By Aidan Lytton
PUBLISHED APRIL 2010 in Answer Print Vol 19 #1

Among the films screened on Friday March 5th at the $100 Film Festival, Amanda Dawn Christie’s daring combination of film and improvised live performance, entitled Transmissions, stood out as the most unique and engaging. Christie strikes one as an experimental artist in the truest sense, letting her creative curiosity constantly guide her in new directions. Recently she has been exploring new worlds of creation with the vehicle of live projector film manipulation, and Transmissions is a marvelous example of her work in this area (Christie 19). The most fascinating aspect of Transmissions, is its ability to showcase a creative mind at work, chiseling into new ground, while simultaneously remaining part of a theoretical lineage which has guided experimental filmmakers past and present on their quest for undiscovered treasures of creative expression. At the end of the day, Christie remains a true avant-garde artist, working at a low budget, and remaining outside of the commercial industry of mass-produced film, which holds many back from pushing the boundaries of the medium.

The nature of Amanda Dawn Christie’s performance-film work is at first difficult to wrap one’s mind around. Christie merges the roles of filmmaker, editor and projectionist into one supreme conductor. Using film loops playing on multiple projectors, she toys and experiments with the images in real time as they leave the projectors. Using prisms, lenses and even her own body, she manipulates the light as it is transmitted from the projector to the screen. Repetitious loops are given infinite room for variation as the onscreen images are warped, refracted, and superimposed upon each other, creating a perpetually engaging display of light. The images used in Transmissions are cryptic and symbolic; as the name would suggest they focus on communication technologies. Film loops depicting a cell phone being opened and closed, and fingers typing away dramatically at a lap top computer, coupled with enigmatic phrases popping up on the screen establish a theme based on the concepts that surround the transmission of information. This establishment of theme brings the viewers attention to the very nature of the images they are viewing, information being manipulated and transmitted through electro magnetic frequencies. The soundtrack, which is composed of what may very well be static and distorted radio signals, mirrors and reinforces the theme imposed by the visual elements of the film. Although very abstract and open to interpretation, Transmissions acts as a potent catalyst for meditation on the manipulation of natural forces, sound and light waves, to create and transmit meaningful information. Among the most striking images used in the film is that of a train leaving a lit station and entering into the dark unknown of night. This image is strongly metaphorical of a meaningful transmission leaving one medium (a film projector perhaps) and entering into the unknown space where it becomes a mere abstract series of vibrations, susceptible to infinite manipulations, before it is received by another medium (such as a viewer’s eye) and regains meaning. Christie considers part of her role as projectionist-performer to be a stunt driver, taking a machine designed to go from point A to B, and exploring the broad scope of detours and unexpected possibilities that can occur between A and B (Christie 21). The image of the train in Transmissions is powerfully representative of this artistic philosophy.

Avant-Garde filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac outlines in her writing the difference between what she calls “visual” and “anti-visual” films. For her, visual films are those which explore the pure form and motion of what has been captured on camera, where as anti-visual films are preoccupied with the telling of a dialogue based narrative. The pre-occupation with narrative in anti-visual films distract from the pure visual experience that the film medium has the potential to create (Dulac 31-35). Dulac’s criticism of commercial cinema as being anti-visual, proposed in the nineteen twenties, helped establish the creation of truly visual film art as the goal of the avant-garde filmmaker. Although Amanda Dawn Christie employs the use of a narrative skeleton to base her improvisational performance-films on top of, her work is in every sense in keeping with Germaine Dulac’s vision of an intensely visual film experience (Christie 19-20). The very essence of Transmissions is based upon the creation of image through the transmission of light. Christie’s experimental manipulations of the images being released from the projector emerse the viewer, as well as the walls and roof of the cinema, in rhythmic motifs of light and images.

The conceptual framework underlying Transmissions also builds upon the foundational ideas of influential experimental filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Man Ray. Deren believed that the creative act of the filmmaker comes not in the form of photographing the images, but in the manipulation of the spatial-temporal relationships within the filmic images (Deren 194-198). Man Ray, who is associated with both the Dada and Surrealist movements, attached a contraption of prisms to his glasses when he watched popular films, to transform what he felt were mundane narratives into beautiful abstract images (Kuenzli 8). Thus we can see strong parallels between the ideas of these two pioneers of experimental film, and Amanda Dawn Christie’s manipulation of light and image with prisms and lenses in Transmissions.

While Amanda Dawn Christie uses the foundations laid by previous filmmakers, she renovates and expands upon these foundations greatly. She takes the creative editing process so essential to May Deren, and brings it into the present moment. Physically shaping the nature of the light as it leaves the projector.  The film loops she plays with are simple and based around rhythmic motion. Unlike Deren’s manipulation of motion on film, which are forever set in a single variation, Christie’s manipulations are spontaneous and infinite in variation, taking on a different form each time the film is viewed. The element of Transmissions which was perhaps the root cause of its unique beauty, is that it brings the viewer out of the voyeuristic experience associated with traditional film viewing, and into an awareness of one’s actual surroundings. The film does this by means of the presence of the filmmaker working live in the theatre, and light from the projector being refracted to actually illuminate portions of the theatre other than the screen. This characteristic of Transmissions contrasts sharply with the Surrealists, who sought to create a type of “conscious hallucination” where in the dark of the cinema the viewer is brought out of a lived experience of reality, and into the subconscious realm of possibility (Goudal 86-87). Christie makes her performance part of the viewer’s reality, and hence they become inseparable, the boundary between lived experience a created performance is blurred.

Transmissions, by Amanda Dawn Christie, is adventurous and imaginative in its exploration of the possibilities of performance film. This is a genre that remains still largely unchartered, and Christie delves into it fearlessly, taking established elements of experimental film, and utilizing the unique capabilities of performance film to guide them in new directions. Working with minimalistic loops, Christie’s film is certainly in keeping with the low-budget tradition of experimental film. However, its very nature transcends the concept of a “budget” in a certain sense, as there is no single copy of the film that will ever be produced or distributed which one can attach a budget to. The creation of a real time film performance which integrates the viewers lived and film viewing experiences through manipulation of image and light, makes Transmissions a work that truly exemplifies experimental film.


Works Cited
Christie, Amanda Dawn. “A Meditation on Improvised Narrative.” CSIF $100 Film Festival Program. (2010) : 19-21. Print.
Deren, Maya. “Cinematography: The Creative use of Reality.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Sixth Edition. Eds. Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 187-198. Print.
Dulac, Germaine. “From ‘Visual and Anti-Visual Films’.” The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987. 31-35. Print.
Goudal, Jean. “Surrealism and Cinema.” The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema. Third Edition. Ed. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001. 84-94. Print.
Kuenzli, Rudolf E. “Introduction.” Dada and Surrealist Film. Ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996. 1-12. Print