CAPTURED

A Thesis
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Digital Media
in the Department of Digital Media of The Rhode Island School of Design

By

Serena Kuo

Rhode Island School of Design

2008

Master’s Examination Committee

Approved by:

Teri Rueb, Digital + Media Associate Professor

Rhode Island School of Design, Primary Advisor

John Terry, Dean of Fine Arts

Rhode Island School of Design

Dietrich Neumann
Professor for the History of Modern Architecture and Urban Studies, Brown University
Vincent Scully Visiting Professor for the History of Architecture, Yale University
Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Brown University

Amy Kravitz, Film/Animation/Video Professor

Rhode Island School of Design
CAPTURED

Captured by Serena Kuo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Liscense.
The word ‘shot’ can be reserved for fixed spatial
determinations, slices of space or distances in relation
to the camera. […] It is then the sequence of shots
which inherits the movement and the duration. But
since this is not an adequately determinate notion, it
is necessary to create more precise concepts to identify
the unities of movement and duration. […] From our
point of view for the movement, the notion of shot
[plan] has sufficient unity and extension if it is given
its full projective, perspectival or temporal sense. In
fact a unity is always that of an act which includes as
much a multiplicity of passive or acted elements. Shots,
as immobile spatial determinations, are perfectly
capable of being, in this sense, the multiplicity which
corresponds to the unity of the shot, as mobile section or
temporal perspective. The unity will vary according
to the multiplicity that it contains, but will be no less
the unity of this correlative multiplicity. 1

1 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image. University of Minnesota Press, 1986. PP. 25-26
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Illustrations 00:00:00:VII

Abstract 00:00:00:IX

“Captured “ 00:00:00:X

Introduction 00:00:00:01

Theory 00:00:00:05
I. Experiencing Geography, Architecture & Constructed Space 00:00:00:07
The Origin of Cinematic Space 00:00:00:08
Objectifying the Medium 00:00:00:12
Excerpt: My Visit to Pompeii 00:00:00:15

II. Construction of Reality 00:00:00:17

Synthesis of Science and Art 00:00:00:18
Mise-en-scene & Cinematography 00:00:00:22
Structural Fragmentation in Cinematic Space 00:00:00:23

Work 00:00:01:10
5/4
The Water 00:00:01:11
00:00:01:17
The Bicycle Camera
00:00:01:23
Transpositions 00:00:02:03
Ice Apartment 00:00:02:07
Body Landscapes 00:00:02:09
Captured 00:00:02:13

Conclusion 00:00:02:17

Bibliography 00:00:02:19
ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig 1. Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967. 00:00:00:03
Fig 2. Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger, 1975. 00:00:00:03
Fig 3. Sergein Eisenstein, October/Ten Days that Shook the World, 1927. 00:00:00:04
Fig 4. D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, 1915. 00:00:00:08
Fig 5. René Clair, Paris qui dort, 1915 00:00:00:09
Fig 6. Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. 00:00:00:11
Fig 7. Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967. 00:00:00:14
Fig 8. Eadweard Muybridge, Galloping Horse, 1878. 00:00:00:20
Fig 9. F.W. Muranu, The Last Laugh, 1925. 00:00:00:21
Fig 10. F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, 1922. 00:00:00:21
Fig 11. F.W. Murnau, Sunrise, 1927. 00:00:00:21
Fig 12. Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, 1941. 00:00:00:23
Fig 13. Chris Welsby, Windmill II, 1972. 00:00:01:02
Fig 14. Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger, 1975. 00:00:01:04
Fig 15. Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window, 1954. 00:00:01:06
Fig 16. Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo, 1958. 00:00:01:07
Fig 17. Serena Kuo, Script diagram for 5/4, 2007. 00:00:01:14
Fig 18. Serena Kuo, Set still from 5/4, 2007. 00:00:01:16
Fig 19. Serena Kuo, installation vizualization for The Water, 2008. 00:00:01:20
Fig 20. Serena Kuo, The Water, installation view, 2008. 00:00:01:21
Fig 21. Serena Kuo, narrative brainstorm for The Water, 2008. 00:00:01:22
Fig 22. Serena Kuo, scenario maps for The Water, 2008. 00:00:01:25
Fig 23. Serena Kuo, Documentation of filming process, The Bicycle Camera, 2007. 00:00:02:02
Fig 24. Serena Kuo, sketch exploring the inverted relationship between 00:00:02:04
speed and distance, The Bicycle Camera, 2007.
Fig 25. Serena Kuo, Transpositions: Nathaniel, 2008. 00:00:02:06
Fig 26. Serena Kuo, Transpositions: Lauren, 2008. 00:00:02:07
Fig 27. Serena Kuo, Ice Apartment, film, 2007. 00:00:02:07
Fig 28. Serena Kuo, Ice Apartment, installation view, 2007. 00:00:02:07
Fig 29. Serena Kuo, Body Landscapes, 2007. 00:00:02:10
Fig 30. Serena Kuo, Composition timeline and corresponding scenes, 00:00:02:12
Body Landscapes, 2007.
Fig 31. Serena Kuo, Captured, 2008. 00:00:02:13
Fig 32. Serena Kuo, Captured, 2008. 00:00:02:14
Fig 33. Serena Kuo, Captured portrait. 00:00:02:15
Fig 34. Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. 00:00:02:23
ABSTRACT “CAPTURED”

My current work focuses specifically on the depiction of action traversing through space In several ways, representational media such as filmΘ can be deemed non-generative. The
and creation of spatiality in cinema. Using the camera as a physical extension of the eye, images we see, printed or projected, are markings made by light reflecting off of pre-
the viewer is asked to bridge the conventional function of a shot with real-experiences of existing objects onto chemicals and sensors. The stories we delineate from these images
perceiving space as an immersive environment during the process of travel. In my body are altered personal experiences, adaptations, fables, and common human logic. We are
of thesis projects, this endeavor is manifested in various ways: handed visual and textual components, pieced together in specific fashions, that direct us
to re-imagine what it is like to be within a certain real world, real place, real time, and
1. Referencing the traditional narrative film format in a purely two-dimensional real situation. Nothing is made from nothing.
projection, where the audience expects a beginning, middle, and end, and hence
restricting the film space and temporality to one finite entity When looking at an action taking place within the letterbox of a film, we are not always
2. Placing the lens at the position of the eye to visually simulate the experience of addressed with what exists beyond this frame, yet two phenomena take place during our
moving within real space viewing experience: (1) We gather information from the characters, the set, and the story
3. Establishing a more active spatial environment for cinematic spectatorship to inform what kind of a world contains this limited space presented before us, and (2) We
through a change in the placements of its projection surfaces place ourselves within this world in the role of an ally, a witness, or a passive spectator.
4. Inverse to point 1, removing narrative and temporal finiteness to imitate the While these are the two certain goals for any film work that engrosses the viewer, the
mundane and seemingly infinite nature of reality parameters within which they occur are flexible and subject to inventiveness. This is how
film is in actuality completely generative, its execution absolutely original to each maker.
Through the work examined in this brief thesis, my attempt is not to interrogate the all-
encompassing question of reality in cinema, but to articulate a body of work that both While film reproduces pre-existing material, it is more so the reiteration of that material
stems from and expands the medium’s conventions. With my work, I wish to facilitate a as opposed to its replica. The changes that take place in a film work from the reality that
critical engagement with the medium’s process of constructing reality by using its very originates its visual content are the result of layers of capturing – a selective process that
conventions to move outside the constraints and traditional parameters. highlights and obscures facts and emotions. The moving image captures a reality and
contains it within a cinematic space, shaped by this selective process. The viewer captures
a reality construed and impressed by the resulted film, and is reciprocally captured within
the reality she has just created. In other words, film is the art of capturing captured-ness.

As a final note, the title “Captured” is also influenced by my own obsessive indulgence with
the craft of filmmaking. The empty frames of the unexposed filmstrip or a blank miniDV
tape (and recently, portable hard drives that directly connect to the camera) are voids
eager to be filled with a certain angle of the outside world. The camera apparatus provides 00:00:00:X
the maker with access to a specifically conceived construct of reality, and simultaneously
captures the physical world it photographs and the filmmaker into its mechanisms.

