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Abstract
‘Film in the Gallery’ is a concept that I propose to understand a phenomenon of exhibiting cinema in a gallery or museum. The main tension of this practice is located in the laymen’s
view that gallery’s elite status determines the status of ‘ilm in the gallery’ practice. In other words, a ilm is regarded as an artwork because the gallery says so. This essay tries to look into the practice by asking the questions below: What is the signiicance of screening a ilm in a
gallery? To what extent the exhibition design demanded by the spatiality of the gallery adds to the artistic dimension of ‘Film in the Gallery’ practice? The answer will be demonstrated through a close analysis of a particular artwork titled American Night (2009) by Julian Rosefeldt
that challenges the traditional notion of a ilm’s exhibition design.
Keywords
Film in the Gallery, cinema of exhibition, spatiovisual art, intersubjective spectatorship
Travel-lingering Through American Night:
Rethinking Space in ‘Film in the Gallery’
practice
Nayla Majestya
le.jamais.natya@gmail.com
1. Introduction
‘Film in the gallery’ has become a predominant phenomenon in the context of art consumption that refers to a set of practices of exhibiting cinema in a gallery or museum. Regardless its
practicality, the term ‘ilm in the gallery’ raises a paradox. On one hand, ‘ilm in the gallery’ signiies a sense of media displacement that
comes from a long-established notion of a cinema or a movie house as the venue of the
ilm exhibition proper. On the other hand, the
gallery also has its own spatial connotation as an institution of high arts that quite often
in polarity with the notion of ilm as mass
production and mass entertainment. Hence, resulted in a laymen view that the gallery’s
elite status determines the status of ‘ilm in the gallery’ practice. In other words, ilm is
seen an artwork because the gallery says so.
In his study of virtual museum, media archeologist Erkki Huhtamo claims that the origin of virtual museum could be found from the emerging practice of exhibition design (that is by incorporating exhibition design in
the artistic practice) as new medium within
the avant-garde art movement in the early
20th century (“On The Origins of The Virtual
Museum” 3). Huhtamo’s discovery provides a
useful context to situates the status of ‘ilm in
the gallery’ as art by taking into account its exhibition design. Thus, this essay will answer the following question: To what extent an
exhibition design is signiicant in the artistic practice of ‘ilm in the gallery’? The answer
will be demonstrated through a close analysis of a particular artwork that challenges the traditional notion of its exhibition design. In this case, the artwork in discussion is
American Night (2009).
American Night is a ive-widescreen ilm
installation by Julian Rosefeldt, a German
contemporary ilm artist widely known
especially in the UK and Europe with his
multi-screens ilm installation. Shot in
16mm and showing a depth characteristic of celluloid-based image to show a cinematic world of western genre, American Night
could be easily made as a single screen ilm
exhibited in the cinema. American Night
as a ilm installation placed in a speciic
context of gallery exhibition, thus, raises a set of questions in regard to our notion of
ilmic experiences. Does the gallery setting ofer diferent experiences compared to
those of cinema setting? If so, what do those
experiences tell us about ‘ilm in the gallery’
spectatorship?
Deducing from Huhtamo’s account and Giuliana Bruno’s notion of ilm spectator as
a voyager or traveler, a person who takes a
journey through the geographical terrain of moving image (Bruno 56), this essay claims
that ilm spectatorship, regardless in a gallery
or cinema setting, is a space created by experiences established between the artwork and the spectator. The spectator creates her/his own space of experience rather than inhabits a predetermined one dictated by the exhibition space’s social status. Thus, the cinematic experience of a spectator is intersubjective, rather than institutionalised. This essay will attempt to interpret spectatorship as an integrated space through Huhtamo’s idea of integration. In this context, reading a space is like performing
mettre-en-scene, putting things together to construct a
scene in order to understand it as a space. By taking into account both the mise-en-scene
on the screen and the mise-en-scene out of screen, the spectator performs an integrated reading. Hence this essay will focus on the idea of spatial experience of a traveler, starting
with a journey through the ilm’s diegetic
space, then through the gallery’s space, and lastly through the intersubjective space created from a synthesis of the two spatial experiences.
2. The West as Cinematic Space
The notion of spatial coniguration in cinema
usually tied to narrative cinema convention.
