BETWEEN THE BLACK BOX AND THE WHITE CUBE

EXPANDED CINEMA AND POSTWAR ART

By Andrew V. Uroskie

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-84299-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix,
Introduction: From Medium to Site, 1,
1 RHETORICS OF EXPANSION, 17,
2 LEAVING THE MOVIE THEATER, 53,
3 MOVING IMAGES IN THE GALLERY, 83,
4 CINEMA ON STAGE, 131,
5 THE FESTIVAL, THE FACTORY, AND FEEDBACK, 171,
Epilogue: The Homelessness of the Moving Image, 233,
Notes, 239,
Illustration Credits, 259,
Index, 261,

CHAPTER 1

RHETORICSOFEXPANSION

Multiscreen Cinema and the ’64 World’s Fair

In April 1964, the World’s Fair came to New York. Reports of nightmarishlycongested parking and two-hour-long exhibit lines were unableto dissuade millions of visitors from all over the world. Many localsattended the fair not once or twice but literally dozens of times duringthe two summers it was open. Yet if the success of previous World’sFairs had rested on their ability to inhabit a futural temporality—to offerviewers spectacular yet convincing dreamworlds of tomorrow—the NewYork World’s Fair managed to botch the job entirely. Despite its resolutely”space-age” theme, it was widely criticized as being neither forward-lookingnor visionary. Largely planned and designed in the late 1950s, bythe mid-1960s it had become a kind of living relic, a ready-made ruin.As America and the world had changed drastically, the fair seemed frozenin time. Rather than familiarizing viewers with a strange and excitingfuture yet to come, it managed to defamiliarize that which had seemednatural only a few years back.

On the same site a quarter century before, the 1939 World’s Fair hadbeen received with both popular and critical acclaim. General Motors’Futurama exhibit was a heady vision of the future metropolis featuringtowering skyscrapers, elevated multilane highways, and cars for everyone.Coming at the end of the great Depression, when many families didn’t yetown cars and superhighways were cultural novelties, Futurama inspiredmillions. Yet for the baby-boomer generation coming of age in 1964, burgeoningsuburbs and extended workaday commutes were beginning toprovoke a reconsideration of the automotive romance. General Motorsdoubled down. Its updated Futurama II showcased a robotic “Jungle RoadBuilder” intended to delve deep into the last untrammeled jungles ofthe world, eviscerate everything in its path, and leave behind elevatedasphalt superhighways. For the nascent youth culture of the 1960s, thesekinds of technologies were a proverbial “road to nowhere”—a vision ofthe future better left in the past.

What did seem particularly new and exciting was the spectacularrange of multiscreen cinema that was there on display. Man in the 5th Dimensionat the Billy graham’s Christian evangelical Association Pavilion,Saul Bass’s The Searching Eye at the kodak Pavilion, American Journey atthe US Pavilion, The Triumph of Man—”an immersive panoramic journeythrough the ages”—at the Travelers Insurance Pavilion, To the Moon andBeyond at the Transportation and Travel Pavilion, and Charles and RayEames’s Think at the IBM Pavilion were among the most popular exhibitsof the fair. To Be Alive!, produced by Alexander Hammid and FrancisThompson for the Johnson Wax Pavillion, was perhaps the most popularand celebrated of them all. Hammid was principally known for hiscollaboration with Maya Deren on Meshes of the Afternoon twenty yearsbefore, and Thompson for his prismatic city symphony NY, NY of 1957.Their collaboration on To Be Alive! proved quite unlike these earlier works.A program presented the short film’s message: “While millions of peopleare frustrated in this complex modern world of ours, there are millionsof others who retain a sense of the underlying wonder of the world, whohave a capacity for finding delight in normal, everyday experience, andwho realize that there can be great joy in simply being alive!”

While the fair would be roundly criticized for its aesthetic conservatism,Thompson and Hammid’s panoramic triple-screen film was aninstant standout. Combining images from Africa, Italy, and the UnitedStates, To Be Alive! was like an abridged, cinematic version of Edward Steichen’sThe Family of Man from the decade before, and it was similarly wellreceived. According to the company magazine, “more than 300 membersof the New York press corps gave the film a standing ovation” afterthe advance screening, and played to “capacity audiences every day ofthe fair.” Viewers were forced to wait “as long as two hours” to see theeighteen-minute film, and attendance over the twelve months of the fairreached more than five million within its single theater. “Tremendoussuccess brought inquiries and requests to see the film from throughoutthe world. Celebrities came almost every day until our guest register readlike an inter national Who’s Who of entertainment, business and governmentleaders.” As with The Family of Man, the frenzied pitch of excitementwas in no small part due to the particular conjunction of an innovativeaesthetic form with a clear and uplifting social message.

