Condition Report #13

In the archive, condition reports are used to monitor the ongoing changes in film prints, documenting their gradual transformation over time. In this series, artist and filmmaker Juan  González Monroy shares moments of discovery from his work inspecting prints in the Arsenal collection. For this edition, we look at films that reflect on the origins of cinema, revealing how the drive to reproduce reality through mechanical means is inevitably shaped by irrepressible and contradictory human impulses. In EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, ZOOPRAXOGRAPHER (USA 1975), Thom Andersen reconsiders Muybridge’s legacy, arguing that his significance lies less in revealing what the eye cannot see than in exposing the technology’s inability to fully capture time. Cinema relies as much on what it omits as on what it shows. Before this film, we will see MAGELLAN: CADENZAS I & XIV (USA 1977–80), two segments from the start of Hollis Frampton’s unfinished Magellan cycle. With a nod to Duchamp, Frampton presents cinema’s birth as a comic struggle of frustrated desire. (Juan González)

Films:
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer USA 1975 16 mm engl. OV/German ST 59 min.
Magellan: Cadenzas I & XIV USA 1977–1980 16 mm engl. OV 11 min.