Malcolm Le Grice. Little Dog for Roger,1967. - PDF document

Malcolm Le Grice. Little Dog for Roger,1967. Darkened Rooms: A Genealogy of Avant-Gardeto the London Film-MakersÕ Co-op and Back AgainNOAM M. ELCOTTThe cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms.ÑAndrŽ Breton, Manifesto of Surrealismre witnessing the reconÞguration of twentieth-century art history as a darkpassage illuminated by intermittent projections. Most notably in ÒLe mouvementes imagesÓ (2006), a survey exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, paintings, sculp-tures, and other material objets dÕart were relegated to side galleries groupeder cinematic rubrics. The spine of the exhibition was a darkened corridorwith looped digital projections of Þlms that traced a cinematic history of twentieth-century art: Richard Serra and Paul Sharits, Joseph Cornell and MarcelBroodthaers, L‡szl— Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray.In each instance, the invest-ent in cinema exceeded the production of Þlms and was augmented by a rangeof works in adjacent galleries. There unfolded an ÒimmaterialÓ passageway surrounded by material relics. Nowhere did the division between immaterial pro-jection and material object congeal more strikingly than around a single wall onwhich was projected Man RayÕs Retour ˆ la raison923) and behind which sev-eral meters of the ÞlmÕs rayographically inscribed 35 mm Þlmstrips were exhib-ited as such for the first time: laid out flat for inspection like a museologicalrtifact or specimen rather than upright like a painting, as in the case of the neatlyframed Þlmstrips of Peter KubelkaÕs Arnulf Rainer958Ð1960), also on view. Theost attentive viewers repeatedly skirted around the dividing wall to piecetogether the different components of the work. The Þlmstrips reveal white formson a dark ground: tacks and pins, a coiled spring, rope, crystals, glass plates, Grey Room 30, Winter 2008, pp. 6Ð37. © 2008 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Grey Room 30photographs and other quotidian objects whose x-rayÐlike traces span severalers. For these strips, Man Ray relinquished his camera andÑin the obscurityof his makeshift darkroomÑplaced objects directly on the celluloid and exposedit to light. He later recounted, ÒI threw pins and thumbtacks at random; then turned on the white light for a second or two, as I had done for my stillRayographs.Órom Jean CocteauÕs 1922 open letter to Man Ray in praise of the rayographsthrough Rosalind KraussÕs 1977 theorization of the index, cameraless pho-tographsÑalso called rayographs or photogramsÑhave epitomized the potentialimmediacy of the photographic process.In the conclusion to her surveyof nineteenth-century natural drawings made without a camera, Carol Armstrongsks why one should even bother with photographic self-reßexivity and answers,ÒBecause it allows us to look the material mode of the photograph rather thanthrough it; because it is a way of making that materiality matter.Óet this rayo-graphic immediacy and materiality seem to dissolve as soon as the Þlmstrips areprojected: meter-long strips appear on screen for barely three seconds each whenprojected at a rate of sixteen frames per second, the rough standard at the time.What is more, Man Ray ignored the frame divisions essential to the traditionalcinematic dissection and reconstitution of movement. The result is illegible con-ent or erratic motion: Òa snowstorm, with the flakes flying in all directionsinstead of fallingÓ and Òhuge white pins crisscrossing and revolving in an epilep-tic dance.ÓThe white shadow of a serrated knife vanishes when divided intoframes and projected on screen, but a springÑcameralessly inscribed without theslightest movement of object, filmstrip, or light sourceÑis magically set intootion when segmented and projected. The two minute and forty-eight secondvie thus comprises a ßurry of images, abstract and representational, that nevercohere into anything like a narrative: black-and-white silhouettes, points of light revolving in every direction, artworks in motion, visual noise and ßeetingblurs, a twirling egg crate, a nude torso undulating in raking light. One can only smile when, at the start of each loop, Man RayÕs title appears: The Return to Reason.An endlessly looping digital projection and its once-upon-a-time material substrate: the installation wall at the Pompidou seemed to divide a material pastfrom an immaterial presentÑas well as the medium-specific filmic from thepostmedium digital, and perhaps even an embodied viewer from a disembodiedone. But if the rayographic strips could not help but appear like vestiges of apredigital era and the bearers of all the originary traits we fear ost to our present,Michel Foucault reminds us that ÒWhat is found at the historical beginning ofGrey Room 30 Man Ray. Elcott|Darkened Roomsthings is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of otherthings. It is disparity.ÓA nonlinear genealogy of the rayographic strips of Retourˆ la raisonÑfrom their recent museum debut to their 1920s oblivion via their960s and early-1970s recuperation in the histories and practices of avant-garde filmÑwill demonstrate not the stability of these oppositions but a trans-uation of these values: materiality and its attendant medium-speciÞcity andembodiment. At its 1923 premiere, no one took note of RetourÕs cameralessness.The cinematic dispositifor apparatus occluded access to the Þlmstrips and to theintelligibility of the rayographic inscription. (In the cinema, one cannot skirt thescreen to get a peek at the strips.) The moment where the Þlmstrips were Þrst leg-ible as suchÑin the histories, theories, and practices of structural and materialfilmmakers beginning in the late 1960sÑcoincides with the avant-garde recon-Þguration of the cinematic dispositif,in particular at the London Film-MakersÕo-operative (LFMC, founded 1966). Not only is this moment chronologicallyequidistant from the reception of Retour within the historical avant-garde and itsmuseological present, but it marks an early, failed attempt to transform the cinema into a museum and the museum into a cinema. This staccato history ofRetourand its Þlmstrips will wind its way slowly from the present to the 1920sÑwith stresses around 2006, 1966, and 1926Ñbut will jump frequently betweenthese dates to highlight the incongruities and peculiar continuities that abound.My argument is deceptively simple: until 2006, RetourÕs rayographic Þlmstripsere referenced but never exhibited. They existed in a state of latency for overeighty years. At least twice, far-reaching attempts were ventured to make thiscy manifest: by Man Ray in the early 1920s and by avant-garde Þlmmakersin the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unable or unwilling to exhibit the Þlmstrips asan object, they were forced to reconceptualize the institution of cinema in termsradical, even if far less explicit, than the two-part Pompidou installationand its pronounced division of materiality and immateriality. The resultantreconceptualized cinemas frequently bordered on the world of art and now pre-sent themselves as historical models for and alternatives to the ÒcinematizedÓmuseum, ones where material-immaterial divisions were much more dynamicthan a wall. This genealogy will also trace the outlines of the cinematic dispositiffrom its post-WWI rise through its 1970s decline and its current museiÞcation inthe form of the black box; it is, however, neither a history of the black box (thougha range of black and gray boxes are in play) nor a chronicle of handmade films(though such is the dominant reading of cameraless films) but a genealogy ofRetour ˆ la raison,its rayographic Þlmstrips and the successive dark chambersin which they unraveled. Grey Room 30II.The Þrst of these chambers was the ThŽ‰tre Michel on the night of July 6, 1923.ÒDo you remember Dada? If youÕve already forgotten, there are Messieurs Breton,Tzara, Aragon, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Soupault and Eluard. You thought theyere dead? Well, Þne. Last night they were resurrected.ÓSo begins the account ofthe SoirŽe du coeur ˆ barbe published in Comoedia,the leading art and theaterily in interwar Paris. The tone is light, even ßippant. Dada poetry and dramare discussed only to be dismissed. Films garner no mention. Yet it was at thisÞnal dada soirŽeÑcarried out amidst the tumultuous fall of Tristan TzaraÕs brandof dada and nearly cleared out by the police after several brawls instigated by theBreton gangÑthat Retour ˆ la raisond its sole interwar screening.Jane HeapÕsreport in the pages of The Little Review,while more sympathetic and extensive,pays equally scant attention to the works, except to name them.Only LouisAragon, in a manuscript unpublished at the time, offered more than a fleeting reference to the Þlms, and he was clearly not amused:One saw a short film by Man Ray that displayed his mistress, Kiki, then abeautiful unfolding spiral entitled The Return to Reason,which provides the ornamentation of his atelier. The film is equal neither to thepainting nor to the photography of Man Ray, who was pressed by Tzara toproduce something at all costs for this spectacle. Tzara cares for nothing butes; that the individuals create stupid works means little to him.No one referenced the filmÕs material substrate until Man Ray concocted a dramatic and bunk account for his autobiography decades later. In a tale too oftenrepeated, Man Ray writes off the Þlm as a dada provocation and claims that hisamateurish splicing led to frequent breakages, plunging the audience in darknessand instigating the famous brawl.The only corroboration that any reaction toRetouroccurred comes from Louis TosmasÕs review in Bonsoir:An audaciouslyentitled Þlm, The Return to Reason,revived, by virtue of its relative clarity, theindignation of the Surdada sectarians.ÓBorn of an undead dada and without alliance to nascent surrealism, disownedits creator, Retourbelonged nowhere. Articles, reviews, and artist interviewsublished in the 1920s frequently list ÒallÓ of Man RayÕs films only to omitRetour.Even the committed surrealist and cineaste Georges Sadoul laterclaimed to have Þrst learned of Retoursome twenty years after the fact.As lateMan RayÕs 1966 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a catalog essay appraising his cinematic oeuvre erroneously claimed that Retour ˆ la raisons Òunfortunately lost.