Outlying Areas
On a personal introductory note, this research weaves together a number of interlinked experiential and stylistic strands: part-time academic; regular magazine-based reviewer; moving-image maker and enthusiast. These influences and inclinations converge in a process of translation, aiming to convey the complexity of visual, screen based material by written means, and to articulate a highly individualised viewing response. Created specifically for online engagement, content has been arranged as a digital mapping of territory, allowing end-user to determine navigational pathways, and hyperlinked as an additional layering of text. Quotations from a range of artists and commentators, relating to the field of screen practice, have been included as contextualisation.
The maker of dance video must be a video artist, with creativity geared to specific sets of choices in video terms, as well as a dance artist.
During November and December 2009, I viewed thirty works from the BFI’s extensive archive at Cambridge Central Library’s Mediatheque, documenting each encounter in written form. None of the work conforms to conventional notions of screendance as record of pre-choreographed, codified dance. Work was drawn from such disparate areas as advertising; medical teaching aid; film musical and nature documentary, representing trends and techniques from a broad spectrum of twentieth and early twenty-first century moving image, and selected on the basis of historical span and level of engagement with formal experimentation. Patterns and clusters, such as use of still image; animation techniques and camera motion, emerge from the sample grouping. Examples of rhythmic patterning, kinaesthetic resonance and non-linear configuration are also of potential interest for those viewing screen composition through dance-informed eyes.
Given the representational history of the panorama, it is not surprising that the pan in the cinema was first activated in the on-the-scene footage of the actuality...The accumulation of historical detail was was one of the assumed properties of the apparatus, and the unpredictability of the random movement of figures within the frame consolidated the impression of the real.
Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon place camera within moving vehicle, documenting turn-of-the century urban environment in Tram Ride Through Nottingham, while largely static camera positioning captures patterns of motion in 1931’s Scenes at Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Underground Stations, and filmmaker Mick Nicholls manipulates currents of mass passenger movement, shot from aerial perspectives, in 1970’s Rush Hour. In Winter, created in 1923 as part of a series of nature documentaries, time-lapse photography renders visible natural phenomena such as slow-spreading frost and the cycle of plant life. Filmed in extreme close-up, Time-Lapse Study of Nail Growth, created as a medical school case study in 1960, documents similar processes at work within the human body.
That dance should reflect these changes at all is of interest, since for obvious reasons it has always been the most isolated and inbred of the arts.
From 1952, Audrey Hepburn’s Screen Test foregrounds the actress’ particular performance qualities, with a distanced, near-abstracted feel enhanced by repeated takes and absence of sound. Douglas Hickox’ hyper-stylised treatment of visual and narrative content in 1968’s Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, condenses individual elements into a film musical in chamber form. Tartans of the Scottish Clans, from 1906, presents a sequential progression of near still image as advertisement, while from 1971, Ivor Abraham utilises advertising stills within a highly mediated image progression in By Leafy Ways - A Garden Memorabilia.
To see is to see from a point of view; there is no such thing as nonperspectival seeing.
William Raban’s Sundial, from 1991, and Yohan Forbes’ Project One, from 2009, construct composite pictures of a recognisably contemporary London, with Raban’s tightly-edited conceptualisation of Canary Wharf as marker of place and time contrasting with Forbes’ looser weave of motion-governed progress through urban environment.
We view all of the plastic arts through a rigid frame...opera and ballet arranged its scenarios and choreography to be seen in association with theatre’s proscenium arch stage-space, and cinema copied the theatre, and television copied the cinema, and then there are photographs squared up for picture-frames to fit in the right angles of a book. This wholesale practice has become so traditional and orthodox, it is not questioned.
Experimentation with narrative form is central to pioneering animator and filmmaker Len Lye’s N or NW, from 1938, and Peter Greenaway’s Dear Phone, from 1976. Both focus on relationships mediated by specific communication mechanisms, as Lye strikingly utilises expressionist-influenced image sequences as visual shorthand, while Greenaway’s tightly boundaried, parallel progression of text and image provides an economically-achieved commentary on creative process.
