Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty 9781474407137

Citation preview

Indefinite Visions

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality Series editors: Martine Beugnet and Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli Founding editor: John Orr A series of scholarly research intended to challenge and expand on the various approaches to film studies, bringing together film theory and film aesthetics with the emerging intermedial aspects of the field. The volumes combine critical theoretical interventions with a consideration of specific contexts, aesthetic qualities, and a strong sense of the medium’s ability to appropriate current technological developments in its practice and form as well as in its distribution. Advisory board Duncan Petrie (University of York) John Caughie (University of Glasgow) Dina Iordanova (University of St Andrews) Elizabeth Ezra (University of Stirling) Gina Marchetti (University of Hong Kong) Jolyon Mitchell (University of Edinburgh) Judith Mayne (The Ohio State University) Dominique Bluher (Harvard University) Titles in the series include: Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema John Orr Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts Steven Jacobs The Sense of Film Narration Ian Garwood The Feel-Bad Film Nikolaj Lübecker American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image Anna Backman Rogers The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts Tarek Elhaik Screen Presence: Cinema Culture and the Art of Warhol, Rauschenberg, Hatoum and Gordon Stephen Monteiro Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit (eds) www.edinburghuniversitypress.com Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Indefinite Visions Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty

Edited by Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit, 2017 © the chapters their several authors, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Garamond MT Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0712 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0714 4 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0713 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0715 1 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Contents

The asterisked chapters have been translated from the French by Elise Harris with Martine Beugnet List of Figures List of Contributors

vii xi

Introduction 1 Martine Beugnet Illuminations   1. The Veiled Image: The Luminous Formless Jacques Aumont 17   2. The Black Screen Richard Misek 38   3. Flicker and Shutter: Exploring Cinema’s Shuddering Shadow Tom Gunning 53 Definitions   4. One Hundred Years of Low Definition Erika Balsom 73   5. Genres of Blur Martin Jay

90

  6. In Praise of the Sound Dissolve: Evanescences, Uncertainties, Fusions, Resonances * Giusy Pisano 103 Frames   7. Jumps in Scale * Michel Chion 123

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

vi

Contents

  8. Reflecting on Reflections: Cinema’s Complex Mirror Shots Julian Hanich 131   9. Cinematic Indeterminacy According to Peter Tscherkassky: Coming Attractions * Christa Blümlinger 157 10. Partying in The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime Carol Vernallis 180 Temporalities 11. The Force of Small Gestures D. N. Rodowick 209 12. Bill Viola and the Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli 223 13. Slow Looking: Confronting Moving Images with Georges Didi-Huberman Catherine Fowler 241 Materialities 14. (Re)visioning Celluloid: Aesthetics of Contact in Materialist Film Kim Knowles 257 15. Seeing through the Fingertips * Emmanuelle André 273 16. Homo Animalis Kino * Raymond Bellour 288 Glitches 17. Temporalities of the Glitch: Déjà Vu Sean Cubitt 299 18. The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision Steven Shaviro 316 19. Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image Allan Cameron 334 Index 353

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Figures

Figure I.1 Bathing in the Sea (Baignade en Mer), Auguste and Louis Lumière (1895) 2 Figure 1.1 The Age of the Earth (A Idade da Terra), Glauber Rocha (1980) 17 Figure 1.2 Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich (1955) 18 Figure 1.3 Faust, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1926) 19 Figure 1.4 Satyricon, Federico Fellini (1969) 19 Figure 1.5 Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper (1969) 20 Figure 1.6 Oedipus Rex (Edipo re), Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967) 21 22 Figure 1.7 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Cassavetes (1976) Figure 1.8 Deep Red (Profondo rosso), Dario Argento (1975) 22 Figure 1.9 Super 8, J. J. Abrams (2011) 23 Figure 1.10 Walden, Jonas Mekas (1969) 25 Figure 1.11 Kiss, Andy Warhol (1963) 26 27 Figure 1.12 Roslyn Romance, Bruce Baillie (1976) Figure 1.13 Decasia, Bill Morrison (2002) 29 Figure 1.14 Rumpelstilzchen, Jürgen Reble (1989) 30 Figure 1.15 From the Life of the Marionettes, Ingmar Bergman (1980) 32 Figure 1.16 Gertrud, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1964) 33 Figure 1.17 Marilyn Times Five, Bruce Conner (1973) 33 34 Figure 1.18 The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo (2004) Figure 4.1 O, Persecuted, Basma Alsharif (2014) 86 Figure 4.2 O, Persecuted, Basma Alsharif (2014) 87 Figure 8.1 Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974) 132 Figure 8.2 Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974) 132 134 Figure 8.3 Gertrud, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1964) Figure 8.4 Veronika Voss, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1982) 135 Figure 8.5 Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad), Alain Resnais (1961) 135 Figure 8.6 Che: Part 1, Steven Soderbergh (2008) 135 Figure 8.7 The Suspended Step of the Stork, Theo Angelopoulos (1991) 136 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Figures

viii

Figure 8.8 Figure 8.9 Figure 8.10 Figure 8.11 Figure 8.12 Figure 8.13 Figure 8.14 Figure 8.15 Figure 8.16 Figure 8.17 Figure 8.18 Figure 8.19 Figure 8.20 Figure 8.21 Figure 8.22 Figure 8.23 Figure 8.24 Figure 8.25 Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2 Figure 9.3 Figure 9.4 Figure 9.5 Figure 9.6 Figure 9.7 Figure 9.8 Figure 9.9 Figure 9.10 Figure 9.11 Figure 9.12 Figure 9.13 Figure 9.14 Figure 9.15 Figure 9.16 Figure 9.17 Figure 9.18 Figure 9.19 Figure 9.20

Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974) 137 Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974) 138 Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais (1959) 138 Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais (1959) 139 India Song, Marguerite Duras (1975) 142 India Song, Marguerite Duras (1975) 142 India Song, Marguerite Duras (1975) 142 Written on the Wind, Douglas Sirk (1956) 144 Written on the Wind, Douglas Sirk (1956) 144 The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il Giardino dei FinziContini), Vittorio de Sica (1970) 144 Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974) 146 Written on the Wind, Douglas Sirk (1956) 148 The Immigrant, James Gray (2013) 148 Journey to the West, Tsai Ming-liang (2014) 149 India Song, Marguerite Duras (1975) 151 India Song, Marguerite Duras (1975) 151 India Song, Marguerite Duras (1975) 151 Mirrorsong (Spiegellied), Ulla von Brandenburg (2012) 152 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 159 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 159 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 160 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 160 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 160 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 160 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 161 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 161 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 161 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 162 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 163 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 163 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 163 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 164 Motion Picture (La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière à Lyon) 167 (installation, in detail), Peter Tscherkassky (1984) Motion Picture (La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière à Lyon) (installation, pictured together), Peter Tscherkassky (1984) 168 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 169 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 171 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 171 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 172

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Figure 9.21 Figure 9.22 Figure 9.23 Figure 9.24 Figure 9.25 Figure 9.26 Figure 9.27 Figure 10.1 Figure 10.2 Figure 10.3 Figure 10.4 Figure 10.5 Figure 10.6 Figure 10.7 Figure 12.1 Figure 12.2 Figure 13.1 Figure 13.2 Figure 14.1 Figure 14.2 Figure 14.3 Figure 14.4 Figure 15.1 Figure 15.2 Figure 15.3 Figure 15.4 Figure 17.1 Figure 18.1 Figure 18.2 Figure 18.3 Figure 18.4 Figure 18.5

Figures

ix

Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 172 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 173 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 173 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 173 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 175 Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010) 176 The Man With the Rubber Head (L’homme à la tête en 176 caoutchouc), Georges Méliès (1901) The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013) 180 The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013) 183 The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013) 185 The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013) 188 The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013) 192 The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013) 195 The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013) 199 Silent Mountain, Bill Viola (2001) 223 Ocean Without a Shore, Bill Viola (2007) 229 Double Tide, Sharon Lockhart (2009) 246 Double Tide, Sharon Lockhart (2009) 246 Konrad & Kurfurst, Esther Urlus (2013–14) 261 sobbingspittingscratching, Vicky Smith (2011) 264 Parties visible et invisible d’un ensemble sous tension, Emmanuel Lefrant (2009) 268 Priya, Alia Syed (2011) 270 Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage), Jean-Luc Godard (2014) 276 The Three Disasters (Les trois désastres), Jean-Luc Godard (2014) 279 Aquarelle, Nicholas Ray (1973) 281 We Can’t Go Home, Nicholas Ray (1973) 282 Déjà Vu, Tony Scott (2006) 307 Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, Gregory Plotkin (2015) 328 Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, Gregory Plotkin (2015) 328 Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, Gregory Plotkin (2015) 328 Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, Gregory Plotkin (2015) 329 Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, Gregory Plotkin (2015) 329 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

x

Figures

Figure 18.6 Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, Gregory Plotkin (2015) 329 Figure 19.1 Dear Mister Compression, Rosa Menkman (2011) 336 Figure 19.2 Untitled (Silver), Takeshi Murata (2006) 341 Figure 19.3 Long Live the New Flesh, Nicolas Provost (2009) 344 Figure 19.4 Unfriended, Leo Gabriadze (2014) 347

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Contributors

Emmanuelle André is Professor in Film Studies at the University of ParisDiderot. Her research focuses on the links between cinema aesthetics, art history and cultural anthropology. She is the author of Esthétique du motif: Cinéma, musique, peinture (2007), Le choc du sujet. De l’hystérie au cinéma (2011) and, with Dork Zabunyan, L’attrait du téléphone (2013). She has acted as guest editor for several volumes of essays as well as journals, including ‘Pornographiques’ with L. Zimmerman for the journal Textuel, and ‘L’accélération’ with C. Coquio and P. Savy for the journal Écrire l’histoire. She has a forthcoming book, Le cinéma, art de la main. Pour une histoire détournée de l’œil. Jacques Aumont has been a professor in film studies and aesthetics since 1970. He has taught mainly in Paris, but also in Berkeley, Iowa City, Lisbon, Lyon, Madison and Nijmegen. He is currently giving a seminar at the École supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris. He is the author of more than twenty books on film and other arts, most recently: Moderne? Comment le cinéma est devenu le plus singulier des arts (2007), Matière d’images, redux (2009), L’attrait de la lumière (2010), Le Montreur d’ombre (2012), Que reste-t-il du cinéma ? (2012), Limites de la fiction (2014), Montage (2015). Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London. She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017), the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016), and a frequent contributor to Artforum and Sight and Sound. Raymond Bellour is a researcher, writer and emeritus research scientist at  the  CNRS (CRAL, Paris). He has been responsible for the edition of the  complete works of Henri Michaux in the Pléiade (1996–2004) and co-curated in 1990 the ‘Passages de l’image’ exhibition at the Centre Georges  Pompidou. His books include L’Analyse du film (1979), L’EntreImages. Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo (1990), L’Entre-Images 2. Mots, Images (1999), Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, Émotions, Animalités (2009), La Querelle des dispositifs. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

xii

Contributors

Cinéma – installations, ­expositions (2012). He is a founding member of the film journal Trafic. Martine Beugnet is Professor in Visual Studies at the University of Paris 7 Diderot. She has curated exhibitions and written articles on a wide range of film and media topics. She is author of Sexualité, marginalité, contrôle: cinéma français contemporain (2000), Claire Denis (2004), Proust at the Movies (2005) with Marion Schmid, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (2007, 2012) and L’attrait du flou (2017). With Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli she co-directs the Edinburgh University Press book series Studies in Film and Intermediality. Christa Blümlinger is Professor in Film Studies at the University of Paris 8 (Vincennes-Saint-Denis). She has directed numerous curatorial and critical projects in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. Her publications include an edition of writings by Harun Farocki and Serge Daney as well as Cinéma de seconde main. Esthétique du remploi dans l’art du film et des nouveaux médias (2013), Paysage et mémoire. Photographie, Cinéma, audiovisuels, edited with S. Lindeperg, M. Lagny and S. Rollet, Théorème 19 (2014), Attrait de l’archive, special issue Cinémas, vol. 24, no. 2–3 (2014) and Morgan Fisher, Off-Screen Cinema, edited with JeanPhilippe Antoine (2017). Allan Cameron is Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland. He is the author of Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (2008). His work has also appeared in journals including Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Jump Cut and The Velvet Light Trap. Michel Chion is a composer of concrete music, a writer, a researcher, and a director of short films and of videos. He has published more than thirty books, several of which have been translated into English by Claudia Gorbman. His book Audio-vision was published in ten different languages around the world. In 2014–15 he was Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin). Website: michelchion.com. Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect, EcoMedia, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels and Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology and the co-edited open access anthology Digital Light. Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, he researches political, technological and environmental media aesthetics. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Contributors

xiii

Arild Fetveit is visiting scholar in the Department for Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen. He has published in the fields of reception studies, convergence, medium-specific noise, music video, and the digitisation of film and photography as well as written a dissertation on discursive possibilities between documentary and fiction film. He is currently directing an international research project on precarious aesthetics. His writing has appeared, among other places, in Screen, Media, Culture and Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies and NECSUS. Catherine Fowler is Associate Professor in Film at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is author of Sally Potter in the Contemporary Film Directors series (2009), co-editor with Gillian Helfield of Representing the Rural: Space, Place and Identity in Films about the Land (2006) and editor of The European Cinema Reader (2002). Her essays on the art and film axis of influence have been published in journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen and Framework. Tom Gunning is Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago, and author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1994), The Films of Fritz Lang; Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000) and over a hundred articles. Julian Hanich is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen. He is author of Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (2010) and The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience (2017). His articles have appeared in Screen, Cinema Journal, Projections, NECSUS, Studia Phaenomenologica, Movie, Film-Philosophy, Jump Cut and New Review of Film and Television Studies. Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught Modern European Intellectual History and Critical Theory. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (l973 and 1996), Marxism and Totality (l984), Adorno (l984), Permanent Exiles (l985), Fin-de-siècle Socialism (l989), Force Fields (l993), Downcast Eyes (l993), Cultural Semantics (1998), Refractions of Violence (2004), Songs of Experience (2005), The Virtues of Mendacity (2010), Essays from the Edge (2011), Kracauer: l’exilé (2014) and Reason After its Eclipse (2016). Kim Knowles is Lecturer in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, Wales and Experimental Film Programmer at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She has written widely on historical and contemporary avant-garde film, poetry and photography, including the monograph A Cinematic Artist: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