Diegesis as a term revived by David Bordwell
from Etienne Souriau’s use to describe the ‘recounted story’ in literature, has come to
be an accepted term for the ictional world
of the story (Bordwell 16). Diegesis or the
diegetic space in ilm is the ilm’s story world,
a constructed realm in which the story taken place.
However, there is another ilmic realm that
Bordwell refers as ‘excess’ and describes as:
Anything in a narrative ilm that is not
narrational…. the realm in which casual lines, colors, expressions, and textures become “fellow travelers” of the story…. materials which may stand out perceptually but
which do not it either narrative or stylistic patterns….. A perception of a ilm that
includes its excess implies an awareness of the structures (including conventions) at work in
the ilm,... that can allow us to look further into a ilm, renewing its ability to intrigue us
by its strangeness. (Bordwell 53)
By taking into account the realm of ‘excess’
within the spatial coniguration of a ilm,
we could understand cinematic space as a
constructed space consists of a ilm’s diegetic space and ilm’s aesthetic (the excess).
Cinematic space is an integral part of narrative representation. Within the convention of
narrative ilm, usually a concise boundary is established between the ilm’s cinematic space
and the spectatorship’s space that is the space inhabited by the spectator while experiencing
the ilm. However, an aesthetic intervention
could be performed to obscure this boundary
among other ways through self-relexivity.
Dana Polan explains self-relexivity as “
(a) strategy in the interplay of a technique
intrinsic to and actually deining the process
of art... which signals awareness of their own
artiice” (“Brecht and The Politics of Self-Relexive Cinema”). In American Night, the
self-relexivity could be found in any manner
of referencing to the contemporary world
inhabited by the spectator within the ilm’s
diegetic world. By performing this attitude,
American Night thus ofers a new spatial
contract regarding the frontier that separates the cinematic space from the spectatorial one. In order to understand this, we should look
into how the ilm sets up a spatial contract
through its mise-en-scene. American Night
shows us the West through ive diferent spatial representations on ive diferent screens that
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1. The irst screen shows a lone cowboy exploring various American landscapes, from the dessert, mountain, and then on a seaside.
2. The second screen shows a deserted-looking town, empty from inhabitants except for one moment in the ilm when a helicopter lands and a team of American troopers barges into the space, moving further from the camera until they disappear amid the town’s buildings. 3. The third screen shows a group of cowboys
slouching around a ire while talking about gun, law, violence, contemporary American politics, and auteurist ilm in a self-relexive manner. 4. The fourth screen shows a juxtaposition of
interior and exterior space of a town illed with inhabitants. A travelling performer unloads his cart outside a saloon where people hang out, play card, drink, and later watch a vaudeville performance. Later, the scene inside the saloon is broken by the presence of a assistant to director and a cameraman giving instruction for the casts. The camera dolly up to follow the casts walk out the ilm set, revealing the diferent lighting setup, from the darkened ilm set to the broad daylight where the other ilm crews work. 5. The ifth screen shows a woman standing in
front of her house, forever waiting. The camera portrays her through various angles. Later, a combined movement of dollies up and a backward move of a property reveals that the woman and the house are merely a property set by camera and its tracking rails.
In American Night, the images that form the
imagined western are visually showed at least
in two manners, irst as a conined space of
movement and second, as tableaux-vivant or painting-like scenes. What is the implication of such imposition?
Rather than a background for action, the space
in this ilm is the action. It contains movements and igures that deine the space. The space
is a static site that contains movement, thus creating an experience of immobile mobility.
The igures move across the space, explore it or
even disappear amidst it. However, the space remains still. This notion of moving in a circle
conined by space is best represented by the lone cowboy igure. While he keeps moving
around the landscapes, almost like testing the boundaries of the space he inhabits, he eventually meets the border.
(Fig 1. The lone cowboy meet the sea, captured from Rosefeldt’s vimeo page http://vimeo.com/54721000 )
In a painting-like shot composition that brings a recollection of German Romantic artist
Caspar David Fiedrich’s painting, Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog (1818), the lone cowboy and his horse encounter a true frontier, a seaside. This idea of human and spatial limitation
is diferent from the traditional western’s
notion of the frontier as a threshold between the civilized and the savage. Rather, in this scene, Rosefeldt proposes an alternative idea about frontier as a limit between human and nature, in which humans’ mobility is limited by the space they inhabit. The tableaux-vivant
manner that brings a painting-like reading of the image emphasises this notion of stillness. Like a frozen moment, it is simultaneously motioned and motionless.
