Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis
Laura Mulvey - Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London - and artist Mark Lewis on their fascination with the once ubiquitous 'rear projection' filmic technique:
"Critics, theorists, many directors and even audiences have, over the years, despised rear projection as an essentially un-cinematic device. Widely, almost universally, used by film industries from the coming of synchronised sound in the early 1930s to the late 1950s, stars' dialogue scenes would be shot in the studio while their supposed 'locations' would be projected on a screen behind them. It might well have been these flat, artificial shots, so characteristic of Hollywood cinema in the 1940s, that Andre Bazin had in mind when he welcomed a cinema that was composed in depth, shot with a camera that could wander over a scene and, ultimately would restore the unity of human figure and landscape."
It was while they were watching Tay Garnett's 1931 film Her Man in 2007 that Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis realised that rear projection had an intrinsic aesthetic interest of its own and that its very artificiality, its lack of transparency, brought with it a certain 'modernist' self-consciousness. This moment marked the beginning of Laura and Mark's 'rear projection dialogue'. In addition to a cinephile fascination that has lasted ever since, Mark had used it in his film work and has made a documentary about the last Hollywood rear-projection studio. Laura has written and lectured about it, as well as Mark's incorporation of this archaic film technology in his digital gallery projections. They hope that their 'dialogue' serves to illustrate the hidden beauty of this despised device.
Mark Lewis is Professor of Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts. An exhibition of his work was held at the BFI Gallery in 2007.
March 2011