xiv

Contributors

The Films of Man Ray (2009). Her work on contemporary photochemical film practice has been published in Cinema Journal, NECSUS, Moving Image Review and Art Journal and Millennium Film Journal. Richard Misek is a filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Kent. His interests focus on montage and appropriation, cities and space, colour and light. He is the author of Chromatic Cinema (2010); his articles have been published in journals including October, Screen and the New Review of Film and Television. His essay film Rohmer in Paris (2013) has been exhibited in five continents and received widespread critical acclaim. Giusy Pisano is Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière and Associate Professor at the Center of Korean History. A researcher at the IRCAV (Institut de recherche sur le cinéma et l’audiovisuel) at the University of Paris 3 (Sorbonne) and at Grafics (Groupe de Recherche sur l’Avènement et la Formation des Institutions Cinématographique et Scénique) in Quebec, she has published La Musique! (2003), Une archéologie du cinéma sonore (2004), Le muet a la parole. Cinéma et performances à l’aube du XXe siècle (2005), L’amour fou au cinéma (2010), L’Archive-forme (ed.) (2014), Les archives de la mise en scène. Hypermédialités du théâtre (ed. with J.-M. Larrue) (2014). She heads two research programmes: ‘La Mise en scène théâtrale et les formes sonores et visuelles’ and, with J.-M. Larrue, ‘Deceptive Arts. Machines, Magic, Media’. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and Mythopoetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity (2017), and is currently working on the ‘Digital Uncanny’. She teaches in the Department of Cinema and Digital Media, and in Science and Technology Studies, at the University of California, Davis. D. N. Rodowick is Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His newest book, What Philosophy Wants from Images, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. Other books include: The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory (1991), Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (1997), Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (2001), Virtual Life of Film (2007), Elegy for Theory (2013), Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (2014). Rodowick is also a curator, and an award-winning experimental filmmaker and video artist. Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. His books include Post-Cinematic Affect (2010) and Digital Music Videos (2017). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Contributors

xv

Carol Vernallis is completing a monograph on musical spectacles in the digital age and a collected volume on transmedia directors. Her research at Stanford University deals broadly with questions of sound and image in contemporary moving media. Her published books include Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (2004) and Unruly Media: Youtube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (2013), as well as two co-edited Oxford handbooks on contemporary audiovisual aesthetics.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Introduction Martine Beugnet

In the beginning, technology has no rules. Then we teach it how to speak.1 Jean-Luc Godard

Étienne-Jules Marey’s first chronophotographic film, shot in 1891, was entitled La Vague (‘The Wave’). It shows the sea crashing against a pontoon, the raised water disappearing in a whirlpool of foam. Marey planned to use the film as a basis for creating a precise graph of the movement of a wave. He could see little point in showing the original images in public, such as they were. The Lumière brothers, on the other hand, realised the moving image’s spectacular quality and its power to fascinate; they valued it and set out to exploit it, to great success. Writing in 1896 about the first public projection of the Lumière brothers’ films, journalist Henri de Parville attempted to put into words his experience of cinema’s extraordinary rendering of detailed movement. In response to the 1895 films L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (‘The Arrival of a Train’), La Baignade en mer (‘Bathing in the sea’), and Le Repas de bébé (‘Baby’s Meal’), De Parville marvels at having been able ‘to distinguish all the details, the rising swirls of smoke, the waves that come crashing on the beach, the leaves quivering in the wind’.2 Many a historian of the cinema has pondered on De Parville’s observations and choice of terms; how, in the same sentence, he exclaims that cinema can ‘distinguish all the details’, before he proceeds to emphasise those elements that most resist stability and definition: quivering leaves, swirling smoke, crashing waves.3 These early films were not depicting anything that could not be seen by the spectators without the aid of cinema. What De Parville found remarkable was the specifically cinematic quality of the rendering – that is, film’s ability to capture everything in movement, and therefore to bring to our attention the presence of all the detail that we do not normally consciously acknowledge. It does not follow, however, that cinema’s mediation makes perception more accurate or definite. Appearing as a shifting combination of separate yet indistinct elements, a spectacle of multifaceted, gaseous, or liquid matter in perpetual movement, the leaves, the smoke, the waves remain too Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

2

Martine Beugnet d­ ispersed and confused to be grasped fully and definitely. Rather, then, as the journalist immediately intuits, for all its photographic objectivity, cinematographic vision allows for the indefinite to surface: it is a unique means of recording as well as expressing the world’s natural state of confusion.4 Vague, indefinite, yet full of detail: De Parville’s description echoes Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s classic concept of the ‘clear but confused’. According to Leibniz’s well-known critique of the Cartesian concept of knowledge, although only scientific, fully rationalised knowledge is both clear and distinct, it does not follow that it is the only legitimate form of consciousness of the world. Whether knowledge gained from our senses is obscure (when you can simply not identify that which you are perceiving), or clear and confused, it is valuable nonetheless. One of Leibniz’s favoured examples of clear and confused perception is that of the sea, which we identify although we cannot distinctively perceive it: we hear the roar of the sea, made of all the crashing waves, writes Leibniz, and we identify it as the sound of the sea even though we cannot distinguish the sound of each individual wave. As expressed in De Parville’s paradoxical observation, what goes for sound is equally true of vision. The French terminology gives additional force to the manifestation of the clear and confused as captured by the spectacle of the crashing waves, for in French, the word vague has a double meaning: as an adjective it means vague (synonymous, as in English, with ‘indefinite’ and ‘uncertain’), and as a noun – la vague – it translates as ‘the wave’.

Figure I.1  Bathing in the Sea (Baignade en Mer), Auguste and Louis Lumière (1895).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Introduction

3

Though their etymologies are different, the meaning of the two words overlaps from the start: the adjective comes from the Latin vagus, meaning something random, in perpetual motion, something indefinite or indecisive. The noun has an Indo-European etymology that refers it to the random, ceaseless movement of liquid matter. Writing about it in the context of literary creation, Georges Didi-Huberman observes that la vague, the wave, hovers between form and formlessness, and, because it is the very manifestation of incessant motion and constant transformation, it can only ever be grasped fleetingly. La vague is, therefore, the favoured stuff of poetic creation.5 DidiHuberman’s bringing together of poetry, the wave, and the vague echoes the connection between sensory perception and artistic creation observed by Leibniz and his disciple and founder of the study of aesthetics, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten: art explores and cultivates the indefinite part of perception or experience, the ‘je ne sais quoi’;6 it is only in the realm of the clear and confused that it can thrive. Artistic intuition and vision thus stem from the incompleteness and constant variation of the perceived, the impossibility of a full and perfect knowledge of the world.7 As a medium and as a dispositif, cinema appears uniquely predisposed to the capture and the expression of the ‘clear and confused’: on the one hand, incessant motion and the confusion of parts necessary to create the whole characterise the way projected images fuse into movement. In the projection of analogue film, we see the image change in front of us, without separately perceiving each of the photograms which, in the unravelling of their subtle differences, constitute its variations. Though the shift from analogue to digital has radically altered the basis of the projected image, the blending of separate images still arguably takes place in the movie theatre, where digital projection still relies on ‘frames’ and frame rates. On the other hand, as we just saw, film’s mechanical eye has the ability to capture everything, the multitude and dispersion of movement recorded in its simultaneity and in duration, as it unfolds in time. But crucially, cinema as a medium also has the means to explore, alter and intensify our experience of the world’s constant transformation, its constitutive indeterminacy. In the silent era, a broad range of techniques were elaborated by filmmakers who, striving to establish cinema as an art form, sought to emphasise this particular quality of the medium, be it at the recording or at the developing stage. The confusion of details was creatively exploited with techniques such as superimposition, where several layered photograms appeared simultaneously, their content separate yet fused; it was accentuated through acceleration and slow motion (the dissolving forms of speeding objects or the vacillating outlines and ghostly doubling of moving figures captured in slow motion). Alternatively, definition could be deliberately attenuated: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

4

Martine Beugnet

through intentional defocusing or by selecting particular film formats or film stocks; similarly, the use of filters and specific developing techniques altered the quality of the image, bringing out the whole at the expense of the parts, drawing film towards painterly forms. Although experiments with the capture and expression of the ‘clear and confused’ have remained, as method and as object, a key concern of experimental film and art cinema, the advent of sound – or, rather, the advent of synchronised sound and image – has worked to marginalise such practices: sharp contours and the constancy of figures became the norm, necessary to make dialogue and other sounds immediately intelligible as well as readily assignable to identified sources.8 Favouring clear and ‘effective’ storytelling and communication, the grammar of mainstream cinema established a range of camera movements and framing choices, and devised a strict management of focus and depth of field, with the corresponding careful guidance of the spectator’s gaze arguably applying not only to 2-D film but also, with renewed techniques and efficiency, to 3-D. High definition (HD), Paula Cardoso Pereira and Joaquín Zerené Harcha conclude, is the epitome of ‘visual capitalism’: ‘Fetishized not only by advertising, graphic design, HD television, 3-D cinema and 4K resolution, but also by military and scientific devices, high definition is attractive, seductive, impressive and accurate’.9 Even if one still recognises cinema’s unmatched capacity for expressing the disorderly exuberance of the real, the historical roots of the drive to control this particular predisposition are much older than the medium and far more pervasive than the effect of the advent of sound film. The conception of knowledge that founds the ideal of utmost precision, and which prompted Leibniz’s initial defence of the ‘clear and confused’, remains the classic Cartesian model of thought, its central tenet already expressed in the form of an analogy with sound or vision: knowledge and progress belong to the realm of the ‘clear and distinct’. Though the critique of the Cartesian model was continued throughout the nineteenth century, and was pursued to the point of becoming a truism of the recent history and theory of visuality, the advent of the digital and the need to offer alternatives to the drive towards an ever greater definition and legibility of the film image gives it a new impetus. There is, nowadays, talk of ‘fuzzy logic’ to describe modes of reasoning that develop without strictly established categories of judgement.10 In art and media studies, the corresponding ‘phenomenological turn’, with its emphasis on haptic visuality and synaesthesia, has led to the reappraisal of the indefinite as key to perceptual and artistic experience.11 Yet obscurity, lack of definition and blurring remain associated, in common understanding, with the irrational and the faulty, or, at the very least, with the absence of an essential quality.12 Given technological thinking’s grounding in ideals of precision, this collapsNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Introduction

5

ing together of the indefinite with lack is particularly in evidence in conventional discourses connected with technology. The history of audiovisual technical developments, including the increase in the scope and precision of lenses and the increasing gain in sensitivity of film stocks, as well as the growing range of precisely calibrated post-production tools, all ostensibly reflect, and participate in, the narrative that fuses together the notion of progress and that of a better legibility of the audiovisual field. Born out of a machine, the child of an industrial and technological modernity – the advent of which, for Jean-Louis Comolli, inaugurated an era of the ‘frenzy of the visible’ – cinema’s evolution is aligned, from the beginning, with the logic that today extends to mainstream discourses on and practices of high-definition digital media.13 At first glance, with the advent of the electronic, then digital, moving image media, the drive towards the eradication of confusion appears to have intensified. After all, digitally captured and stored moving images are ultimately reducible to the variations of a continuous binary coding (of zeros and ones) that one struggles to conceive of as confusion.14 The size of the screens and the resulting changes to the perceived quality of the image challenges even more tangibly our appreciation of the cinema image as a ‘clear but confused’ depiction of the world. Whereas the image projected in large scale, even the most carefully constructed image, allowed the gaze of the spectator to wander and even lose herself in the composite space of a shot, the display of the image in reduced formats (from television to computer to mobile phone screens) not only heightens the definition (in relative terms, at least) but encourages us to seize the image at once, as a cohesive whole.15 Smaller screens thus foster a regime of the glance that does not seem well predisposed to an imaginative investment in images’ inherent incompleteness. The displacement of the mechanical by computing processes is equally significant in the way it subsumes the subjective to automatic systems: at its worst, when it was first integrated into recording devices coupled with small sensors, the automatic focus and light function were responsible for a generation of dull, flat images where, for the sake of maximum readability, the whole of the field of vision, from foreground to background, was subjected to the same, indiscriminate focus. Finally, there is the lingering issue of the unequalled quality of celluloid film, of the unique effect of its fine and irregular layer of silver salts. If digital film can theoretically emulate the fine unevenness of celluloid film (including in post-production, through the addition of ‘noise’ to the initial recording), common discourses on media technology align with the retailers’ in the way they uphold the argument for an ever greater definition and constancy, the insufficiently questioned ideal and future goal for the moving image remaining one of utmost clarity and precision – clear and distinct. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

6

Martine Beugnet

Though we have arguably never known a broader range of possibilities in moving image capture and treatment,16 today’s mainstream aesthetic of the moving image privileges that which is controlled, stable and instantly ‘readable’: high definition, with its attendant well-contoured image, immediately identifiable face and perfectly synchronised sound. In commercial exploitations of the moving image, the creative exploration of cinema’s ability to convey reality’s inherent instability and confusion tends to be safely grounded in narrative or generic rationales (which include the incorporation of obscured, shaky, blurred images as a token of authenticity) or attached to clearly signposted sensational effects. And yet, Gaston Bachelard reminds us: ‘The value of an image can be measured by the extent of its imaginary aura [. . .]. Hence a stable and fully completed image effectively clips imagination’s wings’.17 It is well known that the indefinite and the incomplete are an essential part of the spectator’s experience. As Leonardo da Vinci famously proposed, a few stains on a decrepit wall might be the best stimulation for the imagination. Similarly, Ernst Gombrich argued that the extent of the spectator’s ‘share’, of her active engagement in perceiving and interpreting the image, depends on its partial legibility or incompleteness.18 While new technologies offer a wealth of alternative modes of recording, however, as well as producing images that often disregard the ‘clear and distinct’ imperative, the still prevalent search for the ideal of the perfectly defined image pulls contemporary cinema back to its uncertain beginnings as an art form. Experiments with high definition contour algorithms and high frame rate (HFR) seem destined to reawaken the spectre of the soulless copy and rekindle the Baudelairian debate on the impossibility of a photographically based artistic medium. Moreover, where the latest trends in digital imaging overlap with the fuzzy or the unreadable, advertising and scientific imagery are quick to exploit or occupy the field: whether it aims to channel the viewer’s gaze into a consumerist logic by isolating and putting emphasis on a product, or to subject access to the interpretation of the visible to exclusive (and therefore seemingly authoritative) scientific knowledge, these strategies do not seek to challenge perception nor to address the viewer’s imagination. Remarking that the imagination is ‘absent from current discourse on images and imagery’, Bernd Huppauf and Christof Wulf ask, ‘will it be possible to reclaim the imagination under the adverse conditions created by digital technologies and an overpowering market?’.19 As far as film is concerned, and as the contributions to this volume eloquently testify, the answer is yes: confusion and indefinition, as the stimulants to imagination, are not easily eliminated. If the dominant discourse places the immediately legible and perfectly defined image at the top of the visual Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Introduction

