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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathAkerman
 
Zen for Film (Paik, Nam June), 1964Empire (Warhol, Andy), 1964
 
 
 

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in time. Here, the term «simultaneity» refers not only to the display of several events at one time, but to the bleeding of the work into its conditions of reception. More accurately, it refers to the coexistence of representation and spectator. In cinema, the representation of events in real time is a principal way of bringing this coexistence about.

Performance vs. Film

While aleatoriness and multiplicity are perfectly adequate to «silence» intentionality in a work, they are easier to effect in theatrical or live performance than in cinema. In cinema, the demand that the observer's gaze negotiate simultaneous foci of attention may be prompted through multiple-screen projection. Or, in projects as diverse as that of the Fluxus group and of structural materialist film, a film's screening is shown as dependent on contingency: as the scratches and dirt accumulate on the empty screen of Nam June Paik's «Zen for Film,» or in George Landow's «film in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, etc» (1966), the specificities of both cinema and performance are

 

recognized—cinema in its predicament of repetition, performance in its condition of aleatory uniqueness. [16] Another solution, following André Bazin's notion of a wandering spectatorial focus, is the long take, which may or may not exhibit the many planes of a deep-focus shot. Warhol's cinema shows that both a simultaneity of events on screen and the extended duration of a single image or event can forestall unidirectional apprehension. «Empire,» with its single image and extended duration, as much as «The Chelsea Girls,» with its screening of two segments at a time and its busy, haphazard zooms, attest to Warhol's welcoming of «noise,» both within the work's structure and surrounding its reception. Underlying all these procedures is a sense of the exhaustion of meaning. Both pure, holistic shapes and an endless substitution and juxtaposition of paradigmatic camera shots, a layering of formal plays, are strategies to deflect signification. A simplified shape, content, or process can hamper logical apprehension no less than an excess of associations (as in several game structures proposed by Hollis Frampton, Snow, and Landow). Richard Serra's «Hands Scraping»(1968) visualizes a

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