Alternative Screens in Western Avant-Garde Cinematic Practices: Exploring Site-based rather than Sight-based Cinematic Experience

Coming from a combined architectural and media studies background, I want to draw attention to the relation between moving images and the physical, tangible environments where they are viewed by concentrating on alternative screens in Western avant-garde cinematic practices. As a part of alternative exhibition modes, alternative screens have largely been overlooked in film studies. Nevertheless, they have a long history of their own, as demonstrated in Early Cinema and avant-garde practices, and deserve close attention.

Screens are commonly understood as flat surfaces that display projected film images. A beam of light originates from the back of a room and is directed toward a flat screen at the front. Leaving aside screens that emanate light (e.g., television or computer screens), my focus lies on the physical site of projection. Alternative screens exist mainly in non-entertainment cinematic practices, where we discover numerous examples whose aesthetic experience is based on their location, spatiality, and site specificity. Thus, the specific context of the exhibition space and how the screen appears within that space will be at the center of my investigation. Such an approach foregrounds the physical space and highlights attributes such as spatiality, materiality, performance, liveness, hapticity, interactivity, immersion, diversity, and three- dimensionality – all in contrast to the conventional “flat” screen experience.

This research paper explores this under-explored “otherness” that has existed in parallel with conventional screens and delves into a site-based rather than sight-based cinematic experience. Site-specificity then becomes a condition to be tracked down, meandering as it does through a wide range of divergent avant-garde cinematic practices throughout film history. Contrary to commercial cinema’s “site-general” experience, site-specific cinema prioritizes bodily attendance in a grounded physical space. Hence, its effect on the viewer’s body must also be considered, and primarily based on a phenomenological or experiential understanding of the cinematic-site or cinematic-spatial relationships. Thus, features such as the size, scale, proportion, texture, and dimension of the arena, topographical features, traffic patterns of the space, or even seasonal characteristics of the regional climate become essential factors.