Lars Henrik Gass

Film and Art After Cinema

English translation Ÿ 2019 by Lars Henrik Gass
and Multimedijalni institut
Translation: Laura Walde
editing/adaptation: Katrin Gygax

Film and Art After Cinema is translated from the second expanded German
edition under the title Film und Kunst nach dem Kino Ÿ 2017 Lars Henrik
Gass and StrzeleckiBooks.

No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in

any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other
electronic or mechanical methods, nor within any information storage or
retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Multimedijalni
institut.

Multimedijalni institut
ISBN 978-953-7372-47-7

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National and
University Library in Zagreb under 001025557.

Zagreb, March 2019

The author would like to thank Carmen Strzelecki and Petar Milat for
their support in kindly taking on this project, as well as Laura Walde and
Katrin Gygax for their careful and thoughtful translation.
Lars Henrik Gass

Film and Art

After Cinema
Contents

7 Preface to the First Edition

13 Preface to the Second Expanded Edition

19 Cinema is Disappearing from Films

55 Film Festivals as Temporary Museums
85 The Compulsion to Perceive
115 A New Kind of Epic Film
143 Film Becomes Sculptural
173 The Music Video Adapts Cinema
199 Far from the Twisted Reach of Crazy Sorrow
(Epilogue)

207 About the Author

Preface
to the First Edition
Philo Fine Arts, 2012

... dans le miroir glacé de l’écran, les spectateurs ne

voient présentement rien qui évoque les citoyens
respectables d’une démocratie. (Guy Debord)

This book is about how ∫lm is disappearing from

cinema. It deals with the decline of the cinema as a
place to appreciate ∫lms ∞ both industrially and
artistically ∞ and as a place that turned ∫lm into an
autonomous social mode of perception, which
distinguished it from all other forms of art for
about 100 years. This is therefore also a book about
∫lms that were conceived for this speci∫c place. It
discusses ∫lms whose images were technically
produced and reproduced in a particular way,
which is why they shape our perception in a histor-
ically unique manner. Yet above all, this book also
deals with ∫lms that already refer to a mode of
perception beyond the space of cinema. The decline
of cinema is taking place not only in a directly

7
economic and indirectly urban sense, in that tradi-
tional places for viewing ∫lms (and the corre-
sponding architectural spaces) are disappearing.
This would hardly be worth mentioning, since
∫lms continue to be produced (for a speci∫c market,
or none at all) and are simply shown elsewhere.
This development is not new; it has been apparent
since at least the early 1960s. What is new is that
cinema is also declining in terms of the mode of
perception that ∫lm owes precisely and exclusively
to cinema: a cognitive space in which the viewer no
longer observes, reΩects on, or envisions reality, but
∞ lost in time ∞ is compelled to perceive. This social
mode of perception is what I term cinema.
The decline of cinema is played out simultane-
ously at the movie theater and within the ∫lms
themselves. Cinema is almost imperceptibly fading
from ∫lms, which in turn are disappearing from
cinema. This book is therefore about a social mode
of perception that once constituted a particular
historical manifestation of cinema. The technolog-
ical and economic grounds for this development ∞
cinema as a venue for viewing ∫lms is increasingly
losing importance; changes in the leisure habits of
society mean the social pact linked to cinema-going
is becoming ever less relevant ∞ have been described
many times before and shall therefore not be dealt
with again in this book. The decline of cinema can

8
be traced back to both societal reasons, with other
leisure activities replacing the trip to the movie
theater, and technological reasons, as leisure society
began using other means to regulate access to ∫lm.
First television, then new storage media for private
use: VHS, later DVD, the internet, mobile devices,
etc. However, as cinema declines ∞ a decline which
began as gradual destruction and will ultimately
lead to cinema’s disappearance ∞ not only are ∫lms
being released that are meant to be viewed outside
the cinema (in private as well as in public, on
computer screens and as part of art exhibitions),
they have also changed in appearance and in the
way they are perceived. Cinema was intrinsic to
∫lm as a mode of perception. Film was once the
visible expression of cinema, visualizing both it
and the unknown world within it. Film structured
social experience through cinema. How ∫lm is used,
where and how it is shown, and the speci∫c cultural
practice of ∫lm all determine the way it is perceived.
Never have so many ∫lms been produced, never
have so many ∫lms been available to us thanks to
the internet and DVDs, and never have we watched
as many ∫lms as we do today. Strictly speaking, this
book is not about aesthetic appraisal, but about
asking how ∫lm is produced, presented and
perceived beyond the scope of cinema.

9
 This book is less about the “death of cinema”
than it is about the mutation and migration of
∫lms, for example the relocation of artistic ∫lm to
the spaces of the art world. Therefore, this book
looks at a development in which viewing ∫lm takes
place outside the cinema, and at the consequences
of this on its speci∫c forms of appearance and pres-
entation. Film has been acknowledged within the
art world under conditions we did not expect. For a
few ∫lms and ∫lmmakers, this has resulted in
unforeseen recognition and a new source of income.
At the same time, this also has had an impact on
how ∫lms are produced and perceived in this
context. Any kind of institutional logic ∞ that is, a
system of discourses and values, of spaces and tech-
niques ∞ is inevitably mapped onto the ∫lms, onto
their presentation and reception; it dictates what
we perceive, what we think.
Therefore, this book is not about ∫lm as an art
form considered from the vantage point of philo-
sophical aesthetics, but rather about the current
conditions under which ∫lms are created and
shown. This book is a critique of the cognitive space
we call cinema, which has occasionally allowed us
access to an alternative mode of perception and a
different existence; and it is above all a critique of
the social and economic, architectural and technical
conditions and formats ∞ be they television, DVD,

10
internet, ∫lm festivals, exhibitions or museums ∞
insofar as they structure our perception and deter-
mine how we view ∫lms and what we perceive of
the world at present. Speci∫c ∫lms (by Steven Spiel-
berg, Andy Warhol, Douglas Gordon, and others),
historical manifestations (experimental ∫lm, found
footage, music videos, etc.) as well as a speci∫c kind
of institutional logic ∞ particularly that of the art
world ∞ serve as points of departure. It is almost
inevitable that certain generalizations will be made
that cannot do justice to the individual institution,
speci∫c exhibition, museum, ∫lm festival, or,
generally speaking, to the simultaneity of various
practices. Some pointedly critical remarks may
therefore be contestable from a ∫lm-historical or
theoretical perspective. If cinema is in retrospect
speculatively and emphatically understood as
an autonomous mode of perception ∞ a mode of
perception presently in danger of being lost ∞ then
perhaps this is a result of us not yet having fully
grasped what cinema once was. Furthermore, for
the purposes of this book cinema is understood as
a possibility, meaning that although indeed feas­
ible, it is an always-unstable alternative to the gaze
currently prescribed by the majority of television
programs, ∫lm festivals, museums and exhi­bitions.

11
 This book is the result of texts I have written
and presentations and interviews I have given since
1995. Parts have been published in newspapers,
magazines and books, as well as in the catalogues of
the KunstFilmBiennale in Cologne and the Inter-
national Short Film Festival Oberhausen. I would
like to thank everyone who has encouraged the
creation and publication of these texts. They were
often contributions, or interventions made for a
speci∫c occasion. This concern for the present
remains. References and footnotes are deliberately
omitted for better readability. I wish to thank
Jan-Frederik Bandel, Alexander Horwath and
Stefan Ripplinger for their critical reading of the
manuscript.

12
Preface to the Second
Expanded Edition
StrzeleckiBooks, 2017

Two years after its publication in 2012, the ∫rst

edition of this book was out of print. As no agree-
ment on a reissue could be reached with the original
publisher, I had to ∫nd another publishing house
that could be convinced to continue the journey.
This enabled ∞ or even compelled ∞ me to revise the
texts in order to remedy any shortcomings I had
allowed myself, due to impatience or lack of ability,
and to expand on my understanding of the issues at
stake based on the many new exhibitions and ∫lms
I have seen, the countless articles and books I have
read, and the myriad presentations and discussions
I have witnessed since 2012. Upon its release I was
convinced that this book could be discarded within
two years, as it was thought to be a response to
current events and would have lost its signi∫cance
by then. Thanks to the many reactions to this book
I was able to realize exactly what I had written, or at
least had wanted to write; and this may now allow

13
me to delve more precisely into the questions I had
already answered. This book was meant to be a
critical intervention into the present; it was meant
to bring about change, while being ∫rmly rooted in
the now. So why not tackle the matter again today,
∫ve years later?
Film and Art after Cinema advocates an emphatic
concept of cinema and therefore mainly attempts
to understand what cinema once was, to what
extent it has changed us, and grasp what we might
not yet have thought through to the end. The book
deals with cinema not primarily as a semiotic
system, but as a cultural practice in the process of
disappearing, while the ∫lms themselves transform
into new shapes as they are distributed beyond the
cinema. This book is about both the migration of
∫lms from the cinema as well as the disappearance
of cinema from ∫lm, hence it also explores how we
perceive reality without cinema. As a consequence,
this book is undoubtedly at times melancholy, but
never nostalgic. It is always unfortunate when
something that made life more meaningful, that
allowed us to feel more deeply, is in the process of
disappearing. Sometimes it becomes necessary to
be conservative in order to preserve something ∞
even if it’s only in the form of an idea. The tone of
these texts, therefore, oscillates between polemic
opposition and ironic absolutism.

14
 To my surprise, it was people who manage
cinemas who rejected this book the most. Opinions
and ∫gures were brought to my attention to
demonstrate that ∫lm and cinema were not faring
all that badly. Therefore, while some accused me of
“cultural pessimism,” others felt I had a lack of
“love for cinema” (which usually entails dealing
with ∫lms uncritically). Against the backdrop of a
“post-cinematic reality” (Manfred Hermes), it is
more necessary than ever to defend cinemas against
those who manage them, as well as against those
who no longer ∫nd them essential for showing
∫lms. This book is concerned with establishing a
deeper comprehension ∞ socially, historically,
media-theoretically ∞ of cinema and the new insti-
tutional and medial typologies that are currently
formatting ∫lms with their inherent logics and
speci∫c techniques. These observations are
intended to contribute to the better understanding
and assessment of the accelerated aesthetic, social
and technical changes with regard to the moving
image. How does the reformatting of ∫lm beyond
the cinema modify the way we perceive both it and
the world?
Since the release of the ∫rst edition of this book,
the correlation between the emergence of a new
subjectivity and the decline of cinema in post-­
industrial societies has become ever more apparent

15
to me. The compulsion to perceive that cinema’s
particular media technology exerts upon the indi-
vidual establishes a link to reality (or rather, it
forces one). This link is currently being replaced by
a new understanding of the self and an altered role
of subjectivity, not only when dealing with culture
and technology. Increasing privatization and
mobility of viewing, the trend towards limitless
networks emerging on the internet, and the partic-
ipatory and interactive references to and between
images in general all point toward a subjectivity
that individually shapes and regulates ∞ that is
manipulates ∞ an external reality. Cinema, on the
other hand, has stood for a predominantly passive,
cognitive connection to an unfamiliar and inacces-
sible reality. For this new subjectivity, however,
practically nothing seems impossible or inacces-
sible. It is reΩected in the technological develop-
ments of digital media as well as in the rationales
and practices of new institutional typologies, which
are formatting and regulating access to images
even as it becomes an expression of them. This
comprehensively changes our understanding of
external reality, thereby also our notion of the
normalizing power of facts and objects, which are
then no longer an equal opposite to subjectivity. In
short, the decline of cinema is accompanied by
processes happening in post-industrial societies,

16
which are having to readjust their approach to
reality, meaning both their communicative bases as
well as, in a narrow sense, their democratic consti-
tution. Although there is no direct causal correla-
tion between the emergence of a new subjectivity
(from the “independent” appraisal of art to populist
opinions in the political sphere) and the disappear-
ance of cinema from ∫lms and in the handling of
∫lms, there is a social and technological connection
that we are only now beginning to understand.
Apart from the unchanged preface to the ∫rst
edition, all texts have been signi∫cantly expanded
and altered. Even though there aren’t endless ways
to “say something,” I took this opportunity to
enhance the sentences representing my central
ideas; the text has been freshened up, yet the song
remains the same. As can be seen from the table of
contents, all chapters now have proper titles,
replacing the rather dry numbers from the ∫rst
edition. The intention is to provide clearer orienta-
tion and structure, but by no means should it invite
you to read the chapters individually. The term
“∫lm” is consistently used for technical moving
images, irrespective of whether they are analog or
digital or of where they are shown; exceptions to
this rule are clearly marked as such in the text.
Many of the insights at the heart of this book
would not have been possible without the

17
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. I
would like to thank Carmen Strzelecki, who has
accepted the challenge to reissue this book,
Jan-Frederik Bandel for his diligent editing, and
everyone who has supported me over the years. I
regret that my friend Klaus Behnken, who enlight-
ened me so much during the past 25 years, has
passed away too early to read the revised edition
and discuss it with me. This book is therefore dedi-
cated to his memory.

Oberhausen, March 2017

18
Cinema is
Disappearing from
Films

The market, which created the commercial distri-

bution of ∫lms, has up to now determined what
∫lm is. This fact, among others, distinguishes ∫lm
from the arts. It is therefore more than likely that
the current changes in the distribution of ∫lms,
which in all probability will bypass the movie
theater, will impact both the ∫lms’ aesthetic design
as well as their social signi∫cance and our mode of
perception. These ∫lms will look different and they
will be perceived differently. They will have nothing
in common with ∫lms as we have known them.
This change will not be noticeable as a rupture; it
will not be evident within the ∫lms. Instead, it will
happen almost invisibly. Stories will continue to be
told; some that deeply impress us and others that
bore us. But ∫lm has also always been more than
just the story it tells us. It has always represented a

19
piece of alternative reality, perceived in and through
cinema. In that moment when I watch a ∫lm at
home instead of at the movie theater, where I am
compelled to perceive, the ∫lm is something else:
the other.
From an economic standpoint, cinema is no
longer relevant, says American ∫lm producer James
Schamus; cinema is dead. In the future, distributors
will release their products to the audience more or
less simultaneously in cinemas and on digital plat-
forms. Cinemas are thereby confronted with
increasingly shorter theatrical windows. Anybody
wanting to learn how the current cinema industry
is faring is more likely to ∫nd this information in
the newspaper’s business section than in the culture
pages. Per capita, an average of one and a half visits
per year were registered in Germany in 2015,
meaning there were a third fewer visitors to
cinemas in the ∫rst ∫fteen years of the new millen-
nium. Movie theater attendance in Germany
dropped from roughly 800 million admissions in
the 1950s to roughly 121 million in 2016. Movie
theater attendance in Germany dropped from
roughly 800 million admissions in the 1950s to
roughly 121 million in 2016. Higher admission fees,
for example for 3D ∫lms, and an increase in screens
somewhat conceal the statistical downward curve
of analog ∫lm distribution. Cinemas have vanished

20
not only in many cities, but even in entire countries.
At the same time, audiences are growing older and
more sophisticated. A ∫lm’s average theatrical
release window has been drastically reduced within
the last few years. Various distribution channels are
currently serviced more or less simultaneously.
New technological opportunities entail new
economic considerations.
It is highly probable that in the medium-term,
∫lms will only make back their investments within
the private spaces of home cinema. Video stores ∞
also on the verge of dying out ∞ have most recently
generated twice the revenue of cinemas. Already
around 2010, only roughly a quarter of a ∫lm’s
revenues were generated by cinemas in Germany
(even less in the USA). In 2016, an online Goldmedia
survey showed that 43 percent, or roughly 24
million online users, access fee-based VoD services
in Germany. As a result, the commercial value of
these services has more than doubled in the last two
years. Right now, distributors are saving both ∫lms
and their own business models at the expense of
cinemas. Considering how poorly many ∫lms are
screened and the conditions these cinemas (also at
∫lm festivals) are in, this is quite understandable.
Cinemas have become too expensive for distribu-
tors. Certain pro∫t expectations can only be met by
reducing costs. It has already become more ef∫cient

21
to sell a ∫lm on DVD or release it on demand for
smart TVs or on the internet. DVDs are now so
affordable that it’s more attractive to watch ∫lms at
home or on mobile devices while traveling ∞ where
I can smoke and drink as I please. I can put my feet
up without disturbing anyone. I can interrupt the
∫lm when the phone rings or if I want more snacks
from the kitchen. I don’t need a parking space or a
babysitter, I don’t have to stand in line or endure
the smell of nachos. No one enforces rating guide-
lines based on age and I can choose from different
languages and subtitles. Most importantly, the
∫lms are available to me anytime. I don’t have to
show consideration to anyone. In short, there are
only bene∫ts. The movie theater will certainly be
used for marketing purposes in the future, to
reenact its status as a social, architectonic space.
The essential creation of added value, however, will
no longer take place in the movie theater. In this
way, the movie theater has long since become the
object of “nostalgic reΩections” (Constance Ruhm).
Digital projection, which aims to suspend the
decline of “cinema” as a business model in Europe
(granted thanks to incredibly high subsidies), will
at best slow down the process, but not stop it.
Initially, this development will result in severely
restricting what can still be shown in cinemas. Both
the digital quality of reproduced old ∫lms ∞ i.e.

22
analog ∫lm copies ∞ and the production of new
∫lms are subject to rapid technological change, so
that the respective standards of quality for digitiza-
tion (and the digital copies themselves) will soon
become obsolete. Digitization can only achieve
what is technically possible now; it quickly becomes
outdated. The history of ∫lm can therefore only be
preserved and shown within the framework of the
technical standards of a speci∫c time. Inevitably,
this raises the question of how we can keep ∫lm
history accessible under optimum technical condi-
tions. Digitized ∫lms will basically have to be
updated with the newest technologies at regular
intervals, admittedly at enormous cost. Digital
scanning under the best possible conditions is far
more expensive than producing a new analog
screening copy. Each digital master has to be copied
and saved to a higher standard at regular intervals,
too. The analog part of ∫lm history will only be
available in a screenable, technically up-to-date
format to a very limited extent. Cinema has been
cut off from its own history through a technological
rupture. If old ∫lms are digitally restored and
screened, it’s usually for an event under special
conditions, often in the form of classic silent ∫lms
accompanied by live music. Such screenings are
neither the norm nor will they ever be, because ∫lm
archives or ∫lm festivals can only ∫nance them with

23
third-party funds in exceptional cases. These events
are essentially already a symptom of the crisis at
hand; they only reenact cinema, they are fake. It is
uncertain whether ∞ and how ∞ the digitization of
analog and the preservation of digital ∫lm history
can be funded, and whether there will even be a
future demand for such offerings in cinemas. The
moment analog ∫lm projectors ∞ and with them
the technical knowledge of ∫lm projection ∞ disap-
pear, we risk removing analog ∫lm history from
cinemas. At the same time, ∫lm laboratories for
analog ∫lms are also disappearing. In this respect,
the decision to favor subsidizing larger cinemas
with big audiences for digital upgrades over smaller
ones was wrong. Film history should, even in a
digital environment, have its place in smaller
venues. Of course we are all grateful that digital
∫lms are ∫nally being projected in focus on the
screen. Seen from an economic standpoint,
however, the digitalization of cinema implies there
is a prospect for ∫lms in re∫nancing themselves
beyond the movie theater, which is illusory. Digital-
ization therefore presents us with a helpless reΩex
∞ one with no alternative ∞ in the face of a new
distribution system with which the movie theater
won’t be able to compete. Quite the contrary:
presumably, the subsidization of digital movie
theater projection will indirectly help ∫nance a
future of ∫lms without cinemas.
24
 The DVD and subsequent generations of digital
carriers also seem merely to be transitional forms
on the way to carrier-free, individual distribution
for private spaces (on demand). DVDs can most
de∫nitely offer new visibility to old, as of yet inac-
cessible ∫lms. Who among us isn’t glad to see ∫lms
∫nally available that we waited so long or even in
vain to see in cinemas or at festivals, and which have
also disappeared from television? Doesn’t encoun-
tering ∫lm history now predominantly take place
on DVD (also because we have neither the time nor
the option of watching ∫lms at the movie theater or
on television, if they are even shown there)? It’s all
the more sobering that there is something about
these ∫lms that cannot be transported home
through DVD, and not just because the digital
reproduction will never meet the quality of a ∫lm
copy. Film is something else beyond the screen and
collective perception. It is the other. The feature of
being always available contributes to the erosion of
cinema as a mode of perception.
When we used to watch ∫lms on television, we
got an inkling of and a desire for cinema. Today,
these ∫lms can no longer be viewed under the
circumstances they were previously shown, which
lent them their impact. What remains is only the
story ∞ that which can be told. Television has
conquered ∫lm by taking away everything that,

25
through cinema as a mode of perception, let ∫lm
reveal a different reality. Watching a Ford, an Ozu
or a Tati on television has always been torture, but
the situation has changed fundamentally since
∫lms started being made predominantly because of
and for television. This is mostly a consequence of
the (European) ∫lm funding system, which requires
∫lms to be co-∫nanced by television stations and
therefore comply with their aesthetic and commer-
cial stipulations ∞ and those responsible expect
gratitude in return without realizing that they are
actively playing a part in the decline of cinema.
After all, who wants to watch TV movies at the
cinema, where they will be even worse? A TV movie
cannot allow itself certain types of images or dura-
tions. The decline of cinema is therefore not only
about the economic decline of a speci∫c way of
distributing ∫lm, which will likely have an impact
on urban retail and restaurant industries, nor is it
just about nostalgia for cinemas as architectural
spaces. The decline of cinema reΩects a societal shift
toward ever greater individualization. Even though
everyone is supposed to consume the same things,
they are meant to be able to do it anytime and at any
location. The privatization of ∫lm reception redi-
rects the purchasing power of the whole movie
theater audience towards television as a principle
for individual access to ∫lm. However, the images

26
of television are essentially different from those of
the movie theater, because from the outset they
address someone who can change channels or
switch off at any time. I have to disagree with
Jacques Rancière, who posits that a ∫lm on televi-
sion and a ∫lm in a movie theater are the same, even
though a television show screened in a movie
theater certainly remains the same. A ∫lm tailored
for, or at least including, distribution on DVD,
television or even the internet also adopts their
respective modes of use and perception. Films have
to be distributable to increasingly smaller devices.
In view of social mobility, they have to be percep-
tible and understandable in ever smaller image
sizes and shorter units of time. Television stations
or providers on the internet don’t sell a ∫lm as a
product to a viewer, instead they sell the viewer (the
“user”) of the ∫lm as a product to the advertising
industry (in the abstract: the “ratings”).
In view of our deregulated work environment
and increasingly individualized leisure society,
cinema today is more of an opposing force to the
trend toward individual consumption. Not readily
available at all times, cinema ∞ like other performing
arts or musical performances ∞ reΩects and requires
a certain form of social engagement. The experi-
ence of the other, only possible when perceived at
the movie theater, must necessarily remain ∫ction;

27
∫lm without cinema. The social engagement corre-
sponding to this cultural practice already resembles
a throwback. Even television, at least insofar as it is
still live on the air, requires me to sit in front of the
screen at a speci∫c time. For cinema, the same
essentially archaic social format holds true as for
concerts, opera or theater. You have to meet at a
certain point in time at a speci∫c place. This agree-
ment equals a liminal experience, which entails
certain collective obligations (punctuality, sitting
still, keeping quiet, etc.). The effect of the internet
resulted in considerable pressure to innovate
regarding this cultural practice, to loosen social
engagements and to release “content” as products
available everywhere and anytime. At the same
time, it is evident that the arts have come under
pressure to be like or operate like they would on the
internet. As it happens, the internet and thereby
the mode of individual usage regulate today‘s
cultural mainstream. Theaters, even opera houses
and concert halls, are not just expanding their
offerings online, they are reformatting them
according to the same logic, for example by using
mobile devices as part of a performance on site,
thereby raising the question of why cinema, music,
opera or theater still even need a site. Liminal expe-
rience: physical, sensory and social experience and
conventions, etc. are increasingly receding into the

28
background. How “non-liminal” must culture be
today? Are certain social engagements even desired
any longer? Countless cultural policy issues are
linked to these questions, not only regarding the
brick-and-mortar aspect of these sites, but mainly
in the debate about the social function of art. To
what extent must society remain outside, and to
what extent is or must art generally be tied to
liminal experiences and conventions? And where
should art be perceived collectively? In an attempt
to newly legitimize culture, the trend towards
dissolving boundaries between different media
and arts is doing the opposite by delegitimizing the
very same.
Although it keeps a critical distance, the central
∫nding of Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay
remains that ∫lm was primarily a profound innova-
tion in media history thanks to its impact on a
social mode of perception, rather than as an artifact
in itself. In the ∫rst decades of ∫lm theory, the
general consensus ∞ no matter on which side of the
debate you stood ∞ was that cinema represented an
attack on the classical arts and bourgeois forms of
reception. Benjamin was one of the ∫rst to recog-
nize the social relevance of ∫lm as an imposing
mode of perception. To not have a choice, not even
in your imagination (if ∫lm were not simply the
continuation of your own imagination through the

29
means of another), is exactly what rendered ∫lm so
powerful a mode of collective perception and why
it attracted so much suspicion from the art world
and bourgeois perception: the entirely authori-
tarian compulsion of having to perceive a different
reality for a certain duration of time (and not simply
contemplating or imagining it).
The collective and public experience of cinema
should soon be a thing of the past, or at least of
minor importance. A new, scattered public is
emerging on the internet ∞ a public that partici-
pates: through voting, insider knowledge, opin-
ions, rankings. Whoever gets involved can believe
they are part of something and actually matter.
Reduced to a few keywords, the public presents a
platform for new marketing strategies and accu-
rately trackable consumer targeting. The decline of
the political public (the idealization of whom was
hardly ever justi∫ed) is currently being trivialized
as a “political disenchantment” (even though the
populist departure from democracy is indeed
becoming increasingly militant) and is occurring in
parallel to the decline of cinema. On the internet,
people behave as they have learned to participate in
politics: they vote. No knowledge required, opin-
ions suf∫ce. Totalitarian subjectivity abolishes
reality and begins to ignore factuality. Users in
front of a DVD player or on the internet are the

30
people entitled to vote in Western democracies.
Every four to ∫ve years they can tick a box: they
form a public whose limits and rules are de∫ned by
others.
Jaron Lanier showed that the knowledge gener-
ated by the networked society on the internet is not
resourceful, it is instead highly conservative or
“retro.” Simon Reynolds notes that the internet
produces a proper “retromania”, “a digital regime
of complete and immediate access to the cultural
artifacts of the past ∞ a type of excess that has
become a form of predicament and crisis.” The
return of the vampire movie in the past few years is
a symptom: nothing is ever forgotten, nothing is
ever dead once it has become a part of the digital
world. The vampire movie articulates the return of
a past that can never vanish in music and ∫lm; it
represents a farewell to the new in the form of a
genre we cannot escape from. Everything becomes
a pastiche, a set-piece, a reference: everything that
returns is necessarily undead and cannot die. The
vampire, embodying the crises of modernity and
cinema itself, draws only from traditional images:
endless analogies, revenants and repetition as
horror.
Terry Gilliam in 12 Monkeys (1995) and Kathryn
Bigelow in Strange Days (1995) anticipated the
inescapable simultaneity of information and

