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Amsterdam University Press

Chapter Title: The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives

Book Title: Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art Book Author(s): Erika Balsom Published by: Amsterdam University Press. (2013) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt45kdsq.7

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Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives

I suppose that if a work of art is by definition that which conserves, a mythology never ceases, on the contrary, to manage itself and to recycle itself according to the taste of the age and the state of technology... Nothing will be kept of cinema except that which can be remade. – Serge Daney

In the spring of , Chris Moukarbel, an MFA student in the Yale University School of Art’s sculpture department, was sued by Paramount Pictures. Why? The “nature of the case,” according to the affidavit issued to the United States District Court, was as follows:

This is an action for copyright infringement pursuant to the Copyright Law of the United States,  U.S.C. §  et seq. (the “Copyright Act”). This infringement claim arises from defendant Chris Moukarbel’s (the “Defendant”) unauthorized creation and distribution of a twelve-minute motion picture which is a virtually identical copy of a substantial portion of the Plaintiff’s copyrighted screenplay for its upcom- ing motion picture World Trade Center.

With a budget of one thousand dollars, a screenplay bought from a bootlegger, and actors from the Yale School of Drama, Moukarbel remade – or rather pre- made, as the feature had not yet been released to the public – sections of Oliver Stone’s film, World Trade Center (), as his MFA thesis project. Stone’s $ million film set out to tell the “true story” of John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, two of the last survivors to be pulled from underneath the rubble on  September . Whereas Stone’s version crosscuts between scenes of the men trapped underneath the collapsed Twin Towers and diegetically antecedent foo- tage leading up to the event, Moukarbel stays underneath the debris, stringing together several disparate snippets of Andrea Berloff’s cliché-ridden screenplay. Where Stone seeks to inject narrative interest through flashback, Moukarbel questions the very possibility of responsibly producing such a story. Stone’s World Trade Center was marketed with the tagline “The World Saw Evil That Day. Two Men Saw Something Else.” What is this “something else” that the men-turned-characters of Stone’s movie supposedly saw? True to the con- ventions of the genre, perhaps it was the greatness of the human spirit. Moukar-

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bel, by contrast, drains the screenplay of its promises of visibility, knowledge, and redemption. Throughout the video, it is very dark under the collapsed buildings and there is nothing to be seen; there is no exit from the claustropho- bic enclosure, just a few lines of dialogue torn from context and unsentimentally delivered to the utter vacuity that Hollywood would bestow upon them. The radical insufficiency of the representation becomes clear and the distance that separates it from the event it purports to depict becomes impossible to ignore.

When the work was shown at the sculpture department’s thesis exhibition, Moukarbel installed a single upward-cast blue-tinted spotlight outside the gal- lery, recalling both a film premiere and the Tribute in Light ceremonies that have been held in lower Manhattan to commemorate the events of /. By con- densing the glitz of Hollywood and a monument in remembrance of national trauma in a single gesture, the spotlight speaks directly to what is at stake in the project that Moukarbel named World Trade Center  (): it ques- tions the cinema’s role as repository of public memory, who has the right to tell a particular story, and why and how they will tell it. Five years after the event (too late) and four months before the Hollywood debut (too early), Moukarbel’s (p)remake deftly utilized its purposeful untimeliness to perform the becoming- formulaic of an exceptional event with a difficult relationship to narration.

Chris Moukarbel, World Trade Center  ().

Hollywood, with its astounding global reach, has emerged as perhaps the pri- mary way the historical narratives of the twentieth century have been delivered to us. Trauma is repackaged as spectacle, given an uplifting human-interest an- gle, and fed to the public for consumption, eliding the socio-political vicissi- tudes that reside therein in favor of individual-driven narratives with universal humanist themes. The artist told the New York Times, “I’m interested in memor-

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ial and the way Hollywood represents public events... Through their access and budget they’re able to affect a lot of people’s ideas about an event and also affect policy. I was deliberately using their script and preempting their release to make a statement about power.” By suing Moukarbel, Paramount compounded what his project had always been about: the lawsuit pushed questions of own- ership to center stage, prompting an inquiry into the relationship between nar- rative as private property and as public memory.

The word trauma comes from the Greek for “wound,” an etymology that evokes the manner in which the traumatic event punctures the fabric of signifi- cation. It is only through repetition that this asignifying blot can be recuperated into knowledge. The events of  September  functioned as a national trau- ma that served to disrupt established frameworks of understanding, and yet in the months and years that followed, real dialogue in mainstream media outlets was quashed by the Bushism of “Either you’re with us or you’re with the terror- ists.” As Judith Butler has written, “The articulation of this hegemony takes place in part through producing a consensus on what certain terms will mean, how they can be used, and what lines of solidarity are implicitly drawn through this use.” Stone’s World Trade Center was central to the continuing produc- tion of this consensus, as it worked to suture over the wound of trauma with a representation that would deny ambiguity and contradiction in an embrace of American unilateralism that told the “true” story of innocent citizens menaced by an unseen and unknowable enemy. Moukarbel’s World Trade Center  starts from this problematic to ask: what transformations take place across these proprietary retellings of an instance of national trauma? How does a fleeting event – one that troubles our comprehension and quickly recedes into the past – become digested, monumentalized, and standardized through the production of Hollywood’s “official” version of it? And what might result from moving beyond this practice into the domain of unsanctioned remakes that function as hostile takeovers of an industry obsessive about holding tight rein on its intel- lectual property?

Moukarbel distributed the video for free on his website, which eventually drew enough attention that the project became known to Paramount, resulting in legal action. Interestingly, the lawsuit names Moukarbel’s place of residence as Washington, D.C., even though the Whois record for the artist’s website in- cluded in Paramount’s dossier of supporting evidence lists his address as New Haven, Connecticut. By locating the artist in the nation’s capital (where he had resided some years prior), the lawsuit mobilizes a rhetoric of the enemy within the heart of America, thus setting up the production of World Trade Center  as an exemplary unpatriotic act. To rephrase one of George W. Bush’s fa- vorite sayings, “Either you are with Hollywood or with the terrorists.” While this might seem like a stretch, it rhymes with a statement made by the late Jack

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Valenti, copyright extremist and long-time president of the Motion Picture As- sociation of America; regarding unauthorized online distribution of Hollywood products, Valenti asserted, “We’re fighting our own terrorist war.” The lawsuit against Moukarbel also claimed that the “issuance of an injunction would not substantially harm the other party” since he did not seek commercial gain from the enterprise, putting forth a notably circumscribed understanding of “harm” as well as making clear that the lawsuit was not at its core a financial matter.

The lawsuit claimed that, “The preemptive release of the Moukarbel Film on the Internet before Paramount's WTC Film means that unquantifiable but, most likely, large numbers of people will see the Mourkarbel Film first for free and determine, based on this poor-quality copy, that they do not want to pay to see the remainder of the WTC Film.” An unnamed Paramount spokeswoman told the Yale Daily News that, “He stole our material, and he shot a script that we owned...People were confused, and that's not something we want to happen.”

Obviously, the rhetoric of “confusion” is laughable, despite the fairly high pro- duction quality (given the available resources) of Moukarbel’s video. Though a case for fair use clearly presented itself, as Lawrence Lessig has written, “...fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as fair use is astonishingly bad... It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The legal system may be tolerable for the very rich.” For a graduate student, the cost of contesting the lawsuit made a claim of fair use unfeasible. The lawsuit was settled out of court on the condition that Moukarbel destroy all existing copies of the work.

Rather than any real fear that an unsuspecting Internet user might be dis- suaded from a trip to the multiplex by coming across Moukarbel’s MFA thesis project, Paramount’s lawsuit speaks to the current climate of copyright paranoia brought about by the fact that, as Moukarbel himself has put it, “We're at a place now where technology allows the democratization of storytelling.” Re- cent developments in hardware, software, and bandwidth have spurred prac- tices of remaking, recycling, and retelling in a way that has disrupted Holly- wood’s near-sovereign majesty over the right to fictionalize history, to say nothing of its ability to regulate derivative uses of its products. The Internet is awash with amateur “mash-ups” and reenactments, the cultural significance of which has not been lost on contemporary art. While such non-professional on- line activities have become the object of litigation, Moukarbel’s World Trade Center  is something of an exception in the art world, a space in which practices of basing works on preexisting films have proliferated without major interference from those who hold copyright on the source texts in question. Since , there has been an explosion of new narratives created out of old

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movies, often with something to say about “the way Hollywood tells it,” to borrow from the title of David Bordwell’s study of the narrative conventions of dominant cinema.

This chapter will examine exemplary works of this tendency to remake com- mercial cinema, embracing the notion of the “remake” broadly to designate any artwork produced by reworking elements of an existing film. This might in- volve recycling existing footage, reenacting a scenario from a film, interviewing an individual whose life has been involved with film production, or producing non-filmic objects by using an existing film as a source. Such practices appear as the progeny of appropriation art born in the Internet age, making use of com- mercially available software such as Final Cut Pro and manipulable digital video files to take up the products of Hollywood as raw material for an investi- gation into the ways in which popular media shape subjectivity and experience. Claude Lévi-Strauss defined mythic narrative as an imaginary solution of a real contradiction, ascribing to it a fundamentally synthetic function, while Frederic Jameson has built upon this premise to demonstrate that this synthesis never takes place without a residue that may be read so as to reveal the “political unconscious” that lies latent. The counter-narratives produced by artists re- making old movies often take this residue as a starting point and use it to pro- duce narratives of analysis rather than synthesis. Instead of an imaginary reso- lution of contradiction, the very terms of conflict that had formerly been sublated now reemerge in tension with one another. In order to evade the traps of a discursive position falsely external to the spectacle it seeks to criticize, these artists bring together spectators through their common recognition of mass cul- tural icons and stories. This at once forces them to take account of how thor- oughly such icons and stories have shaped the ways in which they understand their lives and their history. It also, however, allows for the formation of a com- munity around such collective recognition, repurposing the shared memory to- wards knowledge-producing ends.

Though the remake as a strategy in art since  emerges as a privileged iteration of a more widespread rejection of the unique and the original at this time, it is in fact as old as cinema itself, with the Lumière brothers often making multiple versions of their short actualités, which were then copied by others the world over. It has a long history in Hollywood in particular, from repeated lit- erary adaptations such as Imitation of Life (by John Stahl in  and Douglas Sirk in ), to Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Haneke’s self-remakes (the for- mer with The Man Who Knew Too Much in  and , the latter with Funny Games in  and ) to the contemporary trend of the transnational remake embodied most forcefully in J-Horror crossovers such as Ringu/The Ring (/) and Ju-on/The Grudge (/) and seemingly undying action franchises such as Rambo and Terminator. The very action of remaking

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is central to the Hollywood system, which ceaselessly produces updates of the same themes and retells the same stories, feeding off of the corpses of national cinemas and cult genres when necessary. As Lessig notes, Hollywood is no bas- tion of originality, but was built by “fleeing pirates” – people who left New York for California in an effort to get away from the monopoly Edison had se- cured through his patent holdings. Peter Decherney, meanwhile, has sug- gested that, “The Hollywood studio system was built on plagiarism just as the early film industry had been built on piracy.”