The West as a spatial representation in
American Night thus could be understood
irstly regarding its form as a site of
movement; a still site that contains a loop or circle movement. Secondly, it is a space that is constructed through the use of Western genre’s iconography to represent the idea of myth. It is no coincidence that myth is also part of Western genre discourses that we will further discuss later.
In his 1969 article, Jim Kitses exclaims “ A western is a western is a western” to point
out how the term Western as a ilm genre
can be pejoratively understood as a cliché, a repetitive practice that after some time has established its iconic quality. Iconic, a term he borrows from art history connotes “an image that both records and carries a conceptual
and emotional weight drawn from a deined symbolic ield, a tradition” (“Authorship and
Genre: Notes on the Western” 67).
The iconicity of Western genre in Kitses’s term is the basis of how American Night
establishes a contract with its spectator. Since the images are widely familiar and already carry meanings that are also recognizable, the spectator is positioned in a space of recognition and deception, especially by the
ilm’s mode that simultaneously conirms
and betrays the expectation formed by the
genre tradition. In this sense, while the ilm’s self-relexivity could be seen as a break out
of a convention, the reason that strategy could work is also because the convention
has already established. Put it another way,
American Night sets up an agreement with its
spectator through the recognition of Western genre iconographies.
3. American Night as Cinema of Exhibitions
I was there with another spectator and we were both alternately changing our position, from sitting, standing, to wandering from one screen to another.
To sum up the experience, it was a combination of familiarity and unfamiliarity. An experience of ‘strolling’ while watching the artwork that is not motivated by a camerawork or a subject on screen is unfamiliar, likewise the visible
projector on the loor. However, the dark room is familiar as a space of ilm viewing associated
with the cinema, as well as the images on screen. A lonely cowboy, a deserted-looking town, a crowded saloon, a group of cowboys camping, and a woman standing in front of a house, waiting. It was a familiar world of the West, a repetitive image that we closely associate with a cliché notion of western genre.
In the four pages genealogical tree of expanded cinema, the writers of Expanded Cinema:
Art, Performance, Film deine a practice they
term as ‘cinema of exhibitions’. They suggests that this practice tends to use a gallery “as a context for on the one hand, deconstructing the identity process inscribed in iconic works of classical cinema, and on the other, for
exhibiting the processes of ilm production as
a form of media displacement” (Curtis, Rees, Whites, and Ball 9).
American Night its well within this deinition.
Experimenting with the idea of myth of the West, American Night deconstructs the western genre that is groomed within the classical Hollywood cinema tradition.
The ilm’s ideological position in criticizing
American frontier policies is illustrated through the myth of America par excellence. In a scene on one of the screens, a group of American troops lands on an empty deserted-looking town hunting for God-knows-what. They enter the town, march into it, and then blend into the buildings before at last disappear from view. This besiege act is a striking reminder of contemporary American policy in sending their troops to capture the so-called terrorists in a desolate wasteland of Middle East.
This imagery of a wasteland on one screen and
(Fig 2. American Night ilm installation in BFI 10 Sptember-6 November 2010 from Max Wigram gallery
http://www.maxwigram.com/artists/julian-rosefeldt/)
American Night as exhibited in British Film
Institute in 2010 is part of my lingering memory of travelling experience. It was my
irst visit to London and in fact, it was my irst
experience of travelling abroad. Upon entering the exhibition space, inside the darkened BFI Southbank gallery, I was already a traveler ready to take a journey through a new terrain of moving image. Hence, my recollection of experiencing American Night is tangled and melded with my travelling memory, forming a narrative of journey and discovery.
I remember that the gallery was illed with ive
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a stunning nature of various landscape that the lone cowboy riding through on another screen form a contradictory spatial image of the West. In his study Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith traces how the West as symbol has functioned in America’s history and consciousness through its spatial imagery. “Is the West a garden of natural dignity and
innocence ofering refuge from decadence
of civilization? Or is it a treacherous desert stubbornly resisting the gradual sweep of agrarian progress and community values?” (qtd. in “Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western 58).
