I’ve not posted in a while, having been on holiday — or watching film — or thinking about films that aren’t quite films. Thanks goes to George MacBeth and Ralph Pritchard in reading and commenting on an earlier version of this post.
— In July 2012, Muhammad Didit uploaded 2 Hours Doing Nothing, a film in which he does nothing except sit and gaze into the camera. Throughout the 140 minutes of the film (it is longer than the two hours of its title), Didit sits mostly motionless. The frame is defined by a small diamond portal, a square window (covered by a white blind), the surface of a bed, and a smear of dark paint on the wall to his left. There’s not much more to describe.
Still taken from 2 Hours Doing Nothing (2012)
— Later, in 2017, Andrew Wong and James Thompson released astronaut.io, a website that pulls videos from YouTube that have “almost zero previous views”. They are “unnamed, unedited, and [mostly] unseen”, their titles gesturing toward the rawly indexical: DSC 1234, IMG 4321, Etc. Watched together — in a steady flow — they begin to suggest the contours of an almost-existing narrative (a “possible film”, as described by Shezad Dawood), even while we know that nothing – except the mode of their distribution – really connects them.
— Rather, each film represents a kind of fragment in which “the reality of the earth continues to exist”, an interruption that nonetheless impresses upon us a moment of unknowable continuity (what lies beyond the filmed moment, the life that fed it — that made it ‘realisable’). It is a film that cannot be a film; even while it appears — somehow, inexplicably — to be a film (even just a slither of it). Yet, it cannot ever “come to a point” as a film ‘comes to a point’, embodying a kind of infinitely passive “waiting” (as Gerald Bruns glosses of Blanchot’s fragmentary writing).
Still taken from IMG 9873 (via YouTube)
— What emerges – between ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ — is a kind of film that isn’t really a ‘film’ at all, even while it cannot claim to be something as humdrum as a ‘video’ (which describes merely a method of capture and storage). You could argue that the non-film embodies a ‘structure of feeling’, a mass of collective filmic gestures and expressions which reveal something about the texture of videoed modernity without ever positioning themselves within the ‘official’ discourse and traditions of film, or the virality-seeking maneuvers of memes. They are not attempting to sell anything or to instruct us on how to do something.
— From this emerges the non-film; an object that speaks with the language of film, but it doesn’t speak to film. Rather, it peers through the fence, trailing the periphery. Yet, we still find ourselves as spectators before it: “suspended between a giant body [the screen] and the object of its gaze”, as Jean-Louis Schefer argued of the ‘true’ cinema. Like film, it is something we watch. But it is not a ‘film’ in the proper sense of the word. So what is it?
***
— Together, the non-film gestures, at a remove, to film — toward the durational cinema of Lav Diaz or Bela Tarr, toward experiment and sublimity (it can be very beautiful!) But it is not attempting to enter into a dialogue with it. Their existence is irrelevant to it (even if we find ourselves watching it and thinking: it is like, it reminds me of, it is similar to). The resulting non-film ‘is what it is’ — explaining itself entirely to itself, even while this explanation remains invisible to the spectator. Its purpose is occluded. It waits for a moment of closure that will never arrive.
— For Marc Auge, the non-place (a ‘somewhere’ that is defined by its transience, its anonymity) does not really “exist in the absolute sense of the term”. In much the same vein, the non-film can never function as a really-existing category of spectatorship, but rather as an accumulation of references and effects that bring the non-film toward completeness (as a Film) while rendering it utterly incapable of existing within that space. Without context or discourse, it slips between the centre and the edge. It looks something like a film — but it cannot ever be a film. Really, it is not even trying.
Still taken from xcoffee (1993-2001)
— The prehistory of the non-film is prefigured by the invention of the webcam. In 1993, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky linked a camera in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory to the web. The stream had a purpose, an intent: to save people working in the building from walking to the pot only to discover that the coffee had run dry. Running until 2001, it could be argued that the film itself — xcoffee — in its post-functional afterlife, seen today when coffee pot and stream are both deactivated, is a kind of non-film. But the intent still lingers. It had a purpose, even if that purpose has subsequently elapsed.
