Expanding Cinema: A Winter Diary

“Are You Experienced?” is the summer 2024 edition of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture.

Illustration by Chau Luong.

1.

On December 3, 2024, when Malcolm Le Grice passed away at the age of 84, the cinema lost an artist who challenged its limits like few others. As Maria Palacios Cruz put it in a thoughtful obituary, Le Grice was “a leading figure of a distinctively British avant-garde that interrogated the material, structural and experiential qualities of film.”¹ Forget about being comfortably whisked away into and elsewhere and elsewhen; in Le Grice’s hands, film was surface and grain, illumination and color, a live event occurring in four dimensions. Why? Out of the conviction that there was an aesthetic and political imperative to throw a wrench in the dream machine of the movies—to break the illusionist toy, pull out its guts, and see what cinema could be if it were liberated from the constraints of commercial exhibition. There was something violent about this, to be sure, but it was not simply dry and joyless. That caricature of the avant-garde has never been correct. For Le Grice, there were new pleasures to be had, a different kind of magic to be made.

In addition to the many films he made for the movie theater, Le Grice explored expanded forms of presentation that put filmmaking in relation to performance, light shows, and sculpture. In the early 1970s, he moved the 16mm projector out of its seclusion in the booth and into the space of the viewer, creating works that emphasize liveness and corporeality. Horror Film 2 (1972), a photograph of which graced the cover of a December 1972 special issue of Art and Artists devoted to artists’ film, gives a good example of how Le Grice unmade and remade the cinema: Adopting a title that riffs on the popularity of the genre, he used anaglyph 3D, multiple light sources, rear projection, the human body, and sculptural components to create a shadowplay performance in which proto- and post-cinematic forms of spectacle converged. As he put it in “Real Time/Space,” a now-classic text included in that issue, “The whole history of the commercial cinema has been dominated by the aim of creating convincing illusory time/space, and eliminating all traces of the actually physical state of affairs at any stage of the film.”² It was time for this to change. 

Horror Film 2 (Malcolm Le Grice, 1972).

Le Grice was not alone in this conviction. In “Real Time/Space,” he discusses the work of contemporaries like Michael Snow and Paul Sharits, who pruned the content of their films to a minimum and drew attention to the materiality of the cinematographic machine. In T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), Sharits pulls the viewer’s awareness back to the flatness of the screen and segmentation of the filmstrip. Drawing out the difference between one frame and the next where it would typically be invisible, he creates an assaulting chromatic flicker that pulsates with hallucinatory violence. Yet as confrontational as T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G is, there is something about itthat remains bound to tradition: The standard exhibition architecture is left intact. A seated viewer gazes upward at a single, frontally-positioned screen. This, too, would have to be broken. In a moment when film theorists were articulating a biting critique of the cinema space as a handmaiden of dominant ideology, claiming that it induces a soporific passivity, and when many visual artists were leaving traditional mediums behind to explore more environmental forms like happenings and mixed-media installation, iconoclastic artist-filmmakers—Le Grice, Sharits, Snow, and many others—went in search of new configurations of spectator and screen.

Le Grice concludes “Real Time/Space” with an acknowledgement that such experiments with projection and performance would likely be best accommodated not in cinemas but in art spaces—provided that galleries were prepared to source equipment and learn how to properly maintain it. The essay is now over 50 years old; its author is no longer with us. What has transpired in the intervening decades? Where does Le Grice’s dream of an expanded, materialist cinema stand in the 21st century?

Line Describing a Cone (Anthony McCall, 1973).

2.

On a somber January evening, I went to Tate Modern to visit the exhibition “Anthony McCall: Solid Light.” Passing through a small display of McCall’s diagrams and photographs, I stepped into a black box to find his Landscape for Fire (1972), a filmic record of a performance in which several people dressed in white ignite a grid of small fires on an Essex field. I then entered the heart of the exhibition, a dark, cavernous space in which four of the British artist’s “solid light” works were on display, beginning with his first, Line Describing a Cone (1973). McCall explains it like this:

The viewer watches the film by standing with his or her back toward what would normally be the screen, and looking along the beam toward the projector itself. The film begins as a coherent pencil of light, like a laser beam, and develops through thirty minutes into a complete, hollow cone.

Line Describing a Cone deals with one of the irreducible, necessary conditions of film: projected light. It deals with this phenomenon directly, independently of any other consideration. It is the first film to exist in real, three-dimensional space.³

Real time and space, more action in the room than on the screen, cinema drastically reduced and dramatically expanded: such are the ingredients of this emblematic anti-illusionist work, which is as playful to experience as it is rigorous in its conception.