Θ
The term “film” here encompasses all time-based photo-realistic media.
INTRODUCTION
I create narrative and non-narrative films with altered parameters of space, time, and
movement. My work questions the spatial reality constructed in traditional cinema. The
basis of my work is informed by a synthesis of traditional and avant-garde films, new
media, architecture, and the intrinsic symbiosis between mobility and time-based media.
The thematic thread that runs through my work examines personal interactions as the
product of specific spatial and temporal constraints and the emotional fragmentation that
characterizes these interactions. It is my goal to reference traditional cinema in my work
- to provide a familiar reference point for the viewer in order to facilitate examination of
experimental elements from a reinvented context.
Film as a medium constructs reality partly through the cinematic conventions employed
to represent space and time. These conventions are the foundation of all categories:
narrative (story or the text), mise-en-scene2 , cinematography, assemblage of shots,
special effects, and space of spectatorship. For example, conventions of a narrative include
genre, character, form and time. Low and high angles, close-ups and extreme wide
shots, dolly, and point-of-view are some of the most frequently utilized cinematographic
conventions. Assemblage of shots can be conventionalized by collisional or conflict-driven
montage. Lastly, the space of spectatorship is culturally fostered into multiplexes, black-
box art house theatres, televisions, and recently, personal computers and portable media
players – all of which generate different levels of social and intellectual interactions
between the image and the viewer. The sense of space and time a spectator translates
from a film is informed by preexisting experience and the knowledge of cinema’s
structuring of time and space. Both “seeing” and “cinema” occur within a cultural
context from production to reception. This is what contemporary theorists refer to as the
“impression of reality 3” – it is actually an image and not the reality it appears to be – an
act of signification. Upon equating the act of signification with ideology, Louis Althusser
2  Francois Truffaut refers to mise-en-scene as comprised the camera position, the angle selected, the shot’s length, 6  Baudry, Jean-Louis. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. Film Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2
an actor’s gesture. In other words, at once the story that is being told and the manner of telling it.
Truffaut, Francois. The Films in My Life. Da Capo Press, 1994. PP. 13-14
3  Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge Studies in photographic recordings but as purely spatial manipulation within a projective geometry.
Film). Cambridge University Press, 1997. P. 9
describes that “the effect of the impression of reality in the cinema upon the spectator
was likened to the effect of language upon the individual in its ideological impact. In
the case of the analysis of signification, it was necessary to turn to a distinctive use of
language – literary language – in order to find a way to expose the ideological effects of
language.”4 This process is central to Structuralist filmmaking, which P. Adams Sitney
describes as “cinema of structure in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined
and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film.”5 Jean-
Louis Baudry respondsto Althusser’s theory by breaking down its effect on the spectator
into three parts6: perspectival positioning, identification, and believing in the illusory
world presented by film as truth.
As film is a representation of a reality within which the spectator exists, it represents (and
enforces) ideological assumptions about the nature of that reality. Since film is a time-
based medium that is first invented with the purpose to document and examine actions
– in other words, a representational medium - it reflects the nature of space and time
through the synthetic application of its conventions. For instance, the progression of time
in narrative is cinematographically captured by exposing the action onto the filmstrip at
a specific frame rate, which is then coupled with editorial dissolves that convey a passage
of time. The selective framing of an interior space, repeated from a multitude of angles,
distance, is cut together to establish a specific physical environment that both reveals and
obscures the action. In other words, the process of communication for the filmic medium
is the organization and construction of space and time.7
This process of re-organization and reconstruction of space and time in cinema always
runs along two tracks: fidelity to reality versus the desire to revolt against the very
transparency of this constructed reality. This is the conflict between classical cinema’s
transparent mise-en-scene and a filmmaker’s conscious effort to objectify and bring
attention to the orchestrated content within the film frame. Toward the first approach
of mediation, Baudry writes that “[…] cinema is ideological in its form because it is not
authentic art; that is, it does not present the world to us in a manner that appears mediated
by artistic form.” Whereas the latter, a conscious objectification of the medium, according
to Theodore Adorno in his influential writing Culture Industry8, “elevates film to art.”
4  Allen. P. 9
5  Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000. 00:00:00:02
Oxford University Press, USA, 2002. P. 348
(Winter, 1974-1975). PP. 39-47
7  Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, noted for his causal editing montage techniques, considers film not as
8  Adorno, Theodor. Culture Industry (Routledge Classics). Routledge, 2001.
Adorno uses Michelangelo Antonioni as an example of this latter methodology, where the
filmmaker consciously distills the photography of the environments in The Passenger to
the point that the motion that accompanies the perspective of a moving perceiver – the
camera and the viewer – is entirely removed. Michael Snow’s renowned Wavelength brings
attention to the function of zooming in with a camera lens, which, in contrast to walking
closer to an object, elicits a more visual, less physical spatial experience. In the realm of
assemblage, Vsevolod Pudovkin believes that the montage is the only way through which
film can translate reality: “the isolated shot is not even a small fragment of cinema; it
is only raw material, a fragment of the real world. Only by montage can one pass from
photography to cinema […]. Broadly defined, montage is quite simply inseparable from
the composition of the work itself.9” Whereas Pudovkin strives to manifest realism
with his cuts, Sergei Eisenstein refuses to submit to any type of flow in his work, and
consciously opposes descriptive realism with Kuleshov-inspired “collisional montage,”
the juxtaposition of visually conflicting shots.
With a minimalist approach to narrative, my work brings awareness to the filmic medium
specifically through the portrayal of space and time. My methods of approach encompass
various aspects of the five elements previously mentioned.
the experience of physically intersecting a three-dimensional reality through
two-dimensional means? How much of the spectator’s preexisting knowledge
contributes into understanding this construction? How much can be altered before
this construction becomes completely incomprehensible?
In ways of content and form, my work links the ideological signatures implicit in
the filmic medium (such as the psychological effects of cinematographic styles, shot
duration, sound perspectivization, assemblage, off-screen space, etc.) and incorporates
technology/techniques in video installation and site-specific cinema. My work aims to
discuss the perception and conception of action in space and time in these formats in the
traditional sense, and these media’s deliberate departure from the normative. Originally
educated as a filmmaker, I was once completely submerged in the content of film as a
traditional medium. Through these two specific types of installation-based new media
work, my goal is to generate new syntaxes as formal filtration of the content. I wish to
reinvent both the spectator’s and my personal relationship with the medium.

The filmic medium emerges in the late 19th century when depictions of stillness
no longer suffice to translate human experience with surrounding environments,
when mobility by the means of automobiles is required to fulfill an expanding
urban lifestyle. Drawing from this correlation, I question how our perception of
space changes in accordance to our increasing freedom to traverse through diverse
landscapes, and how film evolved to facilitate the articulation of these travel
experiences. I also question the medium’s capacity to simulate the experience of
crossing through a spatial environment: how does the medium successfully construct
00:00:00:04

9  Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. University of Chicago Press, 1990. P. 32
Fig 1. Left, Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967.
Image courtesy of http://www.greylodge.org
Fig 2. Right, Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger, 1975. Fig 3. Sergei Eisenstein, October/Ten Days that Shook the World, 1927.
Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Image Courtesy of http://www.youtube.com
00:00:00:06
 THE ORIGIN OF
CINEMATIC SPACE

1.
The invention of the cinema comes from Eadweard Muybridge’s desire to reveal the truth
about a racehorse. Animals are regarded as machines, whose close analysis requires the
more acute perception of another machine, the camera. In such a way, the early function

Experiencing
of film is scientific and revelatory; it brings its subjects to the audience for further
examination. The Lumieres consider film to be no more than a “scientific curiosity,”
nature caught in the act. Unnoticed by the Lumieres, stylistic visual motifs are present

Geography,
throughout their work that veer the films away from being purely objective observations.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, countless screen tests, short films, and

Architecture and
film experiments test the capacity of the film camera. On one end of the spectrum are
observational shots of events and landscapes by technological pioneers such as Thomas
Edison and W.K.L. Dickson. These films, often referencing panoramas or dioramas (that

Constructed Space
were popular in Europe in the 1800s), break away from the theatrical proscenium of-the
pre-cinema screen. Panorama from Times Building, New York (Edison, 1905) exposes an
expanse of cityscape using the film camera’s primitive ability to pan and tilt. Panorama
of 4th St., St Joseph (A. E, Weed, 1902) uses the mobile and first person perspective of a
moving vehicle to couple the experience of travel to that of exploring landscape in cinema.
The marriage between cinema and mobility is instigated by the same curiosity that
Muybridge possesses to see more and to be immersed in the experience of world travel.
As a filmmaker strives to communicate the emotional journey of encountering a new
place, film transforms from a scientific device to a medium that incites both intellectual
and emotional response. This is where the technical conventions of film become essential
to facilitate the expansion of the medium’s communicative capacity. This is where early
filmic experimentations enter and broaden the language of the medium.

In describing this social trend that forms around tourism and cinematic viewer-ship, Italian
Film Theorist Giuliana Bruno comments “[film] – and the ‘house’ in which its motion dwelt
– was a way of further extending this cityscape, fragmenting it, reinventing its assemblage,
expanding its horizons.”10 Just as an actual site of travel is filtered through one’s subjective 00:00:00:08
perception, broken down into moments paired with personal meaning, the authorship of

10 Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. Verso, 2007. P. 77
Fig 4. D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, 1915.
Image Courtesy of Henderson, Robert M. D. W. Griffith His Life and Work, 1972.
conveying specific ideas in experiencing space is characterized by the process of organizing
the visuals to resonate with intended meaning. This process engenders progressively more
methods of establishing space in cinema. On the opposite end of observational panoramic films
are film experiments that explore the effect of new cutting methods, camera movements, and
new compositions by D.W. Griffith, as well as the methodical approaches to creating meaning
through the conflict and collision between images by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Lev
Kuleshov, which are calculated to a state that can be described as mathematical.
As the originator of American narrative cinema, D.W. Griffith is known for his exploration
of urbanism and the country life. The increasing tempo of editing in his historical
epic, Birth of a Nation (1915), endows the viewer with a sense of mobility that traverses
through separate yet connected physical landscapes of America through parallel editingγ.
The rhythm of editing, in this context, supplies the experience of travel with increasing
emotional effect. His filmic style references the expositional structure of 19th century
novels, where subplots overlap and jump back and forth through the pages, especially in
his editing of parallel actions, which is one of the first attempts for cinema to tackle the
notion of simultaneous actions in multiple spaces.
During these two decades of proliferation, film enters into the masses as a popular
medium. A series of “City Symphony” films that emerged in the 1920s used the
birth of cinema to explore the medium’s intrinsic link to mobility with a revelatory
agenda. French Filmmaker René Clair remarks that the main aesthetics of cinema is
movement – the object’s external movement and the inner movement of the action.
In Paris qui dort (1925), a laser ray accidentally freezes the entire city of Paris in time.
Film theorist Annette Michelson describes Clair’s work (along with the work of Dziga
Vertov) as “metacinematic11”, a conscious analysis of the film apparatus through
the metaphorical use of the narrative. Thematically, the ray illustrates how the
movie camera constructs the relationship between corporeality and motion. It is the
instrument that translates the meanings of actions through suspending them, framing
11 Michelson, Annette. Dr. Craze and Mr. Clair. October, Vol. 11, Essays in Honor of Jay Leyda. (Winter,
1979). PP. 30-53.
γ
A technique in film editing to suggest simultaneity of actions in separate locations by placing one
action after another.
Fig 5. René Clair, Paris qui dort, 1925.
Image Courtesy of http://www.youtube.com
them in space. This is perhaps what Bruno refers to as the “perceptual interplay that
exists between immobility and mobility.”12 Those that are spared by the ray maneuver
through the frozen city, exploring its various corners, in a sense assembling together
the staged fragments of a complete narrative.
Film’s spectatorship is thus a practice of space that it dwelt in, as in the
built environment. The itinerary of such a practice is similarly drawn by
the visitor to a city or its resident, who goes to the highest point – a hill,
a skyscraper, a tower – to project herself onto the cityscape, and who also
engages the anatomy of the streets, the city’s underbelly, as she traverses
different urban configurations. Such a multiplicity of perspectives, a montage
of ‘traveling’ shots with diverse viewpoints and rhythms, also guides the
cinema and its way of site-seeing. Changes in the height, size, angle, and
scale of the view, as well as the speed of the transport, are embedded in
the very language of filmic shots, editing, and camera movements. Travel
culture is written on the techniques of filmic observation.13
Dziga Vertov was the founder of the Kinopravda movement of 1920s Soviet Russia.
Kinopravda (“film-truth”) describes the reality captured by a camera without artificial
creative input by the screenwriter. The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) documents,
with creative flair, a day in the life of a Russian city (shot in Moscow and Odessa). The
sequence of the edit is chronological. There is also an absence of titles, which removes
narrative specificity from the work. Vertov regards drama to be an opiate for the masses,
yet stylistically, his film reflects the emotive rhythm of traveling. American Video
Artist Doug Aitken describes the film as a “kaleidoscope of visual impressions” and a 00:00:00:10
12 Bruno. P. 55.
13 Ibid. P. 62.

