Moving Image Review & Art Journal · Volume 1 · Number 1

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/miraj.1.1.13_1

Brakhage’s sour grapes, or notes on

experimental cinema in the art world

Erika Balsom
Carleton University

abstract keywords
This article examines the place of experimental cinema within the contemporary muse- experimental film
um in order to challenge the commonly held assumption that it is somehow opposed to, or artists’ cinema
at least outside, the art world. Despite possessing a degree of material truth, the perceived museum
separation between experimental cinema and the art world has led to an unfortunate gallery
lack of interrogation into the alliances and antagonisms that exist between them, partic- contemporary art
ularly as they have shifted over time. This article insists on the historicity of such relation-
ships and traces how they have changed from the 1970s to a contemporary moment that
sees experimental cinema in a closer relationship to the art world than ever before. The
integration of experimental film into the museum is a key feature of the preoccupation
with all things cinematic that has marked the art of the past two decades, prompting
new questions as to the place of experimental film amongst the mediums of art practice.
This article assesses not the distance so often thought to exist, but rather the proximity
between experimental cinema and the art world in our moment.

i don’t think i’m blind to the negative factors operating on the executive
levels of the art world; but i’ve been lucky enough, so far, to find some very
helpful and kind persons in that scene. […] it has been a long time coming
but more and more the art world is recognizing that i am an artist, despite
the fact that my medium is film, and i expect that my financial – & thereby
creative – future has a lot to do with that world. […] i really do believe that film
is being accepted now and that the old angers should be put aside and that we
should try to find better ways of exhibiting our work, responding positively to

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 Erika Balsom
1. The rental model does
exist within the art world,
notably through organiza-
tions such as Electronic Arts
Intermix in New York City and
Video Data Bank in Chicago,
but the limited-edition model
is dominant. For an extended
discussion of the distinctions
between experimental cinema
and artists’ cinema as modes
of film practice, see Walley
(2008). Walley’s extremely use-
ful demarcation of these two
modes of film practice finds its
weakness in a lack of historical
specificity, as he suggests that
the relationship between them
has remained unaltered since
the 1960s, when in fact they
have changed substantially.
For more on the differences
between the rental and
limited-edition models of
distribution, see Balsom
(2009: 423–25).
2. Certainly, there are impor-
tant distinctions to be made
between the commercial gal-
lery, the international biennial,
alternative/non-commercial
spaces and the museum. While
in another context, grouping
these spaces together might be
an egregious conflation, here
what is at stake is the presence
of experimental cinema –
which has historically belonged
to the movie theatre – within
the spaces of art, not the par-
ticular differences between
such spaces.
3. The term ‘spectator-visitor’
comes from Dominique Païni.
Païni believes that the term
‘spectator’ fails to capture the
centrality of mobility to the
experience of viewing moving
images in a gallery setting. See
Païni (2002: 17).
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MIRAJ_1.2_Balsom_11-25.indd 14
these art world changes of heart (?). (Paul Sharits, letter to Stan Brakhage dated
14 January 1974)
I.
Jonathan Walley has noted that there exists ‘the spectre of a split, even an unbridgeable
gulf, between two camps of film art’, namely experimental cinema and artists’ cinema
(Walley 2008: 183). While this split is perhaps less pronounced in other contexts, such
as that of the United Kingdom, in North America a true divide exists between the two
and has for decades. Some work to fortify its boundaries and others attempt to tear
them down, but most acknowledge their existence. The differences between experi-
mental cinema and artists’ cinema in North America may be traced out at the levels of
production, distribution and exhibition. Whereas experimental cinema has tradition-
ally found support in the academy, in festivals and in film-specific organizations such
as Anthology Film Archives, artists’ film and video depends on private collectors and
commissions. Experimental film-makers espouse a rental model of distribution, while
artists working with film and video make use of the much more lucrative limited-
edition model of sale.1 The site of experimental cinema is the movie theatre, while that
of artists’ cinema is the gallery and/or museum.2 Accordingly, experimental cinema
tends to privilege the single screen and an immobile viewer, while artists’ cinema
makes use of a variable apparatus (ranging from monitor-based display to installation
to multiple projection and beyond) and an ambulatory spectator-visitor.3
In the letters exchanged between Stan Brakhage and Paul Sharits in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, the relationship between the two camps, implicitly acknowledged
as such, is a recurring topic. Throughout the correspondence, the film-makers raise
questions even more pressing now than they were then: might the art context provide
some relief from the economic hardship that experimental film-makers face and open
new creative possibilities? Or would participation in such a realm betray the aims
of the experimental film-making community? Unsurprisingly to anyone even curso-
rily familiar with the figures involved, the argument saw Sharits finding in the gallery
context possibilities both aesthetic and financial and Brakhage rejecting it as antitheti-
cal to his idea of cinema. As Sharits pursued gallery-based multi-projection works
such as Shutter Interface (1975), he found the experimental film-making community
less than supportive. He wrote to Brakhage:
i have been hassled and hassled and hassled about my work in the art world; i
am at raw nerve endings over it. you mean a lot to me … and it freaked me that
i was picking up more of those anti-art world vibes from you. jonas is hassling
me, hollis is hassling me … like i’m some traitor to the ‘cinema art cause’. […]
when my long time friends all seem to be inferring that i am a traitor & that my
‘little loops up on the wall’ are stupid, then i get very deeply upset.4
Brakhage remained unpersuaded. Even in 1985, by which time the men discuss the
issue with considerably less frequency, he would maintain his derisiveness, writing
to Sharits:
As to the ‘art world’, Peter Kubelka […] said that he gets a great death wish ev-
ery time he passes a museum or art gallery […] That maybe [sic] ‘sour grapes’
too, but what’s wrong with ‘sour grapes’ if they’re the only ones free of poison?
I’d rather eat, or spit, goat turds than be one of those peoples [sic] whose success
THESE days has them dining at $100-a-plate …5
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 Brakhage’s sour grapes, or notes on experimental cinema in the art world

