The History We Need
Malcolm Le Grice • 23.09.2026
Empire (1964)
The underlying thesis of a historical construction not only affects the ordering of facts but also the articulation of what constitutes the facts themselves. In addition a historical formulation has a different function for the involved practitioner in a field than for the less involved 'general public'. For that nebulous 'general public' (in whose name so many decisions are made) a historical exhibition like 'Film as Film', as well as drawing attention to a particular field of past activity also validates those current practices which derive from them — providing them with historical credentials. In effect, whilst acurrent practice is evidently determined by its historical relationship, definition of a structure for this causality is a constructive production very much parallel to the practice itself. It is only when the historical enterprise becomes an aspect of defining and analysing the determinants of current practice that it begins to have a real function for the involved practitioner. Unfortunately, the basic level of public awareness in the area covered by 'Film as Film' is such that the didactic intention has played the major part in defining the direction of the exhibition. That this may be seen as inevitable does not remove the need for a critique and this article affords me the luxury of making one from the standpoint of the involved practitioner. Bearing in mind that the 'we' of the title may be no more that a conceit which disguises an ''I'' , it symbolizes an attempt to be more than idiosyncratic. The 'we' addressed is broadly the involved practitioner, film-maker or theorist so committed as to be illiberal about films or their presentation.'The History We Need' implies a recognition that a neutral and inclusive history is broadly impossible and that the historical enterprise should be aimed at aiding the development of contemorary practice. Whilst clearly given a didactic framework, the involved practitioner will polemicize inclusions or exclusions, recognising how this serves promotion and suppression. On the other hand, even outside the polemical motive, selection and suppression is inevitable, implying no question of falsification but one of evaluation and priorities.
One of the problems with the current exhibition is the difficulty of defining its underlying thesis. This difficulty has increased with the expansion of the exhibition through a committee structure for the London presentation. In its original form, being largely conceived by Birgit Heinz and Wulf Herzogenrath and aimed at a particular situation in Germany, some of its underlying principles were more readily discerned. Even then, expediences, like limited availability and the presentability of works in the art gallery affected the selection, tending to obscure some principles. Other inclusions, particularly the extent of attention to the American West Coast abstract films, signalled unresolved and, in the context of the exhibition, seemingly unproblematic contradictions.
Before attempting to unravel some of the fundamental assumptions which underlie 'Film as Film', I should point out that the critique is simultaneously a self-critique. This exhibition was initiated as one stage in a series of publications and exhibitions which have developed and refined the concepts it embodies. My own writing, in particular Abstract Film and Beyond, has formed a part of that development. Its historical view is very similar to that which underlies 'Film as Film'. My own book is based on many of the same fundamental assumptions, makes the same suppressions for similar reasons and fails to resolve similar contradictions.
Two fundamentals for the cultural enterprise represented by this exhibition can be defined by tracing a negative and positive expression. Negatively, it is contained in the rejection of what constitutes the mainstream of commercial narrative cinema. Positively it is the prog-ressive exploration of the potentialities of the medium in-it-own-terms. The consistency of the positive expression with the basis of modernism is evident — 'Painting as Painting', 'Sculpture as Sculpture', 'Art for Art'— a general set of notions designating special and particular qualities to the medium in question. Thus the consistent tendency in this framework to talk of 'Film', the material, rather than 'Cinema' which has come to mean the form ofthe dominant commercial film institution. The negative and positive expressions are in a sense axes which have simultaneously motivated the actual practice. In general it would be tempting to argue that the negative expression has been primarily a feature of theoretical pronouncements and critical writing supporting the practice, which, on the other hand, has attempted to seek a non-narrative rather than anti-narrative cinematic form. But already some caution must be introduced on the degree to which negation functions as a constructive principle within art work. More at issue is the problem of defining what is being rejected in the general opposition to narrative cinema.
