Martin Rumsby

On the first night people sat around fires trading stories, creating narrative. Our enraptured ancestors followed a lightshow of glowing embers. Then, after the fire died a small group, now long dead poets, lay on their backs and traced the night time stars shaped by imaginations' special effects to glittering constellations. Amidst rustling leaves and gently lapping waters in myriad ways these poets retold their birth, suffering then death. Beholding a pagan moon we felt small and humble, but connected. Such was the first cinema.

Today we look back through human time to assert the end of photography and cinema. Every photograph that ever needs be taken has already been taken. Every film that ever needs be made has already been made. The future of cinema and photography is its history. Our tradition awaits invention. Cinema will be colourized and digitized in new combinations of old parts. New heroes, ourselves even, will be inserted alongside old stars to create imaginative inner constellations in which what has been will merge seamlessly with what could be. The media will assimilate us. Our century of cinema will comprise the basis of the translucent post-literate history of the future. An interactive, digitized history of cinema that will turn time travel into virtual reality. In this way we may find ourselves able to hurdle the great dilemma of an age in which forgetting is paradise but survival depends on memory.

QUESTION: What becomes of the new when it grows old?

The beginning was protracted darkness into which a muffled whirring sound gradually grew from behind. The projectionist flicked on the lamp, streams of light punctured the darkness above, ricocheting off the flat white expanse before us in a kinesis of shadows and light. And, clutched in its wondrous grasp, we discerned meaning, we saw the light. Week after week we came back, throwing our hope into the anonymous void.

It has all gone now, fragments of memory like torn ribbons of film, ripped sprockets and dusty projection rooms now spun on developers' gold to auction halls, shopping malls, bars and arcades.

The scene is set for a post-mortem. The archivist and academic morticians come charging out from a dry, stunted undergrowth with the sabers and subtlety of a uniform calvary. In the murky light left by the long rays of a setting sun, angels flutter silent and unseen over the hulk of a gutted corpse. They are film artists, come to revisit and remake our history.

Artists reworking found film footage create surprising new contexts for tired images, resurrecting them in combinations that lend new purpose to the original footage. An artist working with found footage can bring latent meaning to the surface, stripping back the flesh of an image beyond its bias to its basis. In this way old film can be brought back to life and our understanding of cinema transformed. For the first time we see something that was always there but that we did not previously perceive. Our ideas and precepts are thus liberated. This is the true meaning of the term reinvention. Do not accept imitations.

Collage is a defining technique of Twentieth Century art. From the pioneering achievements of the Cubist artists Picasso and Braque, through Dadaist and Surrealist permutations at the hands of Schwitters and Tzara as well as in the work of later figures such as William Burroughs, Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell. Today some people call it appropriation but it is still much the same thing.

This is not new to cinema. As early as 1929 the Russian filmmaker V.I. Pudovkin stressed the essential plasticity that editing brought to cinema, thereby distinguishing film from theatrical and narrative precedents. Of course Pudovkin studied D.W. Griffith who, in his film HEARTS OF THE WORLD (1918) combined actual war footage he had shot at the front in WWI with dramatic battle sequences he subsequently staged in Hollywood. (Griffith's motivation was based on his dissatisfaction with the documentary war footage. It just did not seem real enough. Hollywood could improve the war). Nine years later in THE FALL OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1927) Russian filmmaker Esfir Schub critically reworked the Tsar's 35mm home movies to emphasize the Romanov family's distance from the Russian people. At the other end of the spectrum, closer to Dadaism than didacticism, the Marx Brothers 1933 feature film DUCK SOUP includes a lively collage sequence which the American avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner attributed as the primary inspiration for his collage films.

Experimental films do not originate from positions of power. They are not part of a corporate or institutional agenda. Film artists create their own systems of meaning. In the case of collage films the frame of reference, the language in which they speak, is the history of cinema. Framing themselves inside cinema collage films can be seen to represent the non- hierarchical. Meaning is not imposed on the material from an outside source. Meaning is derived from relationships set up by the filmmaker, usually when editing the film. In this way the original intent of an appropriated shot becomes blurred, sometimes poetically. Collage films ask us to look at how meaning is created in film, how we come to understand discrete sequences of moving images. Experimental films introduce us to new possibilities for structuring our understanding of cinema and the world.

New York artist Donna Cameron spent eight years making her direct film NEW MOON (1989), creating a cinematic light symphony on a 16mm wide strip of hand-made paper and textiles mixed with photographic images, simple line drawings and television images. Cameron's process involved splicing the various materials together on the 16mm strip then affixing these strips onto clear acetate or paper treated with the chemical SIAB to render the paper transparent. Since the strip is very thin Cameron then sealed the image with tape or varnish to protect it. The result, when projected as film, is a type of sculptural motion picture collage in which blocks of color, text and filmed images come to life as an improvisational rhythmic dance. Like visual jazz.

Cameron's technique, going so far as making the paper that she uses, brings to mind the notion of intimate, hand-made women's work. NEW MOON is a textural, internalized work that exists for itself. It neither titillates nor entices the audience. NEW MOON is not a story.

Arthur Lipsett made films at the Montreal studios of the National Film Board of Canada. A colorful character, Lipsett was a complete mystery to his employer but in the course of his employment Lipsett created some of the greatest masterpieces of the international avant-garde cinema. Strangely, Lipsett is little known in Canada and largely unacknowledged by a parochial American avant-garde.

Lipsett's collage film 21.87 (1963) presents an intense view of social dislocation and alienation. It speaks of how individuality can be twisted out of shape by society. How society can steal one's soul and engender madness.

In a procession of meaningfully collaged sounds and images we see debased humanity looking up to a monkey, anonymous crowds, an astronaut and hear a voice pleading, "Can I go back?" (To the womb?)

Sandra Moore's REVERSE TRANSCRIPTASE (1988) is a collage film in which the sounds and images are organized as direct replication of the genetic codes that make up the HIV virus. Moore appropriated imagery from a popular cartoon film, assigning various characters and objects to specific genetic codes to determine the film's sound and image arrangements. Underlying that is the inherent acknowledgment of each individual film frame, one twenty- fourth of a second, as the basic building block of cinema. Moore's technique brings to mind the work of filmmakers such as Hollis Frampton and Peter Greenaway, who sometimes employed various mathematic and alphabetic codes to generate the structural base of their films.

Moore vigorously attacks her source material, dirtying, scratching and punching holes through it. Tape splices are clearly visible on the screen. It is hands on and honest, not distant, remote or abstracted.

A sound collage of African. Caribbean and Oriental drumming invokes the idea of transmission ? transmission of messages, codes and infection.

REVERSE TRANSCRIPTASE situates itself at a strange junction of modernism and post-modernism. The film seems to derive energy from this aesthetic tension. Halfway through REVERSE TRANSCRIPTASE Moore replaces the appropriated flat cartoon images with hand-drawn equivalents of objects, such as a mop and pail, which had been featured in the animation. This unexpected realism is quite jolting, suddenly seeming to project incredible depth, the filmed objects seeming to jump right out of the screen at you. It is as if the virus has taken over. Nothing else in cinema so effectively and economically evokes the reality Moore addresses in her film.

There are so many other models. The films that I discuss above come from a vast body of genuine, vital art films that, variously, exhibit the qualities of form, integrity, vision, politics and sexuality in a profound, articulate way. They are not trivial. Films like these can be found in the Canyon Cinema and New York Filmmakers' Distribution Catalogs. They are worth investigating.