Stephen Barber - Abandoned Images. Film and Films End

The nature and status of film are undergoing a profound transformation, which will undoubtedly lead to the perception of film itself being formulated in new ways, and to films being created or re-imagined with unprecedented aims. Similarly, cinematic space is also experiencing fundamental shifts, notably in the abandonment of its distinctive forms. Since the centenary in 1995 of the first film projections for public audiences, and during the subsequent rise and expansion of the digital era, multiple predictions of the end of film have made made. Although it still possesses a formidable industrial presence, film, in many ways, has lost its unique status within the multiple media of corporations, and become an abandoned entity, formed of abandoned images. At the same time, film appears an ineradicable presence that vivifies memory, overhauls architecture, and engages in an intricate and intensive confrontation with the human eye. Film also holds its own approaches to sensory self-abandonment, and its particular, strategic formulations of the end. This book probes the dynamics of film at a pivotal moment in its history, when it may either disappear into the engulfing forms of digital-media industries, or else be reconfigured, by its infiltration into new forms of human vision. Above all, the book examines and visualizes conceptions of the abandonment of film, and its wide-ranging implications, by scrutinizing (and inhabiting) in depth a

This book consists of four parts, each of which interrogates different, but interconnected, elements of film and cinematic space, and their relationship to ideas of abandonment and termination. The first part is concerned with film theorists and cultural historians who have, in a range of ways, formulated ends of film, and also with filmmakers whose work involves an anatomizing of decay and ruination, often by making explicit links to corporeal and memorial processes of disintegration, or whose work, as with that of Michelangelo Antonioni, invokes the terminal or extreme landscapes and environments within which film must operate, in order to maximally seize its own capacity to dissect human acts and forms. This part of the book also initiates an exploration of the cinematic space of Los Angeless Broadway, examining its diverse layers of abandonment, which can disclose evocative filmic detritus, notably when that space is re-inhabited, in its dereliction, by films preoccupied with sensory falls and hauntings, as in the work of David Lynch. This part of the book also examines how films apparent disintegration and obsolescence contrarily entail the originating of compulsive reinventions, with sensorial and ocular dimensions, of film and its spaces.

The second part of the book looks specifically at how film images, across filmic history, appeared complicit with their own decay and downfall, and how that content relates to conceptions of film as comprising a sensitized medium for human memory and history, and for the determining of the particular forms of the gestures, behaviours and dreams of its vast audiences. The memory of film remains so embedded within the nature of memory itself that the lapsing, shattering or disappearance of film constitutes a significant trauma of memory, within a contemporary era that predominantly formulates visual media of oblivion. Often, film has been charged with holding and displaying images of death as in such documentary films as Africa Addio and Gimme Shelter and of prefiguring terminal or apocalyptic events, as though film formed the supreme medium for the embodiment of definitive human endings. This part of the book also examines what happens to cinematic space after its distinctive presence and aura appear to be erased, when a cinema becomes abandoned or demolished, or re-used for seemingly antithetical and alien purposes to that of film projection. Cinematic space may be overhauled, or else entirely uprooted and displaced, as in the iconic architecture of the Hollywood and Vine metro station in Los Angeles, which re-creates the aura of a lavish cinema. In all cases, the residual traces of film, notably those which appear to intimate its end, constitute vital materials for the instigation of new visual forms.

The third part of the book examines, in particular, the relationship between film and the human eye, and the future of that rapport as films status is transformed. Notably in the 1920s, filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov and Luis Buuel conceived of the eye as a target for films experiments, with the aim of creating actively engaged spectators. Throughout the subsequent decades, that often-confrontational relationship between the eye and film has been an insightful one, in determining the parameters of how film impacts upon its spectators and its surroundings; film has been conceived as entailing and presenting conflagrations and woundings, transmitted from the eye to film, or from film to the eye. Film has frequently envisaged acts of blinding, and the loss or ending of vision. Cinematic space, in the forms of the lavish film-palaces constructed worldwide in the 1920s and 30s, indicates another dimension of that rapport between film and the eye, in the architectural formulation of an excessive ocular luxury which could serve to divert the spectators eye away from film, to scan the multiple attractions of cinemas interiors and facades; the ruination or abandonment of such spaces now entails a form of austerity in which that luxurious engulfing of the eye is abruptly ripped away, thereby instigating new perceptions and formulations of vision.

The final part of the book probes in detail what forms of media may take on films powerful, often perverse obsessions in the future. Films survival in the digital era is bound to the way in which it enduringly constituted the axis of sensory and ocular experiences, which became so central to human perception, over an extended period, that film may, finally, be able to transmutate into all future media that attempt to seize, beguile and assault the human eye. Especially in an era of digital malfunctions and crashes, the residue of film its material once held together for projection by splices may be crucial for the reparatory suturing of memory and vision. Architecture itself may be determined by films disappearance, and be required to work to conjure film back into existence, in a parallel way to that in which films pioneers of the 1880s and 90s used magical sleights of the eye to bring film into being, and foresaw ways, in the face of what then appeared to be impossible technological obstacles, to project films images to its audiences. The contemporary space of abandoned cinemas now appears as that of an experimental laboratory for the conception of new media of human vision; the book ends with a resuscitatory act of filmic projection in an otherwise abandoned cinema, intimating that film remains an essential, aberrant spectacle.