This ideological tension within the western
tradition’s spatial coniguration is part of
the mythical West. On one hand, the West is a myth that is constructed through the reconciliation of its contradictory nature since this contradiction allows “a wide range of intervention, choice, spectacle and experiment” (“Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western” 64). On the other hand, it is also a myth that constructs a certain idea about America particularly in regard to the notion of homeland and the nature of frontier (as a myth of barrier, the threshold between the insider and the outsider, the civilized and the uncivilized, the lawful and the outlaw). As Kitses has put it, “Its greatest strength has been this very pervasiveness and repetition... It is only because the western has been everywhere before us for so long that it ‘works’ ” (“Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western” 65).
Deconstructing western genre as iconic work through self-relexivity thus creates a sense of
media displacement as a state of asynchronous or an out-of-place impression. The title
American Night is a reference to another ilm
La Nuit Americaine (Trufaut, 1973), a ilm
about the process of ilm production and
also a reference towards a lighting technique
commonly used in western ilm that enables
a night scene shot in a broad daylight. This
reference towards ilm production process is illustrated by the presence of ilm crews,
camera track, and an overall portrayal of the
ilm setting as a ilm set.
The sense of displacement not only works
spatially, but also temporally. The reference towards Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Jean-Luc Godard, or even 50 Cents is a temporal distortion that interrupts the conventional
time setting of western ilm world in a
far-away period of American past.
A sense of displacement also comes from the way we experience the exhibition space. The fact that the spectator could move freely
within the conined space of the gallery
enables a certain degree of distance navigation and negotiation. We could come closer to the screen and focusing on one screen after another or we could sit in a distance and watch it altogether. This experience of movement creates uncertainty since there is no single way to experience the artwork. The spectator thus experiences a sense of displacement that came from the fact that the distance between her and the artwork is liable to change.
Understanding American Night as cinema of exhibition thus illuminates the notion of space while experiencing the artwork in two levels.
In the irst level, we experience a textual space where we make meanings within a conined space of ilmic text. In the second level, we
experience this textual space in its exhibition space where the moving bodily experience creates uncertainty of placing the artwork within a distance from her body. In other words, we could say that its exhibition design has positioned the spectator to experience a sense of displacement.
4. Spatiovisual Art and Intersubjective Spectatorship
In this narrative of journey and discovery, we have concluded at least two senses of spatial
coniguration in experiencing American
Night. Within the cinematic space, the
spectator is positioned to experience a sense of immobile mobility. Secondly, within the exhibition space the spectator is positioned to feel uncertain, to sense some sort of displacement. However, I would argue that these two spatial experiences share a common trope that is a state of in-between-ness.
In her study of ilm spectatorship, Giuliana
Bruno introduces the term ‘dwelling-voyage’ to challenge the view that travel always
implies mobility. ‘Dwelling-voyage’ is an
in-between mode of travel that “implies a series of interactions. A voyage deeply involves and questions one’s sense of home, of belonging, and of cultural identity... It is not a static notion, but a site of transito. More than simply a point of departure and return, it is a site of continual transformation” (Bruno 103).
Understanding ‘dwelling-voyage’ as a spectatorship mode that acknowledges a static interaction or immobile mobility is helpful
to understand the gallery as a space of ilmic
experiences. In this case, the exhibition space
is not a stationary ediice, but rather as Bruno
suggests, “a site of mobile inhabitations” (Bruno 103). Thus, in this sense we could understand the sense of displacement as a
trace of movement, of a travel. It is a leeting
moment of moving from one place to another without any precise points of departure or destination.
Moving in circle, a loop, or a conined space
is an example of this kind of passage, which is exactly the aesthetic of American Night. Likewise, my experience of moving around the gallery space also creates a narrative of mobility, of coming to a place, lingering through both the cinematic and exhibition spaces, and then leave and carry the experience with me. Hence, it is not only a narrative of a lingering travel memory, but also a spatial memory.
Thus, American Night requires a speciic
kind of spectatorship that might be diferent from the traditional mode of ilm viewing in the cinema. Especially, since the ilm’s whole
aesthetic comes from the integration of the cinematic and the exhibition spaces. In other
words, the ilm’s aesthetic is built upon the
idea of spatial experience. In this sense, we could say that American Night is not only a cinematic art, but also a spatiovisual one.
So what is the implication of experiencing
American Night as spatiovisual art? What
kind of particular spectatorial mode does it require?
