Issue #7

Given the proliferation of online confessional videos, it should come as no surprise that artists have appropriated them and incorporated them into their own artworks. The confessional video is often emotional and candid, a raw glimpse into the emotional turmoil and struggles of others. Given the nature of the confessional—an individual’s private reflections on their struggles, thoughts, actions, and behaviours that are considered shameful or disgraceful—it is a mode ripe for interrogation and hermeneutic readings. The confessional is a way in which the confessor acknowledges and recognizes deviations from accepted societal norms and values; therefore, by analyzing the confessional it is possible to unpack the underlying economic, political or ideological conditions that ultimately led one to confess. Through appropriation, the raw underlying emotions of the confessional can be used by artists to construct new narratives and sensations. In this essay, I provide a brief historical overview of the confessional focusing on its social and political functions. I discuss artistic uses of the confessional mode, and the relationship to its contemporary form, the online confessional video.

While “24 Frames” is, of course, a reference to celluloid filmmaking, 24 Frames is, among other things, Kiarostami’s revisiting and recycling of his photography, particularly his black and white photography of the Iranian countryside in winter. 24 Frames opens with a manipulation of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Hunters in the Snow (Winter), simultaneously an homage to Bruegel and a demonstration of what Kiarostami means to do with his own photographic work in the following 23 Frames. Subtle additions to the painting—smoke coming from chimneys, birds flying, a dog entering the image, three cows…all accompanied by faux environmental sounds—make clear that Kiarostami was exploring a range of possibilities that working in digital made available to him. He then revisits his own photographs, providing manipulations—sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious—of each.

The concept and practice of retracted cinema pose a polemical contrast with the expansionist, annexational logic of expanded cinema by means of a process of folding found or archival footage back on itself in the manner of a conceptual origami. The algorithm as such is radically abstract (and abstractable) and demonstrates that execution and application turn out to be a distinguishable instance of conception and instruction. In short, the algorithm itself is already taken out of context to the same extent that any readymade is. It is this potentiality at the root of the algorithmic—whether constructed with film/video editorial tools or with coding—that the work of retracted cinema seeks to foreground, exploit, and even celebrate. This essay introduces a theoretical framework for appreciating this practice’s use of algorithmic procedures performed on appropriated film materials in advancing a politics and aesthetics of the non-orientable surface.

What does it mean to be, as Stanley Kwan’s title has it, Center Stage? Insofar as it’s possible to deal with the present moment—that is to say, the present pandemic moment—historically, I think that one of the most dubious and objectionable words repeatedly intoned with gravity by TV news commentators is in fact the word historic. Given an extra spin in some cases by American exceptionalism, even during a period when our former President Donald Trump has opted out of many of our accords and treaties, it is used smugly and even narcissistically yet also quite vaguely to describe us and our current experience, as if to distinguish both as being somehow superior to or on a higher plane than those who preceded us or those who will come afterwards—our supposedly ahistoric (and therefore less important) grandparents and grandchildren and what they had or will have to deal with. This is arguably little more than a futile effort to legitimize and glamorize our inertia and helplessness by asserting that the mere fact that we’re alive during an awful period automatically makes us historic or historical. Simply put, it’s our mute, passive suffering that allegedly brings significance to our troubled times, not our existential decisions.