Stop and go

Film and sculpture might not seem ideal partners in a medial interplay, the first being the medium of movement in time while the second develops in space. This difference, however, has not prevented sculpture being of interest to experimental filmmakers, even before the cinematic apparatus and its spatial qualities were explored in the context of ‘Expanded Cinema’ in the 1960s. There are, of course, many different possibilities for how the medium of sculpture may become part of experimental film, and many of these were first explored by Man Ray and Maya Deren, as the following analyses of their films will show.