7

hierarchy, the recognition that film is in fact, and in essential ways, ill-suited to the expression of the fixed, complete and clear-cut, continues nonetheless to inflect the medium’s evolution, practices and theorisations. Accordingly, the essays included in this volume offer themselves as alternative narratives on the nature and vocation of film. They consider moving images and sounds in their more indefinite, ungraspable manifestations, where film hovers on the threshold of representation and legibility and challenges the way we look and listen. Three of the chapters included in the volume address the formal as well as conceptual question of definition applied to the visual (Erika Balsom, Martin Jay) and to sound (Giusy Pisano) respectively, and outline the historical, philosophical and aesthetic theorisation that founds the understanding and embracing of film as a medium of the indefinite. A number of the contributions further explore key aspects of the cinematic that determine its relationship to the uncertainty of vision, and encourage an active and imaginative spectatorial engagement: pitched at the border of art and technique, Jacques Aumont, Richard Misek and Tom Gunning’s reflections take light, darkness and the flicker, and the experience and significance of the blinding and the obscure, as their subjects. Michel Chion and Julian Hanich, in their examination of framing and montage, focus on the play on scale and mirror reflections respectively, emphasising the complexity of the relationship between on- and off-screen (champ and hors champ) and cinema’s articulation of the visible through ellipsis. If mainstream cinema can be considered the ‘flagship store’ in a ‘class society of images’20 that values sharpness, high resolution and stability above all, the great diversity of the corpus addressed in the volume shows that the obscure and the ‘clear and confused’ nonetheless permeates all cinematic forms, demanding a renewed engagement from viewers of experimental cinema and video art, but also blockbuster film. ‘Cinematic indeterminacy’, precisely analysed in Christa Blümlinger’s piece on Peter Tscherkassky, and advocated as the essence of filmmaking and theorising practices by David N. Rodowick, remains a staple of experimental cinema’s innovative and critical strategies. Kim Knowles draws attention to an array of experimental practices that foreground process and the partly uncontrolled alteration of celluloid, and reinstates the ethical import of the ‘performative power of materiality’21 in the era of digital dematerialisation. Turning to video art, Catherine Fowler and Kriss Ravetto concentrate on the ways in which contemporary artists adopt the long take and slow motion as a means to challenge perceptual habits and current viewing regimes. At the other end of the spectrum, the high production values of contemporary Hollywood are the focus of Carol Vernallis’ chapter, where she evokes an excess of visual information that defeat attempts at fully grasping the content of a shot. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

8

Martine Beugnet

Even in the digital era of optical and sound precision, the medium’s aptitude for the vague, the confused and the obscure endures, producing new forms of indefinite visions. Enhancing the possibilities offered by the overabundance of detail and precision, or, on the contrary, encouraging the products of low definition, error-prone media, new technology breeds new types of indefinite sounds and images (interestingly, the etymology of the word error is strikingly close to that of the word vague: a wandering, a straying or meandering; the roots of the term also connect it to doubt or uncertainty). The explosion of software and hardware that produce, disseminate and display moving images coincided with the dawn of a new era for glitch and noise. Increased accessibility, intensified reproduction and manipulation, compression and circulation, as well as the ubiquity of fully automatic recording devices, also ushered in the age of the ‘poor image’. The ‘poor’ variants of moving images, their reduced definition often further marred by low resolution, glitches and noise, have an ambiguous status: on the one hand, they are a product of the advanced commodification of image production and circulation. In some of their low definition forms, stripped of details, they suit an economy of attention that encourages the regime of the quick glance; in others, as with CCTV images, they are associated with surveillance and control. On the other hand, in a culture of ‘neoliberal media production’ that fetishises ‘pristine visuality’,22 poor image platforms such as YouTube offer an outlet to marginalised non-commercial imagery, including experimental films. More generally, as Cardoso Pereira and Zerené Harcha emphasise, ‘the growing presence of these “precarious images” in daily life has changed the ways of appreciating images and their dynamics’.23 Just as glitches and noise disturb mimetic transparency, the poor image – re-filmed, ripped, squeezed, zipped and unzipped – calls attention to the processes that led to its degraded look. Not only do such phenomena, whether they emerge as accidental or deliberate interruption, create points of resistance to the regime of the hypervisible, but they make us aware of communication as mediation, and conscious again of the labour that goes into the production and display of images and sounds. Artists and filmmakers that appropriate and develop these dimensions of the electronic and digital technologies in their work thus extend the tradition of avant-garde and experimental cinema that embraces the possibilities of chance - of intentional and non-intentional effects - turning errors into productive formal and critical strategies. In both cases, unstable, obscured images foreground the process that goes into their appearance, lending material presence and gravitas to immaterial media. These questions are addressed in the contributions of Sean Cubitt, Steven Shaviro and Allan Cameron, who look at the aesthetics and politics of glitch and noise in fiction cinema and art video. They show how, as interruptions Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Introduction

9

and alterations of the image and sound flow, glitch and noise make manifest and disturb a logic of enmeshed representation-as-communication specific to the era of the electronic and digital image, while pointing to the uncanny sense of increasing self-sufficiency associated with twenty-first-century technology. What kind of cinema emerges out of such technological mutations, where radical changes in the techniques and protocols of production and dissemination generate new forms of uncertainty regarding the authorship, point of view and modes of circulation and reception of film images? Emmanuelle André envisages cinema’s recent transformations as an annexation of the visual by the manual (the thumbing through images required by tactile devices) and of flatness by 3-D, that has antecedents, however, in earlier modes of display and superimposition. Raymond Bellour’s intervention tracks the emergence of animal presence as the unexpected result of film technology’s growing autonomy from human agency. In both cases, the authors look at the work of filmmakers who appropriate emerging modes of imaging to probe and extend the territories of cinematic representation. A historian and theorist of the development of modern techniques and practices, Vilém Flusser argued that creativity was dependent on the practitioner’s ability to become more than an operator (even an excellent operator, able to activate and apply to the full the machine’s functions) and to seek instead to counter the effect of automatism (the camera’s in-built functions). The history of film, and of ensuing audio-visual forms of expression, is made up of such alternative practices: the drive to align the image with a readily legible regime of representation and efficient medium for communication is woven together with the conscious (as advocated by Flusser) and continuing exploration but also the unplanned appearance, of imprecise, obscure audiovisual forms that run counter to or alongside the dominant practices.24 Accordingly, in the contributions that make up this book, indefinite visions born out of blur, glitches, de-framing, darkness or blinding light, the erasure or excess of detail, that surface on our screens or invade the films’ soundtrack as the results of artistic strategies or of technology’s ‘defects’ are not, or not primarily, explored in comparative fashion – as transitory states of the image, a step towards greater definition and clarity – but in and of themselves. As such, the general outlook of the volume might be envisaged in terms of potentiality. In his reworking of an Aristotelian concept of potential and actual, Giorgio Agamben circumvents the issue of actualisation: potentiality, he proposes, is not reducible to this process. Indeed, the value of potentiality in itself is derived from the resistance to actualisation; it resides instead in states of non-being or non-perceiving (as opposed to defined, complete, fully identified objects).25 In implicit contrast with the Cartesian model, Agamben illustrates his reflection with a discussion of darkness, pointing out Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

10

Martine Beugnet

that we do not experience darkness merely as a lack of, or as the opposite of light, but in and of itself. Accordingly, in Indefinite Visions the moving image is valued as a manifestation of the vague, the obscure, the fragmentary and confused – as a site of potentiality or endless becoming. In Peter Campus and Jacques Perconte’s recent video work we find again the spectacle of the ‘vague’ we started with, the unfurling waves rendered, this time, in shimmering variations of pixels.26 The advent of the digital has not reduced film’s capacity for capturing and expressing the world’s incompleteness. In his description of new media as ‘not something fixed once and for all’, but as ‘mutable’ and ‘liquid’, Lev Manovich echoes theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein and his advocacy of film as the medium of flux.27 Writing from the 1920s onwards, Epstein ceaselessly stressed the need to cultivate what he called cinema’s photogénie, that is, the medium’s inclination towards the indeterminate and permanently changing. In his conception of cinema as indefinite vision, it is not just the instability of the figure that is at stake, but all references and spatio-temporal anchors that are cut adrift. It comes as no surprise that Epstein was particularly drawn to seascapes and shot some of his most striking works about the sea. For him, cinema was thought in motion, and as such, it contradicted all knowledge systems based on the establishment of stable rules: Cinema is, par excellence, a machine for the detection and representation of movement, that is, of the variation of all spatial and temporal relations, the relativity of all measurement, the instability of all points of reference, the fluidity of the universe. Cinematographic culture is thus profoundly opposed to all systems that suppose fixed standards and set values; opposed to currently received conceptions of a stable and solid world that are alien to cinematographic experience; [. . .] opposed to classical rationalisms that have the pretension to reduce to an invariable set of rules the ceaseless fluctuation of feeling.28

While images have become ‘predominant vehicles in the circulation of knowledge and key to the shaping of power relations’,29 so have simplistic messages proliferated, threatening to reduce our view of the world to a set of preconceived, immediately graspable affirmations and one-dimensional oppositions. Film’s indefinite visions form potential points of resistance,30 more precious than ever in their capacity to make us doubt and reconsider the world and its representations not as givens, but as complex, vague and unfixed: if film images excel in capturing the world in its fluidity and open-endedness, it is because each frame contains an ocean of variables.31

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Introduction

11

Notes 1. Jean-Luc Godard, ‘La technique, au tout début, elle n’a pas de règles. Après, on lui apprend à parler.’ Interview (2014), http://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/ Jean-Luc_Godard.do (accessed 12 November 2016). 2. Henri de Parville, ‘Le cinématographe’, Les annales politiques et littéraires (26 April 1896). 3. Nicole Vedrès, ‘Les feuilles bougent’, Paris le . . ., Paris: Mercure de France (1958), pp. 51–62. Robert Bonamy, Le fond cinématographique (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2013), pp. 11–16. 4. See Siegfried Kracauer’s discussion of the Lumière films in the introduction to his Theory of Film, and his description of ‘camera-life’, the ‘flow of Life’ and the ‘indeterminate’ as intrinsic qualities of film. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). 5. Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Aesthetic Immanence’, in B. Huppauf and C. Wulf (eds), Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination: The Image between the Visible and the Invisible (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 49–50. 6. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica scripsit, 1750. On modern aesthetics and the je ne sais quoi, see Richard Scholar’s The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 7. For an analytical survey of the contrasted philosophical discourses that established or critiqued the ‘theoretical framework that defined sharpness as an epistemological ideal associated with value judgements’, see Bernd Huppauf: ‘Between Imitation and Simulation: Towards an Aesthetics of Fuzzy Images’, and Gottfried Boehm, ‘Indeterminacy: On the Logic of the Image’, in Huppauf and Wulf (eds), Dynamics and Performativity, pp. 230–54 and 219–30 respectively. 8. See Dominique Païni’s introduction to Silenzio!, an exhibition catalogue of François Fontaine’s photographs (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Oeil, 2012). 9. Paula Cardoso Pereira and Joaquín Zerené Harcha, ‘Revolutions of Resolution: About the Fluxes of Poor Images in Visual Capitalism’, TripleC, 12:1 (2014), pp. 315–27, p. 320. 10. See Martin Jay’s ‘Genres of Blur’, published in this volume, pp. 90–102. 11. See Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensations: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 12. Bernd Huppauf, ‘Between Imitation and Simulation: Towards an Aesthetics of Fuzzy Images’, in Huppauf and Wulf, Dynamics and Performativity, p. 231. 13. On the parallel development of military and cinema technology, see Paul Virilio ‘A Travelling Shot over Eighty Years’, in John Orr and Olga Taxidou (eds), Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

12

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Martine Beugnet Post-war cinema and modernity: a film reader (New York: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 145–60. Note also that Eadweard Muybridge is often described as the precursor of ‘bullet time’. Attacks and subversions of digital coding represent a growing dimension of artistic practice. See for instance the practice of datamoshing, based on the alteration or corruption of media files data, and in particular the work of artist Jacques Perconte. See Martine Beugnet, ‘Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone’, in Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau (eds), Cinematicity in Media History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 196–210. Director of photography Jean-Pierre Beauviala describes this transitional period as offering a ‘colossal’ range of options. Benjamin Bergery, Diane Baratier and  Caroline Champetier, ‘L’Avenir de l’image cinématographique. Entretien avec Jean-Pierre Beauviala’, in Lumières, les Cahiers de l’AFC, no. 1 (2006), pp. 85–101. Gaston Bachelard, L’Air et les songes (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1943), pp. 5–6. Leonardo da Vinci, Traité de la peinture (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2003), p. 216 (first published in 1651 as Trattato della pittura); E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). See also Georges Didi-Huberman on the spectator’s productive ‘épreuve du non-savoir’ (the trial of not-knowing) in Devant l’image (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990). For a discussion of precariousness and the effect of ‘precarious aesthetics’ on the spectator’s experience, see Christine Ross’s introduction to Johanne Lamoureux, Christine Ross and Olivier Asselin (eds), Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2008), as well as Arlindo Machado, El paisaje mediático. Sobre el desafio de las poéticas (Buenos Aires: Nueva Libreria, 2009). Huppauf and Wulf, Dynamics and Performativity, pp.1–3. Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal (10 November 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (accessed 28 November 2016). Barbara Bolt, ‘Introduction: Towards a New Materialism Through the Arts’, in Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (eds), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a New Materialism through the Arts (London & New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), p. 6. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’. For Cardoso Pereira and Zerené Harcha, taking their cue from Arlindo Machado, the proliferation of ‘precarious’ images, and the emergence of forms of ‘precarious aesthetics’ is an upshot of the unreliable technical conditions in which the images are produced, circulated and archived (or not), and their ‘allegedly inferior representational quality’ should not obscure ‘their great potential’. Pereira and Harcha, ‘Revolutions of Resolution’, pp. 319–20; Machado, El paisaje mediático, p. 316. See also Lamoureux et al. (eds), Precarious Visualities and Arild Fetveit, ‘Death, beauty, and iconoclastic nostalgia: Precarious aesthetics and Lana Del Rey’, in NECSUS (Autumn 2015 special issue on Vintage), http://www. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

