The essence of the medium is time. . . . Its basic underlying characteristics are change and transformation. . . . The medium unfolds itself in time. —Bill Viola

An extended viewing of Zen for Film can facilitate a profound spatiotemporal experience not only of the apparatus but also of our own existence through a direct experience of time. For the spectator, time in Zen for Film demands of the spectator the highest effort of endurance and meditative calm. For Heidegger, dealing with raw time within the vacuum created by the absence of the conventional noise of modern life makes us aware of our surroundings and of ourselves. Here, a prolonged temporal passing establishes the relation between time and boredom.

Yet the time of Zen for Film is, first of all, time processed by a machine——the projector——present in the movement of a filmstrip through its mechanism in a sequence of discrete images. In the process, it should become tangible, cinematic time, but the film leader is empty, the time frames nonexistent. Paik’s is a clear film leader, in which nothing has been stopped and turned into a frozen snapshot. The film subverts Henri Bergson’s critique of cinema, in which he argues that the cinematograph substitutes frozen instances, frame by frame, for the fluidity of real motion and ceaseless, durational flux. In Zen for Film there are no instances recorded, no photograms, or any kind of pictorial presence, so it becomes a subtle means of representing duration cinematically.

Time in Zen for Film means also the imprint of time, endowed with a positive value. It inverts the relationship between transparency, which enables seeing, and the loss of transparency, which imbues what is being seen (or what is becoming less visible and more opaque) with another quality. And rather than in an instant, this new dimension of seeing reveals itself in time, in duration. —HH