Posthumous Cinema: Unfinished Films in the Archives

The conundrum of the artist’s unfinished film is not itself unique, and appears in notable film archives and collections. This chapter looks at different typologies of what I have been calling Posthumous Cinema, engaging unfinished experimental films in the archives to see what they might yield through their revisitation and exploration. I developed this propositional concept in working with my late artist-father’s film archive, and have expanded it to consider other "unfinished films" that have been left behind after death by established, experimental (in contrast to commercial) filmmakers such as Maya Deren’s Divine Horseman (completed posthumously by her husband, Teiji Ito) and her collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, Witch’s Cradle (1943), as well as other incomplete films by filmmakers including late conceptual artist, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Andy Warhol, Joyce Wieland, Hollis Frampton, Philip Hoffman, and others, as well as homages, such as Wim Wender’s Pina (2011), in which he collaborated with German choreographer, Pina Bausch, but only completed the film after she died in 2009. This exploration has yielded a remarkably rich range of films, as well as conceptual reflections on the creative filmic process, collaborations with the deceased, and the history of technology and communications with the dead, ranging from spiritualism in telegraphy to spirit photography (Peters 1999, Sconce 2000). Drawing from existing unfinished films from private collections and institutional archives, this chapter will explore the complexity of collaborative relationships in filmmaking that have developed between the living and the dead.