ABSTRACT
Taking cues from architecture, painting, and experimental cinema, Noam Elcott maps three distinct paradigms for the format of the vertical screen. Portraiture—the erect human figure or face—may be understood as the eponymous and paradigmatic form of this vertical format. Vertical screens also align with the celluloid strips that run vertically through nearly all projectors, whose properties were interrogated by postwar avant-gardes and have taken on renewed urgency in light of celluloid’s impending obsolescence. Finally, the luminous verticality of stained glass windows helped define the Gothic order, which provided a model for avant-garde experiments in light and space for a century or more, and which have suddenly returned to centre stage in contemporary art. Elcott’s three distinct paradigms map a centuries-long encounter with vertical screens that resonate unexpectedly yet unambiguously in the present.
