Melancholy Projection

Where does this black sun come from?

—Julia Kristeva, 1989

The projected image has become increasingly prominent in the art gallery over the past quarter century.¹ In the accompanying catalog to an illustrative 1997 exhibition, Projections: Les transports de l’image, Dominique Païni argued that this prominence of projection heralded its crisis, resulting from the displacement of film and photography by video and digital means. The 2010 installation American Falls by Phil Solomon both existed in and figured the crisis that Païni described. American Falls highlighted its filmic legacy through its images’ appearance as distressed celluloid, produced by multiple stages of digital and chemical manipulation of carefully curated found footage, while multiplying its own projection; it figured the filmic medium in its digitally mediated images and was projected digitally onto six screens. American Falls presented an elegy for the filmic medium by retaining specific material characteristics of film as its content and model. Through an analysis of Solomon’s postfilmic installation, I will theorize a practice of melancholy projection in which melancholia is an instance of failed or negative projection and projection exists as a juncture where nonidentity is cultivated in both cinema and psychoanalysis.

American Falls was commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and was exhibited there from April 10 to July 18, 2010.² In this manifestation the exhibition occupied the Corcoran’s rotunda, which acts as an entryway/centerpiece to the galleries. American Falls grounded its concern with filmic cinema in that medium’s historicity—its indexical relation to its objects, the sense that filmic cinema is grounded in the concrete reality of what it records—which is most apparent in its use of images bearing the marks of distressed and ruined celluloid. This concern with the material of film addresses a physicality that is felt to be lost in digital media’s fantasy of immateriality.³ In American Falls, film is a signifier of a specific yet distorted history that can be felt in and through the loss of cinema’s association with filmic materiality. Film’s association with materiality and historicity recurs throughout its century-long existence, established in part through its photographic lineage, as suggested by Mary Ann Doane: “The photochemical image is an inscription, a writing of time, and while Kracauer was suspicious of its potential for a positivist historicism, it nevertheless bore within it, and produced for its spectator, a respect for the resistances and thereness of historicity. . . . Its promise is that of touching the real.”⁴ In other words, film promises the past presence of history—of historicity itself—even as it manifests a fear that the mediation of history is also history’s forgetting. American Falls connected this historicity to the specificity of the mass public audience, the public component of filmic cinema, through the spectral appearance of recognizable and definitively American imagery and the thematization of projection as integral to the presentation of the filmic image.

Solomon’s installation coincided with a special exhibition on Eadweard Muybridge, a key figure in the development of technologies that would soon coalesce into cinema. This coincidence served to emphasize the importance of cinema as a medium closely identified with history in American Falls, which included portions of Muybridge’s precinematic imagery as part of its own image stream. Solomon has noted the importance of this coincidence: “I thought that I would also parallel the history of American movies with American Falls. It ran concurrent with the Muybridge exhibition at the Corcoran, so that was wonderful coincidence and served as a last minute inspiration. Essentially I decided that I needed recognizable images and I needed to tap into the collective unconscious idea: here’s our collective pool of images and sounds.”⁵ The presence of the Muybridge exhibition, with its emphasis on American landscape photography and its parallel appearance in American Falls, highlights the importance of cinematic historicity for Solomon. Solomon’s association of “recognizable images”—pulled from a “collective pool”—with cinema can be read as a reference to the specific and individual content of the varying images, which runs from Muybridge...