Óints survived, but the Þlm all but lostGrey Room 30 Elcott|Darkened Roomsto avant-garde discourse, its rayographic base little more than a curiosity in theannals of cinema, dada, and surrealism.In the late 1960s, as critics, historians, and practitioners of underground orexperimental Þlm began to search for interwar precedents, Retourslowly gaineda marginal place in alternative film histories. The film was selected in 1970 byAnthology Film Archives as part of their Essential Cinemaprogram but wasexcluded from Parker TylerÕs 1969 filmography, which otherwise Òincludes virtually all key works stressed by the present writer as indicative, and oftenimportant, in the passage from avant-garde to Underground Þlm.ÓThe Þlm wasconsidered foundational only by those Þlmmakers for whom the material of Þlmand the processes of its production were paramount. Nowhere was this tendencystronger than within the LFMC. Malcolm Le Grice, among the leading practi-tioners and advocates of material Þlm at the LFMC, made a case for Þlmic mate-riality and, with it, Man RayÕs rayographic Þlm:The earliest example of this awareness is found in Man RayÕs Retour ˆ laraisonnsic]) through his incorporation into film of the direct pho-tography ÒRayogramÓ technique. . . . Distancing the representational imagein this way draws attention to film substance and process as an element of content.So powerful were the terms of this recuperation that Deke DusinberreÑamongthe earliest supporters of the LFMCand the most extensive interpreter of Retourto dateÑlabels his recent analysis of the film Ò1970s-style.ÓWhere surrealisthistories have excluded Retourand Emak Bakia926) from their canons in favorof Man RayÕs later films,Le Grice reversed their selection and asserted thatÒwhile Man RayÕs first two films, Retour ˆ la raison and Emak Bakiaclearly Ôin,Õ I have not been alone in the impulse to reject his subsequent Þlms asa retrogression.ÓThe current essay is little concerned with canons or progress.(As Man Ray liked to say, ÒThere is no progress in art, any more than there isprogress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.Ó)en as postwar German filmmaker-theorist Birgit Hein worked to construct agrand, progressive narrative of material Þlm closely aligned with the LFMC, sheacknowledged that no continuous tradition could be forged:ith hindsight, we can establish links with artistsÕ Þlms of the Õ20sÑandere Man RayÕs Retour ˆ la Raison(as a material film) appears especiallysignificant . . . but we cannot draw a straight line from here to the Õ60sbecause developments of this kind did not occur after the mid Õ20s. Grey Room 30Instead, Retourcircuitous route from the darkroom to the darkened museum viathe cinema and the Þlm co-ops is a history that does not progress evenly but infits and starts, doubling back on itself and reversing its position, asserting rup-tures where we imagined continuities and continuities where we once assertedradical breaks.III.By 1926, V.I. Pudovkin was able to recapitulate nearly a decade of Russian ÞlmtheoryÑin particular what Lev Kuleshov had named Òcreative geographyÓÑinFilm Technique and Film Acting.y cognizant of the materiality ofediation, Pudovkin contended that whereas the substance available to the the-ater director is a Òreal and actual process that takes place in obedience to the lawseal space and eal time. . . the active raw material [of the Þlm director] is noother than those pieces of celluloid.if in perverse adherence to PudovkinÕssertion and in strict observance of Clement GreenbergÕs modernist dictum onedium-speciÞcity, avant-garde Þlmmakers from America, England, and acrossthe Continent began to explore the materiality of filmstrips in the 1960s.Independent of one another, Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow,Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.,966), Malcolm Le Grice (Little Dog for Roger,967), and Wilhelm Hein andRohÞlm,968) mobilized the celluloid (actually acetate) Þlmstrip asthe basis for the ÞlmÕs image and structure, a tendency that would soon be desig-ed ÒstructuralÓ or, within the LFMC,Òmaterial(ist).Óing and developing equipment, designed and largely built by Le Grice, and theacquisition of professional developing and printing equipment for the LFMCorkshops at the end of the 1960s made the otherwise marginal emphasis oneriality into a centerpiece of Co-op production. As David Curtis chronicledin 1975, ÒThe loops and straying images of MalcolmÕs Little Dogproved to be thebeginning of a whole genre of English film-making.ÓAnd as Le Grice madeclear, material film generally and Little Dog for Rogerin particular Òshould beconsidered as clarifying the direction begun by Man Ray in Retour ˆ la Raison, Òto draw attention to the material nature of the Þlm itself and the imageson it as a photochemical reality.ÓSuch an approach enabled the exploration offilm in a manner similar to the medium-specificity of modernist paintingor,consistent with an oft-repeated slogan, the treatment of ÒÞlm as Þlm.Óaul Sharitsobserved in the early 1970s that Òthere seem to be some general aesthetic interests shared by contemporary arts (one of which is, ÔparadoxicallyÕ self-deÞnitionÑÔpainting as the subject of painting,Õ etc.).ÓAlthough Þlm critics frownedGrey Room 30 Elcott|Darkened Roomsupon the encroachment of Greenbergian art rhetoric into the sphere of experimen-tal cinema, the insistence on medium-speciÞcity allowed these progeny of Retourto extend far beyond the cameraless inscription of celluloid and help, in turn, tosituate RetourÕs rayographic strips within the broader experience of cinema.References in LFMCwritings to the tradition of handmade filmÑbegun byMan Ray and continued in Len LyeÕs Colo935), Stan BrakhageÕs 963), and other ÞlmsÑwere eventually supplanted by a more direct attack onthe institution of cinema: not only works by Man Ray, Landow, and Le Grice, butNam June PaikÕs Zen for Film962Ð1964), composed of nothing but clear leader.the same time Le Grice and others turned to Greenbergian art paradigms, theyintuitively rejected the ÒautomaticallyÓ modernist experience of cinema postu-ed by Michael Fried in 1967. Fried wrote, ÒIt is the overcoming of theater thatnist sensibility Þnds most exalting and that it experiences as the hallmarkof high art in our time. There is, however, one art that, by its very nature, escapestheater entirelyÑthe movies.ÓThe LFMCÕs interrogation of Òthose pieces of celluloidÓ quickly opened on to the Òeal space and eal timeÓ that Fried, likevkin, attributed to theater and that Le Grice saw as the continuation of aerial practice of Þlm: ÒThe direction of my thinking and the tendencies of myÞlms, keep returning me to an afÞrmation of the projection event as the primaryreality. In other words, the real TIME/SPACE event at projection.ÓLe GriceÕsdirect target was not a modernist sensibility so much as the darkness of the theater,the immobility of the subject, and projection from the rearÑprecisely the condi-tions of reception Fried and others highlighted as guaranteeing the absorption ofthe moviegoer.Le Grice announced his attack on cinematic absorption with the Þrst Þlm hescreened in the environs of the LFMC, stle One966, Þrst screened 1968). Theork consisted of found newsreel footage of the military-industrial complexontaged into visual and audio repetitions, occasionally interrupted by shots ofa lightbulb. Under the inßuence of Robert Rauschenberg, Le Grice augmented theepicted lightbulb with a real lightbulb that hung near the screen.During the performance of the work, the lightbulb was turned on and off, illuminating theaudience and obliterating the projected image. As Le Grice asserted in his pro-gram notes, ÒThe awareness of the audience is returned to their actual situation(viewing a Þlm) by reference to the bulb and the perceptual problems which itsßashing creates.ÓInsomuch as Òelectric light is pure information,Ó as MarshallMcLuhan had recently avowed, its intermittent presence here decoupled the pho-tographic images from the luminescent medium that carried them and created adialecticÑpowerful and primitive in equal measureÑbetween absorption in the Grey Room 30film and awareness of oneÕs environment.The action anticipated by severalrs Roland BarthesÕs 1975 strategy of breaking the ideological fascination of themovie theater:it is by letting myself be twicefascinated by the image and by its surroundings,if I had two bodies at once: a narcissistic body which is looking, lost ingazing into the nearby mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not theimage, but precisely that which exceeds it: the soundÕs grain, the theater, theobscure mass of other bodies, the rays of light, the entrance, the exit.Where the traditional movie theater insists on what Barthes called a Ònarcissis-ticÓ body absorbed in the image, Le GriceÕs stle Onecompelled its spectatorsto take on a second, ÒperverseÓ body. Þrst, Le Grice envisioned that these actions would best unfold in a galleryrather than a theater. By the end of the 1970s, however, he acknowledged thatÒNeither the current institution surrounding cinema nor that related to the pre-sentation of the plastic arts has forms which suit such a concept of presenta-tion.ÓThe gallery dissolved the narcissistic body to the same degree thataditional theaters suppressed the perverse one. This shift can be identiÞed bestin Anthony McCallÕs Long Film for Ambient Light975)ÑÒscreenedÓ in Nework independent of the LFMCbut closely related to and received widely in o-op circlesÑwhere the simultaneous assault on the image and illumination ofspectatorial space reached its apotheosis: natural light and an electric bulb illu-minated a loft for a twenty-four hour period; the windows were covered withwhite paper; a time scheme and a two-page statement hung on the wall. Ratherthan the absorption of traditional cinema or even the dominant axis of earlierorks like McCallÕs Line Describing a Cone973), Òthe entire space was utilizedso that there was no particular axis of attention.