Since 2003, a big part of Teaching and Learning Cinema’s activity has involved the re-enactment (or re-creation) of Expanded Cinema performances from the 1960s and 70s.
As artists, we have discovered that direct access to the work of our aesthetic precursors is essential for understanding, and building upon the work of the past.
However, since many Expanded Cinema events were ephemeral and situated in time and place, they do not easily lend themselves to documentation and archiving.
As a result, the works are poorly represented in art history.
Re-creating them in our own ‘here and now’ is a creative pedagogical process, in which the works become available once again for first-hand experience.
Here are some of the works we have spent time with in recent years. Click on the links for summaries of each of these projects:
Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1 (1971) – our current work-in-progress
Guy Sherwin’s Man with Mirror (1976-)
Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light (1975)
William Raban’s 2’45” (1973)
William Raban’s Breath (1974)
Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973) – (strictly speaking our work with this piece is an “enactment” not a “re-enactment”)
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In the early days of Teaching and Learning Cinema (before we used this title) we carried out some very experimental re-enactments of works by VALIE EXPORT, Takehisa Kosugi, and Annabel Nicholson. These were really groping around in the dark, but they set the scene for our more thorough recent activities.
Here’s a poster we made in 2004 describing our approach to these works.
More recently, we presented a paper at the RE-LIVE conference in Melbourne in 2009 – the paper, entitled “Re-enacting Expanded Cinema – Three Case Studies” is here.
In 2012, a chapter Lucas wrote about our re-enactment of Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light (1975) was published in the book Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History – more info here.
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