Some films demand a room.
Not just a screen or a projector, but fog machines, open space, and an audience willing to stand up, move around, and look back toward the light. Anthony McCall’s “Line Describing a Cone” is one of those films. Made in 1973, it’s a 30-minute study in projected light that turns a cinema into a sculptural experience. You can’t stream it. You can’t approximate it at home. You have to be there.
On Dec. 11, Film Love brings “Line Describing a Cone” to the Plaza Theatre, alongside works by Gordon Matta-Clark and Jamie Nares. We talked to Andy Ditzler, the founder and curator of Film Love, about what happens when you turn a neighborhood theater into an installation space, and why some cinematic experiences refuse to be archived.
Why does “Line Describing a Cone” keep pulling you back?
I rarely repeat a film program once I’ve shown it, but “Line Describing a Cone” is something I just have to show every so often. I love it so much: the elegance of it, the visual beauty, the complexity-through-simplicity that always signals a great work. I love how it’s high art (the projected light beam through fog is an interactive form of sculpture) but has no high-art baggage. It’s unashamedly spectacular, in its Zen kind of way. It’s a definitive statement on the nature of projected light, the passage of time, and the collective viewing experience that cinema can still offer us, and it’s as fundamental to cinema as Hitchcock or anyone else I could name. That’s why it’s important, but also why it’s fun.
You’re pairing it with films by Gordon Matta-Clark and Jamie Nares. How do these three works talk to each other?
All three artists do share the New York of the 1970s, and it’s always great to see Matta-Clark’s “Conical Intersect,” knowing he cut that conical hole through that Paris building after seeing “Line Describing a Cone”. Ultimately, though, as with any film program I put together, it’s about creating an evening at the cinema with an emotional trajectory that can also spark ideas. I know these three films together will do that really well, because, however experimental they are, these three artists know exactly what they’re doing.
FILM LOVE founder and curator andy ditzlef
You could call “Line Describing a Cone” an installation in the museum sense. Whenever it’s shown, there’s an aspect of that, and of course, it is often shown in museum exhibitions. But it was first shown in the context of film screenings in art spaces… not cinemas, exactly, but not museums either.
What should people expect when they walk into the Plaza?
I’ll give a little introduction to the films as usual, to set a welcoming context for viewing, and then off we go. The events depicted in the Nares and Matta-Clark films are quite adventurous and … they’re not really available to see anywhere else in the quality they deserve, so we get to see them once, and maybe not again for a while. I’m sure, though, that the big screen at the Plaza will make up somewhat for the ephemerality; when you see a movie on a large screen, the feeling of it sticks around longer in the memory.
“Line Describing a Cone” requires a space free of fixed seating, so that viewers can interact with the projection beam and view the film from a number of different vantage points, including looking back toward the projector. So we’re projecting it in front of the front row, parallel to the big screen, where people can circulate. So people should expect not to be in their seats for that film!
All three works change how people experience physical space. What was the thinking behind treating the Plaza as an installation space?
It goes back to the idea of the connections between the films and between the audience and the films. We’ll start by seeing an artist, Jamie Nares, in the street manipulating the giant pendulum … the artist in the middle of the work, so to speak. Then we’ll see Matta-Clark cutting the giant cone through the building. Crucially, a sequence near the end when the work is complete and a few people are allowed inside … so those viewers are in the middle of the artwork, which is a giant hole through several stories, so it’s disorienting to even watch, much less imagine yourself inside. And then, with “Line Describing a Cone,” the audience at the Plaza will be inside the work, as viewers are encouraged to interact with the cone of light created by the haze machine and the projection beam. And the film looks great from the screen’s vantage point, looking back toward the projector! So we’ll go from seeing the artist in the middle of the work, to seeing viewers in the middle of a work, to being in the middle of the work.
You could call “Line Describing a Cone” an installation in the museum sense. Whenever it’s shown, there’s an aspect of that, and of course, it is often shown in museum exhibitions. But it was first shown in the context of film screenings in art spaces… not cinemas, exactly, but not museums either. It was a single screening where the audience watched it straight through, rather than the looping gallery installation it’s most often seen as now. I badly wanted to show it inside the Plaza, partly to get the work further away from “installation” and closer to “cinema.” And in turn, to somehow modify the Plaza, too – though just how will only become apparent at the screening.
For people unfamiliar with experimental film or artists’ cinema, where should they start when considering this work?
That’s a great question. “Line Describing a Cone” calmly defies and subverts all the boundaries we like to set up between high art and movies and cinemas and museums and sculpture and performance and sociality and contemplative experience, and more. I’d say approach this film from wherever you’re at in terms of your artistic or cinematic interests – guaranteed, it will find you there.
Film Love presents Classics of the Avant-Garde, part two at 7 p.m., Dec. 11, at the Plaza Theatre.
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