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This article was downloaded by: [University of Otago] On: 8 March 2011 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 907699972] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK New Review of Film and Television Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713701127 Into the light: re-considering off-frame and off-screen space in gallery films Catherine Fowlera a University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand To cite this Article Fowler, Catherine(2008) 'Into the light: re-considering off-frame and off-screen space in gallery films', New Review of Film and Television Studies, 6: 3, 253 — 267 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17400300802418578 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400300802418578 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. New Review of Film and Television Studies Vol. 6, No. 3, December 2008, 253–267 RESEARCH ARTICLE Into the light: re-considering off-frame and off-screen space in gallery films Catherine Fowler* University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand This paper explores the way that a body of films made for the gallery space (gallery films) both make use of and transform our understanding of off-frame and off-screen space. Focusing on examples from the work of Steve McQueen, George Barber, and Stan Douglas, I argue that once the frame is either emphasized or connected to the gallery space that surrounds it, so the off-frame can be configured differently and the off-screen is highlighted as a space where we confront the limits of representability. The consequences of all of this are evident in my final example: Isaac Julien’s Vagabondia (2000). Keywords: off-screen space; gallery films; the cinematic; perspectival space; Isaac Julien Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 From black box to white cube In her 1996 exhibition at the Whitney Museum: ‘Into the Light’ curator Chrissie Iles collected together projected artists’ films from the years 1964–77 that had been made for exhibition not in the auditorium but in the gallery space. In examples such as Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973), Michael Snow’s Two Sides to Every Story (1976), and Robert Whitman’s Shower (1964) once the cinematic apparatus has been taken out of the black box, it seems to behave differently. In McCall’s piece we see before us the cone of light of the projector that is conventionally behind us and above our heads, and this becomes the subject of the work. In Snow’s double-sided screen the ‘behind’ to the frontal cinema screen is revealed and the actions in-frame are designed to remind us of the screen’s flatness. Meanwhile in Whitman’s piece the two-dimensional moving image of a woman taking a shower is projected onto an actual shower curtain, which has water cascading behind it. In the book that accompanies the exhibition Iles suggests that the cinematic apparatus is transformed from a ‘static viewing space’ into an ‘active participatory field’ (2001 [cover text]). Such a transformation would seem to refer to both the work and its visitor. In all pieces the flat screen is no longer the object of our attention, instead we are presented with sculptural objects that invite our movement around and about them. For example, we are forced to keep walking around *Email: Catherine.fowler@stonebow.otago.ac.nz ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17400300802418578 http://www.informaworld.com 254 C. Fowler Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 Snow’s screen if we wish to see how the action is proceeding on both sides, we may peer behind Whitman’s curtain, and McCall’s piece seems to demand that we walk through the beam of light and smoke, stand inside and outside, investigate the source and place ourselves in the cone. For Iles the mobility that is granted to the visitor of these projected works brings with it the freedom ‘to experience an infinity of multiple viewpoints and planes through a physical movement around the film’ (2001, 45–6). My objects of study in this paper are also artists’ films made for exhibition in the gallery space, but my focus is on a period 30 years after those Iles discusses. In the years between McCall’s, Snow’s, and Whitman’s pieces and the work of those artist-filmmakers I discuss the moving image in the gallery has largely returned to the security of the frontal flat image (or images, since some of this work plays on multiple screens). Given the return to the conditions of cinema, one might be forgiven for thinking that these artists’ films are enacting a retreat from the freedoms granted by those discussed above. Yet my argument will be that this return to the flat screen constitutes a repetition with a difference, as it incorporates some of the findings of earlier experimental projects, whilst also denying the ‘multiple viewpoints and planes’ evoked by Iles (2001, 45–6) above. On the one hand then gallery films continue a critique of the frame, and on the other they utilize codes and conventions, such as renaissance perspective, pictorial framing, and narrative that center the image and thereby return our gaze to the center of the frame. In doing so, I will suggest, they draw our attention to our innate assumptions as to how a moving image has and may be framed, assumptions that I will discuss in this paper. Critiquing the frame – avant-garde and expanded cinema Gallery films