31
visibility, the end of cinema and the end of memo-
ries, long before moving images became available
everywhere and anytime on mobile devices, long
before digital images. In Strange Days, memories
migrate to a digital storage device, a sort of visual
Walkman, allowing everyone to perceive the sensa-
tions of others and individually access the past.
Film is suffering the same fate music did once
personal playback devices created “portable inti-
macy” (Diedrich Diedrichsen), which Raymond
Williams already called “mobile privatization”
back in 1974. The past is short-circuited by the
present. The perceptive body is attached to a
machine that “perceives” for it, as is the case in the
movie theater. The privatization of ∫lm viewing,
however, is the antithesis to cinema: cinema under-
stands that it ceases to be when it is viewed on a
personal device. In the strictest sense, the decline of
cinema is not just an economic consequence of new
modes of distribution for ∫lms, nor is it the result
of a new aesthetic. Instead it is the consequence of
the social crisis of the image. Cinema is disap-
pearing from screens and ∫lms. If cinema is
vanishing as a space, this signi∫es much more than
simply the collapse of a venue for screening ∫lms. It
signi∫es the disappearance of the collective and of a
mode of perception. The possibility of showing
∫lms in a private space because it is more

32
convenient, it saves time and money, and ∫lms look
even better and bigger on an HD monitor than they
used to, considerably alters the perception of ∫lm.
But cinema once represented a dissident space of
perception, one that compelled me to watch for a
certain duration of time, in material immersion, so
to speak. Film thereby also loses reference to its
outside. Its visibility articulated itself in contrast to
the conditions of the world found outside of the
cinema. Cinema didn’t provide a reference to the
world by depicting it in ∫lms, but rather by
suggesting another mode of perception of the
world ∞ a world not yet known to me. Tele­vi­sion,
but mostly the possibilities of the DVD and the
internet, offer me a choice that in fact doesn’t exist.
“Cinema’s death date was 31 September 1983, when
the remote-control zapper was introduced to the
living room,” says Peter Greenaway. Home cinema
knows no outside, no liminal experience. It always
addresses the private, individual person who
subjectively decides what to watch, where and
when. The private person is a different social being
than the viewer in the movie theater. They do not
differentiate between the ∫lm they are watching
and all the other things at their disposal at home.
They are no longer subjected to an alternative
concept of reality for the strange, random and
sometimes strenuous duration of the ∫lm. The ∫lm

33
turns into a game, the consequence of the moving
image after cinema and television. A narcissistic
image, because it is a manipulable image (which in
turn can itself be manipulative, as Harun Farocki
analyzed in his last works). It’s the terror of subjec-
tivity. The human being in the movie theater and
the one outside it may be the same one in sociolog-
ical terms, but not in their perception, because
there they stand outside of society ∞ if not de facto,
then at least cognitively. In the movie theater, they
are with themselves. They feel and think differently
for the duration of this experimental time
unfolding before their eyes, compelling them to be
someone different. The ∫lm’s other, alternative and
“irresponsible” (Roland Barthes) life reveals itself
to them not through viewing, contemplation and
concentration, but solely through the movie theater
itself, which leaves them no choice, neither in how
they see things nor in how they imagine them.
“Cinema has always observed the world less than it
has observed the world watching it,” said Jean-Luc
Godard at the ceremony for the Adorno prize. “So
when Ingrid Bergman hides a key in her hand, [on
television] you no longer see that the key is looking
at you.” As long as the movie theater was more or
less the only place to watch ∫lms and generate
added value, it was the cinema that decided what
∫lm should look like and how we looked at the

34
world through it. The movie theater shaped and
structured our perception of the ∫lm, which in turn
was the most visible expression of cinema. If the
majority of a ∫lm’s pro∫ts is generated outside the
movie theater, these distribution processes also
determine both how a ∫lm manifests itself and how
we perceive it.
Against the backdrop of the new power of tele-
vision and advertising of the late 1980s, Serge
Daney already described how the cinematic image
in the works of Jean-Jacques Annaud, Jean-Jacques
Beineix and Luc Besson was replaced by a new
visuality, by ∫lm after cinema (in his posthumously
published conversations and annotations: Devant la
recrudescence des vols de sacs à mains, cinéma, télévision,
information; L’Exercice a été pro∫table; Monsieur; and
Persévérance). These ∫lms no longer discover reality,
they create it, he said. For Daney, cinema was always
an encounter with the other. An image stood in
relation to the “not yet,” to the “unknown.” But
today, cinema can no longer counter the power of
television and advertisement. Daney can exactly
pinpoint the moment when ∫lms were created that
are no longer an expression of cinema, but instead
of new channels of distribution that let cinema
disappear from ∫lms. Taking the example of Jaws
(1975), he shows how Steven Spielberg introduced
an impossible gaze, a new and informal image to

35
cinema, by taking the shark’s perspective. It is a
gaze that can do anything, is authorized to do
anything. Nothing is impossible for this gaze; it
made a monstrous impact on me by placing me in a
position I neither could nor wanted to adopt. The
great white shark, however, is only a remnant of the
old cinema ∞ a piece of forgotten nature that has
returned. The situation is very different in Jurassic
Park (1993), a ∫lm about an amusement park in
which genetically reproduced dinosaurs escape
their cages and wreak havoc. The fascination of this
∫lm lies in the creation of a reality that is technically
possible, a reality that is feasible. Animation in the
place of duration. The ∫lm becomes a translation of
images that were there before it. It’s not about a
reality being discovered, but a reality being created
by our gaze; it is essentially a generative reality.
With The Adventures of Tintin (2011), Spielberg
ultimately even transformed a comic book into
“realistic” 3D. In Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs’ ∫rst
appearance is witnessed by a small group of park
visitors who are in turn watched by us. The fascina-
tion with what is possible is part of the mise-en-
scène. The simulation technology in the ∫lm is also
the ∫lm’s simulation technology. The logo of the
amusement park and that of the ∫lm are identical.
The ∫lm embodies the viewer’s gaze, which can do
anything, from the privatizing of experience to the

36
appropriation of time through what is visible. It
doesn’t matter whether this reality is digitally
generated or not (cinema has built illusions from
the very beginning). The “discovery” of the dino-
saurs is all about the fact that they can be shown,
that it is “possible” to make them look so alive and
“real”. It doesn’t matter that they appear new or
hidden to the gaze, on the contrary: the dinosaurs
only exist for the consumers, who already know
which products they are being sold.
The ∫lm touches upon a relation between image
or appearance and reality, or illusion and reality ∞
technically virtual relations, in other words. In
particular, however, the ∫lm focuses on the relation
between what is visible and what is invisible, as the
dinosaurs were already an image and a product
before they were made the subject of and animated
for the ∫lm. It therefore both demonstrates and
enforces in itself ∫lm’s historical change, the new
order of the gaze and its mode of perception. This is
the moment when animation begins to supersede
documentary ∫lm: the image loses its reference to
reality, not in the sense of being a depiction of it,
but in the sense of having a relation to the gaze; not
in relation to duration, but to time; not in relation
to aesthetics, but to social conditions. These dino-
saurs can never vanish ∞ could never have vanished
∞ as they are not made of time. You can create and

37
touch these dinosaurs. The performance of their
authenticity is decisive for the introduction of the
informal image. The children pet the dinosaurs in
the ∫lm to show that they are “real,” while the
adults are busy being worried by their antiquated
neuroses and ideals (therefore basically repre-
senting the older audience in the movie theater).
The children are presented as little experts who are
neither aware of nor care about the difference
between ∫lm and game, between cinema and tele-
vision, or between virtual image and reality. They
have never known the mode of perception that only
cinema could propose; they have overcome cinema.
Even in childhood, they already possess the neces-
sary subjective skills to cope with this altered
reality. Kids know how to handle a joystick, while
the adults seem naïve and childish. This is about a
gaze for which nothing is impossible.
Daney established a link between this new form
of informal image and tourism as a mode of
perceiving reality: easy access to reality for everyone.
Our gaze slides through a reality especially created
for it, a reality that is socially permeated, just like a
travel brochure. Cinema’s fascination used to lie in
the fact that we had to perceive a yet unseen reality
by being compelled to assume another gaze. In this
∫lm, however, something is shown before it even
becomes visible ∞ an image before an image. Society

38
begins to look at itself in the ∫lm. You look at what
you already know, a world of commodities, an
unframed or unframable image, so to speak,
because it is porous. The images evoked by Daney’s
critique are “digital” not in a technical sense, but in
a social one. Suddenly there were ∫lms starring
actors we already knew not from ∫lms, but from
advertising, such as Andie MacDowell in Steven
Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) or
Milla Jovovich later in the 1990s. Film is now the
amusement park in which reality is accessible on
request (even though it might spin out of control).
The product range available in the park’s gift shop
reΩects the fact that such a ∫lm capitalizes on and
re∫nances itself only through its merchandise. The
product is no longer just the ∫lm itself, but
everything that is shown in it. There is no longer a
distinction between product and advertising, or
between ∫lm and society. It all comes together in
one continuous value chain. The ∫lm provides the
imagery for what is sold outside the cinema: CDs
and DVDs, toys, books, etc. Welf Kienast used the
example of Pokémon: The Movie (2000). This ∫lm
is basically only an advertisement for something
beyond it, it is part of a corporate identity. In his
∫lm, Spielberg represents what Daney termed the
“auto-consumption of society” with regard to Jean-
Jacques Annaud’s ∫lm L’Ours (1988). The image

39
becomes a product, an advertisement for itself. This
is the “short circuit” broached in Strange Days. It
is not the aesthetic of the ∫lm that changes in
Jurassic Park ∞ the ∫rst appearance of the dino-
saurs is modeled on the presentation of King Kong
∞ but the unique form of visibility that ∫lm owed to
cinema (and to which King Kong [1933] still
belonged). This was also about the time when ∫lms
in theaters suddenly yielded less revenue than
other distribution channels: advertising time
(outside North America) and popcorn at the theater,
as well as toys, television broadcasting and home
entertainment. The decline of cinema cannot,
strictly speaking, be understood on an aesthetic
level, but only socially and economically. The state
of emergency has already arrived within the contin-
uance of cinema. In the midst of images, cinema is
perishing.
In its history, cinema has time and again
reΩected how it shows reality and how it presents
the conditions under which reality becomes visible
to those who watch it. This was done not as a matter
of form, and not even in a speci∫c kind of form, but
in terms of staging the gaze (as Heide Schlüpmann
already demonstrated with regard to early ∫lm).
For the viewer, cinema had to indicate how it
wanted to be seen and understood. Cinema had to
refer back to itself in order to communicate its

40
change and to show the socio-historical relation
between image and reality as well as between ∫lm
and audience. Cinema hid clues in its images that
pointed to an altered reality and to access to reality
in general. The movie theater used to be inscribed
into the ∫lms as the space for perception; in its
forms, it reΩected its relation to the viewer.
In Jurassic Park Spielberg also uses the impos-
sible gaze from Jaws, from the perspective of the
dinosaur. In his very next ∫lm Schindler’s List
(1993), however, he went even one step further.
Thus far, critical engagement with the Shoah in
∫lm had always been characterized by the notion
that the inconceivable cannot be represented, that
the historical record is not the truth nor does it
disclose the past, but that it is merely a trace or a
script of the past. This is what Alain Resnais
demonstrated with Nuit et Brouillard (1955).
Spielberg, on the other hand, turns records into
conclusive images of the past. He “animates” these
records. The process, however, differs fundamen-
tally from, for example, Art Spiegelman’s book
Maus, which sparked a debate about whether the
Shoah can be rendered into comic book form. But
Spiegelman never interfered with any records.
Schindler’s List’s incredible transgression does
not consist in showing something that has never
been shown before, but in staging the inconceivable

41
as a record and thereby introducing an impossible
gaze. Spielberg has repeatedly invoked the authen-
ticity of his depiction, also based on his use of a
handheld camera that mimics on-site presence.
Everything was historically documented, every­
thing “authentic.” He even reconstructed archival
photographs. Coincidentally, nothing remained of
what was not documentable about the Shoah. This
was Spielberg’s decisive shift: suddenly what is
documentable is true, instead of that which really
occurred, and which therefore can no longer be
documentable. The records were once merely the
authentic trace of the inconceivable. If only what is
documentable is true, then ∫lm loses its genuine
connection to the relation between the visible and
the invisible; that is, to thinking. Claude Lanz-
mann’s critique of the ∫lm published in Le Monde ∞
that the representation of the Shoah is per se
impossible ∞ does not go far enough. Godard says
that Spielberg “reconstructed” Auschwitz. Spiel-
berg not only produced a possible “informal”
image, he introduced a new order of the gaze.
In the ∫lm’s pivotal scene, he adopts the strategy
of the impossible gaze: all of a sudden, you ∫nd your-
self in the gas chamber, waiting for certain death in
the dark. You hear cries of fear, you see women
weeping (analogous to the woman in Jaws getting
devoured by the shark at the beginning of the ∫lm).

42
But ultimately he only opens a water tap. Spielberg
doesn’t need to go to the extreme of releasing the
gas, as he has already introduced the possibility. He
is inside the gas chamber, showing us the gaze. But
he is forced to turn on the water tap to make us feel
the incomprehensible power of a gaze that can kill.
As a result, this process becomes even more effective
and cynical: the gaze inside the gas chamber, the
shark’s gaze, the dinosaur’s gaze. He could have
entered the gas chamber to claim no one was gassed
there ∞ it would have amounted to the same thing.
The problem isn’t that Spielberg shows too much
or reenacts history as a ∫ctitious feature ∫lm. This
has been done before and was already criticized
when the Holocaust TV series was broadcast
(1979). Neither, and this too has already been criti-
cized in reference to Liliana Cavani’s The Night
Porter (1974), is the problem that National
Socialism was once again depicted as the tyranny of
a demonic perpetrator against helpless (and
particularly sexualized female) victims instead of
as a structural principle (with, of course, the bril-
liant exception of a few individual heroes). In one
scene in the ∫lm, Spielberg shows the desire of
SS-Lagerführer Amon Göth for the only scantily
dressed Jewish worker, Helene Hirsch. What counts
is the power of the gaze: it signi∫es the victimiza-
tion of the female body (similar to the one in the

43
“gas chamber” watching the naked female bodies).
The camera had already raped the woman before
Göth did it. Spielberg used the same strategy in his
∫rst feature Duel (1971), in which he adopts the
perpetrator’s gaze (the truck driver acting as killing
machine) without letting him be seen. Spielberg
himself also stands out of sight on a platform
selecting who will be eaten by sharks and dinosaurs.
It’s usually the people who are morally question-
able and need to be punished (the woman who gets
eaten by the shark at the beginning of Jaws is
portrayed as a promiscuous hippie, and he uses a
similar approach in Jurassic Park). Dario Argento
follows a completely different strategy by consist-
ently showing us death as something that would
never agree with our sense of moral righteousness.
In his ∫lms, the viewer is twice condemned to inac-
tion: they can neither inΩuence what is happening
(which violates their moral standards), nor can they
return to the world outside the ∫lm or the movie
theater, where these moral values originate. Just
like Spielberg, Argento expects us to adopt the
killer’s gaze. But at the same time, he shows us the
gaze of the one condemned to inaction, who ∞ tied
up, eyelids ∫xed ∞ must watch the murderer perpe-
trate his crime. Opera (1987) is probably the most
impressive rendition of this gaze. There is no use in
shaking in disgust ∞ you won’t be able to shut your

44
eyes. The desire to see is dangerous because it is
passive. Cinema itself then becomes the true horror,
because I have to see through the gaze of another.
I’m at someone else’s mercy in a double sense: with
my gaze and through their gaze.
The completely novel experience introduced by
Schindler’s List lies in its reduction of thinking
to what is possible, and of the past to what is docu-
mented. Upon the liberation of the camps in 1945,
British documentarians tried to make the situation
as undeniable as possible by stating the place and
time of their recording in front of the camera. They
knew that the images were insuf∫cient to record
what had really happened, that the records would
remain silent. Slavoj Žižek declared Schindler’s
List to be a “remake” of Jurassic Park: while Spiel-
berg revived dinosaurs for one ∫lm, he revived
records for the other, at the price of creating
informal images, images outside of time. Therein
lies the ambivalence of “liberating” the ban on
images from its taboo: only what can be shown has
really existed. The past is replaced by the possible.
The so-called end of history acknowledges its
arrival through the disappearance of time. This is
reΩected in the moment when the neo-Nazi in
Winfried Bonengel’s Beruf Neonazi (1993) denies
the reality of the gas chambers while standing
inside a gas chamber.

45
 Cinema, unlike opera or theater, was never
staged or make believe, because it never called upon
my imagination, it was never an illusion. I have to
disagree with Malcolm Le Grice that cinema is
neither a “symbolic space” nor a “mystical past.”
The movie theater really was this other life I disap-
peared into, which turned me into an uneducated
being. At the movies, in contrast to in museums, I
can’t and don’t want to educate myself. On the
contrary, I want to position myself outside of society
at the movie theater. This is what neither art nor
science have ever understood about cinema: cinema
has never been ∫ction (illusion) or depiction (docu-
mentation). If ∫lms are reduced simply to moving
images I can individually manipulate anytime,
which are therefore at my service, then they enter
into a new economy of consumerism that they have
as yet evaded in the movie theater, by compelling
me to expose myself to a strange, impenetrable and
forbidden form of perception. This also justi∫es
Daney’s reservation with respect to animated ∫lm
(largely restricted to the narrow ∫eld of hand-
drawn ∫lm), which he articulated in 1992 in one of
his last texts for the fourth edition of his ∫lm maga-
zine Tra∫c. He writes that he has never watched the
∫lms of Walt Disney. Because he was captured by
cinema, he never saw the allure of animation. For
Daney, the hand-drawn ∫lm has always been

46
something other than cinema, maybe even its
enemy. Mickey Mouse was the precursor to Spiel-
berg’s dinosaur, cinema’s ∫rst immortal being:
invulnerable and all-powerful because it stands
outside time; unlike cinema, which has a genuine
relation to death through its connection to time. By
and large, this is also Siegfried Kracauer’s conten-
tion against Disney’s animated ∫lms in his Theory of
Film. It is not known whether Daney knew about
Kracauer’s book. But just like him, he wants to
“redeem physical reality,” meaning the relation
between the visible and the invisible in ∫lm. In
short, that which referred to another time and to
thinking; to reality, not to subjectivity.
If there was a reason for talking about ∫lm, then
it was to express outrage or fascination about this
transformation into a pre-linguistic life, to an
essentially ethical and by no means aesthetic attitude
towards the world. If a theater production is bad,
you can simply go home. If the way a ∫lm is shown
at the cinema is bad, you can still look at things that
are in the moment. In this respect, “bad” ∫lms are
sometimes even better than “good” ones, because
they don’t distract you from perceiving the world
that, to a certain degree, is stored within them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who loved to go to the movies
and went frequently, said that the “non-participa-
tion of the mind” is what distinguishes cinema

47
from the arts. The movie theater is the only space
where I can transform another’s perception into my
own memory by perceiving the world as a memory
(“My memory becomes a wilderness of elsewheres,”
said artist Robert Smithson in A Cinematic Atopia). It
affects the issue of how I want to live, how I can live
and wanted to live. It compels me to take a stance, it
affects my faith (this has been demonstrated by
Bergman, Bresson and Dreyer, among others).
Cinema, says ∫lmmaker Pedro Costa, is about being
in the world. Watching a ∫lm by William Wyler,
Roland Barthes realizes that the grief over his
mother’s death extends into the ∫lm: “Je suis là.”
This other, alternative life offered by the ∫lm is
only revealed inside the cinema, which leaves you
no choice. The movie theater completes the ∫lm by
its desire to resemble time.
Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books essentially only
deal with this one great thought that ∫lms corre-
spond to ways of thinking, individual brains and
philosophical concepts. The fundamental idea of
the Nouvelle Vague consisted of taxonomy of
perception, the ethics of authors. The Nouvelle
Vague was an expression of the need to talk about
∫lm, because a strange perception was nonetheless
common to us all; it addressed us and concerned us
all because we were alone in the movie theater, but a
collective outside of it; in the world but still on a far

48
away planet. You left the cinema and had to talk in
order to change the world; not through education,
not through form, but armed with a new perception.
Once you had seen and experienced the world differ-
ently, it could no longer stay the way it once was.
This was achieved by the highly distinctive and
socializing power of ∫lm, made visible for some time
by cinephiles and ∫lm critics. In the past we looked
at the world through cinema, today we can do it
faster and more comprehen­sively through the
internet at any time.
Film has long since become a leisure activity
among many. Film reviews, reports on ∫lm festivals
or texts written by ∫lm scholars, now only serve to
communicate within a small group of people and
can hardly hope for any kind of social response. The
importance of ∫lm criticism, which is affected by the
same kind of general helplessness with regard to the
inef∫ciency of social criticism, is fading at the same
rate as the movie theater as a space for watching
∫lms. The meaning of ∫lm criticism is lost when ∫lm
reception becomes private, because criticism
demands a space where that which I myself saw was
perceived by others under similar conditions around
the same time. Criticism demands a general
consensus on the need to talk about an external
reality based on a shared approach to reality.
However, as soon as subjectivity comes into play,

49
which is no longer required to conceptually and
factually disclose its approach and effect on reality,
criticism has lost its foundation. Cinema meant
access to a different reality. Because it reminded us
of thinking, you could discuss cinema ∞ not because
you liked this or that; cinema has never been a
question of taste, not like with art. Almost unno-
ticeably, ∫lms lost the need to be discussed; they
lost the reason why someone like Jacques Rivette, as
a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, could and wanted to
discern the right setting for an attitude towards the
world within a tracking shot. Film criticism loses
its social signi∫cance at that moment when ∫lms
assimilate the leisure industry’s mode of percep-
tion, in which everyt­hing is individually accessible
at any time. Cinephilia comprised what could be
expressed about cinema; its critical distinction, its
sociogenesis. This is what kept it from being a
source of nostalgia for a long time ∞ in cinephilia,
cinema became consciousness.
Never has this been described more accurately
or beautifully than in the mid-sixties, in Georges
Perec’s Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties), where
he says “cinema was not so much an art as simply a
given fact. [...] Sometimes it seemed as if they had
grown up with it, and that they understood it better
than anyone before them had ever been able to
understand it.” The cinephiles’ illusion, however,

50
was that the world could be understood through
cinema (even though for a while it was about
changing the world through cinema). Cinephilia
used to be the most progressive attitude you could
take toward cinema. Today this attitude risks being
chauvinistic if it cannot conceive of ∫lm after cinema.
And, except for Serge Daney, cinephiles have largely
failed in this endeavor. For Daney it is the “author”
who can save us from society and consumer culture
(which also keeps his notion of “the author” from
the authors’ canonization), because it is the author
who, as it were, can always show us something for
the very ∫rst time. The “author,” for Daney, is there-
fore not a certain style or a “signature,” but an
individual, unique, and liminal view of the world
and of an access to reality. Seen in this way, the gaze
of cinema is always the gaze or the attitude of the
individual (which is exactly why the viewer is
condemned to be alone in the movie theater). Toward
the end of Cinema 2, Deleuze asserts the primacy of
aesthetics and author against economics and tech-
nology, but at the same time he detects the rise of an
informal image, an image as “table of information”
(“table d’information”). He believes that this will
not seriously endanger cinema, but he nonetheless
thinks it possible: “The electronic image, that is the
television and video image, the digital image
coming into being, had either to transform cinema

51
or to replace it, to mark its death.”
To understand the historically different
approaches to cinema as a mode of perception, you
can refer to two ∫lms that reΩect on the ∫gure of
the star in completely different ways. William
Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953) shows Audrey
Hepburn as being part of cinema; she cannot join
real life outside of it (no matter how much she
might want to, which is also the ∫lm’s topic). The
princess leaves behind her social status in exchange
for a different, dissident life for one day and one
night in Rome, for the duration of the ∫lm. The
star, however, never becomes part of a living reality.
She remains other-worldly, never to be part of a real
life. The ∫lm draws attention to the irresolvable
contradiction between the world of cinema and the
world of consumer culture: the nature of cinema
(royalism against the backdrop of Rome’s antique
scenery) and business (in the form of an upcoming
media industry represented by Gregory Peck as a
tabloid journalist). At the end of the ∫lm, this
contradiction is not covered up, it remains visible
within the melodrama. In melodramas, the inade-
quacies of reality that cinema shows us remain
unresolved. Unlike in theater, where melodrama is
presented as a tragic conΩict of relationships
between people, in cinema it is de∫ned by the view-
er’s position at the mercy of the technological

52
apparatus. It is a conΩict between my ethical stance
and the reality of cinema, between what I see and
that which is looking at me. The couple is only
united for the duration of the ∫lm, for the duration
of this other time. In contrast, forty years later in
Notting Hill (1999) the contradiction remains
only between rich and poor. The ∫lm’s star (Julia
Roberts) has already become part of consumer
culture. The only thing that essentially differenti-
ates her from the audience (Hugh Grant) is class.
What in Roman Holiday was an irresolvable
contradiction between ∫lm and reality, between
cinema and life, simply becomes insurmountably
social in Notting Hill. This ∫lm already demon-
strates the historical change pertaining to its medi-
um’s economic status: it became pure ∫ction the
moment it stopped being shown in cinemas, where
∫lm always was irreconcilable with the reality we
found outside of it. This used to be the monstrous
space between perception and action, the pain
across the distance between emotion and mind.
Fiction in ∫lm has never disguised this conΩict. On
the contrary, the beings of cinema have never found
themselves to be part of reality. It was the cinema
that introduced me to an inaccessible new world in
the dark. The possibility of an alternative reality
accounted for this bit of anarchism within a world
of capitalism; it was cinema’s unbelievable affront

53
to the consumer culture it belonged to. Created by
the cultural industry, cinema was an Arcadian place
to which I retreated ∞ speechless, invisible,
immersed, lodged in a pocket of time.

