To open, an Overture . In 1986, Stan Douglas produced a 16mm work that recycled some of cinema’s earliest images and one of its earliest genres, the phantom ride. Douglas paired recycled footage from two Edison films shot in the Canadian Rockies, Kicking Horse Canyon (1899) and White Pass, British Columbia (1901), with a soundtrack of passages excerpted from Marcel Proust’sIn Search of Lost Time. Overture consists of three image sections, each separated by black leader, and six passages of text. These passages are read by a male voice-over through two repetitions of the image track, resulting in the...

Upon enteringHitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales (Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences), the museum visitor encountered twenty-one columns, each presenting a spotlighted vitrine containing a single object resting on red satin. The exhibition, held in 2000-2001 and curated by Guy Cogeval and Dominique Païni for the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Musée des beaux arts, Montréal, showcased the Unica key from Notorious (1946) , the bread knife from Blackmail (1929) , the lighter from Strangers on a Train (1951) , the yellow handbag from Marnie (1964), and other famous Hitchcockian objects. The objects were, as one critic would have it,...

In 2001, Tacita Dean traveled to the west coast of Madagascar to film the total eclipse of the sun, a project that would later become the film Diamond Ring (2002). By chance, while she was there, she heard of a phenomenon called the “green ray”: often glimpsed at sea, the brief flare of green light that shoots up as the last bit of sun dips below the horizon had long been a symbol of good fortune for sailors. Morombe, Madagascar, was an ideal place to sight the elusive ray, which takes place under conditions of low moisture and clear air....

In the spring of 2006, Chris Moukarbel, an MFA student in the Yale University School of Art’s sculpture department, was sued by Paramount Pictures. Why? The “nature of the case,” according to the affidavit issued to the United States District Court, was as follows:

This is an action for copyright infringement pursuant to the Copyright Law of the United States, 17 U.S.C. § 101et seq. (the “Copyright Act”). This infringement claim arises from defendant Chris Moukarbel’s (the “Defendant”) unauthorized creation and distribution of a twelve-minute motion picture which is a virtually identical copy of a substantial portion of the...

Upon entering Omer Fast’s The Casting (2007), two screens hang from the ceiling and confront the viewer withtableaux vivantsof a casting session. It is the beginning of the work’s fourteen-minute loop, and the action is taking place on a soundstage. A man with chin-length hair and wearing a plaid shirt is in the middle of an audition, responding to questions asked by another man seated behind a video camera. The images appear to be still photographs, so this dialogue is delivered in voice-over, invoking the formal system of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). But looking closely, one notices...

In his “Alphabet of Cinema,” Peter Wollen implies that the age of new media constitutes something of an end for cinema, but also an opportunity to begin again. This chance at recommencement is borne precisely of the ways in which digitization has prompted a simultaneous compromise and reassertion of the boundaries of cinema. “Z is for zero”: a point that marks both a complete exhaustion and a reservoir of possibility from which the new might spring; “Z” arrives at the end of the alphabetic sequence but as the “Z” of zero, it is also a beginning. In the preceding pages,...