Mark Lewis

© and courtesy the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto, and Galerie Serge le Borge, Paris

Still from "The Pitch" (1998). 35mm transferred to HD, 3 min, 59 sec. Pictured: Mark Lewis.

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For some time now, Mark Lewis has been interested in the old, celluloid-based special-effects technology known as rear projection. He has written about its aesthetic implications, and his new rear-projection film, Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating (2009), will be shown in the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year. In addition, he has made a documentary (which will also be shown in Venice), Backstory: Hansard Rear Projection (2009), about the Hansard family, whose work with this technology in Hollywood spans three generations. Lewis first encountered the Hansards when he made his 2006 film Rear Projection: Molly Parker, and his interest in using an old technology then extended to the story of its rise and decline. In the documentary, the surviving father-and-son team, positioned in front of backdrops typical of the device, tell of the success of their family business over a number of decades, until it was overtaken and finally displaced by electronic effects (green and blue screens) and computer-generated imagery. Here, in a compressed and poignant form, is a firsthand account of the modern object’s trajectory from being in demand to being "outmoded" that so fascinated Walter Benjamin. But when it’s recycled obliquely back into history, through a work of art, say, such an object can acquire new unexpected interest and significance.

Rear-projection technology was a response to a threefold problem posed by the arrival of synchronized sound in the late ’20s and early ’30s: how to combine star presence and narrative action with audible dialogue. A would-be seamless combination of all three involved first separating them into two component parts. A narrative setting would be filmed on location for later projection in a studio onto a translucent screen. Arranged against the background footage, stars could then be easily shot, and their dialogue carefully recorded, all in the safety of the studio space. This technique allowed stars to remain in privileged close-up, their words clearly audible and their emotions clearly visible, while the dramatic setting, landscape scenery or urban streets, rolled behind them.

Over the years the illusion improved, but it was always vulnerable, verging on visibility and a certain absurdity even in its heyday. Now that obsolescence has overtaken rear projection, its paradoxes can be simultaneously related back to its own historical period and reconfigured in the present. Mark Lewis’s film work has returned to the problem of modernity, to the dilemma of its irretrievable pastness on the one hand and its continued centrality to thought about art and politics on the other. In his choice of rear projection as a means he resurrects an archaic technology that shares some attributes of the aesthetic of modernity; for instance, its celebration of disjuncture in time, space, and performance. Through its very nature, rear projection folds one level of time into another: the temporality of the "setting" is asynchronous with that of the figures in the studio foreground. The potential to make viewers aware of this temporal disjuncture, as well as the disjuncture of action and situation, is a consideration characteristic of the modern. The once-upon-a-time absurdity of rear-projection artificiality mutates into a site in which the mind’s ability to shift between knowledge and belief can be both indulged and considered.

For instance, the device, in order to fake mobility, reverses the natural order of things: the figures supposedly speeding in a car or train remain static in the studio, animated by a "mobilized" landscape unwinding behind a window or simply framing the scene like a theatrical backdrop. This aspect of rear projection descends directly from the precinematic panoramas used as a special effect in the theater or as popular entertainment in themselves. When he made Heller in Pink Tights (1960), George Cukor paid tribute to the theatrical illusion. In the film, a little theater company traveling the West puts on a performance in which a live horse (with Sophia Loren strapped to its back) gallops on a treadmill placed on the stage while a panorama of the steppes unfolds in the background. The treadmill remained an essential part of rear-projection technology, allowing stars to seem to walk toward the camera while remaining within the confined space allotted by the background plate. But directors got the most traction from the device by using it to illustrate the railway journey, and perhaps no one more so than Alfred Hitchcock, whose persistent return to the railway carriage as a site of drama, from the 1930s (The Lady Vanishes) to the 1950s (North by Northwest), demanded use of the rear-projection illusion.