21L.011  The Film Experience

Hiroshi Sugimoto, from the "Theaters" series.

"One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself.  I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera.  I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle.  In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater."  (Hiroshi Sugimoto, Time Exposed, 1995, p. 91).

In this series, Sugimoto photographs vintage movie theaters and drive-ins using long exposures over the entire film's duration and only the light reflected from the screen as illumination.  This pure white rectangle of light -- an entire feature film's output and a blank frame around nothing -- reappears in numerous films; we might see it as the ground-zero of cinema.