The Process Cinema Artisan: Comparative Materialities in Celluloid and Digital Filmmaking.

Experimental cinema has long engaged with handmade techniques, but within the past ten or fifteen years there has been a surge of interest in small-gauge cinema as a craft practice. Often referred to as "process cinema" because the experimental process of creation is prioritized over a particular end result, the artists and scholars in this community consider such work in both political and aesthetic terms, often invoking the term "artisan" to contrast their artistic practice with commercial, digital cinema. In this article, I examine the discourses of artisanship and materiality within process cinema discourse, comparing celluloid-based and digital glitch art practices and arguing against the perceived "immateriality" of digital media. The discursive juxtaposition between photochemical film and what I term "photoelectrical film" that persists in a range of artist interviews and critical scholarship elides the potential for digital process cinema to engage in the same ideological critique as their celluloid film colleagues. Yet, both sets of artists find ways to critique industrial mass production and extractive capitalism through experimentations with the physical materiality of their respective media formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]