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“These are not exercises in style”: Le Chant du Styrène **

“These are not exercises in style”: Le Chant du Styrène ** “These are not exercises in style”: Le Chant du Styrène* EDWARD DIMENDBERG For Richard Sieburth and Vanessa Schwartz No celluloid, no cinema. From Stan Brakhage scratching emulsion with his fingernail to produce his last film, to the 70mm wide-screen spectacles of Hollywood, all transactions of the cinematic institution must negotiate the humble filmstrip.1 Speculation about its replacement by digital technology may well be premature. After more than a century of investment in exhibition infrastructure, the movie projector, a fixture of the cinematic institution from Bombay to Brooklyn, seems unlikely to disappear anytime soon.2 Film history provides multiple examples of an attentiveness to plastic as technological material and cultural metaphor.3 Yet the richest exploration of this scarcely fortuitous linkage between cinema and its ineluctable material base, a work that transcends modernist selfreflexivity, though it surely implies that modernist gesture, remains Le Chant du Styrène (The Song of Styrene), a 1958 industrial documentary commissioned by the * My ability to complete this text was bolstered by the practical assistance, inspiring insights, and friendship of Richard Sieburth and Vanessa Schwartz, to whom it is dedicated. I am also grateful to Annette Michelson, Malcolm Turvey, Emma Wilson, Caroline Constant, and Barry Bergdoll http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png October MIT Press

“These are not exercises in style”: Le Chant du Styrène **

Dimendberg, Edward
October , Volume Spring 2005 (112) – Apr 1, 2005
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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
0162-2870
eISSN
1536-013X
DOI
10.1162/0162287054223882
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

“These are not exercises in style”: Le Chant du Styrène* EDWARD DIMENDBERG For Richard Sieburth and Vanessa Schwartz No celluloid, no cinema. From Stan Brakhage scratching emulsion with his fingernail to produce his last film, to the 70mm wide-screen spectacles of Hollywood, all transactions of the cinematic institution must negotiate the humble filmstrip.1 Speculation about its replacement by digital technology may well be premature. After more than a century of investment in exhibition infrastructure, the movie projector, a fixture of the cinematic institution from Bombay to Brooklyn, seems unlikely to disappear anytime soon.2 Film history provides multiple examples of an attentiveness to plastic as technological material and cultural metaphor.3 Yet the richest exploration of this scarcely fortuitous linkage between cinema and its ineluctable material base, a work that transcends modernist selfreflexivity, though it surely implies that modernist gesture, remains Le Chant du Styrène (The Song of Styrene), a 1958 industrial documentary commissioned by the * My ability to complete this text was bolstered by the practical assistance, inspiring insights, and friendship of Richard Sieburth and Vanessa Schwartz, to whom it is dedicated. I am also grateful to Annette Michelson, Malcolm Turvey, Emma Wilson, Caroline Constant, and Barry Bergdoll

Journal

October – MIT Press

Published: Apr 1, 2005

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