4’ 22”

4’ 22” captures a performance made over a period of 6 days at the BFI Southbank cinema, London, in December 2008. On the first day, a blank screen was filmed onto 35mm colour negative film by a movie camera placed at the back of the cinema. The filmmaker entered the screen to announce the film title, the date and place of the screening which is recorded by a microphone positioned on the opposite side of the screen. The camera filmed the screen for the exact length of a 400’ roll of 35mm film (4’ 22”). The negative from the camera was then developed ready for projection at the next day’s screening in the same cinema and the camera filmed the screen as on day 1, with a new sound recording being made. Over the course of six evenings the re-filmed footage of each performance built up a layered and complex film-within-a-film mise en abyme.

The resultant documentation shows that the film production is integral to the film’s exhibition and the audience become active participants in the construction of meaning. 4’ 22” is based on 2’ 45” that was first performed at Gallery House, London, in March 1973.

4’22” was made for the symposium EXPANDED CINEMA: THE LIVE RECORD at BFI Southbank in 2008. It was shot onto 35mm colour negative and given the title 4’ 22” because that is the running time of a 400’ roll of 35mm film.

By the final day, all the preceding iterations of 4’ 22” were seen as successive negative and positive images receding into the depths of the film screen as a form of “mise en abyme”. 4’ 22” use the internal mirroring effect of the mise en abyme to build a picture comprised solely of the layers of space and time of the film’s coming into being. The screens-within-screens of its current and past performances are the sole picture and sound content and in this respect it exemplifies reflexive filmmaking.

4 Minutes 22 Seconds, is a new version of Raban’s iconic ‘expanded’ work 2’45’’. 2’45’’ ‘begins and ends with the period of its own making’ and ‘is a film which IS its showing, different each time, always the sum total of its past screenings’ (W. Raban, 1972)

• http://www.rewind.ac.uk/expanded/Narrati...
• http://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project...
• http://www.studycollection.co.uk/expande...