of the 90s. As one of the second
wave of film-makers who began to contribute
to the developing work there in the mid-70s,
Hamlyn was well placed to view critically
the earlier work and assess the later
and subsequent work as it passed though
the various stages of emergence. This
process is by no means even handed and
does not pretend to objectivity. It has
the style of a journal or artist / teachers
notes of encounters with the phenomena.
In the opening pages the lines of demarcation
are clearly drawnthe integrity
of a works original medium,
the self-effacing machines
that are video projectors and the sleights
of hand attributable to digital trickery.
He goes on: "DVD is a kind of revenge
of technocracy on creative approaches
which examine the specificity of the medium."
Clinging to the fetishistic tendencies
of the late modernists, he has a greater
tendency to rush in with ill-considered
and shaded paranoid judgements that fail
to address the central ontological issues
involvedDVD is indeed a specific
medium, now being explored widely by artists
around the world, which in the same way
as so many of the films made in the 60s
and 70s, is only failed by the artists
inability to recognise that specificity
and thus the appropriate creative approach.
Whilst technology is by no means neutral,
neither is the artists role in all
this.
Film, video or digital media used simply
as a convenient delivery means for representational
forms will continue reproducing the cultural
formations that much of the work made
by these film artists critiques, which
includes Hamlyn both as writer and film-maker.
To assume DVD is simply another transparent
carrier is to overlook the obvious. It
may not have the seriality of dust, dirt
and tape dropout but it certainly has
a different set of relational possibilities
worthy of investigation. Later, Virtual
Reality researchers also come in for a
drubbing from Hamlyn, continuing what
is only blind vitriol, there being no
discussion. Too often he leaves rhetorical
questions at the end of sections that
purport to address contemporary developments
within digital culture. If the writers
declared interest is in film art and to
a lesser extent video art, why bother
with loose jibing at more recent developments
in the moving image field of arts practice?
Experiments with installational forms
of film exhibition that acknowledged the
apparatus as part of the "imposing
presence" of the medium are well
covered in this account. Expanded cinema
was an area of particular investigation
by the London filmmakers and the documentation
gathered here may well be the only remaining
vestiges of a truly ephemeral stage in
the larger project.
The general index does not reveal any
reference to Husserl et al, so anyone
expecting phenomenology to be considered
in the context of this title will be disappointed.
There is a useful index of the films cited
in the text. Much of Hamlyns descriptions
of the films, how they look, and how they
work encourages a desire to experience
the films first hand, and this list will
make requesting a film from the distributor
much easier. In most cases, since the
demise of the LFMC and the relocation
of its distribution collection, the Lux
Holding Company in London will be able
to respond to requests.