“rapid-fire montage of city life in split screens, freeze frames, double exposures, and
dissolves.”14Furthermore, the movie theatre contextualizes the viewing of the meta-film,
which begins with the parting of the theatre curtains and the unfolding of theatre chairs.
The journey of the cameraman/camera through the city in turn carries the movie audience
through the cityscape.
In addition to The Man with a Movie Camera, and Paris qui dort, numerous other city
symphony films establish the intimate association between cinema and urban travel on
both a documentary and an emotional level. Mobility also becomes a necessary part of
reinstating reality, whether it is in the staging or in the production. Motion, first introduced
to realistically render the gesture of moving in space, becomes a creative element used to
simulate the physical sensation of movements, grand or minute. “The technically mature
film ‘subjective’ movements – movements, that is, which the spectator is invited to
execute – constantly compete with objective ones,” states Bruno. “The spectator may have
to identify himself with a tilting, panning, or traveling camera which insists on bringing
motionless as well as moving objects to his attention. Or an appropriate arrangement of
shots may rush the audience through vast expanses of time and/or space so as to make it
witness, almost simultaneously, events in different periods and places.”15
Soon, as the movie camera becomes portable, the camera’s movement through space
also gains the added freedom to simulate any mode of travel. Once bound to a car or a
train, the camera is now handheld and organically expressive. The camera’s course of
action transforms from framing the audience into its spatial construction to becoming
the extension of the eye. Its very presence within the film’s physical environment
facilitates the telepresence of the viewer’s body. Traversing through the filmic space,
the viewer becomes immersed and informed by the perspective and configuration of the
environment. As a result of this propagation of visuality, the engagement between the
screen and the viewer becomes progressively more experientially immersive.
14 Aitken, Doug. Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative. D.A.P./Distributed Art
Publishers, Inc, 2005. P. 287
15 Bruno. P. 34.
Fig 6. Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929.
Image Courtesy of Kino Video.
OBJECTIFYING
THE MEDIUM
German Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer qualifies films that are regarded as art as those that
“organize the raw material to which they resort into some self-sufficient composition instead
of accepting it as an element in its own right,” that “their underlying formative impulses are so
strong that they defeat the cinematic approach∋ with its concern for camera-reality.”16
Art in the form of film, or any other medium that exemplifies the science of film, or
metacinema, is the deliberation of formative filmic techniques. Using the conventions of
cinema – its staging, its cinematography, and the phenomenology of cinema spectatorship
– artists frequently explore the perception and construction of spatiality by borrowing
from our familiarity with popular films.
Michael Snow’s work builds heavily from the process of filmic objectification, the
spotlighting of cinematographic conventions (camera zooms, actions occurring out
of frame) to imply the existence of a narrative that is actually rarely present. Snow’s
work often relies the on viewer’s analysis of the process and mechanisms involved in the
making of the work. In his filmic work, Back and Forth (1968-1969), a camera swings
back and forth in the path of a pendulum within a room. Primarily, the work emphasizes
the presence of the camera as a traveling object within the space. Its route is concrete and
predictable; its limited view of the room does not construct the space of the room any
more than the viewer is capable of placing the motion within the actual space within
which the footage is filmed. “The distension, repetition, and aggressive use of movement
[…] is an attempt to force discursive and analytic functions from the mind, thus creating
a timelessness within a temporal structure, or more exactly, a temporality ground in the
perception of space rather than in narrative.”17
In La région centrale (1970-1971), Snow once again highlights the movements of the camera by
revealing compositions of a Quebec landscape unperceivable by the human eye. The camera, 00:00:00:12
moving along various axes at different speeds, transforms the framing of the space into abstract
∋
Kracauer describes two ways of cinematically constructing reality: motion and staging.
16  Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film. Princeton University Press, 1997.
17 Taubin, Amy. “Double Visions” in Michael Snow Almost Cover to Cover. Black Dog, 2000.
shapes. With no narrative center to focus on, the interaction between the image and its frame
becomes the film’s most accentuated action. Unlike city symphony films, Snow’s work seeks to
separate the first-person immersion within the filmic space, but nevertheless imparts on the
viewer the sensation of experiencing the physical friction of movements through space.
Film and video installation artist Doug Aitken references traditional cinema primarily
through the filmically aestheticized rendition of his subject matters. One of his earliest
works, Inflection (1992), displays the footage shot from a 16mm film camera mounted
onto a rocket roaming over the landscape of a Californian suburb. The work strives to
communicate an imagined point of view, unable to be directly experienced by the human
eye – much like La région centrale. Aitken consistently looks to filmic technology as an
enabler of alternative perspectives. A later work, Diamond Sea (1997), contains the world’s
oldest desert, only referred to as Diamond Areas 1 and 2. Shot on film, scored with orchestral
music, the three-channel video installation juxtaposes the grandeur of vast landscape in
film with the sensation of social desolation. The deserted natural space also contrasts the
installation’s overt display of technology. Aitken’s design for Diamond Sea calls attention to
role of camera as both a revelatory instrument and a bridge between the out-of-reach and
the accessible space within the museum.
engulfed by a panorama of the film, or confronted by an array of screens, together
forming a field of fragmented imageries, while individually segregating elements from
the whole of the film to induce unpredictable rhythmic change. In writing about his work,
Aitken makes a direct correlation between the linearity of a filmstrip, its implication on
temporality, and his desire for a “broken screen.”
Film and video structure our experience in a linear way simply because they’re moving
images on a strip of emulsion or tape. They create a story out of everything because it’s
inherent to the medium and to the structure of the montage. But of course, we experience
time in a much more complex way. The question for me is, “how can I break through this
idea, which is reinforced constantly? How can I make time somehow collapse or expand,
so it no longer unfolds in this one narrow form?18

Aitken’s multi-channel video work challenges the temporal and spatial linearity of
traditional film by both inheriting the look of cinema and breaking apart the frame into
multiple facets. This is not unlike a new iteration of Griffith’s cross-cutting of simultaneous
actions, or Eisenstein’s purposeful collisional montage. A body of installation work,
including Electric Earth (1999), I Am Into You (2000), Blow Debris (2000), and New Ocean
(2001), conveys change and transformation in the form of narrative, character, and
landscape. To access and capture the reality of these installations, the viewer is either
00:00:00:14

Fig 7. Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967.

Image courtesy of http://www.greylodge.com 18 Birnbaum, Daniel. Doug Aitken (Contemporary Artists Series). Phaidon Press, 2001. p. 51
My Visit to Pompeii The next day, I began to investigate precisely why I was so moved. I listed several topics that have
always fascinated me and driven me to self-expression. I wrote this response in my sketchbook:

This real-life cross-section of an entire society is something that has

fascinated me since childhood. I was perpetually drawn to it with
unexplainable force. As I aged, this attraction did not subside. If anything,
it grew stronger and more complex. Even now, I am fixated on exploring
space, breaks and continuums in space, simultaneous actions within and
around spaces – the visible and invisible sense of space. I fully recognize
my passion, but rarely asked why. It’s been with me for so long. Standing
Walter Benjamin’s description of the theatrical character of the townscape against the ruins, I suddenly began to wonder – it was the first time I have
of Naples is an exact picture of the combined stage and auditorium in been immersed within a dreamscape-like arena where my usual sense of
Rear Window: Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided spatiality was challenged. It has never happened before…where I could so
into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, clearly see multiple planes of divisions simultaneously. I could visualize
window, gateway, staircase, roof are the same time stage and boxes.19 the people that used to possess these spaces moving about, all together, in
one continuous web of interspersed strings. The story of the place suddenly
The field of vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of an becomes about the inter-relationships, the energ y of transitions, as opposed
archeological excavation. 20 to any singular object. The simultaneity of actions performed by multiple
I have always harbored a deep passion for architectural cross-sections. For as long as I can
people is a form of calm rhythm.
remember, their aesthetics and design have mesmerized me. It’s a very specific interest - July 7, 2007, on the train to Cefalu
for which I previously had no rationale. In July of 2007, I traveled from through Italy,
from North to South, with a close friend, Heather McPherson, who is a painter. We began
After this reflection, projects that I have never considered personal have become quiet
to discuss the reasons behind specific aspects of our artistic passions. These discussions
intimate. My film work attempts to describe the conflict between isolation and coexistence.
eventually led to an important personal discovery…
The situation is often mundane, or at least nothing “happens.” The dramatic tension in
the narrative exists not in the subjects, but in the physical void between them.
I was walking in the ruins of Pompeii, Naples. It was late in July, during a shade-less
afternoon. Pompeii was one of the last destinations of my Italy trip.
To build a theoretical map of an architectonics as mobile as that of motion pictures,
one must use a traveling lens and make room for the sensory spatiality of film, for our
I was glad that all the artifacts were either excavated or looted, because the bareness
apprehension of space, including filmic space, occurs through an engagement with touch
of the architecture was honest and un-staged. Moving past the roofless walls, down a
and movement. Our site-seeing tour follows this intimate path of mobilized visual space,
kilometer of streets that were simultaneously anonymous and specific, layers of rooms,
“erring21” from architectural and artistic sites to moving pictures. Haptically driven,
common halls, and courtyards shifted past me. I witnessed multiples at the same time,
the atlas finds a design for filmic space within the delicate cartography of emotion, that
a strange clash of vacancy and society. The rectangles and squares in the walls formed
sentient place that exists between the map, the wall, and the screen. 22
infinite configurations of filmic compositions. It was the highlight of my year.
00:00:00:16

19 Pallasmaa: “Geometry of Terror” p. 147 21 Bruno refers to erring as straying from a path.
20 Virilio, Paul. L’horizon Negatif: Essai De Dromoscopie (Debats). Editions Galilee, 1984. p. 1 22 Bruno. P. 16
 SYNTHESIS OF
SCIENCE AND ART

2.
One shouldn’t be astonished that the cinema has always felt the natural,
unavoidable necessity to insert a ‘story’ in the reality to make it exciting
and ‘spectacular.’ All the same, it is clear that such a method evades a
Construction of direct approach to everyday reality, and suggests that it cannot be portrayed
without the intervention of fantasy or artifice. 23

Reality When film was first invented as a practical technology, it observed reality through one
angle and one composition. It was conceived as a machine that more acutely reveals
truths in the world unperceived by the human eye. Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope dissects
motion into individual moments as to offer scientific evidence for the moment when
the horse’s four legs are suspended in midair. Right from the start, film is regarded not
just as a medium that sustains movement, but as one that generates movement from the
assemblage of single moments. This concept is the springboard for decades of filmic styles
to come – the methodical and scientific assignment of images onto a continuous timeline
conveys premeditated thoughts and triggers planned sensations.

