A Matter of Frames and 'Dispositions': ‘Real Time Film’ and ‘Sensitive Environments’

My paper links two different “dispositifs of representation” that in recent years have problematized the boundaries between cinema and performance. The first is known as “Real Time Film” and was proposed by Big Art Group for the first time in the work Shelf Life (2001), and then developed in Flicker (2002) and House of No More (2004). The making of Real Time Film involves the positioning of a series of screens that cut the stage horizontally. A certain number of cameras are positioned on the top of the screens, to frame the space behind them. The whole performance on stage that the spectator can only partially see behind between, under, over the screens, is functional to the shooting and the simulation of film language resources, and so to the production of images that are “edited” and screened live. Therefore the Real Time Film involves and, at the same time, rejects both the screen mode and the stage dispositif, as well as their respective viewing regimes. The screens hide the stage, but the “functionality” of these screens is continually interrupted by the actions taking place around the frames: product and production are forced to coexist, and the performative discourse produces an effect of opacity and “hypermediation.” The space of Real Time Film is marked by plurality, discontinuity (space of the screen, space between/behind/above and below the screens) and heterogeneity (filmic space, stage space). On the contrary, the space proposed by the “Sensitive Environments” of Studio Azzurro appears to be unique, continuous (the video projection expands to fit the scenic space, rejecting the model of the cinematic frame) and homogeneous (the performer interacts with the image without the mediation of visible interfaces). These choices, as opposed to those of Big Art Group, produce an effect of transparency and “immediacy.” Starting from these ideas, from a crisis of the “frame” through its multiplication or removal, the paper analyzes the ways in which Big Art Group and Studio Azzurro problematize the convergence of theatre and cinema as “dispositifs of representation.”