In the 1970s, McCall typically showed Line in lofts and art spaces filled with dust and cigarette smoke. The particulate matter in the air endows the light emanating from the projector with spectral solidity, creating a moving object in space without mass. Onscreen, one would see something prosaic: a white line progressively drawing a circle on a black backdrop. But in the room, this flat geometry became something altogether different: a beguiling volume in three dimensions that calls out to be touched. Even outside a dedicated movie theater, the single-projector set-up used in the 1970s to display Line asserted a relationship to the habitual protocols of the cinema. The spectator who turns toward the beam, who touches it and moves within it, turns her back not only on the screen, but on a whole set of ingrained conventions. At Tate, things were different, and not only because Line is now a looping digital projection that uses a vapor machine to bring its luminous cone into view. In this room full of projections, there was no standard cinematic protocol to adopt or refuse, no expectation of disciplined stasis to interrupt. In the 21st-century museum, moving images of all shapes and sizes are shown in innumerable configurations to visitors encouraged to move around at will. McCall’s original gesture was transformed; the sharp edge of contestation dulled into a smooth, electronic ambiance.

Deeper inside the darkness were more solid light works. These pieces, made between 2003 and 2018, have been digital from birth, possessing none of the trembling grain and flecks of imperfection that betray the photochemical origins of Line even when it is shown as a transfer. Doubling Back (2003) comprises two serpentine curves that intersect with one another in configurations that evolve over the course of its 30-minute loop. The title is appropriate enough given the visual form, but its evocation of retrospection and replication is also an acknowledgment that with this work McCall returned to solid light for the first time since the 1970s.

Line Describing a Cone (Anthony McCall, 1973). Installation view from “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977” at the Whitney Museum of Art, 2001. Photograph by Hank Graber.

In 2001, for the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977,” curated by Chrissie Iles, Line was transformed into a gallery installation—reigniting interest in its maker. Resurrecting multi-projection works by Sharits and Snow as well, the exhibition was a key part of a broader revival of 1960s and ’70s expanded cinema in the first years of this century. As major contemporary artists like Christian Marclay and Pipilotti Rist embraced large-scale projection, and as digitization lent images a new malleability and transportability, underappreciated figures from an earlier generation who had questioned cinema’s shape and site appeared newly relevant. In his 2014 book Between the Black Box and the Cube, Andrew V. Uroskie notes that such practices had occupied a “peripheral location” in histories of both art and film because they were awkwardly positioned between the two realms.⁴ But in the expanded mediascape of the new millennium, the time for reassessment was nigh. McCall recommenced his work with solid light in 2003; Line entered Tate’s collection in 2005.

Twenty years later, immense projections are a familiar sight in gallery spaces. Museums must compete for visitors’ attention (which is to say, their money) in the experience economy, and the moving image offers an excellent means of creating immersive environments that promise something unstreamable, worth traveling for. Traces of these encounters tend to find their way onto social networks. Many people at the McCall exhibition held out their phones and attempted to photograph themselves and their companions as they negotiated the metamorphosing volumes of light and darkness. I was reminded of Claire Bishop’s contention, in her 2024 book Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, that beholding an artwork now means being simultaneously there in front of it and “networked to multiple elsewheres.”⁵ So much for real time and real space; new kinds of virtuality now intrude without end in a multimedia experience stretched across devices and locations. 

Yet as I tried to take a few photographs of my own to serve as visual notes, I noticed something important: They looked terrible. Almost nothing of what was so compelling about McCall’s delicate, swirling volumes of light could be registered by my iPhone camera. I had expected the display to be a selfie-friendly wonderland, perhaps a replacement for Tate’s immensely popular run of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. And yet this plunge into chiseled obscurity was nothing like that. It encouraged a state of embodied presence. As I watched a woman bend around one of the projections, as if its materiality put up resistance to her movements, it struck me that despite all the transformations from 1973 to 2025, there was something important that McCall had held onto: the idea that art should assail the dreck of mass culture and upset the impoverished ways of seeing and being that it imposes upon us.

One or Several Tigers (Ho Tzu Nyen, 2017). Installation view of “Time and the Tiger” at Mudam, 2024. Photograph by Mareike Tocha.

3.

In his 1975 essay “The Two Avant-Gardes,” Peter Wollen set out a distinction between two currents: the formalist filmmakers associated with various co-operatives in the US and UK (e.g., Le Grice, McCall) and the political modernists (e.g., Godard, Huillet/Straub).⁶ Though Wollen wasn’t writing about gallery-based practices, when I visited Luxembourg in February to see Ho Tzu Nyen’s exhibition “Time and the Tiger” at Mudam, I found myself thinking back to this legendary essay. Half a century later, it seems that the children of the second avant-garde have won out. The kind of reductionism found in a work like Line Describing a Cone largely belongs to another era; today, essayism is everywhere, intertextuality and figuration are embraced, and the reigning consensus is that a politics of form should be matched by a politics of content. All the same, throughout “Time and the Tiger,” I felt that the legacy of figures like Le Grice and McCall was powerfully present. In Ho’s work, their explorations of the dimensionality of the moving image are re-energized through a collision with research-based methods and new technologies.

