“The Unfinished Film”
At the heart of this exhibition is a 1,100-square-foot cinematheque where, every day at 3 PM, rarely screened prints of films and working fragments by auteurs ranging from Sergei Eisenstein and Maya Deren to David Gatten are projected. Curator Thomas Beard’s monthlong invitation to this experience pays credence to—in the words of Hollis Frampton, whose Magellan, 1969–80, anchors the program—“the temporal plasticity proper to an art that subsists at once within the colliding modes of memory, absolute ‘presentness,’ and anticipation.”
Among the ephemera displayed are Monsieur Phot (seen through the stereoscope), Joseph Cornell’s 1933 screenplay for a film he arguably never intended to shoot; graphic scores for Paul Sharits’s unrealized opus Passare, 1988; and hyperdetailed storyboards for Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s incomplete White Dust from Mongolia (only thirty-two minutes of footage were shot before political turmoil in Korea forced her to abandon production in 1980). A conversation about creative process—approaches and departures, failure as ghostly context for the work that does get made—migrates between points throughout the gallery and zigzags back onto the screen, where, for example, Kenneth Anger’s well-known short Puce Moment, 1949, might now be viewed as a chapter from Puce Women, the never-made feature-length film for which Anger drew pages of scenarios in an accordion notebook (hung just outside the screening room).
A rich catalogue, edited and introduced by Beard, elucidates the theoretical underpinnings of his programming via project descriptions and seminal essays by Dziga Vertov, Gregory Markopoulos, Annette Michelson, and others. The dynamic idea unfolding through time is central to each work, whether on filmstrip, on paper, or immaterially in the mind. Early episodes of Leslie Thornton’s twelve-part Peggy and Fred in Hell, 1984–2010, will close the show. Following two abandoned children through a postapocalyptic landscape littered with the detritus of pop culture, the film has an open form that enables the elasticity of a concept developed over twenty-five years. A thought is never complete.
