Creation by Destruction: Experimental Film Practices and the Art of Splicing

This text focuses on a specific phase of analogue film postproduction, namely splicing, with a particular emphasis on splicing as a gesture in experimental film practices in the interwar period. Our central concern is how splicing can serve as an epistemological tool. By looking at the films by Ubaldo Magnaghi, a member of the Milan Cine-Club and an official Agfa collaborator in the 1930s, we claim that splicing works as a reconfiguration driver acting on the film. In the case of amateur/experimental cinema, we can assume the filmmaker splices the film, and when it happens the conjunction that this implies is made technically possible by using cement (tape came later in history); however, using cement implies emulsion or even frame loss. We then stress splicing as a “gesture of destroying” (Flusser 2014). Guided by glueing and slicing, destruction becomes not only a gesture of dismissing, dismantling, disposing, and displacing but also a productive, creative move—from within the editing practice—that allows the displaying of the film material in its full surface, thereby shedding light on a new way to think of it.