Introduction

13

necsus - ejms . org / death - beauty - and - iconoclastic - nostalgia - precarious - aesthetics and-lana-del-rey (accessed 24 November 2016). Vilém Flusser, Pour une philosophie de la photographie (Paris: Circé, 2004). Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 183–5. Peter Campus, A Wave, HD digital video; Jacques Perconte, Vielle-Saint-Girons. Sans titre. 2016, generative digital video. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 56. ‘Le cinéma est, par excellence, l’appareil de détection et de représentation du mouvement, c’est-à-dire de la variance de toutes les relations dans l’espace et le temps, de la relativité de toute mesure, de l’instabilité de tous les repères, de la fluidité de l’univers. Profondément, la culture cinématographique sera donc ennemie de tous les systèmes qui supposent des étalons absolus, des valeurs fixes; ennemie de toutes les conceptions encore actuellement en vigueur, qui se fondent sur l’expérience extra-cinématographique, cent fois millénaire, d’un monde stable et solide; (. . .) ennemie encore des rationalismes classiques, qui prétendent saisir dans une invariable règle la perpétuelle mobilité du sentiment.’ Jean Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, Vol. 2 (Paris  : Cinéma Club/Seghers, 1975), p. 18. Author’s translation. Pereira and Harcha, ‘Revolutions of Resolution’, p. 315. As the video works included in Soulèvements, an exhibition curated by George Didi-Huberman on the theme of the notion of revolution, rebellion, and revolt (on show at the Gallery Jeu de Paume in Paris from November to February 2016), amply demonstrate. My thanks to Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli for her careful reading and her comments on this text.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Illuminations

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 1

The Veiled Image: The Luminous Formless Jacques Aumont

‘Bathed in light’, or, The Luminous Veil What we see is the rising sun, nothing more. An ordinary, indeed a trivial subject; yet I understand that what is shown is not solely the daily return of the star. Something solemn, in this sunrise, brings to mind those civilisations,1 where every morning some priest had to see that the day did begin: the appearing of this sun is a miracle. A tiny orange disk, tearing itself away with difficulty from the mountain, very slowly getting unstuck, during four more minutes still rising, and finally flooding the sky, the image and my eyes with a pure intensity, slightly tinted in light yellow. In this, the lengthy first shot of Glauber Rocha’s The Age of the Earth (A Idade da Terra, 1980), climaxing in a vapour of golden atoms that disintegrate my sight, I feel something other than a mere light source or the possible origin of an eye injury. This star was here at all times, long before me, long before humankind; it will see the end of the Human, and it rises, disdainfully or magnificently drowning the whole of the Earth it inundates. ‘The sun, like death, cannot be stared at’:2 the old aphorism by La Rochefoucauld does not appeal to us anymore, for its rhetoric is too blatant. The invention of photography has renewed it, by substituting for the sun – too univocal, and laden with too many symbols – the idea of light in general

Figure 1.1  The Age of the Earth (A Idade da Terra), Glauber Rocha (1980).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

18

Jacques Aumont

as something one cannot look at. This in fact is an old paradox: light, which makes us see, and thereby engage with the world in a distant relationship of knowledge that is essential to our existence (animal, mental, spiritual) – light is per se invisible. The history of photography, then of film and video, has long held to this flat certainty: I do not see the light, I see things and events of the world via light and its action over me. Images that aim at figuring light, particularly photographic ones (including moving images), are always singular. Most often, they set about it slantwise, by showing the effects of light, such as reflections, rays or beams of light. To look fixedly at the sun with a camera is an absolute taboo, for many reasons, starting with optics and ending with chemistry. Light entering frontally into the lens and into the image has always been considered as an accident, a technical bungling, a mistake that only beginners commit; or again, a project that is particular enough to be only conceivable by virtue of a desire for expressiveness. When, at the end of Kiss Me Deadly (1955), in the midst of the Cold War, Aldrich looks for a metaphor of the much dreaded atomic explosion, he cannot find a better figure than an excess of light; the box containing the magical ore opens like a Pandora’s box, inexorably, and an unbearably white light inundates the image, burning the figure and, for good measure, the character with it. Thirty years earlier, in the silent era, a brightness of the same kind had been produced as an absolutely transcendent one: in the prologue of his Faust (1926), Murnau made Light penetrate the darkness of Evil; stray streaks of light would brush against the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, then would gather into an orb of pure radiance, slowly transfigured into the shape of an angel. What was striking was not the archangel, with his cardboard sword, but the audacity that substituted an electric arc for God Himself, thus bedazzling our eyes and soul.

Figure 1.2  Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich (1955).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

19

Figure 1.3  Faust, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1926).

Balls of light have exerted a long fascination in cinema. In 1969, Fellini adapted a tale by first-century ad Roman writer Petronius. After a number of mishaps, Encolpio, one of the Satyricon’s young heroes, is led through a labyrinth; he gets out, only to find himself caught in the Feast of Momus, the god of laughter, in a vast and dusty arena, where he will have to confront a gladiator dressed as a minotaur, to the amusement of the audience. Upon entering the arena, a light globe blinds him, and us. As he goes on, it becomes even more glaring, through the dust and the vibration of the burning air. In the end, the image is nothing but light, a mist of light shed over the whole space. As with Murnau, this has been shot in a studio, with scenery and heavy make-up, and a mythical fiction that underlines this expressive infrastructure. From Murnau to Aldrich and Fellini, through time and the diversity of styles, a recurrent idea: light can cancel vision, and therefore, cancel the figure. All these were calculated effects. It took a very singular project of the late 1960s to find a comparable value in a pure luminous accident. To

Figure 1.4  Satyricon, Federico Fellini (1969).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

20

Jacques Aumont

shoot the journey of two bikers through a continent, the cinematographer László Kovács, having no equipped vehicle at his disposal and making a virtue of necessity, secured his Arriflex to a board on the front of a Chevrolet Impala. It is on account of this makeshift job that, so often, light unexpectedly penetrates the lens, a glitch that Kovács and director Dennis Hopper were inspired enough to preserve, and which gives Easy Rider (1969) Figure 1.5  Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper (1969). the appearance of being bathed in a sunny fluid. The flare, this obsessional nightmare of all fastidious cinematographers, was all of a sudden raised up to the status of aesthetic and expressive object, graciously loaded with a hidden but easily imaginable meaning: if the two heroes drive under such a marvellous sun shower, it is because, mysteriously, they are blessed. To be honest, one need not have waited until 1969 to witness these effects. Two years earlier, a film multiplied such invasions of light, by exposing the lens to an African sun. Even though the cameraman, Giuseppe Ruzzolini, was a quasi-beginner, the barbagli (flares) in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (Edipo re, 1967) are perfectly orchestrated. The camera looks at the sun for the first time during Oedipus’ fateful meeting with the oracle, bringing about his immediate blindness; he goes away groping amidst a crowd he does not see any more. The sun later dazzles us and the hero, systematically and explicitly, like a sort of threatening deus ex machina, during the lengthy scene of Creon’s murder. Oedipus’ savage struggle with each one of the guards and the murder of the unarmed old man are punctuated with violent flares, which give the figures an uncertain character. With the last stroke of the sword, through the body of the defenceless king, the wicked light, still emanating from the sky, turns blue: it is not the sun any more, it is the oracle’s malediction come alive. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

21

Murnau and Fellini had asked their respective cinematographers to programme an invasion by light; Hopper accepted light’s contingent intrusions; Pasolini’s stroke of genius is that he did both. The effects are different, and so is their value; either their electric origin is underscored, or they ostensibly fall from the heavens, here beneficial, there melancholy or nefarious, and almost always connoting some divinity, or something beyond. Soon, the films Figure 1.6  Oedipus Rex (Edipo re), Pier Paolo that imitated this rhetoric Pasolini (1967). strove to relieve it of such symbolic cumbersomeness – generally to find other, equally heavy, connotations. Thirty years apart, two films rediscovered the same figurative inspiration, turning the complex reflections of light in modern camera lenses into a means to produce the same unexpected form of a sphere. In 1976, in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Cassavetes and Al Ruban used diffraction and a filter to create a massive luminous red sphere, at once comical and fantastic, floating above the hero, ‘the most intense and stupefying figurative phenomenon of the whole sequence, indeed of the whole film’ – a form that ‘associates plastic economy and mythical figurativeness’ and ‘works toward a symbolic twirling’.3 And in 1997, in Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai staged a football match in a street in Buenos-Aires, shot against the light and also ending with the appearance (or apparition?) of a huge translucent bubble, which remains for a dozen seconds before the hero’s knees, and which could elicit the same comment. With their delicate and solid light balls, Cassavetes and Wong demonstrated that a luminous accident is liable not only to submerge the visual field and to pervade the image, not only to hint at the intervention of a supernatural beyond, but also to produce new visual objects. Levitating objects, incongruous, uncanny or eerie, which one may designate with the names of real objects, or leave to their indetermination as pure visual events. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

22

Jacques Aumont

Figure 1.7  The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Cassavetes (1976).

In Deep Red (Profondo rosso, 1975), Dario Argento and Luigi Kuveiller took up again, in a literal way, Cassavetes’ idea: while exploring the house of the crime, the young pianist is, on two occasions, encircled by an iridescent, translucent circle that will be his protective shield in this dangerous enterprise. At the same time, on another continent, in The Last Wave (1977), Peter Weir and Russell Boyd used the front lights of an automobile under the rain to give light the sculpted form of a small protective tent: the metaphor is unambiguous, and here, light defends, rather than aggresses. In all these cases, light is paradoxical: it veils as much as it illuminates; it conceals while revealing – and always with an obvious symbolic benefit.

Figure 1.8  Deep Red (Profondo rosso), Dario Argento (1975).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

23

Playing with elaborate devices, as do Fellini and Rotunno, Murnau and Hoffmann, means putting one’s technical mastery at the service of expression, by doing precisely this: transforming what should throw light into what creates a veil. Slightly different is the fortunate accident, or the deliberate accident that one has learned to control. The flare comes from the camera lens: it is a veil, partially overlaying the image, due to the interposition of an optical device between reality and the surface that registers its analogical image. A technical veil, so to speak. Like any medium, film depends on its technology for its existence – that of the ordinary automatic moving image – but also, for its expressive existence. Scenes staged in an excess of light, accidental flares (soon becoming intentional), are tokens of this dependence, and did not disappear with the evolution of film techniques, even though my examples are taken from a period between the end of modernity and the end of analogue film. As a matter of fact, they have become even more desired, controlled and conscious. J.  J. Abrams, a follower of Spielberg, equally possessed by a taste for startling lighting, has striven to carry on with this visual style in digital films, the proof being Star Trek (2009), in which he himself acknowledges that he did not do things by halves: The flares weren’t just happening from on-camera light sources, they were happening off camera, and that was really the key to it. They were all done live, they weren’t added later. It became an art because different lenses required angles, and different proximity to the lens. Sometimes, when we were outside we’d use mirrors. Certain sizes were too big [. . .] literally, it was ridiculous. It was like another actor in the scene [. . .]4

‘Another actor in the scene’: what better way to summarise all these luminous apparitions, whether intentional or accidental, made up or registered?

Figure 1.9  Super 8, J. J. Abrams (2011).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

24

Jacques Aumont

With these figures, we are exactly midway between the two major conceptions of the film image: the index and the simulacrum. The Veil: When Light and Chemistry Concur in Occulting the Image Let us go back to the early 1970s – more precisely, to 1972. After having directed a series of films aimed at digging out hidden chapters of the history of contemporary Japan, Shôhei Imamura breaks a new taboo and goes in search of the ‘soldiers who have not come back’: those who have settled in one of the countries occupied by the Japanese army in the 1940s, and who in Japan have been considered as deserters or as deceased. One of them comes back to his native country; the film shows him conveying his indignation upon discovering that he has been registered as dead. One of the bureaucrats who meet him apologises: ‘memories are blurred’. Now, what is striking in that scene is that the film is, precisely, not blurred but fogged: a reddish ghost hovers on the right side, appearing and disappearing, for a long while. Amateur filmmakers in these years dreaded this involuntary veil or shadow, usually resulting from a mistake or mishap while loading or unloading the film. It is frequently found in home movies, or in the personal films of underground artists. When, in the mid-1960s, Jonas Mekas visited his friends the Brakhages in their home in Colorado, he turned the trip into a lengthy episode of his film diary, Walden (1969). On several occasions, the sun enters the lens and burns the film, resulting in a whitish image; at another point, while Jane Brakhage fondles her mare, the whole surface is tinged, for a few seconds, with a flimsy reddish brown, until it recovers the usual colours of a 16mm Kodachrome. Mekas has retained this accident in the edited film, for to him, the important factor was the unstaged recording of a poeticised, but undoctored reality. In an aesthetics founded on the springing-up of an affect, this veil or fog is the visible mark of a relationship of immediacy and unity with filmed reality. It is an index of veracity. This, for sure, was also Imamura’s intention. The ‘soldier who has not come back’ cannot exist, since he would testify to the possibility, for a Japanese soldier, of not having died in the emperor’s service, and having survived the defeat. At the exact moment when he-who-came-back discovers that his desertion has been faked as a demise, a wonderful piece of chance allows this crucial scene, in which ‘memories are blurred’, to be haunted by a red ghost. A ghost of history, and equally blood-soaked. This fortuitous apparition is too perfect a metaphor for Imamura to expunge; rather, he probably relished it, and secretly appreciated its irony. Film registers. Film registers superlatively, given that, along with the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

25

Figure 1.10  Walden, Jonas Mekas (1969).

appearances of things, it captures their movement. One will recognise here a recurrent theoretical theme, culminating for instance in André Bazin’s famous phrase about ‘the mummification of change’.5 It is the theme of the film image as an indexical image, almost in Peirce’s absolute sense: it shares some qualities with its referent, and above all, temporal qualities. It is also the core of phenomenological realism, not only in Bazin’s thought, but before him, in Epstein’s, and at the same time, in Edgar Morin’s and Kracauer’s: film yields an image, but an image that participates in ‘something’ of the registered reality. Now, the very material of this image, its medium, allows this essential co-participation, while constantly threatening it: such is the lesson of Imamura’s and Mekas’ veil. During the same period when Mekas went to Colorado, Warhol shot in his Factory a series of lengthy kisses – as long as the three odd minutes of one 16mm reel. The respect for film’s indexicality was absolute: once the frame and the lighting were set, nothing would change, nobody would intervene. However, the medium did intervene, and at the end of each reel, as in Walden, a veil would rise, float, pervade the image and abolish it, until from this white mass another image would rise for the duration of the next reel. As is often the case with Warhol, the properties of the medium are crudely exposed, to a point where they become part of the work’s concept. In Kiss, the aim is to shoot an ordinary gesture, a kiss on the mouth, while exhibiting the duration of a filmic act: continuous, unimpaired, nevertheless permanently threatened with annihilation if the materiality of the medium were allowed to come forward. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

26

Jacques Aumont

Figure 1.11  Kiss, Andy Warhol (1963).