Though the action is the same, the forms of remaking that have emerged in contemporary art often have very little in common with their Hollywood coun- terparts, working to question mainstream cinema rather than to ensure profit margins. When the tables are turned and Hollywood winds up as the host of the derivative work rather than the parasite that creates one, the character of the remake shifts from a hope for guaranteed revenue to a site of unsanctioned use. Such works serve to call into question Hollywood’s univocity, interjecting another perspective into a discourse that presents itself as seamless. Daniel Birn- baum questions, “...[W]hy steal from cinema? Perhaps the answer is that video can pose questions to film that film is incapable of putting to itself.” Birn- baum’s use of language risks suggesting that the matter is a question of the medium, that video might provide the remove necessary to ask questions that would be impossible to confront through the medium of film. Rather than a case of video versus film, however, what is truly at stake is a relationship be- tween art and cinema: through appropriations of Hollywood films, artists ad- dress questions of ideology, subjectivity, history, and collectivity that are at once crucial to contemporary art practice and that reveal something about the past and present of cinema. These works attempt to tell the other side of the story of Hollywood’s official discourse: they actualize a possibility that had rested dor- mant in the host text, sometimes in fierce opposition to it, sometimes in adula- tion, but most often with a marked ambivalence that embraces certain aspects of the text while challenging others. A remake might investigate the representa- tional codes of an existing work, it might reflect on its relationship to history, it might focus on the labor of spectatorship, it might fetishize a loved film, it might question what new possibilities for freedom and control are made possi- ble by the digitization of cinema, or it might do something else entirely. It is impossible to generalize a single relation between a remake and its host text, but what unites all the remakes that will be discussed in this chapter is that they all exhibit cinema: that is, they hold it up for examination and investigate its contemporary state by using its past products as raw material.

This chapter will bracket a consideration of cross-medium remakes that serve to illuminate medium-specific characteristics through hybrid formations of cin- ema/new media (such as Cory Arcangel’s Colors []) and cinema/painting

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(such as Sam Taylor-Wood’s Still Life [] and A Little Death []).

Instead, it will examine how strategies of remaking serve to set up a relation to cinema as a social institution that functions as a cultural vernacular and a reser- voir of shared experience. Through a discussion of work by Candice Breitz, Douglas Gordon, Chris Moukarbel, and others, it will situate the popularity of the remake as an aesthetic strategy within the histories of art and cinema and provide an account of exactly what kinds of relationships to cinema – and to Hollywood cinema in particular – are imagined by these artists. For Moukabel, the concern is questioning how the cinematic institution digests and monumen- talizes historical events. Breitz interrogates the status of fandom in a digital age, while Gordon makes visible the contours of a post-VHS cinephilia. All of these artists, then, turn to Hollywood cinema for different reasons, but all of them find within it an ambivalent site of collectivity and make use of the shared cul- tural memory of cinema to tackle spectacular culture from within.

Ambivalent Appropriations

While the remake may be used as a strategy of media critique, it must be em- phasized that activities of remaking are by no means inherently critical; rather, a diversity of positions vis-à-vis the host text is possible, ranging from outright condemnation to lionizing homage. Chrissie Iles has remarked that “the rela- tionship between art and film is a one-way love affair,” but if it is so, it is most undoubtedly a love/hate affair. References to film history proliferate, making it possible to speak of a palpable cinephilia within contemporary art, but simul- taneously, a large number of these references hold up dominant cinema as a great exemplar of the machinations of culture industries. One thus confronts a marked ambivalence towards the cinematic institution. On one end of the spec- trum, Moukarbel’s World Trade Center  manifests nothing but contempt for Stone’s original. Similarly, RSG-BLACK- (), Radical Software Group’s algorithmic reediting of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (), reverse engi- neers the racial segregationism of what group member Alex Galloway called a “Jim Crow film” by algorithmically editing out all white characters. This re- duces the running time of the film – which is “based on a true story” of the U.S. Army mission to Mogadishu, Somalia, on  October  – from  minutes to only :. Works such as these engage the legacy of appropriation art as a mode of critique, invoking the Situationist International’s technique of détourne- ment as an important precedent.

This outright condemnation of the appropriated film is, however, by no means generalizable as a characteristic of contemporary art remakes of old

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movies. In some cases, a distinct cinephilia emerges. Take, for example, Kota Ezawa’s LYAM -D (), a three-dimensional animated remake of Alain Re- snais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad, ) or Stan Douglas’ Inconsolable Memories (), a loose remake of Tomás Gu- tiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesar- rollo, ) transposed to the Mariel boatlift of : here, beloved art cinema classics are appropriated as a way to investigate temporality and historical memory, respectively. There is no move to dismantle the host films, but on the contrary a desire to mobilize the discourses they explore and bring them into confrontation with present concerns. Meanwhile, Christoph Draeger’s Schizo (Redux) () stages a cinephilic comparison between Psycho () and Gus Van Sant’s  remake of that film by laying one on top of the other in a ghostly doubling that highlights the many differences between Hitchcock’s film and its supposed shot-by-shot copy. In Feel Lucky, Punk??! (-), Drae- ger moves into the fantasies of cinematic identification by engaging friends to recreate hold up scenes from Magnum Force (), Natural Born Killers (), Pulp Fiction (), Taxi Driver (), and Thelma and Louise (). In describing the production of the work, Draeger invoked a gathering of friends happy to return to the playacting of childhood and the joy of pretend- ing to be robbers.

Most often, the polarities of love and hate are both present in a decidedly ambivalent relationship to cinema that sees them intermingle within a single work. If, as chapter one demonstrated, the moving image in contemporary art must be seen as a major component of the spectacularization of that domain, practices of remaking deploy the ambivalent pleasures of cinema and its status as a cultural vernacular to problematize spectacular culture from within. Rather than unqualified aggression or unqualified affection, one finds a conflicted rela- tionship to cinema that sees it as occupying a double position: its mass appeal is valorized for its ability to forge an imagined collectivity, but this mass character is simultaneously acknowledged as a site of ideological interpellation and pos- sible exploitation. In terms of the formal operations of remaking, one might say that film history is submitted to a kind of murder by scissors, but this recontex- tualization can also be a form of homage or tribute.

Douglas Gordon, perhaps the best known of the artists working with found footage, has proclaimed that, “for us” – presumably his generation of artists – the cinema “is already dead.” Pierre Bismuth, meanwhile, easily shrugs off any apparent relation to cinephilia: “Anyways, I am not really that interested in the cinema. I used it as a tool for capturing the viewer’s attention.” In a similar vein, Pierre Huyghe has stated that,

The label of being nostalgic for cinema has been glued to me in an easy way. As if one was to say of Cézanne that he liked apples or that Picasso liked bulls! I have no fasci-

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nation for the cinema. I’m interested in it because it is the vehicle of our collective unconscious, of our relationship to the scenario. But only as much as the supermod- el Kate Moss, an advertisement, or a music video!

Statements such as these seem to support Raymond Bellour’s assertion that Douglas Gordon is “without nostalgia” and suggest that it might be extended to other artists working with the remake. And yet, the often deadpan work of Bismuth, Gordon, and Huyghe witnesses the continuation of cinema by other means, a cinema that is perhaps uncannily “undead” rather than already buried and gone. The disavowal of cinephilia in these artists’ statements does not neu- tralize the ways in which their work makes use of a love for cinema; it does not do away with the fact that their work manifests cinephilia even if the artists themselves do not profess to be cinephiles. Significantly, Huyghe never does investigate Kate Moss or a music video, but instead returns to the cinema again and again as a repository of material to be replayed and remade.

Gordon may personally lack nostalgia; he may be blissfully unaware of the experimental film traditions his work sometimes engages. He may see the his- torical products of cinema as nothing but a moribund set of images ripe for recontextualization, but his work nonetheless depends on a cultural climate characterized by a widespread nostalgia for classical cinema. This nostalgia is not that of the postmodern historicism described by Jameson, marked by an eclectic mixing of signifiers at odds with genuine historicism and exemplified by films such as American Graffiti () and Body Heat (). Rather, though these works share “‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect”, they in no way function as quotations that seek to displace history with surface effects. On the contrary, many of these works use strate- gies of remaking precisely to agitate against the ways in which cinema has func- tioned to spectacularize the past and reduce it to nothing more than a space to be colonized by glossy surface styles. They serve to assert cinema as a site of collectivity and shared cultural memory, very different from the amnesiac pas- tiche of Jamesonian postmodernism.

To assert that there is a cinephilic tendency in contemporary art is not to sug- gest that the artists involved profess a personal love for cinema or have any extensive knowledge of film history. Rather, it is to discern, on a cultural plane that extends far beyond the individual subjectivity of a given artist, the emer- gence of narrative cinema as a highly cathected object within the artistic pro- duction of the last two decades. This is, of course, not the case without excep- tion, as World Trade Center  suggests. But the impact of a work such as  Hour Psycho () cannot be considered outside of its relation to a public intimately familiar with Hitchcock’s films, a public that finds in these films something to trigger a memory that returns with all the bittersweetness of time

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lost and regained. Through this employment of the resurrected familiar made strange, these works stage a relation between the private and public dimensions of contemporary cinema. They are made possible by the private cinema of VHS and DVD and yet, through their location within the museum and their resurrec- tion of a past image regime, they offer a possibility of recovering a relation to collectivity crucial to the specificity of theatrical exhibition. The production of art derived from old movies provides a way of taking the private cinephilia of watching films on television and video back into the public sphere and subject- ing it to scrutiny.

The Four Operations

Contemporary practices of remaking may be grouped into four primary opera- tions that describe the technique used to repurpose an appropriated film: re- enacting, interviewing, recycling, and translating. Before delving into works that represent this tendency, it will be helpful to outline a schematic typology of these operations so as to provide a broad overview of the techniques employed in the practices that have come to prominence since .