54
Film Festivals as
Temporary Museums

Evidence suggests that ∫lm festivals, alongside

television and the internet, are developing into the
most important public platform for ∫lms. These
three platforms, which are more commonly
reserved for the public ∞ just like VHS and DVD
once were ∞ will take over the traditional function
of the cinema. Film festivals were once a market-
place for ∫lms; they created the necessary condi-
tions for the commercial distribution of ∫lms in the
∫rst place, while at the same time reaching only a
small public audience. Today, they contribute to
making ∫lms available to a wide audience ∞ often,
they provide the only public a ∫lm will ever have. It
is currently estimated that there are several thou-
sand ∫lm festivals worldwide, 120 in Germany
alone. Author and producer Stephen Fellows once
took the trouble to count them all: “When I last
studied the topic three years ago, I found 9706 ∫lm

55
festivals which had run at least once between 1998
and 2013, of which 2954 had run in the previous
two years.” Film festivals such as Berlin, Rotterdam
and Toronto reach an audience of hundreds of
thousands over the course of a few days.
We should harbor no misconceptions, however:
hardly any ∫lms ∫nd distributors on the few rele-
vant ∫lm markets worldwide. The following
example demonstrates how drastic the situation
has already become: As the director of the Venice
festival, Marco Müller suggested establishing a
foundation to foster sales for Cannes, Berlin and
Venice in 2008, as not even these festivals managed
to get their ∫lms into movie theaters. In a 2014
article about the Sundance Film Festival, The New
York Times came to the conclusion that not only do
ever fewer of the festival’s ∫lms move on to commer-
cial distribution, but also that a mere two percent
of the 4,000 submitted ∫lms manage to regain their
investment in the festival’s aftermath. The number
of award-winning ∫lms from those festivals with a
theatrical release was increasingly diminishing too,
almost dropping to zero. In the past, you could at
least count on seeing prize winners from US festi-
vals in theaters at some point.
In his 2014 blog post, American ∫lm producer
Ted Hope proposed that cinemas shouldn’t wait to
screen award-winning ∫lms until they have

56
distributors, because that results in a long delay.
Instead, they should be shown immediately after
the ∫lm festival, which is exactly when people want
to see them. The digital distribution of ∫lms has
made this possible. Urs Spörri put forward a similar
idea in 2017: “Film festivals need to be recognized
as commercial platforms with their own distribu-
tion channels. After the festivals, the options of
day-and-date release (online at the end of the festival)
and of speci∫c events at independent venues would
make much more sense than enforcing a theatrical
release, which bene∫ts the distributors and the
cinemas much more than the ∫lms themselves.”
Films that have the potential for the theatrical
market ∞ usually ∫lms that can amortize their
production costs on the (often US) domestic market
∞ no longer need festivals. It’s not because of festi-
vals that they get a theatrical release, and if they are
screened at festivals, then they are shown in theaters
immediately afterwards or have already been
released abroad. These kinds of ∫lms don’t need to
be discovered. In these cases, festivals only function
as additional advertising right before the ∫lm’s
release date. The prestige that used to accompany a
∫lm being selected or winning a prize ∞ at least at
important festivals ∞ seems to have lost its signi∫-
cance. This means that the concept of “the market”
itself is in crisis. Business is now being done

57
elsewhere, mostly on the internet. Meanwhile,
cinemas survive as an af∫rmation of a different
form of social utility. The less socially relevant they
become, the more they celebrate themselves, for
example on major festivals’ red carpets, at premieres
or at important award ceremonies.
As products, ∫lms no longer need festivals, and
maybe not even cinemas. Film festivals are in the
process of becoming a classic cultural offering. We
must seize this historic opportunity to ∫nally show
better ∫lms at festivals. But just as ∫lm festivals are
creating a new audience for ∫lms with no or few
commercial opportunities, the “audience” as we
once knew it is disappearing. Looking at the
numbers, movie theaters have no great future of
commercial viability. If commercial ∫lm distribu-
tion is turning away from theatrical release (and
there is nothing to indicate that this development
can be halted), then where will we be able to see
∫lms that cannot be made pro∫table? Will they
even continue to be produced? It is very likely that
the whole traditional chain of distribution for ∫lm
will eventually fall apart. This, too, raises questions
of whether subsidies for the cinema industry can
still be justi∫ed in future. The decline of cinemas,
however, will also have serious consequences for
festivals: where, on what grounds, and under which
circumstances can they still take place? How and

58
why should they still receive (new) ∫lms that
cannot, or only to a very limited extent, be distrib-
uted? Some ∫lm festivals are already encountering
problems in ∫nding movie theaters with the appro-
priate screening technology, because many analog
∫lm projectors have been disposed of and suitable
digital screening copies of older ∫lms aren’t always
available. It remains entirely unclear as to where
and how ∫lm festivals, which have the potential to
inherit cinemas, could themselves take place in the
future.
Film festivals now ∫nd themselves in the unex-
pected position of becoming the cultural distribu-
tion platform for ∫lms that have no or only very
limited commercial prospects. They continue to
foster the focused transmission of content, and in
this respect they provide an overview of the
complex structure of offerings. However, festivals
hardly accomplish their original task ∞ functioning
as a marketplace by procuring content for other
uses ∞ anymore. This is due to the rapid prolifera-
tion of ∫lm festivals and the simultaneous loss of
importance of target markets such as television and
cinemas. Today they assume the role that, at least in
Germany, used to be taken by repertory cinemas
and the ∫lm departments of television stations: to
supply a wide audience with ∫lm culture. Without
∫lm festivals (and a few ∫lm museums), ∫lm history

59
would hardly be publicly accessible (even though
today’s corresponding outreach is usually highly
canonical and canonizing).
Film festivals are gradually becoming social
installations; the genuine experience of cinema
within the security of the collective. A 2015 study
dedicated to so-called “special forms of cinema”
conducted by the German Federal Film Board (FFA)
registered a substantial increase in audience
attendance, number of screenings and revenue for
∫lm festivals in contrast to classical cinema distri-
bution. The rise in the number of ∫lm festivals
corresponds to a signi∫cant increase in the number
of ∫lms. More and more ∫lms (and with them more
and more ∫lmmakers spat out by more and more
media factories) are competing for ever fewer
potential distribution platforms. Withoutabox, a
submission and preview platform for ∫lm festivals,
allegedly represented 125,000 ∫lmmakers for 2,000
∫lm festivals as early as 2008. In the face of such
numbers, Internet Movie Database (IMDb) bought
the portal for an uncon∫rmed three million US
dollars. Film festivals are increasingly a symptom
of the contradiction between managing the mass of
∫lms resulting from new technologies, forced
media education and an increase in ∫lm funding on
the one hand, and the challenge of earning money
with them on the other. On a structural level, this

60
results in a loss of legitimacy for the festivals. Today,
∫lm festivals can offer ∫lmmakers little more than
passing on their ∫lms to other festivals.
The new power of the internet or of the indi-
vidual use of moving images has apparently not or
only barely slowed down the festival boom, apart
from the fact that many new online ∫lm festivals
are appearing on the web. However, you can hardly
de∫ne these as “∫lm festivals,” as interaction and
communication are usually only carried out elec-
tronically, most commonly in the form of voting:
public opinion at the push of a button. If they
happen at all, encounters or discussions with
∫lmmakers generally only play a marginal role
online. The various origins and material “texture”
of these works and screening formats are also trans-
ferred to a uniform digital (and usually compressed)
standard. All this may well explain why although
individual downloads or streaming, whether legal
or illegal, are meeting with increased acceptance on
the internet, the social pact of meeting at a certain
time and place isn’t. The social act of gathering
together is a fundamental characteristic of a ∫lm
festival, but it is rather foreign to the nature of the
internet, which targets individual use, even though
we constantly speak of its networking components.
The internet’s potential lies in providing the indi-
vidual user with access to works that have already

61
been broadcast on television or shown at ∫lm festi-
vals here and there. In this way, novel parallel
structures are being established regarding the
simultaneity of commercial and non-commercial
forms of ∫lm distribution, whether on the internet
or through conventional channels. Furthermore,
the internet has made a signi∫cant contribution to
the speed at which ∫lms can circulate, and ∫lm
festivals participate in this development by using
digital submission and online viewing platforms.
Film festivals considerably accelerate the digital
circulation of these works based on the fact that
digital images, whether they are moving or not, are
simultaneously available to an almost unlimited
extent through links. Films can circulate via these
decentralized digital sources without ever being
moved. It is safe to assume that every new ∫lm will
be submitted to a ∫lm festival at some point.
Even though the bene∫ts offered by the internet
with regard to the individual use of images is
evident, the social need for “real” communication
has obviously not been diminished. On the contrary,
what was until recently a highly improbable expec-
tation is today reasonably possible: that analog and
digital ∫lm distribution will continue to coexist for
quite a while with ∫lm dissemination at festivals
and on the internet, similar to the case of the music
industry. Of course, because the majority of ∫lm

62
festivals, even the largest ones, are dependent on
public subsidies, this form of distribution doesn’t
have equally sustainable social or economic
perspectives. Film festivals are tied to the market
even if there hasn’t been a market for them to
re∫nance their offerings for a long time now. The
commercial future of ∫lm lies in individual use,
independent of time and place.
As a general rule, whatever ∫lm festivals no
longer show won’t be shown at all, or at least not
through commercial distribution. Even though
political decision-makers and ministerial bureau-
crats often still cling to the guiding principle of
supporting ∫lm festivals as “Ωagship projects” or
for their “unique selling points,” in reality we are
already facing other challenges. Under current
circumstances, “unique selling points” are dif∫cult
to achieve or even as pointless as the ∫ght for
premieres or awards, which are supposed to vali-
date distinction and relevance. Concurrently,
digital evolution offers industry visitors viewing
and communication options that, given the
shrinking budgets for travel and ∫lm acquisition in
television and other places, render visits to festivals
less and less attractive. If ∫lm festivals are no longer
a marketplace, but instead have turned into a
forum, if they are no longer a place to do business,
but instead to exchange ideas, and if they no longer

63
offer outreach, but instead just provide screenings,
then how will ∫lmmakers and producers make
money? Should ∫lm festivals start paying to screen
∫lms? And since the current ∫nancial resources of
∫lm festivals can’t cover that, then who will provide
the funding?
Originally, the establishment of ∫lm festivals
was essentially controlled by the clear interests of
the political elite. While the festivals in (in the order
of their foundation) Venice, Cannes, and Berlin
were very discernably part of a geopolitical and
partly nationalist agenda (with regard to national
representation, political supremacy, the promotion
of tourism, etc.), later on the notion of bringing
∫lm culture to a wide and local audience in remote
areas also became a decisive factor in establishing
∫lm festivals. This can explain the sometimes
slightly odd festival locations. Often the driving
forces behind establishing a festival were or are
individuals ∞ ∫lm lovers who essentially build a
forum for themselves, admittedly also to cultivate
their own image, who in doing so offer non-institu-
tional and non-governmental access to culture.
This obviously does not require a great deal of skill
or knowledge, as Reinhard W. Wolf already ascer-
tained resignedly when he went looking for bench-
marks and binding standards for ∫lm festivals for
the online magazine short∫lm.de: “Most do not

64
deserve this name, many work with obscure regula-
tions, and some even make do without any rules or
terms & conditions at all.” It is doubtful that
∫nancial motives have often played a signi∫cant
role in establishing (and sustaining) ∫lm festivals.
At any rate, most festivals founded on the basis of
strategic intentions such as location marketing or
other unmistakably economic reasons have not
lasted for long. Even the emergence of so-called
∫lm markets is considered marginal and only a
handful of these are really relevant. This can easily
be explained by the fact that European ∫lms are
now almost exclusively produced with money
provided by public funding and government-owned
television broadcasters (with all the problems that
go along with that system). They are therefore
essentially completely publicly subsidized (even if
indirectly). The ∫nancing structure for US produc-
tions ∞ or generally for mainstream feature ∫lms
that have to re∫nance themselves on a global scale ∞
has always been embedded within an autonomous
market logic. We therefore have to distinguish
between the social, cultural and economic condi-
tions under which ∫lms are produced, distributed
and perceived.
As a result, it is becoming increasingly
accepted that ∫lm festivals ∫rst and foremost
contribute to the rise of symbolic capital. Often the

65
non-­­com­mercial circulation of ∫lms on the festival
circuit generates value that the ∫lms couldn’t build
up within a commercial setting. This creates an
arti∫cial distribution scenario. For the ∫lm scholar
Marijke de Valck, who along with Dina Iordanova
founded the branch of ∫lm studies they called
“Film Festival Studies,” ∫lm festivals mainly serve
the “cultural recognition of artifacts and artists
that acquire cultural value in the process.” This
can without question indirectly have a commercial
impact on training, image building, marketing,
etc. through formal access to funding schemes, but
also on the continued existence of communicating
about “∫lm culture,” as part of which the social
discourses and ideals ∞ all the way to canonization
∞ manifest and preserve themselves. Art in ∫lm, it
seems, is hibernating at ∫lm festivals. In the early
1960s, a critical public socialized through cinema
developed the new concept of the “auteur,” which
gradually turned ∫lm into a part of the classical
cultural offering. New aesthetic forms and artistic
strategies enforced the reformatting of presenta-
tion spaces. For example, in 1968 the festivals in
both Cannes and Oberhausen were cut short or
almost canceled, while new festival formats and
forms of organization emerged concurrently (in
Hamburg and London) that were better equipped
to deal with the new requirements of the time.

66
National representation, the inΩuence of (semi-)
governmental lobby groups, of production studios
and distributors was reduced and the purpose of
competitions in assessing artistic concerns was
questioned. Already in 1967, autonomous formats
and presentations of Expanded Cinema, perfor-
mance and other activities developed alongside the
competition as the core piece of the experimental
∫lm festival in Knokke. Auteur cinema socially
digni∫ed a new type of artist (based on cinephilia,
publications and magazines, funding programs,
culture awards, etc.), while at the same time, tech-
nical (television and the internet) and social devel-
opments (in particular the deregulation of working
hours and changes in leisure habits) unsettled the
economic foundation of cinema culture. Due to the
proliferation of presentation spaces for ∫lms and
the resulting pressure to distinguish themselves,
∫lm festivals were able or forced to develop from a
market into a trademark.
Most ∫lm festivals work with scarce resources,
usually at the cost of both staff and ∫lmmakers, and
their reality consists of the often quite dismal pres-
entation and projection of ∫lms. In itself, this must
be read as a symptom of the decline of cinema. At
the same time, large festivals with their new
branding power create the tremendous illusion of a
supposedly commercial “∫lm industry” by means

67
of new training formats such as in-house funding
programs, pitching sessions and talent promotion.
This development is sometimes marked by neo-im-
perialist traits, as Simon Rothöhler criticized in
2011 in the magazine Filmbulletin: “If nothing else,
the attendant market politics are obeying the
general rules of the new event culture. Selection
and branding go smoothly hand in hand [...]. It’s no
small problem that this is happening with public
funding and accompanied by paternalistic rhetoric
about fostering and enabling artists without any
critical awareness of the postcolonial structures in
place today [...]. The festival politics of these festival
stakeholders ∫rst and foremost engage in self-
serving ‘development aid’, which isn’t an invest-
ment in the establishment of a largely autonomous
local ∫lm industry, but a centralist form of subsidy
for ∫lms with strong ‘authorship’ whose real
addressees are Western festival visitors.” Contin-
uous expansion is the impetus for festivals as
trademarks: ever larger, ever more expensive, ever
more important. Film critic Neil Young diagnosed
a kind of implosion of large festivals using
Rotterdam as an example in a 2014 Indiewire article:
“How many bad movies does it take to ruin a ∫lm
festival?” Based on this, author and curator Mark
Peranson determines that “[f ]estivals here are seen
as political actors, and by this I mean they are

68
subjected to pressures from interest groups and
that festivals exist in relation to each other, and,
one could even argue, are in a constant struggle of
power. In the course of this struggle, relationships
of exploitation have come into place.” In this way,
cinephilia turns into a depraved expression of the
power of knowledge and pretentious opinion.
These festivals pretend to present new discoveries
even though they primarily strive for geopolitical
dominance, sometimes extortionately so. The
decline of cinephilia can be demonstrated by the
current practices of many festivals. “What is left for
the spectator, in this perspective, is a mere second-
order cinephilia, presented on a plate, ready for
consumption: a commodi∫ed mass cinephilia
instead of privileged revelation,” as Marijke de
Valck pointed out.
The main danger lies not only in ∫lm festivals
becoming the single distribution platform for a
certain kind of ∫lm (already accurately called
“festival ∫lms”), but in the fact that they are unob-
trusively beginning to generate and enforce a
particular aesthetic. An aesthetic halfway between
canonizing cinephilia and cultural location
marketing, an aesthetic that risks nothing and
overwhelms no one, that drives away neither the
audience nor the sponsors who come with ordinary,
consensus-based expectations, because this kind of

69
aesthetic is ∫rst and foremost geared toward
offering a space the audience can identify with and
the sponsors can present themselves in. It therefore
becomes an issue if, for example, someone were to
upset the sensibilities of the political middle classes
by provocatively calling himself a “Nazi,” as Lars
von Trier once did in Cannes in referring to his
German roots. Film festivals are currently rein-
venting ∫lm after cinema as a brand that is aesthet-
ically and politically correct at all times. Culture
journalists lament the quality of ∫lms (often on the
occasion of a jury’s decision); they complain that in
Berlin, the ∫lms ∫nanced by the local funding
agency are disproportionately represented more
often in competition, and they criticize that the
sponsors’ interests obviously take precedence over
the audience’s in Rotterdam or Toronto. For all
intents and purposes, however, these journalists
are quite content with a system that offers suf∫cient
extravaganza to somewhat justify coverage in an
increasingly precarious media market. The Zurich
Film Festival, a more recent brainchild of location
marketing, is now owned by the NZZ Medien-
gruppe, an integrated media conglomerate that
creates the content and character of its news (there-
fore positioning itself in competition with other
∫lm festivals). Even for the culture section of news-
papers, attending stars and paying visitors serve as

70
suf∫cient criteria for assessing quality within an
environment of declining critical public discourse
about the quality of ∫lms. This development is
establishing a false alliance between critique and
festival, because instead of aesthetic radicalism,
sustaining one’s own image and survival becomes
the benchmark. As long as attendance ∫gures are
high enough, stars come to town and the political
mainstream is catered for. The “∫lm industry”
thinks everything is hunky-dory, as Olaf Möller
lamented in his summary of the 2015 edition of the
Berlin International Film Festival in Film Comment.
Everyone seems pleased with the social democrati-
zation of culture, with “Berlin Republic event-
movie neoliberal realism,” he stated. Many ∫lm
festivals dedicate programs to ∫lm funding agen-
cies, broadcasters and “∫lm industry” associations,
just as they do for other sponsors. Often, these
parties are themselves direct or indirect patrons of
the festival, which is in turn eager to pander to the
various interests demanding attention. In this way,
∫lm festivals are no longer just a “∫lter” viewers
can use for independent qualitative orientation, as
a guide to cope with the mass of ∫lms, instead they
are becoming an institutionalized ordering prin-
ciple that establishes mediocrity as the aesthetic
standard.

71
 But the task of ∫lm festivals could be to preserve
cinema as a cultural practice, with its speci∫c mode
of perception, its social engagement within a
liminal experience, and the particular architectural
features of its spaces. Film festivals take place in
movie theaters whose very existence is at stake
right now. Film festivals provide the spaces where
∫lm can renew itself, where we can keep an aware-
ness of and discuss aesthetic and social alternatives.
In that sense, cultural-political demands should
focus on institutionalizing and professionalizing
∫lm festivals and presenting them with a new
cultural-political mission. Spaces like the cinema
are required to preserve aesthetic and social alter-
natives to academic interpretations, as well as to the
conventions of the art scene, to the education main-
stream or the individualization of the internet, etc.
Film festivals could lead cinema toward a regulated
musealization. We have to decide right now
whether the market will put an end to cinema as a
cultural practice, just as has already happened to
analog ∫lm, or whether we want to understand,
pass on and shape the historical con∫guration and
diversity of cinema and ∫lm formats. It doesn’t
necessarily follow that we need more ∫lm festivals,
but the ones charged with cultural promotion must
understand that they can most likely only salvage
cinema with and through the work done at ∫lm

72
festivals. The problem with such cultural-political
demands, however, is essentially the always-terri-
fying prospect of living with the “imposed right
thing to do,” which spells the end of any form of
unregulated existence within a quasi-govern-
mental, didactic cultural zoo. Compared with the
economization of cinema, however, a pact with
cultural politics de∫nitely seems to be the lesser
evil and an opportunity to gain time.
A shift in the mindset of culture promoters and
the art scene in particular is needed to bring about
substantial change. They need to realize that the
movie theater is a place with speci∫c architectural,
social and technical requirements and conditions.
Among others, we have to ask the question whether
we’d rather show a program with experimental
∫lms in a cinema foyer for 300 people instead of in
the auditorium itself, where only 30 people are
interested in watching them. In short, are we
prepared to surrender that which makes these ∫lms
seem something else, which lets them have a
different effect? “Cultural education” ∞ with which
cultural promotion tries to play social politics at
the expense of art, and art promises social function
and real effect ∞ must develop an idea of where and
how to keep the enormous artistic heritage of ∫lm
accessible and how to impart it to future genera-
tions. You cannot expect people to go out to the

73
cinema or the opera if they are not familiar with
movie theaters or opera houses. Once it has lost its
commercial relevance, a cultural practice not only
needs to be taught and learned, it also needs to be
experienced and expanded. There is no question
that the term cinema must be historicized in order
to do this, because it always refers to a different
social practice of showing and watching ∫lm.
This development must also include a vision of
a new compensation system for ∫lmmakers. Today
there is no suf∫cient reason why directors should
enter competitions without being paid if there are
no realistic expectations for commercial distribu-
tion afterwards. Of course they cannot count on
high-level revenues from a single festival, but the
potential for large sums are there if all festivals are
taken together. The redistribution of ∫lm festival
prize money is unquestionably only a makeshift
avenue toward a new distribution and re∫nancing
model. The new system could be capitalized by
adjusting the model of per-screening and box of∫ce
subsidies for commercial, digital distribution, for
example, by establishing a culture-wide Ωat rate,
and through a radical shift in ∫lm funding by
remunerating participation at festivals to a greater
extent. The entire ∫lm funding model needs to be
reviewed. Film festivals, at least in Europe, could
become part of the funding and re∫nancing circuit

74
for ∫lms. Germany’s ∫lm promotion act already
stipulates that ∫lms with a certain number of
festival participations or awards gain access to
subsidies. As part of this system, ∫lmmakers are
indirectly awarded some ∫nancing, but this doesn’t
go far enough. It would be sensible to establish a
second pillar of ∫lm funding in addition to the
grants awarded by committees and juries, one
based on participation and awards at festivals, a
performance-based automatism of funding that
provides ∫lmmakers with greater independence
from broadcasters and the cinema business. From
an economic point of view, it is unjusti∫able to keep
a commercial cinema structure arti∫cially alive
through subsidies, and all the less so from a cultural
point of view, considering the quality of its
programming.
“To foster cinema only because it is culturally
important seems to me an insuf∫cient explanation.
This is a fundamental question of cultural politics,”
says urban planner Ralf Ebert. Cinema can only
survive if individual movie theaters are developed
into special venues that can be used by festivals and
other cultural events. The movie theater has to be
turned into the kind of place that is already self-ev-
ident for housing contemporary art. It has to
become a museum, removed from the grip of the
market. Not primarily a storage facility for the past,

75
but a temporary museum of moving images, a
museum of the artistic ∫lm, of social and intellec-
tual interaction. A plate outside the entrance of the
Austrian Film Museum in Vienna explains to its
visitors what to expect inside: “Our exhibitions
take place on the screen.” Even as the last cent is
being squeezed out of it, the cinema will only be
able to survive as a museum. The temporary
museum is a place where cinema can defend its
alternative mode of perception and its unique
social space. It therefore doesn’t de∫ne itself in
contrast to the art museum, nor does it signify the
transformation of the movie theater to the museum.
It is the museum’s evolution in the form of a
program, as a sequence of reproducible works
shown under the terms of cinema. Compiling ∫lms
∞ within the art world, where it is considered a
career called curating ∞ is not an artistic strategy; at
best, it brings such a strategy to light. What cinema
can learn from the museum is, among others, the
intellectualizing and intimacy inherent in dealing
with artworks and artists. Yet what the museum
can learn from cinema is a peripheral, technical
mode of perception that belongs to cinema alone.
Until now, cinemas or screening rooms in
museums have often been treated as merely side
stages of an exhibition or, in contrast and even
worse, as separate and essentially commercial

76
venues for “arthouse” ∫lm. The standards with
regard to curatorial care and screening quality are
often accordingly disastrous. When museums are
newly built or remodeled, this is where they often
save money. Only very few museums have ever tried
or managed to realize the idea of a cinema as a
genuine and integral part of museal practice. But
there are examples. Frequently ∫lm and art cura-
tors work in different museum departments, with
different budgets and possibilities; they address a
different kind of audience, too. The larger the
museum, the sharper the distinction. If ∫lm is
allowed to be part of an exhibition, then only under
the conditions set forth by the focus of the show; if
art is allowed to enter the cinema, then only as an
illustration of the exhibition. Cinemas and
museums have remained separate and their
connection largely misunderstood, both aestheti-
cally and architectonically, as well as structurally
and technically. A temporary museum, however,
should understand the sequence of these moving
images, their screenings as durational exhibits, as
well as the cinema’s and the programs’ compulsion
to perceive as a component of the exhibition itself ∞
and certainly in connection to the business of art.
Viewed in this light, cinema as a social mode of
perception cannot be saved through the cinema as a
commercial venue. The idea of a temporary

77
museum is the result of both the crisis of the cinema
as the place to see ∫lms and the sometimes hardly
adequate presentation of ∫lms within the contem-
porary art world. Judged by these standards, both
movie theaters and ∫lm festivals currently fail just
as much as museums do. They only rarely succeed
in confronting the consumerist individual ∞ who is
just as isolated and separated from entering into a
potential intellectual process with others at the
cinema as they are in a normal art show ∞ with a
new social engagement. It is nothing new to think
about reformulating cinema (how to make cinema
more attractive for the audience), as this has been
happening ever since the crisis of the movie theater
as a place to show ∫lms began. What’s new is
reΩecting on how we can save the social mode of
perception brought forward by cinema without
thinking about the ∫lms’ amortization.
British curator Ian White, for example, once
asked, taking a consciously reductionist and
polemic stance, whether the museum was failing
with regard to ∫lms. “Does the museum fail?” then
became the title of a panel discussion at Interna-
tionale Kurz∫lmtage Oberhausen and triggered
nervous reactions within the art scene, claiming
that after all we had to differentiate whether the
individual museum or the individual curator was
failing or the entire institution, which of course

78
could not be the case. Needless to say, it is not the
museum, not the festival, not the cinema that is
failing. Of course there is good and bad art, there
are good and bad curatorial decisions, and good
and bad ways of presentation. Nevertheless, we
cannot maintain that most exhibitions, galleries or
museums are successful examples of showing ∫lms,
just as movie theaters in their current condition are
not successful examples because they only survive
in Europe thanks to many subsidies. And even the
majority of ∫lm festivals aren’t a good example,
because they have never considered, during this
crisis of cinema, what a ∫lm festival could look like
after cinema.
A temporary museum calls for a new, multifunc-
tional space that is shaped by artistic motives alone:
it is at once exhibition space, library, café or restau-
rant (where artistic motives usually lose impor-
tance), cinema, concert hall, artist’s studio and
much more ∞ an essentially transitory space, and a
space that evolves according to the circumstances
and the people who use it. A few museums, cine-
matheques and ∫lm museums are already trying
this, although at considerable cost and negotiation
efforts. They are constantly facing the risk of being
too dependent on the government, or of reducing a
cultural practice to indirect cultural pro∫tability in
middle-class, intellectual, multipurpose halls that
nostalgically glorify the cinema.
79
 Every cultural practice undergoing the process
of musealization, and this is true both for the
cinema and the opera, is of course highly threat-
ened by cultural stagnation. The musealization of
its spaces endangers the social signi∫cance of an art
form. However, neither the performing arts, which
currently claim roughly half of public cultural
subsidies even though they have already lost large
numbers of their middle-class audience, nor the
cinema, which is probably affected by even heavier
losses in audience numbers, need necessarily lose
their social relevance as a result of musealization.
They lost their economic relevance long ago anyway,
and musealization primarily means only that the
commercial costs incurred for society clearly exceed
the existing demand. The temporary museum is a
space that makes an alternative perception of
reality historically possible, asserting its position
against the need for the ∫lms it showed to be
economically ef∫cient. It’s a place where you can
save yourself from the obligation to purchase some-
thing, a clandestine space for a duration of time
that can sometimes seem endless and also a bit
bizarre. This process requires the cinema. The
movie theater claims an interruption of the current
social context. In this sense, the decline of cinema
as part of the industrial exploitation of ∫lm isn’t
the actual threat, because artistic, good and bad

80
∫lms will continue to be produced and will ∫nd
their audiences elsewhere. The threat lies in the
potential loss of a mode of perception that only the
movie theater can offer, and which could reinvent
itself at ∫lm festivals.
But will a demand for ∫lm festivals even exist in
the future? With the progressing convergence of
television, telecommunication and the internet,
∫lms will probably be predominantly available and
watched through electronic means. The DVD and
its extensions are already disappearing from the
market. Does that mean ∫lm festivals themselves
are already an anachronism? In September 2011, the
German daily paper die tageszeitung published a
survey on the popularity of ∫lm festivals and the
media coverage on them. Only 11 percent of all
respondents said ∫lm festivals were interesting and
that their coverage was worth reading. The rest
thought both to be super∫cial and unnecessary.
This result demonstrates a social development in
which ∫lm and the cinema, in addition to other arts
and cultural spaces, have signi∫cantly lost social
importance. Film and the cinema now have a less
discursive, distinctive and socializing effect than
prior to the internet’s advent. Technology is condi-
tioning our leisure society toward new economies.
The justi∫cation for the existence of ∫lm festivals
today are therefore different from those before the

81
internet: ∫lm festivals keep aesthetic and social
alternatives alive within communal spaces and they
contribute to the differentiation between aesthetic
criteria. They help relate artistic, scienti∫c and
generally societal concerns to each other. Festivals
counteract the individualization of reception. And
they defend cinema as an alternative mode of
perception against television, which has been
corrupted by the pressure of ratings, against
pedantic universities, and against cinema itself as a
convention, in its current, depressing state. Presum-
ably, there will continue to be a need for essential
∫lm festival offerings, at least for a certain crowd. A
need to discover ∫lms, for correctly projected
images, a collective mode of perception, quality of
selection, thematic pro∫les, interaction and discus-
sion. One thing you can be sure of: if ∫lm festivals
don’t succeed in plausibly formulating some kind
of social added value, they will become expendable.
A good ∫lm festival is like one of those bookstores
where you end up buying something you weren’t
even looking for. You enter with certain expecta-
tions and leave with experiences; you get some-
thing you didn’t expect. Jacques Ledoux, the long-
term director of the Cinémathèque royale de
Belgique in Brussels and of the legendary ∫lm
programs at EXPRMNTL in Knokke-Le Zoute, once
explained his concept for ∫lm festivals as follows: 1.

