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4’22”

‘4 Minutes 22 Seconds’ (4’ 22”) is a film performance filmed at London’s British Film Institute between 1 and 6 December 2008 as part of ‘The Live Record Symposium’. It was shot on 35mm colour negative. 4’ 22” is the duration of a 400’ roll of 35mm film. The film captures the 6-day performance in which the audience is filmed watching a projection of the previous day’s performance which is then incorporated into the film’s sequence; thus the film is always the sum total of its past screenings. The screens-within-screens of its current and past performances are the sole picture and sound content; in this respect, 4’ 22” interrogates the nature of reflexive filmmaking and the audience’s active participation in the construction of meaning. The film’s materiality and its investigation of the tensions between illusionism and non-illusionism engage with central tenets of structural film practice and theory.

4’ 22” offers a new version of Raban’s ‘expanded’ work 2’ 45’’ (first performed London, 1973). 2’ 45” has been widely referenced in histories of expanded cinema but no film documentation survives. 4’ 22” was made with the intention that the final iteration serves as documentation.

The accompanying peer-reviewed chapter, ‘Reflexivity and Expanded Cinema: A Cinema of Transgression?’ investigates the creative contexts for both films. Arguing that in the UK expanded cinema emerged from structural film at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, the chapter investigates experimentation, improvisation, and performative models for making and viewing film.

4’ 22” and the chapter were produced as part of the 2 year AHRC funded research project: ‘Expanded Cinema and Narrative’, University of the Arts London 2007–09. The film was screened at the conference ‘Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception’, Tate Modern 2009, the International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam 2009, and Onion City Film Festival, Chicago, 2010.