The argument between Brakhage and Sharits exemplifies the two primary attitudes
American experimental film-makers have historically held towards the art context:
contemptuous rejection on the one hand and a quasi-suspicious embrace on the other.
The dialogue between the two film-makers calls out for a greater understanding of the
complex alliances and antagonisms that underwrite the ‘unbridgeable gulf’ often taken to
delineate experimental cinema and artists’ cinema as relatively independent entities. For
rather than suggesting an ignorance of the art world, or a singular condemnation of it as
a villainous other, the letters point to the existence of multiple and contradictory stances
towards the art context within the experimental film-making community. They suggest
that sites of dialogue and overlap between the two realms were both numerous and fraught
with tension. Despite possessing some degree of material truth, the perceived separation
between experimental cinema and the art world – often construed as the former’s totalizing
rejection of the latter – has led to an unfortunate lack of interrogation into the various
relationships that exist between them, be they positive, negative or ambivalent. In his
thorough discussion of the interplay of ‘dependence and resistance’ that characterizes the
relationship between the academy and the experimental film-making community, Michael
Zryd has noted that the mythology of experimental cinema as romantic and autonomous
has been maintained through a ‘widespread disavowal of the institutional and economic
matrices that undergird, however meagerly, this marginal sphere of cultural activity’ (Zryd
2006: 17). While the art world has by no means provided support for experimental film-
making comparable to that of the academy,6 failing to interrogate the relationships that exist
between the two risks perpetuating the disavowal and mythologization Zryd highlights.
The insistent return to questions of the art world in the letters exchanged between Brakhage
and Sharits gestures to the numerous points of intersection between the two spheres of
activity. It suggests that debate over how the experimental film-making community might
best interact with and participate in the art world had been under serious discussion for
some time, even if the topic is notably absent from P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film: The
American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000, the history of American experimental cinema first 4. Paul Sharits, letter to Stan
published in 1974 – the same year Sharits wrote to Brakhage about the negative reception Brakhage dated 28 February
his gallery-based work was receiving from the experimental film-making community. 1974. All Brakhage-Sharits
Given their common media and often shared formal and conceptual concerns, correspondence courtesy of
why have experimental cinema and artists’ cinema remained so separated in the Anthology Film Archives.
North American context? Writing from the side of the art world, Tanya Leighton
(2008: 9) has suggested that, ‘To a great extent the problem […] has been caused by 5. Stan Brakhage, letter to
the formalist, high modernist allegiances of much of the experimental film world’. Paul Sharits dated 17 December
But modernism is perhaps not the true issue here; if it enters into the discussion at 1985.
all, one must assert that it was precisely the modernist allegiances of the art world
that led to the exclusion of film in the first place. With its link to mass culture and its 6. Indeed, Zryd writes, ‘That
basis in mechanical reproducibility, film by no means fits with the modernist notion university classrooms should
of high art founded in values of originality. The institutions that would provide vital be the primary economic
support for experimental film – such as Cinema 16, founded in 1947 – developed at engine for avant-garde film
a time when film was far from an accepted artistic medium and built foundations points to how far removed
that would support experimental film-making as something that happened by some this sphere of film practice is
necessity outside of the art world. However, Leighton is right to suggest that there from the economy of the art
was a concerted rejection of the art world on the part of certain elements of the market, its plausible home.’ The
experimental film-making community. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a palpable art world has, however, offered
impulse to stake out a claim on the category of ‘experimental film-maker’ as distinct some support to experimen-
from that of ‘artist’. Precisely at a time when film and video were gaining a foothold tal film-makers in the form
in the gallery, experimental film-makers and their advocates positioned themselves of grants, both from private
in opposition to an established art world, embracing structures of production and foundations (particularly in the
distribution very different than those of uptown gallery artists. Though historically American context) and from
experimental cinema in the North American context has defined itself in a negative state-funded agencies. See
relation to mainstream narrative film-making, it also constituted itself in opposition Zryd (2006: 22).