At its birth, the film camera’s role as a spectator simulates that of a theatre audience. In
theatre, actions are pantomimed and speech is exaggerated for practicality’s sake, so that
the audience member sitting at the further rows away from the stage can still understand
the gesture and the message. In a sense, the narrative is communicated through symbolic
and mimetic means. Familiarity with theatrical arts allows the audience to filter out the
exaggerations and extract the intent of these gestures, then assemble them into a story.
Beginning cinema sought to do the same. Film theorist Noel Burch calls this mode of
presentation in cinema primitivism, where the bare-bone construction of filmic reality
functions when the spectator is centered within the illusory picture at crucial moments of
action. This immersion, as defined by Burch, is “of a single space-time continuum and of
00:00:00:18

23 Zavattini, Cesare. “Some Ideas on the Cinema.” MacCann, Richard Dyer, ed. Film: A Montage of
Theories, 216-228. New York, Dutton, 1966.
the spectator as a unified subject of vision who moves from one vantage point to another
within the continuum is created by the many converging codes of representation: linear
perspective, camera ubiquity, camera movement, eye-line matching […] and so on.”24
During the period that Burch describes as primitivism – namely before the introduction
of sound film in the late 1920s, or movable camera (by dolly tracks and then by hand) –
the framing of a scene generally resembles a theatrical stage, where the film audience is
placed in front row center. In order to maintain the time-space continuum of the action,
this stationary shot persists, sometimes with small degrees of panning on a tripod, until
an important plot point in the narrative calls for the insertion of other information, such
as a text-card or a close-up. After this insert, the composition returns to the original
“master shot” as the story succinctly ends.
Beginning in the 1910s with Kuleshov, Eisenstein, and Griffith, cinema was soon able
to realize that the fixed distance and viewing perspective between the subject and the
audience can be abolished. This is where mise-en-scene takes a front seat in creatively
controlling the visual content through spatial organization, design, orientation, and
fragmentation. “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification
with the camera,” Walter Benjamin comments on the shift toward the use of cinematic
technology to break up the carefully maintained temporal and spatial continuum in early
cinema. “[C]onsequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is
that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.”25
24 Burch, Noel. N.d. Correction Please – or How We Got into Pictures.(Pamphlet accompanying film of same
name.) ____. 1978 – 1979. “Porter, or Ambivalence.” Screen 19, no. 4: 19-105.
25   Benjamin, Water. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections. Schocken, 1969. P. 228.
Fig 8. Eadweard Muybridge, Galloping Horse, 1878.
Image courtesy of http://www.digitaljournalist.org
Before diving into the techniques that accompany this shift away from cinematic
primitivism, one must keep in mind that the role that reality plays in different genres and
movements of film. In his seminal essay, written in 1967, Andre Bazin26 opposes two kinds
of filmmakers in the orchestration of the cinematic image: those that put faith in the image,
such as Russian Constructivists, and German Expressionists, Hitchcock, and filmmakers
of the French New Wave; and those that put faith in reality, such as Renoir, Antonioni,
Murnau, and Angelopoulos. In the first grouping, the image is assembled jarringly and
manipulated to communicate an intellectual and emotional message. In the second
grouping, the cinema is used to, as commented by David Bordwell, “capture the concrete
relations of people and objects knit into the seamless fabric of reality…which conveys the
filmmaker’s unique conceptions of the world.”27 Yet the two groupings of filmmaking
are not polar opposites, within the tension-packed visual compositions by Eisenstein,
imageries and rhythms reference instances of reality – and the collision resulted by each
abrupt cut certainly recalls some type of real emotional experience. Likewise, within the
canvas of seamless portrayals of reality, aberrant elements occur to set things awry in
order to direct the viewer’s attention toward specific visual and narrative threads.
This following chapter is dedicated to addressing the primary methods through which cinema
references and constructs reality with an emphasis on spatiality and temporality. The discussion
will be broken down into the production components of mise-en-scene, cinematography,
and assemblage. The second part of this chapter investigates the reality within the narrative
context as created by these components and the message that the spectator receives.
00:00:00:20
26 Bazin, Andre. “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1. University of
California Press, 2004.
27   Bordwell, David. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. University of California Press, 2005. P. 11
 This is what Bordwell means by his first point. It is also easy to see that the four functions
of successful mise-en-scene work hand-in-hand with one another. In other words,
narrative emotes, symbolism reinforces narrative (as it does in literature), and aesthetics
incites specific sensational responses.

Eisenstein’s meticulous study of montage is partnered with his detailed analysis of

cinematography, which he calls “mise-en-cadre,” or “mise-en-shot.” “Art is always
conflict, according to its methodology” and “cinematography is, first and foremost,
Mise-en-scene montage.”30 The conflict, which Eisenstein extensively breaks up into several categories
(which will be addressed later in this chapter) entail the relationship formed between
images, or frames of a film. Instead of seeing each image as placed laterally in relation
Expanding from François Truffaut’s definition, Bordwell outlines “mise-en-scene” as
to one another, Eisenstein perceives one as on top of the other. Motion emerges from this
setting, lighting, costume, makeup and performance within the shot.28 These elements
juxtaposition. By motion, Eisenstein does not simply mean the physical act of moving
when combined form the visual style of the film. They serve four main purposes:
through space, but also emotional and intellectual movements, which establish the
tonality and narrative content of the film. These movements, working symbiotically
1. To denote a fictional or non-fictional realm of actions, agents, and circumstances (the
within the film frame, construct reality in all aspects that relate to the human experience.
narrative)
This is “the reason for the phenomenon of spatial depth, in the optical superimposition of
2. To generate expressive qualities – to “infect viewers with strong feelings”29
two planes [...]. From the superimposition of two elements of the same dimension always
3. To yield more abstract, conceptual meanings – symbolism
arises a new, higher dimension.”31 The content within the frame is analyzed in both a
4. To work somewhat on its own – functioning decoratively
painterly (form-oriented) and intellectual (content-oriented) fashion.
Together, the elements within a frame construct the “world” of the film. While it is most
likely referential of reality in appearance – for example: earthy landscapes, identifiable
architecture, illuminations that imply sunlight or practical lighting, class-appropriate
clothing, non-pantomimic acting, and so on – it is also a completely believable unique
entity. An extreme example is Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), where every visual element
of the film helps to establish a culture very removed from an ordinary life on earth. Right
from the start, the film announces that it takes place “in a galaxy far, far away.” This
statement not only sets the fantastic tone for the trilogy, but also immediately suspends
the audience’s belief in establishing that the visual uniqueness throughout the film is not
unusual or artificial to the civilization it seeks to create. Hence, the visual content within
the film is compatible with the parameters set for the reality within the film. In addition,
while this faraway galaxy is a departure from life on earth, the behavior and sociality of
its inhabitants, as shown through the performance, is significantly comparable to that of
earth. Uniformity of the mise-en-scene is what ultimately makes this separation possible.
30   Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Harvest Books, 1969. 00:00:00:22
31 Ibid. P. 49
Fig 9. Left, F.W. Murnau, The Last Laugh, 1924.
Image courtesy of Kino Video.
Fig 10. Center, F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, 1922.
Image courtesy of Kino Video.
28  Ibid. P. 16 Fig 11. Right, F.W. Murnau, Sunrise, 1927.
29  Ibid. P. 34 Image courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

