Justin Remes

Absence has played a crucial role in the history of avant-garde aesthetics, from the blank canvases of Robert Rauschenberg to Yves Klein’s invisible paintings, from the “silent” music of John Cage to Samuel Beckett’s minimalist theater. Yet little attention has been given to the important role of absence in cinema. In the first book to focus on cinematic absence, Justin Remes demonstrates how omissions of expected elements can spur viewers to interpret and understand the nature of film in new ways.

While most film criticism focuses on what is present, such as images on the screen and music and dialogue on the soundtrack, Remes contends that what is missing is an essential part of the cinematic experience. He examines films without images―such as Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1930), a montage of sounds recorded in Berlin―and films without sound―such as Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959), which documents the birth of the filmmaker’s first child. He also examines found footage films that erase elements from preexisting films such as Naomi Uman’s removed (1999), which uses nail polish and bleach to blot out all the women from a pornographic film, and Martin Arnold’s Deanimated (2002), which digitally eliminates images and sounds from a Bela Lugosi B movie. Remes maps out the effects and significations of filmic voids while grappling with their implications for film theory. Through a careful analysis of a broad array of avant-garde works, Absence in Cinema reveals that films must be understood not only in terms of what they show but also what they withhold.

Conducting the first comprehensive study of films that do not move, Justin Remes challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation. Reading experimental films such as Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), the Fluxus work Disappearing Music for Face (1965), Michael Snow's So Is This (1982), and Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), he shows how motionless films defiantly showcase the static while collapsing the boundaries between cinema, photography, painting, and literature.

Analyzing four categories of static film--furniture films, designed to be viewed partially or distractedly; protracted films, which use extremely slow motion to impress stasis; textual films, which foreground the static display of letters and written words; and monochrome films, which display a field of monochrome color as their image--Remes maps the interrelations between movement, stillness, and duration and their complication of cinema's conventional function and effects. Arguing all films unfold in time, he suggests duration is more fundamental to cinema than motion, initiating fresh inquiries into film's manipulation of temporality, from rigidly structured works to those with more ambiguous and open-ended frameworks. Remes's discussion integrates the writings of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Tom Gunning, Rudolf Arnheim, Raymond Bellour, and Noel Carroll and will appeal to students of film theory, experimental cinema, intermedia studies, and aesthetics.

This essay analyzes Joseph Cornell’s landmark found footage film Rose Hobart (1936) by exploring the filmmaker’s relationship to Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and the Surrealist movement. Just as Rose Hobart is composed entirely of excerpts from pre-existing films, this work of scholarship is composed entirely of language from pre-existing texts. Quotations that appear on the left-hand side of the page accurately represent the arguments made by the authors being cited. Indented quotations, however, are “remixes” of this source material, many of which distort or subvert the original meaning. By emulating the formal strategies of Cornell’s found footage cinema, I attempt to explore what makes a film—or a work of scholarship—original.

Discussions of “silent cinema” have generally focused on films made during the silent era (1894–1929). Even after the spread of synchronized sound, however, several experimental filmmakers created films without soundtracks, purely visual experiences that challenged cinema’s status as a multisensory medium. This article gives close attention to Stan Brakhage’s 1959 film "Window Water Baby Moving" as a way of outlining
some of the effects of cinematic silence, such as aesthetic ambiguity and a heightened awareness of cinema’s visual rhythms.

While most films use moving images as their primary currency, there are several experimental films—such as Michael Snow’s So Is This (1982)—that instead traffic in the written word. This article argues that such experiments problematize rigid conceptions of film’s ontology and instead foreground the usefulness of a Wittgensteinian approach to cinema.

In the early twentieth century, Erik Satie argued for the necessity of ‘furniture music’. Such compositions would not monopolize the audience's attention, but would instead serve as the backdrop for other experiences. This essay suggests that Satie's formulation provides a useful framework for understanding the early cinema of Andy Warhol. While films like Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964) are often conceptualized as experiments in boredom, I claim that they are best understood as furniture films, works designed to be consumed partially and distractedly in conjunction with other experiences, such as conversing, eating and drinking. Furthermore, I argue that in Warhol's cinema, the rigid and predetermined temporality of traditional motion pictures gives way to one that is open-ended and amorphous, thus paving the way for new modes of cinematic reception.

The words we use to discuss film reveal how central movement is to our understanding of the medium. We call films "movies," "moving pictures," and "motion pictures." Even the word cinema is derived from a Greek word meaning “movement.” But there are a substantial number of experimental films with little or no movement, films in which stasis predominates. Those who are interested in learning about movies that don’t move might want to check out one or more of the following works (listed in chronological order). Since experimental films are often difficult to find, I have only included works that can currently be seen in reasonably high-quality versions online. Whenever possible, I have also included links to Blu-ray and DVD versions of the films.

While almost everyone has seen avant-garde paintings by Picasso and Pollock, few have ever had the opportunity to see an avant-garde film by Buñuel or Brakhage. This post features short descriptions of ten key experimental films for those who are interested in exploring this cinematic terrain.