Reenactment has become a widespread practice in contemporary art, extend- ing beyond references to film history to also include the reenactment of events both historical (Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave []) and art histori- cal (Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces [], for which the artist re- enacted seven canonical performance art pieces in one week at the Guggenheim Museum in New York). Contrary to these examples, which reenact singular events, the reenactments under discussion in this chapter repeat something that already existed as a repetition, as a representation already mobile within cul- ture. Brice Dellsperger’s body double series (-ongoing), for example, con- sists of over twenty reenactments of segments of popular films that serve to investigate the performativity of gender and the problem of authenticity. Often Dellsperger will play all parts within an excerpt, as in body double  (), which remakes the elevator murder scene from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (). A male artist playing both the female victim and the transvestite male murderer remakes a movie that is itself in large part a very loose remake of Hitchcock, thereby throwing into crisis any stable sense of copy and original. Later in the series, Dellsperger explores having multiple non-professionals re- enact the same role and exhibits all performances simultaneously as a multi- screen installation; body double  () uses nine screens for nine reenact- ments of the scene from the conclusion of Blow Out (), in which Jack (John Travolta) finds Sally (Nancy Allen) dead on the roof during the fireworks.

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Brice Dellsperger, body double  ().

Stan Douglas’ Subject to a Film: Marnie () is a six-minute black-and- white mm remake of the robbery sequence from Marnie () that loops back to the beginning when the title character’s hands are on the safe. Instead of continuing the narrative to depict the discovery of Marnie’s crime, Douglas imprisons her in a nightmarish eternal return of never-ending theft but gives her salvation from another kind of imprisonment: marrying Mark Rutland. Through this tension between the loop (common in gallery exhibition) and the teleology of start-to-finish viewing (proper to the cinema), Douglas highlights the important question of how experiences of narrativity are impacted by cin- ema’s integration into the gallery space. Reenactment emerges as a way of pro- ducing difference from repetition, of producing the new from the old at a time when notions of novelty and originality are held under suspicion. Maeve Con- nolly has suggested that, “The rise of reenactment may also signal a crisis of belief in the future, in line with the economic and social developments of the post- era.” It introduces a complex and fractured temporality, as it sum- mons an earlier event while remaining distinctly anchored in the present. It ac- knowledges that the only access to the past is through a representation of it, but

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by remaking this representation, it can point to its failures, omissions, and biases.

The interview provides artists with a way of engaging with individuals whose lives have become intertwined with the production of feature films in one way or another. The reified images of the culture industry occlude the labor that goes into their production, seemingly materializing out of nowhere as glossy ciphers. Countering this prevailing regime, the action of interviewing individuals in- volved with the making of feature films reintroduces a social relation into the circulation of images and prompts a consideration of the affective labor that goes into their production. For Blanche Neige Lucie (), Pierre Huyghe interviewed Lucie Dolène, the woman who dubbed the voice of Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves () into French in . In the mid- s after receiving no royalties from the film’s  VHS release, Dolène suc- cessfully sued Disney and regained the legal rights to her voice. When Jane and Louise Wilson were commissioned to make a work in response to the holdings of the Stanley Kubrick Archives, they delivered Unfolding the Aryan Papers (). For this work, the artists interviewed Dutch actress Johanna Ter Steege, who was set to play the lead role in the Aryan Papers project, a film about the Holocaust that Kubrick researched for many years but never made. The work functions as a portrait of the actress and of a failed project, but also mobilizes discourses of the Holocaust as an unrepresentable event, as Ter Steege recounts that the film remained unfinished because Kubrick couldn’t bear the responsi- bility; she says, “No one can represent this.”

Omer Fast’s Spielberg’s List () responds to a similar question from an- other angle. In this double-channel installation, Fast interviews Polish extras who participated in the production of Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust blockbuster Schindler’s List (), a film that received both glowing praise and virulent criticism. Fast makes use of three kinds of footage, each performing its own negotiation between the Hollywoodization of the Shoah and the historical Real: there are talking head interviews with these extras, footage of the replica of the Plaszow camp built as a film set and never fully dismantled, and segments of the “Schindler’s List Tour” that caters to the many (mostly American) tourists that have visited Poland since the film’s release. Often, a tour operator tells us, these visitors make little distinction between remnants of the Second World War and their film-set replicas. Throughout the interviews, the distinction be- tween personal experience and acted role blurs, as one respondent abruptly shifts from a discussion of her own life in wartime Poland to some fifty years later when she acted in Spielberg’s film.

Recycled works make use of footage from existing films, evincing a certain kinship with the subgenre of experimental cinema known as the found-footage film but often rejecting the model of start-to-finish viewing proper to it. The

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digitization and networking of cinema that took place in the s allowed what was once a technique requiring access to stock footage and equipment such as an optical printer to become something able to be accomplished with minimal skill, resulting in an explosion of recycled works on the Internet and in galleries. Many of these works make use of kinds of recycling that would have been difficult or impossible before the advent of DVDs, high-bandwidth Inter- net, and easy-to-use editing software, such as an increased emphasis on remak- ing popular films. The found-footage genre has a rich history within experimen- tal film, but before the s, such films often made use of repurposed footage with no intent that the spectator would or should identify the original source.

In the years since, the recognizability of the source footage has become an inte- gral part of much found-footage practice. The present viewing is always re- doubled by a memory of seeing the source film in the past, introducing a differ- ent relation to the host footage than the ur-text of the found-footage film, Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (). It is widely known that the footage of Cornell’s homage stems from East of Borneo (), in which Hobart starred. And yet, Cornell’s reediting of Hobart’s appearances in that film by no means necessitates a familiarity with it in order to achieve its full impact.

Quite differently, since , many recycled works depend on their host films’ popularity and recognizability across a wide demographic. Christian Marclay’s The Clock () is a supercut of twenty-four hours’ worth of narrative cin- ema’s engagements with temporality that encourages spectators to remain aware of time while at the movies rather than forgetting it, as is so often the aim. Douglas Gordon is perhaps the best known of artists to engage the opera- tion of recycling, famously subjecting feature films to extreme temporal dila- tion:  Hour Psycho is fairly self-explanatory, while Five Year Drive By () made the running time of The Searchers () coextensive with its die- getic time, resulting in one second of the Ford film lasting . hours. Gordon has completed numerous multiscreen reedits of films concerning riven identity and the double, including through a looking glass (), which excerpts seventy-one seconds of the “You talkin’ to me?” sequence from Taxi Driver, and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (-), which uses Rouben Ma- moulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (), looping three sequences of transfor- mation from good to evil in a double projection.

The final operation of remaking involves subjecting a preexisting film to a cross-medium process of translation. Here, one might invoke Angela Bulloch’s Z Point (), which translates the closing sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point () into a bank of forty-eight “pixel boxes,” six high and eight wide to mimic the aspect ratio of mm film. Each box is a fifty-centimeter glass-fronted square containing within it three fluorescent tubes. Using custom software, Bulloch’s pixel boxes can produce up to sixteen million colors, as

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many as possible from a computer screen. Z Point samples one frame from each second of the excerpt (since the pixel boxes are limited to one change per second) and translates it into an array of forty-eight large pixels, one for each box. Color and movement are retained while the representational powers of the image are obliterated. The result is a pulsing grid that brings together a sense of bodily rhythm with geometric rigor. Z Point recycles an art cinema classic as new media artifact, bringing into tension the poles of senescence and novelty that mark the integration of cinema into the museum since .

Angela Bulloch, Z Point ().

The remakes that engage in translation may remediate old media into new me- dia, much as takes place in culture at large, but they may also translate cinema into older media. Examples of such this kind of cross-medium translation are to be found in Fiona Banner’s transcriptions of Vietnam War films, such as Apoca- lypse Now (), a hand-scribbled text measuring some seventeen square me- ters, or her artist’s book THE NAM (), which compiles typewritten tran- scriptions of Apocalypse Now (), Born on the Fourth of July (), The Deer Hunter (), Full Metal Jacket (), Hamburger Hill (), and Platoon () into a single, nearly unreadable text. Pierre Bismuth’s Fol-

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lowing the Right Hand of... series does exactly what its title suggests: the artist watches a DVD behind a plexiglass sheet and uses a marker to trace a shaky line that follows the female star’s right hand throughout the film. This is placed on top of a still of the actress, resulting in a defiled portrait of, for exam- ple, Louise Brooks in Prix de beauté (, remade by Bismuth as Following the Right Hand of Louise Brooks in Beauty Contest []). The scribbled line indexes Bismuth’s viewing of the film, its nervous energy pointing to a tho- rough redirection of attention away from the narrative progression and towards the movements of an actress’ right hand. In the translations produced by both Banner and Bismuth, the labor of spectatorship is made visible in the produc- tion of manually produced artifacts that index the time spent as a viewer.

Precursors

Basing an artwork on an existing cultural product is by no means new, nor is making use of the gallery space to comment upon the mass medium of cinema. Strategies of appropriating mass media imagery are very familiar within art historical discourse, whether one speaks of the Situationist International and their strategy of détournement or the “Pictures” generation’s interest in the poli- tics of the sign. It is imperative, however, to make certain distinctions between these antecedents and the remakes of the s and s.

When Angela Bulloch substitutes the soundtrack of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (Solyaris, ) with her own audio to make Solaris () or dubs Jean Rouch’s Gare du nord segment of Paris seen by... (Paris vu par..., ) into German or English based on interior and exterior shots and adds scenes filmed in Vienna to make From the Eiffel Tower to the Riesenrad (), her gestures have a clear precedent: in , René Viénet, member of the Situa- tionist International, took the martial arts film Crush (Tang shou tai quan dao, ) and dubbed his own soundtrack to make Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (La Dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?). This is a classic ex- ample of Situationist détournement, that process by which mass cultural prod- ucts are “diverted” or “hijacked” towards critical ends, contesting the spectacle from within. And yet, Bulloch’s use of this operation possesses none of the po- tency of the Situationists, none of the desire to appropriate an existing mass cultural text in an indictment of that realm. For the S.I., détournement is an op- eration of radical negation; in a critique of the Tel Quel group’s literary avant- guardism, Guy Debord states, “Not some ‘writing degree zero’ – just the oppo- site. Not the negation of style but the style of negation.” This contestation must maintain a critical distance towards its object so as to restore “the ancient

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kernel of truth” that might be excavated from amidst the petrified surfaces of spectacle.

Notably, while the formal operations of some of the strategies of remaking that have emerged since  resemble those of Situationist détournement, on the whole they by no means maintain its virulence towards the appropriated objects, its critical distance from them, nor its focus on negation as a way of instituting a new totality founded on a recovered truth. The S.I. aimed at noth- ing less than cultural revolution, seeing the divide between art and life as an integral part of the separations that characterized spectacular culture. In this sense, their militant interventions must be seen as attempting to destroy the category of art as much as violently contesting mass culture, seeking a Hegelian Aufhebung that would institute a new totality free of alienation and atomiza- tion. Recent artists’ remakes of existing films have abandoned the Situationist call for the abolition of art as a distinct category and have ceased to view mass culture as an unqualified villain. Firmly ensconced within the institution of art, they leave behind negation and totality to instead forge an ambivalent and con- flicted relationship to the fragmentary network of signs that constitutes popular culture. Today, the act of appropriation in itself guarantees no criticality, but rather functions as a starting point to open other avenues of investigation, some of which may entail a critique of media, others not.