Cinematography
There are two important qualities that define cinematography:
1. Subconsciously or consciously, it is a decision
2. It is motivated by the text of the film.
Cinematography is the visual framework through which the filmmaker interprets and
expresses events, which, unless it is a purely abstract idea, possesses temporal, spatial, and
emotional continuity. It is clear why the movement of a camera, the granularity of the
film stock, and the depiction of the image through the choice of lens and focal length – all
the attributes that make up cinematography – work to create motion and spatiality in the
same fashion, if not collaboratively, with assemblage or montage.
To more closely investigate how mise-en-scene and cinematography contribute to the
construction of reality, whether it is spatial, textual, social, or aesthetic, I will identify
their function within several stylistically distinctive films that heavily employ space as
either a metaphor or a direct component of their text. This theoretical analysis serves to
explicate both the referential aspect and the point of departure in my own work.
Two entirely different directions of filmmaking surfaced in Germany during the 1920s,
particularly in relation to their dissimilarities in mise-en-scene. Robert Wiene’s most
notable work, Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), is characterized by sets painted with
shadows, corridors, and light. In conjunction with its stylistic title cards and cryptic
storyline, Caligari’s mise-en-scene is overtly fabricated and non-representational. While
there is no spatial realism in Caligari, the film implies depth and apertures on blatantly flat
planes, a process that calls attention to the artifice of film as a two-dimensional projection.
Fig 12. Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, 1941.
Image courtesy of Warner Home Video.
After Nosferatu (1922), F.W. Murnau’s films, albeit remaining expressive and surreal, take
a realistic turn. The success of The Last Laugh (1924) – which will be discussed further for
its cinematographic significance – leads to Sunrise (1927), a film that visually articulates
the experience of travel through the imitation of realistic rural and urban landscapes.
During a dramatic narrative sequence, the film’s protagonists transition from a rural
town into the city center via a train. The moving vehicle enables continuous visibility of
changing exterior – a trope from beginning cinema, and undoubtedly resonant with the
urban movement mentality of its time. With this staging, Murnau not only addresses the
spatial reality and the world of Sunrise, but also juxtaposes the character development with
the setting, emphasizing the importance of this architectural shift in the narrative. This
is how visual information is both passive and active: the landscapes around the train serve
both as background information and analogize the emotional change that the characters
are about to experience in Sunrise’s narrative arc.
Going back to The Last Laugh, the relationship between mise-en-scene and cinematography
plays a crucial part in the film’s narrative. The affluent city of Berlin rises over its
protagonist, glorifying his role as a proud hotel porter and diminishing his status when
he is emotionally devastated by his demotion to a janitor. To communicate the diminutive
spatiality that accompanies the character’s psychological low point, two shots take place:
1. The physical gesture of buildings falling over the porter, as if they are
anthropomorphized to the role of villains. This is what Eisenstein refers to as
conflict between matter and its spatial nature – which is achieved by the distortion
of the lens.
2. The placement of the porter to the lower right corner of the frame – the least
noticeable area of the composition – removes his power over the situation.
Here, the construction of space goes beyond addressing the certain cultural or geographical
identity of Berlin. The film’s spatiality is not just the architecture that contains actions,
but the active tension between the environment and character. Mise-en-scene and the
camera activate this psychology.
The four-minute opening shot in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) is a signature example
of how the realist director “dramatizes film space.”32 As a wideshot, the moving composition
explores the US-Mexico border with deep focus and clarity. The space is depicted concretely,33
since geographies of both the border and the town play important parts in the narrative.
Within the space framed by this shot, layers of actions take place, some setting cultural
00:00:01:00
32  Bordwell. P. 172
33 In fact, Welles demands that the film be shot in a “real space” as opposed to a film set.
context, some the noir aesthetics that resonates throughout Welles’ work, some establishing
moral identification for the male protagonist, and some building up the narrative plot point
that is about to take place – the explosion that interrupts the shot.
Actions are framed within and outside of the film frame; the continuity of the shot
reinforces the idea that narrative extends beyond the visible realm. The motion of the
camera describes Eisenstein’s third conflict of motives: the projection of conflict into space,
a zig-zag movement traveling through space. While the camera work orients the viewer
within the world of Touch of Evil, the mise-en-scene implies the presence of facts yet to be
revealed, i.e., a lurking danger that sets the world off-balance, a common theme of Film
Noir. As the audience, we are now keyed into the multi-layering of action and space.
Welles employs deep focus shots constantly to fill his framing with information. The slow
dolly-ing back from the snow in Citizen Kane (1941) is another famous example. A young
Charles Foster Kane playing in the snow is framed by the window, placed center screen
to emphasize his importance and entrapment, the bleak interior of the Foster residence
counterbalances the blissful child’s play, while the actual dialogue exchange takes place in
the foreground. In one shot, Welles collapses three spaces into one in order to create conflict.
The emotional experience of moving through this film space also increases in tension.
The works of Italian Neorealistic (and later) New Wave Director, Michelangelo Antonioni,
challenge the way of seeing the environment by stripping away dramatic elements,
cinematic style, and the artifice of studio films. La Notte (1961), for example, is filmed with
documentary aesthetics. The visual tension is subtly conveyed through one’s prolonged
observation of the mise-en-scene. Blowup (1966) takes an alternate approach through using
the photographic medium as a metaphor for the cinematic construction of spatial reality,
which also translates into the construction of truth in the narrative. After all, what is
Fig 13. Chris Welsby, Windmill II, 1973.
Image courtesy British Film Institute.
revealed by the camera is what informs the reality of the situation; what is hidden is only
inferred by the visible, and is otherwise non-existent, as if it never happened. Antonioni
describes that his goal for Blowup is to “question ‘the reality of our experience,’” and that
one of the film’s main themes is “to see or not to see the correct value of things.”34
Events hidden from the eye of a camera are either non-existent or presumed to have taken
place in an unexplored space, which is nevertheless existent within the spatial reality of
the film. In other words, what Antinioni means by questioning the reality of experience
is for the viewer to decide between these two possibilities implied by this act of obscuring.
Three scenes in Blowup demonstrate the method of its spatial construction. In the park,
when Thomas the photographer first encounters a man and a woman having an affair,
his visual perception is driven by the couple’s actions. With the couple situated in the
center of his line of vision, he captures the moment with his camera, casting both the
couple’s behaviors and the physical structure of the park into the mise-en-scene. In the
second scene, these fragmented images are printed and arranged to recreate the physical
reality of the park. What is noteworthy of this assemblage is the motion that motivates
Thomas to begin this endeavor – the woman’s eyeline. Her gaze extends the space beyond
the camera that frames her in a two-dimensional plane. This framing informs the
photographer (and the film viewer) of a counter-action that occurs opposite her gaze. This
is the Eisensteinian “conflict between viewpoints,” which is directed by camera angles35.
A frequently used convention is the “shot-reverse-shot,” which constructs a causal
relationship between shot A and B purely by placing one after another in editing. Before
revealing the subject of her gaze, space is constructed outside of the frame. Antonioni
asks us to have faith in our speculation about a reality that is more often deduced than
revealed. This is what the film’s final scene is about: believing in a reality separate from
the norm through piecing together dialogical actions.
00:00:01:02
34 “E nato a Londra ma non e un film ingelese,” from Corriere della Sera, 12 February 1982. Translated by
Allison Cooper.
35  Eisenstein. P. 54.
Film and video artist Chris Welsby, often described as a British Structuralist filmmaker,
illustrates this shot-reverse-shot causal effect with Windmill (1973). In Windmill, a mirrorized
windmill is placed in close proximity to a 16mm film camera. The camera is set on a tripod
situated in a park. As the windmill rotates in response to wind flow, three layers of spaces
are recorded by the film: the deep space beyond the windmill (the park), the space behind
the camera reflected by the mirrors, and the in-between space, the visual plane that appears
as a merging of the abstract flashes of colors and light captured by the quick movements of
windmill, acting almost as a camera shutter that both obscures and reveals. The work is a
manifestation of the editing process and its function to cohere and construct spatiality.

Being, says Heidegger, is being-in-the-world. When David senses the end

(although probably not even he himself is sure of it), he is no longer in the
world. The world is outside the window.36

– Michelangelo Antonioni, in response to the end shot of The Passenger.

The last shot of The Passenger (1975) is one of most theorized moments in Antonioni’s
work. Spanning seven minutes, the shot begins from within protagonist David Locke’s
hotel room, moves steadily out the gated window, pans over that empty arena outside the
hotel, and finally turns around so that the window is now in its view and we are now
looking inside at Locke, dead. This is done in one long take with no edits. Like his other
work, The Passenger unravels slowly and naturally, without dramatic high points, music,
or even extensive dialogue. Natural and man-made architectures, which demarcate the
expanse and confines of physical space, are heavily explored by the camera. In slow, wide
compositions, Antonioni prolongs the process of staging, forcing the audience to speculate
on the scene’s purpose. The architectural mise-en-scene, in this context, removes visual
cues indicative of drama by obscuring the actions – to “dedramatize” the situation, as
Bordwell puts it. What is significant about this seven-minute shot is its preservation of
temporal continuity, and in turn spatial continuity. Throughout the entire film, Locke
is a character out of place, yet shaped by his foreign environment. By integrating the
interior of Locke’s world with the exterior environment with which he cannot connect,
Antonioni stresses the multilayered nature of space.

00:00:01:04

Fig 14. Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger, 1975.

36 “Il mondo e fuori dalla finestra,” in Filmcritica 252, March 1975. Translated by Dana Renga. Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
STRUCTURAL
FRAGMENTATION IN
CINEMATIC SPACE:
CINEMATOGRAPHY &
MONTAGE
The isolated shot is not even a small fragment of cinema; it is only raw
material, a fragment of the real world. Only by montage can one pass from
photography to cinema, from slavish copy to art. Broadly defined, montage
is quite simply inseparable from the composition of the work itself.37
Drawing from the beginning of this thesis, Gilles Deleuze expresses in his writing
“Cinema 1: The Movement-Image” that cinema depicts motion as a unity of multiplicity.
Not only does sequence of shots describe an action, it places us, the audience, within
motion to provide a sense of perspective and time. Deleuze goes on to describe two types
of mobility: the mobility of the action, and the mobility of the camera, which are both
embedded into the nature of shots. As previously discussed in this chapter, shots are
placed within the mise-en-scene, which is given form by editing and by cinematography.
Yet, it is the assemblage of shots that orients the action. In other words, visual editing
is capable of fragmenting and reconfiguring filmed or staged physical space into a new
space that conveys a deliberate emotional and intellectual message.
In his influential writing, “The Production of Space,” French philosopher Henri Lefebvre
describes that space is socially constructed in a fashion comparable to Eisenstein’s
explanation of the role conflict and Deleuze’s emphasis on multiplicity. “The form
of social space is encounter, assembly, simultaneity.38” Lefebvre includes everything
there is in space as what creates space, objects, movements, and signs. “Natural space
juxtaposes – and thus disperses: it puts places and that which occupies them side by side.
It particularizes. By contrast, social space implies actual or potential assembly at a single
point, or around that point.” In this light, the process of assembling fragments of space
as captured by film into a sequence, providing an implicit movement and convergence of
perspectives, accumulates and transforms the natural space into a social space.
37  R. Barthes. In Communications, no. 4, 1964 (special issue: “Recherches semiologiques”). p. 47
38  Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1991. p. 101
Motion exists in space. As it drives through space, it possesses a certain kind of rhythm,
a temporality. This driving force is the mobility of the action within the mise-en-scene.
Since montage is the superimposition of one image onto the next, a second motion arises
out of the change between the two images. “The concept of the moving (time-consuming)
image arises from the superimposition – or counterpoint – of two differing immobile
images.”39 This is a phenomenological projection of motion. Above and beyond creating
emotional undertones and addressing the orientation of one’s movement through film
space, the rhythm formed by visual conflict is, at its best, an intellectual montage.
“Composition takes the structural elements of the portrayed phenomena and from these
composes its canon for building the containing work...In doing this composition actually
takes such elements, first of all, from the structure of the emotional behavior of man,
joined with the experienced content of this or that portrayed phenomenon.”40
The intellectual message of this type of montage is integral to the narrative. Instead of
directly addressing the textual components and hard facts of the story, the phenomenological
approach of intellectual montage is to reference the mental experience simulated by
the design of an assemblage of shots, as to contextualize the actual narrative. Through
this contextualization, the relationship between space and its subjects becomes more
complex. A quick illustration: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) uses interspersed cutting of
expositional visuals and stylized graphics to weave together a simultaneously anxious and
narrative experience. This is how the film appears at a glance. Upon deeper examination,
one can easily identify the thematic and structural emphasis on the staircase of the church
– where the “accidental” fall of the female protagonist proceeds to haunt James Stewart’s
Detective Ferguson for the rest of the film – as a space whose presence resonates throughout
00:00:01:06
39  Eisenstein. P. 53.
40  Eisenstein. P. 151.
Fig 15. Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window, 1954.
Image courtesy of Universal Home Entertainment.
the entire film. Vertigo’s main graphic, spiraling out of control, is a good example where
Hitchcock uses collisional montage to infer the desired phenomenological experience
associated with the staircase (its association with vertigo, repetition and transition), and
in turn situates the audience in a certain direction of narrative. We know that the staircase
is physically threatening to the protagonist, who has vertigo. We understand that the act
of looking down the staircase induces neurosis as it recalls tragic memories, triggering
conflict between matter and its spatial nature (the distortion of the lens when the character
looks downward41), but most significantly, we also, through Hitchcock’s rather abstract
assemblage and production of spatiality, expect the staircase to be a vital part of the
resolution. From this case, we can see how the symbiotic connection between assemblage/
editing, cinematography, and mise-en-scene is crucial to what, in my introduction, Jean-
Louis Baudry referred to as “the impression of reality”.