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 Erika Balsom
7. The case in the United
Kingdom is somewhat different
in that experimental film-
makers there did not define
themselves in opposition to the
art world, nor recognize the
same antagonism towards it as
their American counterparts.
However, even within the
British context, it is possible
to draw a distinction between
the mode of production called
‘experimental film’ and that
called ‘artists’ cinema’. Of the
London Film-Makers’ Co-op,
A.L. Rees writes, ‘From LFMC
experimentation sprang a
kind of filmmaking which was
related to but finally distinct
from the contemporary films
of Gilbert and George, Gordon
Matta-Clark and Marcel
Broodthaers, to take a random
sample of artists. In their cases,
film extended or documented
their practice in other media,
as it still does for artists from
Bruce Nauman to Tacita Dean.
The LFMC – in the spirit of
Deren and Brakhage as it
happens – was committed to
film as an independent art
form’ (Rees 2002: 8; quoted in
Walley 2008: 192).
8. Stan Brakhage, letter to
Paul Sharits dated mid-August
1967.
9. Indeed, in his response
to Sitney’s ‘Structural Film’,
Fluxus artist George Maciunas
highlights Sitney’s many
art-world omissions, accusing
him of an ‘ignorance of
precursory monomorphic
examples in other art forms,
such as music, events, and even
film’ (Maciunas 2000: 349).
The films of Andy Warhol do,
however, constitute a major
exception for Sitney, even if
they are particularly offensive
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MIRAJ_1.2_Balsom_11-25.indd 16
to the art world in general and to artists’ cinema in particular.7 As Brakhage wrote to
Sharits in 1967,
I’m more live-set against Andy Warhol & Co. than I am against all such foreign
fakery (as passes for art thru its P.R. job: ‘Exoticism’) – vis. Trauffaut [sic], Antonioni,
Bergman, Resnais, etc. – because Warhol is, to be blunt, a snake in my own backyard
and threats [sic] the life of my children (in the fullest sense of the word).8
This sentiment recurs, albeit in a tacit way, in Visionary Film, which excludes films
made by gallery artists in favour of marking out the ethos of experimental cinema as a
purist practice that was both romantic and anti-institutional.9
In his primarily British A History of Experimental Film and Video, A.L. Rees asserts
that experimental film derives ‘more directly from the context of modern and post-
modern art than from the history of the cinema’, and names the gallery as one of its
primary sites (Rees 1999: 2). And yet, many fruitful interactions between experimental
film and the gallery in the United States have been closed off due to the hegemony
of Sitney’s approach, which neglects to take into account film- and video-making by
artists such as Jack Goldstein, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Robert Whitman
or the Fluxus group, as well as gallery-based work by individuals such as Sharits and
Michael Snow. Sitney’s dominance remains particularly egregious since, as Janet Berg-
strom and Constance Penley (1985) have argued, the collusion between Visionary Film
and Anthology Film Archives’ selection of its works of ‘Essential Cinema’ has served
to ‘create the consensus that an official canon of important works and film-makers has
already been created’ and has had a tremendous influence on university curricula and
the experimental film collections of museums around the world.10
Though Visionary Film remains indispensable for anyone engaged in the study or
practice of experimental film (or artists’ cinema, for that matter), recent years have
seen the boundary lines it draws severely compromised. With the increased emphasis
on cross-disciplinary artistic practice, perceived crises of both experimental film and
theatrical exhibition11 and the ascendance of video in both experimental cinema and
the art world, it is no longer so easy to paint the broad strokes that Sitney and his
cohort once did. The need now is not to deny the difference between experimental
cinema and artists’ cinema, but simply to understand the spaces of overlap and inter-
action between the two. As a new generation of scholars and practitioners engages the
legacy of 1960s and 1970s moving-image art in the gallery and out, the relative auton-
omy of experimental film from the art world during this period appears as a biased
critical construction subject to necessary revision. The invisibility of artistic practice
in Visionary Film is by no means faithful to the historical actuality of the activities of
the individuals involved. Moreover, to the degree that a firm distinction did indeed
exist between ‘artist’ and ‘experimental film-maker’, it now appears as something of
an entr’acte. For in light of contemporary developments, the period covered in the
first edition of Visionary Film (1943–78) now appears as an interregnum that stands
between two eras during which experimental film-making practices have been very
linked to the art world, both at the level of individual activity and at that of infrastruc-
ture: the era of the historical avant-garde of the 1920s and our own.
II.
A significant mutation has occurred in the relationship between experimental cinema
and the art world of late. An augmented presence of both historical and contempo-
rary experimental film-making within the museum and gallery has brought the two
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 Brakhage’s sour grapes, or notes on experimental cinema in the art world