In Imamura’s case, as in Mekas’ and Warhol’s, an accident of the shoot has been welcomed, preserved, transmuted into a sign – an ambiguous one, as is any visual sign, of which one never knows if it allows something to be seen, if it shows it or even if it comments on it. Integrating a shooting accident into a film has become a banal gesture after modernity; however, such an accident runs counter to a deeply rooted ideology of technical correction, much more than do flares or barbagli. The sun may enter a movie camera, so much may be tolerated, as it does not challenge an idea of shooting as casting one’s eyes over the world; the film itself, on the contrary, is not allowed to see the light (in a literal or a figurative sense) otherwise than through the lens. The sun is there when I shoot, but the film is supposed to remain ignored; to show it, no matter how indirectly, in a moving picture, is a transgression, that banishes it from an industrial context where technical proficiency and its permanent demonstration are mandatory. A film that has retained undue veils, be it a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

27

Figure 1.12  Roslyn Romance, Bruce Baillie (1976).

documentary or, as is Godard’s One P.M. (1971), a political essay, proffers itself unambiguously as a statement that aims at breaking the rules – or else, whose contents are so essential that it may justify this imperfect form and its flaws. In fact, it is in experimental and poetical cinema that such film veils are found, in plenty. By the end of the underground period, Carolee Schneeman’s Fuses (1964–7) multiplies visual obstacles; scratches, scrapings, cuttings, underexposure – everything goes, in this endeavour to preclude or Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

28

Jacques Aumont

c­ omplicate the perception of what is nevertheless there to be seen. Be it by dazzle or by saturation, the veils are then naturally produced, as a part of the overall poeticising. The veil exerts an irresistible appeal. As late as 1976, Roslyn Romance, Bruce Baillie’s poem in memory of his mother, yields to this appeal, and explores its entire gamut: light shining through foliage into the lens, reflections on ancient photographs evoking playful ghosts, disfiguration by bursts of light – and red or orange veils.6 It is obviously in such personal films, far from institutional constraints, that such an unrestrained play of light and chemistry finds its natural site, since these films mobilise the entire range of possible interventions on the image. As Dominique Noguez once empathetically commented on Brakhage’s An Avant-Garde Home Movie (1961): ‘it gains its value above all from a felicitous accident; the film stock used having escaped fire, it yielded upon development bluish images, except in the center where the colors remained unmarred. This, added to the use of multiple exposures, contributed to turning a day in the life of the Brakhages [. . .] into a jungle of mobile lines, of bounding bodies, of running children, of swirling film reels, all in vivid colors’.7 * * * There exists, however, an entirely different genealogy of the veil. In 2013, South Korea paid a tribute to its oldest living filmmaker, the old hand Im Kwon-taek, who had just finished his hundred and first film, after a career of over fifty years. In a country where the preservation of film prints, indeed the mere existence of a film archive, is a recent phenomenon, only one third of his work had been recovered for this retrospective, with some prints having visibly suffered. In Genealogy (1979) and Mandala (1981), the print used for the DVD edition displays at times a reddish ‘breathing’, a spectre floating over the image: a veil due this time not to an accident of the shoot, but to the film’s poor preservation. A ghost, in a nearly literal sense. The visual effect of both kinds of veil is much the same: a coloured layer, of a wavering and uneven shape, clouds the image, while seeming to add to it an ironic comment. In front of these ‘old’ films, however, which are celebrated as precious testimonies of the past, one cannot help thinking that they have been rescued from certain ruin and from an invasion by mould. This veil is akin to the light patches that one often sees on even older films (on nitrate films). In both cases, the veil betrays the film’s chemistry, its granular structure based on photosensitive silver salts, but the morphology of the attack is very different. The red veil is a sort of toning (in the sense used to refer to the colouring of film during the silent era); its shapes evoke a gauzy mist, while film decay creates blotches that seem solid and compact, giving rise, rather, to an imaginary of attack and destruction. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

29

Figure 1.13  Decasia, Bill Morrison (2002).

A decayed film print, as we all know, is fit only for the dustbin. Long ago, some such prints were shown in film archives (notably, at the Cinémathèque Française), when for instance the film was so rare that there was no hope of finding a better print. These prints had to be seen with this undesirable addition, and the rules of the game were to pretend, as much as one could, that it was not there. A parasitic veil, which, not too surprisingly, postmodernism has raised to the status of a pleasurable object, and one that can be modelled. A typical work, from this point of view, would be Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) – a title that contracts decay and Fantasia (1940), proffering a visual fantasy that renews Disney’s old one, by adapting it in the era of the decay of nitrate. The ‘round’ aesthetics of Disney are substituted with a disquieting style, where the icy connotations of white are exalted, as if the aim were to show us glimpses of some engulfed continent. It is not by mere chance that the fascination with the decay of nitrate began in the 1980s. It was a time when large film archives became aware that film stock was a perishable medium, which had to be preserved and constantly restored. It was also a time when a number of tinted and toned prints of silent films were rediscovered: hence a sustained trend to reproduce the old colour processes in brand new prints whose colouration sometimes made them look as weird as did, in another domain, the restoration of the Isenheim altarpiece or of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Simultaneously with these salvational endeavours – not only by museums or archives, as private firms have begun Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Jacques Aumont

30

Figure 1.14  Rumpelstilzchen, Jürgen Reble (1989).

to understand the commercial relevance of these restorations – a few artists sensed that the chemistry of decay might be a magnificent agent for an ‘automatic’ poetic creation, emphasising the extravagant character of the informal forms generated by mould on the film, and their unpredictability. The repertory of these forms was strikingly stable, unless it was the artists who were all fascinated by the same kind of effects, especially those affecting the human figure, around which or upon which would fluctuate such unlikely shapes as those of geometrical comets, salt crystals, rigid amoebas . . . It was the time when Jürgen Reble and the Schmelzdahin8 group experimented (and for once, one may really speak of ‘experimental cinema’) with deliberate decay, by burying found footage on which one discovered, months or years later, the devastation or the wonders of a process that burying had considerably accelerated. The Filmic Veil: Fleeting From the sunny veil, belonging to our world, to the chemical veil, that sprouts from the inmost depths of matter, both process and effect have altered. Both, however (alongside filtering, which I have only mentioned in passing) have a lot in common: these optical and chemical effects occult the image, but the most interesting ones are those which do not occult it absolutely, and rather are added to it, hover on it, as if hesitating to be a part of it. Furthermore, the specific charm of veils – of luminous or filmic origin – is that in both cases it is the image that produces its own veil. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

31

In strictly visual terms, such veils have at least two types of models: one in vision itself, independently of any image, the other in the first art of image: painting. Seeing has its moments of trouble, when one loses focus, when the visual field is invaded by fog, when the blood in the retina comes to the forefront. It is the ‘red veil’ of the pilot or the long distance runner, that may result in a blackout or ‘black veil’. Other and more mysterious, more grave troubles result in a white veil, bordering on opacity and a total loss of vision. The film veil flirts with these diverse psychological effects, these troubles or illnesses of vision that change it entirely, for a moment or forever. In Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957), a nearsighted marshal is confronted with one of the outlaws he pursues; a subjective shot shows the face of the villain totally blurred, undefined. In Blindness (Fernando Meirelles, 2008), a splendid script idea: humanity as a whole is contaminated by a mysterious illness, beginning with a sudden and extreme dazzle, that immediately becomes permanent; one sees only a white veil. Both these examples, and all those that one might add (when the screen turns red, to evoke a blow on the head or a heart attack), verify a simple fact: an image (a film image, in this case) cannot visualise a physical and psychological phenomenon, unless it simplifies and/or symbolises it. It should be clear that the veils I have discussed are of a different nature. Painting has often aimed at a similar effect, but it had to produce it, as it does everything, deliberately and ‘from the exterior’: symbolisation is inherent to the very painterly enterprise. The most obvious solution is to use a transparent or translucent piece of the décor, the most banal being the gauze curtain floating in front of an object, or the mist drowning it – respective topoi of interior and landscape painting. As late as the twentieth century, works like Boccioni’s Interno con due figure femminili (‘Interior with Two Female Figures’, 1915) or, in a more photographic style, Andrew Wyeth’s poetical Wind from the Sea (1947) exhibit their skill by producing insubstantial, see-through, mobile curtains. This is an idea that film may be tempted to replicate; semi-transparent fabrics play this part in films with as divergent aesthetics as Dreyer’s Dies Irae (Day of Wrath, 1943), when Anne appears through the whitish screen of her embroidery, and Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), where, among a riot of luminous effects, the white gauze of the music room incessantly flutters; in both cases, the veil is efficiently used, but remains a sheer fabrication used merely to qualify an action. Things become more interesting when (Christian) painting summons the veil as an essential object – but in the realm of the supernatural. I have in mind above all the medieval legend of the veronica, an image obtained by impression, but a magical one, without any pigment. Still today, they pretend that the ‘Holy Veil’ in Manoppello is neither painted nor woven; moreover, it may be seen from both sides and the image seems consubstantial with the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

32

Jacques Aumont

fabric – so that it has been identified by turns with the Mandylion of Edessa, or with a fragment of Christ’s shroud: a piece of popular mysticism. More generally, the image ‘made without hand’ is an ideal horizon, and a challenge that very few have accepted. Most figurations of the veronica show a full face’s expressive physiognomy (afflicted, suffering or beaming), but conspicuously painted. The most convincing are perhaps two of Zurbarán’s, Holy Face paintings – one (1631) currently kept in Stockholm, and another (1658) in Valladolid. They succeed in disturbing our perception while suggesting the half-illusion of an image that would be magically printed. To create this effect, he used sfumato in both paintings, a complex technique that requires several layers, between which the pigment has to be perfectly dried. Thus is the most evanescent effect, the representation of the impalpable, achieved through a long and meticulous labour. Obviously, then, the film image is radically different. The bathing in light, the invasion of the stock by a veil, are instantaneous. No labour, no delay. No magic, no supernatural intervention. It happens immediately, and results from undulatory physics and chemistry: always the old topos of indexicality and automatism. The film image ‘transfers reality from the object depicted to its reproduction [. . . it] shares in the existence of the model, like a fingerprint’.9 There is no lack of examples of film that exalt such indexicality and automatism by producing expressive light effects, for example the excess of white deployed by Fassbinder in Veronika Voss (1982), Bergman in From the Life of the Marionettes (1980), and earlier, Dreyer in a key scene of Gertrud (1964);10 or the gradual dissolution of the image that Bergman imagined for the finale of The Passion of Anna (1969), which is echoed in some ‘experimental’ films such as Peter Tscherkassky’s Freeze Frame (1983), where the film is

Figure 1.15  From the Life of the Marionettes, Ingmar Bergman (1980).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

33

Figure 1.16  Gertrud, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1964).

Figure 1.17  Marilyn Times Five, Bruce Conner (1973).

seen burning, or Bruce Conner’s Marilyn Times Five (1973), where the grain of the emulsion is enlarged; or, again, visually similar effects, though intrinsically quite different in their inner structure, as in Chott-el-Djerid (Bill Viola, 1979); or, in a comparable vein, the erasing of parts of the image in certain science fiction films, for instance Byron Haskin’s War of the Worlds (1953), in which the trick of a human being ‘wiped out’ by the Martians was effected for the first time. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

34

Jacques Aumont

Digital cinema allows an even greater control over the image, by adding the virtues of cinematography (catching light as it goes) and of drawing (adjusting, correcting, completing the image at will). Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), one of the first masterpieces of the new technology, includes at least two passages that were remade in postproduction, to lend them a grey, melancholic veil (the workshop with the coffins of the dead of the Patriotic War of 1941–5, and Catherine II strolling in the cold); the very last ‘shot’, the sudden appearance of the sea at the gates of the Hermitage, in its way suggests some unexpected veil. * * * To better delimit the figure of the veil, we must therefore add, to indexicality and automatism, a third feature: accidentalness (and its corollary, lability). The film veil – the kind of veil I am discussing, which does not consist in coating the entire image with a semi-opaque layer, à la Bergman or Dreyer – is an effect changing in time, ceaselessly; hence, an eminently cinematic effect. This accidental character of the veil is never more to be felt than in films which have to emulate it. In Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001), when the young American biologist is greeted in a laboratory that perhaps possesses the key to his trouble, his interlocutress makes a rather unkind speech, and the shot ends with an orange veil, for less than half a second, but quite unexpected in the context, and of course, as little accidental as one may imagine. More conspicuous yet, and even more artificial if possible, is the brownish veil appearing cyclically during the long wandering of the hero of Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2004). Such films cannot help resorting to one of the major trump cards of postmodernism, namely, pastiche, thus revealing a contrario one essential feature of what they imitate: it cannot be entirely controlled.

