To subscribe to Afterall journal, starting with this issue, please click here.
Alternatively, if you wish to purchase this article individually, you may do so via JSTOR. Please follow the instructions on this page.
Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.
– Samuel Goldwyn
We wanted to go into the movie business, but every time we went
out to Hollywood nothing much ever really happened. Then I was
shot.
– Andy Warhol, 19811
Every cigarette, every drink, every love affair echoes down a never ending passage way of references – to advertisements, to television shows, to movies – to the point where we no longer know if we mimic or are mimicked.
– Thomas Lawson, 19822
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the title of a 2-minute-long, 16mm colour film made by Jack Goldstein in 1975. The film shows the animated emblem of the Hollywood studio, a lions head, set in an ornamental, (almost) perfectly round frame on a ground of deepest red, flanked symmetrically by heraldically curled strips of film. Already familiar from innumerable trailers, the lion roars and jerks its head to one side. The movement is stopped at short intervals and rewound. The lion has to begin again and again without ever reaching fulfilment. The majestic gesture congeals into catatonic jerks.
The sight of the MGM lion, locked into this cage of repetition, could be described as an infinite delay. Goldstein constructed the image through the editing and subsequent addition of found footage. The prelude, the pre-image, the overture are all thrown uselessly back on themselves. The image of the lion – forced into a traumatic, hospitalised rhythm of repetition – does not introduce the movie anymore but has to serve on its own as the main feature. Of course, it appears totally inadequate. The twitching lion does not occupy us
