Baruchello and Grifi: "Verification Uncertain" Montage and Displacement Between Art and Cinema of the 1960?s
Carla Subrizi
Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi, "Varification Uncertain," 1964, film still.
This year the Venice Festival of Cinema will explore beyond the more interesting cinematic production of the last two years. Director Marco Muller has dedicated considerable space in the festival to a history of cinema which continues to be marginalized. Under the title "Secret Histories of Italian Cinema" three auteurs: Gianfranco Baruchello, Alberto Grifi, and Romano Scavolini are reconsidered, focusing on the importance of a cinema which, between the end of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, planted deep experimental roots and changed not only cinema but also art history and helped to usher in the new medium of video. One of the most meaningful films in the program is "Verification Uncertain."
Realized on a shoestring by Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi between 1963 and 1964, the film’s experimental character represents an epistemological shift in the art of the 60’s. The 60’s saw avant-garde experimentation, great movement of ideas and energy (such as Gruppo 63 in Italy, the new American cinema, and experimental music), the beginning of a paradigm of deconstruction (Jacques Derrida), and the "other" of Giles Deleuze. This decade saw the advent of texts by Guy Debord with his manifesto to put into practice and a critique of authorship (Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault) along with the great recital against globalization that was beginning to take form. It also witnessed the parallel emergence of new analyses and hermeneutics for works of art and language (Umberto Eco, Nelson Goodman, and Roland Barthes). "Verification Uncertain" is part of that complex artistic landscape within which multimedia experimentation was an essential component. The history of video and the experimentation which aligned art, media, process, and editing on the same level, is worthy of reconsideration from different perspectives.
Between 1964 (the year work began on "Verification Uncertain" although stills dedicated to Marcel Duchamp were realized in 1963), 1965, the year in which work on the film concluded and when it was screened (first in Paris at Marcel Duchamp’s studio, then in Palermo, Rome, Milan, and Naples), and 1966 (the year it was screened in New York at the MoMA and Guggenheim at the invitation of John Cage), "Verification Uncertain" signalled a combination of different experimental tendencies of the time. Linguistic innovation and experimental research, the use of new and radical techniques that anticipate video, an artistic conception based on displacement, discontinuity, fragmentation, and montage, all affirm the necessity for art to open new frontiers. Questions the film raises touch crucial points that are still relevant today, such as the identity of the author, the rules for artistic production, its audience, its techniques, the reuse of something already made, process as a function of art, etc. "Verification Uncertain," by addressing these concerns, heralds an important phase in art of the twentieth century.
The title already suggests the critical and artistic orientation of those years and the need for art to create a new paradigm, like the transformation of a butterfly in a cocoon, prompted by the decline of "certainty" and the desire to verify outmoded ideas once held as absolutes. The film also seeks to verify new values, such as the affirmation of open hypotheses, the undefineability of theory, or its own uncertain nature. Marcel Duchamp and his coefficient of art, the concepts of retard and the fourth dimension had been already been proposed, along with John Cage’s aesthetics of indifference and the musical gesture of silence, clearing the way for new exploration.
Gianfranco Baruchello is an artist who, since the late 50’s, experimented with diverse media and who, to this day, works with painting, video, performance, and writing. Alberto Grifi is a director, photographer, and producer of political and social documentaries. Together they worked for about eight months to select and edit images from 450,000 feet of film from Hollywood movies of the 50’s, destined for the dustbin and acquired for 15,000 lire. The original film consists of pieces of film stuck together with scotch tape according to an unprecedented theory of montage, which could be considered an "activity" reflecting the total destruction of the film after its first projection (it was to be distributed, in pieces, to members of the audience who had just witnessed it under the title "Disperse Exclamatory Phase"). "Verification Uncertain" was conceived around the "deconstruction," of both the original film and the edit of pieces of film according to similar themes in subject or action. The film articulated the technique of d�montage and montage which reflect a deconstruction from the beginning of the film, interrupting levels of narration and insinuating a readymade only to break its continuity, its measure, and its unity. These qualities were essential to the working method of "Verification Uncertain." The screenplay was arrived at, but it didn’t exist prior to making the film.
After the first screening in Paris, a copy was made in 16mm (the sound magnetically transcribed by Cinemascope) and all of the copies currently in distribution in film, beta, VHS, and digital media, come from this master. In its transcription, the images were distorted or flattened due to the absence of a Cinemascope lens, and the primitive sync of the original soundtrack was preserved. The color of the copy is also that of the original.
The editing theory of the film was conceived on the border between art and cinema but also between the happening and critical theory. At the same time, it was audaciously ironic, subverting conventions of mass communication. "Verification Uncertain" has its origins in the question of the image, its rules in relation to time and movement, but above all in the question of the image with respect to appropriation (of what already exists), montage, and its reproduction. These modalities are not technical but philosophical, aesthetic, and theoretical questions.