Figure 1.18  The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo (2004).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

35

To Veil, in Effect Cinema was invented, and, half a century later, praised, as the most perfect reproduction of reality. What the veil reminds us, is that such perfection, in its automatism, is prone to mistake and lapse – a mistake that is not human, and is thereby even more fascinating. The veil (and here, it matters little whether luminous or chemical accident) is what allows, in the otherwise ‘seamless’ fabric of the ideal film, a fault, a tear. What does one see through this tear? The real? Nothing? A world of fantastic shapes open to free interpretation? Obviously the answer depends on the idea one carries of cinema in general – nay, of cinematography. Cinématographe is the word expressly opposed to ordinary cinéma by such authors as Robert Bresson and Eugène Green, the latter term designating a mere rendition of a drama played by actors. In this extreme conception, cinema is nothing less than what reveals the real under the fleeting shades of reality,11 and to it the veil is an incongruity: either, as a luminous powder, it unduly stresses and interprets an essential, but essentially silent, element of the world; or, as a smudge of physical corruption, it equally unduly allows matter to manifest itself as such. To the opposed extreme conception, that of the filmic image as a created and controlled simulacrum, the opposite prevails: the veil is one among many other modes of this creation and of this control. When one of the most decided upholders of this definition writes that ‘the filmic image appears not as a representation but as a configuration of light’,12 he says nothing else: whatever its nature, be it radiance or decay, the veil configures light, i.e., it creates forms with a highly paradoxical material. One would try in vain to reconcile two approaches that have been opposed since the advent of film theory, but one may try to bridge them. As Georges Didi-Huberman justly noted, images ‘are neither pure illusion nor all truth, but the dialectical flutter agitating both the veil and its tear’.13 What is at stake in the phenomena I have described is at least twofold. Firstly, the cinematic image in general is meant, not to give me the world (as the ideology of the index and of presence asserts), not to give me an artificial equivalent of the world (as does the ideology of the simulacrum), but to give me a perception – a new and unaccustomed perception – not of the world but of a world. What happens, then, in veiled images? They underline a more marked intervention than in the normal filmic image: the intervention, between control and chance, of the cinematographer (in the case of flares), or the stupid and uncontrollable intervention of the material (in the case of hazes or blurs). It results undoubtedly in a style, but not the kind of style that naturally matches my natural perception. This style, as with any film style, is an ­experimentation Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

36

Jacques Aumont

in perception. It seems to restrict itself to testing marginal or rare conditions of perception, its flaws and failures, but in fact, by its position at the heart of perceptibility – even though the experiments may be executed rather coarsely – it represents a fair answer to a famous proposition by Merleau-Ponty: ‘A film is not to be thought, but perceived’.14 What happens when what is perceived is not the world become image, but an image manifesting itself in place of the world? We are then led into ‘a controlled experimentation, instead of the ordinary experience’:15 we are given a world to perceive, in the way film worlds are given, but this one demands from us a novel mental and perceptive performance. It provides us with a novel perception. Secondly, in a totally different way, these attacks on the image are also a roundabout way to ask an old question: what can an image show? And what, exactly, does ‘to show’ mean? Do we have to understand that visual expression is akin to some implicit way of saying things? Or that the image has no other power than to present itself silently? What do we understand when we think we have understood what an image of the world gives us? Here again, there are two extreme answers: the mistrust toward the image as a ‘veil’ that masks the real or distorts it (be it to console or to deceive), according to the ancient Platonic theme; or, the trust it deserves, as a tool for exploration and knowledge – in fact, equal to language. A veil being veiled: this is almost too lucid. By its acceptance of veils of diverse origins, the image consents to identify itself with what occults the real, thereby renouncing its right to say anything about it, for the benefit of the construction of a different world. On the other hand, a ‘constructivist’ conception of the image might see in these veils a kind of frankness, the acknowledgment that the image is made (up), that it aims to say something, including something about itself. The sun rises, endlessly; a light shower floods the bad and arms the good with powerful shields: these are of course mere interpretations, as no image ever says anything (except at the price of a heavy loss). The film stock haunts the story; all matter will some day assert its right to decay. While saying nothing, the veil has appeared to me as a proof that a film work retains the power of all works: to appear, to come to me, to proffer an encounter.16 The veil, the veiling, is only one of the means by which a film attempts to persuade us that it is meant for us. Notes 1. Norbert Elias, An Essay on Time (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 2007), p. 22 and ff. 2. ‘Le soleil, comme la mort, ne saurait se regarder fixement.’ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Veiled Image

37

3. Nicole Brenez, ‘Couleur critique: Expériences chromatiques dans le cinéma contemporain’, De la figure en général et du corps en particulier (Paris-Bruxelles: De Boeck, [1995] 2000). Author’s translation. 4. http : / / io9 . com / 5230278 / jj - abrams - admits - star - trek - lens - flares - are - ridiculous (accessed 17 February 2017). 5. ‘A film is no longer limited to preserve the object sheathed in its moment, like the intact bodies of insects from a bygone era preserved in amber . . . For the first time, the image of things is also the image of their duration, like a mummification of change’. André Bazin, ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: caboose, [1945] 2009), pp. 8–9. 6. His most famous film, All My Life (1966), consists in a one-take lateral travelling showing a wood fence where wild roses grow, while Ella Fitzgerald sings the eponymous song. It is shot in 16mm Kodachrome, a film whose texture can be identified among a thousand, and a yellow filter covers the lens. The veil here is obviously intentional, one is compelled to wonder what it means. 7. Dominique Noguez, Une renaissance du cinéma: Le cinéma “underground” américain (Paris: Paris-Expérimental, 2002), pp. 104–5. Author’s translation. 8. This poetical name is the imperative of the verb dahinschmelzen, meaning to melt; it commands the film to melt, or suggests that it does. (Thanks to Christa Blümlinger.) 9. Bazin, ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, pp. 8, 9. 10. These scenes are commented on in my L’attrait de la lumière (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2010). 11. ‘It is in the world, conceived as a finite reality, that contemporary man chooses the elements from which he builds his “fantasies” [. . .] Cinéma shows him these same elements as fragments of the world that possess an intrinsic truth, while, however, forbidding him to “fantasize”’. E. Green, Poétique du cinématographe (Arles: Actes Sud, 2009), p. 19. Author’s translation. 12. Paolo Bertetto, Lo specchio e il simulacro: Il cinema nel mondo diventato favola (Milano: Bompiani, 2007), p. 95. Author’s translation. 13. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2003), p. 103. Author’s translation. 14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie’, Sens et non sens (Paris: Gallimard, 1948, p. xx). Author’s translation. 15. Clélia Zernik, Perception-cinéma: Les enjeux stylistiques d’un dispositif (Paris: Vrin, 2010), p. 48. Author’s translation. 16. ‘The work of art aims at conveying not something, but itself. Just as, when I visit someone, I do not wish to cause in him simply such or such feeling, but above all, to visit him – and of course, to be myself welcome.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarques mêlées (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), p. 48. Author’s translation from the French.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 2

The Black Screen Richard Misek

‘[E]ach image is plucked from the void and falls back into it’.1

Recent decades have seen a massive increase in the number of screens in the world, the range of contexts within which they appear, and the types of content they display. Almost all, however, at some point display full-frame blackness. Though it appears irregularly and often also briefly, the black screen provides the diversity of contemporary screen media with at least one element of visual continuity. At the same time, the black screen is itself a metonym of this diversity. It can appear through different combinations of techniques: for example, it may result from filming a dark space or a black surface, it may be computer-generated or colour graded. It can exist in different environments: from online platforms, through art galleries and cinemas, to shopping centres and stadiums. It can even take on different visual characteristics: for example, the dust-flecked blackness of a film print, the light-polluted blackness of a video projection, or the specular blackness of a tablet. In short, the black screen is not one phenomenon, but a range of phenomena, activated across different forms of moving image through different technologies. Alone, however, the black screen communicates nothing beyond its own blackness. To communicate more, it requires context. As its context changes, black slips between different significations and evocations. In this chapter, I argue that the black screen’s privileged status as a means of imaging nothing depends on its referential ambiguity, which raises the possibility that what we are seeing is not a space, not a representation, and perhaps not even media. In order to clarify the ways in which the black screen presents absence, I juxtapose it with the white screen. Underlying this comparison is a basic question: what gives the black screen its uniquely privileged status as cinematic nothingness? As Jacques Aumont observes, white also has a strong claim to signify nothing.2 So why did black leader and fades to black become a default, not white leader and fades to white? In this chapter, I suggest in particular that the black screen owes much of its universality and its affective power to the fact that it encompasses both surface and space. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Black Screen

39

The Black Screen: Functions The quintessential manifestation of full-screen blackness in cinema is the ‘fade to black’. The word ‘fade’ implies a physically disintegrating image, gradually bleached to white through exposure to light. The cinematic fade, by contrast, follows an opposite trajectory: it implies an image gradually giving way to immanent blackness. Historically, however, the black screen was a relative latecomer to the repertoire of classical film style. Barry Salt notes that, in contrast to dissolves, which were a feature of magic lantern shows and so quickly incorporated into film style, fades only became common in the early 1910s.3 Nonetheless, as early as Gaumont’s La Vie du Christ (Alice Guy, 1906), full-screen blackness already served to separate sequences. It has continued to do so ever since. By separating two shots, the black screen also prevents them from combining to generate meaning through montage. According to Deleuze, what becomes important when a moment of fullscreen black appears is ‘no longer the association between images, the way in which they associate, but the interstice between two images’.4 The role of black as an interstice is famously made explicit at the start of Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983). Faced with a shot of three Icelandic children that refuses to combine with any other shot, the filmmaker sandwiches it between black and accompanies it with a voice-over: ‘One day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film, with a long piece of black leader. If they don’t see the happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.’ Of course, by naming the blackness and explaining his reason for using it, Marker slyly manages to incorporate the troublesome image of the Icelandic girls – and the black – into his narrative after all. The black screen in Sans Soleil signifies an absence but constitutes a presence. The localised visual discontinuity that the black screen brings about serves the film’s overall continuity: through separating, it joins. The combination of separation and connection is perhaps the black screen’s most essential role. In documentary and fiction film in particular, the black screen typically appears outside the space-time of a film’s diegesis (its fabula), so from a diegetic perspective, it does not exist at all. Yet it is integral to the narrative film’s syuzhet, fulfilling a structural function equivalent to that of a white space in a book. Since the 1920s, its structural function of separating scenes and shots has been further codified to indicate the passage of time.5 This narrative codification, however, is itself indefinite: the black screen alone is never enough to communicate how much time has passed. A brief fade through black does not necessarily signify any different degree of temporal ellipsis than do the three minutes of black that separate the two acts of JeanMarie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Moses und Aron (1974); how much time Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

40

Richard Misek

has passed can only be gauged retrospectively, from what comes after. In this way, the black screen simultaneously makes possible a suspension of narrative temporality and an indefinite extension of it. Though the black screen most often exists outside the space-time of a film’s fabula, it may alternatively indicate ‘pro-filmic’ darkness. Anchored by a diegetic soundtrack, the black screen can suggest countless places: from a damp cellar to the dark side of the moon. The translation of ambient darkness into on-screen blackness occurs through various techniques including no lighting, a closed aperture, underexposed film and digital manipulation. In this context, the black screen does not evoke nothing, indeed quite the opposite: though the viewer may see nothing, there is clearly something there; the blackness conceals it. In countless horror films, it is darkness itself that generates the threat, contradicting the claim made in Joseph Losey’s The Boy With Green Hair (1948) that, ‘There’s nothing in the dark that wasn’t there when the light was on.’ Yet total pro-filmic or diegetic blackness is rare in narrative cinema and for the most part appears only briefly – for example, before a light is switched on, or as a camera passes an unlit foreground object. If an image fails to provide visual information for too long, narrative confusion may set in. Unsurprisingly, extended pro-filmic blackness is most evident not in horror films but in art cinema and artists’ film and video. For example, as the details of the serial killer story in Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (1998) get lost in the shadows, what – on the white page of a filmscript – may have been slightly clichéd becomes indistinct and intriguing. Indeed, beyond a certain point, diegetic blackness transforms a narrative film into an experimental film. Such is the case with Shinya Tsukamoto’s Haze (2005), which communicates minimal visual information for almost its entire duration. Set in a dark underground space, from which there appears to be no escape, it presents a glimmer of light here, a fragment of texture there, but mainly just blackness. The occasional glimmers of light merely intensify the film’s blacks through the use of contrast: the light makes the blacks seem even blacker and more obscure. The only thing that keeps the film nominally within the confines of narrative cinema is its richly foleyed soundtrack. It is this that tells us all we need to know: the size of the space, the distance of potential threats, the movements of the main character and his reactions. Tsukamoto immerses his main character in darkness, disorienting both him and us. Is he almost free or just crawling in circles? It is impossible to know. When flattened into full-screen blackness, different dark spaces become indistinguishable, and edits become imperceptible – any shot ending with black can seamlessly combine with any shot beginning with black.6 Despite the rarity of the black screen in early cinema, films exploiting its ability to create an illusion of continuity are evident as early as The Big Swallow Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Black Screen