ÓEven as scholars have identi-Þed a series of metaphors and practices that bind the work to the idea of cinemawhile dispensing entirely with the materials of Þlm, McCall did not hesitate tout the word in scare quotes to conclude his statement: ÒI do not rule out thepossibility of continuing to make ÔÞlms.Õ However, for the time being I intend to Right: Malcolm Le Grice. Castle One, erformance view.5. Installation view. Elcott|Darkened Roomsconcentrate less on the physical process of production and more on the presup-positions behind Þlms as an art activity.ÓThe material Þlmstrip and the processesof its production gave way to light and duration. As Dusinberre quickly noted,ÒThe very emphasis on the material nature of the cinema and of cinematic repre-sentation leads to immateriality.ÓCastleOneattempted to summon advancedrt in the transformation of the cinematic arena, Long Film for Ambient Lightreturned the question of cinema to the institutions and spaces of art. The materialRetour ˆ la raisonat the LFMCunfolded between Òthe lightbulb Þlm,Óas stle Onecame to be known, and a ÒÞlmÓ composed largely of a lightbulb.Whereas stle Oneand Long Filmerturned the traditional cinematic expe-rience through negation, Le Grice and his former students (who became LFMCcolleagues) confronted those conditions through the extension of production intothe realm of reception: from the treatment of film as material substance to Òthereatment of: the projection situation as material event.No Þlm illustrates thisconvergence better than Le GriceÕs Little Dog for Roger.The Þlm existed in mul-tiple versions: sound and silent, single and double projection. But already at itsOctober 1968 premier, where it was shown as part of Le GriceÕs second paintingand Þlm exhibition at the Arts Lab in London, Little Dog s a two-screen, loopfilm performance: one image projected at sound speed (24 fps) and the other atsilent speed (16 fps). The performative nature of the screening ensured that theoperation of the projectors was experienced as anything but automatic. In moreefinitive versionsÑthe work has recently been standardized as a two-screen digital installationÑLe Grice used a single sound track and edited the 16 fps versionwn so that the reels start and end at the same time and are repeatedly, if onlyfleetingly, aligned during the course of the film. Woven tightly into the manyoops and edits, the temporal displacement is difficult to observe. Instead, theviewer struggles to ascertain the temporal filiations and frequently submits totheir ever-modulating present. Double-screen double exposures of positive andegative Þlmstrips create a Þeld of incandescent and obscure rectangles closer toanimated abstraction than home movies. The persistent temporal displacementcreated by the two projection speeds forces the viewer into the real time of the Grey Room 30situation as material event even when not performed live.In Le GriceÕs many program notes and artistÕs statements on the Þlm, he invari-ably marginalized the contentÑÒthe original material for Little Dog for Rogera few short sequences of 9.5 mm Þlm rescued from the basement of a house whereI used to live. It is a home movie shot of me, my brother, mother and a dogÓeference to medium-speciÞcity: ÒThis vaguely nostalgic material has providedan opportunity for me to play with the medium as celluloid and various kinds ofprinting and processing devices.ÓAnd yet an unavoidable nostalgia permeatesthe work at every level: the home movie, the soundtrack composed of 1950srecords that sporadically and without warning interrupt the purring of the pro-jector, and, most of all, the Þlm stock itself.Released in 2006 on DVD, the Þlmw appears doubly nostalgic: for a 1950s childhood and an obsolescentBut already by the 1960s, the 9.5 mm Þlm gauge was so near extinc-tion as to have been labeled Òthe living corpse.ÓThe gaugeÕs most distinctivefeatureÑa single, central sprocket hole whose placement allows the format toeliver an image size comparable to 16 mm at nearly half the widthÑwas not theest technological advance so much as the Þrst mainstream casualty of a mediasystem maintained through perpetual obsolescence. Insomuch as 9.5 mm filmand 1950s records already belonged to a departed era by the late 1960s, Little Dogis less an exploration of the timeless essence of the medium than a proclamationof the mediumÕs historical and technological contingency.Nevertheless, Little DogÕs handling of the Þlm materiales it representative of a range of LFMCpractices. Lece transferred the original material onto 16 mm by con-tact printing under glass and by hand pulling the 9.5 mmÞlm through a primitive printer that he had converted froma projector. The film is first and foremost a self-reflexiveand lyrical documentation of that transfer. For the firstminute of the roughly ten-minute-long film, a flood ofblurred images rushes down the screen, as if the shutterd been removed from the projector (instead Le Griceetached the film from the claw of the printer), andreminds the viewer that printers and projectors were oncecoupled with the camera as a single apparatus. In 1969,en Jacobs included an extended section of projection slip-page in his seminal Tom, Tom, the PiperÕs SonJacobs dissected a 1905 film by refilming it off the screenand performed the analytic work of an amorous eye through Elcott|Darkened Roomsclose-ups, repetitions, slow motion, and other techniques. He brought the camera-s-eye metaphor into the darkness of the cinema, into the eye that gazes at thecinematic screen, peruses its content, its surface, its reality. In place of the camera and screen, Le GriceÕs projector-turned-printer anchorsLittle Dog.After a minute of printer slippage, the image of a dogltingly appearsÑat times frozen, at times moving, at timesstill but pulled slowly through the printer, always framed bythe filmstrip, with its distinctive, now luminescent centralsprocket. The rest of the ÞlmÕs short loops undergo seeminglyendless printing transformations: over- and underexposure,sharp and soft focus, positive and negative printing, upsidewn and right side up, double exposures, wandering film-strips. Sections of black and clear leader are augmented byscratches and stains. The emphasis on the printer, Le Gricesoon argued, Òallows physical aspects of the medium, the real-ity of celluloid, emulsion, sprockets, the nature and capabili-ties of the machinery to become the basis of experience andcontent.ÓAll the original material for Little Dogwas shot on acamera. The Þlm is ÒcameralessÓ only insomuch as it shifts theemphasis from a world mediated by the camera to the mediationof the printer. This is how the LFMCtranslated the cameralessRetour.This is how it made RetourÕs Þlmstrips visible. In her Þlm Slides970), Le GriceÕs former student AnnabelNicolson did away with the camera entirely, ran the celluloidthrough a sewing machine, wove it with thread, collagedshreds of photographic transparencies and filmstrips directlyon the celluloid and pulled it by hand through the Co-opÕsDebrie step printer.Three years later in Reel Timelive expanded-cinema piece, Nicolson ran a long film loopfrom a projector, which projected images of her at a sewingchine, across the ceiling and down to a real sewing machinewhere she sat, sewing holes into the same loop. The loopÕs pro-jection was tied to its perforation. The performance was repeat-edly interrupted and the audience plunged into darkness as theprojector jammed; it ended when the loop broke. Nicolson apsed the sites and technologies of production and receptionÑhighlighting the opposing (and hier-rchical) gendered associations of the Opposite, top: Ken Jacobs. om, Tom, the PiperÕs Son, 969.Opposite, bottom: Malcolm Le Grice. Roger,. Two-screen version.rame enlargements.op: Malcolm Le Grice. for Roger,Bottom: Malcolm Le Grice. Little Dog for Roger,1967. rame enlargement. Grey Room 30related technologies of projector and sewing machineÑand bound the immater-l realities of the cinematic experience to the material properties of the Þlmstripand the processes of its fabrication. But unlike in traditional gallery or cinemaspaces, the LFMCÕs Þlm workshop and theater were so proximatethat Reel TimeÕs elongated Þlm loop could have physically con-ected the one to the other. Reel Times a microcosm of theentire LFMCinstitution. The LFMCwas among the few facilities that combined pro-duction, exhibition, and distributionÑas if the aesthetic engage-ent with the material Þlmstrip spawned an entire apparatus; asif the visibility of the Þlmstrips required a new conception of thecinematic institution. Peter Gidal nearly said as much in 1980:ÒSince 1966, members of the London Film-makers Co-operativethought it necessary to have equipment at hand in order toallow for the making of Þlms.Ó Participation in the constructionof a cinema, the projection of films, the writing of criticism,upkeepÑall these activities contributed to Òthe ÔmachineÕ calledthe Co-op, that of experimental Þlm.Óthe LFMC,the film workshop and the cinema in particular were part of asingle apparatus, a machine for production and reception, whereeriality and process permeate each stage of the cinematicexperience. Films were made, screened, edited, and rescreenedbut (like the filmstrips of Reel Time) not necessarily preservedbeyond the extended production loop that was this apparatus ofexperimental cinema. The ultimate legacy of Retour ˆ la raisonerstood by Le Grice and his circle may have been theLFMCitself: where the site of reception came to mirror the siteof production and enabled the materiality of celluloid, process,and projection to come into the light.IV.Europeans discussed Retourat length, but its inclusion in theAnthology Film ArchivesÕ cyclical Essential Cinemaensured it got more screen time there than anywhere else. In970, the Anthology Film ArchivesÑthe Þlm museum foundedto promote American avant-garde Þlm and its European prede-cessorsÑopened its doors to the general public. In the manifestoescribing its new theater, Anthology asserted that where early Reel Time, 3. Performanceview. Photograph by Ian Kerr.UX, London. Elcott|Darkened Roomsvie houses grew out of vaudeville and were hardly appropriate for the art ofÞlm, the aptly named Invisible Cinema,conceived by Peter Kubelka in 1958, wasa Òmachine for viewingÓ in which stadium seating, hooded seats, complete dark-s, single-source sound equipment, and strict decorum ensured that the vieweruld Ònot have any sense of the presence of walls or the size of the auditorium.He should have only the white screen, isolated in darkness, as his guide to scaleand distance.