What Images Withhold: Film Form and Public Sphere

Shirley Clarke, A Moment in Love (still), 1956.

“If a sailor such as Odysseus, for example, is sailing on the Mediterranean, he can determine his locations by taking the measurements of two stars; calculating the distance between the stars and between stars and horizon with the help of a sextant, he can figure out his position. Montage involves nothing more than such measurements; it is the art of creating proportions. What is decisive in this case is that Odysseus does not measure the location itself, but rather the relationship; it is this relationship which is contained in the cut, at exactly that point where the film does not show anything. Whatever is shown, on the other hand, is both the insignificant part of the message and yet, to a certain extent, the condition of its communicability.”

—Alexander Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere,” 220.1

Naming extraction, displacement, or colonial violence as a film’s subject tells us little about how the film makes these histories and political conditions perceptible or places the viewer in relation to them. An off-screen voice can change how one sees a landscape. A cut can leave one to imagine an event the film never shows. Such decisions ask the viewer to make connections the film does not spell out. When criticism treats a film as a mere illustration of an already established argument, it passes over this activity—and with it, part of the film’s political potential.2

Over the past three decades, artists’ moving images have developed into a field of practice extending across contemporary art and cinema. No longer strictly confined to the movie theater’s black box, filmmakers produce installations for museums and galleries, while artists make short and feature-length works for cinemas and festivals. Much of the discussion of this movement has concerned funding, distribution, exhibition, and ownership. These conditions matter, but they cannot account on their own for the experience of a film. In a 2025 roundtable, Ana Vaz challenged the art market’s terms directly: “Associating film with scarcity is an oxymoron created by the art market. Films cannot be owned—this is their value.”3

When we started e-flux Film Notes in June 2024, two questions guided the publication: what histories artists’ moving images inherit and what their expanded forms make possible. We have pursued these questions through conversations with artists, theoretical and creative essays, and republications of historical texts. Terms such as experimental film, video art, and artists’ cinema remain serviceable for institutions, festivals, and funds. Understanding what film does, however, requires a genealogy extending beyond the institutional boundaries reinforced by the market and the periodizations used by critics and curators. Read alongside contemporary artists’ films, these earlier writings become indispensable working notes for the present: many practical and philosophical questions the moving image artists confronted in the 20th century are still being worked through in films and installations today.

Since its beginnings, cinema has shaped attention through what it shows and what it leaves unseen. Ellipses, cuts, interruptions, and incomplete stories can create what Abbas Kiarostami called “an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience.”4 The narrative gaps in such a film allow viewers to bring their own experience to it and make connections the filmmaker could not have anticipated.

This openness depends on exact decisions about film form. Alexander Kluge described montage as “the art of creating proportions.” The relationship between images, he wrote, resides “at exactly that point where the film does not show anything.”5 Dziga Vertov placed the interval at the center of his thinking on montage, defining it through movement between shots and their visual correlation with one another.6 What has just been seen continues to work on what comes next. In Too Early, Too Late (1981), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet separate historical narration from the filmed present. Off-screen readings recount peasant struggles while the camera records their present-day locations. The filmed places neither reconstruct the past nor illustrate the texts. Heard over these images, the historical accounts change how otherwise ordinary places are seen.7 Similarly, in Forgetting Vietnam (2015), Trinh T. Minh-ha withholds familiar war footage and shows instead the war’s persistence in the land and in daily rituals. Here, what she calls “the work of the invisible within the visible” makes the past perceptible without showing the war directly.8

What remains on-screen can also be used to actively conceal what is left out. Writing during and immediately after the 1991 Gulf War, film critic Serge Daney distinguished “the image” from what he called “the visual.” The visual, in his account, offers “the optical verification of a procedure of power” and, without a reverse shot, closes around the spectacle presented by one side. The image, by contrast, emerges from an encounter with someone else and remains open to what is not shown. For Daney, the war’s missing image was Baghdad under bombardment. He did not live to see photographically plausible pictures generated from verbal prompts, without the depicted scene ever having passed before a camera. Applied to the present, his distinction asks us to consider both how a film is produced and whether it remains answerable to what it excludes.9

The connections viewers make between images draw on experiences formed beyond the cinema. They may arise from conditions shared with others while remaining isolated in their expression. For Kluge, montage can connect what viewers see to what they have lived, allowing each to be reconsidered through the other. The question of the public sphere concerns how these connections become communicable beyond the individual encounter with a film.10 An oppositional public, as Kluge and Oskar Negt conceive it, requires people to be able to articulate and organize their experiences according to their own needs, rather than being organized around the priorities of dominant institutions.11  Critical writing, discussion, and programming can extend this work by placing films in relation to one another and creating occasions for viewers’ different experiences to enter into exchange.

This fall, e-flux Film will focus on the relation between film form and the public sphere through Film Notes publications, Screening Room events, and online programs. Su Yu Hsin’s Particular Waters trilogy follows semiconductor production through the water and silicon on which it depends, setting these materials against the supposedly immaterial nature of clouds and data. A conversation with Rachel Maclean on AI-assisted rotoscoping will examine another relation between the material and the synthetic: the interval between a recorded performance and its generated image.

An evening with Andrei Ujică will explore relations between images recorded in the world and those formed in the imagination, examining how montage reorganizes them into different accounts of the past. Daniel Schwartz’s Film Notes essay will precede a talk on Artavazd Peleshyan’s theory of distance montage, which explores how images placed far apart act on one another in the spectator’s perception.

Linda Lai Chiu-han's essay, accompanying the September online program “A City in Transmission: Five Works from Videotage,” will address video art in Hong Kong as a practice of visual historiography. A Screening Room event devoted to Pınar Öğrenci brings together films in which histories of forced displacement pass between places and generations. These programs extend the question of how a film can keep a history present without claiming to show it whole.

Questions of collective practice run through “Fire, Film and Ancestral Dreaming,” Gawan Fagard’s conversation with Elizabeth A. Povinelli and members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Their discussion concerns filmmaking shaped by obligations that extend beyond what the camera can record. “Rehearsal Behavior,” a two-part screening series, brings together films by Chantal Akerman, Shirley Clarke, and Yvonne Rainer that approach rehearsal as a formal method for organizing social relations. Dylan Sherman’s accompanying essay considers how dancing in front of a camera creates a collective among performers and filmmakers.

Max Levin’s text turns to the gatherings around experimental film, asking how a public might form through them. From the Flaherty Seminar and the Temenos screenings to Jodie Mack’s Flower Tea Film Seminar, these gatherings represent different attempts to build community around the viewing of film.

In December, the artists’ symposium “What Happened to Video Art?” will mark the fifth anniversary of the Screening Room by revisiting video art’s beginnings and tracing its continuations in contemporary moving-image practice. Martha Rosler, one of the participating artists, will revisit “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” first delivered as a talk in 1984. 

Writing against a familiar origin story of video art, Rosler recalls early video’s promise to challenge the audience’s passive position and traces how this promise narrowed as video became established within art institutions.12 The symposium will ask whether, and in what forms, this promise persists in artists’ cinema today, and what kinds of oppositional publics might form through these practices.