00:00:01:08

41 The shot is achieved by a simultaneous zooming in and moving away from the object, so that the
relative sizes of the foreground object and the background constantly change – achieving a frenzied,
dream-like visual effect. Often referred to as the “Vertigo Shot.”
Fig 16. Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo, 1958.
Image courtesy of Universal Home Entertainment.
5/4
Moving along with the history of space, cinema defines itself as an
architectural practice. It is an art form of the street, an agent in the
building of city views. The landscape of the city ends up interacting closely
with filmic representations, and to this extent, the streetscape is as much a
filmic ‘construction’ as it is an architectural one.42

5/4 43 uses an infinitely rising staircase to demarcate and map a physical continuum. From
a visual stance, each flight of stairs is as nondescript as the next. During the six-minute
loop, the central character continuously walks upstairs to imply that the path is infinite.
While her uninterrupted motion cuts through this spiraling physical construct, actions
around her take place in loops with varying lengths. For example, a man waits next to
his fiancée’s door every four flights of stairs on a loop. Another woman taking her dog for
a walk descends in a five-flight loop, thus intersecting with the man at different points
of her descent during each loop. Each character occupies separate temporal continuums
like different durations of melodic ostinatos in a musical composition44. Their spatial
occupation, in turn, become individualized and isolated, despite the sharing of the
stairwell. This work visualizes the multi-layered quality of time as defined by actions in
space using film and architecture as means of organization into a logical narrative.

This work is first conceived to take place in a circular corridor. Soon, because of the natural
spiraling architecture of a staircase, the narrative and characters are designed to fit its
structure instead.

The metaphorical connection between the different layers of temporalities and the narrative
makes the construction of a linear script difficult. To clarify the visual dynamic of the screen
space (to facilitate storyboarding), a chart is constructed to display where any character is
at any time – with minutes spanning the x-axis, and flights of steps (20 being the end of one 00:00:01:12
loop) spanning of y-axis.

42 Bruno. P. 27.
43  Denotes the musical time signature that is five beats per measure, one beat being one quarter note.
44 Sets of continuous variations in a musical composition.
In this chart, the sociality within the film space is excavated from what the camera does
not reveal, as continuity of space and time is assured. From a secondary glance, it is
apparent how the structure of the work takes after a musical composition, where multiple
partials of frequencies and melodic components are assembled in changing but ordered
fashion. The finished composition is usually not overtly structural, but its elements repeat
enough to convey their own sets of behaviors. The single diagonal that travels up to the
upper right corner indicate both the protagonist’s presence and the eye of the camera. The
dog and its owner, demarcated by downward-pointing diagonal lines, are deliberately
arranged to occupy five flights of stairs, as to generate varied interactions with the camera
(protagonist) each time in passing. With this scientific blueprint of a rather abstract
conceit, my intended central intellectual experience of viewing 5/4 is the mental act of
piecing together spatiality and narrative through implicative cinematic and performed
gestures. The framing of each shot provides visual cues to aid to this endeavor.

In 5/4, the organization of space and action is also likened to the metric montage of
organization discussed by Eisenstein, in that the “realization is in the repetition of
formula-driven measures.”45 Metric montage, according to Eisenstein, differs from
rhythmic montage in its adherence to concrete mathematical divisions of time. The
musical composition is written so that each chord change coincides with the crossing
of one more flight of steps. Despite the different durations of each chord, the implied
temporal organization of a musical score reinforces a deliberated mathematical method
of spatial organization. The objectification of both the physical environment and the
fleeting intersections between paths of motion accentuate the scientific methodology
behind the process of making the work, emphasizing its formative aspects, removing it
from the representational cinematic approach defined by Kracauer.

We exist in separate layers of reality, prescribed by our own sense of space, time, and thus
actions. To say that we perceive our coexistence because we occupy the same physical
space is negligent of the social interactions that signify the intersection of our actions.
The changing manners of interactions between the protagonist and the surrounding
characters demonstrates the multilayered quality of time and space theoretically
discussed above. On a surface level, the loop structure forms permutations of intersecting
actions. Taking advantage of the spectator’s familiarity of film narrative tropes, these
intersections generate escalating expectations, investment in characters, and build an
ascending story arc that takes after traditional cinema. From a metaphysical angle,
5/4 questions the social nature of our lifestyles as dictated by routines – a built-in,
programmed personal sense of time – our unique metronomes.
00:00:01:14

45   Eisenstein. P. 72
Fig 17. Script, 5/4, 2007.
Fig 18. Next spread, sequential shots, 5/4, 2007.
00:00:01:16
THE WATER
The Water is a video installation that comprises of three simultaneous video projections
onto three surfaces within an unlit, empty room. The central projection occupies the
width of the room and faces the other two projections, laid out side by side on the opposite
wall. Between these two projections is a five-foot gap that accommodates entrance
into the viewing space. Together, the videos convey a looped narrative of a character’s
exploration of this physical space, full of straying paths, visual motifs, and sounds that
“dimensionalize” this projected environment.
The two walls that accommodate the side projections are placed diagonally. As the viewer
walks past the initial five-foot gap, the walls part to suggest of entrance into physical
space separate from the rest of the exhibition. The space is consciously configured this
way to bring awareness to the gap’s transitional characteristics, that it is a conflux of
ingress and egress. In other words, it both invites the viewer to step into an alternate
cinematic space and calls upon the film’s character to exit the cinematic space within
which she exists. Lastly, the inability to perceive all three projections simultaneously –
where the film is constantly experienced both directly and in periphery – induces a sense
of visual fragmentation and ambiguity also present within the narrative.
In the central screen, filmed cinematically widescreen, the protagonist is shown walking
toward the viewer, although her eyes never cross the lens. She is motivated by the sound
of water, which grows louder as she steps downhill. The water, as indicated also by the
title, is the narrative goal and her final destination.
The sound distribution and music are designed to reinforce the thematic link between the
cinematic space and the narrative. The sound of water is positioned at the entrance point,
which is situated behind the viewer as she walks into the space, and beyond the character’s
reach. Ambient and footstep sounds pan across the viewing space, transforming the
movement-image into action in space.
The two projections facing the central image display what appears to be the character’s
point-of-view, inferring to film’s function as a revelatory medium. As she traverses through
the forest, this set of moving images informs her of her location, but simultaneously
disorients her with their frantic movements and disjunction. At a glance, the whole of the
piece seems straightforward – but it is precisely the impression of realism that is used to
confuse the understanding of the work’s spatiality. When juxtaposing the film’s natural
space into the natural space of the installation, the positioning of the three projections
also implies that the character is walking toward the gap that leads to the outside world.
The character uses the woods’ architectural makeup (as provided by the surrounding
projections) as visual cues in an endless attempt to solve the labyrinth. The term labyrinth
is used here to imply both some type of organized structure inherent in the forest and the
motion of traveling in circles. What the viewer does not notice at first is that the three
projections loop seamlessly at different intervals, hence creating new spaces as the character
wanders on, desperately trying to break the labyrinth. Through her journey, forest’s
anonymity instigates confusion and struggle. As we the viewer experience the installation,
we too constantly question our construction of the forest’s geometry. After some period
of disorientation, the character’s implied goal changes from trying to find the water to
trying to locate herself within the infrastructure of the environment constructed by the
assemblage of shots amongst the three screens. This constant second-guessing challenges
the traditional sense of film space shown on a solely two-dimensional plane. With two
additional moving images protruding toward and wrapping around the spectator, the
physical relationship between the projection and the receptor is reconsidered.
In terms of referencing the conventions of cinema, The Water draws from the impression
of space in filmic projection and the idea of duration in filmic narrative. Revealing visual
clues that strive to complete the construction of physical space, in a way “sculpting space,”
the jumpy editing amongst the three screens, as well as within each screen, sculpts
time to bring awareness to the extended temporality that accompanies the experience
of being lost. This deliberate emphasis on editorial structure parallels Stan Douglas’
execution in Win, Place or Show (1998) and Suspiria (2002-2003) where, through carefully
programmed durations of edits, intellectual impressions that contextualize the event as
well as frame the emotional experience, are materialized in spectatorship. The work also
aesthetically echoes Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s filmic installation, The Wind (2006), where the
narrative is broken down into fragmented segments, and as a result distort time and
causal relationship from one action to the next.
The work aims to dispute the viewer’s impression of the three-dimensional space
as implied by the various conventions in traditional cinema. In a subconscious and
00:00:01:18
automatic effort to orient oneself within the work’s constructed real space, an ideological
and physical exchange takes place between the viewer and the screen(s), much akin to
that of cinematic spectatorship, which is constantly immersive.
 00:00:01:20

Fig 19. The Water, installation visualization 2008.

 00:00:01:22

Fig 20. Left top, installation views, The Water, 2008.

Fig 21. Left bottom, narrative brainstorm, The Water, 2008.
Fig 22. Above, scenario maps, The Water, 2008.
 THE BICYCLE
CAMERA

Part 1
To examine the communicative nature and intricate balance between realistic portrayal
and emotive interpretation of action in space, my work, The Bicycle Camera, borrows the
spectator’s preexisting visual impression of the road as viewed from a moving bicycle
as a basis for contrast to a manipulated film that depicts the action. (We all have a fixed
impression of how quickly our surroundings pass us by as we bike down a street.)