ÓKubelkaÕs Invisible Cinemaattempted to purge anything thatexceeded the imageÑeven exit signs were a reluctant concession to fire codes.While Invisible Cinemas lauded as Òthe Þrst true cinemaÓand Òa projectiveand spectatorial dispositif,generated by [the American avant-garde] movementÕsradical revision of the cinematic institution and apparatus,ÓKubelka was unam-biguous: ÒThe concept of Invisible Cinema has nothing to do with the specialaims of Anthology Film Archives.ÓIn 1970, with various forms of expandedcinema raging from the West Coast across the European continent, InvisibleCinemas less an avant-garde reconfiguration of the classical cinema than abulwark against its avant-garde corruption. Where Paul Sharits argued that Òoney Þnd it necessary to construct systems involving either no projector at all orore than one projector and more than one ßat screen, and more than one volu-space between them,ÓKubelka insisted ÒThis kind of cinema is not formulti-media, multi-screen, multiple speakers or for action mixed with Þlm. . . .There is nothing really radical in this project, this is a normal cinema.ÓRealized in 1970 but conceived in 1958, Invisible CinemaÕs design and principlestook form long before expanded cinema coalesced into a conspicuous force.KubelkaÕs primary rival was television. From the moment the theater opened itsoors to the public Kubelka asserted, ÒThis . . . is normal cinema. If it looks different, itÕs because other theaters are abnormal. They are like living roomsequipped with huge television sets.ÓAlthough it is beyond the scope of thisessay, Invisible Cinemas conceived and implemented as a buffer against thevisualization of movies, not as an extension of an avant-garde project.Rather than see Invisible Cinemathe realization of a uniquely avant-garde dispositif,one must emphasize a certain incongruity, conceptual and historical,at play in the Anthology Film Archivestheater: on the one hand, a Þlm program Grey Room 30aimed at consolidating a particular vision of advanced experimental ÞlmÑLandow,Sharits, Jacobs, and others; on the other hand, a cinema that worked to shore upthe conditions of reception taken more or less for granted since the 1920s andw threatened by multimedia and expanded cinema within the ranks of the Þlmant-garde and by the increasingly dominant televisual distribution of moviesin society at large. Indeed, the name ÒInvisible CinemaÓ is something of a retronym:only in the half-light of television and multimedia must one champion the invis-ibility of classical cinema.That invisibility first became entrenched after World War I and was widelytheorized and debated by the 1920s. In his 1926 treatise Philosophie des Films,Rudolf Harms argued that Òspaceless darknessÓ (raumlose Dunkelheit) reignedinside the cinema.AnthologyÕs manifesto skips over the decades between earlycinema and the presentÑthat is, the years of normative cinematic invisibilityÑsuch that its description of Invisible Cinemais nearly identical to the accounts ofirate critics from the 1910s: ÒThe auditorium is so dark that we are unable to rec-ognize our immediate neighbor. We only perceive the luminous rectangle on theopposite us.ÓIn each case, the setting disappears so that the spectator canbe more fully absorbed in the projected image. As one early visitor to InvisibleCinemaut it, ÒI was so shaken up by the picture that the novelty of the theaterore off. . . . Maybe thatÕs how it should be.ÓThatÕs largely how it had been forecades. Like the educator as posited by Nietzsche, the movie theaterÕs greatesttask, according to Harms, resides in rendering itself superfluous. The cinemashould Òguarantee the highest degree of bodily detachedness and seek to alleviatethe shortcomings of the individualÕs Þxed and local bondedness.ÓThe turns ofphrase are quite nearly KubelkaÕs. Already in 1925, Jean Goudal gave voice to theconditions that would later prevail at Invisible Cinema:LetÕs go into a cinema where the perforated celluloid is purring in the darkness.On entering, our gaze is guided by the luminous ray to the screen where fortwo hours it will remain Þxed. . . . Our problems evaporate, our neighborsdisappear. Our body itself submits to a sort of temporary depersonalizationwhich takes away the feeling of its own existence. We are nothing but twoes riveted to ten square meters of white canvas. . . . The darkness of the Elcott|Darkened Roomsauditorium destroys the rivalry of real images that would contradict theones on the screen.In GoudalÕs cinematic experience, the purring in the darkness induces a Òconsciousallucination.The spectatorial experience of Invisible Cinema,in the wordsof one reviewer, Òwas rather like floating in a vast, benign space, looking at a rectangular-shaped hallucination of almost drug-induced clarity.ÓIn its mostimportant aspects, then, Invisible Cinemawas a classical cinema.But the cinema at Anthology was a two-pronged apparatus: Invisible Cinema(a theater) and EssentialCinema(a film canon). As announced in AnthologyÕsWhat are the essentials of the film experience? Which films embody theeights of the art of cinema? The creation of Anthology Film Archiveshasbeen an ambitious attempt to provide answers to these questions; the Þrstof which is physicalÑto construct a theater in which films can be seener the best conditions; and the second criticalÑto deÞne the art of Þlmin terms of selected works which indicate its essence and its perimeters.Essential Cinema,which numbered Retouramong its rank and Þle, was a cyclicalprogram of several hundred films arranged alphabetically according to authorand screened as an extended loop.Although no postwar European avant-gardeÞlms were included, excepting those by Peter Kubelka, there was a strong empha-sis on the formal and the recently emergent structural Þlm: if not Le Grice and theHeins, then Landow, Sharits, and Jacobs.Situated within this discursive, even museological contextÑwith its sharpemphasis on the visibility of the celluloid, looking rather than looking throughÞlmÑthe Þlmstrips of Retour ˆ la raisoncould come into view. As Eric de Bruynrgues in relation to the physical and discursive institution that was Anthology,ÒThe spectator was transported to another world, but this world coincided withthe surface of the film itself that was subjected to the critical judgment of thespectator.ÓIn sum, the theater was not an avant-garde cinematic apparatus tocomplement the avant-garde Þlm program but an invisible cinema for the exhi-bition of visible Þlm. The incongruity of this juxtaposition cannot be overstated.Anne Friedberg has characterized the phenomenological tangleÑÒtwin para-oxesÓÑin which the spectator/viewer/user is generally caught when facing thescreen: Òof mobility and immobility (the mobility of images; the immobility ofthe spectator) and of materiality and immateriality (the material space of the theater, domicile, or office and immateriality of the cinematic, televisual, or Anthology Film Archives, 1971. Grey Room 30computer image).ÓInvisible Cinemaimmobilized its viewers forcefully, butÑcombined with a heavily structuralist avant-garde film programÑlargelyreversed the material-immaterial opposition asserted by Friedberg: the strangeInvisible Cinemas composed of a space that insisted on its imma-eriality and images that, however fleeting, maintained their own materiality noless adamantly.More than anyone, Man Ray wrestled with the visibility of his rayographic strips.rom 1923 to 1926, Man Ray experimented with various forms of cameraless Þlmand alternative projection, none of which was satisfactory and of which merefragments survive.The inclusion of a few short rayographic sequences fromRetourat the opening of Emak Bakia926)Ñtheir cameralessness largelyeeded in the widespread reviews of the filmÑmarks the close of a phase ofaesthetic exploration rather than its apex. Yet as late as 1929Ñthat is, after therelease of his last official filmÑMan Ray shared his Òbeau rveÓ with an inter-viewer for CinŽa-CinŽ pour tous:ÒThe dream would be to do away with the cameraand treat the Þlm directly though chemical means. This is a question that excitesme.ÓIt was a question that had excited him ever since the 1923 SoirŽe du coeurˆ barbe, but one that met with little success. Instead, Man Ray borrowed thephrase Òto do away with the cameraÓ from an interview he gave earlier in 1929,where it was used to describe his rayographs and their cinematic qualities.rom very beginningÑand then time and time againÑthe rayographs weregranted cinematic traits in the words of critics and through their placement in artand cinema journals. As Jean Cocteau announced in his public letter to Man Rayupon the 1922 introduction of the rayographs: Òyou have just opened up on trea-sures, cinematographic among others.