What are we all doing here?

One of the real joys of expanded cinema is the way in which it can be at times both transcendent and deeply silly. Imagine a group of people coming together on a Monday night to sit in an auditorium and stare at an almost entirely blank screen for anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour in near total silence. If that already sounds like some type of ridiculous art-culture satire, then imagine in detail that magic moment when the lights dim and the projector starts up and there it is on the screen: basically nothing. But we’re all watching, and sometimes watching in a state of complete rapture and sometimes in boredom and sometimes in deep mediation and sometimes in disbelief that this is “it”. But in many ways that is the entire point of Sandra Gibson and Luis Recorder’s expanded cinema collaborations. They have created works that force you to consider and re-consider what exactly “it” is, and why we gather together in auditoriums to stare at it.

The second piece of the program, a 12 minute film called “Lightline” so succinctly embodies this mission that it made me laugh in the auditorium. That old rule you hear about cinema being a time based medium? Gibson and Recorder said bet and removed the gate and pressure plate from the projector. Instead of watching the film strip one frame at a time, twenty four frames per second, we get a continuous stream of frames flashing in front of the lamp, creating a rainbow of shivering streams of color, shifting and transforming as scenes change and camera angles shift (occurrences we can only guess at and assume are causing the progressions of color and light). Maybe it’s funny to me because I frequently play films and YouTube videos at 2x or 3x speed, with no shame about not honoring the intended viewing conditions of the medium. That’s all just experimental, in the end. Celluloid is just a material and the rules about how it can be viewed are just rules.

Maybe that’s also why I prefer to see these pieces in a traditional auditorium setting rather than a gallery or installation. I want to be held captive in my seat, forced to keep watching and keep engaging with material that often doesn’t offer a point of entry at all. The final piece of the screening, “Corner Film” is an 11 minute black and white series of shots of a dark figure slowly shifting between static poses in a corner. The figure stands facing the camera, then sits facing the wall, then stands facing the wall, then does an incredibly awkward pose where one leg is bent and one is flat (difficult to describe, you had to be there), then a handstand, then stands facing the wall again. All of this is interspersed with light leaks and flashes as the film runs out, and the next shot starts. This was the end of the program, and I had already had about thirty minutes of meditation and at least another thirty where I reflected deeply on where I am in my life, my goals, how I feel about my close relationships, what my parents mean to me, whether or not I should move apartments, what groceries I should by, whether or not I buy into horoscopes as a concept. During this last film I found myself fresh out of topics and I was instead left to just consider the formal and graphic realities in front of me. Interesting compositions, beautiful light quality to the film print, which was actually a color negative that had been printed in black and white. And when the figure moved to stand facing the wall I had to laugh and turn to Claire in the seat next to me because her cat, Goose, is blind and sometimes does the exact same pose. Goose sits up straight, face inches from a completely flat surface, and stares ahead as if she is watching birds through a window or looking out at a vast landscape. When she does this Claire will look at her and say “I wonder what’s going on for her in there” and for all we know she could be seeing something beyond our imaginations, or she could be going inwards, expanding in some other way, while looking out at basically nothing at all.