To briefly describe the conceived technical construction of the central mechanism, a gear
is positioned next to the front wheel of the bicycle as well as a 16mm film camera mounted
directly on top of the wheel. As the wheel rotates, its spokes drive the gear forward, which
in turn flicks the shutter of the camera, one frame at a time. The faster the wheel rotates, the
more frames per second is exposed onto the film. Playback of this footage reverses the speed
of travel during filming - as portions where the bicycle moves at a faster pace are slowed
down by the higher number frames exposed, and slow portions quickened by the lack of
frames. The relationship between the speed and action of biking is inverted. In a sense, the
physical continuum of the path traveled becomes the only constant in dictating film’s visual
component. No matter how fast or slow the bicycle moves, the same amount of imagery
is recorded. Additionally, only surrounding actions can reveal this distortion of time and
space, since otherwise it only seems that the revolution per second remains unchanged.

When we enter an environment, we cut into it with momentum and force. While we do
not make direct contact with the objects around us, a frictional impulse emerges between
our surrounding objects (and life forms) and ourselves. I wish to document a variety of
urban and rural landscapes with this mechanism, and as a result both accentuate and

00:00:02:00
 time becomes distorted (inverted relationship to speed during playback)

mediate this universally physical and psychological response. As film originates as a cinematic organization of space can be removed through this return from projected form
contemporary to and a product of industrialization and mobility, it is the most effective to physical form. If the spectator is able to project significance of physical space onto film’s
format for generating discussion of the two topics. ephemeral space, what level of physical detail is retained or added? In regards to both the
architecturally or geographically defined and the more abstract, what is the difference
The material chosen to create this work is celluloid film for two main reasons. One, I between spectatorial spatial reality – which exists solely in the mind – and the spatial
want to emphasize the direct linkage between the motion that characterizes the film reality represented by the film in selected bits and parts as images?
medium and the application of transportation. The two technologies exist hand in hand,
and it is most appropriate to have one quite literally drive the other. Two, the filmstrip,
too, is a path, an unbroken continuum that maps out a space.
Part II
To seek an answer to the question of the reinstatement of the physical, The Bicycle Camera
sprouts into its second phase. After filming the physical space of Providence with the
The film belongs in the genre of a “city symphony,” and like films by Dziga Vertov,
modified camera, the footage is projected back onto the road via a bicycle-driven projector.
René Clair, Walter Ruttman, Sheeler, and Strand, simulates our experience within
The projector is wired to the bicycle similarly to the camera, and all the increments are
a physical space by mimicking the visual transformation of the city landscape during
carried over from the first to the second phase. Since the physical continuum of the
travel. Perhaps more significantly, like Russian Constructivist and Propaganda films, this
path traveled is the constant, a continuously moving and changing cityscape is projected
work approaches the documentary of reality with the attitude to emote and challenge.
back onto three-dimensional architecture in the appearance of its original presence. In
My perpetration is enabled by a change of the camera motor technology as opposed to
a sense, one physical space is translated, through the mode of film, onto another physical
a scripted narrative. The narrative takes place in the city of Providence, Rhode Island,
space. This phase signifies my gesture of physical reinstatement through a quite literal
where a diverse group of cityscapes are lumped together into close proximity. Within
means of projecting back, and more extensively explores the multilayered quality of
the span of twenty minutes, a bicyclist is likely to encounter rich suburbs, universities,
physical and social space. The actual action exerted for this projecting back also conveys
local town stores, grand hotels, shopping malls, boutiques, bridges and waterways, an
the active effort exerted by the spectator while creating meaning from a film.
abandoned downtown, and industrial developments. Such anthropological variance
offers opportunities for a dramatic arch, which furthers my endeavor to embed emotional
The documentary reference in this work invites the spectator to project her understanding
meaning into the activity of travel through the film medium.
of that physical reality back at the film in order to comprehend its narrative. The
spectator’s projection ultimately leads to my attempt to reinstate physical significance
Obviously, the reality of the work is loyally representational of its counterpart reality
into the transient filmic medium. The distance between architectural organization of
outside of film. As a result, the spectator is invited to project her understanding of that
space and cinematic organization of space can be removed through this return from
physical reality back at the film in order to comprehend its narrative. The spectator’s
projected form to physical form. 00:00:02:02
projection ultimately leads to my attempt to reinstate physical significance into the
transient film medium. The distance between architectural organization of space and

Fig 23. Documentation of filming process, The Bicycle Camera, 2007. Fig 24. Sketch exploring the inverted relationship between speed and distance for The Bicycle Camera, 2007.

“At the moment I’m fully conscious of my every step being recorded by the
camera and the fact that I need to speak of my steps. These first maybe
ten steps are in complete camera consciousness. I think at this pothole
here I’m ready to switch into just walking and not acting…so for the
next ten steps to this series of cracks on the road and this breeze of wind
against my face I’ll recognize that the house next to you is for rent.”
He crosses Brown Street and approaches the fence that outlines a field.
“I’m gonna cross this fence now that allows entry to Hope High School…
and it surprisingly looks more like a fall day today than a spring day. I
remember when we played football here…I remember that there’s an
entrance in the fence right here, here it is.”
He crawls in.
“And here I am…at the home plate. And you know, I don’t think I’ve played
baseball in my entire life…I’ve never actually stood on a baseball diamond.
I’m not even sure where one’d stand in relation to the base. And the ball would
come like this, and I’d swing and hit. That was not a very good one. That
was a foul ball, maybe? Not growing up in this country it was not part of my
experience.. Like, growing up playing baseball, little league, maybe? I don’t
even know what to do. I think right-handed is more sure-footed, right?”
He stands over the diamond, pretends a ball is coming. He swings. His body
spins around fully.
“And the pitch is coming, and I’m an ATHLETE!!”
Fig 25. Transpositions: Nathaniel, 2008.
TRANSPOSITIONS
Transpositions is a one-channel video that presents the journey of four people walking
through an open field. Each walk is filmed in one continuous hand-held shot to reinforce
its spatial and temporal continuity. Instead of implementing a script, each person is given
three simple directions that vaguely structure the performance:
1. Your goal is to traverse from one end of the field to the other.
2. You should speak instructively and descriptively about your walk, as anything you say
will inform the following walker of the right course of action during their travel.
3. You should not consciously ignore the presence of the camera. As in, you are allowed to
acknowledge the gaze of the lens and make visual interactions with it.
After the first walk, the audio information of the recorded footage is passed onto the
following walker, who is told to “respond” to what is said about the journey. The deliberate
choice of the transitive verb “respond” leaves room to explore the relationship between
the performers, who are familiar with one another on a personal basis. The performers
are given the freedom to connect the fragments of verbal information with the various
impressions associated with the instructor, whether it is a specific past experience or an
assumption based on personality.
The title of the piece is derived from the process of translating one space to another, one
movement to another, and one impression to another. The repeating element from one
segment to the next is the action of traversing an unchanging space. As the route of the
travel transforms based on a performer’s biased interpretation of instructions, the spatial
reality that is understood by the previous traveler becomes reconfigured. In this sense, the
spatiality that is formed by movement becomes an extended metaphor for the reconfigured
“narrative,” and vice versa. From a Structuralist standpoint, this work is my attempt to
address the infinite amount of angles one can use to perceive and interact with a natural
00:00:02:04
space. Through the cross-examination between each film segment, not only does the space
become more explored, but also the interrelationships between the four travelers.
 “I guess I’m supposed to respond to Nathaniel, though.
He talked about Art, and he talked about baseball, and he talked about
leaves and seasons. But the thing that was more striking when I was
listening to him were the things that were happening around.”

“This bench is missing a seat. But I guess you can sit on it.”

She sits down. It’s cold. She tucks in her hands.

“How do I know when I’m done. How do I know when I got there?”

Merging the genres of documentary and improvisational performance, the characters

are not directed to act as someone else, although a transformation from a non-actor to a
performer takes place during filming, as the individual is subject to both the examination
of the camera and the next traveler. Utterances are made with the intent of a specific
listener, personal details are mediated both by the consciousness of a public audience and
tailored for a familiar individual with certain predispositions. As the four performers
are not formerly trained in acting, their transformation is unnatural and conspicuous.
This, too, adds to the suspicion of artifice when constructing truth in film spectatorship
– a salient topic of discussion in the documentary genre.

00:00:02:06

Fig 26. Transpositions: Nathaniel, 2008.

 ICE
APARTMENT
In The Ice Apartment, the counterbalance between the mundane and the dramatic once
again enters my filmic exploration. The installation conveys a situation between four
co-inhabitants of a square room. These four figures, three women and one man, are
aware of one another’s physical presence, but do not commit themselves to any true
communicative exchange. As if they exist in separate spaces, they are distilled within
self-centered motions that repeat for an indefinite amount of time.

This situation is shot from four different angles to establish the physical presence of the
room. The four-sided video is then translated via projection onto a four-sided miniature
room made of ice walls. In the dark, this ice room is illuminated by the blue-green light
emitted by the projectors. Depending on the surface texture of each ice wall, the video
image either floats on the outside, or appears trapped within the 5-inch thick material.
The video playback is looped to express the unchanging dynamic of the characters’
relationships, as well as the tension that lies dormant under their lack of interaction.

It is my intent to incorporate the material and thematic attributes of ice into the mise-en-
scene of the film. As a physical object, the ice serves both as a projection surface and as a
substantial three-dimensional object that seemingly contains the visual content (which
provides it with palpability). Aesthetically, its refractions and luminosity spotlight the
mundane event. Tonally, its temperature and inconsistency become a metaphor for the
fragile and unstable relationships present within the environment. The four faces of the
ice room simulate theatrical staging – flat, uni-planer perspectives where the characters
are placed so that their actions are completely visible to the viewer. When juxtaposed onto
the ice, however, the images are partially obscured by material incongruousness, which
forces the viewer to constantly seek a better angle at understanding what is going on.
This interactive element of the work adds complexity to the spatiality within the film,
drawing emphasis to the fact that space is created through motion, or the motion created
00:00:02:08
by the association between images.

Fig 27. Top, Ice Apartment, Film, 2007.