Born in Singapore in 1976, Ho deploys complex configurations of the moving image to explore histories of Southeast Asia, a region that he underlines as being a concept constructed by the West at midcentury. The five works on display at Mudam confront geopolitics, extinction, land, time, and the status of the image through a decolonial optic—and through many, many screens. “The enemy of my work is the One,” Ho said in a guided tour of the exhibition, emphasizing his interest in multiplicity and variability. This conviction comes through in the recombinatory form of works such as T for Time (2023–) and CDOSEA (2017–), which rearticulate the tradition of essay filmmaking for the algorithmic age, using a computer program to generate a new montage of fragments with each viewing. And it is there, too, in the artist’s inventive use of formats: each piece in “Time and the Tiger” relies on a different arrangement of screens. 

T Is for Time: Timepieces (Ho Tzu Nyen, 2023–). Installation view of “Time and the Tiger” at Mudam, 2024. Photograph by Mareike Tocha.

CDOSEA, which draws on Ho’s database The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2012–), was shown as a single projection in an auditorium but also exists in a different version online. Hotel Aporia (2019), a work in four chapters concerning Japanese imperialism in Asia during the Second World War, was a quartet of projections, each with its own tatami-mat viewing area—a choice inspired by Yazujiro Ozu, whose war years in Singapore comprise one of the six stories the installation weaves together. In T Is for Time: Timepieces (2023–), 43 LED screens of varying sizes are set into a black wall, each one displaying an animation evoking an idea of time: the embalmed head of Mrs. Bates from Psycho (1960), a river flowing, a metronome, a beating heart. Some were loops of as little as one second, while others were generated by applications programmed to mimic longer cycles, such a seascape that changes according to the time of day.

This atlas of temporalities formed an antechamber to T for Time, in which 42 sequences appear in a randomly generated order on two screens, unfolding the ideas of temporality hinted at in the Timepieces in ever-shifting ways. The projection at the back of the room presents lens-based images pulled from diverse sources, but these are difficult to see clearly, for a structure clad with translucent black fabric bisects the space, impeding access to the rear half of the room. Part of this barrier forms a second screen on which animated versions of the lens-based images appear. Looking through the first screen toward the second, the two layers at times seem to merge; in other moments, the differences between them are palpable. The field of representation splinters in two with a ghostly shimmer, as Ho exploits the dimensionality of space to play with the temporal concept of the afterimage. The animations are visual echoes of the lens-based images, mimicking and transforming them in a superimposition occurring across the two screens. The image ceases to be a unified presence on a single flat surface and becomes a palimpsest that occupies the room in three dimensions. Whereas Le Grice’s concern was to give primacy to the real time of the viewer’s encounter with the work, in Timepieces and T is for Time, Ho suggests that temporality cannot be reduced to any single conception or rhythm, and must instead be understood in its plasticity and multiplicity.

Interrupted Road Surveying in Singapore (Heinrich Leutemann, c. 1865).

The most elaborate installation was undoubtedly One or Several Tigers (2017), which the wall label described as comprising “video, smoke machine, automated screen, show control system, [and] 14 wayang kulit puppets in aluminum frames.” Positioned just outside the installation was the starting point of this undertaking: Heinrich Leutemann’s Interrupted Road Surveying in Singapore (c. 1865), a color wood engraving depicting Irish civil architect George Drumgoole Coleman—a key player in the development of colonial Singapore—conducting an 1835 survey of the jungle in the company of incarcerated Indian laborers. The titular interruption arrives in the form of a Malayan tiger, who leaps toward the surveying instrument, as if in protest of colonial encroachment. Occupying an important position in East Asian folklore, tigers roamed Singapore until their habitat began to be destroyed in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to attacks on humans, which in turn led to bounties on their heads; the last tiger on the island was reportedly killed in 1904. One or Several Tigers restages the episode from Leutemann’s print as a double projection in which a computer-generated tiger confronts a computer-generated Coleman. Unfolding across two screens facing each other, their operatic duet ranges widely across Singaporean history and charts the shifting symbolization of the tiger within it. Toward the end of the loop, bursts of light evocative of flash photography emanate from behind one screen, momentarily rendering it translucent and enabling the viewer to catch a glimpse of human and animal silhouettes. Then, that screen lifts like a curtain to reveal the Indonesian shadow puppets, which together recreate the scene of the lithograph and become a surface for projection. On the opposite screen, live-action figures enter what had been a work of animation, as a group of Indian men—contemporary residents of Singapore whom Ho cast off the street—confront the print in the National Gallery. Between past and present, virtuality and actuality, live-action and animation, man and animal, colonized and colonizer, Ho orchestrates a spectacular and speculative encounter that recalls Le Grice’s Horror Film 2 while also being entirely his own, entirely new.