into an unprecedented imbrication, a shift that makes revisiting the exchange between to Brakhage. Warhol is both
Brakhage and Sharits of particular relevance today. As Rees notes, ‘The difference discussed in Visionary Film as
between the film avant-garde and the other artists who used the medium did not espe- a progenitor of structural film
cially materialise in open debate in the 1960s,’ but, he adds in parentheses, ‘in some ways and included in the Essential
the debate is more relevant to our own times than it was thirty years ago’ (Rees 1999: 71). Cinema canon.
This is by no means to suggest that the contemporary moment sees a total subsumption
of experimental cinema into the art world, but rather to indicate its increasing involve- 10. Bergstrom and Penley
ment in that realm. As the following pages will explore, the contemporary relationship note, for example, that the
between the art world and experimental film is marked by an enormous potential, but Centre Georges Pompidou
also by some very real problems. It is neither to be championed nor condemned, but ‘bought virtually Anthology’s
rather examined as a complex set of issues relating to how experimental film and video entire collection as its founda-
are to be financed, distributed, exhibited and understood historically. tion collection of experimental
The integration of experimental film into the museum is a key feature of the preoc- film’ (see Bergstrom and Penley
cupation with all things cinematic that has marked contemporary art over the past 1985: 295–96).
two decades. The advent of video projection in the early 1990s meant that video art
no longer had to be displayed on monitors, but instead could partake in the imma- 11. The crisis of avant-garde
teriality and giganticism proper to the cinematic apparatus. Throughout that decade cinema is perhaps more
and continuing strongly into the present moment, one witnesses the emergence of perceived than actual, but such
spectacular multi-screen installations, a renewed use of 16mm film, a tremendous perceptions do carry weight,
number of references to the history of cinema, an embrace of the previously rejected particularly when they stem
modes of narrative and documentary and a large number of group exhibitions curated from the avant-garde’s most
around the theme of cinema – in short, the art world is going through something of a prominent critics. As William
‘love affair’12 with the seventh art.13 The ramifications of this development for experi- Wees writes, ‘During the 1980s,
mental film are twofold: firstly, it has sparked an increased art-institutional interest in North American experimental/
contemporary experimental cinema, resulting in its incorporation into museum and avant-garde film underwent a
gallery exhibitions; secondly, it has ignited a desire to excavate possible prehistories of paradigm shift that many
the current proliferation of moving-image art, resulting in a new enthusiasm for the supporters of the old
canonical works of the experimental film tradition. generation of avant-garde
The first aspect of the increased presence of experimental film in contemporary filmmakers’ – Wees cites Fred
art is familiar from the Brakhage–Sharits correspondence: individuals known as Camper and J. Hoberman –
‘experimental film-makers’ are now venturing into the gallery, whether by making ‘either failed to recognize or
work specifically for this context or by participating in screenings held in art spaces. Just saw only as a falling off in
as the film-based work of artists such as Richard Serra and Robert Smithson warmed quality, originality and artistry’
the reception of experimental film in the art world and brought it onto the pages of (Wees 2005: 22). Camper’s
Artforum in the early 1970s (what Sharits called a ‘change of heart’), the attention essay, ‘The End of Avant-Garde
paid to artists working in film and video beginning in the 1990s has overflowed to Film’, and the controversy
contemporary experimental film-makers. While experimental films have long screened surrounding the 1989
in the basement auditoria of major museums and continue to do so, the contemporary International Experimental
moment sees a new embrace of experimental cinema, which now appears in galleries Film Congress in Toronto are
as a component of exhibitions large and small. Many practitioners associated with perhaps the greatest exemplars
experimental film, such as Peggy Ahwesh, Martin Arnold and Matthias Müller, have of this moment. While,
produced work specifically for a gallery setting; while others, such as Ben Rivers, contrary to such sentiments,
Michael Robinson and Leslie Thornton, have shown work in the gallery that was many vital new film-makers
originally made for theatrical exhibition. The move to a gallery setting has provided have emerged, the increased
much needed financial support for experimental film-makers, who have historically availability of experimental film
depended on employment as teachers and in other sectors in order to maintain their on DVD has hurt institutions
livelihood. As Müller has put it, ‘After twenty years of making “experimental films” such as Canyon Cinema,
[…] I know there will never be enough profit to secure my existence. Thus, there is no adding another dimension
alternative but a gallery …’ (MacDonald and Müller 2005: 255, emphasis in original). to the perceived crisis. See
In addition to its financial possibilities, the gallery can provide opportunities for Camper (1986–87: 99–124.
increased accessibility and exposure, as well as the exploration of non-traditional For an account of the decline
apparatuses such as multi-screen projection. Even Jonas Mekas, who ‘hassled’ Sharits of film culture in general, see
about his work in the art world, now regularly shows in a gallery context and sells Dixon (2001: 356–66).

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 Erika Balsom
12. Whitney Museum curator
Chrissie Iles has described the
relationship between art and
film as a ‘one-way love affair’.
See Baker et al. (2003: 74).
13. Ricciotto Canudo called
cinema the ‘sixth art’ in 1911
as a part of a critical project to
elevate the cultural status of the
medium. Canudo believed that
cinema synthesized Hegel’s five
arts (architecture, sculpture,
music, painting and poetry).
In 1923, he added the sixth art
of dance and cinema became
the ‘seventh art’. See Canudo
(1988: 58–65 and 291–302).
14. The term ‘transcoding’
comes from Lev Manovich,
who specifies it to be one of the
five principles of new media
in his book, The Language of
New Media. For Manovich, ‘to
“transcode” something is to
translate it into another format’.
This ability is, for Manovich,
‘the most substantial conse-
quence of the computeriza-
tion of media’. See Manovich
(2001: 45–47).
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his work as limited editions. Institutions have shown a marked interest in reflecting
upon the phenomenon: in 2010, the International Experimental Media Congress held
in Toronto included panels such as ‘The Cinematic Enters the Gallery’ and the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art held a three-part series of panel discussions entitled
‘Experimental Film in a Museum Context’. The old antagonism that experimental
film-makers harboured for the art context is significantly weakening.
The second aspect of the recent increase in the art world’s interest in experimental
film represents a relatively new development: the historical products of experimental
cinema – works made for a movie theatre, most often on film, and until now circulated
through channels quite separate from the art world – are now being appropriated by
the museum structure for exhibition. Along with the recent interest in artists’ film
and video of the 1960s and 1970s, one witnesses a new investment in the history of
experimental film, which had until recently remained relatively unknown and unseen
within an art context. At the Musée nationale d’art moderne in Paris, avant-garde films
(in the form of DVD transfers) are now regularly included in the permanent collection
displays. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2001 exhibition, ‘Into the Light: The
Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977’, curated by Chrissie Iles, concentrated
primarily on American artists’ film and video but bucked traditional historiography
by also including canonical works of experimental cinema such as Anthony McCall’s
Light Describing a Cone (1973). The historical products of that tradition have appeared
in large-scale cinema-themed exhibitions such as ‘Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since
1945’ (1996), curated by Kerry Brougher for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, and ‘Le Mouvement des images’ (2006), curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud
for the Centre Pompidou.
What is one to make of this integration of the history of experimental film
into the art world, a sphere of activity many experimental film-makers had for so
long disdained and/or rejected? How and why does the work of someone like Stan
Brakhage, so openly hostile to the art world during his lifetime, now appear in promi-
nent museum exhibitions? Under what conditions are the films exhibited and what
consequences does this practice have for an understanding of the past and the future
of experimental film-making?
III.
When Derek Jarman’s Super-8mm films were exhibited at X-Space in New York City in
2009, they were shown as digital transfers projected at a scale considerably larger than
the artisanal intimacy their original medium would allow. As one wandered through the
galleries of the old Dia Art Foundation space in Chelsea, Jarman’s films were distributed
throughout, several to a room, presented for a meandering spectator. Such an exhibi-
tion raises questions concerning the site and medium specificity of the moving image –
questions that are of particular importance in the case of experimental film, a sector of
practice that has often, to greater or lesser degrees, taken as its subject cinema itself.
In the wake of digital media’s ability to transcode formerly discrete media to a
shared substrate,14 cinema today quickly and easily shifts formats and exhibition situ-
ations, moving from the movie theatre to the television, the laptop and beyond. The
exhibition of the historical products of experimental cinema in the museum partici-
pates in the new and unprecedented transportability and malleability of moving imag-
es after digitization. Its canonical works now appear in a changed exhibition space
and often a changed medium. The museum is no stranger to decontextualizing the
artefacts it displays – it has traditionally abstracted objects from their original context
and inducted them into a mythic timelessness (O’Doherty 1999: 15). But the embrace
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 Brakhage’s sour grapes, or notes on experimental cinema in the art world

