Futurs de l'obsolescence: Essai sur la restauration du film d'artiste by Enrico Camporesi (review)

As Enrico Camporesi details in his fascinating book Futurs de l'obsolescence: Essai sur la restauration du film d'artiste (Futures of Obsolescence: An essay on the restoration of Artists' Film), each act of Restoration—broadly conceived as the ushering of a work into the future—is an act of interpretation. Take Barbara Rubin's underground classic Christmas on Earth (1963), a film I saw twice in 2018. In both instances, the film was shown as a double 16mm projection, with one image projected in reduced dimensions inside the other. Gels were manipulated live in front of the projectors' beams, intermittently bathing the monochrome film in lush color. With its close-ups of genitals and orgiastic energy, Christmas on Earth possesses a spirit of riotous anarchism. Yet Rubin was fastidious in her specifications as to how it should be seen. In a note that would accompany the work when rented from the New York Film-Makers' Cooperative, she wrote, " please project my film in the image in which it was created—i.e. exactly in accordance with the projection instructions!"¹

The screenings I saw, one in London and the other in Berlin, largely conformed to Rubin's wishes, but there was one significant difference between them: the soundtrack. Rubin specified that "a radio must be hooked up to a PA system, with a nice cross-section of psychic tumult like an AM rock station, turned on and played loud." AM radio was discontinued in Germany in 2010, so the Berlin organizers did their best, cycling through the FM dial to give Christmas on Earth the live broadcast accompaniment its maker imagined. The sounds of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" amid radio static lent Rubin's images an inflection they would not have had in 1963 but also wed them to an unfolding now. In London, the organizers used a CD simulating 1960s radio (albeit without advertisements or much talk), compiled by Bradley Eros and distributed with the film print. This option tempered the anachronism of the Berlin presentation, but the chance collisions between image and sound, central to the filmmaker's conception of her work, had vanished.

Anyone presenting Christmas on Earth must make a choice as to what soundtrack to use. The decision may seem a local matter of little consequence. Yet embedded in decisions regarding the conservation and presentation of works such as Christmas on Earth are theoretical judgments concerning authenticity, historicity, and authorship that evade easy certainties. Camporesi, currently a researcher in the film department at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, rereads the history of American experimental film between 1963 and 1982 through this lens, demonstrating the shortcomings of the tendency of textual analysis—still a dominant method in the subfield—to discuss objects as ideal rather than material, static rather than dynamic.

Drawing on the discourses of literary philology and art conservation, particularly Cesare Brandi's 1963 book Theory of Restoration, Futurs de l'obsolescence considers what happens to filmic artworks as they circulate in the world, migrating to new spaces of exhibition and new material supports. The book's examples will be well known to readers familiar with avant-garde cinema, but here they emerge in a dramatic new light. Camporesi shows how filmmakers such as Bruce Conner, Anthony McCall, and Carolee Schneemann embraced the variability and instability inherent in their medium, often emphasizing the performative dimensions of projection and producing works in multiple versions. Schneemann's Kitch's Last Meal (1973–1976), for example, was shot on 16mm and Super 8 and was initially shown as a double projection of selected reels in no set order, accompanied by a soundtrack on cassette, while Conner's (1961) exists in an array of iterations, analog and digital, single and multiscreen, 16mm and 8mm.² Such practices can make it difficult to discern what constitutes the "text" of a given work and pose significant questions for those tasked...