82
∫lm programs, 2. programs without ∫lms, and 3.
the unpredictable result of 1. and 2.

83
The Compulsion to
Perceive

The decline of the auteur ∫lm in cinemas and the

absorption of auteurs by the art world happened
almost simultaneously. On the one hand, because
artists couldn’t survive economically within a
system regulated by television and the logic of ∫lm
funding, and on the other because we neglected to
talk about the future of ∫lm and ∫lm funding right
after cinema’s loss of importance. We therefore
missed the opportunity to develop and foster alter-
native forms of distribution for artistic ∫lms. The
directive for ∫lm funding still stipulates it be
destined for theatrical release (and judged on
whether it can achieve distribution in cinemas, no
matter the costs or how absurd that may be).
Considering the actual social and commercial
circumstances, this is a naïve point of view which,
at least for the time being, is maintained on behalf
of the (commercial) interests of the movie theater
industry and not at all on behalf of the cultural

85
practice of cinemas. Whenever we have to use and
justify subsidies for the ∫lm and television industry
∞ in Germany alone we spent around 250 million
euros in 2015 ∞ we like to use the term “cinematic
art.” The modest artistic (and commercial) success
of European ∫lms when compared to international
productions is the penalty for ∫lm funding policies
that back a powerful lobby and are interested in
leveling extremes. Given the original motivations
and background leading to the formation of ∫lm
funding, current funding practices are clearly the
result of a failed development. In 1960s Europe, we
fought hard to establish ∫lm funding as a remedy
against stale post-war cinema. It was supposed to
especially foster ∫lms that, due to their artistic
interests, would never achieve any kind of commer-
cial success. Meanwhile, players who once had to ∞
or should have had to ∞ prove themselves on the
market because they pursued commercial interests
by making mainstream ∫lms, are now comman-
deering access to subsidies from those productions
the funding originally targeted. For the sake of
simplicity, mainstream ∫lms today have their
productions subsidized risk-free by national ∫lm
funding. Therefore, the European “∫lm industry”
is not only essentially dependent on subsidies, it
also ∫rst and foremost makes its money from subsi-
dies. However, the purpose of ∫lm funding was

86
never to replace the market, but rather to maintain
artistic quality despite the market. Television is
currently greatly inΩuencing a product it only
∫nances to a small extent. Highly sophisticated
content, which cannot hope for money from televi-
sion networks because it has no chance of getting
broadcast on television, therefore has hardly any
prospect of support. Such a system, which is more
interested in the secured advantage of a few than in
competition for the best quality among all, is prone
to establishing a dictatorship of the mediocre. It is
constantly reassuring its own structures and ideals,
it immunizes itself against all risks ∞ against the
unpredictable as well as against calculated provoca-
tion. Such a system is impeding the development of
new paths of production and distribution, of
addressing new audiences and, most of all, of
generating new cinematic forms. This system is
sealing an alliance based on the lowest common
denominator in the interests of broadcasters,
funders, a few producers, distributors and theater
chains. It aims at preserving its own existence, not
at fostering better ∫lms. It’s part of “∫lm industry”
jargon to say that culture and business are “two
sides of the same coin.” There is certainly not much
left of either one now. Clarity on the parameters of
success or the de∫nition of criteria for commercial
or artistic accomplishments are not in anyone’s

87
interest, because they maintain a system that has to
relentlessly produce while never legitimizing itself.
Any interest in culture is only as great as it serves as
a justi∫cation for interests that, measured by the
results, can hardly even be called “cultural.” Film
funding is therefore growing a systemic problem,
not only because it is abolishing a market that
should regulate who is successful and who is not,
but even worse, it eliminates the production and
distribution of artistic works that cannot success-
fully compete on the market. It prevents the devel-
opment and renewal of artistic ∫lms. Film critic
Peter W. Jansen wrote about how the young Wim
Wenders once received funding at a meeting of the
committee of the “Kuratorium junger deutscher
Film” simply based on the novel The Goalkeeper’s
Fear of the Penalty by Peter Handke, which he had
submitted to them. In the early years of ∫lm
funding, these committees apparently still took
risks without demanding fully developed scripts,
well-known names or other securities.
In today’s Europe, ∫lm funding not only contra-
dicts its historic mission, it also engenders an
arti∫cial environment without allowing for artistic
impulses for the continued existence of the cinema,
which presently doesn’t offer any commercial pros-
pects at all. There is no longer a market for (Euro-
pean) ∫lms that allows them to re∫nance

88
themselves in the movie theater (through ticket
sales). Cinemas have become a commercial shadow
play, a “state cinema,” as German director Klaus
Lemke calls it. Meanwhile, television networks
have a substantial portion of their offerings
∫nanced through ∫lm funding. Lemke has drawn a
radical conclusion from these circumstances: he
∫nances his own ∫lms with scant resources and no
∫lm funding (without the inΩuence of broadcasters,
distributors, etc.), retaining complete control of the
result. In doing so, he is paving the way towards a
return to a structure based on supply and demand,
which is the only way to guarantee artistic quality.
Like Christo, Lemke believes that only one’s own
money can absolutely guarantee artistic autonomy.
Art in ∫lm has been taking place outside the
cinema for a long time. While appreciation for ∫lm
as an art form must continue to be seen as having
failed ∞ at least with regard to television and movie
theaters ∞ the art world has rendered a signi∫cant
number of ∫lms marketable since the mid-1990s
thanks to the promise of “liberation from the
formatting of cinema” (Jan Verwoert). And this
despite the partially deplorable artistic make-up of
the programs shown on television, in movie
theaters or at festivals, and the dismal conditions
under which they are screened there. The art world
promises ∫lmmakers new attention and exclusivity,

89
and is keeping its promises in part. Every short ∫lm
in a large-scale exhibition today reaches a greater
number of spectators and receives greater recogni-
tion there than it could ever attain in cinemas. This
increase in value is a genuine element of the logic of
value creation within the system we call “art.”
While the majority of artists play a marginal role
with their ∫lms in the art world, there are a few
people receiving international recognition and
making a considerable livelihood as a result. Film-
makers able to live off prize money and rental fees
alone have always been the exception. Most ∫nance
their ∫lms through teaching positions and have
little ∫nancial stability. Only once artists such as
Nam June Paik, who experimented with video,
began working in a more sculptural mode did their
market value Ωourish in the art world. Few artists
working in ∫lm met with success in this business.
Kurt Kren, for example, survived in the US for years
by working as a museum guard, in the end
subsisting on bene∫ts from the Austrian govern-
ment until his death. A variety of artistic ∫lms
achieve considerable success at ∫lm festivals, there-
fore ∫nding a speci∫c audience within this context
and, in contrast to screenings at cinemas, occasion-
ally reaching quite a sizeable audience. At the same
time, their presentation at ∫lm festivals isn’t
connected to a funding system determined by lobby

90
interests and geared toward a distribution in movie
theaters and on television that in itself isn’t
commercial, but conducts itself commercially. This
phenomenon is therefore rare, a thing reserved for
star artists such as Matthew Barney (Drawing
Restraint 9, 2005) and Steve McQueen (Hunger,
2008), who successfully showed features made
thanks to ∫lm funding and proper budgets at ∫lm
festivals as well as in cinemas. In the German-
speaking region, visual artists such as Rebecca Horn
(Buster’s Bedroom, 1990) and Pipilotti Rist
(Pepperminta, 2009) were not able to emulate their
success.
Still, some ∫lmmakers who have been artists for
decades are suddenly miraculously “discovered” by
a quite heterogeneous and sometimes even incon-
sistent art scene. Numerous ∫lmmakers who are
effectively more or less “experimental” in their
approach, with an already extensive ∫lmography to
show for themselves, were discovered by the art
market at a very late stage ∞ among them Chantal
Akerman, James Benning, Robert Breer, Harun
Farocki, Isaac Julien, and Ulrike Ottinger. Others ∞
for example Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Matthew Barney, and
Pipilotti Rist ∞ found acceptance early on (if not
from the very beginning), because the conditions
were right at a speci∫c moment in time. The price
for the assimilation of the “experimental ∫lm” into

91
the art world was de-historizing these works. Many
a ∫lmmaker “discovered” by the art world is
subjected to a founding myth, given that it is not
least because of their “originality” that they gain
“value”. Originality, in this case, is meant with
respect to the history of art, not the history of ∫lm.
All of a sudden, even an artist’s older works made
for screening in cinemas are shown at exhibitions,
regardless of how they were originally received
outside the movie theater. Films that have only
earned moderate revenue or are considered mere
shelf warmers in the catalogues of experimental
∫lm distributors are now being bought by museums
or even withdrawn from distribution. Sometimes
these works just move from one museum depart-
ment to another, from ∫lm to contemporary art,
which of course have completely different budgets
and prices. Some museums only started buying
these artists’ works once they were represented by
galleries and therefore became part of the symbolic
system and value chain we call “art.” The art market
also requires reassurances. No one wants to be
wrong. Apart from a few really bold curators, it was
the galleries that stimulated this development, not
the museums. Everything is supposed to have its
origin and destiny in art history, or better yet: in the
art market. The reformatting of ∫lm through the
art world can sometimes have an almost exorcizing

92
effect on ∫lm history and the cultural practice of
cinema, which is denied its standing as a funda-
mental technique and genuine mode of perception
of ∫lm. An obituary about ∫lmmaker Harun
Farocki in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allge-
meine Zeitung not only omitted mention Farocki’s
∫lms and his work as an editor (listing him only as
author) of the magazine Filmkritik, but also insinu-
ated Farocki found his salvation as an artist within
the art world, where he allegedly encountered “the
focused spectator he had wished for. And he was
successful, exhibiting in all major museums.” What
is certainly satisfying on a commercial level for
every individual artist is, however, nowhere near
suf∫cient justi∫cation for their art. It seems like
we’re not talking about the same thing: the incom-
prehension now inherent in the clashes of discourse
between ∫lm and art has rarely been this great and
this hopeless, not only regarding the valuation of
aesthetics, but even of craftsmanship. Embar-
rassing silence or evasion are the usual responses on
both sides when you challenge the work of a
renowned artist because it involves image and
sound material that has already been used in other
∫lms, which they should have looked at critically.
The suppression of ∫lm history within art discourse
is a requirement for a certain type of logic on added
value and its inherent origin myth with reference

93
to both artist and work. Given the art world’s new
sovereignty over the interpretation of which ∫lms ∞
and, most of all, which names ∞ even have market
value, the issue of experimental ∫lm and its poten-
tial ∫lm historical standards has apparently been
settled.
Whoever says ∫lm, cannot mean art; there are
still too many reservations on this point. Neverthe-
less, the term “∫lm art” implies something that
certainly doesn’t match up with the current state of
artistic production. It usually refers to a canon of
“masterpieces.” While ∫lm festivals dedicated to
experimental ∫lm have largely disappeared or
taken up new, zeitgeisty names, the designations
“experimental ∫lm” and “video art” have gradually
been absorbed into the term “media art.” But even
“media art” has never really been able to access the
art market, even though the classi∫cation itself
contains a claim to artistic accomplishment. Media
art contains the promise of artistic integrity in the
age of its technological reproducibility. As a sponsor
of culture, you cannot go wrong with media art.
Film is elevated to the level of art, and the aspects
that have always been dubious ∞ screenings at the
movie theater, the stigma of the popular or even the
proletarian, the smell of popcorn, the noise of chil-
dren ∞ are left out. The label “media art” itself,
however, does not guarantee access to the art

94
market, which functions according to the idiosyn-
cratic, often obscure but ultimately astonishingly
simple logic of relationships and names, in short:
of networks. It is therefore not surprising that the
art world’s appropriation of ∫lmmakers in the last
few years has meant success to people who have
never de∫ned themselves as “media artists.” To
prosper, the artists’ “positions,” as the art scene so
aptly calls them, ∫rst had to be “discovered,” espe-
cially those pertaining to animated and documen-
tary ∫lms.
This has contributed to a late ∞ for many too
late, i.e. posthumous ∞ appreciation of a whole
series of artists. In any case, earnestly opposing the
art scene’s sovereignty over the interpretation of
∫lm as art was no longer possible anyway. The
elevation of ∫lm to an art form on the condition of
its scarcity (limiting the number of copies and
screenings) was gratefully accepted by many
∫lmmakers, because this offered them the recogni-
tion, sometimes also ∫nancially, that the cinema
had refused them so far. Filmmakers such as Robert
Breer and others managed to unexpectedly sell
their graphic works in this way as well. In this
respect the movie theater has clearly failed as a
distribution venue for artists’ ∫lms. We therefore
shouldn’t be surprised if they migrate from cinemas
to galleries in large numbers. Those who deplore

95
the state of ∫lm festivals are also right, because
there is too little attention paid to and too little due
diligence done for the individual artist and their
work within a mass operation dealing with
hundreds of ∫lms. Exclusivity in the art scene,
meanwhile, is a privilege awarded only to the happy
few.
Furthermore, reasons for migrating into the art
world are also technological in nature. Only the
emergence of digital processes and affordable
professional software, especially the opportunity
represented by increasingly satisfying video projec-
tion, made it possible to elevate this medium in the
∫rst place. This laid the foundation for the transi-
tion of ∫lm to video technology. Video installations
were then able to be shown not only on small
monitors, but on large screens too, without the
technical complexity and noise of ∫lm projection.
Film could effortlessly be transferred to video. HD
technology opened up a new dimension in which
∫lm and video technology were able to converge.
Erika Balsom demonstrated that the tremendous
success of the moving image in the art world coin-
cided with the introduction of the LCD projector,
which emerged in the early 1990s. In 1992, docu-
menta 9 presented numerous video positions,
marking the turning point for “media art” and the
inception of the assimilation of ∫lm and video into

96
the art world. Today, these works can easily be
shown as installations on several screens (in a space
mobile viewers can enter and leave), or in the form
of a traditional projection. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, for
instance, has always seen herself both as a ∫lmmaker
and a visual artist, therefore showing her work as
installations (multichannel) at exhibitions and as
∫lms (single channel) at festivals (in this case
without any commercial prospects, of course).
The rapid development in ∫lm and video
production coincided with a signi∫cant crisis
within the art market during the early 1990s. The
(perhaps already waning) success of technological
media on the art market may therefore on the one
hand be explained by momentary fatigue with
regard to established techniques for visual art (and
the necessity to open up new ones), and on the other
by the possibility of presenting immense,
convincing technical images that can be preserved
as durably as large panel paintings. This was ∫rst
demonstrated by the large-scale photographs of
Jeff Wall and the Becher-School, as well as works by
artists like Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, and
Thomas Ruff. Even the market value of small-scale
photographic works such as those by William
Eggleston bene∫ted, because their durability level
is generally as high as for canvases. Only a few years
ago, it would have been unthinkable for ∫lmmakers

97
to sell their copies strictly in limited editions (if we
ignore the works of Bruce Conner or Gregory
Markopoulos for this observation). That ∫lmmakers
like Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi,
who are now both part of the art world themselves,
accompanied the copies of their ∫lms into the
projection room, refusing to let them out of their
sight, can con∫dently be dismissed as a whim that
had nothing to do with market value.
Everything that once only received a modest
response at festivals like Biarritz, Hyères or Knokke
is now confronted with completely different stand-
ards for assessment in the art world. To maintain or
establish any innovative kind of imagery there, you
have to prove yourself, because all other distribu-
tion networks have largely disappeared (revenues
from distributing artistic ∫lms are marginal and
predominantly declining, it is said) and were never
very signi∫cant, for that matter. This has caused an
essential change in the mode of production for each
individual artist, who no longer has to deal with
the customs of (experimental or media art) festivals
and the niche market for distributors. Instead, they
must meet completely different requirements and
adapt to the logic of added value supported by
museums and collectors, as well as the galleries
addressing them.

98
 Today, the art world decides what is artistic
about ∫lm. It alone can promise the general
commercial conditions for aesthetic standards,
even though the artistic expression of ∫lm used to
be a matter for the avant-garde. However, avant-
garde ∫lm has always had a distinctly anti-institu-
tional and anti-economic dimension. Almost no
one earned any money with it; avant-garde meant
leisure time. A ∫lmmaker such as Lutz Mommartz
worked as an administrative employee. “Experi-
mental” ∫lms that cannot be distributed and vali-
dated in the system of the art world today appear as
marginal forms of amateur ∫lmmaking; the avant-
garde itself has long become inherent to the system.
As long as the art scene didn’t function as a distri-
bution platform for artistic ∫lms, festivals like
Knokke were the place where very different artistic
projects with no commercial prospects came
together, although they didn’t always coexist
without conΩict. Experimental and narrative strat-
egies weren’t separate from the beginning, but for a
time formed a wide space dedicated to artistic
invention. Martin Scorsese’s The Big Shave (1967),
for example, was shown ∫rst at Knokke and Ober-
hausen before he was considered a director of
feature ∫lms. The end of avant-garde ∫lm arrived
the moment when ∫lm became interesting for the
art scene; when ∫lm could be integrated into art

99
exhibitions in a satisfying manner and handled as a
“multiple,” as part of a limited edition. Experi-
mental and narrative techniques separated into
“feature ∫lm” and “artist’s ∫lm.” At the same time,
and not least due to the rise of video and digital
procedures, the experimental form has become
tremendously more complex.
Avant-garde ∫lm never managed to establish a
commercially relevant distribution system for its
presentation and monetization. In this case too, the
market determines what ∫lm ∞ or rather what art ∞
is. Value can only be generated by inclusion or
exclusion on a communicative level. The term
“experimental ∫lm” was essentially always too
vague to attain commercial relevance. In important
theoretical works on avant-garde ∫lm, for example
Birgit Hein’s Film im Underground, Peter Gidal’s
Materialist Film and P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film,
this term is of absolutely no importance. Even
today, ∫lmmakers like Mike Hoolboom prefer to
speak of “fringe ∫lm.” Hans Scheugl and Ernst
Schmidt Jr. already deemed the avant-garde to be
obsolete in their Sub-History of Film in the 1970s.
What remains is the desire to ∫nd a conceptual
term for the special status of the artistic ∫lm at the
cinema as opposed to within the art market. This,
however, has contributed to a highly reductive view
of ∫lm history. The history of American avant-garde

100
∫lm between the 1940s and the 1970s ∞ following P.
Adams Sitney’s formula ∞ has long been viewed as
the paradigm of any reasonably serious engage-
ment with experimental ∫lm, even though almost
the entirety of non-Western works in avant-garde
cinema were completely ignored. Until today, festi-
vals and program series such as the “Experimenta
Weekend” (London Film Festival), the ICA Artists’
Film Biennial (London), the Plastik Festival of
Artists’ Moving Image (Dublin), the “Views from
the Avant-Garde” (New York Film Festival), “Wave-
lengths” (Toronto International Film Festival) and
the Flaherty Film Seminar in New York continue in
this tradition to a great extent. These programs
almost exclusively feature British or American
(sometimes also Canadian) works under the not
very speci∫c label “artist’s ∫lm.” Sitney’s reduc-
tionism is an expression of the fact that these
∫lmmakers were only familiar with the ∫lms in
their own environment and didn’t appraise experi-
mental ∫lms with an eye toward the entire cinema.
The artistic part of ∫lm is limited to your own range
of experience and learned conventions ∞ and ∫lm
festivals, as well as a few ∫lm distributors and
universities, are contributing to this. A small
community meets at a few festivals and events to
ritually discuss a phenomenon that today has
become as seriously marginalized as never before:

101
the avant-garde ∫lm, meaning the ∫lm that elevates
its own materiality to an aesthetic object (Malcolm
Le Grice speaks of “the material instead of an illu-
sionistic presentation”). What this community
essentially does is mutually corroborate the
constant expectations of the genre “artist’s ∫lm,”
which is actually de∫ned by the art world, whereas
divergent aesthetic and cultural practices tend to be
completely overlooked. In this way, the “avant-
garde” turned into a dominance of Western culture.
Whatever remained of social progress is supposed
to be converted into aesthetic progress, but a canon-
ized form remains that prede∫nes the social frame-
work of thinking, not taking into account its
authoritarian character. Gregory Markopoulos
created a symbol and precedent for these circum-
stances by holding screenings exclusively reserved
for his ∫lms in Temenos, far from civilization on a
remote mountain in Greece. In trying to radically
remove cinema from the market and therefore the
cultural industry, he created a pastoral version of a
cinema before its fall from grace, a scenario in
which nature and audience were to form a symbi-
otic relationship without distraction, wholly dedi-
cated to the service of art. The audience had to go to
considerable lengths in order to reach this place;
they had to consciously renounce social presence.
Art wanting to withdraw from the art world in this

102
way always threatens to turn into aesthetic
fundamentalism.
The arrival of ∫lm in the art world in the begin-
ning of the 1990s also engendered an impressive
number of “curated” ∫lm programs; in the past, they
would have been merely “compiled.” A program
therefore must be “curated” at the very least, and a
∫lmmaker needs to be a “position.” No exhibition
on the present state of contemporary art can do
without ∫lm. Film, however, is detached from its
∫lm-historical and aesthetical references and there-
fore also from critical engagement. Film history and
∫lm aesthetics are by no means the only valid
measure for assessing a ∫lm, but considering how
“positions” of classical avant-garde ∫lm, for example
Kenneth Anger, Robert Breer, or Bruce Conner, are
presented in the art scene, numerous shifts regarding
mostly the aesthetic and historical evaluation of
these artists can be detected, especially regarding
the standards of presentation. The curator is consid-
ered the new hero of deregulated working condi-
tions within a neoliberal reality of life that listens to
this nicely named “creative class.” For some, these
circumstances and their own role within them may
appear to be a proper profession. The more unset-
tling contemporary art is, the more urgent the
apparent need for explanation and orientation
through discourse mechanisms. Steven Rosenbaum

103
talks of a “curation nation” in which everything is
curated and everyone is a “curator,” giving in to the
illusion of self-determined work. The curator
embodies what remains of the idea of non-hierar­
chical life equaling an individual success story.
They regularly present themselves as a form of
opposi­tion. The only people who are really
successful, however, are those who are and remain
mainstream. The curator’s blind spot is their rela-
tion to power. Their success cannot be judged along
the lines of artistic standards, but rather upon the
inΩuence they can exert. The star curator no longer
needs to establish artists and they don’t even need
to “curate”; they simply need to orchestrate some-
thing highly spectacular and create name artists.
Even though ∫lmmakers ∫nding success on the
art market today, albeit sometimes only post
mortem, is very welcome, what is incomprehen-
sible is that their works are presented as if they had
nothing to do with the practice of screening ∫lms
in cinemas or with ∫lm history; as if this was an
aspect you could simply forget. The art world is
developing a mostly af∫rmative discourse about
∫lm as an art object, which de-historizes ∫lm and
decontextualizes it. This is American artist Andrea
Fraser’s general critique: “Despite the radical polit-
ical rhetoric that abounds in the art world, censor-
ship and self-censorship reign when it comes to

104
confronting its economic conditions.” Critical
analysis in the art world usually ends at the point
when you have to address your own participation
in the underlying economic system. “Criticality”
usually doesn’t refer to the art world’s institutional
logic and even less so to its handling of ∫lm. We
therefore need a critique of the formatting that
determines how we perceive and discuss ∫lm,
cinema and art. Because how we watch a ∫lm isn’t
irrelevant ∞ just as how and where you listen to
music isn’t irrelevant (much of what is written
about ∫lm also applies to music anyway). It doesn’t
necessarily follow that the standards of the movie
theater need to be implemented for every presenta-
tion of a ∫lm in the art world. All of us are already
too used to being content with completely inade-
quate forms of ∫lm screening. When did you last
see a ∫lm that was projected under the best possible
(and necessary) conditions? The problem with
showing ∫lms is, among other things, that screen-
ings are only ever an approximation. It makes a
difference whether you stroll through an exhibi-
tion, entering and leaving a black box at will (seeing
various exhibits simultaneously) or whether you
are compelled to a different mode of perception for a
certain time within a collective.
What art has never understood about cinema is
the compulsion to perceive, irrespective of the audience