Experiencing American Night as spatiovisual
experiences calls for a discussion on ilms
and other spatial art, that is architecture. The architecture here particularly refers to what Bruno explains as, “A dynamic conception of architecture, which overcomes the traditional notion of building as a still, tectonic construct, allow us to think of space as practice. This involves incorporating the inhabitant of the space (or its intruder) into architecture, ... charting the narrative these navigations
create.... Here, again, architecture joins ilm
in a practice that engages seeing in relation to movement” (Bruno 57-58).
As I have elaborated earlier, American Night’s spatial arrangement is characterised by movements. Not only the gallery allows the viewer to walk around the space, but also it prompts audiences to explore the space by negotiating distance to screens, to another
viewer, and even to the projector. It is a diferent
experience compared to the traditional notion
of watching ilm in the cinema where we are
sitting and unable to negotiate our distance to the cinematic apparatus. In watching
American Night in the gallery space, not only
that the spectator moves through seeing and imagining, but also he or she physically moves. She/he is an embodied spectator who is aware of her/his body movement in her/his relation to viewing.
In this sense, spectatorship is indeed an integral part in constructing American Night as a spatiovisual art. Therefore, ilm
spectatorship should be understood as “a practice of space that is dwelt in, as in the built environment... the spectator turns into
a visitor. The ilm ‘viewer’ is a practitioner of
viewing space – a tourist” (Bruno 62). The
spectator as a tourist is a igure of promenade
that moves across terrains. The movement consists of a physical one within the gallery space and a cognitive-emotional one across the cinematic and exhibition spaces.
Drawing from Bruno’s notion of travelling
viewer, I argue that the particular spectatorial mode American Night calls for is an intersubjective one. What I mean
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subjectivity derives not from the intention
of the ilmmaker, but from its integrated
aesthetic of the cinematic and exhibition spaces. Thus, intersubjective spectatorship is a practice resulted from the relationship
established by the ilm’s subjectivity and
the spectator’s subjectivity in practicing an integrated reading of her/his experience. The spectator that actively views, moves, engages,
relects, and rethinks her/his encounter with
the artwork is what makes the spatiovisuality of the artwork evident. Thus it is the practice of intersubjective spectatorship that makes
American Night arguably a spatiovisual art.
5. Conclusion
At this point, it is worth to conclude on what the analysis of spectatorial mode in experiencing
American Night tells us about ‘ilm in the
gallery’ spectatorship. Understanding ilm
as spatiovisual art help us to relate it with the gallery as a spatial concept. The gallery could serves as a space of experience that in a
certain artistic practice context could ofer an
alternative mode of spectatorship. Alternative here is compared to the traditional notion of spectatorial mode in traditional movie house
with a ixed spatial distance between the
artwork and the spectator. Thus, positioning the spectator as a passive subject under the ideological working of cinematic apparatus1.
What this study could tell us is that the spatial
experience of the gallery could play a signiicant
role in the whole artistic experience. It is a potential terrain for spatial experimentations, not only for the moving images artists, but also for curators who engage with the artwork and make the business of showcasing as part of artistic practices.
1 See Hak Kyung Cha, especially chapters 3 and 4, for further explanation on the notion of cinematic apparatus and its ideological effect in
traditional notion of ilm viewing in the cinema.
Works Cited
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction
Film. Wisconsin: Wisconsin UP, 1985.Print.
Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys
in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso,
2002. Print.
Fiedrich, Caspar David. Wanderer Above the
Sea of Fog. 1818. Oil on canvas. Hamburger
Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
Hak Kyung Cha, Theresa. Apparatus. New
York: Tanam Press, 1980. Print.
Huhtamo, Errki. “On The Origins of the Virtual Museum”. Nobel Symposium (NS
120) “Virtual Museums and Public
Understanding of Science and Culture” May
26-29, 2002, Stockholm, Sweden. PDF File.
Kitses, Jim. “Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western.” The Western Reader. Ed. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman. New York:
Limelight Editions, 1999. 57-68. Print.
Polan, Dana. “Brech and The Politics of Self-Relexive Cinema.” Jump Cut: A Review of
Contemporary Media, 1 (1974, 2004): n.pag
Web. 7 April 2014.
Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis. Expanded Cinema: Art,
Performance, Film. London: Tate Publishing,
2011. Print.
Rosefeldt, Julian. American Night. 2009. Max Wigram Gallery, London. Max Wigram. Web. 1 April 2014.
Rosefeldt, Julian. American Night. 2009.
Vimeo.com, 2 December 2012. Web. 1