may return to the frontal flat image, yet through their form and content they engage with a combination of concerns that derive from first, the cinematic avant-garde and second, expanded cinema practice. First then, for years the cinematic avant-garde has been concerned to ‘break the frame’ and destroy the illusionism that was seen as the enemy of experiment. In the last 40 years alone filmmakers have employed a myriad of techniques to effect this. As A.L. Rees records, examples include: Single framing (Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken), painted or scratched film (Len Lye), extended dissolves (Germaine Dulac), long-takes (Andy Warhol), flicker editing (Shirley Clarke, John Maybury), cut-ups (Anthony Balch, George Barber), fake synch footage (Bruce Conner, Douglas Gordon), out-of-focus lens (Brakhage, Gidal), [and] intermittent projection (Ken Jacobs and Stan Douglas). (Rees 1999, 5–6) These techniques seem designed to remind the black box spectator of the frame that is hidden in the darkness, and to draw his/her attention to other visual pleasures. In the gallery films I will discuss we see a return to the use of characters, narration, and illusionism such that we might suggest that the frame is no longer broken. Yet the avant-garde impulse remains, as the mending of the frame is used as a reminder of its exclusionary effects and therefore a way of questioning ‘representability’. Thus if New Review of Film and Television Studies 255 the avant-garde project was partly to question that which had been framed, then gallery films can also be said to operate through reflexive questioning. Second, these otherwise-cinematic frames in the gallery space are surrounded by the charged physical space produced by those works collected by Iles and explored in other expanded cinema experiments. Whilst Iles’ examples prompt us to see the real dimensions of the screen and frame, other expanded cinema works use it as a material space. A key example is Lichtstrahl: Leiwand (1971) by Austrian Peter Weibel, which consists of a projection of an arrow in a square of space. As with many of his works, in this piece Weibel performed alongside his projector, which he moved across various walls. An accompanying commentary informed the visitor that as spectators we only see what the light transports. Whenever the arrow ‘hit’ the edge of the screen, Weibel arranged for a bang to sound out. For him, the screen’s frame became the starting point for reflections on the sign-like character of the film. (Szope 2004, 183) Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 In the work of British expanded cinema artists such as Malcolm Le Grice, Annabel Nicholson, Gill Eatherley, and Lis Rhodes the frame/screen became a stage on which they performed light shows (Rhodes), shadow play (Le Grice, Nicholson), and live action (Eatherly). Whilst these examples, taking place in cinema-like places, did not require the same activity of their visitors as those pieces exhibited by Iles, the field of the cinematic was nevertheless extended, to include the space around the screen that was occupied by the performer’s body and his/her movements. The gallery films I consider embody the contradictory desires of avant-garde films made for the cinema, and these expanded works made to break out of that cinematic space. For both these forms the frame is the axiomatic point of tension. For avant-garde film the frame confines, excludes, and centers yet all the codes and conventions of narrative work to make us forget this. Equally, for expanded cinema the frame divides the viewer from the act of representation and creates a disembodied visitor. In order to break the frame both forms banish narrative and illusionism; they then replace each with images or performances in which the material of the cinematic apparatus (the celluloid’s grain, the projector’s beam, the screen’s shape) is emphasized in some way. By contrast, as mentioned, gallery films restore narrative and illusionism to their frames, they also feature many of the tropes of film language that have been developed to organize our gaze in the frame, such as mise en scene, camera movement, camera angles, and editing. The starting ` point of this paper is the apparent contradiction inherent in the choice by gallery films to be narrative and illusionist and to incorporate a critical/reflexive attitude to the frame derived from avant-garde and expanded cinema. I will discuss this further by exploring how film language developed to both center the frame and to suggest how the image continues through off-frame and off-screen space. Centering the image – off-frame and off-screen space For Iles’ 1960s/1970s works and the expanded cinema above the off-frame, offscreen became a space no longer associated with fictional narrative; instead it could be read as the literal, material, and performative space that surrounded the screen 256 C. Fowler Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 (and invited the visitor’s participation). But for the films I will discuss that invite narrative and illusionism back into their frames, the off-frame and off-screen once again become valid terms of reference, since these films want to engage our narrativity; to encourage this they provide rich visual imagery that hints of the worlds of fantasy and desire. In order to understand how the off-frame, off-screen space also centers the image and thereby denies it the kind of multiple perspectives outlined by