105
∞ each member of which has their own individual
education, inclinations and intentions ∞ watching
the ∫lm. Film imposes the perception of something
different and a reference to time through its setting,
which has its own duration. Duration is cinema’s
“imposition,” Juliane Rebentisch writes. For Jean-
Louis Schefer, cinema represents a completely
innovative “experimental” experience of time and
memory. This is what has always gotten in the way
of ∫lm in the art world. For the duration of a ∫lm, I
wasn’t part of a world I could imagine and look at;
instead the world was looking at me. In L’Homme
ordinaire du cinéma, Schefer says thinking is inherent
to ∫lm, it doesn’t take place outside of it. This was
cinema’s greatest, most powerful invention, so
radical in comparison with all other arts also
because it didn’t call on your education. On the
contrary: the cinema essentially turns me into a
(“normal”) being with no education, because it is
∫lm itself that is thinking (which doesn’t mean that
the ∫lm isn’t intelligible and cannot ∞ or even must
not ∞ become an object of critique). As part of the
art world, ∫lm gives us art as added value, but at the
same time it loses the independent mode of percep-
tion it owes solely to the movie theater. You
encounter ∫lm as visual art, as an object of aesthetic.
Only during the course of the decline of cinema has
∫lm ∫nally been con∫rmed as art. But at the same

106
time, its signi∫cance and innovation within the
history of media remains misunderstood. Cinema ∞
to adapt one of Slavoj Žižek’s ideas about Brecht’s
morality plays ∞ counters the essentially ideological
freedom of “self-determination” with the compul-
sion to perceive something speci∫c for a certain
duration of time. Self-determination consists of the
possibility to come and go at will, irrespective of
what is imperative for appreciating a ∫lm, and of
the illusory subjective (or liberal) freedom that is
nonetheless based on a fundamental submission to
the ideological imperative of conventions (for
example the rules of the art scene) on the one side,
and physical stasis, the ∫xed gaze, the submission to
time, on the other. Cinema offers an alternative to
the seemingly limitless freedom that amounts to
the prospect of evading this other, different, chal-
lenging perception at any given time in order to
persist in your own perceptual and behavioral
patterns. The choice I actually have versus the
choice I only seem to have comes down to leaving or
staying in order to be compelled to perceive differently;
to relinquish subjectivity in exchange for a passive
experience of objectivity.
The assumption that only ∫lm that is installa-
tive and can therefore be experienced as an object
(or even “interactively”) serves the “anti-illusionist”
(and therefore aesthetic) experience (Juliane

107
Rebentisch) and introduces an analytical “freedom”
(Boris Groys) ∞ what Malcolm Le Grice calls the
“critical arena of the present” ∞ overlooks exactly
that which differentiates ∫lm from the arts. This
assumption may be based on a fundamental
media-historical misconception of the bourgeois
concept of subject and culture, which cements the
art world’s current particular mode of “individu-
ality as a technique of power” (Roger M. Buergel
and Ruth Noack). 1970s ∫lm theorists (inΩuenced
by feminist, Marxist, psycho-analytical thought
such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli,
Stephen Heath, Teresa de Lauretis, Christian Metz
and Laura Mulvey) fell prey to this misconception
when they followed the tenets of “apparatus
theory,” thereby primarily targeting their critique
of an “illusionist” (i.e. manipulative) ∫lm at narra-
tive cinema as the matrix. Several of these theorists,
among them the ∫lmmaker and theorist Peter
Gidal, believed that based on this they could deduce
a genuine justi∫cation for experimental ∫lm, a sort
of anti-cinema aimed at putting an end to the
convoluted, illusionist games of cinema. If experi-
mental ∫lm was thought of and produced as a
general “critique” of the cinema, then it was always
in jeopardy of prematurely becoming an “anti-illu-
sionist” project that would counter the cinema’s
speci∫c mode of perception as a comparatively

108
harmless “critical” aesthetic. The desire for a
different kind of movie theater condemned all
cinemas in the name of anti-capitalist critique.
Every aesthetic of truth always includes authori-
tarian and totalitarian, and therefore also spiritless,
features.
Apparatus theory has rightly diagnosed and
protested cinema’s exercising of a mode of recep-
tion in favor of the industrial distribution of ∫lm.
You can easily corroborate how the cinema was
industrially perfected and how it established a
certain “dispositif” and thereby a certain social
practice. The cinema undoubtedly encompasses
various historical and social practices of presenta-
tion (authors like Noël Burch, Tom Gunning and
Heide Schlüpmann have tirelessly reminded us of
this fact). It nevertheless overlooked how cinema,
to the same extent as it became the perfect illusion
machine, also created a unique media-historical
mode of perception that didn’t merely turn audi-
ences into consumers and victims of an ef∫cient
capitalist process. Cinema shaped us into beings
who perceive differently than how society, ruled by
the principle of capitalist processes, would dictate.
Images may be ideologically charged, but the appa-
ratus itself that produces these images is not, even
if it works as an expression of certain economic
interests. Apparatus theory has misjudged at least

109
two factors in its endeavor to overcome cinema
with anti-illusionism, so to speak: on the one hand
you cannot evade the apparative image. Looking
always rubs off. As much as I try to evade the image
if it seems suspicious to me with respect to my own
thinking and to the world, it will always catch up
with me. Without the image, there is no connection
at all, neither to thinking nor to the world. Gilles
Deleuze’s essential realization was that cinema is
analogous to thinking because it is an image;
cinema is not similar to philosophical concepts
because it can illustrate them, but rather because it
is capable of perceiving the world analogous to phil-
osophical concepts in sound and images. Mean-
while, it is thanks to the apparative image that we
can perceive differently. Apparatus theory has
ignored the media-historical reality on the one
hand and the profoundly new effect of the cine-
matographic image on the other. The idea or expec-
tation that a viewer should or could encounter an
artwork “freely” is a truly persistent teaching of
critical art theory. However, Jean-Louis Schefer, in
his book on Correggio (La lumière et la proie), showed
how an artwork’s individual structure and texture
subdues our gaze, how the artwork “looks at us.”
The claim of a “free” gaze also stands in contrast to
an art world that imposes its own orders of gaze on
each viewer and fosters the illusion of us being

110
“free” individuals who only make conscious
choices, at least for the duration of the exhibition or
simply in the moment of contemplation. A museum
visitor has just as little freedom as a viewer in a
cinema or a user on the internet. The compulsion to
perceive is always suspicious. At least our gaze
should be independent, even if the social circum-
stances aren’t.
The observation that the movie theater
doesn’t offer or represent intellectual, critical,
or self-reΩex­ive engagement with its mode of
perception (which it may enable only in terms of
reasoning in retrospect, i.e. a posteriori), that it is
“thinking me,” even though I myself would like to
think, makes it per se suspected of being an “appa-
ratus,” an “illusion machine,” and an “instrument
of power.” Any pro­ject of “anti-illusionist” ∫lm
overlooks (not­­with­­standing numerous excellent
“anti-illusionist” ∫lms) the part which so radically
differentiated the cinema from the more or less
“critical” mode of perception of the bourgeois
viewing of art. It threatens to fall for an illusion
itself. Only within the past few years have cultural
studies developed a new understanding of how
the cinema doesn’t represent an ideological form
of illusion, but instead a “highly intelligent
symbolization” (Gertrud Koch) and social reality.
Theodor Adorno’s use of the term “semblance” in

111
his later publications might lead us to the heart of
the matter. Cinema is not based on an illusionist
deception. Nothing about cinema is an illusion in
the sense of a falsifying (“ideological,” “mythical,”
etc.) reality. Some have misread Ilja Ehrenburg’s
The Dream Factory, because in it he described the
social reality of the nascent ∫lm industry in 1931,
not the reality of technical images.
The cinema was a mode of perception that
revealed itself as an aesthetic reality only to the
immobilized (“passive”) viewer through the
suspension of everyday life and subjectivity, not
intellectually, but rather in “distracted” and
“tactile” form, as Walter Benjamin stated. It is the
only aesthetic mode of perception that, for a certain
time, not only compelled me to see and think
differently, but to be something different. For
Benjamin, the “freedom” in the compulsion to
perceive consisted in overcoming the limitations of
the subjective gaze. “Pure cinema,” Fernand Léger
wrote in 1925, “is the image of the object that is
wholly unknown to our eyes.” For Benjamin,
cinema is one of the forms of profane enlighten-
ment he had previously only experienced subjec-
tively by taking drugs, and it has since become a
collective form of experience through the appa-
ratus. With the designation “optical unconscious,”
Benjamin established a proximity to Freud’s

112
studies. Shortly after the publication of Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, Gustav Mahler set to
music German poet Friedrich Rückert’s “Ich bin
der Welt abhanden gekommen” / “I am lost to the
world.” It would therefore be worth studying
in-depth why apparatus theory has only under-
stood the cinema completely non-dialectically
under the aegis of illusion, thereby ideologizing
the technical mode of perception and the media-his-
torical radicalism of cinema under that of the criti-
cism of ideology. Fundamentally, apparatus theory
as an anti-capitalist theory of cinema was an
exceedingly romantic method of defense against
both apparatus and media, ultimately causing a
signi∫cant amount of harm that reached all the way
to critical art theory.

113
A New Kind of Epic
Film

Oddly enough it was Andy Warhol who, while

providing key testimony to many “anti-illusionist”
critics and theorists, showed that ∫lm was not illu-
sion, but rather an autonomous mode of perception
connected to cinema and only possible in the movie
theater. Warhol uses the cinema to critique ∫lm. For
a long time, the idiosyncrasies of ∫lms such as
Empire (1964) were expressed by the very fact of
their existence, and not through their visibility.
Warhol’s Empire became the most famous
unknown ∫lm. Few people have ever seen it or
experienced what happens when you see it in the
cinema. This ∫lm embodies the menacing scale of a
single concept and of a completely inactive working
day: an eight-hour shot of a building. Normally, the
movie theater audience is exploited by not being
able to see the work the ∫lm requires of them.
Warhol transforms this very aspect; the action takes
place inside the theater, where the soundtrack of

115
this silent ∫lm is created. Warhol calls it a “‘sound’
movie without sound.” The ∫lm’s silence provokes
disobedience inside the theater similar to children
misbehaving at school. At ∫rst, the appearance of
Warhol’s superstar, the Empire State Building,
suggests to the audience that this will be a serious,
“aesthetic” event for which they are expected to sit
still and be quiet. The continuing absence of
redemptive speech or liberating motion, however,
elicits movement, gestures, and noises from ordi-
narily regimented bodies. The viewer’s individu-
ality in art reception collapses. In this case, art
cheats society out of added value.
The titles of Warhol’s ∫lms contain no secrets;
they don’t offer more than what’s promised. They
are summaries comparable to the labels on cans of
Campbell’s Soup. People eat in Eat, they kiss in
Kiss, and they sleep in Sleep (all produced in 1963).
The skyscraper’s absurd persistence isn’t about
things and symbols or about (abstract) time, but
about the redemption of the symbolic, of chro-
nology and history through a process happening
within the collective audience. This ∫lm overcomes
the framing of art created to perform a symbolic
demarcation from daily life, from lived time. The
∫lm begins with the duration of its projection,
because its content is duration itself. It consists of
watching and murmuring, of inertia and tension;

116
its subject is the amount of time it takes for
boredom to set in. In this way, each audience
member loses their fear of falling silent as part of a
collective, and of the childish dread of the dark.
Warhol’s ∫lm criticism discovers the cinema as a
potential space in which the collective can leap into
a time beyond work, individualization and art.
Watching Warhol’s ∫lms on DVD at home or on the
internet would be just as meaningless as bringing
them to museums as installations. Their artistic
aspects only unfold in the movie theater, only
thanks to the speci∫c “materiality” of ∫lm, only
because of its duration in the dark within the
collective. None of this would remain on an exhibi-
tion screen.
Warhol’s ∫lm anticipates installations with ∫lm
durations that exceed anyone’s individual patience
and stamina; installations that just have a “middle”
and have been clogging the art world’s exhibitions
since the 1990s. He therefore consciously antici-
pates the possibility of not being able to endure the
conventions of the movie theater, by people
becoming vocal or leaving the room, and basically
dissolving the social contract. He nevertheless
insists on cinema’s mode of perception, and not
just because potential activity and mobility are a
genuine part of his artistic idea, or because it is
impossible for the audience to miss a part of an

117
overarching meaningful context or an important
detail (as would be the case in the exhibition of
∫lms with a “plot” or documentaries lasting several
hours). He insists on this mode of perception
because the speci∫c experience of time connected
to this ∫lm only results from the original dialectic
between the submission to time and the possibility
of individually or collectively shaping time.
Warhol’s works stand in contradiction to the
merely conceptual freedom of all ∫lmic installa-
tions which, due to their duration, either turn the
audience into desperate consumers or hopeless
participatory dilettantes. The audience is neither
overwhelmed by not being able to (or supposed to)
appreciate a work in its entirety, which is the case
for many contemporary exhibitions, nor are they
incited into some kind of idiotic interactivity
(whose freedom always remains trapped inside the
tightly limited structural logic of the given work or
the institutional logic of the art world). Because
each individual activity always refers to an intimate
perception of time itself, which is the opposite of
education, namely difference. This is what makes
Warhol’s ∫lms so radical. They touch the limits of
cinema, the passivity that is part of the compulsion
to perceive, because they make it possible to subjec-
tively experience much more than the merely
deceptively “interactive” exposure to one’s own

118
freedom ∞ which is mainly also creative, and results
directly, necessarily and objectively from perceiving
this other world that only cinema can offer. Warhol
doesn’t disavow or stylize (in the sense of a dubi-
ously “anti-illusionist” or “critical” attitude); he
separates the visible from things and movement
from the story, because both things and movement
in the cinema at some point lost their visibility in
favor of meaning and the story. At that point they
were nothing but the agents of the stories. With the
Empire State Building, Warhol ∫lms a fallen diva
whose aura had already been threatened by the
construction of taller rivals. It is no coincidence
that Warhol returns to the scene of the crime within
the high-rise metropolitan jungle where King
Kong once lost his main asset, namely his
monstrosity. Warhol prevents the demonstration of
the unimaginable or the monstrous by showing the
visible in its unmitigated massiveness. There is
nothing invisible hiding behind the visible that
could suddenly appear, that could be discovered
and then need to be carefully revealed like the
secret, uncharted island in King Kong. No more
monsters are there to be forced to just show them-
selves at the end. The visible becomes immediately
proximate, it moves to the sensory surface of what
can be visible. Silent ∫lm worked with head-on sets
that were meant to present just part of the whole.

119
Warhol no longer treats the visible as just a view
through the keyhole; the visible alone is what ∫lls
the frame. He doesn’t look for what’s decorative,
but rather for the moment in which experience
becomes the image. His ∫lms are not a description
of something that has come before, even though
they are always essentially about the same thing: a
dazzling procession of visibility. The image never
becomes informal ∞ it is frontality without back-
ground, an image in which nothing is happening,
that doesn’t refer to anything, doesn’t hide
anything; there is nothing but time and the image’s
own freedom.
This cinema breaks the invisible thread that
leads offstage, which is an effect of the image itself,
both in its visible weight and non-optical
“emptying”: “The more you look at the same exact
thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the
better and emptier you feel,” Warhol says. In its
in∫nite slowness, Empire absorbs all forms and
refuses, in an act of dramaturgically exact
“emptying,” a happy ending for all things. The
completely open aperture and the highly sensitive
∫lm stock take away the image’s depth and horizon.
The impression of watching a silent ∫lm, brought
on by the slowed projection speed, means the
building is already immersed in a radiant, Ωick-
ering brightness at twilight at the very beginning

120
of the ∫lm. The gradual onset of arti∫cial lighting
roughly an hour later creates a completely Ωat
image composed of an arrangement of light and
dark: a surface with secret messages and signals, an
enigmatic map of the visible. A distant building’s
illuminated clock no longer displays chronological
time, instead blinking an unintelligible language
in Morse code. The architecture of light creates a
glamorous being born of the cinema that remains
in view, ever unattainable. You constantly look past
the “content” because this strange, obscure sound-
lessness reaches deep into your own silent existence
in the movie theater. The duration of the immobile
displaces the image’s focus. And, with the dimming
of the building’s lights toward the end, the last
∫gure disappears from the image into a chimerical
materiality.
Questioning conservational or philological
aspects of the “original” ∫lm (which looks like it
needs restoring) misses the point with regard to the
unique optical quality of this stained, spotted,
scratched and quivering work. Callie Angell, the
curator of Warhol’s ∫lms, pointed out that these
“defects” come from the chemical developing
process of the ∫lm negative and therefore aren’t
abrasion marks on the prints. As it pulls things
down with it into the abyss of meaning, the ∫lm
gains even more texture while approaching its

121
inexorable disappearance. By celebrating its visi-
bility, the ∫lm risks its very existence as it burns up.
Nevertheless, where and how the ∫lm is shown is
not immaterial. The better the projection quality,
the stronger its impact. In this case, cinema contem-
plates its own existence outside the cinema.
Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl (1965) acts as a
counterpart to Empire: both ∫lms show how a
“star” is born. The title of this ∫lm is a tribute to the
eponymous ∫lm starring Shirley Temple, who was
Warhol’s idol. At ∫rst, Warhol wanted to ∫lm twen-
ty-four hours in the life of Edie Sedgwick, but he
only shot an hour of her waking up in the morning
and getting ready for the day. Warhol’s “superstars”
are special because they can become that without
presenting stories or embodying characters. Warhol
says that his stars don’t require a script, that
glamour is enough. The ∫rst part of the ∫lm
remains almost completely out of focus. Warhol
also kept this technical defect, joining it together
with a second part that was in focus. This blurriness
has a distancing effect similar to that already seen
in Empire. The eye fails to capture the full meaning;
it submerges into materializing movement. As
Sedgwick dresses in front of the mirror in the
second part of the ∫lm, this equally displaces the
meteoric apparition; each attempt at coming closer
results in the distancing of the focal point and the

122
coveted object. These ∫lms de∫ne the construction
of an impossible encounter, of absolute inaccessi-
bility. They are not about physical desire, but rather
about the attempt to think of the vanishing, of the
incomprehensible itself within the return of time.
They are about the wish to resemble time.
The theory of “anti-illusionist” ∫lm, which
comes from within the narrow ∫eld of ∫lm theories
based on ideology critique and experimental ∫lm,
has largely been integrated into the art world’s
discourse. It de∫nes and endorses ∫lm by neglecting
or even negating the cinema as a screening practice
and mode of perception. Most curators educated in
the art world ∞ including those who show ∫lms ∞
understand ∫lm outside of its historical screening
practice in theaters and its context within the
history of ∫lm. At least two things have been
accomplished by the art world. It has created a new
form of attention and a new source of income for
artist’s ∫lms; a positive development for every
∫lmmaker who is able to bene∫t. It has also abol-
ished the critical, historical engagement with
experimental practices of ∫lmmaking and the
standards of ∫lm presentation. The price ∫lm has
paid for being acknowledged by the art world has
come in the form of the dubious transfer of a bour-
geois concept of art onto ∫lm as an art form. It was
both right and important to save ∫lm as an art form,

123
no matter how. But in the process we lost a mode of
perception that had been until then unique ∞ more
than just an art form ∞ which it owed to the cinema,
a space that now belongs to the history of technical
media. Moreover, ∫lm as part of the art world
outside the cinema is beginning to conform to new
conventions, to address a different audience and
thereby to also change its character.
For a few artists, the absorption of “experi-
mental ∫lm” by the art market, which involved a
drastic selection procedure, resulted in greater
public recognition and a signi∫cant ∫nancial
upgrade of their work. Before that, ∫lms by artists
such as Robert Breer, Richard Serra, Robert
Smithson, and even Andy Warhol were restricted to
the underground (fetching accordingly low prices),
even though their more traditionally produced
artworks already had a certain commercial success
on the market. This also illustrates the different
ways in which the ∫lm and art markets operate.
Value for ∫lm lies in multiplication, whereas in the
art world it consists in scarcity: ∫lms must be shown
as often as possible under any circumstances in the
∫lm world to re∫nance themselves, while a ∫lm on
the art market should be exhibited as little as
possible under very speci∫c conditions. The ∫lm’s
print has purely material value, not sentimental
value. The art market, however, which still clings to

124
the idea of the original, considers only a limited
edition ∞ exclusivity, a certain inaccessibility, some-
times almost culminating in invisibility ∞ as guar-
anteeing the value of a certain work. If ∫lm and art
don’t get along, it is mainly because of their
distinctly organized systems. The question asked
by the art magazine Texte zur Kunst (Texts on Art):
“What does art want from ∫lm?” can therefore be
grasped only by understanding the diversity of the
respective logic of added value involved. However,
this question insinuates that art is scrutinizing ∫lm,
placing it outside of art and therefore not making it
part of a heterogeneous artistic ∫eld. We must
therefore understand the question as follows: Why
is the art world interested in ∫lm? Consequently,
the ∫lm magazine kolik.∫lm later turned the ques-
tion around: “What does ∫lm want from art?”
As a result, it is not just well-known paintings
that sometimes disappear from the public view
after auctions, but ∫lms too ∞ for instance those of
British artist Gillian Wearing, which are now rarely
exhibited. It is nearly impossible to show them at a
festival or at the cinema, as this would clearly not
add value to the ∫lms. You have to have exhausting
debates with gallery owners, who fear for the
market value of the work they represent, about the
pros, cons and modalities of a potential screening at
a movie theater or ∫lm festival. As per the

125
instructions of their representing galleries, ∫lms of
other well-known artists must now be shown
exclusively within the context of the art world and
in some cases even only in solo shows. Art dealers
and private collectors sometimes buy the complete
oeuvre of a deceased artist, thereby establishing
great ∫nancial and formal hurdles for screenings at
cinemas, as in the case of Jack Smith’s ∫lms.
Everything is a matter of market power and the
logic of added value. The danger of this kind of
“reauratization” of works lies in losing an audience
and the increased privatization of art, as it prior-
itizes the market value of a limited-edition object.
In case of doubt, it is the collector (or the gallery
presumably acting in the interest of its client) who
decides when, where and how you can see some-
thing. Limited editions of ∫lms are in this case
secured in high-quality packaging outside of the
public gaze. It is said that data carriers and master
tapes are sold in expensive velvet cases, like
perfume, and certi∫ed on high-quality paper to
anoint technically reproducible images as originals.
The rights and letters of indemnity included with
them are very comprehensive. The peaceful coexist-
ence of ∫lms existing both as limited editions and
distribution copies is unlikely in structural terms,
even though the rental distribution of some artistic
∫lms is often tolerated because, commercially

126
speaking, it is completely irrelevant. You can
admittedly not blame collectors for not wanting
their works shown everywhere, nor can you blame
∫lmmakers for increasingly turning their back on
the rental system as a form of distribution, because
it does not offer any relevant turnover or signi∫cant
public recognition.
The art world once again offers ∫lm an aura that
used to be extended only to the unique object, to
singular and non-reproducible works. The reaura-
tization of artworks is inherent to the system, it is
part of the value chain, not merely with regard to
their value on the market itself, but also to their
underlying idealization, i.e. the manner of their
presentation. The art world has to create its own
origin myth for each artist and work. A lobby of
gallery owners, curators and collectors appoints
names and standards. Now and then a star curator
may even write a triumphant article about a little-
known media artist who is part of the collection of
an institution on whose advisory board the curator
sits. Names are creating names.
In the art world, ∫lm-aesthetic, ∫lm-historical,
or even just plain technical standards for assessing
how an artwork should be made and presented
have almost never been relevant. You can only
wonder at the extent of how technically question-
able the showing of a ∫lm sometimes is. The

127
difference between a preview copy and a proper
release is sometimes completely dismissed. The
standards of ∫lm production and presentation
within the art world are often atrocious. Hito
Steyerl, a ∫lmmaker who is highly successful in the
art world, has meanwhile become the captain of a
new image paradigm and an advocate of the art
world: a “poor image” should overcome its “fetish
value” so that an “alternative economy of images,
an imperfect cinema” may develop. Here again
there is an almost Calvinist mistrust of conceptual
art in particular, of the allegedly “illusionist”
image; there is a fear of the beautiful semblance;
the primacy of “free” contemplation (as opposed to
immersion). That there is something rotten about
this, but that it still neatly ∫ts into the logic of the
art world has also struck others, such as Susanne
von Falkenhausen, who wrote for frieze.com: “In this
light, the video format is something like an inter-
mediate step on the way to a literal Ωattening of art
on tablet screens: gallery-compa­tible, yet still not
especially saleable due to a lack of haptic object
quality, while still more or less resembling an
artwork.”
This new image paradigm has led to a series of
curatorially disastrous decisions, for example the
projection of Lotte Reiniger’s ∫lms as video copies.
Her ∫lms are based on the aesthetic principle of

128
back and white, even though it is well known that
video projectors cannot display true black. Films
get projected onto walls through pocket-sized
video projectors, in rooms that aren’t properly
darkened (or may not be dark in order to prevent
accidents, they say). Films are projected in the
wrong aspect ratio, because people lack ∫lm format
knowledge. The same artist, for example, who no
longer wants to show her work in movie theaters
will present it at a gallery, projected incorrectly in a
1:1 square. And at exhibitions you regularly hear the
sound from the next installation, which you haven’t
even seen yet. Art critic Julia Voss reported on the
2015 Venice Biennial, completely exasperated: “The
sound of various ∫lms roars, hammers and clamors
from the other rooms. You can only hear the narra-
tor’s voice if you stand very close to the screen. But
then you block everyone else’s view.” The art world
has never really established adequate professional
standards on how to show ∫lms, particularly
because a work’s actual “performance” is secondary
to its discursive categorization and market value.
Curatorial solutions get stuck within the conven-
tions of the art world, which promises self-deter-
mined, limitless access to aesthetic experience, and
in doing so rigorously challenges precisely this
experience. “In short, the error consists in thinking
you can move ∫lm history from cinemas into white

129
cubes and black boxes without taking into consid-
eration the essential conditions inherent to the
material. Put another way: They believe it possible
to have the ∫lms without the ∫lm history.” (Volker
Pantenburg). Traditional distribution platforms
for artistic ∫lms are rapidly losing importance,
accompanied by the rash application of the art
world’s conventions for ∫lm as an art form. This is
apparent in the erosion of not only meaningful
professional standards of presentation (tried and
tested in the cinema), but also of a certain state of
theory formation and of a concept of ∫lm and
cinema. It is therefore gratifying that some artists
won’t give up on the cinema without a ∫ght when it
comes to screening their ∫lms. At documenta 11 for
example, Steve McQueen stipulated that his ∫lm
Western Deep (2002) could only be shown at
speci∫c times and that no one would be admitted
late.
The standards we know and treasure for projec-
tion in movie theaters that strongly shaped the
cinephile understanding of ∫lm ∞ vivid and focused
projection, a bright screen, the black box, a begin-
ning and an end ∞ was badly shaken up in part by
insuf∫ciently darkened, acoustically permeable
rooms and in part by the introduction of the loop.
Peter Kubelka has always insisted that his “invisible
cinema” (implemented for the ∫rst time in 1970 in