of medium de-specification that occurs when film is exhibited digitally is in some

sense a betrayal of the museum’s historical task, which – despite the decontextualiza-
tion involved – is understood as a mandate of safeguarding objects in their unique-
ness rather than emphasizing what Walter Benjamin termed the ‘exhibition value’ of
the work of art – that is, its increased mobility and availability by way of its facsimile
(Benjamin 2002: 101–33). The cinema, once the technology that threatened the cult
value of the work of art with its powers of mechanical reproduction, now finds itself
menaced by the new media inheritors of the very process it helped to initiate. Or, put
differently, cinema made the work of art transferable to other formats only to now
find itself as the medium being transferred. This has taken place at a time that sees the
traditional conception of the museum give way to what Rosalind Krauss has termed
the ‘late capitalist museum’, an entity characterized by an interest in technology and
spectacular intensity rather than history and aesthetic experience (Krauss 1990). The
recent mobilization of the moving image in art must be seen as an integral part of this
shift, poised to guarantee values of entertainment and accessibility while retaining an
element of highbrow cachet.
With regard to the question of the medium, James Quandt has described the
prevailing situation with simplicity and accuracy: ‘Museums and galleries take an
increasingly cavalier attitude toward celluloid, displaying films as digital projections
for the sake of economics and convenience. This should be a burning issue in the art
world, but it isn’t’ (Quandt 2006: 287). Why not? Perhaps because there is something of
a double standard at work. No museum would dream of exhibiting a digital copy of a
film by Tacita Dean, an artist represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, a commercial
entity that issues her 16mm films in limited editions that sell for upwards of 100,000
dollars. The practice is, however, quite frequent in the exhibition of canonical works of
experimental cinema. It can result in poor image quality, unfavourable lighting condi-
tions and improper aspect ratios – but perhaps most importantly for some members
of the experimental film-making community, it manifests a blatant disregard for the
medium-specific properties of celluloid.
One might make the argument that certain films – particularly those that reflex-
ively interrogate the material basis of the medium – resist shifting formats more
than others and are done a greater injustice by digital exhibition. And yet, even Paul
Sharits’s Piece Mandala/End War (1966) – a flicker film examining the single-frame
articulation – was exhibited on video in ‘Le Mouvement des images’ at the Centre
Georges Pompidou. The monumental exhibition included many such digital transfers
of celluloid works, reserving celluloid projection for a handful of artists’ films15 and
the singular exception of Stan Brakhage’s Chartes Series (1994). That Brakhage’s work
was seen on film – as was his Window Water Baby Moving (1959) in P.S.1’s ‘Into Me/
Out of Me’ exhibition in 2006 – has much less to do with the level of institutional
respect for the work’s medium specificity than it does with Marilyn Brakhage’s insis-
tence that if her late husband’s works are to be shown in a museum, they are to be
shown on film. Perhaps most representative of Le Mouvement’s attitude towards the
old medium of celluloid was the display of Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960) and
the rayogram sequence of Man Ray’s Retour à la raison (1923) as filmstrips mounted
on the wall, endowed with an objecthood they never possessed as projections. (The
entirety of Ray’s film was displayed digitally elsewhere in the exhibition.) As Noah M. 15. Nam June Paik’s Zen for
Elcott described it, ‘An endlessly looping digital projection and its once-upon-a-time Film (1962–64), Paul Sietsma’s
material substrate: the installation wall at the Pompidou seemed to divide a material Empire (2002) and Marijke
past from an immaterial present’ (Elcott 2008: 8). If the display of digital transfers may van Warmerdam’s Skytypers
be understood as an exploitation of the exhibition value of the work of art, here cult (1997) were all displayed on
value is retroactively assigned to celluloid, the very material that once jeopardized it. 16mm, while Rodney Graham’s
In other words, the precious object of celluloid film is fetishized as such, while the Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003)
digital transfer serves to make the work available by way of its reproduction. was displayed on 35mm.

