Paper Notations in Analog Experimental Cinema. The Algorithm and the Image, before Code

Avant-garde cinema, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, has formed a diverse universe of films that share, besides their opposition to commercial cinema, an intense process of reflection and experimentation. Working without a script, since they generally stood against narratives of a literary cast, experimental filmmakers often resorted to paper notations in order to organize the various elements of their films in time and space.

This chapter proposes an analysis, which could not claim to be exhaustive, of a corpus of analog experimental films, examined through the paper notations created by the artists while making them. These are not fragmentary working notes of the kind that can be associated with any activity. On the contrary, they are the specific and programmatic notations that pervasively permeate analog experimental cinema and that maintain formal links with the films with which they are associated.

Through the prism of paper notations, analog avant-garde films will be set in tension with those of artists working with the moving image digitally, in an attempt to identify the constants and the variables. The question is whether it is possible to grasp, in these analog creative processes based on paper notations, antecedents to the creative production of moving images by means of algorithms and graphical interfaces. Can we discern, despite technological change, forms of continuity in the logics followed and/or the methods used, which would help anchor digital processes of image creation in the tradition of the analog arts? To what extent does the analysis of the use of paper notations by analog experimental filmmakers make it possible to clarify the creative use of algorithms?

This analysis has drawn on existing reflections. An article written by Yann Beauvais in 2008¹ provides a conceptual framework for notations in experimental cinema, which, according to the author, respond to the setting aside of discursivity in the cinema of the 1920s. For his part, in a recent article², Clint Enns sketches a condensed history of the algorithmic editing of moving images, presented as an extension of the work with paper notations in experimental cinema, in a tradition that goes back to the Russian school of montage of the early twentieth century. In addition, Malcolm Le Grice wrote, from 1974 onward, a series of articles aimed at theorizing experimental cinema in the context of the digital³, singling out random access to memory as a specificity of the medium. Lev Manovich, finally, problematizes new media⁴ by taking as his reading grid Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a movie camera, made in 1929, thereby confirming the relevance of experimental cinema as a field from which to try to apprehend the digital.

The approach chosen in these pages favors contact with the works, their reading and interpretation, from which the conceptual issues are allowed to settle. The analog works examined were identified from the texts cited and from books specific to experimental cinema. The aspects of the works concerning the digital moving image were mainly grasped through exchanges with artists, both emerging and established, currently active. These exchanges, which complement and enrich the feeling arising from the personal work at the origin of this research-creation, proved illuminating as to the complexity of the passage from analog to digital in practices involving the moving image.

1. Yann Beauvais, «Künftige filme / films à venir ». dans : VON AMELUNXEN, Hubertus, APPELT, Dieter and WEIBEL, Peter (dir.), Notation kalkül und form in den künsten. Berlin; Karlsruhe : Akademie der Künste; ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 2008, p. 135–142.↩︎

2. Clint Enns, A brief history of algorithmic editing [en ligne]. Medium, 22 November 2018. disponible à l'adresse : https://medium.com/janbot/a-brief-history-of-algorithmic-editing-732c3e19884b.↩︎

3. These articles were collected with other writings by Le Grice in: Malcolm Le Grice, Experimental cinema in the digital age, op. cit.↩︎

4. In Lev Manovich, The language of new media. 1st MIT Press paperback edition. Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press, 2001.↩︎