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Movie Circuits
Curatorial Approaches to Cinema
Technology
Jan Baetens
Gabriel Menotti, Movie Circuits. Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019, 210 p.
ISBN : 9789089648907 (Hardback, also available as e-book)
Movie Circuits is an important contribution to the debate on cinema. It addresses more specifically the
question of how a narrow way of cinema’s technology, and thus its perceived medium-specificity, prevent us from having a more open approach of what movies actually are, what they may be or even can become. Moretti’s book strongly criticizes what the author calls a “media ideology”, that is the belief that cinema coincides with what is visible thanks to its traditional apparatus, generally relying on the linked notions of projection, screen and movie theater as well as harnessed by a rigid system of genre conventions and paratextual signs posts and frontiers.
As a belief systems, such medial ideology decides what is cinema and what is not, while actively resisting the recognition of other types of cinema, either by keeping them outside the field or bluntly ignoring them. This latter type of rejection can take two forms. One can simply not be aware of the fact that something is going on that is no less cinematographic than what is traditionally accepted as cinema (and Menotti’s book opens with a wonderful example of such a cultural blindness). But one can also align traditionally non-cinematographic forms, events, and practices with classic ones, in order to neutralize the strangeness of certain types of movie culture. The shift from analog to digital cinema is a good example of such a streamlining policy: video and, after that, digital cinema were initially discarded from the gated field of cinema because of their alleged lack of “indexicality”, before being completely integrated in a filmic system that continues to do business as usual without noticing to what extent video and digital culture should be approached as a radical critique of film’s media ideology.
Menotti’s critique of the old-fashioned apparatus medium-specificity theory takes its starting point in several key theoretical as well as methodological stances, mainly the notion of “dipositif” and that of “practice-based research”, all of them inextricably linked with his own and long-standing experience as film curator. The notion of curating should not be taken here in the conventional and purely aesthetic meaning of selecting and presenting, but also in a more radical and more material meaning referring to the whole set of practical and technical issues that are involved in the actual projection of a movie. Curatorship is here a very hands-on approach of what it means to select and present, and cannot be reduced to the highly prestigious and often
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somewhat snooty job of the well-paid globalized curator, who has become the real “auteur” in today’s art world.
On the one hand, Menotti’s curatorial take on film focuses on cinema’s “negative space”, as he calls it, that is the often invisible –or at least unseen– dimensions of technology that help make movies visible but that actually perform, in the strong sense of the word, the medium of cinema, less simply by showing movies than by making cinema. This negative space entails material as well as immaterial elements, ranging from software codes to copyright or censorship issues, and Movie Circuits analyzes these elements as “dispositifs” or general rule-based systems in the sense coined by Michel Foucault. The book logically emphasizes the dynamic aspect of such a reading: cinema is not something that “is” there before it starts circulating, it only exists through a permanent circulation which implies a no less permanent modification of what we think (or thought) cinema actually is (or should be).
On the other hand, Movie Circuits makes a strong plea for practice-based research, that is a type of analysis and investigation that attempts to produce new knowledge by producing the very object it studies –and vice versa. More precisely, the practice-based research under scrutiny is not that of film-making itself, but of projecting and curating cinema. It is thanks to the work done as projector cum curator that Gabriel Menotti succeeds in questioning cinema’s medial ideology and that he manages to explore cinema’s negative space. In practice, this book both continues and displaces the avant-garde reflection on the post-medium condition as launched by experimental cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. It expands on these efforts, for instance by investigating what happens when one projects today the experiments of these decades. It also displaces them
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by bringing these experiments to the world outside the art gallery or the specialized theater, even abandoning apparently imperative features such as screen or projecting, as illustrated by numerous examples in the last two chapters of the book which offer an in-depth overview of the curatorial practice of Gabriel Menotti in Vitoria, his Brazilian home town.
Movie Circuits is essential reading. It is a great mix of practice-based reflection and solid theoretical
groundwork. Gilbert Simondon, Stanley Cavell, Bruno Latour, Vilém Flusser and Friedrich Kittler are some of the names whose work gives the larger frame of Menotti’s analysis, yet always in a very supple and almost completely jargon-free style. It is also an excellent and dramatically useful anthology of avant-garde and expanded cinema, not just as works to be analyzed by armchair critics but as works producing new situations whose interpretation helps challenge no longer acceptable axioms on cinema. Finally, it is also a wonderful proof that cutting edge theory and practice are not only to be found in the traditional great centers (Paris, London, New York), but that other ways of thinking cinema are often a gift from the periphery to the center.
Jan Baetens is editor in chief of Image and Narrative.