— Rather, the non-film proper happens almost by accident, and it might actually be better to think of it as a lack of intention toward the idea of a filmic (i.e., cinematic) text. Yet, the non-film never rejects film entirely, nor does it act with utter passivity toward it. It is made, but it is not made-to. It exists somewhere between purpose and purposelessness.
— But the non-film cannot ever really be the CCTV image or the webcam operating from a remote research base, because even these forms of passivity enter into a specific relationship with regard to intent: for CCTV, this is to ‘capture’ the possibility of crime. For the webcam, it is to document the research site and its operations. The non-film, in contrast, is almost impossible to trace back to an intent — or to track forward, to a purpose; even while it gestures toward both of these things. It had to be made (with a beginning and an end), but the making reveals little or nothing about the conditions of its production. It is pure distribution (made, uploaded – like a faucet being opened), even while it stems from a really murky purpose.
***
— Our gaze is not organized by the non-film within any particular hierarchy of the image, nor any overt ideological formation. It is not telling us how to watch. It is not even inviting us to watch. It is merely watchable.
— There are films and methods of filmmaking that seem like non-films but have too much intent toward other films; not least the scurrilous ‘instructional’ films created by howtobasic, the imprimatur of include motifs of breaking/throwing eggs, urinating, giving thumbs up, grunting, breaking objects. Here, the intent of howtobasic is precisely to subvert the mass of banal instructional videos that clog the avenues of YouTube. Already, we have too much context, and the non-film slips into another category of video (video being the base status of all films and non-films — before they find their channel of distribution, their intent).
Still taken from a video lasting less than 1 second uploaded to YouTube
— Looking askance, the non-film cannot be defined by its lack of quality, and it might only overlap with the Steyerlian poor-image by coincidence — that which is defined precisely by its ghostliness, its cascading as a “rag or a rip” that has been “uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited”. When the non-film enters into the stream of editing and remixing, it becomes a film; its intentioned-passivity is obliterated. Really, it shares something with Farocki’s “operational image” — in his Eye/Machine I-III (2001-2003), as a kind of film that emerges, often autonomously (like a camera mounted on a weapon system) from a specific fold of an institutional or organizational ‘base’.
Still taken from howtobasic (via YouTube)
— But where does the non-film exist? There are thousands upon thousands of them, almost impossible to circumscribe or catalogue. We discover them almost by accident, and the vast bulk of them might be ‘non-public’ and therefore irretrievable. Like the operational image, the non-film — a very contemporary kind of image — are tied up “with modern forms of industrial production”, but rather than ‘production’ they stem from modern forms of digital distribution.
***
— The non-film peeps at Film but cannot stir or muddy its waters. Its occlusion — its lack of purpose, or the cascade of possible purposes that radiate from it — makes it trade in the potential space of the sublime. Meaning can enter into the non-film, even while it is incapable of generating meanings for itself (beyond the fact of its own distribution and our ‘chance’ spectatorship of it). All the same, it might help us to intuit a ‘structure of feeling’ that emerges from it — the non-film being a variety of spectatorship that reflects the conditions and context of its production (even if it refuses to comment directly on them).
Still taken from crisis.acting (Instagram)
— The non-film is often collected, shared, and re-distributed — but always without purpose, defiantly refusing the memetic (even if they appear in the same spaces as memes). Here I’m thinking of aggregators, like crisis.acting, which bring together all manner of de-contextualized videos depicting acts of unheimlich banality, strange sublimity, and climate catastrophe, the account’s administrator refusing to explain the source, context, or purpose of the videos they share. Examples include an Orthodox priest baptizing a man at a stony shrine; shaky footage taken from the side of a truck which reveals a large waste dump in summer; another which depicts a group of seated pensioners at a loud party, lasers and lights playing across their motionless bodies. But even here, not all of these aggregated videos might properly claim the status of a non-film (some were captured with a clear, explicable intent — a desire to shock or ‘document’).
