Mark Lewis Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, until 22 April
Cinema is finished and done with. It is as dead as poor old painting. The only difference is that painters are lucky - everyone knows their medium has had it, so they can pick over the relics in peace. But filmmakers? They continue in wilful denial, refusing to accept that every idea, every innovation, effect or style has long since been done to death. Abetted by our blind love of movies, they keep turning out the same old product: plots retold, shots rehashed, features too long by about 90 minutes.
These are the opinions of Mark Lewis, the Canadian-born, London-based artist. They apply to any bad night at the Odeon, of course - but Lewis is more concerned with the death of the avant-garde, its exequies exhaustively directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Lewis also makes films about filmmaking, working in 35mm with a professional cast and crew. But his pieces are mercifully short - not longer than five minutes at the most - and they come to praise, not bury the inventions of cinema. Which, incidentally, do not include sound since it is only added in post-production. 'There is nothing,' he argues, 'inherent in the process of film that actually necessitates sound.'
Lewis, it may be confidently predicted, turns out to be an old-fashioned purist, in love with the visual - the zoom, the pan, the slow track - and bored by character and plot. His method is to select a convention unique to cinema, often quite a rudimentary operation, which he then isolates on screen without the amniotic fluid of narrative. This is easier to do in an art gallery, where nobody is expecting Spielberg. The downside is that the audience still has to be sufficiently fascinated to stay until the final credits.
Lewis is very good at endings. In A Sense of the End he films six alternative endings in long shot - the man rushing to catch up with the train that bears the woman away; the gunshot victim faltering and finally collapsing in an urban wasteland. Each conclusion functions as a kind of film-without-a-film: pure climax that requires no build-up. Lewis makes a similar feature of opening titles. Two Impossible Films is based on a pair of projects that were never made: Eisenstein's movie of Marx's Kapital and Sam Goldwyn's absurd fantasy of filming the complete works of Freud. Lewis shoots only the opening and closing credits. The rest, apparently, is summarised in laconic storyboards - 'Plot Development, 'Temporary Resolution' and so forth. Only in dream or theory could such texts ever be realised as drama.
I say apparently because Two Impossible Films is sadly not included in Lewis' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Nor, I'm afraid, is the excellent A Sense of the End, made in 1996. The six films on show are more recent and austere, almost fundamentalist in their attitude to cinema. They are for people who like to analyse the language of movies, to admire the long take, the jump-cut, the over-the-building shot: people who prefer to study films on video, using the freeze-frame and replay of a remote control.
North Circular, for example, opens with a distant shot of a gutted office block backlit against a violet-tinged sky. Some children move in the interior shadows, disrupting the static image. The camera glides lazily up on its crane, like a bird buoyed up on a thermal current. Gradually it peaks and descends to peer through a window, where a top is spinning on a table. That's all. No pressure of event, no mystery, no beginning or end, since the film is on continuous loop. You could get the same pleasure from any crane-shot in a Hitchcock movie - but you'd have to put up with so much in the way of thrilling action and plot.
In Centrale, an incident almost takes place between two characters waiting in a street. The woman is talking quite sociably to the man although he pays her no attention whatsoever. After a few anxious seconds, you realise he isn't even facing her - the camera is filming two scenes at once with the aid of a cunningly angled mirror. I guess this is a lesson in legibility: how we read speech and body language in the absence of sound. But aside from the sense of what deafness must be like, this optical trick doesn't convey more than can be learnt from the daily business of looking.
Perhaps that is all Lewis really wants - to slow the eye down to its essential function. In Smithfields , he sends a camera gliding back and forth round a glass-sided building by night. You watch the cleaner washing the floor inside. You get on close terms with the architecture and the multiple reflections. It is rhythmically monotonous for about two soothing minutes - at which point the film concludes. According to the catalogue, Lewis is experimenting with the single-reel shot as pioneered by the Lumière brothers. But you can't help wondering if he feels bound by the same imperative as the Hollywood mogul - never to bore the audience.
The most elaborate piece in this show is Upside Down Touch of Evil, a meticulous reconstruction of the long opening sequence of Orson Welles's movie, shot in silence - except for the bomb blast that triggers the plot - and with the camera inverted. I don't know why Lewis has done this. It doesn't add to the spatial qualities of Welles's great tracking shot as it follows Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh along curving pavements, across tramlines and beneath the streetlights of the evening city. Nor does it destroy the suspense, since anyone watching the timer applied to the bomb - even upside down - is braced for the explosion to go off.
Invert an image and you raise a question: why is this not the right way up? The answer, in this case, is a little to do with alienation - looking at a famous film with new eyes - and a lot to do with formal abstraction. Josef von Sternberg is said to have rued the fact that he couldn't edit his movies upside down, so the plot wouldn't interfere with the aesthetic. If Lewis had fixed on Hitchcock, say, like so many other contemporary artists, he might have decoupled aesthetic from plot with this expensive inversion. But Welles's melodrama remains intact, even when enacted on the ceiling.
The best film in this show is the only one that doesn't try to segregate the techniques we all notice perfectly well, even when supposedly scanted and sidelined by the narrative thrust of a movie. In The Pitch , Lewis films himself on a crowded public concourse, conducting a persuasive monologue about the role of the extra - the over-looked proletariat of the film set, always in the background of history. Noting that there is no equivalent in any other art form, Lewis pitches the idea of a film entirely cast with extras - shoppers, travellers, drunks, people who animate the scene with their silent reactions. As he speaks, the camera pans slowly back to take in the bystanding crowds - who have unwittingly become stars of the very film, brief and brilliant, that Lewis has been shooting all along.