130
New York), in which the theater’s complete archi-
tecture retreats into the background (becomes
“invisible”), was by no means a radical venture, but
simply “normal” cinema (therefore the original in
some sense, when compared to screening practices
within other spaces). When it comes to the loud,
cramped art fair booths in broad daylight, the limi-
tations are obvious. But even at exhibitions, we
often have to be content with less than the
minimum standard of a cinema. Exhibition ∫lms
are rarely shown in accordance with technical
requirements and possibilities. Nothing invites
you to linger or concentrate when you look at some-
thing. Being in the know is enough. The main thing
is believing you saw it all. Preview becomes the
standard of aesthetic experience. There are either
no seats or just some that don’t really offer much of
a view ∞ or none at all. It is usually the discursive
framework of the catalogue that later explains how
you should understand something you didn’t see or
only partially saw. The astonishingly high-level,
privileged standards that “Unlimited” at Art Basel
is setting with its screening rooms for other art fairs
remains the exception. The misunderstanding
between the cinema and the art world goes back a
long way. Julie Reiss tells the story of how the well-
known Swedish curator Pontus Hultén, who was
not a bad ∫lmmaker himself, tried to convince

131
Charlie Chaplin to let him use a clip from Modern
Times (1939), transferred to video, for an exhibition
at MoMa in New York in 1968. Chaplin apparently
denied his request in disgust. In an essay about the
legendary exhibition “Prospekt 71: Projection”,
which took place a few years later at the Düssel-
dorfer Kunsthalle ∞ perhaps the very ∫rst exhibi-
tion of media art ∞ Maxa Zoller writes about how
some artists and ∫lmmakers opposed the poor
presentation and the exhibition’s openly commer-
cial orientation. Filmmaker Lutz Mommartz
consciously contrasted the exhibition’s “spatial
experience” as part of the counter-event “Film ∞
Kritisch” (“Film ∞ Critical”), in which he reinstated
the ∫lm inside the cinema.
An artist like Matthew Barney, who knew how
to defeat cinema with its own arguments by
funding his ∫lms with money from the art market
instead of from the audience, irritated the art world
(and the collectors who spent a lot of money on his
∫lms) for the long term when he sold his work in
unlimited editions on DVD after they greatly
increased in value on the market. This meant the
auratization and scarcity of his ∫lms, the condition
of their market value that regulated their public
access, was at stake. The boundary between ∫lm
and art is mostly controlled by the market and not
necessarily based on the individual’s artistic claims

132
or their self-image. The art industry is not actually a
market, it is more a symbolic system continually
assessing the value of objects based on inclusion
and exclusion. Whoever isn’t part of this system has
little chance of success. “The arcane social customs
surrounding this ∞ the stuff of social comedy ∞
divert attention from the business of assigning
material value to that which has none,” says art
critic Brian O’Doherty.
An excellent example of this development is
Douglas Gordon’s and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane,
A 21st Century Portrait (2006), which was
successful not just thanks to their names, but
primarily due to the exhibition of its production
values. The renowned cameraman Darius Khondji,
already well-known for his work for David Fincher,
placed 17 HD cameras around legendary football
player Zinedine Zidane to ∫lm him during a
single game. The production budget amounted
to more than ∫ve million euros, the largest part
of which went to the football club Real Madrid
and its players, it is said. The ∫lm’s premiere took
place during Art Basel in a stadium designed by
Herzog & de Meuron, where the only thing left
of the soundtrack by Mogwai was a loud droning.
The hype surrounding this unknown work by
well-known names was enough to make it art. The
artwork exhibits its worth. The work’s character

133
as a commodity becomes apparent in its elements
of spectacle. The ∫lm’s production values become
a fetish ∞ always bigger, more expensive, more
sensational: culinary cinema. For Deanimated
(2002), Martin Arnold had a team of four employees
digitally retouch an old Hollywood movie over 13
months, for a budget that usually suf∫ces for small
features. He then elaborately presented the result
as a museum installation. It allegedly took three
years and nine “research assistants” for Christian
Marclay to compile and assemble footage from old
∫lms for the 24-hour The Clock (2010). Mathias
Poledna, who used to be an excellent graphic
designer, showed his Imitation of Life (2013) ∞ a
roughly three-minute animated ∫lm in the style
of 1930s Disney cartoons ∞ at the Austrian pavilion
in Venice. With a supposed budget of 1.1 million
euros, more than 5,000 individual drawings were
pro­du­ced by an enormous team, which included
staff from Hollywood studios, in order to piece
together a short ∫lm that looked deceptively
similar to the original it was modeled after. The
soundtrack was recorded by a 52-piece orchestra on
a historical stage on the Warner Bros. studio lot. In
the accompanying text, Jasper Sharp, the curator
responsible for this work, postulates the exagger-
ated thesis that this is a commentary on the pavil-
ion’s history, even on the history of Austrian artists

134
living in exile. Imitation of Life, however, mostly
offers sad proof that only the art world is capable
of replicating a technique once invented by cinema.
The press release lists the “quantitative effort” as
the “∫lm’s special feature.” The art world triumphs
over the movie theater; the imitation of a cinematic
role model becomes a demonstration of how much
power the art world has: it can offer huge budgets
for short ∫lms that can’t be raised for feature ∫lms
anymore. Walking through Venice towards the
Giardini, the host of the Biennale’s exhibitions,
you pass the abandoned carcasses of movie theaters
lining the streets. The cinema is dead before you
even reach the art.
Zidane offers advanced industrial society a
contemporary version of the equestrian statue; this
is its ideological dimension. Artistically, a critique
of the production conditions under which this ∫lm
was made would have been more appropriate. Of
course, very few of the roughly 2,000 spectators in
Basel would have known that the ∫lm is merely a
rip-off of another avant-garde ∫lm, namely Hell-
muth Costard’s Fussball wie noch nie (Football
as never before) (1970), which doesn’t even get a
mention in the credits. With six 16mm cameras,
Costard ∫lmed Manchester United footballer
George Best. This fascinating deviation from the
conventions of television broadcasting consisted,

135
in Costard’s case, in asserting the micro narrative of
a single player against the major narrative of the
whole game. All Gordon and Parreno do is high-
light a star who, on the playing ∫eld, is a mere
reΩection of his own market value outside of the
arena. This offers up some reliable information on
the nature of the art world, which is not only able to
ignore ∫lm history without being challenged, it
even manages to demonstrate its power to adapt
cinema, to forget and to de∫ne. Zidane clearly
marks the moment when the art world triumphed
over ∫lm history, the moment in which it univer-
sally assumed sovereignty of de∫nition over ∫lm as
an art form. Whether the ∫lm made money in
cinemas after the screening in Basel probably never
played a role in its value chain, because it had
already been fully ∫nanced from the outset, and its
distribution on CD and DVD was already in full
swing.
The art world’s sovereignty of de∫nition is now
visible in many works created within and for the art
market. Nothing about Cyprien Gaillard’s Night-
life (2015), for instance, could inherently justify
what the texts issued by galleries and exhibitions
so verbosely read into the work. In the case of this
∫lm too, the technical effort invested not only into
the production but primarily into the work’s pres-
entation requiring advanced digital 3D technology

136
continues to be the main focus of the discourse
surrounding this work. The discourse completes
the assertion within both the work itself and its
aesthetic internal structure. Technically the ∫lm is
merely a succession of elements of spectacle thrown
together for visual appeal (including a Ωying drone
and ∫reworks), but of course it is all exquisitely
presented. We might well see a general contextual
connection between “racist Nazi ideology,” Berlin’s
Olympiastadion, and a tree planted by Jesse Owens
in Cleveland, but you cannot deduce this from the
work itself. The “interpretations,” offered on
guided tours through exhibitions or in lectures, in
the press release, the catalogue essay or the reviews,
all resemble the talks given at galleries or art fairs,
which are intended to provide deeper insight into
the work. But they all refuse to answer the much
more urgent question concerning the artistic
quality of the work itself.
The ∫lm might be “critical” in its intentions
(though not in its form): it deals with identity,
migration, racism, etc. The more critical, the better.
Every act of criticism falls into the trap of intention
when it dispenses with thorough analysis of the
work and doesn’t constantly demand radical oppo-
sition and contradiction of the of∫cial discourse.
Everything is referential, referencing concepts and
values beyond the work itself, which then becomes

137
∫lmed theory, an expression of a common sense
that con∫rms itself with mantra-like repetition in
what it sees. The less aesthetically consistent a work
is, the more receptive it becomes to discourse that
can continue the narrative and ascribe value to it.
Work and discourse are no longer separate spheres,
instead entering into an albeit unstable but insepa-
rable unity. The work is no longer a silent riddle to
be solved or explored time and again. It is by
contrast the discourse, having become part of the
work itself, that continually deciphers what I
perceive, because the work is no longer set against
it; the work surrenders to said discourse. The
discourse prompts me with an inaudible, but ∫rm
voice; it controls everything in line with the system
within which the work was created and continually
has to assert its value. “What is qualitatively good
art, what is bad art, in light of inΩationary concept
art that can claim and make use of everything
without ever producing any art or having to
demonstrate its ability through tangible works of
art?” German art critic Eduard Beaucamp asks with
obvious impatience in an article in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung. “Today, general ideas and
concepts, high-spirited intentions and more or less
accurate messages suf∫ce.” Comprehensive texts at
exhibitions, sophisticated catalogues, and elabo-
rate art education on all levels (ofΩine and online)

138
that can hardly be avoided nowadays ensure that no
one will ever misunderstand anything or prema-
turely fall for the idea that ∞ just maybe ∞ this could
actually be pretty bad art after all.
Put bluntly, the interpretation dictated to me is
the only interpretation the work still allows. Inter-
pretation is no longer personal, speculative and
contingent on the individual, but rather an af∫rma-
tive, tautological reproduction of the discourse
preceding the work. Essentially, the work is meant
to enable an in∫nite discourse of similar interpreta-
tions that don’t contradict each other, a fantastical
machine producing meaning and value. No matter
how “critical” its “message” might be, a work
becomes an expression of ideology whenever the
class struggle between what is visible and what can
be expressed ends, whenever the work stops
opposing its interpretation. The work should never
∫nd peace; it should never be forgotten, it must
speak up, as if impelled by an invisible trainer. No
matter what I say about the work, I see what the
enterprise is dictating, how it wants me to judge
the world. The work can no longer be interpreted
and, most of all, it has no effect beyond the discourse
foreshadowing it. Criticism of the work cannot take
any risks, as the range of potential interpretations
has already been de∫ned, examined and sealed off.
Any discourse about this kind of work only con∫rms

139
the market’s sovereignty over its de∫nition. The
market takes no risk because the work represents
its own discourse, and “criticality” is what it’s
advertising.
It’s understandable why older positions in
media art are out of fashion; for example, Bill Viola,
whose work is fully devoted to an aesthetic (if not to
say “aestheticized”) intention and is not at all refer-
ential. Only a work nurtured by highly-topical
discourse can expect attention and recognition.
Markus Metz and Georg Seesslen point out how the
art market is partially eliminating art history,
thereby abolishing interpretations that are deviant,
speculative and critical by enforcing its own “narra-
tive.” It is therefore no surprise that Nightlife was
presented in Düsseldorf thanks to cooperation
between a museum, a private collection and a
“fashion and lifestyle company.” The museum adds
to the work’s cultural upvaluation and the private
collector can patronizingly exhibit his possession
in a public space, admittedly under the complete
control of the art market. The problem in adapting
∫lm for the art market is of course not so much the
reckless economization of relationships, but the
implementation of a new perceptual dispositif.
A new form of epic ∫lm is being developed
within the art world: “The epic ∫lm Nightlife resides
between high-tech and history.” (exhibition press
kit). “Artist Rosa Barba builds an epic sculpture in
SCHIRN’s rotunda.” (magazine of Schirn Kunsthalle
Frankfurt). “The museum Villa Stuck is presenting
an epic 13-channel ∫lm installation in cooperation
with Sammlung Goetz. (Sammlung Goetz press
kit). “The Clock is the largest monument to remix
and mash-up culture to date.” (Die Zeit). On the one
hand, these ∫lms are produced and exhibited in
ever more elaborate ways, on the other hand they
sometimes even feature movie stars to attract a
wider audience. In Love Story (2016), Candice
Breitz had Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore recite
the stories of Syrian and Somali refugees (instead of
letting them speak for themselves), and in Mani-
festo (2015), Julian Rosefeldt had Cate Blanchett
perform artists’ manifestos. With a clever strategy
that expertly uses celebrities as elements of spec-
tacle, ∫lms can generate a new temporalization and
“eventization” (Metz and Seesslen call it “cine-
matographization”) of the artwork. Art is hyped
into overpowering aesthetics (which at times hardly
even acknowledge the refugees’ messages or the
intentions of the artists’ manifestos). The presenta-
tions of these works, only made possible by the
extensive cooperation between public and private
sponsors, as well as aggressive exhibition and loca-
tion marketing, claim for themselves a singular
kind of visibility that hardly permits, or even

141
outright disquali∫es, the possibility of featuring
the ∫lms in a curated group show. Rosefeldt’s work,
for example, has to be shown on 13 massive parallel
screens, leaving an impression on the audience that
is probably comparable to what a medieval visitor
would have experienced upon entering a cathedral.
It is precisely these kinds of technical images that
are again turning exhibition rooms into adora-
tional spaces. Cinema is returning as a cult to the
art world, which promises the consistent reconcili-
ation of contradictions.

142
Film Becomes
Sculptural

The long history of the art world’s “pre-critical”

adaptation of ∫lm history has its beginning in
Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), among
others. Gordon’s stunt consisted in expanding
Hitchcock’s ∫lm to 24 hours in length and
presenting it inside a black box, making it part of
the art industry. Nicolas Bourriaud characterizes
this kind of practice positively as the “postproduc-
tion” of images by means of digital technology in
contemporary art. But you can see the difference
from Warhol at ∫rst glance: by doing away with the
cinema’s compulsion to perceive ∞ because neither
the work’s aesthetics nor its presentation deposits
the audience into a different time ∞ the work becomes
decorative and at best entices the audience to
participate in empty interactivity. With the genre of
found footage, that is with the manipulation of
surviving and sometimes very well-known material
(for example from feature ∫lms), avant-garde ∫lm

143
started practicing a kind of psychoanalysis of
cinema early on, raising awareness of itself (∫rst
through the works of Joseph Cornell, then mainly
Bruce Conner, later through Matthias Müller and
others). The reappropriation of found footage
within the art world, however, is the appropriation
of cinema’s elements of spectacle, with whose
production means and methods the individual
artist can hardly compete.
It has become increasingly harder to draw a
distinction between, in legal terms, the “fair use” of
material in the creation of “transformative” works
of art, and mere exploitation by claiming some-
thing as art. In some cases, this has become the
object of legal suits for alleged copyright infringe-
ment. It is amusing to see artists who have processed
∫lm material claiming fair use without permission
(or paying for it), who then turn around and warily
safeguard their own copyright of the result. Mean-
while, the use of found footage has become a
perfectly unchallenged, everyday occurrence in the
art industry as part of the sometimes rather decora-
tive, sometimes rather discursive cannibalization
of ∫lm history and of cinema (or of private images
taken from amateur ∫lms). The mere juxtaposition
of unedited scenes of (famous) actors in feature
∫lms within the sculptural form of an installation
is often already enough to be celebrated as a critical

144
achievement, for example in the cases of Candice
Breitz’s Soliloquy Trilogy (2000) and Him + Her
(2008), and various other, lesser known works.
Whereas found material was also once used to
critique cinema itself, in the art world it has increas-
ingly been used for the nostalgic af∫rmation and
fetishization of cinema. The archives of ∫lm history
are meticulously combed through in search of
motifs or personas that can be arranged in series or
condensed into a miniature. These works regularly
outperform each other in the fastidiousness
inherent in the amount of material collected. The
∫nder’s reward, however, is rarely insight.
Simon Reynolds’ ∫ndings on the current pop
culture’s obsession with “retromania” applies
particularly to found footage as an artistic process
using cinematic images, especially considering the
new digital archives on DVD and the internet,
which have created a veritable inΩation of found
images and a new kind of arbitrariness in how they
are used. This artistic process is problematic
because the diligent and technically often impec-
cable, at times fascinating, recycling of the contin-
uing recollection of cinematic imagery doesn’t
bring forth any new images, instead it is threat-
ening to completely solidify itself into a structural
principle. Christian Marclay’s Telephones (1995) is
an early inΩuential example of how you can

145
successfully establish yourself as an artist on the art
market with this form of reduction. Marclay
combines ∫lm clips of actors on the phone as if they
were calling each other, resulting in a sort of
dialogue between ∫ctitious people. In that way,
experiencing ∫lm is reduced to a serial accumula-
tion, to recognizing motifs that were once only the
smallest pieces of cinema, pieces that were part of a
considerably more complex narrative (and ideolog-
ical) logic and, above all, of an alternative percep-
tion of time and reality.
Found footage has become a symptom of the
crisis of the ∫lmic image’s erosion which, as Serge
Daney said, has become an informal image. This is
what makes found footage attractive for advertising
as well. Lana Del Rey’s music video Video Games
(2011) was a great popular success not least because
of how it evoked the past using the decorative, retro
look of worn-out moving images we previously
knew only from experimental ∫lms. In her video
for Love (2017), the future only seems possible in
the past: science ∫ction arrives successfully in our
memories; pop culture becomes a utopia thought
backwards. “Final reconciliation,” which Theodor
Adorno already found fault with in his essay about
Franz Schubert, negates the idea of any kind of
progress in its endless re∫nement of what has
already been. “Retromania” is time stood still in an

146
archive you can’t escape from. Today, found footage
is availing itself of practices that were invented
decades ago by Conner, Müller and others. Few
were as original as Bjørn Melhus, who likes to use
old ∫lm soundtracks, populating and embodying
them with his own interpretations and a variety of
characters (e.g. Auto Center Drive (2002)). Melhus
doesn’t misappropriate ∫lmic material to fake
aesthetic proximity. On the contrary: he uses it as
the starting point for his own artistic process.
Melhus never succumbs to the temptation of cate-
gorizing the images of cinema and being satis∫ed
by their primary iconography, because his “sound
footage” is always a valid interpretation of a new
reality in the form of ∫lm and, most importantly, it
is an independent artistic process. Cinema, in this
case, functions more like a resonance chamber ∞ far,
far away.
As media artist Jesse McLean points out in a
conversation with Christian Höller: “One of the
biggest challenges when working with already
existing material is asking how the material and
the method you use bear any relevance to the
present. [...] I think that you shouldn’t simply be
enchanted by the material you use. In asking after
the potential of no matter what artifact, you should
always be aware of why exactly you are using it here
today.” McLean’s work distinguishes itself in the

147
new way it uses found footage or, more precisely, in
the new awareness it has in using the images we
know from television or the internet that have had
an impact on us. You can call it “post-internet art”
or “post-digital art,” but that would not be very
illuminating. McLean primarily harvests her mate-
rial from amateur YouTube videos or television
genres such as televangelism, quiz and game shows,
telenovelas, etc. At ∫rst glance, McLean deals with
pop cultural phenomena in her ∫lms: how people
listen to music and watch television. What makes
her work so radically different and unsettling,
however, is the confrontation with human projec-
tions as an expression of the asymmetry between
emotions and technology in advanced industrial
societies. McLean traces emotions such as adoration
or fear, which result from seeing images taken from
elsewhere.
Magic for Beginners (2010) contains the Andy
Warhol quote: “People sometimes say that the way
things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually
it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s
unreal.” In the notes on his 1841 doctoral thesis,
Karl Marx expressed it like this: “Real thalers exist
just as much as imaginary gods do.” I consider what
I myself can imagine to be true imagination. We
contract debts based on our imagination. That
means all gods have really existed. In other words,

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McLean doesn’t ask what is real about faith, but
what kind of reality faith creates. Human beings
are inherent in things. What we are can only be
evaluated based on the objects we surround
ourselves with. We understand ourselves through
objects, we communicate through them. And what
will remain of us once we no longer exist? McLean’s
The Invisible World (2012) says: “Unlike nature,
science and technology are not static, they are rest-
lessly on the move; and, at each further move that
they make, they produce disturbing and bewil-
dering changes in the alien environment that they
have imposed on us.”
It turns out it is increasingly irrelevant whether
the material is found or self-created. What counts is
the image’s reference. McLean never uses images in
a purely atmospheric or decorative way ∞ the image
must never be merely beautiful ∞ nor in an additive
or serial way, so that the images only make sense
because they are strung together based on simi-
larity. The poor technical quality of the material,
usually taken from the internet, is sometimes
almost repelling and gives the images a rough,
un∫nished and unbalanced look. McLean’s images
are at times alarmingly artless. She prefers to work
with crude, messy material with absolutely no
aesthetic claims in its production, like those taken
from televangelist or quiz shows. She rejects the

149
additive as well as the decorative. McLean has obvi-
ously been more socialized by television than
cinema, more heavily by shows instead of ∫lms.
This has a particular impact on how she uses the
material. McLean is interested in the relation to the
viewer, who looks and desires. She counters the
danger of a fascinating image by showing the
people who are fascinated by it. All the images have
always already been looked at; they are never “orig-
inal”, they are never seen for the ∫rst time. In a
conversation with Kent Lambert, McLean says: “I
mostly use stuff that’s widely available on purpose
because the very fact that it’s already swimming in
the public sphere is part of my interest in using it.”
The images have already been seen and used,
they are worn; they stand in relation to both those
who have made them and those who have seen
them ∞ to us. The aesthetic, technical quality that
found footage usually has when using material
from mainstream cinema is lacking. The images are
chosen based solely on their unconventional image
quality (instead of their content), regardless of their
provenance. McLean isn’t interested in discovering
analogies; she wants to reposition the images’
status and their iconographic effect. She doesn’t
care about analyzing a sequence of motifs within
more or less identical images of a similar origin
(mainly from Hollywood cinema), she is interested

150
in the new, extended impact of a pre-existing
image. McLean looks for found images that will
seem new within the context they are placed: not an
original, authentic image or an image whose origin
isn’t relevant, but an image that mirrors to us the
gaze directed at it, that reΩects its social use; a
socially impregnated image. This signi∫ed the
de∫ning break from found footage: presenting a
used image as if for the ∫rst time, letting a speci∫c,
shocking effect unfold, even though the image
itself is not usually an artifact. The uncanny effect
these images have is that they look back at us.
McLean ∫nds no similarities in her discoveries,
unlike what found footage ∫lms have done so far in
analyzing the collective unconscious of cinema. She
discovers images that tell us something about our
own fears and desires.
McLean avoids a general danger inherent in
using found cinematic images: that of either being
content with the image’s effect or reducing the
images to motifs which more or less always show
the same thing, in a series, as a visual pun, just like
in Marclay’s Telephones. Found footage has
always been vulnerable on two sides: the threat of
solidifying either into an object of fascination or a
mere motif. Imitators of Conner and Müller are
themselves imitated a thousandfold on YouTube.
The internet has turned into a huge archive

151
everyone normally has access to. This debases the
value of a process that initially seemed suitable for
eliciting “sub-stories” from narrative ∫lm, and
thereby from our childhood. Exploiting motifs
from old and now ubiquitously available ∫lms
became inΩationary, increasingly preventing
discussions on what may come after or accompany
found footage in art, on whether it is even possible
to create new images, or whether everything has
already been said, shown and thought. The fact that
the reused material had already been subject to
changing social tradition wasn’t visible; it wasn’t
even discussed. The engagement with found
footage since the advent of the internet, of digital
editing systems and of the beginning of YouTube
in 2005, in short since the “indistinguishableness
of art from the hobby video” (Vera Tollmann), was
essentially determined by the fact that although
found scenes became increasingly peculiar and the
pace of the editing increasingly masterful, with the
genre basically exploding, the debate over social
changes and advances in media technology became
extremely rare. Everything carried on cheerfully,
just more elegantly so. Differences were leveled
out, the temporally remote was effortlessly
synchronized, and subjectivity was deployed as a
stringent understanding of reality. While in the
beginning the process was still about exploring

152
analytical and historical relations to distant images
of ∫lm history’s past, today it increasingly reΩects a
meta-historical narrative and a certain type of
traditional artist who considers material based on
purely formal aspects. The benchmark for accessing
images is no longer historical or determined
according to criteria of succession and disruption,
or development and distinction, but by simulta-
neity and accessibility. The internet’s unrestricted
access simulates a simultaneity of ∫lm history. The
material’s accessibility makes you believe in a simi-
larity of images, regardless of their historicity.
Using material taken from old ∫lms has lost critical
relevance since television and, subsequently, the
internet became identi∫able as socializing forces.
And at some point it became clear that the cinema
and thereby also the ∫lms made for the cinema lost
their social relevance. At some point people stopped
not only watching old ∫lms, but watching ∫lms at
the movie theater or on television. The cinema’s
images have become a freak show.
Content-wise, McLean has only expanded the
∫eld of provenance away from feature ∫lm, instead
including television shows and amateur YouTube
videos. On a formal level, however, she goes much
further, changing the analytics of montage by
turning away from the serial juxtaposition of
motifs, from linking similar images from feature

153
∫lms. This practice doesn’t simulate a false simulta-
neity of essentially historical images, instead it
historicizes the simultaneous access to these
images. McLean looks at the fact that we are begin-
ning to see (or “read”) and use images differently on
the internet. This begs the question of how and
what we even still see. McLean makes this changed
access to reality, to images of the world, apparent:
the images are available anytime and everywhere,
and this is exactly what changes our relation to
these images. The discovery of similarity among
motifs, the serial approach toward accumulating
material, was an invention of the avant-garde,
which began working with the cinema’s debris and
reorganizing it, because they didn’t have the means
to create new images. It was a lack of images that
helped narrative cinema ∫nd a new language, a new
self-awareness. This practice revealed tremendous
insights as the images became detached from the
logic of the narrative and were newly rearranged.
However, it also regularly failed mid-way, because
it remained restricted to the production of mere
analogies, the juxtaposition or confrontation of
images which, considering the images generated by
the internet every day, now seems naïve. The status
of the single image was hardly ever challenged, as
these early artists all essentially believed in linking
images and making them collide, and quite

154
generally in the critical power of montage. This
remained true even when the internet’s algorithms
began to assemble what we see and how we see it ∞
which has disconnected us from any emotional
connection to the cinema (as a cognitive space). The
trap set by found footage was always the pure effect
of motif-based work, the false similarity, the fasci-
nation of the (already arranged) image, the admi-
rable effort of compiling these images. Filmmakers
were always in jeopardy of falling for the images’
tricks. They went along with the formally masterful
and sometimes entertaining bricolage of cinema’s
images, which they eventually perfected. They
eviscerated the cinema, even while having nothing
but its own fading splendor to counter their work
with in the long run. The avant-garde’s analytical
gesture turned into experimental fretwork that
could be critically rubber-stamped. Found footage
became cinema’s endgame, a fact rarely more
impressively or more painfully depicted than in
Oliver Pietsch’s work, for example in Maybe Not
(2005), Domin, Libra Nos (2006) and Blood (2011).
These ∫lms compose an orgiastic excess of violence,
blood, and death from the images of cinema, as if
cinema, leaving behind its images on the internet
for all eternity, wanted to show us its own mortality
in the moments of its demise as a collective spiritual
exercise.

