ABSTRACT
Fundamental to the concept of “Film as Film” is an equivalence to the modernist view that the meaning and aesthetic base of a work derives from its material rather than from an illusionist representation. Stressing the primacy of the work as material, as process, and constructing the aesthetic experience from the characteristics of the medium. 1
The materialist approach unites different media through their attention to the encounter with the medium (the material) itself, rather than the fi ctional worlds created through media-as-dramatic-narrative. Earlier developments used to describe the avant-garde fi lm and video art are thus instructive in considering the glitch. The development of materialist markers for physicality understands glitch via a Marxist critical role for art that articulates discontinuity as a challenge to capitalist protocols. 2 The distinctions between glitches deployed in fi lm and those of digital media only differ in their technical generation/presentation-challenging the absolute critical distinctions between digital and analog images-Le Grice’s observation that historically “the meaning and aesthetic base of a work derives from its material.” A consideration of historical medium specifi city is thus not only warranted, it can illuminate these problematics by identifying its origins in nineteenth and twentieth century critiques of capitalist production; acknowledging the continuity between digital glitches and materialist fi lm undermines these Formalist aesthetics generally, inherently challenging the conceptual foundations of this critical framework.