ÓThe nature of this Òcinematographicreasure,Ó however, was never clariÞed: not by Man Ray, not by his critics, not byrecent scholarship. Even less so the relationship between the rayographic stripsRetourand the rayographs proper: not only because cameraless Þlms and pho-tographs are now separated by the disciplinary divisions imposed by cinemastudies and art history but because RetourÕs cinematic cameralessness wasquickly forgotten and so existed in a state of latency, at or beyond the limits ofperception, just outside avant-garde discourse. In the balance of this essay, I willproposeÑeven as I cannot possibly present the extensive historical record thatprovesÑthat the rayographs, rather than the Þlmstrips, were the most successfulenue for Man RayÕs exploration of cameralessness and cinema. Although the Þlm Retour ˆ la raisonquickly faded from memory, a photograph Elcott|Darkened Roomsof the same name was an instant classic. As with a number of Man RayÕs cine-atic images (and increasingly more often as the decade progressed), a still fromRetourfinal sequencesÑKikiÕs nude torso undulating in raking lightÑwasreproduced as a photograph in the pages of La rŽvolution surrŽaliste(no. 1, 1924).rom the inaugural issue of this Þrst full-ßedged surrealist mainstay, the imagebecame an icon of the movement in the pages of Das Kunstblattvivant929), and as the introductory nude in the summation of Man RayÕs 1920sphotographic work, Photographs byMan Ray, Paris, 1920Ð1934934), producedJames Soby. The title Retour ˆ la raisonquickly came to denote this Òphoto-graphÓ of Kiki rather than the Þlm from which it was culledÑa tendency that hasbeen reinforced through brilliant recent scholarship that, however, pays littleattention to the film.Instead, the filmÕs cameralessness was first impliedthrough the subsequent rayographic inscription of its celluloid strips. Placeddirectly on photosensitive paper and exposed to light, RetourÕs Kiki-emblazonedÞlmstrip yielded a stunning rayograph that was not only selected for SobyÕs 1934catalog but adorned the 1926 cover of Hans RichterÕs special double-issue of edicated to cinema. RetourÕs filmstrips were disseminated most widely notthrough projection but through their rayographic inscription. In other words, therayographs rather than the cinema were Man RayÕs preferred medium for the dis-semination of RetourÕs filmstrips. Accordingly, if there was any resolutionbetween RetourÕs material Þlmstrips and the immaterial experience of cinema inthe 1920s, it was legible only in the rayographs. A second rayograph, likely createdfrom the Þlmstrips of Retour,begins to articulate the materiality of cinematic andphotographic mediation.Man Ray placed shards from a shattered glass plateportrait of Kiki directly onto thephotosensitive paper. Bands of cel-soar above the glass. Here, theerial support of photography(glass plates) and film (celluloidstrips) are juxtaposed in a singleimage. The content of the Þlmstrip isindiscernible, but an upside-downKiki clearly stares ut from the bot-tom left-hand corner. Her image isfractured into at least three pieces.Several shards cast bright, whiteshadowsÑthe clearest indication oftheir materiality and depth. Like the Man Ray. rame enlargement. Detail. Grey Room 30image of Kiki, bound to the glass plate at the surface of the paper yet hovering ina fathomless space, the ribbons of luminous celluloid appear at times materialand at times like a Òplay of light and shadows whose support has disappeared,Óa critic once described Man RayÕs abstract Þlms.Rather than emphasize mate-riality or medium-speciÞcity, the editors of ahiers du mois,where the rayographÞrst appeared in print, likened the effect to the experience of cinema:ublish here photographs by M. Man Ray, who miraculously was ableto provoke on photo-sensitive paper the illusions and revelations . . . thatoke in us a type of emotion that one would be tempted to call ÒcinematicÓand which seems a priori paradoxical for the desire to obtain a static image.This paradoxÑrepeated variously in countless descriptions of rayographsthroughout the 1920sÑcannot be explained without recourse to the imagesÕ con-ditions of production. The synthesis of RetourÕs material filmstrips and theimmaterial experience of cinema put forth by Man Ray was not a rejection of theclassical cinema in favor of medium specificity and material reality (as wasrepeatedly claimed about Retour material filmmakers in the 1970s) but theansposition of a ÒcinematicÓ experience into another medium: photography, Right: Front cover of 5Ð6 (1926).Opposite: Front cover of 5Ð6 (1926). Detail. Elcott|Darkened RoomsspeciÞcally the rayographs.Le Grice argued, Man RayÕs Retour,like his own Little Dog,inscribes theprocess of production into the Þlmstrips themselves. But where Le Grice createdhis ÒcameralessÓ Þlm Little Dogon his homemade printing equipment, Man Raycreated his rayographic strips in the darkroom.The difference is essential. In asense, Man RayÕs cameraless films and photographs are not cameraless at all;instead, they substitute for the photographic camera the ÒcameraÓ or chamber ofthe darkroom (camera obscura). The importance of this chamber, in turn, cannotbe overstated for a critical history of avant-garde photograms, because its userks a fundamental break with previous cameraless photographs, nearly all ofwhich were created outdoors or in daylight.Christian SchadÕs earlier camera-photographs (later called schadographs) were executed in daylight, on print-ut paper and are most closely related to dada collage. L‡szl— Moholy-NagyÕsearliest photograms, also made in daylight, on printout paper, most resemble con-poraneous constructivist painting.But even before Moholy-Nagy switchedto developing paper, he hinted at the possibility that photosensitive paper couldbe treated like a screen and the darkroom transformed into a miniature butexpanded cinema. In his earliest discussions of cameraless photography, the Grey Room 30s-yet-unnamed photograms are but a subcategory of light projected onto screens:Instead of having a plate which is sensitiveto light react mechanically to its environ-ent through the reßection or absorption oflight, I have attempted to controlits actionseans of lenses and mirrors. . . . Thiseans that the Þltered, reßected, or refractedlight is directed upon a screen and then pho-tographed. Or again, the light-effect can bethrown directly on the sensitive plate itself,instead of upon a screen. (Photography with-ut apparatus.)or Moholy-Nagy, this practice inevitably led tofilm: ÒSince these light effects almost alwaysshow themselves in motion, it is clear that theprocess reaches its highest development in thefilm.ÓBut whereas Moholy-Nagy stressedmultiple, moving light sources in the produc-tion of his photograms (and his various lightdisplays, Þlms and props), Man Ray invariablyemployed a single, stationary light source: asolitary lightbulb.Although never acknowledged as such, theRetouris legible as an illustration ofits own production. The Þlm commences witha near-perfect distribution of granular noiseÑarayographically prepared salt-and-pepper Òroast,ÓMan Ray later described it.A peripatetictack quickly appears in positive (dark forms ona light ground) followed by positive pins. Less perfectly distributed noiseÑÒa snowstorm,with the ßakes ßying in all directions instead offallingÓÑis followed by gray frames and somefleeting, illegible words. (Direct inspection ofthe filmstrip reveals ÒMan Ray ˆ tirer 5 fois.Ó)The tack returnsÑnow in the original negative:Òwhite on black ground as in X-ray filmsÓÑ op: Christian Schad.1919. © 2008Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.Bottom: L‡szl— Moholy-Nagy.Untitled photogram, 1922. © 2008Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.Opposite, left: Man Ray. Opposite, right: Man Ray. rame enlargement. Elcott|Darkened Roomsfollowed by Òhuge white pins crisscrossing and revolving in an epileptic dance.ÓAll this in a mere twenty seconds. More visual noise. Then the Þrst camera-basedimage: an approximately two-second shot of a luminous lightbulb in a completelyrk space. The discernible objects of the opening sequence, in sum, are pins,tacks, and a two-second shot of a lightbulb. Man Ray later described the produc-tion of Retourin almost identical terms: ÒI threw pins and thumbtacks at random;then turned on the white light for a second or two, as I had done for my stillRayographs.Ó This lightbulb is the precise inverse of the lightbulb in Le GriceÕsstle One.Where the bulb in stle One(literally) obliterates the projectedimage and illuminates the spectatorial space of the cinema, RetourÕratively) creates the rayographic images just projected in the dark space of thetheater. (In his later, admittedly dubious account, Man Ray underscores the dark-of the theater no less than three times.) For the two or three seconds the light-bulb is on screenÑthe only source of illuminationÑthe theater is structurallyanalogous to the darkroom during the creation of a rayograph. If stle Onecameto be known as the Òlightbulb Þlm,Ó Retour ˆ la raisonshould be called the Òdark-room film.Ó Where Le Grice attempted to subvert the classical experience of cinema, Man Ray was able to re-create it: a dark room illuminated by a solitaryelectric light projected on a screen. Rather than create an apparatus of experi-ental Þlm where the reception mirrors the production (Le Grice and the LFMC),Man Ray and his critics came to understand implicitly that the rayographsÕ con-ditions of production mirror cinemaÕs conditions of reception and that they werethus able to transpose the cinematic experience onto photosensitive paper. Afterthe SoirŽe du coeur a barbe, Man Ray did not screen or even mention Retourthe duration of the interwar period. His next few ventures in cinema wentwhere. Instead, Man Ray found cinematic success in his darkroom. This is theÒcinematic treasureÓ unearthed in the rayographs. Surely, the transposition from the cinema to the rayographs was not exact. Nors it ever named outright. But in lieu of a thorough historical demonstration, letus conclude by entering Man RayÕs darkroom-turned-cinema via one of his cam-eraless photographsÑand let us do so with the eyes and words of GeorgesRibemont-Dessaignes, the most consistent and insightful champion of the rayo-graphs in the 1920s. The image in question is the eighth of twelve untitled rayo-graphs compiled in Champs dŽlicieux922), the first limited-edition folio of Grey Room 30ant-garde cameraless photographs, introduced by Tristan TzaraÕs short text ÒLaPhotographie ˆ lÕenvers.Ó As with nearly all rayographs, the image is composedof a dark ground that at once insists on its own ßatness and conjures a vast, darkspace. Of the depicted objects, the spring is the most easily discernible; it clearlywinds its way from the lower left-hand corner toward the upper right of theimage. This spring anticipates the rayographic strips of Retour,where a similarform will be inscribed uninterruptedly and in its full length on the celluloid andset into motion exclusively through the action of the projector (when camera-exposed, neither the spring nor the Þlm nor the light source moved at all).RetourÕs spring is suspended between the static materiality of the Þlmstrips andthe erratic immateriality of projection. The spring in the Champs dŽlicieuximageis also suspended: between the materiality of the paper image and the immateri-ality of the space it projects. The rest of the image is not so easily explicable.Nebulous shapes seem to hover in the distance. A perfect circle rests at the sur-face. The image can be deciphered only when we shift our perspective from theertical to the horizontal axis: we are not looking out a window but up, as if frombeneath a glass table. Suddenly, the perfect circle is legible as the base of a wine-glass; the spring snakes around its stem; its empty bulb stands at an angle (theclearest indication of the direction of the light source). By the time Ribemont-Dessaignes came to describe this image, he had alreadyrticulated the effects of the rayographs: Man Ray Òinvents a new world and pho-tographs it to prove it exists,Ó a world composed from the Òrelativity of time andof spaceÓ where one belongs to Òmany fields of gravitation at the same time,Ówhere Òcausality hardly touches the spirit.