Iles, it is necessary to begin with a brief contemplation of how as cinema develops the frame gives way to the off-frame and then to the off-screen, before asking: what do gallery films add to this? In starting, to define my terms I will use the distinction originated by Pascal Bonitzer, for whom ‘off-frame’ refers to the material space and ‘off-screen’ the imaginary or fictional (Bonitzer 1971–72, 15). I will insist on these two different levels of space because, as will be seen, for gallery films they become crucially important. Different language is used by Noel Burch in his detailed formalist ¨ analysis of film practice. He insists on: ‘two different kinds of space: that included within the frame and that outside the frame’ (Burch 1981, 17). These he calls ‘onscreen’ and ‘off-screen’ and he accomplishes a similar distinction to Bonitzer by talking about the difference between ‘concrete’ and ‘imaginary’ off-screen space. The concrete off-screen is the space that may start off as an unseen space but, through particularities of cutting or camera movement, shifts to on-screen space. Meanwhile ‘imaginary’ off-screen space is the unseen that remains unseen, and Burch discusses this as being ‘used almost exclusively as a way of suggesting events the directors felt that simply showing them directly would be too facile’ (1981, 24). For my study Burch does not really touch on the radical possibilities of the imaginary off-screen, rather his exploration rests largely with the concrete offscreen or what I will term the ‘off-frame’. A further useful definition of my two layers is articulated by Gilles Deleuze who talks of on the one hand: ‘that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around’ and on the other ‘a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to insist or subsist, a more radical elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time’ (2005, 18). The frame, the off-frame, the off-screen In early cinema the off-frame was the main signifier of the fact that, as Stephen Heath puts it: ‘the image goes on, continues’ (1981, 5). The cinematic image can be seen to ‘continue’ for two reasons: first, because as a moving rather than still image action is never frozen but is instead constantly changing over time; and second, because as a framed image, framed first by the camera then the projector then the cinema screen, the reality framed is always exclusive. As a consequence of these differences the frame of cinema can be thought of in distinction from the frame of painting or of the theater. The model of cinema that originated in the auditorium was clearly designed to impose some limits on the continuous velocity of the cinematic image. Thus it was that the new media that became cinema and had originated shown on ‘either side of a translucent screen’ (Heath 1981, 1) changed as ‘the screen [was] fixed in what New Review of Film and Television Studies 257 Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 [would] come to be its definitive place’ (Heath 1981, 1). The first public performance at the Grand Cafe, Paris, channeled its spectators’ vision in one direction. The ´ screen became singular, the ‘other side’ that had been present in initial screenings disappeared against the wall and was for a long time inaccessible. Consequently the suggestion that the cinematic image could be in more than one place at once also died with the birth of cinema, to be replaced by one audience, one image, and one screen. Having said ‘one screen’ it is probably more accurate to talk of ‘one frame’ since it is the material framing of the image rather than the imaginary, fictional screening that confines the image in early cinema. However, my subject in this paper is both off-frame and off-screen space, since I want to explore what happens to the imaginary space beyond the fictional world we see (the off-screen) once the frame is taken out of the auditorium and the off-frame is therefore no longer hidden by darkness. Returning to the distinction of the cinematic image from the other arts we might ´ look to Andre Bazin, for whom the frame of a painting encloses a space that is oriented so to speak in a different direction … [t]he picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe. (Bazin 1967a, 166) Bazin uses the terms ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ to describe these different emphases. He also points out that whereas in the theater off-stage means out of existence by contrast: ‘when a character moves off screen, we accept the fact he is out of sight … [t]here are no wings to the screen’ (1967b, 105). Therefore, it follows from Bazin’s theorization of the differences above that for the frame of painting and proscenium of theater we are encouraged to think only of what is inside the rectangle. By contrast, for the frame of cinema we have come to accept that the image projected in frame has a referent outside it that, due to its movement, we sometimes see, and due to its framing, we are encouraged to remember and connect with the in-frame. What cinema adds to painting and theater is the ‘cinematic’ frame, which encourages a distinct way of reading from inside to out. In early cinema there were more rules to learn, as the frame presented problems for spectators who had to get used to what Richard De Cordova has diagnosed as ‘the break-up of perspectival space’ (1990, 76). Thus, in front of static frames, since whatever was framed continued to move, reference points such as