To Be Alive! received a number of honors, including the 1965 AcademyAward for Best Short Subject Documentary. More intriguingly, the filmwould also take pride of place within a special issue of the undergroundjournal Film Culture devoted to expanded cinema the following year. “ToBe Alive! and the Multi-Screen Film” began with the breathless declarationthat now that To Be Alive! had been given an Academy Award, themultiscreen film, “once a freak of the film world … was recognized as anew and effective motion picture form by the Industry.” One might reasonablyask why a publication devoted to experimental and avant-gardefilm would concern itself with what the industry considered “effective,”but this declaration exemplifies the confusion surrounding the rhetoricof expanded cinema within the mainstream and alternative press. Whilethe term often implied a broad range of activities beyond the industrialnorms of cinematic presentation, the most obvious and persistent ofthese activities, and therefore the one most quickly and powerfully associatedwith it, was the use of multiple projection. Yet the widespreadexcitement over multiscreen cinema as new technology and a new formof cinematic practice was possible only due to a particularly acute formof historical amnesia, because the multiscreen cinema that emerged inthe 1960s was neither particularly novel nor greatly innovative. Rather,it was merely the latest iteration of a technology that had been inventedand reinvented compulsively, and almost continuously, since the latenineteenth-century birth of cinema itself.

Well before the emergence of classical Hollywood, even before themost rudimentary grammar of industrial cinema, Raoul Grimoin-Sansonprovided the template for the monumental, immersive cinematic spectaclewith his Cinéorama of 1897. Conjoining the nineteenth-centuryfascination with panoramic painting and the newly invented technologyof cinematographic projection, this ciné-panorama employed ten synchronized,radially facing movie cameras in a hot air balloon to captureits ascent over the city of Paris. For its debut at the Paris exposition Universelleof 1900, spectators were situated within a similar basket whileten synchronized projectors, located beneath them, projected the film ina 360-degree panorama some one hundred meters in circumference. Despiteits unqualified popular success, Grimoin-Sanson’s exhibit was prematurelyshut down after being declared a fire hazard by the city police,and his company went bankrupt immediately thereafter. Its commercialfailure would serve as a template for a range of beleaguered efforts overthe next fifty years as a succession of artists and engineers again andagain reinvented the ciné-panorama as a spectacle of overwhelming andimmersive monumentality.

The most famous of these attempts within film’s silent era was undoubtedlyAbel Gance’s “invention” of his three-screen Polyvision cinemafor his 1927 feature Napoléon. And during a few brief climactic momentsat the end of that film’s final reel, gance would indeed use these threescreens in a radical new way, presenting different images on each in akind of simultaneous montage. Yet for most of the final reel, the multiplescreens functioned just as they had for Grimoin-Sanson: augmentingthe scale of the image with the creation of a single, continuous ciné-panorama.It was certainly this expanded scale, rather than any novelpossibilities for juxtaposition, that captured the immediate attention ofHollywood. By the late 1920s, Fox was promoting its grandeur process,Paramount its Natural Vision, and Warner Brothers its Vitascope—allexpensive, large-format processes that magnified the size and quality ofthe cinematic image but failed spectacularly at the box office and wereabandoned soon after their introduction.

After the great Depression, the multiscreen panoramic cinema wasagain “invented” by Fred Waller for the 1939 World’s Fair. His Vitaramaused eleven linked cameras and projectors to display a greatly enlargedimage inside a hemispheric screen, while his enormous domed”movie-mural” within the fair’s Perisphere was even larger. While generatingconsiderable excitement at the time, his work was also quickly forgotten.In the 1950s, multiple projection would once again be rediscoveredby Hollywood as it desperately sought ways of contesting the fallingbox office receipts that attended the rising popularity of television. Cinerama,like its distant namesake, used linked cameras and projectors tocreate a single panoramic image, while Todd-AO, VistaVision, CinemaScope,and Ultra Panavision achieved a similar scale by means of largerfilm (Todd-AO), anamorphic compression (VistaVision, CinemaScope), orboth (Ultra Panavision).

Contemporary advertisements for all three processes regularly invokeda similar rhetoric of immersion: the viewer did not watch at a distance,but was brought “inside” the spectacle. Often coupled with thisimmersivity was the promise of a new kind of “active” cinematic subject:a Todd-AO advertisement from the 1950s describes “a quality so perfectthat the audience become part of the action, not just passive spectators.”This parody of the Brechtian imperative reveals the nature of this earlyindustrial “expanded cinema.” Beyond the minutiae of diverse technologicalinventions, beyond the breathless publicity campaigns proclaimingthe utter novelty of each newly minted procedure, we can locate a single,almost unwavering aim from the multiscreen Cinéorama of 1900 tothe multiscreen Cinerama of the 1950s: the enfolding of the spectatorin an immersive, diegetic world through the overwhelming sensory conditionsof display. These supposedly radical innovations in multiscreenprojection were, on a fundamental level, structured by a surprisinglyfixed under standing of the spectator-screen relationship. By immersingthe subject within an overwhelming accumulation of visual data, theysought to produce a heightened experience of reality without too greata concern for realism. Within industrial practice, the history of multi-screentechnology might reasonably be considered little more than afootnote in the history of widescreen technology.