'At first look the cinema, born only a few years ago, may seem to be Futurist already, lacking a past and free from traditions. Actually, by appearing in the guise of at heatre without words, it has inherited all the most traditional sweepings of the literary theatre. Consequently, everything we have said and done about the stage applies to cinema. Our action is legitimate and necessary in so far as the cinema up to now has been and tends to remain profoundly passeist . . .' 1916, The Futurist Cinema.
'The film drama is the opium of the masses'. 1920, Dziga Vertov.
'All current cinema is romatic, literary, historical, expressionist, etc.' 1926, Fernand Leger.
'Narrative is an illusionistic procedure, manipulatory, mystificatory, repressive.' 1971, Peter Gidal.
These few quotations briefly illustrate what has been acontinuing, consistent and explicit rejection of the dominant narrative cinema. On the one hand, this rejection is of the commercial cinema institution with its constriction of independent experiment and radical concept by the strangle-hold high finance has on production, publicity and the presentation system — a deep cultural control. On the other hand, and unclearly differentiated from it, it is the rejection of the forms and devices of narrative — identification with characters, story structure extending to a more general rejection of work whose images are broadly 'expressionist' or 'symbolic'. That the dominant cinema has grown up on the basis of the forms of identificatory narrative indicates a correspondence between them and the social effects desired (consciously or otherwise), by that sector of society controlling its finance.
Within the history represented by 'Film as Film' and Abstract Film and Beyond, the most obvious first level of exclusion is based on the rejection of works made within the dominant cinema framework. It has been seen as confusing to discuss work like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or Gance's Napoleon for example even though aspects of certain films from this context might relate to the motives of 'Film as Film'. But much more problematic has been the definition of the borderline of exclusion of films within the experimental area whose makers also reject the com-mercial cinema institution. (Some film-makers who are otherwise considered as central to the history even have works excluded if in some way they suggest a return to 'narrativity'.) For example, whilst Man Ray's first two films, ''Retour a la raison'' and ''Emak Bakia'' are both clearly 'in', I have not been alone in the impulse to reject his subsequent films as a retrogression. Man Ray's case illus-trates this borderline which represents the basis of the major and most contentious exclusion made by this version of experimental film history. Though some of theseworks are included in the film programme of the London show, whose selection has been on more liberal and inclusive lines, the surrealist, mythic and broadly symbolist work from the Bunuel-Dali collaborations on ''Un chien andalou'' and ''L'age d'or'', Dulac's ''Coquille et le clergyman'', through much of the mainstream of the American Underground film, like Maya Deren, Ron Rice, Jack Smith, Gregory Markopoulos, Kenneth Anger and so on has been placed outside this historical concept. Most of the work in this direction rejects the dominant cinema institution but for the concept of this history does not sufficiently reject its forms. Whilst in my book I explained this exclusion primarily on the basis of scope, it now demands fuller consideration, resting on the need for a better articulation of the distinctions within the broad category of 'narrativity'.
If this history is seen as the history of a certain contemporary practice, loosely designated the 'formal' or 'structural' film (in other words assuming the validity of a certain state of current work and tracing its precursors, the history of its ideas), then the loosely defined surrealist, symbolist axis is difficult to integrate. But its oversimplified exclusion on the basis of narrativity masks many issues within the work which is included. As well as the issues of spectator 'identification' to which I shall return, the broadly symbolic work initiates consideration of the mechanisms of psychological association as it functions in the representational image. A very large proportion of so called 'formal' and 'structural' film makes use of representational imagery. The psychological signification in these films needs attention and in this respect the critical tradition which has emerged along the symbolist axis is a necessary reference. Invariably, the issues of signification within the image of much 'formal' work is masked by attention to the formal maneouvres. Whether reference to the surrealist, symbolist tradition would function to refine further exlusions, rather than include films from this axis is not to be pre-judged, but if there is a distinction in kind to be made between the image signification in the 'formal' film and the surrealist/symbolist work then it needs clarification.
Image signification is not a problem confined to films which make use of representational imagery. Even inextreme non-representational art, the production of the image and its subsequent 'received' meaning is affected by the mechanisms of psychological association. The image, however abstract, is read associatively and signifies, produces and takes on meaning. Furthermore, and most important in 'formal' cinema, it must be understood that association and signification are not processes of meaning confined to the constituent images, representational or abstract, but belong also to the formal manoeuvres themselves.