foreground, background, and the masking that had been ‘the predominant means of the representation of depth in pre-renaissance painting and an element the system of Renaissance perspective engaged’ (De Cordova 1990, 76) were no longer of any use. This talk of the ‘depth’ in the image is a reminder that the off-frame can be extended beyond the four sides of the frame (right, left, top, and bottom) to include a further space, as Burch puts it: ‘encompassing the space existing behind the set or some object in it’ (1981, 17). In other words, the space beyond the back of the screen. This further space is not always evident in early films. With early single shot films such as L’Arrive d’un train a la Ciotat/The Arrival of ´ ` a Train at Ciotat Station (Louis and Auguste Lumiere, 1895) or La Sortie des ` 258 C. Fowler ouvriers de l’usine Lumiere a Lyon/Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory (Louis ` ´ ` and Auguste Lumiere, 1895) the off-frame must remain off-frame. However, once ` sequential films begin, so the off-frame can be revealed. Initially people disappear off-frame and we then cut to catch up with them. Gradually though we are able to actually follow the action off-frame in a more continuous and less jolting flow. De Cordova traces the ways in which early Lumiere and Pathe films cope with ‘the ` ´ exigencies of a radically different syntagma’ (1990, 77) and suggests that the effect of movement is minimized by the frequent tableau settings. Then he adds that ‘movement is emphasized as a movement of discomposition’ (De Cordova 1990, 77), referring to shots in which appearance and disappearance become part of the narrative, such as chase sequences across then in and out of frame. The act of cutting in the chase, from one static shot to the next, becomes an act of following the events and therefore the story, as well as an act of centering the spectator (as if re-gaining the privileged optical position of renaissance perspective). Crucially, what is developing alongside editing is a sense of narrative that comes to center and contain framed space. Even at this early ‘primitive’ stage we can see the assumed correlation in operation between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’, whereby narratives that rely on information being continually withheld from us will make great use of offscreen space. As film language develops it is of no surprise that in classical narrative where there can be no uncertainty, and everything: camera movement and camera angles, mise en scene and editing, is working towards coherence, the off-frame rarely ` remains off-frame and instead we cut around spaces as if to reassure us that there is nothing ‘hiding’ where we can’t see it and therefore nothing that we don’t ‘know’. The ‘certainty’ that creates a reassuring sense of omniscience for a classical Hollywood spectator, is soon played with by key avant-garde filmmakers. In Maya Deren’s Meshes trilogy (consisting of Meshes of the Afternoon [1943], At Land [1944], and Ritual in Transfigured Time [1946]) the off-frame becomes an unreliable space, as the boundary between Burch’s ‘concrete’ and ‘imaginary’ off-screen softens. Thus in At Land as Deren wanders along a path with a man the camera pans left, leaving only her in frame. Time is continuous, yet shortly the camera pans back right to the same space and we see a different man now walking beside her. In this example the in-frame and out-of-frame are not continuous, instead there is a radical break that troubles our ‘classical’ expectations. Deren’s renovation of the off-frame is consistent with her transformation of the off-screen, which becomes the space for her psycho-drama of identity. The avant-garde’s use of the off-frame is only slightly tamed by European Art cinema when it develops in the early 1960s. In Antonioni’s painterly modernism the off-frame becomes the site of action. This reversal is given new meaning by L’Avventura (1960) in which of course Anna’s ‘disappearance’ is never answered by a ‘re-appearance’, thus producing the heightened uncertainty that characterizes this ambiguous form. Some conclusions can be drawn about the development of off-frame and offscreen space in cinema films. First, the shift from a still to a moving image brings with it an accompanying shift in how we read the frame. The transformation is generally one from reading from the outside in to reading from the inside out. Typically this outside will privilege the sides of the frame, with some reference to the Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 New Review of Film and Television Studies 259 further spaces beyond the back of the screen and behind the camera. This outside also leaves out ‘the space that might be supposed to be masked at the top and bottom of the frame’ (Heath 1981, 45). Second, although we understand that the framed space extends beyond the frame, we also expect that we will have been prepared for how it will change before it does so, either through some connection to what was in frame, or through clues in frame such as screen direction, shot reverse shot, point of view, or continuity editing, in Stephen Heath’s words: ‘the off-screen space recaptured must be ‘‘called for’’, must be ‘‘logically consequential’’, must arrive as ‘‘answer’’, ‘‘fulfillment of promise’’ … (and not as difference or contradiction) – must be narrativized’ (1981, 45). Revealing the edges of the frame and connecting it to the gallery space Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 