155
 McLean demonstrates how television turns the
private public, thereby abolishing it. Her resources
are duration and repetition, sometimes until it
almost becomes painful. Rather than falling into
the trap of showing a fascinating image, she denies
the images their meaning, such as in Remote (2011),
where she consistently cuts the image before
anything is able to happen that might make sense.
The story, all the characters, every visual motif is
struck from the ∫lm, to let appear at the margins of
the images that which has always been repressed by
the narrative: the pre-lingual as horror. For
example, what McLean always extracts from televi-
sion shows are moments of waiting, the disruption
of the social narrative, those almost eerie moments
when we cannot be certain whether silence will
turn into violence, destruction, submission or
redemption. The image is brought to a point where
it no longer says or represents anything, but instead
suddenly transforms, as if preparing to take a leap.
This is not a quality inherent in the image, but in
the duration that McLean assigns it, sometimes
very obtrusively. For example when we are forced to
reverently endure a religious concert together with
the audience in The Eternal Quarter Inch
(2008). The images must be brought to a point
where they are removed from the social structure
they belong to, where social and media

156
conditioning is transformed: the collapse of the
real into the symbolic, as in the case of the earth-
quake in Somewhere Only We Know (2009). Our
imagination is interrupted as we think “now this
could happen” or “now this should happen” at the
moment when the social and media conditioning
of our emotions is suspended, and we are able to
confront our own expectations. McLean lets us
experience the blind spot of fascination, imageless
in the midst of images.
The criticism targeted at found footage occurs
simultaneously to the success of this process in the
art world. Film is stripped of the mode of percep-
tion it owes to the cinema and reduced to its
iconography, indeed to a continuous middle part or
climax. Its artistic process is therefore usually no
longer analytical, instead it is mainly additive and
decorative. In the case of Christian Marclay’s The
Clock (the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit
called it “the most popular artwork of our time”),
the discussion (encouraged by the sophisticated
media strategy of a leading gallery) centered
primarily on the massive effort needed to sort the
material, and not on the aesthetic quality of a work
that no one had seen (and probably didn’t need to
see) in its entirety. This work submits scenes found
in thousands of feature ∫lms from a different time
to daily routine and chronology. It displays the

157
actual time of day outside the ∫lm. The ∫lm itself
therefore functions like a clock: it lasts for exactly
24 hours and, in sync with the actual time, always
shows a scene featuring a clock displaying the exact
time or people referring to the exact time. Narra-
tion time and narrated time are identical. Film time
becomes real time. Apart from artistry, there is
nothing to see in this ∫lm; there is nothing new to
discover. It is nothing but the art world showcasing
how it has not only gained sovereignty of de∫nition
over the status of ∫lm as art, but also its experience
of time. It is ∫tting then that Marclay stipulated his
∫lm could only be shown in museums and must
never be secretly copied (the ∫lm exists only in the
form of a computer program). Allegedly, the ∫lm’s
six multiples have been sold to the world’s major
museums (among them the Centre Pompidou,
MoMA and the Tate Modern) for hundreds of thou-
sands of US dollars; other interested parties
(museums and collectors) came away empty-
handed. This kind of work vertically piles on the
elements of spectacle it stole from cinema ∞ for a
rushed audience that doesn’t have time for the
cinema anymore. Essentially, it cynically shows
viewers a world in which subjective experience is
replaced by objective power over reality. The
vanishing point of this structural principle lies in
the suspension of expansion through simultaneity,

158
a glamorous farewell to the cold beauty of time:
“time trans∫xed in space,” as Adorno has said about
Wagner and his tendency for rei∫cation. Such ∫lms
are usually short enough to be watched even at
large exhibitions with a full program. Or they can
be shown as loops, in which case it doesn’t matter
when they begin or end, or how long they are. Only
a middle part exists. Cinema is taken out of time
and becomes pure spectacle. But what these artists
have wrenched from cinema was once a necessary
component of a speci∫c mode of perception and a
historical reality that only the movie theater, with
the speci∫c duration and compulsion to perceive it
stipulates, could make visible. Despite their length,
you cannot call Marclay’s (or Douglas Gordon’s)
works “epic.” They neither tell a story nor show
anything. They are fundamentally panel paintings
with a duration. The process of found footage
currently risks decoratively cannibalizing cinema
and nicely preparing it for the art world without
producing new images ∞ thereby becoming the
symptom of a crisis in which all that remains of
cinema are the used images of others, old images.
The art world’s “discovery” of ∫lmmakers led
not only to an increase in the commercial value of
their work, but also to a change in the methods of
artists who work with ∫lm. The art world’s prereq-
uisites became part of both the presentation of the

159
works, which suddenly had to be shown in a loop,
and of their inherent aesthetic design; form became
customized, so to speak. The loop is a technique
that guarantees the audience continuous, effortless
access to the artwork as they, often both cluelessly
and aimlessly, enter a room inside an exhibition
that is crammed with countless artworks at any
given time, without even the patience to watch a
“whole” piece from beginning to end. The exhibi-
tion ∞ not the artwork ∞ is the event. The loop
addresses the implicit viewer of the art exhibition,
whose institutional logic becomes the artwork’s
structural principle. In principle, it’s the gaze of the
collector, the one wanting to possess the work, the
bourgeois artwork.
Films are still looped even when it hardly makes
sense for aesthetic reasons; the loop’s impact seems
almost inevitable, as it affects the work deep into its
microtexture. These works make duration, or the
fact that something can make a claim on time
through aesthetics, or can genuinely represent
time, disappear. This is the basis for the success of
∫lms by Mark Lewis, Shirin Neshat, Fiona Tan and
many others who work with strategies of decelera-
tion and reduction (and through overwhelming
aesthetics). Music often becomes the only sound
design; an off-screen voice narrates a story that
doesn’t develop, but is instead synchronized with

160
the image, which it often comments on. While it
was once the artistic strategy of avant-garde ∫lm
(Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais
and others) to point our gaze to the invisible and
time itself, the off-screen voice in the art world is
progressively becoming a means to return our gaze
to the surface of the image, thereby also bringing
the cognitive process back to critical awareness. The
off-screen voice therefore increasingly serves to
guide the audience through exhibitions with
numerous individual pieces and looped artworks
that have neither beginning nor end. Everything
must be instantly comprehensible. The off-screen
voice becomes a built-in audio guide. Everything is
geared toward verticality, instant grati∫cation.
The loop incorporates the viewer, who is guided
by the art industry, into an aesthetic process. The
work turns into a visual substance in which the
social conventions of the art world are expressed as
a default setting of our gaze and our access to
moving images. A work must be understandable ad
hoc. A ∫lm’s duration is an inconvenience. As
Malcolm Le Grice and Volker Pantenburg have
demonstrated, in the art world, works that are
quickly comprehensible and whose “economy of
attention” ∫ts best with its institutional logic are
the ones that prevail. A whole series of artists have
quickly learned how to create their work according

161
to the requirements of the art world. Some of the
resulting work is good, some less so. But those that
have neither beginning nor end, that only recog-
nize the middle part of an implicit gaze, structur-
ally only make sense within the conventions of
museums or exhibitions addressing the incidental
gaze. Against this logic, the viewing time of an
artwork seldom watched from beginning to end,
no matter if its length is 24 hours or 24 minutes,
becomes irrelevant. This changes its dramaturgy,
which is now directed by the motifs of the art world,
by the viewer’s “blink of an eye,” instead of by time
compelling you to perceive. This is the reason why
many ∫lms are suddenly emerging that are always
too long and aren’t meant to be seen in their
entirety. They continue playing, but never elapse.
The loop has made the length of an artwork mean-
ingless. It could essentially run on forever. In many
countries that have been cut off from their own ∫lm
history by political circumstances, ∫lms are being
created in artistic environments by people who
haven’t been socialized through cinema, by a
post-cinematic generation working with different
artistic processes whose ∫lms aren’t intended for
release in cinemas (and for that matter aren’t suited
for it). Many works produced for and within the art
world can hardly be shown in movie theaters
anymore because they lack dramaturgy. Whereas

162
cinema compels the gaze to objectively perceive the
∫lm’s duration, in the art world ∫lm is rei∫ed into
an object of the subjective gaze that relishes images.
This is the opposite of cinema.
Many gallery owners, curators and collectors
aren’t used to watching a ∫lm program at the
cinema that consists of a series of different works
and develops its complexity through exactly this
diversity. A ∫lm’s artistic dimension stems from the
objective duration of the work; within its sequences,
not in the subjective duration the viewer grants it.
There is tremendous interest in commercialization.
They run through exhibitions and subsequently
can, or must, offer a serious judgment. The art
world ∫nds duration to be the suspicious aspect of
∫lm, and the art market deems duration to be
dif∫cult to exploit. Everything therefore aims
toward taking duration away from ∫lm ∞ or more
speci∫cally: that which only duration can generate
∞ by making duration sculptural within an installa-
tion or a loop, and thereby also exploitable for the
art world. A ∫lm that demands being presented
under speci∫c conditions only, such as controlled
admission, a completely darkened room with tiered
seats or a 35mm projector, is a problem for this
system, because all that extra effort hardly makes it
pro∫table. Which collector would be interested in
this; which museum could ful∫ll the logistic,

163
architectural, personnel and technical require-
ments, and be able to ∫nance them?
Brian O’Doherty has demonstrated that what
artists like Duane Hanson bring into museums is
not essentially illusionist sculpture, but critical
collage, “something taken indoors and rati∫ed by
the gallery.” They make perceptible a symbolic
system that regulates what is inside and what is
peripheral. For the ∫lms it has adopted, the art
market has developed conventions and consider-
able restrictions that are now discernible within
the formal principles of ∫lms aimed at the art
market. At this moment, the cinema is returning in
the “specialized” form of the sculpture and
attaining a “fetish-like signi∫cance” (Dietmar
Schwärzler). Works by Rosa Barba, Rebecca Baron &
Dorit Margreiter and Janet Cardiff & George Bures
Miller elaborately recreate the cinema as a physical
space or object, as a walk-in, sensory, even noisy and
haptic event ∞ the same cinema that was once an
established mode of perception that referred to a
reality beyond the ∫lm. Exhibiting the projector,
the ∫lm reel or the movie theater against the back-
drop of a predominantly af∫rmative attitude
toward the art world and an inadequate under-
standing of cinema often results in an “anti-illu-
sionist” illusion. Art showcases cinema as a trophy.
Tacita Dean projected her 11-minute Film (2011)

164
onto a 13-meter tall monolith outside the Tate
Modern, as if it were a ritual object that, probably
not quite coincidentally, bore a certain resemblance
to Stanley Kubrick’s own prehistoric monolith in
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Even the title Film
suggests we are in ∫nal negotiations. The object is
the spectacle, not the ∫lm. The ∫lm is only showing
itself as an object, not as a medium. The ∫lm’s
object-like status is intensi∫ed because it is silent
and because its perforations ∞ the nails on which
the ∫lmic image is mounted ∞ are also projected.
Film appears under the sign of its disappearance as
a mode of perception of a different reality.
Meanwhile, the art world is considering ∫lms as
objects for exhibition that were made at the time as
critical commentaries on the conventions of
cinema, the commodity aspect of artworks and
institutional formatting ∞ e.g. works by Jack Gold-
stein, Anthony McCall, Lis Rhodes, Andy Warhol
and many more. Alexander Horwath has criticized
this development on the basis of the art world’s
rediscovery of so-called Expanded Cinema, which
turns the critical erosion of cinema into an exten-
sion of the museum (and the art market), imposing
its own conventions and logic of exploitation onto
∫lm. Expanded Cinema, just like any kind of
performative artistic practice temporarily geared
toward the unpredictable always aims at

165
challenging both center and periphery, the artistic
and the non-artistic, everyday life and artistic space.
This process sometimes transcends symbolic, social
and institutional boundaries. It is artistically
speaking always in danger of either diffusing into
daily routine, thereby becoming not only invisible
on a social level, but above all also ineffective, or of
simply falling into the trap of the art market again.
Expanded Cinema was the artistic observation of
cinema; performance was the artistic observation of
the museum. In the form of the installation,
however, the museum today is re-enclosing the
boundaries of the cinema that Expanded Cinema
once dissolved. The observation and critique of the
movie theater turn into the af∫rmation and expan-
sion of the museum. The performative, the live
event and the “eventization” of artworks are now
exceedingly popular at exhibitions and museums.
On the one hand, collecting and providing
continued access to artworks with a precarious and
ephemeral status that can hardly be archived, that
are dif∫cult to perform, and even more dif∫cult to
document (hence performative art in the broadest
sense) is certainly legitimate and clearly reasonable
from a curatorial standpoint. On the other, we must
be allowed to ask whether and how the gestural
meaning of such interventions is altered through
this process ∞ given that they have usually only

166
consisted in the form of a few vague instructions or
relied on the audience’s participation, and have
articulated themselves within their contemporary
setting or presented in their self-conception a
consciously anti-institutional and anti-economic
message. Success proves the institution to be right,
however: the ∫rst evening of Anne Imhof’s perfor-
mance “Angst” (“Fear”) at the Nationalgalerie
Berlin in the fall of 2016 attracted 2,000 visitors. A
critic from the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung limited his impressions to “a fashionable
look and the right keywords.”
Without doubt there are numerous ∫lm works
that are ∞ even though rare enough ∞ better placed
in a white cube than in the cinema, for example
when the sound of the projector is part of the work
(such as ∫lms by T.J. Wilcox), when the projector
must be seen, or when the work needs to be
projected onto multiple screens. But it was
extremely irritating when, for example, Stan
VanDerBeek’s Movie Mural (1968) was transferred
from ∫lm to video and turned into not much more
than moving wallpaper as an installation at the
2013 Venice Biennale. Avant-garde ∫lms didn’t
question cinema simply to newly legitimize the
museum and supply the art market with new
works. Presenting hours-long documentaries by
Chantal Akerman and Ulrike Ottinger at an art

167
exhibition, as was done during documenta 11 for an
audience of 5,000 people, demonstrates the problem
quite plainly: while it may be true that art exhibi-
tions sometimes show better and more ∫lms (also
reaching a wider audience) than cinemas can these
days, at best all the viewer does is gain an impres-
sion from short excerpts. The exhibition’s maze
design doesn’t allow for any other mode of percep-
tion. A large-scale exhibition must insist on quickly
channeling as many people as possible through as
many exhibits as possible, and numbers are impor-
tant parameters for recording its success. Walter
Grasskamp has rightly criticized Boris Groys’ asser-
tion that this kind of presentation shouldn’t be
misunderstood as curatorial incompetence, that it
is calculated artistic intention. Gottfried Knapp’s
description of this problem in an article published
in the Süddeutsche Zeitung with regard to a work by
Amar Kanwar is exemplary: “The result is that only
a few of the already exhausted visitors wandering
in will even sit down to watch a few minutes of one
of the 19 simultaneously screened and thematically
coordinated ∫lms. Most people are content to read
the note in the catalogue describing Amar Kanwar’s
set of ∫lms as dealing with Myanmar’s history of
military dictatorship, including general observa-
tions about literature and politics through the
example of a bookseller from Myanmar who spent

168
three years in prison because he tore out political
advertising pages from the books he was selling.”
Knapp came to the conclusion that ∫lms don’t
belong in art exhibitions. This is a justi∫able claim,
in particular with regard to James Benning’s ∫lms,
which are usually exhaustingly long with expan-
sive dramaturgy that a hurried visitor would neces-
sarily miss; the only thing this kind of person
would see and understand is that nothing is
happening, there is only beautiful emptiness. The
art world’s declaration that it contributes to more
focused reception and more thorough under-
standing of art cannot entirely be accepted for ∫lm.
Whether you can do justice to a work you have only
seen in parts may reasonably be doubted.
Conversely, you also don’t need to dogmatically
adhere to the principle of sitting through every
work in its entirety. Steve McQueen’s rule that his
black box may not be entered at random already
provides a possible answer to one of the worst
developments of the art scene: that people come
and go at will, causing considerable disturbance.
There are rumors that it wasn’t due to artistic
considerations that documenta 11 included all
∫lmic works in the white cube, but because the
∫lmmakers feared they wouldn’t be taken as seri-
ously as the other artists featured in the exhibition
if they were shown at the cinema located next door.
They were certainly right about that.
169
 The black box is in the offside zone, it is the panic
room. However, even the audience of an ambitious
∫lm program such as “Art Film” at Art Basel hardly
consists of gallery owners, curators and collectors.
While everyone who can and wants to seriously buy
and sell art may gather in an illustrious circle at
industry dinners, the ∫lm programs themselves
tend to address a local audience. No one who makes
money with art has time for the cinema. And the
“positions” are already clear anyway. This is why
cinema holds so little appeal for the art world. The
decision made by the curators of documenta 12 ∞
Roger M. Buergel, Ruth Noack and Alexander
Horwath ∞ to show ∫lms not in the entirely unsuit-
able white cube, but instead to include a screening
theater as an integral part of the event, was prob-
ably the only possible solution within the context
of such a large-scale exhibition. So that cinema
could be defended and historicized as the genuine
space for ∫lms and the mode of perception they
require ∞ no matter what the art world thought of
their resolution at the time. Concurrently, with his
program “Kinomuseum” at Internationale Kurz­
∫lmtage Oberhausen in 2007, Ian White made an
exemplary attempt to return art to the cinema, to
turn the movie theater into an exhibition in itself,
to build a temporary museum ∞ a museum with a
(limited) duration that also consists of ∫lm’s mode

170
of perception and cinema’s form of potentiality, i.e.
time: “Kinomuseum is a project that occurs at the
intersection of [...] the museum’s seemingly unlim-
ited ability to reproduce itself and the threat that
reproduction poses to the art museum’s primary
function as the keeper of unique objects. Ultimately,
Kinomuseum is a proposal for considering a
particular kind of cinema as a unique kind of
museum: one where ‘originality, authenticity and
presence’ are not undermined by reproduction, but
where reproduction either turns these qualities
into a new set of questions for the museum, almost
physically disrupting it, or, perversely, where ∫lm
and video as potentially in∫nitely reproducible
objects make these same terms manifest in moving
images considered as works of art.”

171
The Music Video
Adapts Cinema

To the extent that avant-garde ∫lm and media art

have been soaked up by the art world (which now
de∫nes the status of “artist’s ∫lm”), narrative
cinema has also been able to adopt its innovations
and practices with less inhibition and risk. Today,
narrative forms sometimes seem “more experi-
mental” than they used to. It was primarily the
music video that borrowed numerous tools from
avant-garde ∫lm, considerably contributing to
different, new stories at the cinema and, at the same
time, a mode of perception beyond the cinema.
Since then it has become normal to watch visual
strategies taking place in movie theaters, music
videos or commercials that would hardly be concei-
vable without the innovations made by “experi-
mental” ∫lmmakers such as Peter Kubelka,
Zbigniew Rybczyński, Jan Švankmajer, and many
others. This is similar to the fact that in the art
scene, it has been mostly the ∫lms that comply with

173
its institutional logic and “attention economy” that
have succeeded (because they are short enough and
can be grasped at one glance). The music video has
also historically addressed a different viewer from
that of the cinema, whose gaze was lost in time. Since
roughly the mid-1990s, the ∫lm industry has
released soundtracks featuring retro pop music
that are much more intense, which has enabled the
exploitation of secondary ∫lm markets on CD and
DVD. While these markets already existed, they
never did so in conjunction with music that was
fundamental to the ∫lm, that alone gave the ∫lm its
cohesion, and never with a soundtrack that mostly
used preexisting music from catalogues of the
1960s and 70s.
Pop culture’s new presence at the cinema opened
up unexpected platforms for music in ∫lm and for
its capitalization beyond it. Many major ∫lm distri-
butors and record companies are managed by the
same corporations today, which means that the
rights for both music and ∫lms are gathered under
one roof, facilitating this development even further.
Narrative cinema was discovered as a means to
promote the multiple capitalization of music. The
new signi∫cance of the soundtrack, however, wasn’t
due to especially clever marketing. Movie theater
audiences nowadays seem to accept reasonably
“experimental” narrative structures (or at least

174
those considered, or reminiscent of, experimental
structures) much more easily than they used to. The
reason being that the music we already know (or
even own) and are encouraged to buy (again) is
meant to bring everything together, even if the
story is going nowhere and would surely fall apart
without the soundtrack. An audience socialized by
pop culture has learned, thanks to the music video
and its superordinate coherence, to understand
rather complex, disorderly and sometimes illogical
sequences and image compositions. The use of
music has introduced a new, disciplinary order of
the gaze, both in narrative cinema and in the art
world (there mostly in the form of sound design).
This is an order of the gaze that addresses a hurried,
unfocused viewer, a consumer who only considers
images incidentally, who doesn’t have time and isn’t
given any time, neither at home nor in public
spaces, stores nor exhibitions. Experimental forms
suddenly become a natural component of narrative
strategies, but only as long as they remain purely
ornamental.
Without a doubt, narrative cinema today is
much less linear and much less formalized than it
was just a few years ago. The (new) audience has
been conditioned by commercials, music videos
and interactive video games to adopt a vertical gaze
that can “grasp” many things at once. David Fincher

175
was one of the ∫rst directors to adapt techniques of
assemblage for mainstream cinema for the opening
credits of Se7en (1995). Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Magnolia (1999), with its elliptical structure and
relatively minimal dialogue, essentially only
becomes halfway plausible through its soundtrack
and the music speci∫cally composed for the ∫lm. In
this case, the music makes the picture. New narra-
tive styles emerge that we tend to call “experi-
mental” a little prematurely, only because nothing
in these ∫lms would work without the music. In
Germany, the production company X-File Creative
Pool implemented this strategy for Tom Tykwer’s
∫lms, for example. And movies such as So∫a
Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lars von
Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), Wes Anderson’s
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and Cameron
Crowe’s Almost Famous (2005) also offered new
perspectives in capitalization for their soundtracks.
It was at this point that music video directors,
whom up until then no one would have trusted to
produce more than ∫ve minutes of a comprehen-
sible story, suddenly became interesting for the
making of narrative cinema. Almost everyone who
had signi∫cantly set the tone internationally for
the aesthetics of the music video since the mid-
1990s, and who helped promote the genre to a new
artistic level, began making (or at least planned to

176
make) feature ∫lms at roughly the same time.
Directors such as Jonas Åkerlund, Roman Coppola,
Anton Corbijn, Chris Cunningham, Jonathan
Glazer, Michel Gondry, Garth Jennings, Spike
Jonze, Mike Mills, Hype Williams and, in the case of
Germany, Philipp Stölzl; some of these ∫lmmakers
made the most exceptional features of their time.
You might almost be tempted to say it was the
music video and popular culture that saved main-
stream culture from absolute stagnation for some
time. Experimental processes entered the main-
stream as a homeopathic therapy. While many
contemporary avant-garde ∫lms hardly look diffe-
rent than they did 40 years ago, some of the latest
narrative features make an avant-garde ∫lm look
like a music video.
But by no means does contemporary cinema
look like the most recent mainstream music televi-
sion. Traditional German ∫lm critics who use the
term “Clip-Ästhetik”, i.e. music video aesthetics,
think they have understood something about the
“acceleration” of images in a negative sense. But
many music videos do not share this aesthetic so
narrowly. Daft Punk’s video for Fresh (1999)
consists of one long take along a beach. And nothing
really happens in Jonathan Glazer’s video for A
Song for the Lovers (2000), in which Richard
Ashcroft sits in an almost entirely dark room. The

177
music retreats into the background and you wait,
confused, for something inde∫nite to ∫nally begin.
Some of the most extraordinary music videos
became the accompanying music for a ∫lm scene.
Strategies from the golden years of narrative
cinema are also imitated and referenced: the exces-
sive gaze, the idea of having the large screening
space instead of the small screen at your disposal.
Chris Cunningham, making music videos for
Aphex Twin in Come to Daddy (1997) and
Windowlicker (1999), as well as Jonas Åkerlund
for Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up (1997), further
developed well-known fright effects of the horror
genre. Spike Jonze re∫ned the documentary forms
of Direct Cinema for Fatboy Slim’s Praise You
(1998) and techniques of Chinese martial arts ∫lms
for Weapon of Choice (2000). “Music video
aesthetics” were copied from experimental cine-
matic practices, not the other way around.
The acceleration and decomposition of images
was invented by the avant-garde, not by the music
video industry. Exceptional music videos often
consciously follow the tradition of the avant-garde.
It is certainly no coincidence that some of the most
important early music videos were made by avant-
garde ∫lmmakers, for example Jem Cohen, Bruce
Conner, Robert Frank, James Herbert, Derek
Jarman, John Maybury, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Jan

178
Švankmayer, and Cordelia Swann. Initially,
everyone was consciously inspired by avant-garde
∫lms, also due to the lack of other aesthetic models.
Think, for instance, of Bob Dylan’s and D.A.
Pennebaker’s genre-de∫ning proto music video
Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965), in which
Dylan displays the song’s lyrics written on card-
board. The awareness of another ∫lm, of ∫lm that
doesn’t want to tell a story and only uses the image
itself as a subject, is preserved within the many
genres and forms of the music video. The music
video has made it possible for us to see ∫lm diffe-
rently today ∞ less critically, but also more eclecti-
cally; less immersed, but in a more complex fashion.
You pay more attention to the effects than to the
story; you watch ∫lms vertically. The development
of the music video has had considerable inΩuence
on the ∫lms and art made since the 1980s, since the
foundation of MTV. This is well documented. In
trying to be contemporary, the music video has
doubtlessly interpreted and adapted the visual
strategies of narrative and avant-garde ∫lm, at the
same time inventing a new way of watching these
strategies. This is not only due to television’s format
∞ the screen that was always too small and never
really watched closely ∞ but primarily because the
music video as a cinematic form per se isn’t narra-
tive. It is essentially about illustrating or, via image

179
transfer, embellishing the already ∫nished piece of
music; the video’s only coherence comes from the
music. Today we see and understand ∫lm diffe-
rently because of the images we have learned to
observe in music videos.
As a result of the music industry’s crisis since the
turn of the century, which was basically caused by
the internet, music videos became less innovative
and especially less expensive. The demise of oppor-
tunities to distribute music videos on television,
which usually broadcast a song according to its
sales ∫gures, became immediately noticeable. Inno-
vative music videos hardly ever made it on televi-
sion. The better ones were frequently made in the
context of ∫lm or art schools, or by artists. Many
people thought this was too highbrow, so they
declared the music video dead. By the time YouTube
arrived, the growing disparity between music video
and music television became conspicuous. The time
of great artistic achievement in music television,
which had been made possible by a thriving music
industry that could advance the necessary produc-
tion resources, was over. Maybe it really isn’t worth
wasting words on music videos anymore, now that
we’ve begun to canonize and musealize its authors.
Musicians and bands such as Björk and Under-
world, and ∫lmmakers like Cunningham, Gondry,
and Jonze have long been successfully releasing

180
their videos on DVD, thereby gaining public atten-
tion much more effectively than nighttime rotation
on music television, where high quality videos were
once an insider tip for the very patient, ever did.
As soon as music television’s formal require-
ments disappeared, new options were set free. But
most of all, videos had to be produced more cheaply
than before, so music video makers began adapting
the ∫lmic processes of the avant-garde and the
underground, in particular assemblage, found
footage and stop tricks. When Leos Carax was
invited to shoot New Order’s video for Crystal
(2001), he simply sent a pixelated, blurred clip he
already had on his computer of a cat and a dog
fooling around. Jem Cohen’s ten-minute music
video Maxine (2001) for Sparklehorse, shot on
Super 8, is a free association on the band’s singer
Mark Linkous’ studio and its surrounding lands-
cape, as if the song were an expression of the
musician’s habitat. Ever since music television’s
formatting (institutional logic that had turned into
aesthetic principle) was dropped, videos have
become longer and freer in their form, occasionally
more political, and sometimes highly complex
artifacts and analyses of the present. Think of
works by Tony Cokes, Coldcut, Die Goldenen
Zitronen, Arnaud Fleurent-Didier, Jens Pecho, and
Mario Pfeifer. Music videos were also created

181
without shooting any scenes, instead they were
done on a computer at home, as were videos without
visible performers, in which the music wasn’t para-
mount but instead hardly audible, or even inter-
rupted. In Michael Robinson’s video of the
Thompson Twins’ Hold Me Now (2008), a classic
American TV series becomes the cue for a karaoke
session and the audience is invited to sing along.
The issue of the future of the music video
remains, now that the medium for which it was
once intended ∞ music television ∞ has declined. On
the one hand, interesting videos with large budgets
disappeared almost entirely. Musicians with high
sales ∫gures and high visual standards began
producing their works using relatively simple
means. While this led to the impoverishment of
production resources, music videos were created
with seemingly no ambition to be shown on music
television or to follow old production standards or
regulations. On the contrary, these videos were
conceived within an independent artistic ∫eld, and
its makers accepted the fact that these works could
only gain visibility on the internet, in long tail
distribution, so to speak. Filmmakers or musicians
who previously worked with enormous budgets
were now able to present astonishing results and
offer expressions of a genuine audiovisual world
using low-tech artistic processes.