What is designated form or structure in film is primarily related to the pattern of its temporal construction. Each work is a particular instance of temporal pattern, having likenesses to, and differences from, other instances of form. It, like the image, is subject to the mechanisms of association and, by its instances of difference, signifies. Rejection of symbolist/surrealist practice does not eliminate the issues of signification from 'formal' cinema but may encourage a false assumption in the practice that it does.
Through attention to the temporal manoeuvres (form) in cinema we may clarify some of the issues in the rejection of narrative. Rejection of the commercial cinema institution as repressive through vicarious satisfaction has carried over to a general rejection of the narrative forms through which it functions. In the film culture represented by 'Film as Film' the rejection of narrative structure might be simply interpreted as the basis of a search for 'new' form, but I think it is more properly understood as primarily motivated by rejection of the social function associated with it. A number of recent works by film-makers who come clearly out of the culture represented by 'Film as Film', have to one degree or another worked in areas which have related to the mechanisms associated with narrative. That ''Rameau's Nephew'' by Michael Snow, or my own ''Blackbird Descending (Tense Alignment)'', for example, might be seen as some 'return to narrative' is, in general, false. At the same time these films and works by Hammond like ''Some Friends'' or Gidal's ''Condition of lllusion'' tend to problematize, rather than simply oppose, some of the mechanisms to be found in narrative film.
Work in this direction demands a more refined definition of narrative because implicit is the question 'are all aspects of narrative irrevocably embroiled with the repressive social function it has come to serve?'. This development in the practice has been accompanied by an emerging theoretical concern focusing on the psychological formations in the activity of the film's spectator rather than on the intentions or psychology of the maker. This is particularly true of the film-makers like Hammond, Gidal, Dunford and myself who, more or less from the outset of our film work, have couched the issues of structure primarily in terms of the spectator's act of structuring. Recent theoretical work from another direction, stemming mainly from Christian Metz's 'Imaginary Signifier' article, indicates that some awareness of this problem exists outside the limits of 'structural/materialist' film theory. This theoretical direction is concerned to focus on fundamental psychological strategies involved in the process of identification. Many questions are raised by this radical change of focus from the issues of film structure embedded in the concerns of filmmaking to that of filmviewing. For example, if, by implication, certain processes of structuring meaning or unconscious reaction are either fundamental or very deeply embedded by the culture in the psyche how can the posture of diametric opposition dialecticise these processes? A continued discussion of these particular problems is outside the scope of this article, but it indicates some possibility of distinguishing between the processes of identification with portrayed characters, identification with the film's view-point on the scene via the camera on one hand, and the consequential structures of narrative on the other.
In the simplest sense, narrative is the story, it is the story told in the act of narration. A narrative represents a temporal chain of occurrences, a thread of causality. The narrative is not the events themselves, but a representation of events. It is a method of representing consequential temporality by way of a temporal presentation— the narration. A sophisticated narration may present the narrative in a sequence which does not represent the events in a simple sequential correspondence (making use of conventions like flash-back for instance), but whatever the complexity, one temporality is used to represent another. A narrative may represent a series of events which have taken place (in the world) or it may represent, from fragments of the possible, events which never have, nor will take place — a fiction. The former, based on ''fact'', is not strictly a fiction, though as a narrative, with its inevitable linear ordering, its selected representation of causality is not simply factual. The narrative form within ''documentary'' cinema raises its own particular questions of veracity and the relationship between document and documentary is of particular importance to film, based as itis in the mechanical recording of photography. In a prac-tical sense, the culture represented by this exhibition raises the general question of the relationship of a presentation's sequence to the implications of meaning brought about by that sequence.
