Color, the Formless, and Cinematic Eros

I want to reclaim abstraction from its being just a visual style. After all, before abstraction was a visual style, an abstraction was a philosophical concept that called up multiple images. That's what abstraction means to me: the visual demonstration of philosophical nuance.

—Jeremy Blake¹

I choose to begin my discussion of color and formlessness with this passage from a recent interview with Jeremy Blake for a variety of reasons. As a visual artist, Blake's work is especially concerned with the relation between abstraction and narrative. His works on DVD, which he calls "time based paintings," often feature loops of realist images that give way to fields of bright, sensuous color.² In works such as 1906, Winchester (2002) and Century 21 (2004), the formal integrity of the photographic image is led by color toward a state of entropy; streaks of color undo the image. As such, Blake's work is consistent with a recent tendency toward the use of color abstraction in narrative cinema internationally—a tendency that fuses two aesthetic practices heretofore understood as separate and antithetical modes of cinematic production. Jeremy Blake is no mere starting point, however. Rather, Blake's work is inseparable from the production of this recent trend. To begin with, Blake's work is cinema; or at least, his moving image loops exhibited within the more traditional confines of the art gallery have been central to the recent trend in visual media to trouble the institutional boundary between cinema and the art world. But Blake is also the artist responsible for the abstract fields of color spread across the face of pop-singer Beck on the cover of his 2002 CD, Sea Change, and the color designs that would serve as backgrounds throughout the subsequent tour. And last but not least, Blake is the creator of the color abstractions that overwhelm the narrative space of Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love (2002). All of this is to suggest that the phenomenon of which I write is not solely a matter for modernist aesthetics; rather it is a decidedly exoteric trend, playing out equally on the terrain of international popular culture. Moreover, I am in complete agreement with Blake that we must consider abstraction as the visual demonstration of philosophical nuance. Thus, what I would like to argue is not only that we are witnessing a trend toward a particular kind of abstraction within narrative cinema internationally, but also what might be motivating that trend, culturally and philosophically. Why are we currently witnessing these color abstractions in both popular American film and international art cinema? And what are the stakes in this for a developing global film culture?

Before answering these questions, however, we need a sense of the phenomenon of which I speak. As such, we should begin by considering the following three scenes from Anderson's Punch Drunk Love, all of which illustrate this tendency toward abstraction in contemporary narrative film. Punch Drunk Love is a film about the unlikely romance between Barry, a young producer of decorative plungers (a business he runs out of a warehouse in Silicon Valley), and Lena, an office worker inexplicably drawn to this impresario of decorative waste management. Barry is not only a purveyor of kitsch objects, but is, until he meets Lena, in a deep state of alienation. Love, of course, is what delivers Barry. And in that sense, Punch Drunk Love is not so different from most popular American film. However, what one witnesses in Punch Drunk Love is a series of color abstractions that not only interrupt the narrative, but threaten the legibility of the image, and thus narration, altogether.

The first of these three sequences comes from the very beginning of the film, where Barry (Adam Sandler) is seen sitting at his desk, lodging a complaint about the frequent flyer miles he has accumulated through the bulk purchase of Healthy Choice pudding. Barry is dressed in a bright blue suit, matching exactly a wide band of blue paint on the wall behind him. The wall itself is of two colors—blue and white. The bottom half...