The story of this film is bound to the theme of transformation of the work of art, language, and aesthetics. Between 1959 and 1965, Baruchello worked as artist between New York (Sidney Janis Gallery), Paris (Galerie Cordier & Ekstrom and the Center for Post-Production) and Milan (Galleria Schwarz). His work was informed by neo-Dada, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art, but Baruchello developed a personal and original language of activities, images, movements, happenings, and was among the pioneers of art cinema and particularly video. His film production of 1968 is really video, realized by an artist, conceived as visual experimentation, addressing time, movement, and other themes which Baruchello addresses to this day with video and paint.
Experimentation between art and cinema, opened interesting possibilities for the rapport between image, time, and movement (as expressed in the theory of Henri Bergson, 1896 and 1907; Walter Benjamin, 1936; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; 1947; Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, 1973; and Giles Deleuze, 1983). Movement became the foundation of the image, even through different means (cinema, experimental cinema, video, actions, installations) and it is a theme that has to be confronted according to different points of view. In "Verification Uncertain," one finds certain characteristics that are fundamental to experimental cinema, such as the Acin�ma, as theorized by Lyotard in 1972 with important aesthetic implications, but also a positioning of cinema on the artistic railway tracks of Duchamp and Cage, who worked between Modernism and Post-Modernism.
This film articulates the problem of time and movement with images that move according to a system which doesn’t belong to the scenes but which is external to them, arrived at through a process of selection. Cutting away and recomposing the film is based on a particular conception of time: as a rhythm, an interruption and return, as waiting, as distance, and all due to the fact that images and frames of "Verification Uncertain" are ready-mades. Therefore to take them and propose them again in a different order and edit is to maintain distance from what they were and that which they signified and to confer another different meaning. The image is a dialectic (in Benjamin’s sense of the term) as the synthesis between même et l’autre, of the readymade and that which is to be, of the past and the present. A certain principle of mimesis, in the sense given it by Theodore Adorno, applies to "Verification Uncertain," in which texts on editing, artistic concepts, and new structural systems for avant-garde works are as valid as ever, although radically transformed.
Duchamp had already introduced movement of the image, thinking of the duration of observation of the artwork but also of the amplification of the image in time. Cage introduced another sense of duration, which involves listening and which confronts the listener with an aesthetic of silence. In "Verification Uncertain," time has a rhythm but at the same time a regulation which breaks the linearity of the narration, in the sense of waiting for the arrival of a result or outcome. Time is somehow altered in much the same way as the space of the image, its physiognomy sucked into the whirlpool of juxtapositions.
The film projects of Isidore Isou (1951), Maurice Lemaitre (1952), Wolf Vostell (1958), Nam June Paik (1962-63), Peter Kubelka, Andy Warhol, and Jonas Mekas, who in 1962 founded the New York Film Maker’s Cooperative, represented the international context for "Verification Uncertain." The first films of Maya Deren of 1943-45 were also influential. Since 1961-62, Baruchello, Grifi, and Scavolini were experimenting with the interaction between image, cinema, and art, and in 1967 the Cooperative Cinema Indipendente signaled a new phase in experimental or underground Italian cinema.
"Verification Uncertain" certainly finds itself within a European context of experimentation demonstrated by Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge in the late 19th century, the first avant-garde (Duchamp, Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Fernand Leger, the Futurism of Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni and their analyses of dynamism and simultaneity), the cinematic experimentation of declared film makers (Ren� Clair, Luis Buñuel, Sergei Eisenstein), and the works of Jean-Luc Goddard. Each auteur posed questions regarding the image as a screen, a mirror, a conception of the viewer’s gaze and vision, of layers of perception and the relationship between the individual viewer and the world. The issues of movement and time of the image, and duration in European aesthetic theory, are at the base of the theories of Aby Warburg, Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Valery (his reflections on time) and Walter Benjamin.
"Verification Uncertain" is an operation of mise en ab�me: of representation, form, models, ideas, and plots of a script. It constructs its own articulation of images through the renunciation of narrative sequence and representation. It proposes a plot that could justify its edit, but the edit becomes an autonomous means to institute a new modality for language.
Repetition, interruption, fragmentation, displacement, duplication, multiplication, and again repetition, analogies, and resemblances, all suggest an articulated language of images. Baruchello and Grifi theorized, destroyed, tore apart, reinterpreted, and transformed images through the very language of images. Meaning does not reside in the images but outside of them, in the connections between them, through the use of pre-existing film. The film already existed, along with the plots, the cast, the locations, the soundtrack, and Baruchello and Grifi intervened with the material, recuperating it, appropriating it, and recycling it.
But "Verification Uncertain" did not produce an ex novo. The images, once meaningful, had their meaning annulled, and a door that opens or a kiss make no sense, and are used as images emptied to create a new meaning. The action of appropriation by Baruchello and Grifi is the semantic value of the film. In this way, all the processes of meaning are radically destroyed. Materials are selected by chance and plots (or anti-plots) are resemblances, analogies, and repetitions. Baruchello and Grifi, by cutting film, sticking it back together, and editing scenes and fragments, did not plan to invent a conception of film, but to realize an operation which the cinema of the institutional establishment could not. Nonetheless, their experimentation would ultimately influence the development of much experimental cinema from 1960 through the present day.