41

(James Williamson, 1901), in which a performer appears to swallow the cameraman filming him. The film begins with a gradual zoom into the gaping darkness of the performer’s mouth; once this blackness has expanded to fill the screen, the film cuts to another black frame, into which the small figure of the cameraman appears from below; the cameraman then topples over and exits the bottom of the frame, as if falling into the performer’s mouth. The use of black to create false continuity has continued ever since. For example, in Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962), a dark bunker becomes the site of a torchlit journey through Ivan’s traumatic memories; fragments from his past merge with each other through black, reflecting memory’s tendency to flatten time and space. Black can also make possible seamless collages as well as montages, erasing the joins between video clips composited together within the same frame. In Phillip Toledano’s looping web video The Louniverse (2013), images of the filmmaker’s daughter Loulou looking at an iPad, her face lit by the screen, fade in and out of black, creating the impression that there are constellations of Loulous suspended in the blackness of outer space.7 The black here exists both between and behind the collaged shots of Loulou’s face. The metaphor of the black screen as an underlying presence that may occasionally become visible in the gaps between images is so fundamental to moving image culture that it is has even been integrated into digital editing software. In an editing ‘sequence’ or ‘timeline’, any space not occupied by a video clip appears as black. Black is literally coded into digital video – until a sequence is finally rendered and all its layers flattened, black forms the default background. Rather than blackness concealing pro-filmic reality, images here overlay an underlying blackness. Though most of the time this ‘base’ layer remains latent, it can surface, for example, as a fade to black, as the black frame of a letterboxed or pillarboxed image, as a black background to white text, and so on. Even web videos, somewhat anachronistically, often begin and end with a fade – as if, in the absence of a darkened auditorium, the video must generate its own originary void. Of course, the use of black as a visual base for film and video is a choice; alternatives exist. Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) features fades to red. The television series Six Feet Under (2001–5) features fades to white.8 The sense that white forms an alternative base for moving images is also present in the title credits of Stan Brakhage’s early films. Like many films, they feature white text on a black background. However, this text does not appear as if printed onto the black; instead, the lettering is scratched out of the emulsion on the film print in front of our eyes, through stop-motion animation. The scratches let through the white light of the projector, so revealing a further base layer underneath that of the black screen: the white screen. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

42

Richard Misek

The Black and White Screen White is both the light of a projector before a film is threaded through its gate and the blank surface of a movie screen. So it seems quite feasible that, sometime in the early twentieth century, cinema might have chosen white instead of black as its default base. Had it done so, much of what I have so far written about black could instead have been applied to white. Indeed, of all colours, only black and white appear as opposites. This intimate relation renders them reversible and interchangeable, as demonstrated by numerous works throughout the history of moving images – from Hans Richter’s abstract animation Rhythmus 21 (1921) to Susi Sie’s macrophotographic video Black (2010). Richter described the opening of Rhythmus 21 as follows: The first shot was just the dark film screen, then it was pressed together from the sides so that in the end it was completely white. When it opened again, it was from the top and bottom, and it became completely black again, then from one side diagonally and so on. Now, after this introduction, I had established a kind of ‘no-form’ movement, and I allowed myself to take parts of the screen, and that means rectangles, as the screen is rectangular, or squares, moving parts of the screen against each other. They look like rectangles or squares because you have to limit the movement of the space somehow, otherwise you always come out with the black or white canvas – the film projection canvas.9

The film ends with a black square shrinking in size until all that is left is the surrounding white; the white screen then inverts to become a black screen, which again becomes a shrinking black square which leaves behind a white screen. Black and white here exist in a symmetrical relationship, each in a continual process of transformation into and out of the other. The sense that black and white are cinema’s dual limits achieves extreme expression in Norman McLaren’s The Flicker Film (1961) and Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965), whose rapid alternations between black and white frames form both the ne plus ultra of abstract cinema and a figurative return to cinema’s dual origins.10 But if black and white are symmetrical, why do we say ‘black and white’ not ‘white and black’? The terms are not interchangeable, because black and white are not interchangeable. The symmetry of Rhythmus 21 is just an aesthetic effect. To create the film, Richter placed cut-out shapes on layers of glass, moving them towards and away from the camera; he then used optical printing to create the reverse images.11 Yet even though the main axis of production was depth, the sense of ‘z-axis’ motion is absent from the film itself. Rather than appearing as a window on a perspectival view, as in a Renaissance painting, Rhythmus 21 appears a flat surface, as in an abstract painting.12 In Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Black Screen

43

abstracting the three dimensions of physical space into the two dimensions of graphic space, Richter also renounces the use of light and shadow to articulate depth. In Rhythmus 21, white is white, not light; black is black, not shadow. For this reason, they can exist in balance. Whenever white and black form visual expressions of light and shadow, however, their symmetry breaks down: the ‘negative’ image becomes qualitatively distinct from the ‘positive’. In Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950), as Orpheus sits in the back of a car with Death, the passing landscape suddenly appears in negative. By inverting the grey and clear areas of the film through optical printing, Cocteau transforms the landscape into an impossible space of black light and white reflections – a mirror image to the laws of optics. In its alternation between positive and negative, the landscape foreshadows Orpheus’s later passage through a mirror into the underworld and back. The film’s internal logic is flawless: if life and death are reversible, then why not light and darkness? However, in a world where life and death are not reversible, Cocteau’s negative image demonstrates Jacques Aumont’s point that light and shadow are asymmetrical – not least because light requires a source and darkness does not.13 The Black Screen: Forms The cinematographic asymmetry of black and white is an extension of the asymmetry between shadow and light. But there is also asymmetry between how black expresses darkness and white expresses light. Black can evoke a black surface, a dark space, or a combination of both. By contrast, white is most often perceived as a surface characteristic. As Wittgenstein remarks, ‘We say “deep black” but not “deep white”’.14 The ability of the black screen to evoke surface or space, and the ambiguity that may result, dates as far back as cinema itself. The earliest surviving experimental filmstrips by W. K.-L. Dickson, made in 1889 or 1890, are of ‘a man dressed in white on a black background’.15 The black background was a recurrent motif in the early Edison and Dickson films.16 It was made of tar paper, and formed an integral element of the revolving Black Maria studio, set up by Dickson in 1893. According to Dickson, the use of black prevented light spillage and provided figures with a clear outline.17 Though technically effective, this pragmatic choice resulted in a certain phenomenological ambiguity. One journalist visiting the Black Maria likened the tar paper to a ‘dead black tunnel’.18 Surface here is transposed into a spatial metaphor, with the inevitable dash of symbolism that no jobbing writer could have resisted. In his own description of the background, Dickson inverted the metaphor from space back to surface: ‘Against the nether Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

44

Richard Misek

gloom . . . figures stand out with the sharp contrast of alabaster bassorelievos on an ebony ground’.19 Of course, the ambiguity between dark space and black surface is not a specifically cinematic effect and does not require visual media to be felt. The blackness of a black surface is a result of its absorption of light sources, while the blackness of a dark space is a result of an absence of light sources. It can often be impossible to distinguish how much of the blackness that we perceive is due to one or the other. The uncertainty of where spatial darkness ends and material blackness begins is embedded in language (for example, ‘pitch black’ and ‘inky darkness’) and thus also in our cultural understanding of what blackness and darkness are.20 Jun’ichirō Tanizaki provides a particularly evocative example of the ambiguity between black surface and dark space in his famous celebration of the shadows of a traditional Japanese home: ‘A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paperpaneled shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is darkest’.21 In cinema, this metaphoric connection became material: on-screen shadow is deepest where the dye on a film print is thickest. The ambiguity here is both phenomenological and ontological. Of course, one can always conceptually distinguish between blackness as a spatial and material phenomenon. Jacques Aumont does so by highlighting two manifestations of black: ‘impression’ and ‘imprégnation’.22 As an example of ‘impression’, he cites Ode an IBM (‘Ode to IBM’, 1985), in which performance artist Mara Mattushka smears cabbalistic runes onto a transparent surface in front of the lens; seemingly written in her own blood, the runes progressively overlay each other until almost the entire screen is ‘inked’ black. Aumont’s example of ‘imprégnation’ comes from a scene in Orson Welles’s Othello (1952), in which Othello lurks in the penumbrae and then emerges from a background shadow; black here is a spatial characteristic. Though Aumont’s focus is aesthetic, his distinction reflects the two dominant ways in which cinematic black was generated before digital imaging: through the application of dyes to surfaces (sets, costumes, film prints, etc.) and through filming in such a way that dark space registered as black. Visually, however, the conceptual and technological distinction between surface and spatial blackness is altogether more fluid. Aumont’s use of the word ‘imprégnation’ perfectly evokes this visual fluidity. He uses it to describe a spatial blackness that is so thick it could almost be a liquid. At the same time, liquids can occupy surfaces as well as spaces: black ink may fill a bottle when wet, but cover a page when dry. The ‘impression’ of Ode an IBM is achieved through the use of pigment in a liquid suspension, so in a sense both of Aumont’s manifestations of black depend on liquidity – one metaphorically, the other materially. In addition, liquidity itself is a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Black Screen

45

metaphor for changeability; in Greek myth, the shape-shifting Proteus was a sea god. The black screen’s ability to represent surface and space could, then, be regarded as an intrinsically fluid characteristic. This fluidity is brilliantly visualised in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), in which an extraterrestrial’s victims follow her into a Glasgow tenement only to find themselves in a black space. As each victim approaches her, however, the visually indefinite – but so far solid – ground becomes a thick liquid. With each step he sinks further into it, until its surface engulfs his body and he is literally immersed in darkness. Once black pigment dries and becomes solid, even further visual ambiguity between black surface and dark space becomes possible. For example, the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) appears, both on Earth and on the Moon, as an object – something that can be touched, albeit with unknown consequences. Yet its black surface also appears just too perfect to be material; like a black screen, the monolith constitutes both something and nothing. This is the opposite of the effect achieved by Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings of the 1960s. Reinhardt’s paintings exemplify Clement Greenberg’s celebration of flatness in abstract expressionism: their interest derives from the subtle surface texture of the black paint, and the way in which it reflects light.23 In contrast to the subtle materiality of Reinhardt’s paintings, the surface of the monolith effaces itself, appearing as pure black. To achieve this effect, Kubrick’s crew constructed fourteen wooden models, spray painting each with several layers of black lacquer, before finally managing to make one without any visible surface texture. Even then, the blackness of the model remained precarious. Unlike the monolith, it could not be touched. Production designer Tony Masters notes that it needed to be handled with gloves; every time someone left a fingerprint on it, the whole surface had to be resprayed.24 Over recent years, the goal of creating a surface that negates itself has been approached through the use of carbon nanofibres, resulting in black surface coverings so smooth that they absorb up to 99.96% of incident radiation.25 The blacks of ‘nanoblack’ and ‘vantablack’ show no trace of their materiality, effectively appearing as a void.26 The use of nanoblack surface covering would probably have made life much easier for Kubrick’s crew, but could surely not have created a more intense feeling of blackness than that which already exists when the monolith reappears at the end of the film in the Louis XIV bedroom. The camera tracks towards the monolith until it fills the screen, in a shot that evokes the mise-en-abyme of The Big Swallow, but without a comedic cameraman to provide a buffer between viewer and void. Instead, through an implied point-of-view shot, the viewer accompanies Bowman into the monolith. As the black rectangle fills the screen, its darkness extends out into the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

46

Richard Misek

space of the auditorium. Trading on the fluid ontology of the black screen, the monolith appears as surface and space together, simultaneously. The White and Black Screen This chapter has so far focused mainly on how black functions within moving images. When seen in relation to the various spaces in which it is displayed, the black screen takes on additional – similar but different – characteristics. In the ‘black box’ of a cinema or art gallery, for example, as well as concealing the boundary between contiguous shots, blackness may obscure the boundary between on-screen space and the exhibition space. Bill Viola’s installation Tiny Deaths (1993) presents three walls of projected blackness, out of which ghostly monochrome figures intermittently emerge, only to disappear in an overexposed flash of light. The sense that the void-like blackness of the three screens exists in continuity with the darkness of the viewing space is augmented by the fact that each screen is the size of the wall. The edges of the wall merge with the edges of the image; surface and frame both appear indistinct, and the screen approaches invisibility. Aumont emphasises the tendency in films for black backgrounds to form spaces out of which characters emerge. White backgrounds, however, typically take the form of surfaces. In both the opening of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and the dream sequence in From the Life of Marionettes (1980), characters appear on pure white. In contrast to Welles’s Othello, however, ‘they don’t emerge from this white, they are deposited onto it’.27 The metaphor of characters being ‘deposited’ onto a white background finds its material equivalent in the ‘blank page’: a white or near-white surface onto which images may be drawn, painted or printed. Of course, a white screen need not imply the presence of a white surface. For example, it may result from shining a light directly into the camera; or it may form a stylised, immersive space like the detention centre in George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971), or the empty digital space of the Matrix before a virtual environment is loaded into it.28 Nonetheless, despite these exceptions, the white screen typically points towards the presence of a material surface in a way that cinematic blackness does not. For example, when making The Flicker, Tony Conrad generated black frames by leaving his camera’s lens cap on, and white frames by pointing the camera at a white sheet of paper.29 The blackness of Conrad’s film is both surface and space: the black of the lens cap merges with the darkness inside the camera box. The white, by contrast, lacks this ambiguity: it is an image of a white surface.30 The white surface has, of course, also historically formed a material base for cinema. Projected images depend on the reflectivity of the white cinema Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Black Screen

47

screen to be seen; project an image onto a black surface and it approaches invisibility. Cinema’s reliance on reflective light brings with it a physical limitation that helps explain the preference of screen media for black screens over white: though billed as arts of shadow and light, film and video are much better at capturing the nuances of shadow than those of light. If we look in the same direction as a bright light source, ‘catching’ it as it bounces off a white surface, we miss the delirious, joyous, and potentially dangerous sense of immersion that we get when we look towards the light. At one point in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), a spotlight shines directly at the camera. It must have been uncomfortable to film – though not as uncomfortable as the experience of seeing Francis Picabia’s set for the Dada ballet Relâche (1924), which comprised thirty spotlights shining directly at the audience.31 On-screen, however, the retina-searing intensity of the spotlight resolves as white. Filmed in high contrast, so that the light becomes white and the background black, the shot of the spotlight appears more graphic than cinematographic. Aesthetically and affectively, it shares more with the white on black dots of Guy Sherwin’s Phase Loop (1971) than an actual spotlight. As it reaches maximum intensity, on-screen light flattens to become a white screen.32 This transformation achieves its ultimate expression in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s time-lapse photographs of films playing in movie theatres, which superimpose exposure onto exposure, image onto image, until all that is left of the film is an empty square of white on the photographic print. Projected light becomes uninked paper. Sugimoto’s Theaters photographs play on and highlight the fact that whiteness is only equatable with nothing in subtractive colour space. They also highlight another characteristic of the white screen: in a cinema, it is clearly bounded. The dark surrounding walls form a frame that highlights the screen’s presence within the viewing space, and so also its flatness. Whenever a projected image approaches the sensory overload of pure light, it hits a double limit: that of its frame as well as its reflectivity. The black screen’s visual limits are less obvious but equally material: though it may signify and evoke nothing, the black screen cannot be nothing. Sean Cubitt summarises the relation between black and nothing as follows: As nonpresence, black presents nothing. In Aristotelian logic, everything that exists is selfidentifcal [. . .] The mathematician Frege (1848–1925) drew on this concept to coin a new definition of the number zero, which, as ‘nothing,’ does not exist and cannot be present. If every thing is selfidentical, then zero denotes no-thing, the nonidentical. Black has the same quality. In its sheerest state, the absence of all radiant or reflected light, it is pure nonexistence. As with zero, black exists only where nothing exists.33 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