An earlier generation of moving image artists – one that included figures such as Paul Sharits and Michael Snow – interrogated film as film as a turn away from the ideological enclosures of “the movies.” Now, in addition to the material of film, which has seen a renewed interest under the specter of obsoles- cence, the institution of cinema has emerged as an object of fascination. The mul- tiscreen projection formats this earlier generation pioneered may be employed, but many components of the cinematic institution that had previously been re- jected – such as stardom, screenplays, extras, studios, stories, sets, spectators – are now precisely what is investigated. Artists take up the histories, conven- tions, and social functions of cinema as the mass cultural medium responsible for the production of narratives and experiences shared by a society, something that demonstrates an affinity with the “Pictures” group of American appropria- tionists. However, instead of following the “Pictures” artists in an examination of the iconography of cinema through the stillness of photography – thereby freezing circuits of desire and identification into the stasis of a single image to be held up for analysis – now artists delve into an engagement with moving images. In combining multiscreen film and video installations with a suspi- cious embrace of mass cultural codes and the poaching of signs, the contempo- rary generation synthesizes elements of s expanded cinema with s and s appropriation.

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Artists make use of the pleasures of recognizability as central to the affective resonance of their work, playing off of a conception of cinema as a storehouse of communally shared narratives and resurrecting the utopian spark of cinema as an alternative public sphere. But at the same time, it often surfaces that this shared cultural memory is also a site of ideological interpellation to be ques- tioned, as the cinema is seen as a spectacular machine churning out image com- modities, regulating cultural norms, and impacting the way we understand his- tory. Stemming from this is an irreducible ambivalence towards the mass cultural texts that are integrated into the production of new works. This am- bivalence must never be taken for indifference, but must be seen as describing strong forces that refract, splinter, and enter into tension with one another. The challenge now is to take ambivalence seriously, to see in it an opportunity to render visible the contradictory libidinal investments elicited by the culture in- dustries.

This ambivalence is an important response to the collapse of the complicity/ critique divide after postmodernity’s colonization of the last zones of resistance, the realm of art foremost among them. In a discussion of the work of Pierre Huyghe, Mark Godfrey writes, “Rarely has an artist associated with a critical position been canny enough to work with affection, attraction, and amazement and not just against them.” This coexistence of a critical position with “affec- tion, attraction, and amazement” is the affective structure characteristic of the ambivalent engagement with cinema that marks many strategies of remaking since . Leaving behind the anti-pleasure polemics of the s and s, the disavowal of enjoyment has ceased to be a necessary prerequisite for en- gagement. Through such ambivalence, these artists rewrite the dominant narra- tives of Hollywood into an array of multi-faceted and contradictory stories that negotiate the borders between truth and fiction, industrial production and per- sonal experience, visibility and invisibility, fantasy and criticality. Rather than intervening solely at the level of representational codes, central to many of these works is an attempt to locate the various vectors that bind subjects to the image repertoire of popular culture and constitute them as viewing publics.

Like the work of the filmic avant-garde that preceded and paralleled it, the artists making film installations in the s and s maintained a belief in an “outside” to ideology. Indeed, the guarantee of a secure, external space from which one might produce a critique of ideology served as one of the corner- stones of filmic theories of “political modernism” of this time. Today, there is a widespread acknowledgement that one cannot mark out an “outside” to ideology, with the result that the contestation of narrative, the assaults on repre- sentation and spectacle, and the polemics against cinematic pleasure no longer stand as viable political strategies. Easy divisions of inside and outside are re- jected in favor of a shifting topology of forces that takes care not to deny the

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involvement of one’s own discursive position within the libidinal and economic structures of capital. Enjoyment is not at odds with critical engagement; rather, both coexist. Harnessing the pleasures of Hollywood cinema within practices that acknowledge the legacies of expanded cinema, Situationist détournement, and “Pictures” appropriationism, these works try to find a way towards a dif- ferent politics of the image. It must be remembered that there are different ways of being bedfellows with spectacle. The examples of Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalk- ers () and Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out ( Cubic Meters) () provided one paradigm in chapter one; now, the time has come to examine a series of very different engagements with popular culture, engagements that prove that knowledge can and must be produced from within the culture indus- tries. For if it doesn’t come from there – a there that is everywhere – where will it come from?

The False Promises of the “Utopia of Use”

World Trade Center  and the lawsuit it inspired are significant, for they speak to several of the key issues confronting the remake as a practice in con- temporary art. That the art world has been cheerfully exempt from the increas- ing copyright regulation of recent years has not prevented the most prominent theorization of the remake in contemporary art to see it as a part of a utopian move towards sharing and a testament to the new activity and freedom af- forded to the consumer by the advent of digital, networked media. To great popularity and great dispute, Nicolas Bourriaud’s Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay, How Art Reprograms the World sees its title operation as a “neutral, zero-sum process” wherein “the material [these artists] manipulate is no longer primary.” Ignoring the history of appropriation art as embroiled in a politics of representation, Bourriaud advances a new paradigm of derivative art-making wherein the work no longer reflects back on its appropriated material in a criti- cal relation, but instead merely reuses it to advance an emancipatory economy of sharing that makes the formerly “passive” consumer into an “active” produ- cer who creates new cultural objects from the availability of the old. We no longer merely consume media, but take part as active participants. This position follows from Bourriaud’s  book Relational Aesthetics (translated ), which links what the author calls “post VCR art” to a “democratization of viewpoints” made possible by technology. It is a statement that very much echoes Moukar- bel’s concerning the “democratization of storytelling.” However, where Mou- karbel was intent on using the availability of such technologies in a critique of the representations of dominant cinema (democratization as allowing for new

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forms of contestation), in both Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction, critique is left behind in favor of a harmonious community of sharing and the production of benign social relations. Under such a paradigm, it becomes impossible to take account of, for example, the ways in which remaking has been employed to investigate the narrativization of historical events. Political intervention is jetti- soned in favor of a joyous proclamation of neutrality.

Bourriaud draws heavily on the work of Michel de Certeau to champion a “culture of use or a culture of activity” that allows one to “make do” and better inhabit the world. He names the DJ and the programmer as the archetypal figures of the operation, which proceeds with a neutrality that cannot help but be enfolded in an affirmation of neoliberal consensus culture. Bourriaud valo- rizes participation and activity without interrogating their character or their place in structures of domination. As chapter one suggested, following Deleuze and Foucault, the pervasive form of the administration of power is no longer the injunction to conform and stay in place (though such forms persist as important survivals). Rather, there is a constant incitation to participate and circulate. The inside/outside distinctions of disciplinary power have largely given way to the diagram of the control society, a robust and flexible network that thrives on principles of connectivity and communication. As an economy based in materi- al goods shifts to one founded in services and the creation of experiences, a new “performative imperative” arises: participation and conviviality are far from oppositional but, in fact, a new terrain of possible exploitation and expropria- tion.

The advent of the Internet has undoubtedly changed the relationship between production and consumption, but differently than the emancipatory thrust of Bourriaud’s description would suggest. Rather than erasing the difference be- tween production and consumption, post-Fordist production, as Maurizio Laz- zarato has elaborated, is characterized by a shift to immaterial labor whereby the act of consumption becomes an integral part of production. Therefore, parti- cipation cannot be seen as inherently oppositional, but is in fact precisely what is required for the generation of value. As Lazzarato writes, “Participative man- agement is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the ‘subjective processes’...First and foremost, we have here a discourse that is authoritarian: one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, coop- erate, and so forth.” Consumers are called upon to invest immaterial products with value by integrating them into social communication. Here, subjectivity itself is commodified, as tastes, affects, and desires rather than material labor become the locus of value production. The consumption of immaterial com- modities is an activity that does not destroy the object but produces its value through integrating it into the fabric of life. As such, the “culture of activity” Bourriaud champions must thus be seen not as inherently oppositional but

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rather as native to the relationship between power, labor, and subjectivity that marks the twenty-first century.

It is in this light that one must read the assertion in Relational Aesthetics that, “[Modernism] was based on conflict, whereas the imaginary of our day and age is concerned with negotiations, bonds, and co-existences. These days we are no longer trying to advance by means of conflictual clashes...” While it may be true that the old oppositions of modernism no longer hold true – the lines, for example, between work/play, high/low, and complicity/critique have been thoroughly blurred – the false permissiveness of neoliberalism is a fatal problem in Bourriaud’s analysis. The kind of coexistence and cooperation he valorizes is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize, immanent to im- material labor and, as such, to the contemporary mutations of capital. Post- production retains the Situationist term of détournement but cleanses it of the negativity on which it was founded without acknowledging the conditions and implications of such a recuperation. Harmony, sharing, and conviviality become keywords in a paradigm that overwrites a politics of the sign with a complacency toward the status quo that mirrors, rather than agitates against, new forms of power.

Conceiving of the reuse of existing products as a “culture of constant activity based on a collective ideal: sharing” not only buys wholeheartedly into the con- trol society’s injunction to participate, but also occludes the real existence of proprietary media, the high financial stakes involved, as well as the fact that much of the source material has not been “shared,” but rather has been poached against the will of its original producer, as Paramount’s lawsuit against Mou- karbel makes clear. There is no disputing the fact that the Internet has made media available like never before. However, despite such unprecedented access, as Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker point out, “...the liberation rhetoric of distributed networks...is a foil for the real workings of power today. The rheto- ric of liberation is also a foil for the real nature of threats.” Decentralization diffuses power but does not dissipate it; to buy into the technoromantic myth of the unqualified freedoms of online culture is to ignore the ways in which power continues to operate in and through decentralized and distributed net- works.

Tom McDonough’s consideration of the work of Pierre Huyghe, “No Ghost,” criticizes Bourriaud for his transposition of de Certeau’s “making do” from everyday life to the gallery. McDonough writes, “Bourriaud adopts this schema wholesale and, somewhat paradoxically if not perversely, returns it to the artis- tic realm where it originated.” It is de Certeau himself who reminds us that the everyday activity can only be understood in relation to the precise circum- stances in which it is deployed, that is to say, in relation to its conditions of enunciation. If de Certeau wanted to inject an “art of doing” into everyday

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life – the original French title of The Practice of Everyday Life is Arts de faire – and addressed his book to the “murmuring voice of societies,” “a common hero, an ubiquitous [sic] character,” Bourriaud reverses such a motion by returning to the gallery and its relatively high-paid cultural producers. He describes an alto- gether different context, as if such a transposition would have no effect on the efficacy of the gesture. This changed site of enunciation allows the asymmetry in power between strong and weak insisted upon by de Certeau to fade into obscurity in Bourriaud’s analysis; the international art stars he discusses are by no means “weak,” but rather are invested with a richness of cultural and finan- cial capital possessed by only a small elite.

