Film Art Phenomena (review)

Most artists and their audiences regard the film medium as both an industrial tool, delivering distraction to the local multiplex, and an art tool, delivering big luscious moving images and sounds to the local city gallery. Except that in the gallery (and apart from art celebrities such as Matthew Barney), it is not film but electronically mediated images and sounds we encounter. Some artists' engagements with technology amount to little more than changing the script and the performers. Film Art is something apart and certainly has nothing to do with art film (as I once explained at length to a customs official).

The "Phenomena" of the title emerges from the three section headings—Media, Apparatus and Aesthetics—and takes a muscular approach to discussing recent artists' approaches to the phenomena of the film medium (and a bit of video). There is no separation of description suggested by these headings as the writer moves quite freely through the polemics of issues, mainly on representation, that he and others have developed over the last 40 years.

This volume adds to the growing literature arising from the work of a group of artists centered at the London Film-makers Co-operative (LFMC). Established in 1967 to distribute the emerging underground cinema of the time, in 1969 the LFMC expanded to become a cooperative workshop, probably the first run by visual artists, to control every aspect of film production, from shooting, processing, editing and printing film to its exhibition and distribution. It embraced the technology of film in its totality without trying to mimic the practices of the television industry, which in the 1960s relied largely on 16mm and 35mm film mediums for recording purposes. While artists in other countries utilized cameras and editing gear, in London obsolete equipment from television laboratories was readily repurposed, from the inside out. It was a process more recently recognized in the academy as practice-based research, in which filmmaking, reflection, peer-group evaluation and theoretical discourse were conducted within collective and individual frameworks.

Hamlyn correctly holds that as a result of these phenomena, the films and the discourse generated by the filmmakers and the subsequent effect these had on a wider debate within the international fine art and cinema communities was significant. His contribution to the literature brings to some half dozen the book titles specifically addressing the interventions made by the British group, which included a series of public international events in London. Along with film artists from North America and Europe, the international discourse generated, defined and invigorated the mainstream cultures of visual art and cinema.

Later, in mid-1980s Britain, the LFMC would slip into an academe in flux and reemerge as a branch of the catchall subject area of media studies. Unlike earlier writers, Hamlyn is not averse to making occasional reference to mainstays of cinema studies such as Hitchcock, Coppola, Kubrick and Godard.

His focus, however, is on aspects of the analytical approach to filmic representation—the frame, the handheld camera, point-of-view—which are covered in detail but always through Hamlyn's descriptions of a selected range of the filmmakers' work. This can be characterized as a film practice that, through foregrounding the phenomena of the encounter for the viewer, actively engages perception and cognition as the means to bring the filmic experience into consciousness.

With acknowledgement of the earlier chroniclers and polemicists—Legrice and Gidal in particular—Hamlyn's approach is to record his responses to and subsequent thoughts about the filmmakers' work associated with the LFMC, either made or exhibited there, or distributed from the huge international collection of prints accumulated up to the end of the 1990s. As one of the second wave of filmmakers who began to contribute to the developing work there in the mid-1970s, Hamlyn was well placed to view critically the earlier work and assess the later and subsequent work as it passed though the various stages of emergence. This process is by no means evenhanded...