All of the above discussion and definition of off-frame/off-screen relies on the black box auditorium for its meaning; so how is this understanding disturbed by its exit into the light of the white cube? Gallery films build upon the possibilities offered in two ways, both of which draw upon and differ from my previous examples of avantgarde and expanded cinema. The first way is by foregrounding the frame, and thus the edges and the ends of the image, the second is by connecting the frame to the space that surrounds it. In several films, the rule that we take for granted the inclusiveness of the top or bottom of the frame and focus instead on the left or right as the space ‘off’ is challenged. In Steve McQueen’s Just Above My Head (1996) (see Figure 1) he films himself walking along with the camera held next to his waist, Figure 1. Just above my head. Copyright Steve McQueen, Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery. 260 C. Fowler looking up at his head. The resulting image shows us, at the bottom of the frame, the bobbing top of McQueen’s head and a large expanse of sky. Noel Burch ¨ suggests three ways in which off-frame space can be brought to our attention by a director. The first is through an entrance or exit from the off-frame, the second by having an in-frame character look off-frame, and the third ‘involves framing a character in such a way that some part of his body protrudes out of frame’ (Burch 1981, 21). Whilst it might seem that this is what is happening in Just Above My Head, because the rest of McQueen’s body never appears in-frame and because of the particularities of the gallery cube, we are not merely alerted to the off-frame. On entering the space for this film the image entirely fills one wall of the cube. We are confronted by a largely empty black and white image with part of an object sometimes appearing at the very bottom of the frame, which is on the floor. Because of the highly polished floor a reflection of the image can sometimes be seen, such that our attention is returned to the in-frame twice. Therefore, in Just Above My Head it is at the bottom of the frame, on the floor that we walk, that the image ‘continues’, rather than the sides, and we are forced to seek out the bottom frame in order to locate the image. Just Above My Head also connects its image to the space that surrounds it. Formally, with its artist as body, this film could be seen as a performance piece, and it follows that thematically it raises questions about the material presence of a body in space, that are echoed in the visitor’s own occupancy of the space in which the film is shown. For it is easy, upon entering the cube, to miss the subject/object at the foot of the frame and therefore to become self-conscious about one’s presence. We are therefore also forced to confront the frame as embodied visitors and to contrast the frame’s near-absence of an image with our (in cinematic terms) hyper presence. If in Just Above My Head it is as if we are ‘standing’ on the off-frame, in McQueen’s Five Easy Pieces (1995) (see Figure 2) the effect is reversed. In this film three sequences alternate, all of them shot from constructivist high and low angles. In the first we look up, and above us in extreme close up is a foot walking across a tightrope. The angle from which this is filmed is so extreme that it is as if we are ‘below’ the image, even though this film is still being projected floor-to-ceiling on a flat screen on one of four walls of the cube. Once again we confront a frame and become aware of our body, but this time the result could be seen to be to highlight the disconnection between eye and body. What we see is a flat screen in front of us, yet what we perceive is a foot above us that has been framed as if we were looking up at it (in fact the foot could also appropriately be titled Just Above My Head). The disorientation effected by McQueen’s extreme angles continues in other films made for the gallery space. George Barber’s River Sky (2001) (see Figures 3 and 4) brings both the top and bottom of the frame to our attention. In this 10 minute single screen film we listen to three different people as they hang upside down on a moving boat. On the sound-track they relate dreams or changes in their lives that made them re-think their beliefs. On the image-track they appear hanging upside down from the top and bottom of the frame and sway, with their arms also hanging and they are visibly dis-orientated by the effect that their upside-down sailing motion has on their bodies. Despite the flat against-the-wall screen that Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 New Review of Film and Television Studies 261 Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 Figure 2. Five easy pieces. Copyright Steve McQueen, Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery. Figure 3. River Sky. Copyright George Barber. Courtesy Film and Video Umbrella. 