— The longest film on YouTube, The Longest Video on YouTube: 596.5 Hours, might also claim to be a non-film. But the non-film doesn’t need to be long in duration to ‘be’ a non-film. Other non-films exist only as a handful of seconds or minutes. There is the non-film of untitled videos uploaded everyday to file sharing websites, those whose purposes can be guessed at but not finally confirmed. IMG 3324 depicts a beach scene that lasts for less than one second. IMG 9873 depicts a herd of cattle at the edge of a field, lasting for twenty-seven seconds (it is snowing; the camera zooms softly toward them).
Still taken from an ‘imageless’ film uploaded to YouTube
— The non-film is not a kind of detritus — a loose aggregate — but rather a kind of structure assembled out of building-like materials whose purpose we cannot fathom. It is more like a peculiar concrete and rebar structure that we discover in the midst of the steppe whose function we cannot ascertain and whose structure reveals nothing about its purpose. It abstracts itself away from its concreteness as a building. But it is most certainly a building. Nor is it wilfully, consciously ‘avant garde’. Experiment is unknown to it, even if it may be aware of its own texture of difference. Not the sheet metal towers of Anselm Keifer; nor the disused envelope of a now-gutted factory in Detroit, but – rather – a secret third thing.
— By definition, the non-film is not an engaged cinema. It is neither the shore nor the wave. Yet, the non-film, through its lucid maneuvers, recreates a ghost image of experimental subversion — dismembering narrative methodologies and cinematic conventions even while it claims no allegiance to the acts of subversion that it pursues. The non-film participates ambiently alongside conceptual and theoretical vibrations without realising it, making the non-film a kind of holy fool, a fellow traveller who has only, by accident, stepped — correctly — onto the ‘wrong’ train.
Still taken from Sitting and Smiling, an ‘endurance’ film uploaded by Benjamin Bennett (via YouTube)
— The non-film does not market itself as a cinematic project within the context of filmmaking, but it can still be perceived – in a Scheferian manner — as a film, insofar as we find ourselves “suspended” between it and the object of its gaze. It maintains a Farockian “form of intelligence” even while it remains steadfastly pre-verbal, carried along by the currents of distribution and ‘film-making’ within which it accidentally operates. It escapes easy commodification, substitution, and extraction. Nothing can be done with the non-film except to define it by what it is not.
— And yet, the non-film has a film-maker, and we have to assume a certain level of familiarity and even confidence with the knowledge and practice of film ‘proper’. The untitled video uploads of YouTube reveal an edge of what it is that ‘makes’ a film, even while the videos themselves refuse — indifferently — to function within the formal and structural gestures of that film-making. The non-film seeks only to express itself via the channel of its own distribution. It just ‘is’.
***
— At its most proximate, the non-film can look like the structural film or the diaristic film – calling to mind the repetitive ‘mechanical’ work of Michael Snow (La Region Centrale [1971]) and Hollis Frampton (Lemon [1969]) as well as the observational, impressionistic work of George Kuchar and Jonas Mekas.
Still taken from Blind Myself with a Lamp for No Reasosn!!! (2019)
—But these works draw their strength from their position within a cinematic discourse, self-consciously disrupting and reimagining the contours of the traditions of which they are a part. The Weather Diaries function through their radical candour and their irony (the very artificiality of cinema itself) — things that cannot be said intentionally of 2 Hours Doing Nothing or Sitting and Smiling, an ‘endurance’ film uploaded by Benjamin Bennett, even if they ‘succeed’ in reproducing these effects. We might also think of Blind Myself with a Lamp for No Reason!!! (2019). Yet, it cannot even be said that they embody a kind of ‘zombie formalism’, though this label might at times adhere to them (before blowing away).
— I’ve introduced only a few examples of the non-film in this essay, partly reflecting the fact that they are so difficult to isolate — and so tricky to pin down. Yet, they feel ‘thingy’ — like they really exist, even if they are almost impossible to intentionally create. Equally, searching for them becomes a kind of Higgs-Boson project, a colliding and observational ‘looking’ that all but rarely finds the object of its gaze. There is a man doing nothing before his camera for 140 minutes. There is IMG 4739, which consists of two seconds of darkness accompanied by a slight burr of unidentified background noise. They exist just as they refuse existence. They might even outnumber the seemingly countless miles of ‘films’ that have been made to this date, a dark matter that stretches across everything.
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