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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathGraham
 
 
 
 
 

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sensation and movements of the two performers. The two films are projected in an endless loop on opposite walls in a white cubical gallery space. Graham’s film performance intends to inseparably link film, a medium apparently exclusively—and in a strictly monocular fashion—based in visual perception, to the intersubjective and intrasubjective experience of the bodies of the performers. In a topological sense the mirrored cylinder becomes an optical skin in the experience of the film viewer and is united with the skin of the performer. Due to the pressing of the cameras on the bodies and the mirrored cylinder, which stretches the appearance of the body horizontally, the body’s sensory-motor interior is turned inside out and made visible in a continuous process. While the film spectator usually sinks down in the movie seat and forgets his or her body, Graham’s «Body Press» confronts the spectator with a film performance that does precisely the opposite. The position of the spectator between the projection surfaces directs his or her attention immediately to his or her own bodily sensations, not defined as a «private space» but as an intersubjective bodily experience in a

 

public space. In the early films, Graham could expose the way film functions only through a certain negation and/or a intentionally contrary experience: in the cinema filming is not itself shown as action, nor is a bodily perspective introduced; what the film image in the cinema shows is not relativized and exponentially intensified by the view of a second camera and has nothing explicitly to do with architecture. In «Cinema,» Graham tried to come at the problem from the opposite direction. The idea of an optical skin in the topological form of a mirroring cylinder is transferred from the filming situation (in «Body Press«) to the situation of projection—that is, reconceived as a projection screen—and is thus submitted to an architectural redefinition.

While in his early films Graham attempted to exclude or reduce psychological complexities by assigning a task, in «Cinema» he attempts with similar means to create or intensify psychological complexities. In «Cinema,» intersubjectivity as a multiplicity of mutually referential points of view is not conveyed in the correlation between two performers/camera persons but in the creation of two

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