ÓThis 1923 description is reminis-cent of Hugo MŸnsterbergÕs inaugural theorization of the dominant aesthetic sensation that undergirds cinematic pleasureÑlater repeated by countless othersin Man RayÕs direct circleÑnamely, ÒThe massive outer world has lost its weight,it has been freed from space, time, and causalityUnsurprisingly, Ribemont-Dessaignes describes the eighth image from Champs dŽlicieuxand the space itengenders in profoundly cinematic terms:And in fact, in a spaceÑwe have the obligation to speak of space, whateverthat might meanÑin a space where sound appears not to propagate, it seemsthat we have discovered many ways to move, and to go from extraordinaryfloating clouds high above in the sky to a crystal glass. We feel that we noonger have the same dimensions as those which preside over our ownbodyÑwhen it moves in the form of the gaze along a spiraled spring thatrecalls familiar shapes. Elcott|Darkened RoomsThis spaceÑwhere silence prevails and we are freed from the dimension whichormally preside over our body, a body that now moves as a gazeÑis the space ofthe movie theater when the spectator is absorbed in the experience of cinema.Ribemont-Dessaignes aligns the dark spaceÑÒwhatever that might meanÓÑof therayographs with the Òspaceless darknessÓ of the cinema. This spaceless darknessis what the LFMCworked so hard to subvert and Kubelka so hard to preserve.The obscurity of the darkroom, the cinema, and the rayographs are aligned.cm photograph is so utterly different from a ninety-seattheater, the eighth rayograph from Champs dŽlicieuxinverts the terms of InvisibleCinemawhen screening a Þlm like Retour ˆ la raison:rather than the dark spaceof the cinema inducing a sense of Òfloating in a vast, benign space, looking at arectangular-shaped hallucination,Ó the absorption in the rectangular-shaped, two-dimensional rayograph enables us to move in the form of a gaze, freed from bod-ily constraints. Rather than an immaterial space in which one is confronted byimages that insist on their own materiality, the rayographs offer material imagesthat open onto an immaterial space. In an assertion oft repeated (and issued byothers already in the 1920s), Roland Barthes claimed thatthe photograph must be related to a pure spectatorial consciousness and notto the more projective, more ÒmagicalÓ fictional consciousness on whichfilm by and large depends. This would lend authority to the view that the distinction between film and photograph is not a simple difference ofegree but a radical opposition. Film can no longer be seen as animatedphotographs: the aving-been-theregives way before a being-thereof theThe rayographs instantiate neither a photographic aving-been-therecinematic being-thereof the thing but the ot-being-thereof the moviegoer. Theycollapse the Òradical oppositionÓ between photography and film through theepersonalized body of the cinematic spectator and the absorption of the rayo-graphic viewerÑeach of whom floats in a spaceless darkness anchored in pho-tography and realized in a darkened room. Avant-garde cameraless photographsbelong neither on the back side of the Pompidou installation, to a bygone era of materiality and immediacy, nor to past futures of immaterial distance but atthe boundary that divides immaterial cinema from material Þlm and questions theviability of that division. Grey Room 30The impetus for this essay was the fortieth anniversary of the London Film-MakersÕ Co-op and theÞlm programs and DVD, Shoot Shoot Shoot(2006), curated by Marc Webber. A review of the DVDerico Windhausen is published in this issue as part of Grey Matter.I would like to thank Branden Joseph for the impetus to extend a dissertation chapter from the920s through to the present and for shepherding my efforts to completion. Thanks also to KarenBeckman for insisting on a feminist critique of avant-garde Þlm still underrepresented in this andother essays. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.Philippe-Alain Michaud, ed., Le Mouvement des images/The Movement of Images,(Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006).2. Man Ray, Self Portrait963; reprint, Boston: BulÞnch Press, 1998), 212. Patrick de Haas hasonstrated that the placement of the thumbtacks was anything but random. He was also the Þrstto discover photographs of naked body parts contact-printed onto the celluloid. See Patrick deHaas, CinŽma intŽgral(Paris: TransŽdition, 1985), esp. 108Ð111. A great deal can and must be saidabout the content of the Þlm and the Þlmstrips, especially in relation to the female body, but spacerestrictions limit my discussion to the material strips and their projection. I address these ques-tions at length in my forthcoming dissertation, Into the Dark Chamber: Avant-Garde Photogramsand the Cinematic Imaginary(Princeton University, 2008).3. See Jean Cocteau, ÒAn Open Letter to M. Man Ray, American PhotographerÓ (1922), inPhotography in the Modern Era,ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art;Aperture, 1989), 2; and Rosalind Krauss, ÒNotes on the Index: Part 1,Ó in The Originality of theant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).4. Carol Armstrong, ÒCameraless: From Natural Illustrations and Nature Prints to Manual andPhotogenic Drawings and Other Botanographs,Ó in Ocean Flowers,ed. Carol Armstrong and CatherineZegher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 163; emphasis in original. 5. Man Ray, Self Portrait,6. Michel Foucault, ÒNietzsche, Genealogy, HistoryÓ (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory,Practice,ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142.7. Raymond Cogniat, ÒLa soirŽe du ÔCoeur ˆ Barbe,ÕÓ oedia,8 July 1923, 2.8. The best account of the evening remains Michel Sanouillet, Dada ˆ Paris(Paris: Jean-Jacquesauvert, 1965), 380Ð387.9. Jane Heap, ÒSoirŽe coeur ˆ barbe,Ó The Little Review9, no. 3 (1923): 27Ð29.0. Louis Aragon, ÒSoirŽe du coeur ˆ barbe,Ó (1923) in Projet dÕhistoire littŽraire contemporaine,ed. Marc Dachy (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 132.11. Man Ray, Self Portrait,2Ð13. This fictitious description has served as the basis of innu-erable accounts up to the present.2. Louis Tosmas, ÒLa bataille des dada•stes au thŽ‰tre Michel,Ó Bonsoir,8 July 1923, n.p. 3. Georges CharensolÕs passing reference to RetourÑquickly dismissed as having but Òdemon-strative valueÓÑis surely the exception that proves the rule. Georges Charensol, ÒLe Þlm abstrait,ÓLes cahiers du mois,o. 16/17 (1925): 83.4. Georges Sadoul, ÒSouvenirs dÕun tŽmoin,Ó ƒtudes cinŽmatographiques,o. 38Ð39 (1965): 17. Elcott|Darkened Rooms5. Carl I. Belz, ÒThe Film Poetry of Man Ray,Ó in Man Ray Retrospective of the Los Angelesexh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1966), 43. Theessay was Þrst published in Criticism(Spring 1965). In point of fact, Iris Barry acquired a copy forthe Museum of Modern ArtÕs film library in 1935, the first year of its existence, and the film wasscreened at the first international festival for experimental and poetic film at Knokke-Le-Zoute(Belgium) in 1949. Retourgarnered a mention in Alfred BarrÕs 1936 catalog for Cubism andbut only as the poor predecessor of Emak Bakia.Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstractexh. cat. (1936; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986), 167. 6. See P. Adams Sitney, ÒIntroduction,Ó in The Essential Cinema,ed. P. Adams Sitney (Nework: Anthology Film Archives/New York University Press, 1975); and Parker Tyler, UndergroundFilm: A Critical History(New York: Grove Press, 1969), 241. Both Tyler and Anthology includedMan RayÕs next two Þlms, Emak Bakia and LÕetoile de mer7. Malcolm Le Grice, ÒMaterial, Materiality, MaterialismÓ (1978), in Experimental Cinema inthe Digital Age(London: BFI, 2001), 165.8. Deke Dusinberre, ÒLe Retour ˆ la raison: Hidden Meanings,Ó in Unseen Cinema,ed. Bruceosner (New York: Black Thistle Press/Anthology Film Archives, 2001), 66.9. See, among many examples, ƒtudes cinŽmatographiques,o. 38Ð39 (1965); and Ado Kyrou,Le SurrŽalisme au cinŽma952; reprint, Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1963), 174Ð178.20. Malcolm Le Grice, ÒThe History We NeedÓ (1979), in Experimental Cinema in the Digital. He continues, ÒMan RayÕs case illustrates this borderline which represents the basis of theajor and most contentious exclusion made by this version of experimental Þlm history.Ó. Man Ray, ÒTo Be Continued UnnoticedÓ (1948), in Man Ray Retrospective,22. Birgit Hein, ÒThe Structural Film,Ó in Film as Film,ed. Phillip Drummond (London: Artscil of Great Britain, 1979), 94. Hein Þrst made this argument in Birgit Hein, ÒFilm Ÿber Film,ÓDocumenta 6,ol. 2, exh. cat. (Kassel: Paul Dierichs KG, 1977), 255. I have made minor typo-graphical corrections to the English text.23. V.I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting926), ed. and trans. Ivor Montagu (Nework: Grove Press, 1960), 83, 84; emphasis in original.24. Even as his most dogmatic assertion of medium-speciÞcity had only recently become widelyailable, GreenbergÕs conception of modernism was well known throughout avant-garde circles.See Clement Greenberg, ÒModernist Painting,Ó in The New Art,ed. Gregory Battcock (New York:E.P. Dutton & Co., 1966).25. In 1969, P. Adam Sitney famously announced the emergence of structural Þlm. Landow, PaulSharits, and other American filmmakers are discussed at length, but with the exception of PeterKubelka, then active in New York, Sitney makes no mention of European Þlmmakers. In opposi-tion to Sitney, Peter Gidal introduced the term ÒStructural/Materialist ÞlmÓ or simply ÒmaterialistÞlm.