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 Erika Balsom
16. The exhibition, on view
from 22 February to 14
September 2009, included
eight films. Puce Moment
(1949), Eaux D’Artifice (1953)
and Kustom Kar Kommandos
(1964–65) were shown on small
monitors. Most visitors ignored
these tiny, foot-level screens
in favour of the three large
projections of Scorpio Rising
(1963), Invocation of my Demon
Brother (1969) and Lucifer
Rising (1970–81) of which only
one played at a time, with the
other two screens holding still
title cards. At the back of the
space, the two small rooms
covered in grey vinyl showed
Fireworks (1947) and Inaugura-
tion of the Pleasure Dome
(1954–66).
17. Volume one was released
in 2004; volume two appeared
in 2010, as did a Blu-Ray box
set of both volumes.
18. Mark Toscano, archivist
at the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences and
participant in LACMA’s ‘Ex-
perimental Film in a Museum
Context’ series, has noted that
the analogy is in some respects
accurate but is in other respects
an oversimplification. It is suc-
cessful in demonstrating that
‘people don’t have the same ap-
preciation of a film projection
as the original, let’s say, of an
artwork – the way they would
with a painting’, but neglects to
take into account the very dif-
ferent relationships the medi-
ums of film and painting have
to the concept of the original.
Toscano emphasizes that it also
fails to consider that, ‘Film for
almost everybody is not really
about the object so much, it’s
about the content. A movie
is not a piece of celluloid or
20
MIRAJ_1.2_Balsom_11-25.indd 20
It might seem too purist and too silly to complain of a museum’s choice to exhibit
digital transfers of a given work. Celluloid is a costly, fragile material, and the continu-
ous exhibition required in the museum context is hard on prints, projectors and
budgets alike. As it is exposed to the threat of damage at each showing, film brings
to new heights the tension between preservation and display that ceaselessly under-
writes the museological mandate. The sheer ease of digital projection is undoubtedly
one of the very conditions of possibility for the increased presence of the history of
experimental film within a gallery context, a part of a more widespread transportabil-
ity of cinema after the analogue age. If curators were limited to celluloid exhibition, it
is certain that fewer films would make their way into the gallery space and, after all,
many films may be exhibited digitally without substantial losses to their meaning or
impact. Certain film-makers are in no way opposed to such a practice: at the ‘Kenneth
Anger’ exhibition at the P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York, in 2009, for
example, high-quality DVD transfers of the film-maker’s most famous works were
shown in a large room cloaked wall-to-wall in red vinyl and dimly lit with coloured
bulbs hanging from the ceiling.16
That the digital transfers shown in Kenneth Anger were also available as a part
of the two-volume mass-market DVD set issued by Fantoma in 2007 points to an
important fact: the digitization of the history of experimental film is happening in
numerous venues, not simply the museum. As more and more of the canonical works
of experimental cinema become available on DVD and as universities with shrinking
budgets divest of their 16mm equipment, they too tend to exhibit these canonical films
digitally. Even Marilyn Brakhage has granted permission to the Criterion Collection
to release two volumes of the By Brakhage DVD.17 This may seem like an inconsis-
tent position in relation to digitization, but in fact it wisely marks out a distinction
between study/viewing copies not to be mistaken for ‘the real thing’ and public exhi-
bition practice. For unlike both the home- and classroom-viewing contexts, which to
some degree recognize a secondary status vis-à-vis theatrical exhibition, the museum,
with its official status as a repository of ‘high culture’, presents itself as an elevation
or ‘saving’ of cinema. Its institutional frame accords an increased cultural capital to a
medium traditionally allied with mass culture.
Historically, museums have functioned to allow the public to encounter works
of art rather than their reproductions, which are often easily accessible elsewhere.
Care – the quality from which the word ‘curator’ derives – is taken to display the
work in a manner that will allow it to achieve its maximum aesthetic impact. By
exhibiting digital transfers of analogue works, the mobilization of the history of
experimental film within the gallery space inverts this tradition by admitting a
secondary format into the space of the museum. This is not to suggest that such
a practice should be uniformly rejected. Rather, it is necessary to draw attention
to such institutional decisions in order to point to one way in which the advent of
digital reproducibility is impacting on the function of the museum and the status
of the artefacts it displays. At workshops held at the 2010 Society for Cinema and
Media Studies conference in Los Angeles on the topics of ‘Issues in Experimental
Film and Media Scholarship’ and ‘The Avant-Garde and the Archive’, a simple
(perhaps too simple) analogy echoed repeatedly: ‘Would you show a photograph
of a painting in a museum?’18
Even if the film-maker has authorized digital transfer and exhibition, such as was
the case with Anger, this practice is representative of a double standard whereby
experimental film-makers are treated with less respect than ‘artists working in film’ –
such as Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas or Matthew Buckingham – whose work is never
subject to such transpositions. In the case of the acquisition of work by a living artist,
the institution will engage in substantial documented conversations concerning how
the work is to be shown and will follow these instructions even if they are difficult and/
12/20/11 3:01:56 PM
 Brakhage’s sour grapes, or notes on experimental cinema in the art world

