I tend to scoff at people who privilege
analog technology. The idea that vinyl is somehow a more complete
listening experience, or viewing a film on 35mm in a theater conjures
in the gut, a more visceral effect on the body than a digital
copy—starts my eyes rolling. However, I think Mary Ann Doane's
discussion of the viewer's body, women's bodies and technology
provided a new framework through which to view these processes of
spectatorship and experience. Doane does not delineate between
viewing a digital and analog copy, but perhaps these technologies
supplement the body in unique ways. Most of the films we viewed felt
applicable but I decided to challenge myself and think about Morgan
Fisher's Standard Gauge (1984).
The
format of Fisher's film reminded me of a piece I saw 3 years ago at
the Midway Contemporary Art Gallery in Minneapolis. Patricia
Esquivias exhibited a video work called Reads Like Paper.
She seems indebted to Fisher.
Her piece also consists of a body manipulating fragments before the
lens accompanied by a personal narrative. While both artists explore
different themes and artifacts, the narrative is driven through
dialogue, much like an interior monologue or a lecture, and the act
of showing is fostered, only made possible, by the apparatus. The
works are presented in the first person, suggesting a point of view
shot. In Esquivias' piece we even see her hands in the frame. I think
these two explorations of vision and experience complicate Doane's
ideas in really interesting ways.
Morgan Fisher manipulates the film
scraps in movements that seems familiar. The image of a reel moving
frame by frame across the screen pervades popular visual culture.
Shots of the reels slowing down to reveal the illusion of cinema, the
individual frames, revealing the key to the filmic spectacle, are
often recalled by filmmakers, even in Hollywood. At times Fisher
replicates this motion, at others he removes the strips so quickly
that all we see are images blurring together. He plays with the idea
of the 'after image' giving the spectator either a still shot or an
undecipherable moving film strip, where the only motion visible is
the motion of the physical material (on the screen, not in the
strip's frame). Nonetheless, the motion of the strip still mimics the
direction and action of these spectacular tropes (the visible film
strip in Hollywood). Human manipulations of technology like this
pacify the threat of modernity. Fisher's encyclopedic knowledge,
rattled off with such mastery, breach the binary of
pleasure/supplement, suggesting that perhaps this mastery is a way to
glean pleasure from these extensions of human capability.
Esquivias lifts this idea into the
digital world. Making the human manipulations more explicit by
revealing her own hands, which bend technology to a personal
narrative. The arbitrary piecing together of narrative—which both
artists practice—and the referent-less subjects of the films hold
total mastery over “modernity understood as disruption, speed, and
anonymity” (540). I do not want to sound like I am glorifying the
artist, only to suggest that maybe these deficiencies that the
apparatus fills, are subject to the artist, tools which can be
engaged with outside of the hollywood system and perhaps an anarchic
way of challenging that system to decenter the male spectator.
The analog screening does in fact have
a different use and effect than the digital. If we view the cinema as
part of a larger encompassing spectacle, than these tools are suited
for different ways of coping or addressing it. I think an important
question is how do the tactics of these artists remove the “buffer
against the conceptualization of the cinema as an assault on the
spectator” (534)?
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