Every contact leaves a trace. —Edmond Locard

Analogue is finite: it transforms what it processes. When filmstrips move through the analogue medium during screenings, dust and scratches mar their surfaces, and these inevitable, slow accumulations of traces may reach the extreme point where the content is obliterated altogether. Traditionally, dust and scratches are experienced as disruptions or distractions in the context of narrative cinema. Not only do they draw attention to the materiality of the film itself, but they also reveal both the vulnerability of the film medium and the mechanics of the motion through the projector at sixteen or twenty-four frames per second. Traces upset cinematic illusionism and signal the disjunction between reel time and real time.

Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film appears to perform visual silence and existential nothingness, producing a visual experience that is purged from seeing images. Yet Paik’s film is not a complete inversion of narrative cinema, nor is it an ode to the blank screen. Instead, the work demonstrates the impossibility of nothingness and silence: the process of trace accumulation becomes the work’s ever-changing content, keyed to the monotonous——or even boring——rhythm of the laboring projector and its audible mechanics. Here, the trace obliterates transparency and becomes the content, and that which held the trace——a relic.

But what happens, asks Michael Newman, “when the analogue technologies are themselves left behind for the forward move of progress? This concerns not only the obsolete object, which may harbor an unrealized, even explosive, potential. It also concerns the very technological medium of memory that is capable of transforming the modality of the past from a bygone actuality to something that has the potential to open up another future in the present” (Newman, 2003). —LS