TINY CINEMA
from the Vancouver Public Library image archive
Alex Muir

This is a rickety old media piece in a new media exhibition. It is chasing after antique formats while mining past images and anachronisms.

I have spent a considerable amount of time in the last year trawling through the marvelous image archive at the downtown public library. The prints featured here are all scans drawn from this archive. I have made no attempt to conceal the signs of wear on these images – some of which must be close to twice as old as I am. Perhaps in these markings one might find the beginnings of a process of rebuilding aura – in the independent lives led after initial dispersal.

As I said to Dinka when I was first proposing this project, I have difficulties with the concept of montage. These troubles emerged initially in my experiences with film studies, but I don’t think it would be difficult to extrapolate from this particular area. In the most general sense, I wonder how one goes about combining objects, places, times, ideas (etc.), already possessing their own integrity, with other separate similarly integral things. I do not have the exact quote, but Godard once famously professed uncertainty as to precisely when to begin and end a shot. One reason for this difficulty would be the simple fact that things keep happening on either side of these arbitrary cut lines made in order to suture events together. There are so many instances where I find the results to be condescending. At the same time, some of my favourite artists, across disciplines, among them Godard, Chris Marker, W.G. Sebald, Sigmar Polke, and Lionel Marchetti, are all in some way engaged in rhizomatic scattershot personal histories/taxonomies that fascinate me to no end, and perplex me as well. How are they succeeding for me where others fail?

So for me, this project is an opportunity to take my own baby steps in the general direction of montage or collage. Perhaps my hope was that by making very small, quiet interventions from behind, the seams might somehow be less offensive. The title of a song by This Heat, "Music Like Escaping Gas" commends itself as a poetic aim here – insidious combination. The combinations being made here are working along the limits of cinema, as many of the elements held to be integral to its (slippery) essence are present. I am leaning quite heavily on Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film Hitler: ein Film aus Deutschland, and his exploration of cinema’s (and its attendant century’s) fall. All part and parcel of the daft idea that maybe I could begin to work my way towards the condition of cinema without ever picking up a camera. I borrow/scavenge so much and create so little: this must not be art, but rather just a particularly muddy bit of art criticism. Thanks for having me.

– Alex Muir

Alex Muir

(Alex on himself in 3rd person):

Alex Muir is just some boy. He has a degree in film studies and comparative literature from the University of Alberta and has thus graduated to the realm of pretend studies. He has a stagnant amateur interest in environmental recording, art history, film, sensation, travelling, language and hybridity. He has ongoing involvements with VIVO (they let him intern there), Latitude 53, and CJSR (campus radio in Edmonton).