Shooting the Archaeozoic

‘The movie began as a series of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving. And the movie editor, bending over such a chaos of “takes”, resembles a palaeontologist sorting out glimpses of a world not yet together, a land that has yet to come to completion, a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels. Film strips hung from the cutter’s rack, bits and pieces of Utah, out-takes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material. The sun, the spiral, and salt buried in lengths of footage.’1

In 1970 Robert Smithson returned to New York City from the remote elsewhere of Rozel Point, Salt Lake, Utah, with a ‘bramble’ of 16mm film footage in his hand. He had overseen the construction of Spiral Jetty, a 1500-foot long coil of basalt rocks that would quickly become known as the signature example of the Earthworks movement and eventually be recognized as one of the major works of American art. With tightly framed footage of the jetty’s construction and expansive, vertiginous aerial footage of the completed work, Smithson enlisted Robert Fiore’s help with the intention of putting together a film.
Tellingly, the film began – with a nod to Russian avant-garde cinema – as a silent movie of machinic production. Fiore recalls: ‘Once the picture was in some sort of order, I began to add sound, and this was a great discovery for Bob. He loved all of the effects that went with the bulldozers and other machinery. So we began to think up other scenes to film.’2 In a reversal of the usual editing process the film grew as it was assembled. Smithson ventured out to shoot more images – a stack of books on a mirror, the Hall of Late Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), scattered atlas pages in a New Jersey quarry and so on – that would spiral outward from the Utah footage.
The entire editing process was a ‘great discovery’ for Smithson: to some extent Spiral Jetty preserves the process of its development. Before the credits roll, the film concludes with a shot of the editing room in which the film was assembled. Hung above the movieola editing machine is a Photostat of the Earthwork, flanked by spiral reels of film. The movieola – which allows a film to be constructed from ‘bits and pieces’ – became the perfect device for Smithson to explore the vast reaches of time. He wrote:

‘Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and crude. One is transported by the Archaeozoic medium into the earliest known geological eras. The movieola becomes a “time machine” that transforms trucks into dinosaurs. Fiore pulled lengths of film out of the movieola with the grace of a Neanderthal pulling intestines from a slaughtered mammoth. Outside his 13th Street loft window one expected to see Pleistoscene faunas, glacial uplifts, living fossils and other prehistoric wonders.’3

Recently J.G. Ballard anticipated that our descendants in the remote future would perceive Smithson’s Earthworks as time machines – ‘artefacts intended to serve as machines that will suddenly switch themselves on and begin to generate a more complex time and space. All his structures seem to be analogues of advanced neurological processes that have yet to articulate themselves.’4 I would suggest that the Spiral Jetty film does, in fact, ‘switch on’ the Earthwork and articulate a complex ordering of time, even suggesting the eventual fate of an Earthwork encrusted with salt through a series of filmed stills. (That future is now.) If the movieola is a time machine, so is the film constructed with it.
Spiral Jetty does not rely on special effects, such as slow-motion or time-lapse photography, to represent time travel. In George Pal’s 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), for example, a rear-screen projection of time-lapse imagery illustrates the protagonist’s journey from 1900 to the year 802,701 in a rather theatrical manner. Smithson employed only the most basic tool available to any filmmaker: the cut. The dominant strand of classic (i.e., Hollywood) filmmaking, from D.W. Griffith on, attempted to present a seamless sense of continuity by disguising the editing as much as possible. Outside this tradition, however, one can trace Smithson’s editing to the revolutionary montage experiments of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein or to the Surrealist films of Luis Buñuel, which all attempted to use the cut as a shock to thought – to produce ideological meaning in the Russian films or the irrational in those of Buñuel – by splicing one shot to the next.
Clearly indebted to the Russian avant-garde, Smithson reveals classic continuity editing as artifice, returning the cut to its Archaeozoic origins: infinitely small, yet infinitely dense, Smithson uses the cut between two shots as a Big Bang. One might consider the famous match cut in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – a Neanderthal tosses a bone that ‘becomes’ a spaceship – as a precedent for Spiral Jetty, yet Smithson repeatedly uses the cut to move through time, as a lacuna that spans prehistoric past and post-historical future and lands at various points in between.
As evidenced by his writings, Smithson absorbed the imaginative temporal models constructed in countless literary sources, including Wells’ The Time Machine, John Taine’s 1930s pulp serial The Time Stream, Edgar Allan Poe’s 1848 cosmological prose-poem Eureka and Jorge Luis Borges’ metaphysical detective story The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). However, it is the influence of cinema that is most apparent in Spiral Jetty. If Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is a temporal labyrinth, his film Je t’aime, Je t’aime (1968) is an explicit, if unusual, entry into the time travel genre. In the latter a man who fails a suicide attempt becomes the subject of a failed time travel experiment in which he gets ‘lost’ in the recent past. Although Resnais depicts a bizarre gourd-like time machine, time travel is not illustrated but actualized through abrupt edits and repetition. Like Resnais, Smithson uses the basic cinematic apparatus as an ‘agency to distribute time’.
Perhaps the most striking influence on Smithson’s film is Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), in which a time traveller, chosen for his haunting memories, is sent from post-apocalyptic Paris into the past, where he is murdered at an airport terminal. The murder is witnessed by a boy who is, paradoxically, the time traveller. Like Smithson’s Jetty, Marker’s La Jetée features maps and ‘timeless animals’ in a natural history museum. His film is a succession of still images, and, like Spiral Jetty, the cuts between shots are transparent cuts in time.
However, Smithson is not the time traveller of Spiral Jetty – the viewer is. Smithson’s few appearances mark the ‘non existent present’ of the film, circa 1970.5 This is reinforced, in part, by point-of-view shots taken