or costly. The acquisition of experimental films, by contrast, has in the past manifested
no such policy. A film such as Hollis Frampton’s Lemon (1969), acquired by the
Museum of Modern Art’s Circulating Film and Video Library in 1988, was exhibited
as a video loop in its galleries in 2004 – a context very different than the 16mm rentals
of the Film and Video Library with which it was originally deposited. The days may be
over when cinema, due to its basis in mechanical reproduction and mass culture, was
rejected by the modernist space of the white cube. But recent exhibition practices have
demonstrated the persistent vestiges of not considering film to be a legitimate artistic
medium on a par with, say, painting or sculpture – unless, that is, it is sold in limited
editions on the art market. Despite the increasing interpenetration of the worlds of
art and experimental film, these lasting ramifications of their differing models of
distribution and acquisition continue to mark out a divide between the two realms
and their treatment in the contemporary museum.
Even if a work is projected on celluloid, displaying the history of experimental film
in a gallery context involves a very different form of spectatorship than the movie the
atre. In the gallery, works made for start-to-finish viewing are most often shown on a
loop for a mobile spectator who might walk by in the middle, stay for a few moments,
and then move on. The cinema spectator, by contrast, gives him- or herself over to the
time of the film, party to an implicit contract to stay for its duration. A single rect-
angle flickering in the darkness floods one’s field of vision. In a museum setting, total
darkness is rare, many works compete for one’s attention, and works are rarely seen
in their entirety – all of which are reasons that James Benning has refused to show his
duration-based films in a gallery setting despite numerous offers. Frampton’s Lemon
was not simply shown on DVD; it was shown on a DVD loop in a museum stairwell.
Though the question of ‘analogue versus digital’ often dominates the discussion, these
changes in exhibition context are perhaps even more pressing.
Regarding his decision to include Line Describing a Cone in the ‘Into the Light’
exhibition as a gallery installation, Anthony McCall remarked, ‘Well, I do think that
coming across Line in a gallery at a random moment is qualitatively different from
experiencing it from start to finish with an audience. But the degree of access that
running it continuously in a gallery enabled seemed to me to be worth it’ (Baker et al.
2003: 60). Indeed, Line Describing a Cone fared well in the gallery, with viewers able
to move around and through the projector’s sculptural beam of light. Since the exhibi-
tion, McCall has enjoyed something of a career renaissance, anchored firmly within
the art world, and has received much long-overdue critical attention.19 But the trans-
position from start-to-finish viewing to a loop exhibited for mobile spectators can
have less favourable consequences. A film such as Anger’s Fireworks (1947), with its the DVD or the videotape or
narrative arc and accumulative metonymies and metaphors, suffered greatly from its whatever, it’s the thing that is
installation at P.S.1. Viewers wandered in and out, stopping for a few minutes, unaware contained in those carriers’
of the relationship between the images they were seeing and the film as a whole. (telephone conversation with
Morgan Fisher, a figure known primarily within the experimental film world but the author, 22 June 2010).
who has also produced moving-image work for an art context, has made a distinction
between what he terms ‘teleological film’ – work that has a beginning, middle and 19. See, for example, Eamon
end – and moving images that may be encountered at any point.20 In Fisher’s view, it (2005); Legg (2004); Michaud
is this formal difference that makes work more or less suitable for gallery exhibition. (2006); Walley (2003 and
Though some artists, such as Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and Steve McQueen, 2007).
have experimented with scheduled screening times within a gallery context, most
moving-image art runs on a loop for a mobile spectator and is produced specifically 20. Morgan Fisher,
for such a setting; it is, to use Fisher’s terminology, ‘non-teleological’, and to watch ‘Experimental Film in a
it from beginning to end is not expected. The historical products of experimental Museum Context: Material’,
film, by contrast, are made for very different viewing conditions. If the museum is to panel discussion held 4 May
provide a new home for these works and present itself as one of the primary venues in 2010 at the Los Angeles County
which they will reach their present and future publics, the quality of the spectatorial Museum of Art.

21

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 Erika Balsom
21. The complete list of works
exhibited in ‘Hall of Mirrors’
is available in Ferguson
(1996: 315–21).
22. J. Hoberman has written,
‘Opening in December 1970,
the Anthology reified the
avant-garde tradition, creating
a fixed pantheon of filmmak-
ers and a certified canon of
masterpieces, drawing heavily
upon the late efflorescence of
structural film. Avant-garde
cinema left the theaters and
entered the classroom’
(Hoberman 1984: 65).
22
MIRAJ_1.2_Balsom_11-25.indd 22
experience it offers must be evaluated. Though placing experimental films in the
gallery alongside other works of art may accord them a certain amount of respect
and initiate cross-disciplinary dialogue, the risk is very real that they will function
as little more than ambient décor used to add flash to a spectacularizing museum
space. Might these films be better off staying downstairs in the museum auditoria
where they have screened for decades? Alexander Horwath, head of the Austrian
Film Museum, has been a vociferous advocate against transporting the products of
the movie theatre into the gallery, suggesting that, ‘The high popularity of film in art
shows today (and of “film in art” shows) stands in an inverse relation to the number
of successful presentation models we see’ (Francis et al. 2008: 133). Integration has its
benefits, but it also its price. Is it too high?
IV.
While such questions of display are important, it is also necessary to consider the ways
in which curatorial practice is an eminently historiographic practice. After encounter-
ing a barrage of moving images at the 2001 Venice Biennale, Raymond Bellour wrote
that he saw an ‘other cinema’ taking shape, a cinema of artists and of the gallery, a
cinema that stood apart from the cinema as traditionally conceived but yet responded
to the transformations confronting the institution after the advent of digital media
(Bellour 2003: 39–62). In addition to the emergence of this ‘other cinema’, one must
note the emergence of an other history of cinema in its wake. It is a history that sees
experimental cinema, once relegated to the margins of the film historical narrative,
take a central place in what constitutes no less than a rethinking of cinema’s ontology
and a reconceptualization of its function throughout the twentieth century through
the lens of the plastic arts. No longer a primarily narrative art, cinema is reconceived
as a series of mobile forms; no longer allied to a supposedly vulgar commercialism,
cinema is shown to be a medium of advanced art with a strong modernist tradition.
When the exhibition ‘Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945’ paired over fifty
films with cinephilic works of art in other media, four major categories were visible in
the selection: movies about art; movies about movies and/or other visual media; art-
house classics from Europe and Hollywood; and experimental cinema.21 The history of
cinema presented here is one of modernist reflexivity, a history in which experimental
cinema plays a much more significant role than it does in orthodox film historical
narratives – almost as if art history could finally accord to experimental cinema the
respect it deserves but which has largely eluded it. Philippe-Alain Michaud, curator
of ‘Le Mouvement des images’, has written of the need to produce a new definition
of cinema through the history of art, describing film history as a ‘local history’ – as
opposed to the general history of visual art – ‘that one must reconsider, starting with
its margins, in order to ascribe to the cinematographic experience its true breadth’
(Michaud 2006: 7, emphasis in original). The history of experimental film is one of
the primary marginal sites that Michaud identifies to begin his reconsideration; if
such curatorial/critical practices lead to an understanding of film history in which
experimental film escapes the ghettoization to which it is frequently subject, it will be
welcome indeed.
The display of the experimental film tradition within the gallery changes its
relationship to the history of art, but also prompts questions concerning its own canon.
If the formation of Anthology Film Archives and its ‘Essential Cinema’ collection in
1970 constituted a major initial moment in the canonization of experimental cinema
in America,22 the present integration of experimental film into a gallery context
constitutes a second such moment. Once again, inclusion and exclusion will impact
12/20/11 3:01:56 PM
 Brakhage’s sour grapes, or notes on experimental cinema in the art world

