Abandoned Images: Film and Film’s End

ABANDONED IMAGES: FILM AND FILM'S END By Stephen Barber. London: Reaktion Books, 2010, 185 pp. Reviewed by Kelsey Haas Stephen Barber's new book, Abandoned Images: and Film's examines abandonment of film (celluloid) in context of proliferation of digital cinema technologies and considers implications of this historically. Barber contributes to ongoing debates about end of film by reading shift away from celluloid technologies through architecture of defunct movie palaces in downtown Los Angeles. Abandoned Images focuses on the Broadway avenue of twelve ruined cinemas, once granthose and excessive, now derelict but intact, in downtown Los Angeles, which offer their extraordinary facades and interiors as screens for exploration of film's end. He also theorizes about state of cinema and spectatorial experience throughout cinema history. The scope of Abandoned Images is wide-ranging, as Barber elegantly structures his book to not only read architecture of abandoned Los Angeles theatres in depth but also perform brief textual analyses of film sequences from mainstream, art and experimental cinema in order to apply his insights to global viewing culture. Abandoned Images will appeal to readers interested in cinematic space and relationships between film and digital media. The book is divided into four parts, each addressing Barber's central topic using a slightly different methodology. In first part, entitled Film and End, Barber discusses various film theorists and cultural historians who explore issue of end of film, arguing that Filmic history can now only exist in fragments, since its amalgamation with digital has irreparably scrambled its resolution. This section of book also sets up its main underlying concern: trauma. Using David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001) as his main case study, Barber analyses Club Silencio sequence- which takes place in abandoned Tower Cinema - to suggest that experience of cinema is one tied to darkness and death. For Barber, film is a self-destructive medium and this argument sets a cynical tone throughout most of book, even when he sees potential for filmic reinvention within a digital context. In second part of Abandoned Images, Barber reads disintegrating movie palaces as palimpsests, addressing question of what happens to cinematic space when its granthose aura is demolished. Turning to film images, he argues that cinema is a medium ideally suited to issues of memory, history, and death, as film images are often complicit with their own decay. Through all this discussion of death and decay of film and cinematic spaces, Barber also argues that these remaining traces of film can also instigate new visual forms as filmmakers work to keep medium alive through self-reflexive use of celluloid. The third part of Abandoned Images focuses on relationship between film and human eye by examining impact of film on spectators as well as films which, in various ways, play with representation of eyes. In both discussions, Barber's focus is on idea of wounding and trauma of eyes by or in film. His arguments here tend to wander, jumping from textual analysis of films to a metaphorical analysis of architecture, and yield mixed results. However, Barber's later discussion of relationship between cinematic viewing and opulent visual spaces of movie palaces in same chapter is engaging and insightful. He argues that ornate architecture of movie palaces at their peak were visually distracting for spectator. However, he also argues that potential for celluloid to break apart mid-projection (particularly during all-night projections of exploitation or pornographic films in unmaintained movie palaces) or combust (in case of nitrate film stocks) encourages focussed vision of cinematic spectator. …

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