Thokei (Malik Irtiza, 2024).

4.

When I heard that Malcolm Le Grice had died, I was in Bangalore to attend Experimenta, the small, vibrant festival organized by Shai Heredia. In the early days of December 2024, a devoted audience encountered an array of old and new experimental films accompanied by lectures and discussions. The Adolfas Mekas Award for “cinematic madness, risk taking and the making of spirited mistakes” went to Malik Irtiza’s Thokei (2024), a beautifully propulsive work with links to sound and performance art that asserted solidarity between Palestine and Kashmir, where Irtiza lives. 

Another highlight was A Frown Gone Mad (2024), by Lebanese artist Omar Mismar, fresh from winning the award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Mismar gazes unflinchingly at beauty salon clients as they receive injections of Botox and fillers, hoping to preserve their faces from the ravages of age and suffering, molding the uniqueness of their countenance into pumped and plumped sameness. As the needles plunge in and clients chat with salon owner Bouba, everything from war to pain to money comes into the frame. With this work, Mismar joins Narcisa Hirsch and Andy Warhol as one of experimental cinema’s most fascinating disquisitors on the human visage. 

Thokei and A Frown Gone Mad have clear links to visual arts practice; their makers are also active in the gallery space. And yet both films recruit the viewing situation of the movie theater, with its single screen and seated spectators. The work of Ho Tzu Nyen offers ample evidence of the myriad creative possibilities of the installation format, but there are also times when this is not what is most needed. I could see how easily A Frown Gone Mad could transform into flimsy grotesquerie if it were installed: The shock of the needles and blood and bruises would blot out the film’s complexity.

A Frown Gone Mad (Omar Mismar, 2024).

In 2001, amidst the proliferation of moving-image installations, none other than Le Grice wrote, “I have largely rejected this form because of the transience of the viewers’ engagement and consequent lack of depth in time-based art in the gallery. This lack of sustained attention and duration veers work towards concept and idea rather than engaged experience.”⁷ Perhaps the avant-garde imperative to dismantle cinema has now waned and the cinema can be claimed as a resistant space of concentration and collectivity, where images can be held with care. In the 1960s and ’70s, an age of cinema and television, many artists were excited by the democratizing potential of multiscreen arrangements. Now, in a time of miniature devices and gigantic video billboards, moving through environments in which screens proliferate is our default condition. We are always tethered to the network, our attention dispersed and disordered. And we are often alone, our relation to others mediated through digital platforms. Image glut rules the day. That cinema space can be an alternative to all this was certainly my experience at Experimenta, where Heredia and her team created a precious opportunity to gather in time and space around a screen that catalyzed attunement, debate, and dissent, and nourished friendships old and new.

McCall declared Line Describing a Cone to be the “first film to exist in real, three-dimensional space.” P. Adams Sitney understood the artist’s gesture somewhat differently, deeming it “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.”⁸ The gesture of turning back toward the projector’s beam might best be understood as a reminder that what happens onscreen is only ever a small part of what happens at the cinema. There is the room, the apparatus, the public, the liveness of the event: This, too, is a kind of expanded field of cinematic experience. The works shown at Experimenta were generally excellent, but the success of the festival cannot be gauged outside of all these other qualities. Every film happens in real space and real time, if we choose to notice.

1.      Maria Palacios Cruz, “Artist as Filmmaker,” New Left Review: Sidecar (January 10, 2025), https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/artist-as-filmmaker ↩
2.      Malcolm Le Grice, “Real Time/Space,” Art and Artists (December 1972), 39. ↩
3.      Anthony McCall, “Line Describing a Cone and Related Films,” October 103 (2003), 42. ↩
4.      Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 14. ↩
5.      Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso, 2024), 4. ↩
6.      Peter Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes,” Edinburgh ’76 Magazine 1 (Edinburgh Film Festival, 1976), 77–86. ↩
7.      Malcolm Le Grice, “Improvising Time and Image,” Filmwaves 14, no. 1 (2001), 18. ↩
8.      Annette Michelson and P. Adams Sitney, “A Conversation on Knokke and the Independent Filmmaker,” Artforum 9, vol. 13 (May 1975), 65; quoted in: Jonathan Walley, Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia (Oxford University Press, 2020), 408. ↩