![]() 6 For Slide Movie the artist cut a 35 mm filmstrip into its single frames and fixed them into slide frames. ![]() Sengmüller declares the piece to be in the spirit of “fictive media archeology”, and its aim is “to invent things that might have existed earlier but didn’t, because they hadn’t been invented then”. Slide Movie is an installation in which a film projector is replaced by a slide projector. A particularly striking example is Slide Movie (2007) by the Austrian artist Gebhard Sengmüller. Retrograde remediation has gained new relevance in the digital age and covers a wide range of artistic practices and techniques. Unlike Levi’s “Cinema by Other Means”, which uses examples from both the historical and the post-war avant-garde, my article will pose the question of what the translation of cinema into “older”, non-cinematic media means in our contemporary media constellation where cross-media processes have become standard fare. Just like the film apparatus itself, it claims to be a techno-libidinal machine, set in motion by desire, and thus subsumes the idea of cinema. As Levi points out, Boully’s hand-drawn sketch does not just refer to cinema in a general manner, it is related to it in structural terms. ![]() Instead of looking for the old in the new (as Bolter and Grusin do), Boully seeks the new in the old. 5 Boully’s diagram from “Ixion” is perfectly suited indeed to fit this particular version of remediation. 3 Expanding on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s oft-quoted concept of “remediation”, 4 referring to the formal logic by which older media (such as film) are integrated into newer ones (such as television), Levi aptly calls this rematerialization of cinema into materials other than cinema’s original constituents “retrograde remediation”. As Levi explains, he is not interested in artworks made under the influence of, or referring to, the cinema but “in a fairly exact set of structural relations inspired by the workings of the film apparatus itself”. 2 This term focuses on ways in which aspects of a more recent medium, in this case film, are assimilated by an older and non-cinematic medium, such as still photography, drawing, writing, sculpture, or performance. 1īoully’s fantasy, materialized in a diagram/drawing of a chariot driven by desire serves Pavle Levi as one example to illustrate his concept of “cinema by other means”. This is how the four eagles lift the carriage into the clouds. The male cannot catch up with the female for his chain is too short. When I open their cages, the female rushes out fleeing the male. Something similar happens with the other pair of eagles. Wanting to free themselves by force, they lift the entire apparatus off ground with the power of their wings. However, they cannot reach the meat because they are chained to the cabin. If I decide to fly, I step inside the cabin, open the cages, and here’s what happens: the male and the female in the front cage are sexually satisfied, but they are hungry they both fly toward the platform to which some fresh meat is attached. In the middle cage, above the cabin, is a female. In the big front cage, are a male and a female eagle. It is flown by eagles, who are at first kept inside their cages. The heroine of the book describes in detail how this contraption functions: In his prose poem Ixion (1926) Belgrade Surrealist Monny de Boully draws a detailed diagram of a fantastic machine, namely an air-carriage, powered by “sexually starved eagles”.
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