The Film Reel as a Scroll

Scrolls and film have a lot in common from a temporal perspective, so I was particularly interested by the fact that Yun-Fei Ji acknowledged that a large portion of his influence came from film. If we consider the era when film was still used for commercial cinema, films were stored as large spools that were unwound gradually, revealing a narrative. Even the title panel and colophon panels have rough filmic equivalents in the opening titles and closing credits, and silent films also would have had intertitles interceding at points in the narrative for the sake of clarity. There is also something very filmic about Yun-Fei’s work in that the border of the scroll composes a frame that surrounds a two-dimensional image that has the illusion both of depth and temporality; as we look at the scrolls on display, they seem to be passing by before our eyes because our eye travels so freely throughout the frame and each detail seems to connect to the next, like moments in time rather than static images on a piece of paper.

I regret not asking Yun-Fei Ji about which films in particular influenced him, but I personally noticed a connection between his work- particularly the issues of frame, depth, and time- and an experimental film called A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China (or Surface IS Illusion but So Is Depth). In the film, an artist, David Hockney, unfurls a scroll called The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour (1691-1698), scroll seven. As he does so, he draws our attention to the intricate details of the paintings and their artistic significance. The narrating artist points out the way that depth is constructed in the scroll through a unique style of perspective that is not a representation of natural space but rather directs the eye to the emperor, much as the Persian illuminations flattened perspective to achieve similar worshipful acts of viewership. The perspectival relationship between surface and depth becomes complicated, especially to western viewers accustomed to Quattrocento rules about vanishing points and horizons. However, as the title suggests, the film is more than a didactic exploration of one example of Chinese scroll art. The film is also a commentary about our interactions with artworks that have a time element.

In Day on the Grand Canal, we have to change our expectation of what the pace of a film should be in order to appreciate what the pace of the artwork is. We can choose to be immersed in the scroll and follow the canal and its tributaries, or look across a field, or go down the alleys separating the houses. We can pay attention to the perspective and sight lines and look at the illusion of surface and depth. But one thing we cannot do is step back from a scroll painting and look at it within a frame, like a picture. The film necessarily imposes a frame around the scroll because the frame is a substitute for our eye, which cannot see everything that is to come. Even in the exhibit of Yun-Fei’s work, were the scrolls were displayed along the walls, we have to move in time and space in order to keep up. It is meant to move, to unfold; it is not a static experience of place. Both film and scrolls are two-dimensional forms that contain illusory three-dimensional spaces and both forms can be seen as gaining their motion from close, repeating forms that are blurred together into continuity by the eye and mind. Scroll and film achieve a kind of unity: the narrator unfurling the scroll in front of the still camera is a visual metaphor or equivalent for the movement of film past the camera’s aperture. And the spooling of film first through a camera to record the image and then through a projector to make the record viewable is similar to the twofold process of creating the scroll gradually and unfurling it gradually. The two scrolling motions become unified in the process of exploring temporal artworks.