Though various experiments have been made in presenting films without sequential projection, it is none the less basic in general to film that through projection film controls presentation sequence — one section inevitably precedes another. In the history of the search for non-narrative structure, the notion of simultaneity represents the earliest alternative to developmental narrative. As in aspects of Dziga Vertov's ''Man with a Movie Camera'', for example some of the sequential presentation does notimply that the events depicted took place sequentially as a consequence of each other, they are rather to be read ascontinuing independently at-the-same-time, related by some thematic similarity. The dissolution of consequential relationship in the narrative sense makes possible various systems of connective relationships between film images or sequences, analogous in a sense to collage as opposed to conventional story montage. These concepts attempt to establish a kind of a-temporality within the temporal presentation of the film. Many of the formal developments which have occurred with this history, including Brakhage's ''Dog Star Man'' and Kren's development of editing systems on mathematical principles stem from the concept of a-temporal montage.
Another direction which has initiated alternatives to narrative form comes from stress on the presentation sequence itself, mainly by way of repetition devices. This work, traceable back to Leger's ''Ballet Mecanique'', subverts temporal representation by containing the consequentiality of image/shot transformations within the film itself. Or, if there are no transformations within the film then the transformations in perception or response inthe spectator become central.
An allied direction, but leading to other conceptual problems, is that of extremely minimal change, not necessarily involving repetition. This direction mainly emerges from Andy Warhol's early films, like ''Empire'' and ''Sleep'', drawing attention to the material passage of time in the presentation. Though there are works which follow Warhol which concentrate on duration without use of a camera, when based in photographic representation the material durational aspect becomes linked to those problems surrounding the notion of document.
La Coquille et le Clergyman (1927)
Within the specific limits of the mechanism, the photograph as a mechanical trace of particular aspects of reality has veracity as a document — evidence within definable limits. With particular conditions of unbroken durational recording, cinephotography carries similar implications and problematics. This has little to do with 'documentary', which by manipulations at the level of sequential reconstruction breaks any possibility of durational veracity. Work which is an extreme of photographic, durational representation in fact subverts temporal representation by a change in terms. This involves the need to distinguish between representation and recording. When the cinephotographic makes its specificity evident within the work the record is no longer read in its secondary sense as narrative representation but as temporal document. It is outside the present scope to pursue the implications of this difference and the conditions necessary within a film's structure to resist the reading of 'record' as 'representation'. My further reference to cinematic rep-resentation carries the implication that this terminology is inadequately resolved.
It is evidently possible to pursue a film practice which is not based in photographic 'representation' (recording) but the historical development of the machinery is largely predicated on this function. The photocinematic recordingis clearly a primary level of representation in cinema, though through the practice of editing this level of representation is not its primary ''narrative'' means. Literature shows that a narrative representation is possible without the facsimile representation afforded by cinephotography— words bear no resemblance to those objects to which they refer. As we have seen it is possible for films which are representational at the level of their images to be non-narrative at the level of their temporal structure. Conversely a film which is non-representational at the level of image may be quite justifiably interpreted as narrative at the level of temporal representation if its structure is readable anthropomorphically.
The resistance to anthropomorphism, which may be seen as a more general expression, and includes within it the resistance to narrative, is similarly a problematic enterprise again raising issues of psychological mechanisms of interpretation and the function of resistance to them. Gidal has pronounced the need to resist and frustrate anthropomorphic interpretation in general; considering the fact that his films are representational in the special sense of photographic recording, this can be interpreted as a tactic to dialecticize what would otherwise be assumed as inevitable (that the human spectator integrates all experience in human terms). Clearly the dominant cinema brings up no problem of this kind, it is anthropomorphic with no resistance at any level — its pictorial representation matching the identificatory desire of the spectator within the narrative — there is no conflict of interpretation, no dialecticization. Whatever the adequacy of theorization of this issue, in one form or another, the opposition to representation in painting, the resistance in music to classical (and because of the physics of the ear itc an be argued, natural) harmony, can be seen as a thread of opposition to anthropomorphic interpretation in modern art.
