Leonardo

Most artists and their audiences regard the film medium as both an industrial tool, delivering distraction to the local multiplex, and an art tool, delivering big luscious moving images and sounds to the local city gallery. Except that in [End Page 352] the gallery (and apart from art celebrities such as Matthew Barney), it is not film but electronically mediated images and sounds we encounter. Some artists' engagements with technology amount to little more than changing the script and the performers. Film Art is something apart and certainly has nothing to do with art film (as I once explained at length to a customs official).

The "Phenomena" of the title emerges from the three section headings—Media, Apparatus and Aesthetics—and takes a muscular approach to discussing recent artists' approaches to the phenomena of the film medium (and a bit of video). There is no separation of description suggested by these headings as the writer moves quite freely through the polemics of issues, mainly on representation, that he and others have developed over the last 40 years.

This volume adds to the growing literature arising from the work of a group of artists centered at the London Film-makers Co-operative (LFMC). Established in 1967 to distribute the emerging underground cinema of the time, in 1969 the LFMC expanded to become a cooperative workshop, probably the first run by visual artists, to control every aspect of film production, from shooting, processing, editing and printing film to its exhibition and distribution. It embraced the technology of film in its totality without trying to mimic the practices of the television industry, which in the 1960s relied largely on 16mm and 35mm film mediums for recording purposes. While artists in other countries utilized cameras and editing gear, in London obsolete equipment from television laboratories was readily repurposed, from the inside out. It was a process more recently recognized in the academy as practice-based research, in which filmmaking, reflection, peer-group evaluation and theoretical discourse were conducted within collective and individual frameworks.

Hamlyn correctly holds that as a result of these phenomena, the films and the discourse generated by the filmmakers and the subsequent effect these had on a wider debate within the international fine art and cinema communities was significant. His contribution to the literature brings to some half dozen the book titles specifically addressing the interventions made by the British group, which included a series of public international events in London. Along with film artists from North America and Europe, the international discourse generated, defined and invigorated the mainstream cultures of visual art and cinema.

Later, in mid-1980s Britain, the LFMC would slip into an academe in flux and reemerge as a branch of the catchall subject area of media studies. Unlike earlier writers, Hamlyn is not averse to making occasional reference to mainstays of cinema studies such as Hitchcock, Coppola, Kubrick and Godard.

His focus, however, is on aspects of the analytical approach to filmic representation—the frame, the handheld camera, point-of-view—which are covered in detail but always through Hamlyn's descriptions of a selected range of the filmmakers' work. This can be characterized as a film practice that, through foregrounding the phenomena of the encounter for the viewer, actively engages perception and cognition as the means to bring the filmic experience into consciousness.

With acknowledgement of the earlier chroniclers and polemicists—Legrice and Gidal in particular—Hamlyn's approach is to record his responses to and subsequent thoughts about the filmmakers' work associated with the LFMC, either made or exhibited there, or distributed from the huge international collection of prints accumulated up to the end of the 1990s. As one of the second wave of filmmakers who began to contribute to the developing work there in the mid-1970s, Hamlyn was well placed to view critically the earlier work and assess the later and subsequent work as it passed though the various stages of emergence. This process is by no means evenhanded and does not pretend to objectivity. It has the style of a journal or an artist/teacher's notes of encounters with "the phenomena."

In the opening pages the lines of demarcation are clearly drawn—the "integrity of a work's original medium," the "self-effacing machines" that are video projectors and the "sleights of hand attributable to digital trickery." Hamlyn goes on: "DVD is a kind of revenge of technocracy on creative approaches which examine the specificity of the medium" (p. 14). Clinging to the fetishistic tendencies of the late modernists, he has a greater tendency to rush in with ill-considered and shaded paranoid judgments that fail to address the central ontological issues involved—DVD is indeed a specific medium, now being explored widely by artists around the world, which in the same way as so many of the films made in the 1960s and 1970s, is only failed by the artist's inability to recognize that specificity and thus the appropriate creative approach. While technology is by no means neutral, neither is the artist's role in all this.

Film, video or digital media used simply as a convenient delivery means for representational forms will continue reproducing the cultural formations that much of the work made by these film artists critiques, which includes Hamlyn both as writer and filmmaker. To assume DVD is simply another transparent carrier is to overlook the obvious. It may not have the seriality of dust, dirt and tape dropout but it certainly has a different set of relational possibilities worthy of investigation. Later, virtual reality researchers also come in for a drubbing from Hamlyn, continuing what is only blind vitriol, there being no discussion. Too often he leaves rhetorical questions at the end of sections that purport to address contemporary developments within digital culture. If the writer's declared interest is in film art and to a lesser extent video art, why bother with loose jibing at more recent developments in the moving image field of arts practice?

Experiments with installational forms of film exhibition that acknowledged the apparatus as part of the "imposing presence" of the medium are well covered in this account. Expanded cinema was an area of particular investigation by the London filmmakers and the documentation gathered here might well be the only remaining vestiges of a truly ephemeral stage in the larger project.

The general index does not reveal any reference to Husserl et al., so anyone expecting phenomenology to be considered in the context of this title will be disappointed. There is a useful index of the films cited in the text. Much of Hamlyn's descriptions of the films, how they look and how they work encourages a desire to experience the films firsthand, and this list will make requesting a film from the distributor much easier. In most cases, since the demise of the LFMC and the relocation of its distribution collection, the Lux Holding Company in London will be able to respond to requests. [End Page 353]