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.. Stephen Barber, Performance Projections: Film and the Body in Action.
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London: Reaktion Books, 2014, 256 pp.
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.. LUCY FIFE DONALDSON
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.. ‘Interdisciplinary’ persists as a watchword in academia, typically sought
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.. in research strategies, by funding bodies and interview panels. It is
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.. something desired for both genuine and perhaps more cynical reasons,
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but often obfuscated by the very institutional nature of the university.
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.. Stephen Barber announces early on that Performance Projections: Film
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.. and the Body in Action is concerned with the multiplicity of
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.. interconnections between performance and film, and thereafter he is
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.. absolutely focused on expressing the variety and complexity of their
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.. interweaving. The book is broad-ranging and ambitiously far-reaching in
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.. its scope, a genuine and impressive interdisciplinary undertaking that
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.. moves from performance art to clandestine musical performance, from
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Eadweard Muybridge’s precinematic experiments to smartphone footage
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.. of the Occupy movement, from 1930s Berlin to 1970s Japan. Barber’s
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.. perspectives on the intersections of performance, film and space combine
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.. aesthetics, politics, history and technology. Chapters focus on in-between
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.. sites of performance (rooftops, courtyards, underground); the multiple
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.. surfaces of and marks made by/on the body; riot and protest
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.. performance; and the impact of digital media. As a result the connections
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.. and possibilities offered go far beyond film and performance; the threads
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of the book’s interests link with the work of many varied disciplinary
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.. fields, such as urban landscapes (especially representations and histories
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.. of Berlin), political activism and cultural memory. Of course the study of
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.. film is in many ways inherently interdisciplinary, and in making my way
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.. through Performance Projections I was keenly reminded of Raymond
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.. Durgnat’s expression of cinema as a ‘Mongrel muse’, ‘a potpourri of art
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.. forms, sharing elements in common with each, but weaving them into a
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..

503 Screen 57:4 Winter 2016

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
 ...
1 Raymond Durgnat, Films and ..
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pattern of its own’.1 A determinedly interdisciplinary study such as this
Feelings (London: Faber and Faber, ..
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certainly brings out the richness of film’s connectiveness, reminding the
1967), p. 19. ..
.. reader of its deep entanglements in other artistic mediums and routes of
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.. inquiry, but for me there is also a question hovering over the book
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.. concerning the loss of specificity that the spread of such an approach
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.. might entail.
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.. In his desire for Performance Projections to explore the intersections,
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.. interzones and residues of connections between performance, space and
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film, and to capture their liminal, multiple and fragmented qualities,
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Barber situates the study as free-flowing and loose, as opposed to to an

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.. argument bound by categorization. This makes the book potentially both
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.. a liberating experience, wherein the reader’s path flows back and forth
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.. through time, space and artistic expression, and one in which we are
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.. unmoored from the concerns of observing the histories and directions of
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.. scholarship. Perhaps this betrays the anxieties of a newer contributor to
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.. the field, but I found it somewhat disconcerting that certain statements
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passed by without acknowledgement of their connection to seminal and
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similar articulations. For example, the absence of Béla Balazs during
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attention to the human face as ‘the concentrated corporeal site’ (p. 122),
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.. or of André Bazin in a passage concerning the ontological capacity of
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.. film to capture and reanimate the body: ‘Sequences of images, carried
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.. either by celluloid or pixels, hold and revivify the human body in the
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.. performance of its gestures and acts; in that sense, they constitute the
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.. contraries of photographic images, which still and petrify’ (p. 205). This
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is not to say that there should be an enormous checklist of prescribed
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references that we are all bound to make, but rather to express unease
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.. with work that seems at a remove from foundational contexts. It is
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.. equally not to imply that the book is unstructured, for there are clear
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.. threads and accumulations in the argument, with key figures (Muybridge,
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.. the Skladanowsky brothers and Antonin Artaud), places (Berlin
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.. courtyards, underground city spaces) and films/performances (Werner
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.. Herzog’s Strosek [1977], Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty [1970], Nagisa
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Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief [1969]) providing guiding through-
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lines that periodically merge and reemerge.
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A further issue arises with the question of specificity, and one of
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.. primary interest to Screen, which is that of how ‘film’ is being used. In
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.. spanning the range that he does, from the prehistory of cinema to our
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.. most contemporary moment, Barber follows developments of form and
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.. use through a range of technologies (including celluloid, GDR
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reviews

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.. surveillance equipment, smartphones and digital projection). As other
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theorists have done throughout the history of the medium, he engages
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with the capacity of film to transform and recompose, to capture and
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intensify, to record and trace, at one point highlighting ‘the film image as
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.. the pre-eminent, formative medium across a century or more for the
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.. perception of the human body and its movements, and on the digital
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.. image as exerting both a renewal and obliteration of film, in its rapport
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.. with the human eye’ (p. 8). While there is no doubt that the book

504 Screen 57:4 Winter 2016
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 ...
..
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elaborates an almost dizzying range of modes of interconnection between
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film and performance, a journey which itself tells us a great deal about
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.. the many different ways that film may engage with the body, there is at
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.. the same time a lack of medium specificity from within which different
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.. media forms are made invisible. In a study of performance art, I was
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.. surprised by the lack of attention to the particularities of video as a
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.. format (the somatic potential of which has been expressed by authors
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2 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the ..
.. such as Laura Marks)2 and by the absence of attention to television in
Film: Intercultural Cinema, ...
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accounts of the recording of iconic revolutionary gestures of the 1980s
Embodiment, and the Senses ..
(Durham, NC: Duke University ..
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(the famous image from Tiananmen Square is connected to the BBC

