The Location of the Image: Cinematic Projection and Scale in Modernity

Early machines for the representation of movement produced in the 19th century (the phenakistoscope, the zoetrope, the flip book, etc.) involved small images that could be manipulated by hand and viewed by only one or several spectators at a time. With the development of the cinema, there is a crucial although incomplete displacement of touch by sight, materiality by abstraction–a movement toward dematerialization of the image that circulates and is exchanged in modernity. While the projection of an image on a large scale, in theaters, to a mass audience, marked a transition from the production of an illusion of movement as toy, as tangible and possessible commodity, to the spectacular forms of image production and dissemination characterizing the 20th century, that process of projection was also perceived, by the avant-garde, as a distinctly new aesthetic language, capable of dodging, in its dematerialization, the discourse of commodification. The fascination of the historical avant-garde—of Moholy-Nagy, of L?ger, of Man Ray and Duchamp—with light, reflection, and projection, can be seen as an engagement with the intensive rethinking of location and bodies in a cinematographic modernity. In the 1960s and 1970s, the filmic avant-garde, in a move deeply influenced by the historical avant-garde, resuscitated an obsession with projection and with light as medium. Andy Warhol, Anthony McCall, and the filmmakers who produced “flicker films” in the 1960s, were all concerned with the impact and effects of the fact that the cinematic image is projected. This article is an investigation of projection and its various ramifications in filmmaking practice, in psychoanalytic theory, and in a historical trajectory which traces the increasing dematerialization of images.