262 C. Fowler Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 Figure 4. River Sky. Copyright George Barber. Courtesy Film and Video Umbrella. suggests the cinematic experience, each of these works encourage behavior that would be illicit for visitors to a cinema auditorium. Hence we might suggest that McQueen and Barber seem to want to produce a sense of disorientation such as that first felt by early cinema audiences. In McQueen, what may appear at first to be an empty frame is soon occupied by a peripheral subject at the very bottom. Here what we ‘see’ is the edge of the subject as it bobs in and out of sight. The result is a bizarre kind of ‘disappearance and re-appearance’. We are reminded as much of the frame of the camera that shot this as of the bottom edge of the screen where it appears. In Barber we are invited to turn our heads upside down to look at this topsy-turvy image. It takes time to work out how the people are moving and to connect the important events recounted to the change in perspective of the upside-down journey. Hors-champ, visualizing the off-screen My first few examples from Steve McQueen and George Barber call attention to the bottom and top edges of the frame and challenge our expectations as to how the image should ‘continue’. The exclusionary tactics of the frame are further explored in Stan Douglas’ double-sided work aptly named Hors-champ (1992) (the French term for off-screen space). In Hors-champ Douglas simultaneously presents two separate sets of footage of the same free-jazz concert. On one screen the viewer sees a final, edited cut; on another screen, shot from a different angle, the viewer sees all the material which was edited out of the first version. (www.artandculture) New Review of Film and Television Studies 263 However, the difference between these two screens is greater than a shift in angle, as the camera and editing have completely different agendas. On screen one (the first we see as we walk into the space, as shown at the Pompidou show, MCA Sydney in 2007) everything revolves around the performer. Editing is used to emphasize who is playing when, and the camera follows musical cues. The style of screen one is therefore relatively muted, allowing us to follow the music rather than focus on the musicians. On screen two (found behind the first, necessitating a walk around to the back) an entirely different performance is being captured. Here the musicians take precedence. While the music plays we watch Douglas Ewart (saxophone) sway to the off-frame George Lewis (trombone), then Lewis puts down his instrument as Ewart takes up his (off-frame) and we finish with a pan to Oliver Johnson (drums). Ewart and Lewis whisper to each other, we hear Johnson but see a giant close up of Lewis sweating profusely and Ewart jumps up and down. On screen two camera and editing work together in a manner that is dis-connected from the music, deconstructing the continuity and in effect the ‘certainty’ of screen one. Screen two makes the viewing of Hors-champ into a dialectical experience, as the second screen contradicts the first, undermining it and adding to it, and therefore providing the off-screen to the in-frame. Significantly this off-screen, which would typically be the space we might imagine yet never see, Deleuze’s ‘more radical elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time’ is represented by Douglas as the very space Heath suggests is outlawed: it is not ‘called for’ ‘logically consequential’ ‘answer’ or ‘fulfillment of promise’ instead it is ‘difference [and] contradiction’ (1981, 45). In different though similar ways these gallery films also involve us in what De Cordova called: ‘the disappearance and re-appearance’ of their images. De Cordova’s frame of reference was the chase film in which the accused would run off-frame (thus disappearing) as the ‘excuse’ to cut to the off-frame and thereby continuing the action and ‘appearing’. My examples have been chosen to suggest some of the ways in which gallery films use and then break the rules of off-frame and off-screen, persuading us to take into account all of the edges of the frame – top and bottom as well as left and right, making use of the ‘imaginary’ potential contained in the excluded space ‘off’ which is no longer hidden in the dark edges beyond the frame, but is instead incorporated into the screen itself. Having explored first how the frame is revealed and connected to the gallery space and second how the off-screen may be articulated as the space of exclusion I will now turn to my final example, Isaac Julien’s 10 minute Vagabondia (2000) (see Figure 5) in which both these tactics are put to use to confront the limits of ‘representability’ that have been hidden in the off-screen space. The off-screen and the limits of representability Vagabondia like Baltimore in 2003 and most recently True North (2005) is ostensibly a wander around a place, namely, the Sir John Soame museum in London, that transforms it into a space of memory and fantasy. As in Baltimore the wanderer undertakes a distinctive route that says as much about her as it does the museumscape she wanders through. In this case the wanderer, is Cleo, and she acts Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 264 C. Fowler Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 Figure 5. Vagabondia. Copyright Isaac Julien. Courtesy Victoria Miro Gallery. as a curator introducing us to sculptures, books, and paintings. Also images of the actual space are combined with fantasy images of the origins of the works from the colonial imagination. Julien is pictured standing next to the body of T.E. Lawrence, John Soames is pictured in a mirror, and dancer Javier de Frutos, who Julien worked with on Long Road to Mazatalan, meanders archly through crowded corridors, perching on dusty seats. The detail of endless bookcases, pictures, statues, and artifacts are of less interest though than the architectural grandeur of so many frames, pillars, staircases, and doorways. It