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Press, 2000). .. news crew who filmed it, as well as its transmission across the world).
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.. The question of medium-specificity is addressed, however, through the
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.. intersection of film and performance, as Part I positions ‘film’s
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.. recording-medium status as an integral ally of performance’ (pp. 8–9),
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.. with performance being ‘always made present in space by the
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.. corporeality that also allows it to be recorded in images’ (p. 8). There is
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strong potential for Performance Projections to further the depth of
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performance studies in film, in its positioning of the cultural and political
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stakes of filmed performance – far from the typical issues of stardom and
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.. industry and in dialogue with the performativity of documentary and
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.. protest – and the dynamic referents of performance art to differently
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.. conceptualize the powers of gesture and corporeality. Towards the end of
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.. the book, Barber makes a series of defining statements, which are worth
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.. quoting here:
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... Films of performances are not documents. Films of performances are
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.. not performances. Films of performance form projections,
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.. predominantly of performance’s corporeality and its acts. Films of
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performance form transformations of performance, by film. Films of
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performance can constitute art works, or discarded detritus, or both
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together. Films of performance can activate and extend ocular
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capacities and propel the eye into a new domain. (p. 247)
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The notions of transformation and corporeality, and of film and
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performance being bound by their simultaneity of materiality and
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immateriality, certainly speak to ways in which such a scope of enquiry
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.. might illuminate the interconnectedness of both. At the same time, it is
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.. perhaps surprising that the book insists on vision and an ocular
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.. engagement with film, and that on the whole the book does not extend its
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.. concern with corporeality to the range of sensory impressions that the
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.. body engages, or the ways in which our bodies, and not just our eyes,
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might be activated and extended by these filmed performances.
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For me, the excitement of attending to performance is in the intensity
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of engaging with the materiality of the body, its surfaces, details of
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.. expression and movement, the ways in which it negotiates space and
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.. duration. Performance Projections is at its best when it explores and
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.. traces moments of performances: in Part II, for example, a line is drawn
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.. through performative expressions occurring in the courtyard spaces of

505 Screen 57:4 Winter 2016
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 ...
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Berlin, from Berlin Alexanderplatz (Phil Jutzi, 1931) and Kuhle Wampe
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(Empty-Belly Camp, 1932) to Strosek and the final performances of
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.. Bruno Schleinstein and concerts of the GDR punk scene in the late 1970s
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.. and early 1980s. In contrast to such deft and fascinating engagements
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.. with an array of detailed movements and projections of the filmed body,
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.. significant portions of the book’s arguments are made without the
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.. intensities of such detail. The tension between the general and the detail
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.. seems to me to bring us back to the question of specificity, and the
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elation of making bold statements rather than being bound by
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categorization and orientation.

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.. doi:10.1093/screen/hjw048
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.. André Gaudreault and Phillipe Marion, The End of Cinema? A Medium in
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.. Crisis in the Digital Age. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015,
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256 pp.
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BRIAN R. JACOBSON
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In their new book, The End of Cinema?, André Gaudreault and Philippe
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Marion propose a concept, the ‘animage’, designed to clear the
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.. conceptual chaos of cinema’s current ‘crisis’. The word has a complex
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.. constitution. In the most straightforward sense it evokes animation’s
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.. central role in the authors’ reconceptualization of the cinematic image,
... which builds on Lev Manovich’s argument, in The Language of New
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.. Media, that computer graphics had brought animation back from the
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1 Lev Manovich, The Language of ..
.. margins to the centre of cinematic practice.1 Gaudreault and Marion
New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT ..
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extend this claim to argue that cinema might be best understood as a
Press, 2001), p. 300. ..
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subset of a longer history of animation itself, a history running roughly
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.. from Emile Reynaud’s painted ‘films’ to Max Fleischer and the
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.. Rotoscope, and from the Belgian cartoonist Hergé to Spielberg’s
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.. motion-captured Hergé adaptation, The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
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... As with most of this book’s neologisms, however, the ‘animage’ is
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.. more complicated than that. The prefix an–, Gaudreault and Marion
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.. explain, also underscores the removal of film and its essence from the
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.. digital image. The latter is precisely not film but rather ‘an animated
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image that is already no longer an image’, the image-ness having been
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removed with the film (p. 175). In place of film and its ontological basis
.. in photographic realism, the image’s new animus (in the sense of
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.. motivation, from the Latin for ‘spirit’) retains the anima (‘soul’) of the
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filmed image, ‘while avoiding its constraints’ (p. 174).
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.. Reading about the animage, I could not help but think of Mary
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.. Poppins. Who better to explain the ins and outs of a philological history
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.. of cinematic crises – a history driven all along, it turns out, by
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.. animation – than the singing heroine of Robert Stevenson’s part
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.. live-action, part animated ‘film’ of 1964? The film highlights the
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.. convergence of these two ‘cultural series’, film and animation, and

506 Screen 57:4 Winter 2016
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