The exhaustion of space (Birth of electronic space #5)

With the formula — the exhaustion of space in late modern cinema — we intend to describe the thorough and transversal experimentation of internal spatial limits of film that followed the “unblocking” of classical rules by the first modern cinema, after or around WW II, which gave way principally to different pathways for now even more troublesome characters and the creation of disconnected and emptied spaces. Directly related, maybe even a consequence, and no doubt the threshold of this thorough and transversal experimentation of internal spatial limits is the hypothesis we’re suggesting of a “birth of electronic space” within the space of cinema. The repetition and velocity procedures of Michael Snow’s Back and forth (1969) and La région centrale (1971), much more than exposing ad nauseum and ad infinitum the cinematic dispositive itself, develop such an potent abstraction that it can be associated, less by formal affinity than by grounding on the same violence to the perception, to the electronic space being created around the same years by the historical advent of video and its basic grammatical exploration, namely in Sketches (1970) by the Vasulkas, pioneers of american video art.

On the other side of the mirror, after the corresponding emancipation of time (as described by Deleuze), we will find the advent of a rhythmic “machination”, in which the rhythmic parameter is privileged in film and are explored the affinities of cinema with that other art of time, whose ontological generosity is a great aspiration for all arts — music. [to be continued]