As such, it should come as no surprise that the industrial adoption ofCinemaScope in the 1950s and early 1960s would signal the obsolescenceof multiscreen experimentation within the industrial cinema. Of the variousprocesses, CinemaScope was clearly the least impressive, containingonly a fraction of the visual or auditory detail of the other alternatives.Nevertheless, because it required only minor modifications to existingprocesses of production and distribution, it was considered the only economicallyfeasible option for mass distribution. Using only a single lens,CinemaScope adequately addressed the desire for a larger and more immersivespectacle without the complexity and risk that attended multipleprojection formats like Cinerama.

Returning to the ’64 World’s Fair with this history in mind, it is difficultto understand what was so wildly innovative about Thompson andHammid’s piece. In his interview for Film Culture, Thompson claimed thatTo Be Alive! had not intended to subsume the multiple screens into a single,oversized image, yet all the evidence points to the film having preciselythis effect. Maxine Haleff describes the width of the three screens as”enveloping” the viewer and producing an effect of “heightened reality.”The fair’s guidebook was even more explicit, advertising “the Tri-ScreenSystem that puts you in the picture.” Both mirrored the rhetorical tropesregularly employed to advertise Cinerama, Todd-AO, and CinemaScopethroughout the previous decade. In fact, Hammid was quite forthrightin his description of the triple camera setup he had designed for the film:”the purpose is to have the cameras aligned so that the images coincideprecisely.” In discussing those few sequences making simultaneous useof different images, Thompson spoke not of montage or juxtaposition,but of narrative efficiency: “We love this method, because we can say a lotmore using less viewing time … in the pottery sequence, we show thebeginning, middle and end of one process all at once, and it’s done.” Multipleimages here do not disrupt or even complicate the narrative, theymerely accelerate it. Thus, despite their implicitly disjunctive potential,multiple screens were understood principally as a means for creating asingular panoramic, introducing audiences to the “novel” experience ofmultiscreen spectatorship while keeping the resulting experience firmlywithin the comfortable conventions of industrial practice.

Jonas Mekas—filmmaker, critic, and champion of the undergroundfilm community—was one of the few to dissent from the prevailing excitementover these new multiscreen spectacles. As the World’s Fair waswrapping up in the summer of 1965, he wrote that the idea of “expansion”presented within these new multimedia shows was simply a quantitativerather than a qualitative change: “expanded consciousness is beingconfused with the ability to see more color images, with the expandedeye, with the quickness of the eye.” Mekas’s lament signals a prescientconcern that, while shifting the formal vocabulary of cinematic representation,these works merely reiterated the same exhausted model ofimmersive spectacle that had characterized their historical predecessorsfor over half a century. The kind of “active” spectatorship these worksproposed was not unlike those advertisements for Todd-AO and CinemaScopea decade before: it consisted in having to keep pace with the increasedamount of visual data being generated through the encompassingsize of the spectacle. Mekas’s worry would prove well founded. Havingalready found success with three screens, Thompson and Hammid doubledthe number of screens to six for their We Are Young (1967) at expo 67in Montreal. And not to be outdone, Roman kroitor there developed aprojector that handled 70mm film lengthwise, thus magnifying the imageby a factor of four and setting the stage for the popularization ofthe now celebrated IMAx cinema. Within a decade, the legacy of thesevivid demonstrations of the efficiency of sensory bombardment could befound everywhere, from multinational trade shows and corporate exhibitionsto rock concerts and religious revivals.

More fundamentally, the obsession with these supposedly new materialtechnologies failed to represent any critical investigation of cinemaitself as a social technology—as a set of historically contingent practicesof exhibition and spectatorship. Yet the attention lavished on the supposedlyrevolutionary multiscreen spectacles of the World’s Fair servedto displace and conceal another vision of cinematic expansion that wasthen emerging. For just as the World’s Fair was packing up at the end ofAugust 1965, preparations were being made for an entirely different sortof festival at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque that winter. If the World’sFair effectively summarized the past and predicted the future of multimediaspectacle, the decidedly low-tech, artisanal, and critically unheraldedexpanded Cinema Festival would serve both as its antipode andcritical rejoinder. Minimalist rather than maximalist, the “expansion” inits name did not concern the size or number of screens, nor the speed orintensity of the imagery projected on them. A conceptual rather than aformal expansion, it did not concern the formal qualities of cinematicimage so much as the institutional qualities of the cinematic situation.By actively embracing the heterogeneous conditions of exhibition andspectatorship within cinema’s forgotten infancy, it sought to transformthe discussion then taking place about the modern art of cinema. Ratherthan asking what kinds of cinema might be properly designated as “modernart,” it asked how the very nature of modern art was being reconceptualizedthrough its belated incorporation of the aesthetics and philosophyof the moving image.

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