Bourriaud portrays a constant and equal availability of texts and outlets of expression, drawing on the rhetorics of democratization and emancipation that still characterize some discourses of online creativity despite their mythic char- acter. The elision of the discursive position of the artists equally allows Bour- riaud to ignore how the rigidification of copyright law over the last twenty years might temper his ideal of sharing precisely because major artists are pro- vided a substantial degree of protection via their professional status as “fair users” with gallery-funded legal teams to back up the claim if necessary.

When Brian O’Doherty described the white cube as a “survival compound,” he meant something very different, but now again the gallery functions as a barrier between these artists and the possible legal proceedings that could threaten them in the “real world.”

McDonough understands de Certeau’s notion of “making do” as smacking of a post-’ defeatism that abandons both imagining an alternative to the status quo and visible agitation against it in favor of clandestine and temporary ac- tions that improve one’s quality of life under conditions taken to be perma- nent. According to McDonough, both de Certeau and Bourriaud buy into “a ‘utopia of use’ that resists the logic of reification only by recourse to a kind of petit-bourgeois fantasy of consumption as a realm of personal autonomy.”

Though McDonough does not, one might forgive de Certeau for laying out ways in which an individual might make the best of it through microinterven- tions. However, art is a sphere of relative freedom that does allow for creative imaginations of alternative modes of life as well for as fierce indictments of ex- isting conditions, activities that have constituted an important part of the politi- cal function of art throughout the twentieth century. The power relations at stake are different: the factory worker might lose a job that feeds his family if he dissents; an artist might make the cover of Artforum or drive up prices. The arguable resignation of “making do” is problematic but understandable within de Certeau’s framework; its appropriation by Bourriaud speaks to a much more troubling renunciation of the political, of the desire for real change, and of the

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possibility that art might provide a valuable space in which to criticize the mass media.

Remaking Fandom

South African artist Candice Breitz has adapted the found-footage tradition to a gallery context by producing multi-screen installations that investigate the libi- dinal vectors that bind cinema to its public, as well as how they have been im- pacted by the recent advent of the fan’s ability to manipulate and remix existing films. Breitz’s installations ask: what kind of balance exists between control and freedom when a tool of ideological interpellation such as Hollywood cinema becomes available for recycling and remixing in new contexts? And what resi- dues of disciplinary power persist within this institution when it is networked and malleable? Far from being seen as an obsolescent technology or a historical set of great directors, here cinema is used to generate the very image of contem- poraneity, producing narratives that are decidedly new; that is, cinema is used to articulate how the shift to a post-Fordist economy spawns new opportunities for control as much as freedom. Breitz complicates Bourriaud’s assumption that all participation is inherently positive by instead excavating the ways in which the ideological interpellations of cinema persist in and through fan participa- tion.

In Becoming (), Breitz makes use of seven different romantic comedies, pruning them down to a key scene involving their female protagonist and re- moving the appearance of any other actors. The work consists of fourteen monitors positioned in seven groups of two. On one side of each screen, there is an excerpt from a romantic comedy; on the other, Breitz acts out the star’s role in black and white and mouths her lines. Due to the piece’s spatial configura- tion, the spectator has to move around each of the seven pairs of monitors to evaluate the effectiveness of each impersonation. Breitz might be said to engage in the “zero-sum” game of postproduction, reclaiming the pleasures of fan cul- ture and making them visible and valorized within contemporary art; or, one might recognize in the artist’s laborious attempt to imitate these actresses a com- mentary on the violence of attempting to mold oneself in the image of the star. Imitation is a central aspect of stardom, as the star both sets a standard to be followed yet retains an existence as an impossible fantasy projection. Breitz’s imitation of these female stars requires diligent and purposeful rehearsal, but also points to the subtle and scarcely noticed imitation that occurs whenever Hollywood influences fashion, cosmetics, language, or even the way we negoti- ate interpersonal relationships.

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Candice Breitz, Becoming Drew ().

Becoming – which draws its title from the name of an MTV reality series that gives fans makeovers to look like their favorite star and produces a reenactment of one of the star’s music videos – explicitly takes up the relationship between a digitized and networked cinema available for recycling and remaking and the false positions of “activity” it may produce. The drained black and white of the reenactment image, Breitz’s cropped hair, and her plain white shirt all appear in stark contrast to the lush color of the source films and the costuming of the star. Unlike Cindy Sherman’s elaborate self-fashionings, Breitz’s reenactments are spartan. In Postproduction, the script is a jumping-off point for creative endea- vor, but it must also be remembered that a script is something to be followed. Breitz inhabits this contradictory position, showing how fan freedom and fan control are in fact two sides of the same story, just as the images of Becoming are projected onto two sides of the same screen.

What is perhaps most striking about Breitz’s appropriation of these romantic comedy screenplays is the absence of the artist’s own voice. Becoming makes use of the soundtrack from the source film, with the result that the Hollywood texts seem to speak through Breitz’s body, usurping her voice and vernacular in favor of a global narrative of heteronormative romance. The script is no longer the locus of a generative freedom, but of an imperative to stay synchronized with the voices that speak through the dispossessed subject. If according to Bourriaud’s paradigm, she is the empowered consumer-turned-producer, fol- lowing this alternate reading, she has instead become a ventriloquist’s dummy. The strength of Becoming is that it allows for both readings at once, holding them in suspension. For even if Breitz’s recycling and reenactment of these ro- mantic comedies is one that points to the ideological interpellations of popular

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cinema, the mere possibility that such a statement can be made rests on the activity of a fan/artist who chooses to make use of the availability of new tech- nologies to create a work that will serve to interrogate such media representa- tions. In this sense, Breitz’s self-placement as the one who imitates the star is crucial, as the artist is present both as dupe and as demystifier.

Candice Breitz, Her (-).

In the works Him (-) and Her (-), Breitz creates stuttering ka- leidoscopes of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep by combining clips from vari- ous roles the actors have played throughout their careers. Him makes use of twenty-three Jacks from forty years; Her brings us twenty-eight Meryls from thirty years. By dating the works as beginning when the earliest source film was produced and extending to Breitz’s completion of them in , the artist playfully accords a historicity to her found material that a single date would elide. It gives a sense of a devoted fan who has followed the stars through the twists and turns of a career, through good roles and bad, watching films so many times as to become familiar with each line and gesture of the perfor- mance. The pieces are displayed in adjacent rooms, each consisting of six screens arranged in a circle on a single wall, a formation that allows for the various characters to call out and respond to one another. Breitz blacks out the

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background behind the figures, severing them as much as possible from the mise-en-scène of the source film. By bringing together these disparate perfor- mances – all of which belong to their own diegetic universes – according to the rubric of the actor occupying the role, Breitz mobilizes the parallel text that ce- lebrity always constitutes in our viewing of a film. She assembles such a text of celebrity for easy inspection, combining common gestures such as Streep’s nail biting from across dozens of films, as well as highlighting certain motifs that recur, such as Nicholson’s incessant uncertainty about “who he really is.” Like Warhol – the subject of Breitz’s unfinished doctoral dissertation at Columbia University – Breitz stages the tension between seriality and uniqueness that characterizes the star, making use of iteration upon iteration in a dizzying mélange of often quickly edited clips that blend together in a single composite portrait.

In addition to their function as star studies, Him and Her take up Holly- wood’s constitution of gender roles, a preoccupation evident in the impersonal pronouns used in the title of the piece. Throughout the work, Meryl Streep comes to stand in for the idealized-yet-recognizable femininity of Hollywood, defining herself solely, as one clip from Kramer vs. Kramer () says, in her role as daughter, mother, and wife. The topic of marriage is a continual refer- ence, as is self-sacrifice. Meanwhile, Him takes up a very different set of the- matic concerns, such as anger, sex, and as just mentioned, an anxiety over iden- tity – all of which speak to a particular constitution of American masculinity. In this interrogation of archetypal norms through exceptional personalities, Him and Her are the development of earlier works entitled Mother and Father (both ), which each use six screens placed in a row to form a constellation of mothers and fathers culled from various Hollywood films. This allows for an exploration of gendered parental roles to be explored across a body of films, letting the viewer witness the father’s hysterical policing of his daughter’s chas- tity and the mother’s teary unhappiness and frigidity. By selecting excerpts from numerous popular films, Breitz highlights the monolithic nature of Hollywood’s depiction of parental roles. Though the excerpted characters have various sur- face level differences, it quickly becomes clear that certain fundamentals about what constitutes motherhood are shared across films as different as the sappy Stepmom () and the grotesque Mommie Dearest (). To use Siegfried Kracauer’s language, they all have the same secret to confess. As the original narratives of these films fall away, so do their particularities. One is left with attributes and words that might stem from a specific movie, but circulate throughout culture as detached but recognizable signifiers of the essence of motherhood. Out of six seemingly different Hollywood mothers, Breitz pro- duces one Mother; particularity gives way to generality in a metamythology. The individual star performances of Hollywood entertainment lose whatever

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specificity they might have had as they are recuperated back into the archetypes of which they have always made use.

Breitz has described her practice using the abject metaphor of excretion:

We have no choice...but to consume the cultural produce of global capitalism. But consumption must be followed by digestion, and digestion must be followed by ex- cretion. This is a polite way of saying that if we have no choice but to consume what the mass media feeds us, then we must insist on completing the digestive cycle – we must insist on the right to chew up, process and regurgitate mass media forms such that they might service us rather than merely milking us.

The invocation of the abject gets to the confounding of interior and exterior dis- tinctions that takes place in a work such as this, figuring the way in which they are borne of the system of image capital that Breitz describes and yet mark out some difference from it. Breitz uses the availability of commercial DVDs and editing software to divert performances from their original context, a process she calls “involuntary acting,” since she “kidnaps” stars and puts them to work within her own densely woven textile. Once again, one sees here how Breitz’s practice would lend itself to Bourriaud’s discussion in Postproduction: the for- merly passive consumer is made active through production. According to such a reading, these works would be a part of a fan’s remix culture, playfully com- bining clips into a new form that creates a utopian space for maneuvering with- in the enclosures of mass media. However, more than simply embracing this supposed freedom, Breitz never loses sight of the force-feeding of mass media texts she describes in the passage cited above.

Consumption and production are linked but separate activities, with numer- ous relations of varied character that can serve to connect the two. This vector between the consumption of mass media texts and what their spectators do with them is the central point of inquiry across Breitz’s practice. Rather than asserting the inherent positivity of participation, she insists on the need to ex- amine the activity itself. Sometimes it can lead to the possibility of turning against dominant ideologies, other times it can confirm and reproduce them, and still more often it can do both at once. There is a striking ambivalence pre- sent that allows Breitz to at once embrace the activities of fandom as offering something other than a soporific intoxication with the culture industries, but also to cast a suspicious glance on its hollow promises of emancipation.