From the positive axis of the fundamentals underlying 'Film as Film', the exploration of the medium in-its-own-terms, the exhibition demonstrates how the earliest approaches to this concept came through the application of the abstract developments in painting to film. I have argued that this early direction, rather than setting the terms for film as an autonomous art practice tended to replace the dominance of literature and theatre over cinematic form by that of painting and music. I have further argued that a more appropriate basis can be found in work which relates itself to the photocinematic aspect of the medium rather than its suppression (thus the emphasis given to Leger and Man Ray's first two works and the photographic contribution of Moholy-Nagy). Paradoxically, the concept of appropriateness in film re-introduces issues of representation that in painting itserved to resist.
Whilst my general rejection of the abstract film tradition from Fischinger to the American West Coast is primarily based on the dominance of these painterly concepts in film, it does not invalidate the possibility of a cinematic form with no basis in photography. Unless anargument can be made in general against the temporal, aural abstraction — music, then no argument can be made against the possibility of its visual equivalent.
At a more fundamental level, the underlying assumption that a practice would seek autonomy is problematic. This assumption implicit in 'Film as Film', inevitably draws all those arguments which can be brought against modernism. In an historical sense, there is no doubt that tendencies which were at work in other arts are reflected in the attempts to define an art practice intrinsically cinematic. As in painting this process has concerned itself progressively with an exploration based on the materials and properties which can be defined as 'belonging to the medium'. Unfortunately the rhetoric of this enterprise has tended to reflect an essentialism — pure painting, pure film — to encourage tautologies like painting is painting, film is film and to become attached to phenomenalism in away which assumes a kind of unmediated direct response leading to expressions like: 'the work is just itself, an object'. However, this is more an issue of faulty theorization than faulty practice. In effect, the attempt to determine the intrinsics of a medium is always in one sense or another a relativist and historically placed activity. Any assumption that absolute irreducible essences canbe uncovered in the enterprise is not borne out by its practice, the very definition of seeming fundamentals is always open to historical redefinition. The possibility that an autonomous film practice can be postulated already rests on certain historical conditions. The technological development of the materials and machinery is a pre-requisite, but the form which this technology takes is already enmeshed with historical pre-conditions of its social function and psychological determinants. It is impossible to separate the materials and the practice towhich it is attached. It is in this sense that any engagement with the medium becomes a signifying practice within the historical framework. At the same time, if seen in a relativist sense, aesthetic strategies which suppress, in one form or another, current significations make possible manipulations leading to new meaning (so called 'work on the signifier').
Instead of treating the attention to the photocinematic basis of film or any other definable aspects of its machinery or materials in the terms of fundamentals or essences of cinema, they should be considered instead as pre-dominant problematics of the medium in its historical placement and signification. The terms in which this issue is theorized is important not only for an understanding of the practice which has taken place, but also as the basis fora critique. The critique affects the developing practice. For example certain concerns on the one hand with the cinematic materials and machinery and with exploration of a variety of non-narrative structures, by becoming critically dissociated from their historical signification, can become simply recuperable formalist exercises. However, a formalist critique of some developments within the 'Film as Film' direction should not be made without consideration of the critical institution within which it is made. It must be in productive rather than destructive terms lest it merely assists the dominance of dominant cinema by weakening the only real cultural alternative.
Though still fragile and largely unrecognized, the cinematic development represented by 'Film as Film' is a substantial history. It has already begun some definition within its own terms, but the didactic necessity in its presentation inhibits this definition as it is veered towards polemics. This tendency of the committed to polemicise is in its turn counteracted by a tendency of liberal inclusive ness, a classical balancing of viewpoints. The major historical problem for the involved practitioner is the definition of the issues. Without stressing my own formulation of the most demanding current problems, in the course of this brief outline, I have indicated where I think some might be taken up.
So the 'history we need' is more a question of the manner and function of the enterprise than a polemical assertion of its constituents. To function as it should towards the critical development of current practice it needs to begin from a more limited theoretical definition of the problems and be designed as an operation to elucidate them rather than as an exhibition to present a particular construction.
Neither the current institution surrounding cinema nor that related to the presentation of the plastic arts has forms which suit such a concept of presentation.
