Does film need a monument?

    Peter Kubelka in BFI, London (21st October 2012)

Peter Kubelka's Monument Film was supposed to appear in two forms. First as a projection of Arnulf Rainer (1960) and its opposite - Antiphon (2012), projected at the same time, side by side. Arnulf Rainer's negative would then become Antiphon's positive, positive of the first the negative of the second and accordingly silence would become sound and sound would become silence. The appearence of both films would then result in continuous light alternating in space between two projectors and continuous sound alternating between two speakers. Unfortunately, the raising of Monument Film was disturbed by a failure of one of the projectors. However, the project survived in its other form - an installation in a bright rectangular BFI's gallery space defined by three walls in which we see cut films, each in 128 equally long strips, which hang on nails and are arranged in a rectangular, metric form. 

Monument Film (1960-2012)

Kubelka didn't leave his audience dissapoonted and turned this uncanny situation into an impro talk followed by two separate projections of Arnulf Rainer and Antiphon. In this case one could only imagine how the installation could have looked like and while watching Antiphon one would constantly send attention to his memory and bring back the experience of Arnulf Rainer. An impossible and failing monument? Certainly in the context of Kubelka's impro talk proclaiming the end of film and calling 2012 the darkest year in film's history. But I would like to think that, despite the closures of many major film labs and unfriendly politics of Kodak and Fuji, technical failure in BFI was supposed to remind us all that it is really too early to think and certainly to build a monument for film.