Just as the playfulness of Breitz’s reenactments of Hollywood actresses in Be- coming gives way to a sense of violation and confinement of the voice and body by the norms it would seek to replicate, it is important to note that the overall experience of viewing Him, Her, Mother, and Father is one of disloca- tion resulting from an incessant stammering and twitching. Jerkiness is culti- vated, as Breitz will loop a tiny snippet of dialogue and image over and over so

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as to result in a kind of stutter. Something sinister emerges from within these entertaining montages. For the spectator, the fun of enjoying the star’s perfor- mance – taking pleasure in the clever correspondences Breitz excavates and playing the “name that clip” game – is balanced with the realization that such performances play a key role in the formation of the gender and parental norms that frequently pass unquestioned. The opposition of critical distance versus en- tertaining engagement is breached. There is no denial of the immense pull of celebrity culture, no assertion by the artist that she is somehow above it or be- yond it, and at times even a real sense that the fan’s reproduction can bend and twist these texts into something new, different, and oppositional. At the same time, the mimetic function of the star and the ideological interpellations of the cinema are constantly called into question. The ambivalence of this work is not to be mistaken for indifference, but rather is marked by contradiction and the antagonism of irreconcilable and often asymmetrical forces. The ubiquitous availability of the star’s image offers itself up for recontextualizations that hag- gle with the text of celebrity while embracing it, assert the agency of the fan/ consumer while dismantling it, and revel in the malleability of poached signs while testifying to the persistence of cinema as an ideological apparatus.

“Room-for-Play”

Breitz makes clear that the activity of the consumer may no longer be held to be an inherently subversive action that would contest the megaphone of the pro- ducer. Rather, producers call upon their consumers to be active and to invest their immaterial products with value. As Lazzarato writes,

The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, trans- forms, and creates the “ideological” and cultural environment of the consumer. This commodity does not produce the physical capacity of labor power; instead, it trans- forms the person who uses it. Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a “social relation.”

Rather than seeing the activity of the consumer as an inherently oppositional or as a free space of play, this paradigm allows for an understanding of fan/user activity as value producing. Instead of unproblematically championing the ac- tivity of today’s consumers who download and remix, Lazzarato reminds us that this is in fact indicative of a colonization of that time once thought to be free from capitalist exploitation:

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Play...no longer constitutes an alternative to work as domination. The dialectical op- position between play and work has been transformed into a continuum, of which play and work are only the two extremes. Between the two, it is possible to arrange a thousand different ways the coefficients of work and play, autonomy and subordina- tion, activity and passivity, intellectual and manual labour, which nourish capitalist valorization.

Given that this paradigm achieves its full realization with Web . technologies of participation and social networking, why look back at the cinema in order to discuss a condition largely associated with digital media? Why is it that the narrativization of this new mutation of capital takes place through the old me- dium of cinema rather than through engagements with new media technolo- gies?

Of interest here is a peculiar disjunction, an anachronism: cinema – a technol- ogy that has historically been aligned with a unidirectional vector of mass con- sumption and the enclosures of disciplinary power – becomes the primary way that contemporary art speaks about a diagram of power (control) and an orga- nization of labor (immaterial) that are typically aligned with digital technolo- gies. One finds this at play in Breitz’s work, as well as in numerous projects by Pierre Huyghe. Why this asynchrony? One might venture that it is because cin- ema has historically participated in the colonization of leisure time, making it a major site of immaterial labor before it became increasing dominant over man- ual labor. When immaterial labor produces a “social relation,” it is engaged in the production of subjectivity immanent to a process of capitalist valorization. The film industry has always relied on the affective investments of its audiences to give its products value, occupying their free time with activities that would not merely produce value for the studios but also reproduce ideology, as Breitz makes clear. The cinema is a technology of reproduction in a double sense: it reproduces images and it reproduces ideology through these images, creating subjects. The cinema epitomizes Lazzarato’s description of the immaterial com- modity as something that “enlarges, transforms, and creates the ‘ideological’ and cultural environment of the consumer.” Today, as cinema is increasingly digitized and available for fan manipulation, it presents an especially strong site at which to diagnose the dissolution of work and play, autonomy and sub- ordination.

If all of this provides possible reasons that artists might turn to cinema to explore the increased opportunities for control and exploitation that stem from the centrality of immaterial labor in what Yann Moulier Boutang has called “cognitive capitalism,” there might be other, very different reasons that cinema – rather than television or digital media – emerges as the privileged way of interrogating this transition. Immaterial labor makes new zones of coloniza-

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tion possible, but it also makes new forms of resistance possible. There is always a certain contingency to the consumer’s participation in the creation of value, a space that is opened up for diversion and self-determination that one sees dis- tinctly paralleled in theorizations of the collective reception of cinema. Lazzara- to again: “What the transformation of the product into a commodity cannot remove, then, is the character of event, the open process of creation that is estab- lished between immaterial labor and the public and organized by communica- tion.” The event is an unforeseeable and singular force that is marked by the opening of potentiality. As such, the ways in which spectators reproduce the immaterial commodities they consume can give way to negotiation from within the colonized space of capital. This is not a “making do” that attempts to get by within unchangeable structures, but a negotiation that takes place immanent to the production of value.

This understanding of film reception as a node of interconnection proposes another, alternate reason why the old cinema might be used to talk about the new diagram of power: there was a time when the collective mode of spectator- ship proper to cinema was endowed with a utopian potential. Walter Benjamin wrote: “To put it in a nutshell, film is the prism in which the spaces of the im- mediate environment – the spaces in which people live, pursue their avocations, and enjoy their leisure – are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible, meaningful, and passionate way.” Though much has changed in the institu- tion of cinema since Benjamin’s time of writing, it would be difficult to find an- other “prism” that might fulfill the same function today. For Benjamin, this re- fractive “room-for-play” [Spiel-Raum] made available by the cinema was one of its most important and progressive attributes. It is a space that is resurrected and redoubled by artists remaking the products of film history, as they optimize the prismatic and transformative ability that already resided in cinema by trans- forming existing films in turn. If, for Benjamin, the cinema could take what was second nature and deliver it over to a space of eventfulness, unforeseeability, and the generation of new attitudes, the practice of remaking cinema shifts this activity into a second-order system.

When artists call upon the shared narratives of cinema, they find within them a Janus face: they are mechanisms of ideological interpellation but they also open a possibility of shared experience. Collectivity thus emerges as a distinctly double-sided notion, a concept that may function as a site of domination but may also carry within it the utopian spark Benjamin gleaned. This hints at a possible reason that the cinema has had such a forceful appeal for artists in the s and s. Cinema undoubtedly partakes in the Adornian paradigm of mass culture as mass deception, but it also functions as a horizon of collective, public experience.

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Chrissie Iles has suggested that, “[A]rtists’ use of film in the s, particu- larly popular Hollywood film, is partly to do with wanting to engage with, and perhaps influence, the connective tissue that film creates, and participate in a common language of communication.” The value attached to this “common language of communication” is decidedly ambivalent. As an agent of standardi- zation, the commonality generated by film spectatorship might be thought to be inextricable from its functioning as an ideological apparatus, teaching its spec- tators to be “good subjects” at the movies by disguising highly cultural and historically specific notions of race, class, gender, decorum, and so on, as natur- al. And yet, the fervor with which artists have returned to the products of film history as a reservoir of this “connective tissue” suggests a desire to understand cinema as a repository of cultural memory and shared experience despite its ideological workings – or perhaps because of them, so that they might be pried open for negotiation. One finds a distinct effort to work through the vicissitudes of the relationship between subjectivity and spectacle. Rather than throwing the cinematic baby out with the ideological bathwater, so to speak, remaking cin- ema emerges as a way of gleaning a utopian possibility of belonging from with- in a realm once dismissed as suspect.

Miriam Hansen has drawn upon Benjamin to outline the ways in which cin- ema functioned as an alternative public sphere during its first decades, a poten- tial that was increasingly quashed by the consolidation of Hollywood hege- mony and the increasing disciplining of spectatorship. The mobilization of references to cinema in contemporary art recalls this emphasis on the publicity of the institution, which now takes on a renewed importance given the atomiza- tion of spectatorship proper to electronic media. One must historicize both Han- sen’s intervention and the tendency of artists to espouse a similar view of the cinema. Now that cinema has definitively ceded its cultural dominance, the promises of this modernist utopia may be recalled, and the redemptive possibi- lities of cinema’s status as a shared vernacular resurrected.

A statement from Pierre Huyghe, who has worked extensively with both cin- ema and questions of immaterial labor, exemplifies this view of the institution: “A film is a public space, a common place. It is not a monument but a space of discussion and action. It’s an ecology.” The preceding chapter argued that art- ists such as Matthew Buckingham and Tacita Dean interrogate untaken paths of film history and excavate the ruins of utopias that might have been. Despite the very different concerns of the artists in this chapter, one might venture that these remakes also attempt to resuscitate the failed utopia of cinema in their insistence on the public, intersubjective space opened by the shared nature of cinematic narratives. Both the promises and the failures of film history are in- voked in an effort to reimagine collectivity anew without forgetting the ways in which the radical potential of cinema was marshalled into a powerful ideologi-

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cal apparatus. From within a space of commonality, these transformative works can open possibilities of reassessment, turning the spectacle in on itself by con- fronting the gaps and fissures that puncture and rend its attempt at totality.

The insistence on recovering the utopian potential of collective reception that had been dissipated by cinema’s role as a disciplinary technology becomes pos- sible under the specter of a perceived crisis of the institution. While the uses of mm discussed in the previous chapter respond to the superannuation of cel- luloid as a material substrate, practices of remaking take up the notion of cin- ema as a lost object at the institutional level. The many references to classical Hollywood cinema function as a shared cultural memory and as a site of collec- tive experience that is now perceived as lacking. In , Time magazine pro- claimed “You” the person of the year in a gesture that explicitly linked the in- dividualist thrust of the s and s to the popularity of YouTube as a new venue of personalized image consumption. While it is beyond the scope of this study to speculate on the new forms of collectivity and publicity that might be made possible by that website and other comparable developments, there is no avoiding the fragmentary and dispersed nature of online media when com- pared to the mass reception of the classical Hollywood cinema. The return to classical Hollywood in art since  provides a way of excavating an experi- ence of collectivity stemming from a shared reception of media at a time when images are most often consumed individually and directed towards increas- ingly specific niche markets.

