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Abstract ‘Film in the Gallery’ is a concept that I propose to understand a phenomenon of exhibiting
cinema in a gallery or museum. The main tension of this practice is located in the laymen’s view that gallery’s elite status determines the status of ‘ilm in the gallery’ practice. In other
words, a ilm is regarded as an artwork because the gallery says so. This essay tries to look into the practice by asking the questions below: What is the signiicance of screening a ilm in a
gallery? To what extent the exhibition design demanded by the spatiality of the gallery adds to the artistic dimension of ‘Film in the Gallery’ practice? The answer will be demonstrated
through a close analysis of a particular artwork titled American Night 2009 by Julian Rosefeldt
that challenges the traditional notion of a ilm’s exhibition design.
Keywords Film in the Gallery, cinema of exhibition, spatiovisual art, intersubjective spectatorship
Travel-lingering Through American Night: Rethinking Space in ‘Film in the Gallery’
practice
Nayla Majestya
le.jamais.natyagmail.com
1. Introduction ‘Film in the gallery’ has become a predominant
phenomenon in the context of art consumption that refers to a set of practices of exhibiting
cinema in a gallery or museum. Regardless its
practicality, the term ‘ilm in the gallery’ raises a paradox. On one hand, ‘ilm in the gallery’
signiies a sense of media displacement that comes from a long-established notion of a
cinema or a movie house as the venue of the ilm exhibition proper. On the other hand, the
gallery also has its own spatial connotation as an institution of high arts that quite often
in polarity with the notion of ilm as mass production and mass entertainment. Hence,
resulted in a laymen view that the gallery’s elite status determines the status of ‘ilm in
the gallery’ practice. In other words, ilm is seen an artwork because the gallery says so.
In his study of virtual museum, media archeologist Erkki Huhtamo claims that the
origin of virtual museum could be found from the emerging practice of exhibition design
that is by incorporating exhibition design in the artistic practice as new medium within
the avant-garde art movement in the early 20
th
century “On The Origins of The Virtual Museum” 3. Huhtamo’s discovery provides a
useful context to situates the status of ‘ilm in the gallery’ as art by taking into account its
exhibition design. Thus, this essay will answer the following question: To what extent an
exhibition design is signiicant in the artistic practice of ‘ilm in the gallery’? The answer
will be demonstrated through a close analysis of a particular artwork that challenges the
traditional notion of its exhibition design. In this case, the artwork in discussion is
American Night 2009.
American Night is a ive-widescreen ilm
installation by Julian Rosefeldt, a German contemporary ilm artist widely known
especially in the UK and Europe with his multi-screens ilm installation. Shot in
16mm and showing a depth characteristic of celluloid-based image to show a cinematic
world of western genre, American Night
could be easily made as a single screen ilm exhibited in the cinema. American Night
as a ilm installation placed in a speciic context of gallery exhibition, thus, raises a
set of questions in regard to our notion of ilmic experiences. Does the gallery setting
ofer diferent experiences compared to those of cinema setting? If so, what do those
experiences tell us about ‘ilm in the gallery’ spectatorship?
Deducing from Huhtamo’s account and Giuliana Bruno’s notion of ilm spectator as
a voyager or traveler, a person who takes a journey through the geographical terrain of
moving image Bruno 56, this essay claims
that ilm spectatorship, regardless in a gallery or cinema setting, is a space created by
experiences established between the artwork and the spectator. The spectator creates
herhis own space of experience rather than inhabits a predetermined one dictated by
the exhibition space’s social status. Thus, the cinematic experience of a spectator is
intersubjective, rather than institutionalised. This essay will attempt to interpret
spectatorship as an integrated space through Huhtamo’s idea of integration. In this context,
reading a space is like performing mettre-en- scene, putting things together to construct a
scene in order to understand it as a space. By taking into account both the mise-en-scene
on the screen and the mise-en-scene out of screen, the spectator performs an integrated
reading. Hence this essay will focus on the idea of spatial experience of a traveler, starting
with a journey through the ilm’s diegetic space, then through the gallery’s space,
and lastly through the intersubjective space created from a synthesis of the two spatial
experiences.
2. The West as Cinematic Space
The notion of spatial coniguration in cinema usually tied to narrative cinema convention.
Diegesis as a term revived by David Bordwell
from Etienne Souriau’s use to describe the ‘recounted story’ in literature, has come to
be an accepted term for the ictional world of the story Bordwell 16. Diegesis or the
diegetic space in ilm is the ilm’s story world, a constructed realm in which the story taken
place. However, there is another ilmic realm that
Bordwell refers as ‘excess’ and describes as: Anything in a narrative ilm that is not
narrational…. the realm in which casual lines, colors, expressions, and textures become
“fellow travelers” of the story…. materials which may stand out perceptually but
which do not it either narrative or stylistic patterns….. A perception of a ilm that
includes its excess implies an awareness of the structures including conventions at work in
the ilm,... that can allow us to look further into a ilm, renewing its ability to intrigue us
by its strangeness. Bordwell 53
By taking into account the realm of ‘excess’ within the spatial coniguration of a ilm,
we could understand cinematic space as a constructed space consists of a ilm’s diegetic
space and ilm’s aesthetic the excess. Cinematic space is an integral part of narrative
representation. Within the convention of narrative ilm, usually a concise boundary is
established between the ilm’s cinematic space and the spectatorship’s space that is the space
inhabited by the spectator while experiencing the ilm. However, an aesthetic intervention
could be performed to obscure this boundary among other ways through self-relexivity.
