Film as Fabric: Connecting Textile Practice and Experimental Filmmaking through Expanded Cinema Performance

Stark, Mary (2020) Film as Fabric: Connecting Textile Practice and Experimental Filmmaking through Expanded Cinema Performance. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This practice based study examined connections between textile practice and experimental filmmaking as evidence of deeper repressed narratives. The research was informed by the long association of domestic crafts with women, as well as feminist critique of contextualisation of experimental filmmaking as from narrow and misplaced perspectives. Historical analysis was combined with tests in the form of studio-based practice and expanded cinema performance. This led to identifying the terminology of analogue film editing as evidence of the largely unrecognised labour of women who worked in the cutting rooms of early cinema, whose practice was seen as menial due to it being considered similar to cutting and stitching cloth. Underpinned by feminist and post-materialist discourse, the methodology of crafting expanded cinema involved entwining digital and analogue technologies to produce a new expanded cinema performance Film as Fabric. This live work developed through numerous iterations documented using video, digital photography and sound recording. The embroidery practice of sampling enabled examination of a seminal expanded cinema performance that featured stitch, Reel Time (1973) by Annabel Nicolson. The process of combining textile practice and experimental filmmaking through expanded cinema performance was informed by Richard Sennett’s ‘domain shift’ theory. It resulted in hybrid tools and the specific practice of creating moving images and optical sounds from fabric and stitch patterns and editing them into loops with a live method informed by dressmaking. Driven by ideas of the body as a living archive and performance as a mode of memory, the live work became a way of analysing and remembering Reel Time, as well as a way for repressed analogue filmmaking practices associated with women’s hidden labour to reemerge and be celebrated. Documentation of Film as Fabric became a record release, a website and this thesis offering a divergent historical narrative and a field of contemporary practice to support future interdisciplinary exchange.