VCR Memories

The many works that Douglas Gordon has made in reference to Alfred Hitch- cock take up old Hollywood cinema as a lost image regime, fixating on the di- rector as a kind of hinge between cinema in its classical incarnation and the many transformations to which it has been subjected since its disintegration. As Raymond Bellour has put it, for Gordon, Hitchcock represents “the ironic and fascinated demiurge that engineered with an unequalled consciousness the mediatized art of possessing his public through image and sound, and did so in a cinema pushed from then on towards television.” This final assertion concerning the relationship between Hitchcock’s cinema and television is key. Hitchcock’s oeuvre includes multiple, seemingly contradictory responses to the disintegra- tion of classical cinema: he broke down classical norms in his films – notably, Psycho – and produced TV shows, but also participated in technological novel- ties designed to maintain cinematic hegemony over this competing medium.

These responses position Hitchcock definitively on the cusp between one cin-

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ema and another, straddling a moment of intense transition – precisely the sort of condition in which cinema found itself again in the mid-s as it reached its one-hundredth birthday. For Laura Mulvey, Psycho might be the last film of the classical cinema, “stand[ing] on the edge of the divide” between an old Holly- wood and what it has become in the years since the film’s release in : “The crisis in the old Hollywood film industry, caught at a crossroads, faced with its own mortality, gave [Hitchcock] the opportunity to write its epitaph, but also to transcend its conventions and create something startling and new.” In  Hour Psycho, perhaps the best-known remake of the past two decades, Gor- don telescopes this past moment of transition with that of the present, confront- ing the possibilities of a VHS cinephilia while fetishistically overvaluing the di- rector who both emblematized and reflexively interrogated the institution in its classical form.

Douglas Gordon,  Hour Psycho ().

The exhibition specifications Alfred Hitchcock laid out for the theatrical release of Psycho would be virtually impossible to apply to Gordon’s remake. Through lobby posters, special trailers, and the cooperation of movie theater owners, Hitchcock instituted a special policy for the film. Perhaps as a publicity stunt or perhaps out of fear the audience would be disappointed if they arrived to find the female star already dead, Hitchcock required spectators to show up on time

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or they would be refused admission. In an era of moviegoing when it was com- mon to duck in and out of screenings at will, such a practice was unheard of. As a result, Hitchcock has often been credited – perhaps wrongly – with single- handedly changing habits of film spectatorship. With  Hour Psycho, Gor- don changes the protocols of spectatorship once again, altering the way the spectator views this most familiar of films by eliminating its soundtrack, stretching its duration to the titular twenty-four hours, and projecting it on a translucent screen that cuts through the center of the gallery space like a knife. The spectator is free to walk around the image, which also is visible in reverse on the recto of the screen, lending the work a sculptural quality.

Philip Monk has written of the relationship between the temporal distension of  Hour Psycho and the film’s “symbolic condensation” in the iconic shower scene. For Monk, the slowed version “denies the pleasure of this sight: it takes too long to reach this ‘climax.’” Given the unique position Psycho occupies in the disciplining of spectatorship and the requirement to watch a film start-to- finish, in addition to this instance of denial in Gordon’s appropriation of Hitch- cock, one must add another: no spectator, save for an incredibly patient insom- niac lucky enough to be at a gallery staying open all night, will be able to show up “on time” for  Hour Psycho, nor see it in its entirety. Viewing the work is a necessarily fragmentary experience; even staying for  minutes, the origi- nal duration of the film, will result in seeing what used to be about nine minutes of it. This has led some critics to see it as a “celebration of peripatetic mobility” that overcomes the physical paralysis of the cinema. The assignments of mo- bility and immobility that marked movie theater spectatorship here exchange places, as now, instead of an immobile spectator seated in front of a moving image, one finds a mobile spectator who moves around a relatively immobi- lized image. According to such a reading,  Hour Psycho is a critical interven- tion that dismantles the visual pleasure of Hollywood and liberates the viewer from the disciplined spectatorship of the movie theater.

It would be easy to understand  Hour Psycho in this way, to see the instal- lation as an attempt to demystify the manipulative powers of narrative cinema. However, as elaborated in chapter one, the perambulation of the gallery specta- tor by no means guarantees a critically “active” viewer. And what of the claim that Gordon’s use of slow motion might tear the viewer out of absorption and into a distanced, intellectual engagement with Psycho? Daniel Birnbaum ad- vances this position by comparing Gordon’s work to the anti-illusionism of Pe- ter Gidal, writing that, “Here nothing is hidden, and the tools are displayed in such a fashion that nobody can forget that this is all highly artificial stuff, and that there is nothing natural about the ways stories are told on the screen through complex editing technique intent on effacing the marks of the editing slice.” There is no dispute that  Hour Psycho refuses the pleasures on

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which Hitchcock’s film rests. But, in a manner that puts it greatly at odds with Gidal’s anti-representationalism, the work retains a distinct investment in the pleasures of the image. In Gordon’s installation, there is no refusal of iconophi- lia, but simply a substitution of one kind of pleasure in the image for another. Instead of viewing  Hour Psycho as a series of denials, it should be under- stood as an analysis of the transformations to which cinematic pleasure is sub- ject when classic films are watched on video, an analysis made possible by im- porting VHS-based cinema into the museum and rendering it gigantic. For instead of holding a fascination with the cinematic image under suspicion,  Hour Psycho uses the analytic powers of slow motion to fetishize detail and monumentalize a new form of cinephilic spectatorship, that of the VCR and the remote control.

These domestic media technologies played an important role in the genesis of the installation. Gordon explains how the project came to be:

In  I had come home to see my family for Christmas and I was looking at a video of the TV transmission of Psycho. And in the part where Norman (Anthony Perkins) lifts up the painting of Suzanna and the Elders and you see the close-up of his eye looking through the peep-hole at Marion (Janet Leigh) undressing, I thought I saw her unhooking her bra. I didn’t remember seeing that in the VCR version and thought it was strange, in terms of censorship, that more would be shown on TV than in the video so I looked at that bit with the freeze-frame button, to see if it was really there.

In search of a cinephilic fragment, Gordon used the capabilities of home view- ing technologies to slow the film and attempt to find the desired image. With a video dubbed off of a televised broadcast of the film, the artist went in search of a memory, perhaps one of adolescent desire. Gordon has remarked that, “Slow motion is truly the desire to see what is hidden, it’s very erotic.” Erotic, but also marked by death: here one finds a sadistic impulse of possession that returns the liveliness of cinema to the quietus of the photograph. This is not a temporal protraction that would produce a distanced, critical commentary, but a libidinally charged penetration of the film that recalls the violent effort to tame life evoked in Psycho’s taxidermy birds and the embalmed corpse of the mother. Slow motion is here employed in its capacity to make possible a kind of viewing not afforded by a film rushing through the projector with little re- gard for a spectator who might want to return to a favorite scene or review a line of dialogue. Mulvey has described this form of spectatorship, designating it “possessive”: “With electronic or digital viewing, the nature of the cinematic repetition compulsion changes. As the film is delayed and thus fragmented from linear narrative into favorite moments or scenes, the spectator is able to hold on to, to possess, the previously elusive image.” In  Hour Psycho,

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each image is present as a still for about half a second before giving way to the next, allowing for the spectator to grasp filmic instants, but only through their mutilation.

Videotape is not merely the inspiration for  Hour Psycho, but is also key to the work’s material and aesthetic dimensions. Working in the early s before the rise of DVDs, Gordon produced the piece using a commercially available VHS tape and an industrial Panasonic VCR that plays at a speed of roughly two frames per second. The artist did nothing to alter the tape itself; his inter- vention took place on the level of technologies of spectatorship. Amy Taubin compares the use of slow motion in  Hour Psycho to Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (), but Gordon’s work is far removed from this optical reprinting of individual frames for it makes no material alteration to the video- tape. Her comparison to Warhol’s early films is more accurate (despite the fact that they make no use of found footage), for here sound film was projected at silent speed so as to create slow motion at the moment of exhibition. However, neither one of these comparisons captures the centrality of video to  Hour Psycho. The use of the VHS format causes a significant degradation of the im- age when compared to a mm print, made especially evident by the large-scale projection of the image, a scale for which VHS is by no means suited.  Hour Psycho is not merely Psycho slowed to an approximate duration of twenty- four hours; it is also an unabashedly video-based copy of Psycho slowed to an approximate duration of twenty-four hours. Along with inserting  Hour Psy- cho into an existing history of found footage and slow motion, its relationship to the home video technologies that made it possible must be emphasized.

Though it was certainly possible for non-professionals to make copies of films before the popularization of the VCR, it was difficult and required both expen- sive equipment and technical knowledge that few amateurs possessed. The mass marketing of home video technologies made the bootlegging of movies a real possibility for the first time, leading to the  Sony versus Universal law- suit, popularly known as the “Betamax case.” Home video marks the first time that movies could be dubbed and manipulated by the average viewer, inducing an anxiety on the part of the studios as to the ability to protect their intellectual property. It is significant that when Gordon returned to his parents’ house at Christmastime, it was a copy of Psycho recorded off of television that he chose to review – it was a VHS copy of a televised copy of a mm film, already two steps removed from the original format.

The ability to produce private copies and shift formats is central to  Hour Psycho. It makes monstrous a VHS copy of Psycho and shifts formats again, this time to a gallery installation. Such activities are inextricably linked to ways in which spectators’ relations to cinema changed after the domestic use of vi- deotape. The VHS format, which incidentally owes much of its early success to

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the pornography industry, allowed illicit channels of tape circulation to emerge. As Lucas Hilderbrand has suggested, “[B]ootlegging is exemplary of videotape: it foregrounds the technology as a recording format, it exposes the formal degeneration of the signal, it stresses the importance of access, and raises issues of intellectual property rights.” Though  Hour Psycho does not in fact produce a new copy of Hitchcock’s film (it exhibits a commercially available copy under unusual circumstances to change the parameters of aesthetic experi- ence), it monumentalizes bootleg aesthetics to highlight precisely these attri- butes of videotape. Unlike early artists’ uses of the medium, which often fore- grounded the technical possibilities of closed-circuit video, feedback, and real- time playback, here video is investigated as a social technology that makes cin- ema both mutable and available within the home.

 Hour Psycho is an artifact of a post-VHS cinephilia, exploiting the in- creased playback control afforded to the viewer by that technology, as well as making visible the ramifications for image quality and copyright that result from its capacity for dubbing. The copy cannot help but throw the original into crisis, and yet it also expands the reach of that object, disseminating it in new contexts. Dominique Païni has called VHS an “antibody” against the dissolu- tion of cinephilia. If this is true, it is an antibody that fights the immune sys- tem as much as the virus that affects it. It makes possible obsessive re-viewings of films and a greater access to the products of film history, but does so through a degraded image and CinemaScope frames subject to pan-and-scan. Though thankfully these qualities have been minimized by the advent of DVDs, there is nonetheless a discernible loss (of scale, of attention, of publicity, of historicity) that still accompanies the increased access and control afforded by home view- ing technologies.  Hour Psycho captures the contradictions of this new cin- ephilia, and does so by rendering these private rituals of image consumption gigantic, taking them back out into the public sphere for examination thanks to the portability of video. It combines the large-scale projection and collective re- ception of the cinema with newer, home video practices of copying and altered playback to create a hybrid aggregate that brings into relief the tension between its constituent parts.