Dana Polan explains self-relexivity as “ a strategy in the interplay of a technique
intrinsic to and actually deining the process of art... which signals awareness of their own
artiice” “Brecht and The Politics of Self- Relexive Cinema”. In American Night, the
self-relexivity could be found in any manner of referencing to the contemporary world
inhabited by the spectator within the ilm’s diegetic world. By performing this attitude,
American Night thus ofers a new spatial
contract regarding the frontier that separates the cinematic space from the spectatorial one.
In order to understand this, we should look into how the ilm sets up a spatial contract
through its mise-en-scene. American Night shows us the West through ive diferent spatial
representations on ive diferent screens that could be summed up as the following:
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1. The irst screen shows a lone cowboy exploring
various American landscapes, from the dessert, mountain, and then on a seaside.
2. The second screen shows a deserted-looking
town, empty from inhabitants except for one moment in the ilm when a helicopter lands
and a team of American troopers barges into the space, moving further from the camera until
they disappear amid the town’s buildings.
3. The third screen shows a group of cowboys
slouching around a ire while talking about gun, law, violence, contemporary American politics,
and auteurist ilm in a self-relexive manner.
4. The fourth screen shows a juxtaposition of
interior and exterior space of a town illed with inhabitants. A travelling performer unloads his
cart outside a saloon where people hang out, play card, drink, and later watch a vaudeville
performance. Later, the scene inside the saloon is broken by the presence of a assistant to
director and a cameraman giving instruction for the casts. The camera dolly up to follow the casts
walk out the ilm set, revealing the diferent lighting setup, from the darkened ilm set to the
broad daylight where the other ilm crews work.
5. The ifth screen shows a woman standing in
front of her house, forever waiting. The camera portrays her through various angles. Later,
a combined movement of dollies up and a backward move of a property reveals that the
woman and the house are merely a property set by camera and its tracking rails.
In American Night, the images that form the imagined western are visually showed at least
in two manners, irst as a conined space of movement and second, as tableaux-vivant or
painting-like scenes. What is the implication of such imposition?
Rather than a background for action, the space in this ilm is the action. It contains movements
and igures that deine the space. The space is a static site that contains movement, thus
creating an experience of immobile mobility. The igures move across the space, explore it or
even disappear amidst it. However, the space remains still. This notion of moving in a circle
conined by space is best represented by the lone cowboy igure. While he keeps moving
around the landscapes, almost like testing the boundaries of the space he inhabits, he
eventually meets the border.
Fig 1. The lone cowboy meet the sea, captured from Rosefeldt’s vimeo page
http:vimeo.com54721000
In a painting-like shot composition that brings a recollection of German Romantic artist
Caspar David Fiedrich’s painting, Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog 1818, the lone cowboy and
his horse encounter a true frontier, a seaside. This idea of human and spatial limitation
is diferent from the traditional western’s notion of the frontier as a threshold between
the civilized and the savage. Rather, in this scene, Rosefeldt proposes an alternative idea
about frontier as a limit between human and nature, in which humans’ mobility is limited
by the space they inhabit. The tableaux-vivant manner that brings a painting-like reading of
the image emphasises this notion of stillness. Like a frozen moment, it is simultaneously
motioned and motionless.
The West as a spatial representation in American Night thus could be understood
irstly regarding its form as a site of movement; a still site that contains a loop or
circle movement. Secondly, it is a space that is constructed through the use of Western
genre’s iconography to represent the idea of myth. It is no coincidence that myth is also
part of Western genre discourses that we will further discuss later.
In his 1969 article, Jim Kitses exclaims “ A western is a western is a western” to point
out how the term Western as a ilm genre can be pejoratively understood as a cliché, a
repetitive practice that after some time has established its iconic quality. Iconic, a term he
borrows from art history connotes “an image that both records and carries a conceptual
and emotional weight drawn from a deined symbolic ield, a tradition” “Authorship and
Genre: Notes on the Western” 67. The iconicity of Western genre in Kitses’s
term is the basis of how American Night establishes a contract with its spectator. Since
the images are widely familiar and already carry meanings that are also recognizable,
the spectator is positioned in a space of recognition and deception, especially by the
ilm’s mode that simultaneously conirms and betrays the expectation formed by the
genre tradition. In this sense, while the ilm’s self-relexivity could be seen as a break out
of a convention, the reason that strategy could work is also because the convention
has already established. Put it another way, American Night sets up an agreement with its
spectator through the recognition of Western genre iconographies.
3. American Night as Cinema of Exhibitions