Ó Although politically committed, Le Grice avoided the direct Marxist connotations of GidalÕserm and preferred Òmaterial film,Ó partly in line with an early-twentieth-century awareness ofedium-specificity in painting. See P. Adams Sitney, ÒStructural FilmÓ (1969), in Film CultureReader,ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970); Peter Gidal, ÒTheory and Definition ofStructural/Materialist Film,Ó in Structural Film Anthology,ed. Peter Gidal (London: BFI, 1976);Peter Gidal, Materialist Film(London: Routledge, 1989); Le Grice, ÒMaterial, Materiality, MaterialismÓ; Grey Room 30and Malcolm Le Grice and P. Adams Sitney, ÒNarrative Illusion vs. Structural RealismÓ (1977), inExperimental Cinema in the Digital Age,26. David Curtis, ÒEnglish Avant-Garde Film: An Early Chronology,Ó Studio Internationalo. 978 (1975): 181.27. Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 118, 35. In bothinstances, Le Grice refers speciÞcally to the rayographic sections of Retour.28. Le Grice wrote in one of his earliest published pieces (and reaffirmed throughout theecade), ÒIn some respects this development is parallel to a development in twentieth-century art,particularly painting, where the physical properties of the material become the basis of the lan-guage, counteracting, contexting or denying the associative and illusory nature of the image.ÓMalcolm Le Grice, ÒThoughts on Recent ÔUndergroundÕ FilmÓ (1972), in Experimental Cinema inthe Digital Age,16.29. The term Þlm as Þlms a long and complicated history in LFMCcircles. David Curtis ander Gidal used the term as early as 1971. (Gidal later regretted its essentialist connotations.) Theerm became the title of two major European avant-garde Þlm exhibitions that, in retrospect, markthe end rather than the zenith of structural film and expanded cinema. See David Curtis,Experimental Cinema(New York: Universe Books, 1971), 157; Peter Gidal, ÒFilm as FilmÓ (1972), inA Perspective on English Avant-Garde Film,ed. David Curtis and Deke Dusinberre (London: Artscil of Great Britain, 1978); Gidal, Materialist Film,20; Birgit Hein and Wulf Herzogenrath,(Cologne: Kšlnischer Kunstverein, 1977); and Phillip Drummond, ed., Film as(London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979).30. Paul Sharits, ÒWords Per Page,Ó Afterimage,o. 4 (1972): 27. Later in the same essay, Sharitshighlights the importance of the rayographic sections of Retour.. For Peter Wollen, this insistence on the Òontological autonomy of film,Ó typified Òa dis-placement of concerns from the art world to the Þlm world rather than an extension.Ó Peter Wollen,ÒThe Two Avant-Gardes,Ó Studio International90, no. 978 (1975): 172. P. Adams Sitney singledut ÒGreenbergismÓ in his attack on Le Grice and the LFMC. Le Grice distanced himself fromreenberg on ideological and political but not aesthetic grounds. Le Grice and Sitney, ÒNarrativeIllusion vs. Structural Realism,Ó 145. More recently, David James has harshly characterized struc-tural Þlm, in particular the theories of Peter Gidal, as establishing the Þlm medium as a Òtranshis-torical absolute that reconstituted a Greenbergian medium-speciÞc essentialism.Ó David E. James,Allegories of Cinema(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 278Ð279.32. See Le Grice, ÒMaterial, Materiality, Materialism,Ó 165; and Hein, ÒThe Structural Film,Ó 95Ð96.33. Michael Fried, ÒArt and ObjecthoodÓ (1967), in Art and Objecthood(Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1998), 164.34. Malcolm Le Grice, ÒReal TIME/SPACEÓ (1972), in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age,35. By the mid- to late 1970s, as texts became available in English, direct links began to emergebetween members of the LFMCÑespecially Le Grice and fellow LFMCspokesman Peter GidalÑand critics associated with apparatus theory in France and England. See, for instance, Malcolm Lece, ÒProblematising the SpectatorÕs Placement in FilmÓ (1978), in Experimental Cinema in the78; and Stephen Heath, ÒRepetition Time: Notes around ÔStructuralist/MaterialistFilmÕÓ (1977), in The British Avant-Garde Film: 1926 to 1995, ed. Michael OÕPray (London: Arts Elcott|Darkened Roomscil of Great Britain, 1996).36. Le Grice had recently completed seven years of art training at the Slade School of Fine Arts,where he constructed canvases with Òevents in front of them, like tape recorders and other time-based objects.Ó See Maxa Zoller and Malcolm Le Grice, ÒInterview,Ó in X-Screen,ed. MatthiasMichalka (Cologne: Walther Kšnig, 2004), 136Ð137. See also Malcolm Le Grice, ÒReßections on Myactice and Media Specificity,Ó in Experimental Film and Video,ed. Jackie Hatfield (Eastleigh,UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2006), 220.37. Curtis, ÒEnglish Avant-Garde Film,Ó 178. Le Grice repeated this assertion in future programnot38. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media964; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 8.ÒExcept for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the ÔcontentÕ of the other, obscur-ing the operation of bothÓ (52). Not surprisingly, the lightbulb was a favorite subject of avant-gardeÞlmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic. Compare Hollis FramptonÕs description of his Þlm Information966): Òhypothetical Ôfirst filmÕ for a synthetic tradition constructed from scratch on reasonableprinciples, given: (1) camera; (2) raw stock; (3) a single bare light bulb.Ó Hollis Frampton, New YorkFilm-MakersÕ Cooperative Catalogue975): 88, quoted in James, Allegories of Cinema,39. Roland Barthes, ÒUpon Leaving the Movie TheaterÓ (1975), in ed. Theresa HakKyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 4.40. Le Grice, ÒThe History We Need,Ó 37.. Anthony McCall, ÒTwo StatementsÓ (1974/1975), in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader ofTheory and Criticism,ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 253.42. McCall, ÒTwo Statements,Ó 254. Le Grice republished McCallÕs ÒNotes in DurationÓ in full aspart of his Þlm reviews for Studio International90, no. 978 (November/December 1975): 226Ð227.43. Deke Dusinberre, ÒOn Expanding Cinema,Ó Studio International90, no. 978 (1975): 224.or recent scholarship, see Jonathan Walley, ÒThe Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema:ontrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film,Ó October03 (2003); Branden W.Joseph, ÒSparring with the Spectacle,Ó in Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and RelatedWorks,ed. Christopher Eamon (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 94Ð97; andeorge Baker, ÒFilm Beyond Its Limits,Ó Grey Room25 (2006): 116Ð119.44. Le Grice, ÒMaterial, Materiality, Materialism,Ó 167; emphasis in original. Le Grice trainedfuture LFMCmembersÑincluding William Raban, Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicolson, andMarilyn HalfordÑat Saint Martins School of Art, where he taught. Until the LFMCset up its ownorkshop at the Robert Street Arts Lab (IRAT, Institute for Research and Technology) in late 1969,Le GriceÕs homemade equipment was the primary access point for alternative printing. Le Grice,Raban, Nicolson, and Eatherley became a loose performance collective that adopted the nameFilmaktion after a 1972 expanded cinema exhibition at the Liverpool Walker Art Gallery of thesame name.45. Malcolm Le Grice, ÒArtist Statement,Ó in A Perspective on English Avant-Garde Film,rtis and Dusinberre, 69.P.A.P. Filme(Munich: P.A.P. Filmgalerie, 1972), n.p.47. Le Grice now seems of two minds concerning the nostalgic content. He recently avowed,Òthe images of family have been distanced from any nostalgic function by the formal structure of Grey Room 30the Þlm.Ó Le Grice, ÒReßections on My Practice,Ó 228. Yet at the same time, he wrote in programes for a recent screening in Germany (and relayed to me via e-mail on 20 December 2006):ÒWellÑI thought it was about Þlm as a medium and materialÑscratches, sprocket holes, dirt, slip-page in the projector, blank screen, gaps in the sound-trackÑI forgot that one of the boys was me,the other was my brother, the young woman was my motherÑnow deadÑand behind the cameras my fatherÑnow deadÑsee the cyclopsÑthe dog was mineÑnothing to do with RogerÑthatis another story.Ó48. A single-screen version is available as part of the DVD curated by Marc Webber, Shoot ShootShoot: British Avant-Garde Film of the 1960s and 1970s(London: LUX; Paris: Re:Voir, 2006).Malcolm Le Grice generously made a DVD of the two-screen version available to me for this article.49. The 9.5 mm gauge, introduced by PathŽ in 1922, lost a format war with KodakÕs less eco-omical but better marketed 8 mm film stock. See Lenny Lipton, Independent Filmmaking(London: Studio Vista, 1974). Le Grice wrote the postscript to the British edition.50. Le Grice, ÒReal TIME/SPACE,Ó 158.51. Slidesis also available on the Shoot Shoot Shoot DVD. If the materiality of the celluloid Þlmgives way to the immaterial code of the digital video discÑa difference apparent less in projectionthan when the physical reel or DVD is grasped in handÑthat same code enables the viewer topause the movie and extend those moments where Nicolson arrests the ßood of images and allowsthe literally threaded Þlmstrip to appear still on the screen. These momentsÑinfrequent but essentialto the ÞlmÑinvoke a tactile relationship to the Þlmstrip and the cinematic experience, a relation-ship that ironically is enhanced by the capabilities of digitalization. On the digital freeze frame, seeLaura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image(London: Reaktion, 2006), 30.52. Peter Gidal, ÒTechnology and Ideology in/through/and Avant-Garde Film: An Instance,Ó inThe Cinematic Apparatus,ed. T. de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. MartinÕs Press,980), 151, 55. Gidal warned against the fetishization of process but defended its central position atthe Co-op.53. See Sitney, ÒIntroduction,Ó viiÐviii. This explication of Invisible Cinemas Þrst publishedpart of the manifesto issued by Anthology Film Archives at its opening on November 30, 1970.See KubelkaÕs first articulation of the idea in a letter republished in Peter Kubelka, ÒInvisibleCinemaÓ (1959), in antgardistischer Film 1951Ð1971: Theorie,ed. Gottfried Schlemmer (Munich:rl Hanser Verlag, 1973), 40Ð41.54. Sitney, ÒIntroduction,Ó viii.55. Annette Michelson, ÒGnosis and Iconoclasm,Ó October83 (Winter 1998): 3Ð5.56. Peter Kubelka, ÒInvisible Cinema,Ó Design Quarterly,o. 93 (1974): 35.57. Sharits, ÒWords Per Page,Ó 42.58. Kubelka, ÒInvisible Cinema,Ó 34Ð35.59. Vincent Canby, ÒNow You Can See Invisible Cinema,Ó New York Times,29 November 1970, 38.60. Between the 1958 conception and the 1970 realization of Invisible Cinema,the dominantsite of movie reception had become e Invisible Cinema] emerged at a time whenthe movie theater was in its death throes, at a time whenÑin many countriesÑtelevision began to play the dominant role in the distribution of films.