seems that in staging his film in the Soames gallery Julien was looking for ways of interrupting the carefully presented collection of history. What is most interesting for this paper is the fact that the hinge that connects with and transports us to these spaces is a dividing line across the screen that can be seen as a radical kind of off-screen space. Thus the trope that dominates this artful film is the ‘mirror’ image produced through the pseudo split-screen presentation of the film. In effect a vanishing line is created into which half of the action disappears. If we examine the mirror images as single images, cleaving them apart via their center line, then what emerges is a doubling that actually splits the body, such that half of it lies out of frame. As a single image then, the effect is not unlike that produced by McQueen’s Just Above My Head with most of his body dropping out of frame bottom, or even River Sky in which only the top half of bodies is seen dangling from the top of frame. However, unlike in these two earlier examples, the exclusion of half a body also becomes a way of referring us to the center of the frame rather than its edges. For Julien the edges of the frame do not fade into the darkness New Review of Film and Television Studies 265 as a reminder that ‘the image goes on …’ rather those edges can be found in the center of the frame as a reminder of something that we cannot see. Therefore, once this halved image is reinserted on the other side of the frame the doubling becomes a doubling back. We are referred centripetally back to the in-frame rather than the centrifugal to the out-of-frame. Similarly, the splitting becomes a halving that draws attention to the incompleteness of what we are seeing. Once again this is the exact fulfillment of what Heath instructs off-screen space should not do – for here we are given ‘difference’ and ‘opposition’. We might explain Julien’s split-screen trope by recalling that in his film practice he has always been interested in mapping presences and juxtapositions that have rarely be represented visually. For critic Kobena Mercer, Julien’s ‘use of ‘‘style’’ cuts an opening into the closed codes of a culture’ and the result is that he ‘is said to touch upon a nerve, making a mark that alters habitual ways of seeing’ (Mercer 2001, 9). Julien’s subject has forever been the gay black male’s place in history, narrative, and fantasy and his work of ‘opening and altering’ has led to him focusing on that which might have typically fallen outside of the frame or remained unframed, and which therefore remains in the realms of the off-screen to be forever imagined and fantasized yet never in focus or in frame, for example, the mixed race male couple. Further, Julien’s practice has relied on the combination of unlikely elements to ‘imagine’ impossible relationships. As examples we could cite Paradise Omeros (2002), that turns to 1960s Britain, is inspired by a poem by Derek Winnicott, and shows images of recognizably real living rooms in the UK and hazily fantastic beach settings. Or True North, inspired by the story of Matthew Henson the first black man to get to the North Pole, but performed not by a black/ white male but by Vanessa Myrie. Even in The Long Road to Mazatalan (1999) where there is less evidence of a factual starting point, the attraction of one cowboy for another is deferred through references to films (Taxi Driver [Martin Scorsese, 1976] being the most obvious, but also the western genre) and through a carefully choreographed ‘dance’ of costume and looks. Mercer continues his analysis of the nature of Julien’s practice by suggesting that it involves: ‘a ‘‘turn’’ a ‘‘swerve’’’ through which we are ‘led astray to fresh connective possibilities’ (2001, 9). Mercer’s analogy seems to be built upon the assumption that there is a straight line of telling that is classically followed and that therefore Julien’s practice takes us away from this line, as might a detour, side road, or even short cut. To be led astray also suggests a hierarchy of routes that casts Julien’s itinerary as deviant, and Julien himself seems to acknowledge such an agenda when early in his career he suggests: ‘There exist multiple identities which should challenge with passion and beauty the previously static order’ (1988, 36). Whilst I agree with Mercer’s assessment that Julien’s practice does indeed lead us astray, I want to argue that if we foreground the notion of on- and off-frame/ screen we can think of his actions more as ‘folds’ rather than ‘turns’ or ‘swerves’. The difference that is highlighted by this different choice of language rests very precisely on the direction we take to discover Julien’s images. For these are images that were not always there but never ‘in frame’; instead they rely on the merging of imagination and fantasy that is part of the dynamic of off-screen space. They are Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 266 C. Fowler therefore images that necessarily occur at the edges, in the dark folds of an inbetween which relies on visual trickery to conjure them up. The importance of ‘the fold’, the center line of division which actually does not divide the image at all, but instead marks its moment of repetition, is suggested by Julien’s use of centripetal images in which, once we meet the fold so the image begins again. The disorientation we feel confronted by such images seems to hinge on their attack on renaissance perspective. The center point around which they are arranged does not provide its typical coherence and grounding, instead that point is the beginning of the image’s undoing. Whilst in Hors-champ the off-screen was available to us on the under-side of screen one, Vagabondia develops this further as the off-screen forms part of the image, it is simultaneously folded into it and visible in its folds. Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 Once again ‘the image goes on, continues …’ The journey this paper has taken from black box cinema film to white cube gallery film would seem to take us in two directions. First, re-discovering the edges of the frame and connecting their frames to the white cube space that surrounds them, McQueen and Barber address a visitor who stands in the middle of images that tumble towards him/her like the train arriving at the Ciotat station. This dizzying effect is built on by Douglas’ Hors-champ which visualizes the off-screen as the under-side of narrative. Second, again aware of the frame but travelling inward this time, Vagabondia constitutes a claiming of space as it creates an off-screen with little reference, and no ‘answer’ to the frame. Julien in particular, with his 10 years as an independent filmmaker, supplies an important example of how the gallery film might provide an opportunity to transform our understanding of cinematic elements. Whilst his experimental narratives for cinema (Territories [1984], Looking for Langston [1989]) were elliptical, inventing a visual language through which they might express their identities-on-the-edge, Vagabondia disarms us, going even further towards the expression of that which might once have remained off-screen. Part of the effect of this film must be credited to the sound-track, which I have not had time to discuss, but which mixes rhythmic piano with Creole spoken by Julien’s mother. Yet the split-screen trope is also a key part of this disarming effect. On the one hand we are forced to delve into the center of the image, the farthest point from the frame; yet on the other in doing so we are immediately confronted by the edge of the fold. The result, seen in Heath’s terms, is an image that does not ‘go on’ but instead abruptly ends. Whilst Iles’ examples of the projected image dragged into the light provided us with ‘multiple viewpoints and planes’ in McQueen’s, Barber’s, Douglas’, and Julien’s gallery films the image is all center and all edges, on the one hand inviting us to see how the image continues on the gallery floor and ceiling, and on the other inviting us to look at what is in-frame in a new, more intense, way. What I hope to have suggested, in this brief study, is the way in which those familiar elements of film language we recognize in gallery films operate differently because of the space around the screen that is provided by the escape into the light of the gallery. New Review of Film and Television Studies 267 Although it is essential that we recognize how they build on experimental precedents (avant-garde and expanded cinema) we should not only measure them against past achievements, but must also analyze the contribution they make to the transformation of key cinematic elements. Whilst this paper has focused on the transformation of off-frame/off-screen space, further areas for exploration could include the expansion of the edit through the varied use of multiple screens (which provide us with edits in space as well as in time) and an exploration of stillness in the moving image through the extended use of the single shot (in which we might suggest that pensiveness is finally achieved). Through such work the contribution that gallery films make to contemporary experimental film practice might be more fully recognized. References Downloaded By: [University of Otago] At: 00:48 8 March 2011 Bazin, Andre. 1967a. Painting and cinema. In What is cinema?, Vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. ´ Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ———. 1967b. Theatre and cinema. In What is cinema?, Vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bonitzer, Pascal. 1971–72. Hors-Champ: Un espace en defaut. Cahiers du cinema, nos. 234–5, ´ ´ ´ 15–26. Burch, Noel. 1981. Theory of film practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ¨ De Cordova, Richard. 1990. From Lumiere to Pathe: The break-up of perspectival space. In ` ´ Early cinema: Space frame narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser. London: BFI. Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 1: The movement image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Continuum. Heath, Stephen. 1981. Questions of cinema. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Iles, Chrissie. 2001. Into the light: The projected image in American art 1964–1977. New York: Whitney Museum. Julien, Isaac. 1988. Aesthetics and politics: Panel discussion (with Martina Atille Reece Auguiste, Peter Gidal, and Mandy Merck). Undercut, no. 17. Mercer, Kobena. 2001. Avid iconographies. In Isaac Julien. London: Film and Video Umbrella/Ellipsis. Rees, A.L. 1999. A history of experimental film and video. London: BFI. Szope, Dominika. 2004. Peter Weibel. In Future cinema – The cinematic imaginary after film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, 180–91. Karlsruhe and Cambridge, MA: ZKM and MIT Press. http://www.artandculture.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/ACLive.woa/wa/artist?id5722 (accessed June 19, 2007).