Unframing

Abstract

This essay examines the film/video frame variously as a technical, aesthetic, perceptual and ideological object/function via an analysis of some relevant examples of artists' film and video. Several technical functions in film and video are either overlooked or taken for granted. One of the most important of these is the frame, especially in the cinema context where it functions as an image container, a subsistent, invisible barrier or cut-off between the screen space and its surrounding darkness. Several filmmakers have tested the givenness of the framing edges - it’s called the frame but it’s really a mask - either by incorporating them into the work or by making them disappear. The strategy of incorporation, in the form of frames within frames, can generate a partial mise en abyme (Droste Effect), or gesture towards it. In William Raban’s 2’ 45”, for example, there is a pattern of frames and forms within forms, but at the same time there are variations within each framing. These variations distinguish the work from the exact replications of the Droste Effect, where a fractal-like, exact mise en abyme generates a sense of vertigo, of an endless dead-endedness, because it precludes any possibility of deviation and hence uncertainty, on which films depend for their interest. The frame is crucial to the stability that images require and the proliferation of mobile and other platforms in the internet age has done nothing to disperse it, on the contrary, so it is perhaps surprising that only a small number of filmmakers have sought to question and dissolve it. The dissolution of the frame threatens the dissolution of the image: in the works considered in this essay, forms of cinematic framing and hence of off-screen space are challenged on their own terms. The frame ceases to be a window, with the illusionistic implications of that, and its dissolution leads to it becoming more akin to the frame of a material medium like painting, where it is determined by the artist in response to the formal requirement of the picture. For although digital video technology allows aspect ratios to be freely created, the edges still function in the same way as an analogue film frame