Science Without Substance (Daniel Barnett, 2019)

It took me a few false starts, but I finally sat down with Dan Barnett's new feature film. Barnett, for those who've joined the program already in progress, is a key figure in American avant-garde film who has not really gotten his due, despite being enormously influential for other's in the field -- the definition of a "filmmaker's filmmaker." Not too long ago I wrote about White Heart, Barnett's 1975 film that has sort of become his defining classic, even though it remains tragically underseen. But at this point, Barnett has placed most of his back catalogue on Vimeo for those interested in a deep dive.

Embarrassingly, I only just discovered (although I think I once knew and just forgot) that Barnett is also an author who wrote a philosophical treatise on film theory and perception entitled Movement as Meaning. I am trying to get my hands on the book, but it seems that he is applying analytic philosophy (mostly late Wittgenstein, but also Dennett and Quine) to our understanding of the cinematic image as a form of signification. Heady stuff, to be sure, and possibly, as they say, "above my pay grade." (I have read almost nothing in analytic philosophy, apart from some work in aesthetics -- Arthur Danto, Nelson Goodman, and some Wittgenstein.) But obviously I'm curious.

So as I was watching the new film, I got the beginnings of an idea for a filmic category or descriptor. We could call it cinema bombardier, a kind of absolute opposite to minimalism or slow cinema. Barnett is a practitioner, along with other folks who have not gotten their historical due, like David Larcher, Mike Cartmell, Bruce Elder, and perhaps to a lesser extent Pat O'Neill. They seem to overwhelm the viewer with more visual and sonic information than anyone could ever possibly process, and if one does not know what one is in for, the experience can be rather unpleasant. It's a bit like flunking an exam in real time. You know you are supposed to be "getting" something but there is too much coming at you, and in too complex a format.

But this is actually the point. These works are precisely about the incapacity of the human mind to make sense of highly complex systems, and so several things happen as we watch. We can let the whole thing wash over us, like classical music (or more precisely, its 20th / 21st century variety -- atonal art music). We will perceive themes and motifs, overall rhythms, but the micro-relationships built into the piece will most likely elude us, especially on a single viewing. Or, we can try to organize the waves of data into broad categories, which means ignoring lots of surface details and instead focusing on broad patterns of color, texture, light and dark pulsing, the use of text as text rather than as signification, etc. Or (what is usually my strategy) we can concentrate very hard on what's in front of us -- all of it -- for small moments, and then pull our rapt attention away for resting periods, resulting in waves of broad impressionism and select moments of careful notation of the smaller articulations.

Whew.

Science Without Substance is a dense collage of sonic clips, found images, and original performance material. On its surface, there is a constant flashing of the video raster, implicating the viewer in the distinction between analogue (film) and digital (video) media and their integration as we perceive them. There are moments of pure light and color, but mostly there is an overwhelming sense of movement and confusion. There are recurring tracking shots out a train window, treated to make the houses look post-nuclear. These images are accompanied by (at the beginning) a 300-to-zero countdown and (at the end) a1-to-100 "count-up."

But above all there are individuals rifling through forests of discarded newspapers, magnifying portions in search of who-knows-what. This is compared with shots of computer-generated gobbledegook and audio clips about transformation and "waking up a different person." Science Without Substance, over the course of its difficult journey, thematizes the struggle to understand one's world, and is in many ways about the choice that its own viewer must make when confronting it: try to build a system for tentative comprehension, or embrace the chaos.

I don't like when writers on experimental cinema remark that a film is "difficult" or "challenging" or "not for everyone," mostly because I think such proclamations carry a faint whiff of machismo. ("Are you tough enough for this film?!") But at the same time, Science Without Substance asks its viewer to meet it more than halfway, and it does not offer up its pleasures easily. I can imagine it will be hard to program, despite its obvious mastery. But at the same time, it represents a strain of experimental practice that is too often ignored even by most of the guardians and gatekeepers of the avant-garde. Some would simply dismiss Barnett's film as "unwatchable." But I liked it quite a bit, once I found my own path through it. And it is precisely about watchability, and understanding what we do when we confront a series of light-dots on a white screen. The film bombards us in order to see what sticks.