Smithson on Film, Time, and Superstars

"Cinema offers an illusive or temporary escape from physical dissolution. The false immortality of the film gives the viewer an illusion of control over eternity--but "the superstars" are fading" (Smithson 74).

I found this passage in Smithson's "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, NJ" to be particularly and fascinatingly rich. The juncture of the filmic and the photographic (and of their disparate and yet entangled temporalities) within the film strip generates a third temporality: one that is infinite, capable of rewinding, skipping, etc. Film allows for a regression back through time, a challenge to time's accepted linearity and progression. However, this regression is false, in that the film, as a series of photographic frames subject to the same physical dissolution as the photograph experiences, is subject to that time--mastered by it. The power time manages to maintain over the photograph is maintained over film as well. However, film manages to gloss over this and create an illusion of mastery over time.

I found the quotation "the superstars" within this citation to be even more greatly packed with meaning. At once it seems only to correlate film and photography with the culture of celebrity intrinsic to American Hollywood film production; however, at the same time, it seems to point at the avant-garde films and cinematic/photographic culture-style of Andy Warhol and his "superstars". In an ostensibly simple assertion, Smithsom manages to critique both mainstream and avant-garde photographic/filmic representations and the power structures to which they belong and that they regularly and willingly reinscribe. In this way, Smithson places the problematic treatment of film and photography as monument (in relation to time and eternity) in a political-cultural context to dissolve binarisms between mainstream and avant-garde uses of the photographic and to criticize the role of photography and its relation to time in contemporary art.