Direct Theory: Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre

5. Expanded Cinema and Visionary Film

68 5. Expanded Cinema and Visionary Film S heldon Renan’s pioneer study concludes with a chapter anticipating a “whole new area of film and film-like art . . . expanded cinema .”1 Approximately three years later, Gene Youngblood’s book Expanded Cinema continued documentation of the explosive growth of experimental motion pictures’ affinity for technologic innovations: “If one considers the introduction of sound then color as successive ‘generations’ in the history of cinema, it is possible to say that we’ve entered the fourth generation by marrying basic cinematic techniques to computer and video sciences. There have been no fundamental breakthroughs in the nature of cinema since its conception. In one sense the history of film is but a footnote to Lumière and Méliès. But the technological revolution begins the new age of cinema.”2 As Youngblood maintains when discussing the complex, pyrotechnic printer films of Pat O’Neill, “New tools generate new images.”3 That is to say, Expanded Cinema’s special attention to the confluence of cinema’s mechanical-chemical properties and to those far more electronic properties dependent upon video and computers is at once part and parcel of experimental motion pictures’ characteristic affinity for increased technological innovation. It also continues an inextricably interrelated devotion to constructions beyond the bounds of most cinema’s somewhat parasitic relation to narrative. To help clarify this insight that changes and exchanges of technology (or “techniques”) are inseparable from structural changes, and are thereby extraordinarily consequential, Small fashioned a neologism— technostructure. More, this term is based upon the distinct historiography of the man to whom this revised edition is dedicated: Raymond Fielding. As we will clarify in our final chapter, Fielding’s extensive body of publications realized discussion in a 1985 book by Robert C. expanded cinema and Visionary Film 69 Allen and Douglas Gomery: Film History: Theory and Practice. In their preface, they state, “We recognize that film is and has been a multifaceted phenomenon: art form, economic institution, cultural product, and technology. Traditionally, each of these facets has been treated as a separate subdiscipline in film history. In recognition of this fact, we have divided our discussion of film historical research into aesthetic, technological, economic, and social chapters. Although this is certainly not the only division that could have been made, it does represent the major lines of film historical research to date and provides a useful way of grouping the [methodologies].”4 Fielding virtually constitutes Allen and Gomery’s leading example of what they term technological determinism. By coupling it with Ferdinand de Saussure’s revolutionary concepts of semiotics, Small’s technostructure helps distinguish this coupling from Fielding ’s groundbreaking historiography. If structure is the interrelationship of the parts to the whole, there are serious theoretical problems attendant upon the quite typical reduction of technique and technology to adjunct phenomena that serve the structure of a work yet are themselves somehow outside that structure. (Recall the fundamental structuralism of Saussure’s regard for the gestalt unity of signifier and signified in the operation of any sign system.) Pat O’Neill’s 7362 (1965–67) is so reflexively interwoven with the technology of step-optical printers (the film’s very title is a stock emulsion number) that the resulting images are not merely pre-electronic, lavishly colored extensions of European avant-garde abstraction. Rather, O’Neill’s immediate and quite theoretical address is the typically overlooked possibilities of step-optical printers, which often serve only comparatively pedestrian functions, such as creating freeze frames in fictive features or reducing 70mm and 35mm features into a more commonplace 16mm format. In direct contrast, 7362 exhibits the step aspect of the printer as a kind of animation device that not only allows rapid exchanges of colors but a remarkable control of motion, while the optical aspect allows kaleidoscopic symmetries and configurations of barely representational images (for example, oil pumps and human dancers). 7362’s reflexivity is technostructural. O’Neill’s later Runs Good (1969–70) has far more representational imagery and stands as a step-optical printer study of the kind of expanded cinema and Visionary Film 70 compilation we associate with Bruce Conner. With its title charmingly reminiscent of a simple used-car ad, Runs Good begins with the staccato step printing of a drive through a tunnel, yielding to a delightful, dadaist montage of academy leader and storm footage, yielding to found footage (almost home movie...