Independent, The (London): Arts: Why cliches are important

An open mouth screams. A door opens very slowly. A car plunges down a mountain side. A roulette wheel spins. Etc. Etc. This is the stuff of cinema. Below the level of story-telling, films are made up of a repertoire of micro-thrills, single shot motifs, which recur almost unchanged from picture to picture and are reliably enjoyable. You could call them cliches, but that would be ungrateful, since familiarity is part of their pleasure. They are also the stuff of the work of Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller.

The pair are master film-samplers. A few years ago they showed a group of video pieces in Oxford called The Phoenix Tapes, each one a brilliantly re-edited sequence of tiny bits plucked of Hitchcock films, which seemed - with story and character distilled away - to extract a pure essence of Hitchcock, capturing the core obsessions and excitements of his cinema. The pair are now showing a series of new works at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool.

Enlighten is a simple example, but it gives the basic trick. It takes just one motif, familiar from many films, not only horror ones: a flash of forked lightning splitting a night sky, accompanied by a crack of thunder. It's always a great heightener. But here is a sequence of such shots, extracted from a dozen different films, not quite identical, but very nearly, and going crash, crash, crash, one after another.

Of course it's funny. With nothing to heighten but one another, these lightnings just short circuit, and make you conscious of your own pavlovian susceptibility to this hoary old dramatic device. And then you begin to feel fondly towards it, still trying repetitively, impotently, to be dramatic. And finally you start to enjoy the lightning for its own sake, in this new film entirely devoted to it, which in fact gradually accelerates the crashes, each coming more quickly than the last, and building up into a stroboscopic ra-ta- tat.

The main piece here is Manual. It samples shots from sundry futuristic US TV series from the Sixties, and the stress is on technology - or, specifically, on close-ups that show the interaction of human hands with technology. It's a rhythmic sequence of switches being purposefully flicked, buttons pushed, dials turned, levers clunked, plugs shoved into sockets, connections made, aerosols sprayed, syringes finely squeezed so that a single drop of serum emerges from the needle.

There's a Media Studies element to this. You come to feel that this was what such programmes were really about - the stories were nothing, the whole point and pleasure of them were these shots of gadgets being operated. But the great thing about Girardet and Muller's work is that, although it puts in distance, it doesn't itself disavow this pleasure. It renews it. It takes a genial attitude to films' fixtures. It puts these repetitious motifs on literal repeat, and creates a slightly deranged celebration of the thrills of repetitiveness, of stimulus and response, the throwing of mental switches. The show moves to the Milch Gallery in London in April.

Art film and video often turns to the cinema proper. Sometimes it goes the other way. Atom Egoyan is himself a well-known film- director, but what he's showing in London now, in the empty building formerly occupied by the Museum of Mankind, is an installation. It's called Steenbeckett, and if you pick up the references in that punning title you may catch the concept. A Steenbeck is a reel-to- reel film editing machine, now mainly obsolete due to digital editing. And Samuel Beckett wrote a play called Krapp's Last Tape, in which an old man reviews his past, as diarised on an old reel-to- reel tape recorder, spooling backwards and forwards in search of particular events. So we have themes of obsolescence, recorded images/ sounds, going backwards and forwards, cutting and joining things (a life, a film) together.

The concept is neat and maybe promising, though it always seems to me unwise when people are "inspired" by Beckett: it's such a risky comparison to plant in an audience's mind. As for the work, the best thing about it is that it confounds the common prejudice that contemporary visual artists have no skills. You just need to see somebody who isn't one doing it. Stage and film directors (Robert Wilson, Peter Greenaway) sometimes have a go at installations, and it obviously seems easy to them. Why surely, you just fill a room up with resonant objects, atmospheric lighting and weird noises.

The centrepiece of Steenbeckett is this kind of slack, "I could do that" installation. A large semi-darkened chamber is criss-crossed with a web of lengths of film stretching floor to wall to ceiling, but all in motion, spooling round on reels, with a general whirring noise; and at the far end there's a Steenbeck unit showing a film of Krapp on its screen. It's a pretty-ish spectacle, but meaningless. Why does the whirring film all go criss-cross? No reason I can see, except as an attempt, somehow, to make the material of film into an installation. In other parts of the show there are little still- lives of junked, old film equipment, which might as well come from a "themed" shop window display. I'm sorry to say this is an Artangel project.

To more sober business. With the general burgeoning of artist's film and video, it may be forgotten that 20 years ago there used to be something called avant-garde cinema. What's happened, you might say, is that experimental film has largely migrated from the exclusive screening to the more friendly art gallery, and in the process lost a lot of its intellectual austerity. But not entirely. The avant-garde spirit, austerity and all, is alive and well in the work of the Canadian artist/film-maker, Stan Douglas. Three of his films you can see at the Serpentine Gallery.

Douglas has coined some rather beautiful, formal devices. One piece, for example, Le Detroit, has a screen hanging in the middle of a gallery. A black-and-white film sequence is projected on one side of it, and the same sequence (mirror imaged) is projected on the other side, so that they match back-to-back, but one projection is positive and the other negative, so as you go from one side of the screen to another the image reverses out.

But when it comes to the delivery of content, Douglas's work is pretty solidly in true old head-banging avant-garde mode. There's a great deal of footnoting, points that can only be understood from reading the accompanying texts. And their scenarios are purposely viewer-unfriendly, designed to frustrate nor- mal expectations and satisfactions, so as to engender a detached and critical attitude in their audience.

It's an aesthetic where any quickening of the emotional pulse is regarded with suspicion, where the mark of a properly "critical" cinema is a steady tedium. Oh dear. These are serious, thoughtful pieces ofworks, but they are very boring, rigorous in their avoidance of any sort of delight or intensity. And audience-detachment, in the bodily sense of having just walked out, is something I find they achieve rather too well.

Girardet & Muller - `Manual': Bluecoat Gallery, School Lane, Liverpool. To 23 Mar. (Then at Milch Gallery, Tinworth Street, London SE11. 11 Apr to 26 May). Atom Egoyan - `Steenbeckett': Museum of Mankind, Burlington Gardens, London W1. To 17 Mar. Stan Douglas: Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2. To 7 Apr