While  Hour Psycho carries weight as a conceptual gesture, it must be emphasized that the work also possesses an important phenomenological di- mension. Gordon has discussed the experience of viewing  Hour Psycho as one of a riven temporality: “The viewer is catapulted back into the past by his recollection of the original, and at the same time he is drawn into the future by his expectation of an already familiar narrative...a slowly changing present forces itself in between.” The installation draws upon the viewer’s memory of the original film for its appeal and its success, calling upon him or her to con- textualize and give meaning to the slowed snippet in relation to a larger whole

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recalled from past viewings. If  Hour Psycho incessantly summons the past, its future can be difficult to access since any sense of anticipation is frustrated by viscous slowness. Even the future Gordon describes in the above quotation re- mains a matter of pastness: it is generated out of the viewer’s previously estab- lished familiarity with the film. Any true sense of futurity, of time moving for- ward in a meaningful way, is palpably lacking. Temporal progression splinters into a succession of disjoined instants that are exhausting to assemble into a continuous trajectory. While viewing the work, it can be difficult to anticipate what will happen next, even for a viewer intimately familiar with Psycho. The grueling pace of the film and the absence of the soundtrack disrupt the patterns of editing and the narrative cues that would normally serve to structure specta- torial expectation. Anticipation brings frustration more than anything else, leav- ing the viewer stalled in the “slowly changing present,” weighed down by memories of the past.

As a result,  Hour Psycho possesses none of the suspense that marks the original. While this appears to pit the dilation of time against the functioning of suspense, temporal protraction is in fact central to the building of such tension, particularly in Hitchcock’s cinema.  Hour Psycho does away with sus- pense by hyperbolizing the very same temporal techniques on which it de- pends, making Gordon’s alteration of the film an exaggerated allegory of its own temporality. Without suspense to infuse time with desire,  Hour Psycho might be thought to possess no affective resonance for its spectator in its current form, just nostalgia for the film it remakes. This however, is far from the case. While the installation lacks suspense, it does maintain a relationship to the ero- ticization of time. However, instead of the erotic delay of suspense, this tempor- al eroticism is linked to a freezing of the film into a slowed, fetishistic crawl as described above with reference to Mulvey’s notion of the “possessive spectator” – with the important difference, of course, that the viewer of  Hour Psycho has none of the control Mulvey ascribes to such a spectator.

Out of the degeneration of narrativity and suspense, these other possessive pleasures are cultivated. With each frame lasting approximately half a second, the enduring present of  Hour Psycho is a present of scrutiny, one in which each frame of the film offers itself to the viewer for a moment before passing on. This present is not the present of the unfolding of the film’s diegesis; attempting to follow a developing narrative would quickly exasperate the viewer. Rather, it is the present of the spectator’s perceptual encounter with the cinema itself, re- doubled by the past memory of seeing Psycho. Because the spectator is severed from absorption in the diegesis and the soundtrack has been eliminated, a hy- perawareness of detail and minute changes sets in. As the extreme slowness works to defamiliarize these recognizable images, sometimes a perfectly normal continuity cut can become unexpectedly surprising, introducing the eventful-

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ness of kairos into the dull crawl of chronos. It is as if the work were obeying what Pascal Bonitzer has designated to be a law of Hitchcockian narrative: “the more a situation is somewhat a priori, familiar or conventional, the most liable it is to become disturbing or uncanny, once one of its constituent elements begins to ‘turn against the wind.’” The Foreign Correspondent () reference is apposite here, as the uncanniness of  Hour Psycho is, like the windmills turning against the wind, a matter of aberrant movement. The intensity of the slow motion strips the film of the terror it once induced but introduces a new feeling, the eerie return of the familiar made strange. These moments appear suddenly and without warning, possessing nothing of the gradually augment- ing intensity one associates with Hitchcockian suspense. These jarring instants constitute a kind of cinephilic detail that protrudes from the text as a point of interest for the attentive spectator. They serve to puncture the empty time of  Hour Psycho with bursts of revelation that telescope past and present view- ings, bringing together the movie theater, the VCR, and the gallery (and wher- ever else the viewer might have previously watched Psycho) into a single, tem- porally disjointed experience of cinema.

In a seemingly simple gesture,  Hour Psycho effects a complex triangula- tion of issues of technology, temporality, and spectatorship. The represented time of Psycho – the time of the narrative – is overtaken by the time of the apparatus and the time of reception. These temporalities come into tension with one another, as the regimented slow motion evinces a patient regularity that contrasts with the contingent meandering of the viewer around the room. As the viewer wanders around the sluggish movements of the work, she will cross over to the other side of the screen and see a mirror reflection of Hitch- cock’s iconic images, creating an even stronger sense of defamiliarization and disorientation than had already been induced by the stagnation of the image, as they nearly match a memory of an earlier viewing but not quite. But of course, in memory things are never exactly as they really were. Anthony McCall has noted that, “With Douglas Gordon’s work, there is a strong element of nostalgia for a particular period of Hollywood, a classical period that never actually ex- isted in fact.” It may not have existed then, but it certainly exists now. This idea of classical cinema, and indeed, of a golden age of cinema in general, is retroactively produced in the present amidst fears of the institution’s future.

 Hour Psycho is an encounter with extreme slowness in a culture of in- creasing speed and also an encounter with cinema in an era when, as A.O. Scott has pithily remarked, in Hollywood, “Auteur is French for unemployed.”  Hour Psycho replaces the animation of cinema with the mortification of the still and does so through a regime of viewing largely thought to be responsible for the death of that cinema, the VCR. And yet, it by no means asserts such developments as lamentable. Rather, it proposes that such a mode of spectator-

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ship can cull new pleasures from an old cinema. It enacts the very kinds of transformations to which cinema is now subject, but does so with a reflexivity that allows for an assessment of what is at stake in the contemporary cinematic migration. The individual spectator is engaged in a comparison between the “then” of Psycho and the “now” of its gallery-based remake that is equally a comparison between the “then” and the “now” of moving image culture.  Hour Psycho is a swollen emblem of commemoration, offering a public perfor- mance of grief that would be taken up by numerous artists throughout the s. Even Gordon himself would resuscitate the work with ’s  hour psycho back and forth and to and fro, a double-screen projection that plays the slowed-down film forward on one screen and backward on the other.

In the art of the s and s, the obsession with remaking cinema may be understood as indicative of an anxiety over the proliferation of digital media and the attendant effects it would have on the cinema and a simultaneous em- brace of the new possibilities offered by these technological developments. But as this chapter has suggested, this obsession with remaking cinema has a symp- tomatic meaning that goes beyond a concern for the medium in and of itself. In its general usage, a medium is defined as “an agency or means of doing some- thing,” “an intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed.” In their repurposing of Hollywood movies, these artists mobilize cinema as a me- dium in this sense of the word: they use it to grasp at something else, as a way of relating to history and of recovering an imagined collectivity felt to be lack- ing. Recycling and citation are aesthetic strategies most often associated with postmodernism and its accompanying atrophy of history and swell of amnesia. In the practices discussed throughout this chapter, however, these techniques are put to work within a framework that insists that media images, after they have aged, might in fact work with rather than against attempts to recover a memory of collective experience and a relationship to the past.

The remake of contemporary art emerges as the inverted twin of the Holly- wood remake; that is, rather than remaking the ever-same with a false promise of novelty, since the s, artists have been remaking old Hollywood films so as to explode what resides latent within them and put them in service of the present. Daney worried that only the mythologies of cinema would be kept and remade, perpetuating the ever-same in the guise of the ever-new. These artists, by contrast, remake the mythologies of cinema to sometimes indicate what the repetitions of Hollywood might elide, to other times serve as an act of mourn- ing, and still others, to do both at once. Whether this is accomplished by sharply diverging from the host text, such as Becoming, or by repeating it almost ex- actly, such as World Trade Center , such works attempt to work within the interstices of dominant cinema rather than refusing it outright. The remake,

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which is itself a process of translation, is used to interrogate the processes that translate experiences and events into images, questioning the assumptions, omissions, and affects that reside therein.

With ambivalence as their primary affective mode, such practices parasiti- cally make use of the pleasures of dominant cinema while contesting their very foundation. The function of cinema as a site of affective labor and ideological reproduction remains central, and yet a certain “room for play” is opened that makes use of cinema as a common cultural vernacular and a site at which mass media representations become integrated into subjective experience in a way that might disrupt the dominant order. This ambivalent structure of feeling pro- vides a way of acknowledging that there is no outside from which one might critique the representations of the mass media; rather, these representations are understood to make up the fabric of our everyday lives. Though these artists take up Hollywood cinema as an industry that concocts fantasy simulations for the masses, they locate other possibilities for the moving image alongside and within its function as image commodity. These artists embrace cinema due to its status as a vast cultural commons, a lowest common denominator that com- prises a shared vernacular that connects subjects to representations and to each other. They engage in acts of filmophagy, cannibalizing Hollywood – sometimes violently, sometimes playfully – in order to reflect on the mediation of experi- ence, something that engages both power and pleasure. Recognizing the extent to which Hollywood functions as dream factory, as myth factory, as history fac- tory, many of the artists producing derivative works turn to cinema as a site that crystallizes the pleasures and horrors of capitalist societies of control, finding in it a synecdoche for a spectacle that is inescapable.

Mulvey writes: “Just as Psycho, in , marked a final staging post in the history of the studio system as a basis for the Hollywood film industry,  Hour Psycho, like an elegy, marks a point of no return for the cinema itself.” It is true, there is no going back. In very different ways, the works discussed in this chapter all serve to memorialize a particular age of cinema as over and gone, and yet summon it as a “connective tissue” that might have something to offer in the present. The much-vaunted “death of cinema” never really means the death of cinema full stop, but the death of a certain idea of cinema. When Doug- las Gordon proclaims that the cinema is dead, he does so very much in the same way as another figure who has consistently promulgated the idea, Jean-Luc Godard: he declares cinema dead while at the same time continuing to make cinema. Drawing on a nostalgia that calls upon the products of film history as a reservoir of collective memory, these artists come to terms with the passing of one cinema while laying the ground for the birth of another. Next to the conti- nuation of blockbuster spectacle in the multiplexes, this “othered cinema” is emerging, often marked by an interest in what the cinema once was, but also

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actively contributing to what it will become. For within all of the reflections on the senescence of cinema, there is also a trajectory that moves forward to clear a space for a new cinema of the gallery, a cinema of artists who will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with the moving image as cinema moves into its second century.

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