Movement as Meaning in Experimental Film

by Daniel Barnett
No.13 in Consciousness Literature and the Arts series (editor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe).
Editions Rodopi B.V. Amsterdam, New York, 2008
224 pp., illus. Paper, € 48
ISBN: 978-90-420-2385-7.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney
legart@ozemail.com.au

Daniel Barnett is a respected teacher and maker of artist’s film active since the 1960s. His book in many ways reflects his journey as an artist choosing to work with 16mm and 8mm motion picture film. These analogue technologies provide images suspended on acetate with which to experiment, thus maintaining the tactile quality of earlier traditional mediums. Film images are tangible unlike the virtual electronic image, magnetised onto coated mylar, or digitised into memory locations wherever a wire can reach. However, as we have all found, resisting the digital paradigm is at your professional peril.
The artist’s journal is a familiar and often well-regarded artefact recording the aspects of practice more effable than the art work itself. Barnett’s approach is to write part journal, part transcript. As a teacher in an art department, presentations to students, conducted as a seminar rather than a lecture, would involve diversions and examples based on his own practice as an artist, including screenings, performances, meetings etc, part and parcel of the business of making ones way. These form the basis of his first person account, garrulous at times and in some ways an anthropological record of the era.

He presents some 60 headings, (for instance, No. 45. Illusions and Ontological Linchpins), broken down into three main sections: Modes of Perception and Modes of Expression; Dynamic and Syntactic Universals; The Moving Target. The headings form a kind of inventory of issues relational to one another by way of the eagerness and infectious enthusiasm of the narrator. It is not literature or a work of prose but deliberately sets out, like the tease in the title – movement as meaning – to explore ambiguities using anecdote, quotation and speculation. Half-way through he confesses the insights in the book “. . . whether they are philosophical in intent or not, are the insights of a filmmaker and not a philosopher.”

Multiple meanings in poetry encourage the mind to move in a non-linear way to the poem “…perturbed, sometimes oscillating beautifully, sometimes downright turbulent…” with idiosyncrasy part of the expectation of ‘earning rather than assuming meaning’ from the experience of a film screening. A critique of mainstream film and television narrative is explicit throughout Barnett’s account, probably the only common ground between the New American Film artists and the work of European artist filmmakers from the period. For many of the Europeans, representation and the whole filmic apparatus as system was problematic. This ground is not explored, all references being to North American artists’ film and International art cinema, both of which generally celebrated a system intent on holding the illusions in place. He defines later, “… the directions a purer cinema might pursue [are] driven by pictures and music more than words.”

The opening section, by tangents, describes a cinema of layers, based on the singular frame. (To be redefined in the digital era as that of the desiccated frame?) The backdrop to this is a summary from the practitioner’s viewpoint, (rather than the usual specialists, the critics and theorists), of a century of motion picture culture, art film and artists’ film. The following section moves, (with more asides: cognition, phenomenology, etc), into the issues of filmmaking. A discussion of repetition and the loop is engaging - it is the stuff of abstraction in many creative forms especially those with a time-base. The less engaging discussion is about the notion of language in film, of orderings of signification requiring interpretation of meanings, the whole panoply of literature and communication study methods, consolidated within the ‘classic narrative feature film’, (featuring celebrities, characters woven with genres of story-telling). The approach attempts to incorporate these creative differences but obscures what could have been said clearly about the ontologies with which the writer’s practice is evidently engaged: a motion picture aesthetic based on images and music.

The final section, covering the last dozen headings, explores the moving target of the digital era, initially with the jargon terms banded around by contemporary practitioners, describing in various ways the image as data within a computer system. Interaction, or the presence of the viewer affecting directly or indirectly the flow of image, a quality unique to the digital environment, receives attention in the work of the English poet John Cayley, a pioneer in organising lines of word poetry (thus image) on the monitor face but also writing code to evolve the development of poetic form. With his heart on his sleeve and eager to opine, Barnett outlines the ‘context problem’ he has with this work as being wholly autocentric. Personal issues remain for him in the title of the final heading, From the Grain to the Pixel, and the writer continues to seek what could be described as a fitness function to map onto aesthetic principles better suited to the emulsion grain and the darkened room of the cinema.

For those who will persevere with this idiosyncratic author, the outcome may improve your skills of film appreciation, knowledge of contemporary art and might also encourage some pondering on the analogue-digital divide presented here.