on which films will be remembered and which will be forgotten. In examining the
experimental films that have been selected for exhibition in an art context, one sees
that this second moment of canonization rejects Sitney’s historiography by insisting
on the relationships between experimental film and the art world where he had
ignored them, but draws heavily on the selections of the Anthology committee and in
large part replays them. One of the most beneficial possibilities of the integration of
experimental film into an art context is increased institutional support for preservation,
restoration and research projects that might remould and expand the canon as it now
exists. A curatorial inquiry into overlooked areas of experimental film history might
yield important re-evaluations and rediscoveries, as well as new scholarship from
both sides of the film studies/art history divide. However, with the major exception
of the important work that Chrissie Iles has accomplished at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, too many art institutions have demonstrated little more
than a superficial engagement in the history of experimental film in their gallery-based
programming. Even Kenneth Anger’s monographic exhibition at P.S.1 was restricted
to the film-maker’s best-known films rather than exploring work less often seen and
making a true contribution to understanding Anger’s oeuvre in a more complex
way. Convenience and cost are the two reasons most frequently cited for exhibiting
analogue films as digital transfers; pretexts that recur as curators often look no farther
than the most readily available and familiar works for gallery exhibition.
If experimental cinema is to truly benefit from an increased residence in the art world,
curators and institutions will have to follow the lead of Iles and the Whitney and take on
the duties of acquisition, research and restoration in an augmented capacity. They will
have to forego dilettantism and labour to change existing institutional infrastructures and
make the museum a place where serious inquiry into experimental film can take place.
In the words of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences archivist Mark Toscano,
this means that they must simply ‘get over the fact that [film] is a different medium and
it doesn’t fit their normal operations and the normal paradigm of how art is displayed,
valued, cared for, or shown’.23 It also means acknowledging that experimental cinema has
a rich history beyond its best-known films. Internationally, the important work of docu-
menting and theorizing this work has begun, often carried out by artists themselves, but it
remains mostly invisible to art historians and mainstream curators.

V.

Reflecting on the title of LACMA’s series of talks, ‘Experimental Film in a Museum

Context’, Morgan Fisher said:

I would like to assume that the word ‘experimental film’ includes films made by
artists. There was a time when that distinction meant something. I would like
to think that that day is over, but perhaps it isn’t. And perhaps something is still
at stake in making this distinction.24
23. Telephone conversation
Fisher’s position here is that the day should be over, which is something of a heterodox with the author, 22 June 2010.
stance within the experimental film community. Despite increased participation in the
art world, there remains a defensive anti-institutionalism akin to Brakhage’s ‘sour grapes’, 24. Morgan Fisher,
a fear that incorporation into the art world will result in a dissolution or co-option of the ‘Experimental Film in a
marginal sphere of practice called ‘experimental cinema’. In Jeffrey Skoller’s description, Museum Context: Material’,
experimental cinema is ‘often perceived to be made for a closed and impenetrable commu- panel discussion held 4 May
nity of cognoscenti more interested in making and showing films to each other than join- 2010 at the Los Angeles County
ing in larger conversations’ (Skoller 2005: 168). There is without a doubt a self-insulating Museum of Art.

23

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 Erika Balsom

impulse present in this community. The interstitial space that has formed between the
worlds of experimental film and of art has the ability to compromise this carefully culti-
vated niche. This may inspire fear, anxiety, excitement or some mixture of all of the above.
The precariousness and vulnerability of the experimental cinema render it in some need
of safeguarding, and yet policing its borders too zealously can foster a sectarianism that
quashes cross-pollination and prevents new life from taking hold.
The increased presence of experimental film in the art world is a richly ambivalent
development marked by promises, problems and potentials. It is clear from the pres-
ent situation that much work remains to be done if responsible ways of exhibiting the
history of experimental cinema in a museum context are to be found. And perhaps
more importantly, it remains to be seen whether the institutional interest in experi-
mental film will persist after the art world’s infatuation with all things cinematic is over
and another trend takes its place.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Ken Eisenstein, Catherine Elwes, Mark Toscano, and Anthology
Film Archives.

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contributor details
Erika Balsom is Assistant Professor of Film
Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
She recently completed a dissertation entitled
‘Exhibiting Cinema: The Moving Image in
Art After 1990’ in the Department of Modern
Culture and Media at Brown University. Her
writing has appeared in journals such as Screen,
Public: Art/Culture/Ideas and the Canadian
Journal of Film Studies, as well as in the
catalogue for the recent Deutsche Guggenheim
exhibition, Being Singular Plural: Moving Images
from India.
Contact: Carleton University, 405 St. Patrick’s
Bldg, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6,
Canada
E-mail: erika_balsom@carleton.ca
25
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