Ó Werner Jehle, ÒGeschichte der Kino-Architektur,Ó Cinema,o. 4 (1979): 16. For data concerning the rise of the televised film and the Elcott|Darkened Roomse-for-TV movie, see Cobbett S. Steinberg, Reel Facts(New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 29Ð36.KubelkaÕs original conception of Invisible Cinemacoincided with the major studiosÕ initial releaseof their films for televisual distribution in the late 1950s. Equally important, Kubelka excludedall the 1950s film industry innovationsÑwidescreen, stereo magnetic sound, 3D, and soonÑintended to win back their audience from television. These technologies of realism, as JohnBelton argues, engender a kind of excess that was often packaged as spectacle (surround sound tothe point of distraction, etc.), thereby violating the technological invisibility essential to InvisibleCinema.Widescreen Cinema(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992),202Ð216. Additionally, the desperation of the film industry was palpable in several reviews ofInvisible Cinema,in large part because American cinema attendance reached its nadir in 1971. Forannual figures on American cinema attendance and their underlying causes, see Steinberg, Reel46; and Belton, Widescreen Cinema,. Rudolf Harms, Philosophie des Films(Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1926; reprint, 1970), 58. Harmsescribes the cinema in similar terms in his introductory overview (iii).62. Konrad Lange, ÒDie ÔKunstÕ des LichtspieltheatersÓ (1913), in eschichte der Filmtheorie,ed. Helmut H. Diederichs (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 83. Lange was a leading reactionary criticin the 1910s.63. Howard Thompson, ÒSilence Says a Lot for Film Archives,Ó The New York Times,970, 4. Thompson is quoting Roger Mignon.64. Harms, Philosophie des Films,65. Jean Goudal, ÒSurrealism and CinemaÓ (1925), in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907Ðed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 355Ð356. Translation slightly66. Goudal, ÒSurrealism and Cinema,Ó 355. Emphasis in original.67. Canby, ÒNow You Can See Invisible Cinema,Ó 38.68. Sitney, ÒIntroduction,Ó vi. 69. Sitney, ÒIntroduction,Ó vi. Annette Michelson notes that Òthis principle of the loop as theeal form of the canonÕs exhibitionÓ was highly indebted to Kubelka, who, earlier, had foundedthe …sterreichisches Film Museum. Michelson, ÒGnosis and Iconoclasm,Ó 7.70. Kubelka was on the selection committee for Essential Cinemaand avidly expressed his disdainfor contemporary European experimental Þlm. That same committee, moreover, was composed ofsix men (Þve after Brakhage resigned) and not a single womanÑa fact all too poignantly reßected inthe selection.. Eric de Bruyn, ÒThe Expanded Field of Cinema, or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square,ÓX-Screen,ed. Michalka, 165. Michelson and de Bruyn offer strong interpretations of the radicalproject that was Anthology Films Archives only to subsume Invisible Cinema72. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 150.73. The remarkable scope of Man RayÕs Þlm activities was Þrst revealed in Jean Michel Bouhoursand Patrick de Haas, eds., Man Ray: Directeur du mauvais movies(Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou,997). Until this catalog, Man Ray had largely thrown historians off the scent of his hybrid endeav-ors with fallacious accounts such as the one of his failed collaboration with Comte Etienne deBeaumont and Henri Chomette: ÒA young cinŽwho directed the film introduced shots of Grey Room 30revolving crystals, abstract optical effects similar to my Rayographs, but I would have nothing towith such a hybrid production.Ó Man Ray, Self Portrait,32. More on these connections is in myforthcoming dissertation.74. AndrŽ Gain, ÒUn entretien avec Man Ray,Ó CinŽa-CinŽ pour tous,o. 144 (1929): 27.75. Jean Gallotti, ÒLa photographie est-elle un art? Man Ray,ÓLÕart vivant,o. 103 (1929): 282.76. Cocteau, ÒAn Open Letter to M. Man Ray,Ó 2.77. See especially Rosalind Krauss, ÒCorpus Delicti,Ó in LÕAmour Fou(New York: Abbeville,985), 74; and Hal Foster, ÒViolation and Veiling in Surrealist Photography: Woman as Fetish, asShattered Object, as Phalus,Ó in Surrealism: Desire Unbound,ed. Jennifer Mundy (Princeton:rinceton University Press, 2002), 217. The female nude is perhaps thecentral motif in Man RayÕsoeuvre and is a site of subjugation and freedom that I address at length in my forthcoming disser-tation but which lies beyond the scope of the current essay. For a curiously sympathetic reading ofMan RayÕs nudes, see Whitney Chadwick, ÒLee MillerÕs Two Bodies,Ó in Emmanuel Radnitsky,Leif Wigh (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2004). The issue was treated with the utmost urgency inLFMCcircles. Peter Gidal, for example, all but abstained from the representation of the female form78. The rayograph, now located at the Getty, is signed and dated 1922. Man Ray often backdatedrayographs, and this imageÑlike the more famous Museum of Modern Art rayograph just dis-cussedÑis more likely composed of Þlmstrips from Retour.In any event, the image was certainlybetween 1922, the year of his Þrst rayograph, and 1925, the year this rayograph was Þrst pub-lished (unsigned and undated), and so is closely related to the cinematic experimentation sur-rounding Retour.The Man Ray Estate denied the reproduction of this and other rayographs in anyfuture electronic format that the print version would later take. The image can be found, however,at: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=53362.79. Gallotti, ÒLa photographie est-elle un art? Man Ray,Ó 282.80. ÒIntroduction to ÔSecond Žtape,ÕÓ Les cahiers du mois,o. 16/17 (1925): 85.. Man Ray later reflected, ÒI remember when I was a boy, placing fern leaves in a printingframe with proof paper, expositing it to sunlight, and obtaining a white negative of the leaves. Thiss the same idea, but with an added three-dimensional quality and tone graduation.Ó Man Ray,Self Portrait,82. On Christian SchadÕs cameraless photographs, see Nikolaus Schad and Anna Auer, eds.,Schadographien(Passau, Germany: Dietmar Klinger, 1999). On Moholy-NagyÕs photograms, seethe superlative catalog by Renate Heyne, Floris M. NeusŸss, and Herbert Molderings, eds., LaszloMoholy-Nagy: Fotogramme 1922Ð1943(Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 1995).83. L‡szl— Moholy-Nagy, ÒLightÑA Medium of Plastic Expression,Ó Broom4, no. 4 (1923): 284;emphasis in original. That Moholy-Nagy does not immediately grasp the full implications of hisinsight is clear from the changes made between the two editions of his mid-decade classic, aintingPhotography Film925/1927). In both editions, he largely repeats the deÞnition of the photogramBroom.But he changes the parenthetical elucidation of Òphotography without apparatusÓfrom an architectural blueprint or ÒLichtpauseÓ to a Òsophisticated play of light and shadow.ÓWhere the latter allows for a three-dimensional projection environment, the former is resolutelytwo-dimensional. L‡szl— Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Photographie Film(Munich: Albert Langen, 1925), Elcott|Darkened Rooms25; and L‡szl— Moholy-Nagy, Malerei FotograÞe Film927; reprint, ed. Hans M. Wingler Berlin:ebr. Mann Verlag, 1986), 30.84. Moholy-Nagy, ÒLightÑA Medium of Plastic Expression,Ó 284. Photogram scholars havewnplayed the relationship to Þlm. Film and media scholars have echoed Moholy-NagyÕs teleo-ogical rhetoric in order to argue that photograms were Òmerely an intermediate stage in the history creation with light [Lichtgestaltung], a history whose telos is the kinetic light display [Lichtspiel].ÓAnne Hoormann, Lichtspiele(Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 153.85. This and further descriptions come from Man Ray, Self Portrait,2Ð213. A 1970s-styleanalysis might liken this Þrst sequence to the grain of the Þlm.86. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, ÒDada Painting or The Oil-Eye,Ó The Little Review9, no. 4(Autumn/Winter 1923Ð1924): 11Ð12.87. Hugo MŸnsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study6; reprint, New York: Dover, 1970),95; emphasis in original. Miriam Hansen notes, ÒIt is no coincidence that the first systematicattempt to theorize spectatorship was published in 1916 when the techniques (primarily of conti-nuity editing) that supported this transformation were being established as rules in production:Hugo MŸnsterberg, The Photoplay.Ó Miriam Hansen, ÒEarly Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?Ó inEarly Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative,ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 243, n. 14.88. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, ÒMan Ray,Ó Les feuilles libres,o. 40 (1925): 268. Ribemont-Dessaignes cited his 1925 discussion of rayographs in its entirety in his 1930 monograph on ManRay, the very Þrst, and declared, ÒI donÕt recant a word.Ó See Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, (Paris: Gallimard, 1930), 4Ð6.89. Roland Barthes, ÒRhetoric of the ImageÓ (1964), in ImageÑMusicÑText,ed. Stephen Heath(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 45; emphasis in original. Barthes later admitted, ÒI decided Iliked Photography in oppositionto the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it.ÓRoland Barthes, Camera Lucida,ans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 3;emphasis in original.