The ‘absolute realism’ of the motion picture is unrealised, therefore potential, magic.
Basil Wright and Harry Watt’s celebrated Night Mail, from 1936, and Leslie Daiken’s comprehensive portrayal of shared childhood culture in 1957’s One Potato, Two Potato, synergistically thread together seemingly disparate elements, entering into enclosed worlds of specialised knowledge and custom.
One does not express one’s ideas as logical deductions; one embodies them in camera shots and creative editing.
The more recent categorisation of artists’ film provides a fusion of aural and visual, extending beyond purely illustrative dimensions. 1991’s Mile End Purgatorio explores the combination of Martin Doyle’s text and Guy Sherwin’s images and Clio Barnard’s Lambeth Marsh, from 2001, extends exploration into a genre-blurred collision of the seen, heard, remembered and imagined.
In 1950 the filmmaker Hans Namuth persuaded a reluctant Jackson Pollock to execute one of his famous ‘action paintings’ on a canvas of glass while the camera recorded Pollock’s frenzied gyrations from underneath. Although neither of them realised it at the time, their collaboration resulted in one of the world’s most significant dance films.
Orkney-based filmmaker Margaret Tait’s Portrait of Ga, created in 1952, captures nuances of character interaction with highly specific environment, while in 1968’s Sunflowers, Ian McMillan makes visual comparison between plant and human life cycle, and Martin Hearne’s Central Figure, from 1978, sets camera in minimalist motion around an unchanging focal point.
Film renders the world in motion...movement is the alpha and omega of the medium.
Two films created for the G.P.O. film unit in 1938 illustrate highly distinctive approaches to the use of specific animation techniques. Norman McLaren’s Love on the Wing creates a musically-governed stream-of-visualised-consciousness, while the intricacy of Lotte Reiniger’s hand-crafting is served by a witty and elegant economy of narrative detail in The Tocher, with note-perfect evocation of Romantic ballet references and fairy tale tropes. The colour-saturated, coagulating globules of Mark Boyle, Joan Hills, John Claxton, Cameron Hills and Des Banner’s 1969 Beyond Image speak eloquently of their time and cultural context, while the Brothers Quay’s Street of Crocodiles, from 1986, transforms text-based source material into an atmospherically striking, visually immersive world of self-propelled toys and non-linear narrative.
Editing is a kind of frozen dance that depends on engaging as much of the editor’s body as possible.
The use of rapid, accretive montage technique is central to Hans Richter’s commentary on working experience in 1929’s Every Day and British short filmmaker Geoffrey Jones’ cumulative record of a single train journey in 1963’s Snow. Malcolm Le Grice’s Finnegan’s Chin, from 1981, deconstructs its constituent elements, reassembling slowly by use of repetition and accumulation over the course of the work’s ninety minute duration.
It is the motor of the motion-picture camera (in combination, of course, with that of the projector) which reveals to us the very nature and structure of movement, the projection of matter in time.
A moving camera is used to capture the details of an interior scene from 1945 in By the Fireside. Creating in 1978, Johanna Davis uses a mix of stills, text and static camera to provide a gender-aware commentary on the experience of domestic maintenance in Often During the Day, while Peter Gidal’s Condition of Illusion, from 1975, uses a hand-held, shifting camera to explore the filmically-mediated materiality of household surroundings.
Microscope, camera and movie projector magnified vision, opened it to other orders of reality and perception and zeroed in on the hyperdimensionality of information hidden in the interstices between ultimate units - atoms, genes, cells, codes, frames, bytes and ciphers.
As a dance-trained screen artist, close consideration of these outlying areas is necessary to inform, nourish, sustain and develop my own creative practice. Consideration also affirms a personal vision of screendance as a constantly evolving element within a shifting culture of moving image: a process-driven nexus of influence and approach, coloured by rich multiple histories and diversity of practice base. By absorbing and reflecting a multiplicity of incomings and outgoings, contemporary screendance has the potential to function as site for enhanced modes of compositional experimentation, conjuring new configurations from an ever-widening pool of twentieth and twenty-first century sources and resources.