Fig 28. Bottom, Ice Apartment, Installation View, 2007.
Body
Landscapes
Body Landscapes is a satirical abstract narrative film. The prevailing theme – hair as
landscapes – ties twelve segments of short films together to form a continuous emotional
arc, a journey through landscapes. Using extreme close-up photography of various
bodies of hair, dramatic lighting, and special effects that simulate natural phenomena,
the subject matter is de-contextualized from its cultural associations, and inserted into
a new setting often aggrandized in documentary filmmaking. While the film displays a
fair amount of invention and manipulation on a whimsical level, the cinematography
aims to make the mundane subject matter as beautiful as possible - in light of nature
documentary. The soundtrack-esque musical score juxtaposed with the imagery creates
a melodramatic undertone that is simultaneously affecting and peculiarly out of place.

Body Landscapes explores the artifice and irony of emotions present in the context of
heavily decorative cinematic interpretation of reality. The excess use of extreme close-
ups responds to filmic dramatization through aesthetics’ formative techniques alone. In
Gary Hill’s Inasmuch As It Is Always Taking Place (1990), the technology – the framing by
the television – is the agent of fragmentation that extracts textual meaning out of the
body. Body Landscapes seeks to extract the thematic meaning instead. With the grandiose
gesture of its orchestral score, high-definition recording format, and an assemblage that
rises to a heroic climax, the film temporarily removes the stigmatized role of the subject
and transforms the imagery into purely shapes, forms, and colors. Drawing from filmic
compositions by Stan Brakhage, the work also takes on the form of an abstract montage,
taking on the identity of visual music by using a de-contextualized graphical palette.

00:00:02:10

Fig 29. Body Landscapes, 2007.

 00:00:02:12

Fig 30. Composition timeline and corresponding scenes, Body Landscapes, 2007.

Fig 31, 32. Left & Above,Captured, 2008.
Captured
Looking at my body of work, I regard Captured, my most recent one-channel video, as a point
of change. For the first time, I place myself within the frame of this fifteen-minute film as
the one and only character. In doing so, I consciously pluck myself away from the symbiosis
that I usually maintain with the camera mechanism. My role within the work shifts from
being synonymous with the camera to the opposition and the subject of examination.
The set of actions in Captured is simple: I, the filmmaker/film artist/video artist, box
the camera as an equally capable opponent. As I attack my opponent, I am also on my
guard, anticipating a return. Eventually, I am enervated by my actions and physically
forced to stop the match.
The idea for Captured sprouts from a brief conversation about particularly grotesque (yet
simultaneously beautiful) sports photography of boxing matches. The camera’s capacity
to distill incredibly imperceptible details in fast movements astounds the spectator, despite
the reality of the movements always being present. This connects back to my discussion
about film as a revelatory medium at the time of its first proliferation. Yet this ability to
reveal reality beyond what the human eye can see is also frequently used to dramatize
an event – to bring forth all the “gory details,” the strange moments within an act that
appear awkward, out of context, and doubly bizarre because it is real. These surreal
moments become spectacles not only captured, but generated by the camera. For them to
exist, one would have to assume the presence of a camera in the same setting. The image
and the lens are in conflux and conflict with each other.
Originally, my plan was to hire a professional boxer to carry out the previously mentioned
set of actions. My goal was to make a film that firstly provides a constant stream of this said
confrontation. The boxer regards the lens as not necessarily a receptor of substance, but
a force that projects outwards its target. The camera is not so much anthropomorphized
00:00:02:14
as it is viewed as sitting on the same organic and free-willed hierarchy as the boxer.
Secondly, the punches’ physical impact against the lens calls attention to the object-ness of
the camera, that it does not simply replace the eye of the spectator, but stands between the
subject and the spectator as a physical filter.
After some consideration, it becomes clear that my intimacy with the camera is a very salient
point in the conception of the project, which results in my taking the role of the boxer.
Working as a cinematographer, I perceive the camera as both the container of a physical
reality and a weapon toward that reality. By hitting the lens repeatedly until I am exhausted
to the ground, I wish to not only address my original goals for the piece, but to illustrate my
emotional relationship with and regard for the powerful mechanism.

00:00:02:16

Fig 33. Captured portrait by Lucas Roy.

Conclusion
My relationship with film originates from aesthetic appreciation, especially in the area
of cinematography. The re-contextualization of my work through the New Media genre
is my effort to consciously re-examine the medium – and all the constructs around the
camera – as a technology that engages in ideological and experiential exchange with
various bodies of spectators. Through my epiphany in Pompeii, I am able to rationalize
the correlation between the central elements that recur in all of my past work:
cinematography, routine actions, moving through space, and architecture.

Amidst current discussions about film being a “dying medium,” I seek to heighten the
awareness of its actual prevalence in contemporary art. While film as a physical substance
is perhaps no longer the most desirable choice of format for reasons of economy and
efficiency, the connectedness between its form and the theories focused in New Media
is as strong as it has always been with other emerging methods of creative expression.
Form, as I have briefly summarized in my theoretical writing, encompasses ideas such as
the creation and reinstatement of a movement-image, to the compounding and collision
between the lens and its subject, the screen and the spectator, and the spectator and the
physical space generated in the decoding of that projection. The interaction that takes
place prescribed by this formalist study is not so much an action-response relationship
that is sometimes archetypal of New Media and Digital Media, but an initially invisible
ideological exchange that is eventually rendered physical and spatial. My view that the
lens enables such interaction describes the impact and effect, as well as the engagement
with other media it subsumes. This is the mode of cinema that I wish to investigate. This
cinema resonates with the type of intellectual dialogue present in New Media, where
the roles of receiver and the giver are constantly shifting and being reevaluated, where
the definition of interaction is complex and dynamic, where the meaning of the image is
equally important as, if not governed, by the technology that frames it.

In the end, my relationship with this cinema exists on a personal level beyond intellectual
articulation. I feel welded onto the mechanism and ingrained into the movement it
captures. It is not an agent for escape, but a tool of dispersion and multiplication. It
satisfies my desire, and perhaps greed, to be physically in touch with all the layers of pre-
existing and fabricated space and time. During my two years of studies at RISD, my love
for the structuralism and formalism in the medium grew increasingly more prominent 00:00:02:18
and demanding of direct address. This urged an elaboration, hence the emergence of
Captured (the work as well as the title of this thesis). It is my hope to create a new body
of work – extending from where this one takes off – where my love for the camera and
my physical presence within the camera become the subject of close examination.
Bibliography
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Zavattini, Cesare. “Some Ideas on the Cinema.” MacCann, Richard Dyer, ed. Film: A
Montage of Theories, 216-228. New York, Dutton, 1966, 1966.
“Il mondo e fuori dalla finestra,” in Filmcritica 252, March 1975. Translated by Dana
Renga.
“E nato a Londra ma non e un film ingelese,” from Corriere della Sera, 12 February 1982.
Translated by Allison Cooper.
R. Barthes. In Communications, no. 4, 1964 (special issue: “Recherches semiologiques”).
Pallasmaa, Juhani. “The Geometry of Terror”. 00:00:02:20
Available from http://www.safa.fi/ark/ark4_97/hitchcoche1.html. 1997.
Work Hitchcock, Alfred and others. Vertigo. 1958. 1 DVD (129 min.) videorecording. Universal.

Lucas, George and others. Star Wars. 1977. 1 DVD (125 min.) videorecording. 20th Century
Ahtila, Eija-Liisa. The Wind. 2006. Fox.

Aitken, Doug and others. Blow Debris. 2000. Murnau, F.W. and others. Nosferatu. 1922. 1 DVD (94 min.) videorecording. Kino Video.

Aitken, Doug and others. Diamond Sea. 1997. Murnau, F.W. and others. Sunrise. 1926. 1 DVD (95 min.) videorecording. Eureka.

Aitken, Doug and others. Electric Earth. 1999. Murnau, F.W. and others. The Last Laugh. 1924. 1 DVD (90 min.) videorecording. Kino
Video.
Aitken, Doug and others. I Am Into You. 2000. Snow, Michael and others. Back and Forth. 1969. 16mm Film (52 min.)

Aitken, Doug and others. Inflections. 1992. Snow, Michael and others. La région centrale. 1971. 16 mm Film (180 min.)

Aitken, Doug and others. New Ocean. 2001. Snow, Michael and others. Wavelength. 1967. 16mm Film (45 min.)

Antonioni, Michelangelo and others. 1961. La Notte. 1 DVD (122 min.) videorecording. Vertov, Dziga and others. The Man With A Movie Camera. 1929. 1 DVD (68 min.)
Fox Lorber. videorecording. Image Entertainment.

Antonioni, Michelangelo and others. Blowup. 1966. 1 DVD (111 min.) videorecording. Weed, A.E. and others. Panorama of 4th St., St Joseph.
Warner Home Video.
Welles, Orson and others. Citizen Kane. 1941. 1 DVD (119 min.) videorecording. Warner
Antonioni, Michelangelo and others. The Passenger. 1975. 1 DVD (126 min.) videorecording. Home Video.
Sony Pictures.
Welles, Orson and others. Touch of Evil. 1958. 1 DVD (111 min.) videorecording.
Clair, René and others. Paris qui dort. 1925. 1 DVD (35 min.) videorecording. Home Vision Universal.
Entertainment.
Welsby, Chris and others. Windmill. 1973. 16 mm Film (8 min.)
Douglas, Stan. Win, Place or Show. 1998.
Wiene, Robert and others. The Cabinet of Doctor Caligri. 1920. 1 DVD
Douglas, Stan. Suspiria. 2002-2003. (75 min.) videorecording. Image Entertainment.

Edison, Thomas and others. Panorama from Times Building, New York.

Griffith, D.W. and others. Birth of a Nation. 1915. 1 DVD (187 min.) videorecording. Image
Entertainment.
00:00:02:22
Hitchcock, Alfred and others. Rear Window. 1954. 1 DVD (115 min.) videorecording.
Universal.
“We are the twenty-story tower high above the
Soviet streets –
We are the camera –
We are the film –
We are the viewer –
We are the lens –
We are the subject –
We are the lights –
We are the chemistry –
We are the audience –
We watch ourselves –
We reflect ourselves –
We fragment ourselves –
We are the camera –
We cannot be stopped –
We are here to stay!” 46

` - Doug Aitken on The Man With a Movie Camera For excerpts of original work discussed in this thesis,
please visit: www.serenakuo.com

Front & Back Cover Photography by Lucas Roy.

46 Aitken. P. 287
Fig 34. Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929.