Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video by Akira Mizuta Lippit (review)

To assert that experimental film and video has perennially probed matters of form and practice, spectatorship, medium-specificity, and phenomenologies of perception, is both to characterize what it essentially is, and also to gloss over numerous individual strands of inquiry. This oppositional dynamic—at once a distinctive mode of cinema, yet not a homogenous body of cinema—may explain why “theories” of experimental film and video either risk making gross generalizations or becoming mired in individual problems that do not resonate across lines of thought and practice. In Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video, Akira Mizuta Lippit offers an approach that engages both the variable specificities of experimental cinema as well as its larger ambitions.

In language, the prefix “ex-” connotes something that is divorced from an antecedent whole, or is part of a whole, separated both in time and space. It is a notion that Lippit explores from different perspectives through a series of careful reflections on problems of medium specificity, (hyper-)realism, a post-9/11 rhetoric of audiovisual images, gesture and movement in cinema, and revisionary drives common to Freudian dream-logic and cinema. His is not a project that seeks out different theoretical models and simply applies them to suitable film and video works. Rather, Lippit thinks through the works and questions under examination, allowing theoretical structures to develop organically. He is aided in this effort by a remarkably literary style that revolves around extensive wordplay and allusion. Philology is clearly a fundamental premise for him, and it often results in surprisingly compelling arguments.

The notion of an ex-cinema is grounded in that of the “exergue,” which “refers to a space outside the work, outside the essential body of the work, and yet part of, even essentially—a part and apart” (1). Drawing upon Jonathan Walley’s account of paracinema—a body of audiovisual works that may be deemed ‘cinematic’ yet are not founded upon the materiality of film and film technologies—Lippit proposes the existence of an ex-cinema that “opens a space before and beyond…a space beside and outside, but always from within a minor space opened on the other side of cinema” (5). In keeping with this foundational idea, the questions his subsequent analyses take up deal with things peripheral to cinema—contemporary media, animality, dreams—which are, nonetheless, implicated by the works under consideration. Situated precisely between the framework and the actual body of the work, Lippit’s exergue reveals itself at work in Derridean subjectivity, David James’ “minor cinemas” of Los Angeles, and the historical visibility of the color blue.

Provocatively, Lippit’s weaving-together of the notions of exergue, ex-cinema, and paracinema proposes rethinking medium specificity:

Would it alter the very concept of ‘medium specificity’ if the medium were understood as essentially nonspecific, if its specificity were determined precisely by its opening to another form or thought of the outside—that is, an intermediate (mediating) form rather than a fixed body, a channel of communication rather than an essence unto itself, like a spiritual medium?

(5)

Repositioning cinema as concept rather than form, Lippit follows Walley in dramatically expanding the very limits of cinema. It is regrettable that Lippit doesn’t fully develop the question he poses, but subsequent essays offer possible responses.

If there is a figure that haunts this rich collection of meditations, it is that of Austrian filmmaker and video artist Martin Arnold. Lippit first focuses on his work in “Cinemnesis: Martin Arnold’s Memory Apparatus,” a consideration of cinema as mnemic machine. Moving between anamnesis, the Freudian concept of screen memory, and mnemic technology, this essay reveals Arnold’s experimental cinema as a machine, as technology. Readers familiar with Bernard Stiegler’s work on anamnesis and hypomnesis will find much of interest.

Questions of representation run into trouble after catastrophic events. In Lippit’s own earlier Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), he developed the notion of avisuality: an...