182
 On top of the music video’s image value, the act
of visualizing music received unprecedented crea-
tive leeway with the fading of performers and
analog instruments in the heyday of electronic
music in the 1990s. Why even show people only
playing with buttons instead of guitars, whose
beats don’t encourage anyone to dance? A new kind
of attraction between music and digital visualiza-
tion emerged. The most innovative videos often
don’t show people making music at all, or they
stage them within a ∫ctitious space, for example in
Svenja Rossa’s Der Mond (1999) for Rocko Scha-
moni and in Walter Stern’s Thursday’s Child
(1999) for David Bowie. Process in avant-garde ∫lm
relates to contexts of contemporary pop culture, for
instance assemblage and found footage techniques
in Weil wir einverstanden sind (1998), a video by
Smoczek Policzek for German punk band Die
Goldenen Zitronen. Michel Klöfkorn and Oliver
Husain used stop tricks in Sensorama’s Star Esca-
lator (1999) video, in which the garage doors of
bourgeois neighborhoods beat the rhythm of an
unheard world. At that time, much in music was
still being invented, and music videos were still
shown on television. The new reality of production
is frequently reΩected in the works themselves: the
search for images and keywords on Google depicted
in Good Morning Stranger (2007) by Monta and

183
in Robin Williams (2007), the video made by Vania
Heymann for Cee Lo Green; in Ben Jones’ Dot Net
(2015) for American experimental rock band
Battles; and in Metahaven’s Interference (2015)
for composer Holly Herndon, in which the digital
terrain made up of user interfaces, desktop aesthe-
tics and games provides everything for the artistic
process. In Daniel Swan’s Algorithm (2016) for
Emmy The Great, the text that runs across the
screen was created by a music video machine
obeying an algorithm that processes natural speech.
In Jon Rafman’s works Still Life (2013) and Sticky
Drama (2015) for music by Oneohtrix Point Never,
the internet becomes a world with no exit, a digital
drama of networking that can’t be escaped, a realm
in which subjectivity inexorably and solipsistically
heads towards its own demise. The self is drained
and run down in its attempt to reach self-awareness
through others, a self that is constantly networked,
but never objectively or socially connected. “What
concerns me is the general sense of entrapment and
isolation felt by many as social and political life
becomes increasingly abstracted and experience
dematerialized,” Rafman says.
Rubber Johnny (2005), the latest collaboration
between Cunningham and Aphex Twin, created an
epitaph for a past epoch and, simultaneously,

184
announced the new self-image of music video
artists. The ∫lmmakers who had, up until the
advent of YouTube, conceived the most relevant
visual interpretations of the music of famous artists
were suddenly few and far between, because some
turned to making feature ∫lms, and others like
Cunningham temporarily found their way to the
art world. On the other hand, creative personalities
who were able to move effortlessly between various
artistic areas emerged. Musicians began to direct
their own videos and visual artists made music, not
simply because there was a lack of money, but
because music’s visuality became the object of arti-
stic investigation and identity. For example: the
artist duo Luigi Archetti and Bo Wiget created a
series of performative works that have repositioned
the music video as an artistic form of expression;
Detlef Weinrich produced a set of found footage
∫lms for each piece of music on the album Eve Future
(2002) by Kreidler; and Terre Thaemlitz overcame
old dogmas with the one-hour music video for
Lovebomb (2003).
Miranda July’s and Mike Mill’s performance
music video Top Ranking (2007) is another
example of the range of artistic intervention that
shows off a new posed setting in each shot. Another
legendary example is OK Go’s own video for Here
It Goes Again (2006), which made them instantly

185
famous online. In some cases, for example in four-
tythousand3hundred20memories (2005) by
Sue Costabile and AGF, whether the images illu-
strate the music or vice versa is not distinguishable;
rather, these are autonomous artistic works of
continuous music somewhere beyond the music
video. This holds especially true for the unique
works of artist Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), who is
equally appreciated and successful both in the art
and music industries. In 2009, the Kurz∫lmtage
Oberhausen Jury, consisting of Elke Buhr, Diedrich
Diederichsen and Herbert Fritsch, in selecting the
“best German music video” began their jury state-
ment by recognizing the crisis: “The jury observes
that in Germany at least, the genre of the pop music
video we used to know has apparently become
extinct. Instead, we are dealing with a new form,
nurtured less in culture-industrial sweatshops
than at art schools, and this cannot always be
concealed. In the context of the traditional music
video, the question of status and aspiration was
answered by the work’s integration into the broad
genre of pop music. In this new situation, however,
the jury must ask itself what kind of artistic objects
it is dealing with. It is conspicuous, for example,
that producers trained as visual artists frequently
create objects with an artistic ambition of their
own. In other cases, such as the winning video, the

186
image design was adopted as an overall artistic
extension by the musicians themselves. The jury
therefore had to align its criteria in a quasi-experi-
mental manner.”
The twenty-four hour music video Happy (2014)
by the ∫lmmaker’s collective We Are From L.A. for a
loop of Pharrell Williams’ earworm, set new stan-
dards. Hidden cuts give the impression of an almost
in∫nitely long take; at the same time, you can jump
to any given time of day on the video’s online time-
line. Happy is one of the ∫rst music videos that only
makes sense on the internet, it is essentially interac-
tive. From an artistic standpoint, however, the
whole venture was a little underwhelming, as
nothing spectacular happens, neither musically
nor visually. Many newer videos are interactive
now, targeting audiences in front of their screens
(computers instead of televisions) ∞ viewers who
don’t want to just watch, but instead want to parti-
cipate and connect. Happy is basically a continuous
loop that looks and sounds more or less the same at
any position. It never ends, but it also never begins:
it’s time that never passes; the realization of a social
stand-still with the sedating effect of happiness. In
the meantime, interactive aesthetics have reached
into music itself through the internet. Brian Eno,
for instance, offered an app for his ambient album
ReΩection (2017) that basically allows for musical

187
variation ad in∫nitum. Ambient music has always
aimed at establishing new relationships between
everyday life and music, it has always moved along
the borders of life and art. The material is taken
from daily life and music is given back in order to
make everyday life more tolerable; sometimes this
has tended to be soothing, sometimes it has been
more aggressive. In an extension of the escapes of
the early 1970s, ambient music drafted a scenario
for a successful, if only temporary, balance between
the individual’s libidinal desires and the claims
society directs at them. In ambient music, these are
transformed into a permanent state of blissful
consent.
Art “after” the internet is characterized less by
mapping virtual reality as a “second” reality of
contemporary society, instead it sheds light on the
way we subjectively perceive and use this reality
online as a binding feature of how we deal with the
real world. The ∫lmic image’s frame equaled the
“right setting” for the world, it always referred to a
relation to the invisible, therefore offering the
Ωashing of a different, inaccessible reality that only
the technical reality of ∫lm could ever produce.
This frame is now being replaced by an image that
can never be framed, which already mirrors a
subjective reality. The visual world of tourism that
Serge Daney criticized constantly creates

188
immersive, “spatialized,” interactive imaging tech-
niques that pretend to anticipate experiences and
“real” visits to places. The journey only objectively
reenacts the image of a reality that we have already
subjectively established, and therefore we move
within a socially dictated framework at any given
moment. This world’s promise of freedom consists
in unlimited individual access to reality. The varia-
tions of virtual reality, however, not only replace
reality, they also identify the restrictions of the
short-circuited self’s subjective reality, as shown in
Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.
Lawrence Grossberg says that technology is
replacing pop culture, meaning that communica-
tion is replaced by reference. Put bluntly, techno-
logy, the in∫nite deterritoriali­zation of the senses,
abolishes the artistic work in the classical sense, a
work with a beginning and an end. It overturns
front and rear, the completed or even the physical
work and thereby its viewer, a viewer who could
look at these works “in their entirety.” “Post-
Internet Art,” which refers to a hybrid ∫eld of
completely different strategies, is beginning to
conceive of a new viewer for moving images, just as
mainstream cinema is beginning to create ∫lms ∞
which are being reduced to retelling the story told
in the trailer ∞ according to their trailers’ aesthetics.
While Thaemlitz produced a highly arti∫cial

189
artistic concept with Lovebomb, the kind of pop
cultural hypertext that usually drives whole masses
of overwhelmed people out of the cinema, there is
no reason to even watch Happy in a cinema, because
this music video doesn’t actually want to be seen, it
just wants to be “used” and “connected.” Its viewing
time is basically irrelevant for its status as a “work,”
similar to the artworks by Gordon and Marclay you
pass by in exhibitions. These artworks aesthetically
mirror the mode of their social use. The affective
relation to the work no longer consists in contem-
plation and surrender, but in manipulation and
connection, in subjectivity gone wild. The triumph
of the self over the artwork achieved through tech-
nology is simultaneously also a showdown of
cognition, of the notion that the only possible
access to reality exists in absolutely solid, factual
subjectivity rather than in a checkmated self, so to
speak, that is objectively forced to pursue
cognition.
Having sprung from music television, the music
video has emancipated itself from its origin and
will continue to exist in the future as an artistic
process, most likely on the internet. It keeps rein-
venting itself beyond music television, and both art
exhibitions and ∫lm festivals have contributed to
this development. The music industry’s crisis was
not least caused by the insuf∫cient regeneration of

190
innovative forms and ignorance toward a minority
of audiences interested in more experimental
music and videos. It is astonishing that with the
music video, the music television industry created a
new, autonomous genre of ∫lm (apart from well-
known precursors of short musical ∫lms), but failed
to claim this independent artistic form for itself or
use it to bolster its own credibility. Music television
began to lose its unique position and its sovereignty
of de∫nition over music videos with the emergence
of YouTube and other platforms, with the attention
of ∫lm festivals such as Rotterdam and Oberhausen,
and with the discovery and prominent exhibition
of artists such as Doug Aitken, Chris Cunningham,
and Jonathan Horowitz within the art world
(Cunningham, for instance, through Harald Szee-
mann at the 2001 Venice Biennale). New platforms
and audiences also accelerated the de-formatting of
music videos, enabling a new artistic self-con∫dence
in understanding the music video as an art form
independent of the realm of music television.
The art within the music video migrated to ∫lm
festivals and into the art world, the rest of it went to
the internet. Music television itself retained the
mainstream. Even in the mid-1990s, it would have
been unimaginable to encounter music videos at
∫lm festivals or art exhibitions. This new develop-
ment was an expression of the crisis of legitimacy

191
that ∫lm festivals and the art world were going
through, as they tried to reclaim audiences and
attract a new, younger, intellectual public socialized
by pop culture. On the other hand, the music video
only really became apparent as an artistic process at
the beginning of the music industry’s crisis, during
the transition from music television to regular
broadcast television and the internet’s long-term
archive, in the moment of its industrial demise at
the approach of dusk, so to speak. Jens Balzer
described the music video as a type of revenant of
the cinema: “Becoming, passing and eternal
recurrence: these are leitmotifs in contemporary
music video culture. It doesn’t mirror the current
condition of pop music as a review of retro fashion,
but rather the historical condition of the music
video itself: it’s the condition of reincarnation. The
music video has died and risen again; it has experi-
enced the death of music television and was reborn
on the internet. It is now beginning to understand
what it means to live a second life: you must over-
come your own death; remember, repeat, work
through it.” This is clear in Oursler’s Where Are
We Now? (2013) for David Bowie, which is
thought-provoking not only with regard to the
changes in pop culture, but also regarding Bowie
himself, who died three years later. Unlike in the
videos made (and still being produced) for Björk

192
that have increasingly created aesthetics for the
performer that are somewhat corporate, pop
culture in Oursler’s video reΩects its own historical
condition and analyzes the present. Olaf Karnik
says: “In such a way, pop music once used to func-
tion as a classi∫cation system, one that distin-
guished between what’s right and what’s wrong
(music, attitude, style, etc.) in a way that formed an
identity.” Oliver Pietsch’s work illustrates this in an
unsettling manner. Pietsch, who probably doesn’t
even consider his works to be music videos, helps
himself to elements of both cinema and music to
compose his “nocturnes of internet society,” which
celebrate death as a fantastic spectacle of an obscene
world that cannot die, in which everything will
always and forever be present.
This development marked the onset of the
common, maybe even inevitable forms of canoniza-
tion and standardization of the art world and of
∫lm festivals: illustrated perhaps for the ∫rst time
in 1997 by the exhibition “PopVideo” at Kölnischer
Kunstverein, but certainly at the latest by the much
more elaborate exhibition “Video ∞ 25 Jahre Video-
ästhetik” at the NRW-Forum for Culture and
Economy in Düsseldorf (2014) and subsequently by
“The Art of Pop Video” at the Museum für ange-
wandte Kunst Köln (2011). Masses of videos on
monitors were cramped into rooms that were

193
sometimes much too small and too bright; the
videos were arranged relatively conservatively
according to motifs ∞ they were hung thematically,
so to speak. In 2015, the megalomaniacal grand
narrative “Björk” at MoMA in New York followed
(“something like a cross between a fashion show
and a theme-park ride,” Ben Davies wrote on artnet.
com). Less worrying than the canonization of names
and works, which was certainly right and impor-
tant at a certain point in time, even though such
measures establish a rather traditional artistic body
of works, was the fact that these works’ artistic
processes and their respective individual aesthetic
quality, through the form of their presentation,
were not at all or only in a very limited sense visible
anymore. The order of the gaze that was enforced
on music videos within the spaces of the art world
was therefore not as problematic as their museali-
zation. Works were often densely stacked screen-to-
screen, image-to-image, so that the next video was
always already in view. With this type of exhibition,
even headphones would be of little help. As always,
you could hardly cope with the sheer quantity of
works on display, which results more in oversight
than insight. If you have ever seen a well-projected
music video by Chris Cunningham in a movie
theater, you will have detected a wholly different
aesthetical materiality and texture, as well as

194
completely different genealogy and cross-refe-
rences than those who have only seen it on televi-
sion or at exhibitions. Music videos can only be
properly experienced sensorially once they are
taken out of the random context of music television
and shown in the cinema on a big screen, or if they
are viewed within a program as part of a succession
of works. The special aesthetic (political, social, etc.)
qualities and characteristics of an individual work
can only be objectively brought forth through its
presentation in a particular, by no means random,
sensory context: through the cinema, in other
words. The cinema allows us to take a step beyond
the random succession resulting from channel
sur∫ng and the often chronological cataloguing
and evaluation of the music video as a
phenomenon.
This is all not without critical contradiction.
Justin Hoffmann, for example, assumes that the art
world’s and ∫lm festivals’ appropriation of music
videos has a positive tendency toward “culturali-
zing” economic strategies; they casually and
universally want to absolve music videos from
commercial interests in order to idealize and free
them as artifacts. However, understanding music
videos as artifacts with independent intellectuality
does not mean they are considered autonomous
artworks according to a traditional concept of art.

195
There is no question that music videos are conceived
as advertisements and that they remain as such
even when shown at an exhibition or festival.
Nevertheless, this particular form of product
advertisement fosters the development of new
forms that may become partly autonomous from
the pieces of music they illustrate and promote,
articulating moments of aesthetic and social devia-
tion. In particular, the fact that music videos contri-
bute to shaping the visual awareness of music (how
you hear a song once you’ve seen the video) already
gives them a certain autonomy. Some music is now
hardly imaginable without its corresponding
video. The music video is therefore a piece of adver-
tisement that should be subtracted from the (ideal)
aesthetic experience to make it “authentic.”
Perfectly commercial, even industrial music
productions (think of classical Hollywood cinema)
sometimes result in ∞ thanks also to technological
opportunities ∞ completely new artistic forms that
may also have an inventive effect. Music videos are
neither autonomous (i.e. “free of ideology”)
artworks nor are they pure product advertising.
“A music video (like the short ∫lm in general),”
Christian Höller wrote in 2015, “can be anything
these days. A piece of moving image with, admit-
tedly, a beginning and an end, with more or less
music [...], that recognizably references particular

196
genres or actively avoids them. Apart from that, a
compelling connection between musical template
and visual implementation hasn’t existed for a long
time now. After decades of struggling to step away
from existing as a mere functional form and ∫nally
being accepted as an art form, the music video
perfectly ∫ts within the framework of a conven-
tional diagnosis of our time. Consequently, pop
music as the original motive for the music video
format has entered a phase of sheer endless
‘presentness’; a condition in which there is no
beginning and no end. No before or after is fore-
seeable for pop music, and therefore also no note-
worthy historical development that some other
accompanying format (for example the music
video) could foster or counteract. This doesn’t mean
that the music video has become random [...]. All
possible forms of implementation are equally valid,
no one approach can claim conceptual primacy in
this matter.” Pop culture isn’t a clearly de∫ned ∫eld
of forms and genres, but rather an adaptive, genera-
tive force affecting various areas of culture and
economy. Beyond its super∫cial display in musicals,
pop culture in ∫lm is only really effective when, in
the wake of cinema’s decline, the traditional para-
digms of ∫lm’s avant-garde lose their power to
de∫ne aesthetic guiding principles. The question,
therefore, is no longer whether experimental ∫lms

197
still exist or whether music videos can be an art
form. It is about dealing with forms and signs
rooted in the traditions of the “old” avant-garde,
but which substantially differ from it with regard
to contexts of production and reception. Pop
culture’s effects on ∫lm are therefore not always
recognizable through music videos that are beco-
ming ever more “∫lmic” or ∫lms that are turning
more and more into music videos, but by the pop
cultural familiarity between ∫lm, art, and music
and the hybrid expressions of the experimental
itself. In pop culture, the avant-garde has unexpec-
tedly been integrated into “innovation,” or so it
seems.

198
Far from the Twisted
Reach of Crazy Sorrow
(Epilogue)

We are currently experiencing a technological

rupture: many things discussed in this book will
soon probably be outdated. Nevertheless, the ques-
tion remains: how can we defend the speci∫c mode
of perception of ∫lm engendered by cinema inde-
pendently of the cinema, and does it even make
sense to do so? This depends on our perspective on
cinema, but also on concrete sites and spaces for
∫lm, as well as on how ∫lm is handled. It is quite
possible, Alexander Horwath wrote to me, that
now that ∫lm has stepped out of a commercial
context of capitalization, we can potentially, gradu-
ally perceive cinema in its entirety: pristine, a line-up
of all ∫lms, regardless of their production, exhibi-
tion, distribution or interpretation, in full ambiva-
lence of being both products and art. I like the idea
of watching ∫lms in this kind of complex panorama

199
again and again, no matter whether they are
currently de∫ned as art or masterpiece, or who does
so, no matter the genre or context. We can re-appro-
priate ∫lm in the offside of cinema, lost in time,
watching patiently and maybe even casually,
getting new insight every time. We can now gaze
upon cinema as if onto a landscape. We see the
details, the weather, the seasons and the ruins of
time; an almost allegorical scenery. Already in 1968,
Werner Kliess thought the simultaneity of cinema
and the individual viewing of ∫lm to be perfectly
desirable. In his article “Kino und Drogen”
(“Cinema and Drugs”) in the magazine Film he
wrote: “The ∫lm of the future will be shown outside
of the cinema, at home, in apartments. Everyone
will be able to choose what they want to watch, free
from distributors and censorship. We will buy ∫lms
like we buy records, books or pictures. This freedom
of choice will engender a new authority against
mainstream cinema. [...] We will watch it with affec-
tion, like we do the circus: a traditional thing with
its own sorrows and perils, standing magni∫cently
outside reality, perhaps the best alternative to
drugs.”
You have to accept that something is over and
won’t be coming back in order to see ∫lm in a new
light ∞ be it in a niche inside a museum, or by
chance in very few, remote places. In any case, we

200
must submit to the fact that we will be increasingly
alone at the cinema, because the cinema isn’t seeing
many of us there. Cinema is highly unsuitable
for a “defense of culture based on the notion of
collecting art” (Dietmar Dath). We may even have
to live with knowing that the movie theater will,
at the end of its history, only survive under the
conditions of a musealized culture of subvention,
just as the visual arts do. If we are not careful, not
even this will remain of cinema. For a long time,
the cinema was the place where we perceived a
different world we could discuss. It wasn’t just a
niche where I could be by myself, like in my room
with my music. The cinema raised a stop sign to
the world; it used to be an alternative plan to the
present, an objection to the status quo, because it
suggested an alternative perception of the world
to me. Access to reality wasn’t made absolute, there
was no subjective reality, instead it compelled the
self to think. After the cinema the ∫lms remain, old
ones and new ones, some better and some worse;
this is true. But they remain without that which
made them different for us, made them be more than
the stories they told or the art they offered. What
remains of cinema are the stories and the art. That is
good, but not good enough. We have long accepted
that cinema no longer has any great thoughts
and that ∫lms are sometimes original, sometimes

201
decorative enter­tainment or art ∞ which is usually
unquestioningly seconded by cinephilia and the
cultural sections of newspapers, as if the end of
cinema had left ∫lms untouched. Of course we will
continue to watch ∫lms, on television, on DVD,
increasingly on the internet, occasionally even at a
cinema, but the invisible and unique connection to
time, the reason why we used to go to the cinema
to let ourselves be looked at by a different life, now
only occurs rarely and in fewer places. These places
will still exist, places where such an experience can
survive not just temporarily, where it may plausibly
articulate itself anew, perhaps even for those who
come after us. As long as society offers alternative
spaces, and as long as the perception of ∫lm ∫nds a
refuge somewhere in time, where we will be spared
the inΩuence of education and economics, from
a cinephilia reduced to nerdy know-how, from
cinema management and cultural politics, a refuge
in which cultural economics and the curators’
criticality will simply forget about us. The niche,
Diedrich Diederichsen writes on the last pages of
his book about pop music, not only guarantees
an existence out of the reaches of the state and
authority, but also ensures the potential to create
alternative visions and cultural developments.
These undisturbed niches are without doubt the
place for something that used to be, but also for

202
something to be rediscovered by those who come
after us, because we weren’t able to make more
out of it. Maybe only the loss of cultural relevance
will allow for the emergence of spaces that haven’t
yet been discovered by artistic milieus or cura-
torial originality, that haven’t been made viable
by cultural economics or systematically worked
through by academia. A space with no prescribed
depth of experience and no promise of authenticity
or identity. Spaces that are by no means subversive,
but that will allow us to think when faced with an
unfettered cultural industry. An act of resistance
might lie in the infamy of ignoring education and
relevance, and in wanting to be alone for a moment;
individual cognition against total subjectivity, the
helplessness of the escaped individual against the
social dictate of creativity and the forced collectivi-
zation of the cultural industry.
Maybe we should show fewer ∫lms, but show
them better ∞ at least as long as we don’t turn this
thought into dogma. Robert Bresson dreamed of a
small theater in Paris where only two ∫lms would
be screened per year; an idea that is equally sad and
forgiving. All the rest should be watched online for
information purposes. There is nothing to be said
against watching ∫lms under any circumstances,
even without the cinema. But there is much to be
said for not doing only that. Because we are old

203
enough to remember the experience offered by
cinema’s alternative mode of perception, but young
enough to rediscover and newly shape it. For all
those who go to the movie theater passionately but
not sentimentally, who are lost in time and in a
different world, the cinema won’t ever become a
source of nostalgia. The garden of the spacecraft in
Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972)
continues to be looked after by a robot even after
the last human has vanished. At the end of the ∫lm,
the garden turns into a brightly illuminated dome
disappearing into the vast darkness of space. It
represents this cognitive space: the suspension of
subjectivity by the apparatus in an “unthought”
reality, the ∫ction of a world without us.

204
About the Author

Lars Henrik Gass graduated with a PhD from Freie

Universität Berlin. From 1996 to 1997, he was the
head of the European Institute of Documentary
Film (EDI) in Mülheim an der Ruhr, where he
established the book series Texts on Documentary
Cinema at Vorwerk 8 publisher. Since 1997 he has
been director of the International Short Film
Festival Oberhausen. He has published essays,
reviews, and lectures on ∫lm, photography, and
cultural and ∫lm-political topics, and has taught on
∫lm and cultural management. He is co-editor of
the volumes Provokation der Wirklichkeit. Das Ober-
hausener Manifest und die Folgen (2012) and after
youtube. Gespräche, Portraits, Texte zum Musikvideo
nach dem Internet (2018) and author of the books Das
ortlose Kino. Über Marguerite Duras (2001) and
Filmgeschichte als Kinogeschichte. Eine kleine Theorie des
Kinos (2019). He is also a board member of the
Federal Association of Municipal Film Work in
Germany.

207
AUTHOR: Lars Henrik Gass
TITLE: Film and Art After Cinema

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The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften
International ∞ Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and
Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen
Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Of∫ce, the VG WORT
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This book is published within the project Vectors of Collective

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The content and views set out in this publication are those of the author
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