48

Richard Misek

In contrast to the white screen, which always highlights its material base, the black screen should – when viewed in a dark space – be invisible. However, in reality, as Cubitt continues, nonidentical blackness is impossible to achieve: Black has the specific quality of being only ever virtual. Natural luster, imperfect pigments, ambient light, and neighboring colors all inflect surfaces we perceive as black: achieving solid, lasting blacks takes considerable effort, the more so the more we deal with screen media that either reflect or emit light as the basis of their working.34

Cubitt’s analysis of the unattainable, ‘virtual’ nature of black leads him to conclude, ‘Because being black is never an actualized event, we must speak of becoming black.’ This view contrasts with Richard Harvey’s assertion that there is no such thing as pale black or bright black; either something is black or it is not.35 In one sense, Harvey’s point is the same as Cubitt’s: black is a chromatic limit. At the same time, by asserting that black can only be black, Harvey overlooks at least three millennia of material struggles and failures to achieve blackness. Black screens epitomise this failure: generated through light, they are never quite black. Not nothing, they merely evoke it. Rather than negating themselves into nonidentical blackness, they constitute a range of luminous near-blacks achieved through a variety of additive colour technologies. Even the same display technology may result in drastically different shades of grey passing for black. In Thierry Kuntzel’s installation Nostos II (1984), images from the ‘same’ source (Max Ophüls’s ‘black-and-white’ film Letter from an Unknown Woman [1948]) are interpreted in nine different ways by nine seemingly identical video monitors. Needless to say, none come anywhere close to achieving nonidentical blackness. The light that makes moving images possible is always present within them. On screen, even Kubrick’s monolith is grey. The luminosity of black screens limits their ability to disappear into nothing in dark exhibition spaces. The sense of seamless continuity between screen space and viewing space achieved by Tiny Deaths is a rare and sophisticated illusion created through a combination of elements: the use of high contrast reversal film, the complete exclusion of ambient light from the gallery, and – crucially – the transformation of entire walls into screens. By contrast, when faced with the black wall that borders a cinema screen or the black bezel that borders a tablet display, on-screen black appears lighter than its surroundings. Cubitt’s classification of black as a virtual colour finds its parallel in Anne Friedberg’s metaphor of the screen as a ‘virtual window’; like the white screen, the selfidentical grey-black screen also ‘reduces the outside to a [visible] two-dimensional surface . . . at once surface and frame’.36 A common trick to help us perceive grey as black involves contrasting it with white. For example, the impression of darkness in The Third Man (Carol Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Black Screen

49

Reed, 1949) was achieved through the contrast of shadow areas with bright highlights. Cinematographer Robert Krasker made use of arc lights so strong that they were subsequently used to light St Stephen’s Cathedral.37 By extension, perhaps the most effective viewing context for on-screen blackness is not the ‘black box’ of the cinema but its opposite: the ‘white cube’ of the art gallery.38 The grey-black screen appears as an absence within a field of white. Of course, a white cube also brings to light the technological apparatus that makes moving images possible (CRT monitors, plasma screens, LCD screens, and so on), so emphasising that the black screen is physically something. Nonetheless, with ultra-thin frames and glare-free displays, contemporary LCD monitors are coming closer than ever to physically negating themselves. The result, as seen in much of Viola’s recent work including Martyrs (2014), is displays whose combination of presence and absence comes uncannily close to that of the monolith. It is surely no coincidence that the blackness of the monolith at the end of 2001 is itself augmented by the fact that it too appears in a room with white walls and floor – in other words, a white cube.39 Conclusion In my film Rohmer in Paris (2013), immediately following a key revelation, there is a cut to black. The black lasts quite a long time, about seven seconds, so as to release viewers from the flow of images and allow them time to reflect on what has been said – too long, unfortunately, for one projectionist, who decided this signified the end of the film, and so raised the house lights. After a few moments of uncertainty, the black – for him – resolved to signify ‘no film’. Powerless to reverse this, I watched the film’s interstitial black fade to the white of the cinema screen, until indeed no film was visible. The black screen is so effective at signifying absence that it sometimes risks doing so to excess, spilling out from meaning ‘no visibility’ to ‘no image’, and from ‘no image’ to ‘no media’.40 Yet there remains a fundamental difference between signifying nothing and actually presenting it. The signification of nothing is premised on something doing the signifying; the presentation of nothing, by contrast, requires nothing itself to be present. Many of the examples discussed in this chapter involve highly imaginative techniques for implying and evoking nothing. But if it is only possible to ‘become’ black rather than ‘be’ black, can the black screen ever present nothing? In a cinema, when a black screen results from the projection of light onto a white screen, and so is always itself an image, the answer is ‘no’. However, on a digital display the answer may sometimes be a qualified ‘yes’. When a digital screen is switched completely off, its blackness remains imperfect, but it does indeed present nothing: no pixels are activated, no light is generated. It becomes an inert Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

50

Richard Misek

object. Here at last, the black screen presents an absence so fundamental as to undermine the very existence of moving images: no power. Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 173. 2. Jacques Aumont, Le montreur d’ombre: essai sur le cinéma (Paris: Vrin, 2012), p. 72. 3. The use of fades to black to indicate the end of a film, for example, was virtually unknown before 1912. See Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1983), pp, 53, 292. 4. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 193. 5. Salt, Film Style and Technology, p. 195. 6. Digital colour grading makes such segues far easier to achieve. As Lucian Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel discovered when making their GoPro fishing documentary Leviathan (2012), if you reduce gamma and increase contrast, any dimly lit image can be transformed into ‘deep’ black. 7. http://thelouniverse.com (accessed 17 February 2017). 8. Because of their rareness, fades to white usually signify something. For example, in Six Feet Under they always follow a death, so perhaps evoking the soul’s immersion in a heavenly light. 9. Hans Richter, Hans Richter by Hans Richter, ed. Cleve Gray (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 131. 10. ‘The paradigm of black and white as colour’s visual limit has a long genealogy, from Aristotle’s belief that black and white were the two primary colours to Alberti’s emphasis on black and white as the dual ‘moderators’ of colour in painting’, Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 5. 11. See A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: British Film Institute, 2011), p. 38; Gideon Bachmann and Jonas Mekas, ‘From Interviews With Hans Richter during the Last Ten Years’, Film Culture 31 (1963–4), pp. 26–35. 12. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Standish D. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 49–51. 13. Aumont, Le montreur d’ombre, p. 10. 14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 37e. 15. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), p. 30. 16. Dickson’s experiments of 1890–1 also involved a black background, as did various subsequent milestones in the Edison Manufacturing Company’s evolving moving picture technology, including Blacksmith Scene (1893) and Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Black Screen

51

17. W. K.-L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph (New York: Museum of Modern Art, [1894] 2000), p. 22. 18. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 32. 19. Dickson and Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, p. 22. 20. John Harvey, The Story of Black (London: Reaktion, 2013), p. 13. 21. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (London: Jonathan Cape, [1933] 1991), p. 33. 22. Aumont, Le montreur d’ombre, p. 75. 23. Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in Francis Frascina, Charles Harrison and Deirdre Paul (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Sage, [1961] 1982), pp. 5–10. 24. Don Shay and Jody Duncan, ‘A Time Capsule’, Cinefex 85 (2001), pp. 73–117. 25. http://www.surreynanosystems.com/news/19/ (accessed 11 April 2016). 26. A black surface covering using carbon nanofibres was first developed by artist and scientist Frederik De Wilde, in collaboration with Rice University and NASA, and exhibited in the form of his ‘Nano Painting’ series from 2010 onwards; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/07/frederik-dewilde_n_5275760.html (accessed 11 April 2016). It has since been independently developed and commercialised in the form of Vantablack by UK-based Surrey Microsystems, and – controversially – exclusively licensed for artistic uses to Anish Kapoor; https://news.artnet.com/art-world/anish-kapoor-vantablackexclusive-rights-436610 (accessed 11 April 2016). 27. Aumont, Le montreur d’ombre, p. 158. Author’s translation. 28. The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999) 29. Nicky Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena (London: BFI Publishing, 2003), p. 65. 30. The most common spatial use of the term white, ‘white light’, is a misnomer. White light is a full-spectrum radiation whose invisibility makes possible full colour perception; it is only called white light because it provides the conditions under which white surfaces appear as white. 31. George Baker, ‘Film Beyond Its Limits’, Grey Room 25 (2006), p. 93. 32. Aumont, Le montreur d’ombre, p. 158. 33. Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), pp. 42–3. 34. Cubitt, The Practice of Light, p. 21. Cubitt’s claim that black is an unattainable ‘virtual’ colour also sees its counterpart in a discussion between Olafur Eliasson, Mark Wigley, and Daniel Birnbaum on the elusiveness of pure white paint. Wigley draws attention to Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler’s ‘MoMA Whites’ exhibition, which involved going into the MoMA archives and cataloguing all the different ‘white’ paints chosen by different curators for their exhibitions. Olafur Eliasson, Your Engagement has Consequences (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2006), p. 245. 35. Harvey, The Story of Black, p. 8. 36. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, p. 1. Ever alert to the nuances of exhibition, Viola often exploits the commonality between the glass of the LCD screen and that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

52

37. 38.

39.

40.

Richard Misek of a window. For example, The Dreamers (2013) features seven videos of people posing eyes-closed, underwater, on a black background. Though accompanied by gentle sounds of water, the images are emphatically not ‘immersive’. Rather, they appear as if through the glass wall of an aquarium. Charles Drazin, In Search of the Third Man (New York: Limelight Editions, 1999), p. 73. Catherine Fowler summarises the spread of film and video into galleries since the 1990s as a move from ‘the black box auditorium [. . .] into the light of the white cube’. Her use of the terms without quotation marks reflects the fact that they have long since become a familiar shorthand for distinguishing exhibition contexts. See Catherine Fowler, ‘Into the light: re-considering off-frame and off-screen space in gallery films’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 6 (2008), p. 259. But precisely what exhibition contexts do they distinguish? The juxtaposition of ‘black box’ with ‘white cube’ maps at least three distinctions onto each other: between cinema and art gallery, between dark and light viewing conditions, and between black-walled and white-walled rooms. In a sense, ‘black box’ and ‘white cube’ can perhaps best be thought of as the two poles on a spectrum of exhibition conditions (black walls and dark space on one end, white walls and white light on the other) and not as interchangeable opposites. This is how I refer to them here. In the context of a cinema screening, the relation of black and white at the end 2001: A Space Odyssey takes on a recursive dimension. The white cube of the room that encases the black box of the monolith is itself engulfed by blackness; but as the camera zooms in to the monolith, this innermost black box extends to absorb the white cube of the room and implicitly encompass the outermost black box of the auditorium. Certain display technologies have found ways to pre-empt this ambiguity. For example, when no signal passes through a projector, the display defaults not to black but to blue. The versatility of black as a signifier of nothing across diverse media here necessitates the use of another colour to signify no signal.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 3

Flicker and Shutter: Exploring Cinema’s Shuddering Shadow Tom Gunning It doesn’t work without the flicker. Ken Jacobs It is between the frames that cinema speaks. Peter Kubelka

The Cinema Apparatus and its Discontents The cinema appears as a powerful medium. Its visual acuity, its control of sound, but most of all its ability to register the world in motion and time to its smallest increments, have made it not only a major international form of entertainment, but, in its broadest sense as the technology of moving images, a means of communication, indoctrination, education and even scientific and medical investigation. As a form of representation its sensual complexity founds both its realism and its closeness to fantasy. Its economic and technical power has also made it an image of global imperialism, invading every corner of the world, and in its avatars of television, video and the Internet, infiltrating domestic space and every aspect of our private and public life. Yet its technical complexity also yields a material vulnerability, from the fragility of film stock to the evanescent quality of coded electronic impulses, subject to cycles of obsolescence and vulnerable to various forms of infection and decay. As a virtual medium, cinema, and even more its electronic descendants, seems to teeter on the edge of the immaterial and unreal. Within the paranoid style of 1970s apparatus theory, the cinema was described as a nearly all-powerful apparatus of the visual that produced the illusionary pleasures of a transcendent panoptic ego, an all-consuming, disembodied spectator, and enthralled its viewers in subservience to these imaginary senses of power.1 Like most modern paranoia, this extreme view articulated some uncomfortable truths regarding the ideological power of cinema. But it also constructed a model of cinema and visual perceptions that ignored (or denied) its embodied, historical and even its complex technological nature. No one can deny that the history of cinema as a popular medium gives cause for concern about ideological manipulation, and the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

54

Tom Gunning

irresponsibilities of fascination. But apparatus theory promoted a puritanical suspicion of illusion and pleasure and constructed a metapsychology that provided no clear way out of the illusions of Plato’s cave. It substituted an idealist model of how cinema functions for its actually complex technological and social history. This supposedly politically radical theory was all too willing to condemn a medium that was once seen as a revolutionary tool, reducing it merely to a method of reproducing dominant ideology. In this essay I follow an alternative (and ambivalent) approach to the cinematic apparatus, based in an investigation of the fleshly processes of perception and embodied film spectatorship, as well as a more dialectical history of cinema style and technology. I confess I am suspicious of the use of the term ‘illusion’ in relation to cinema. Movement in the cinema has been consistently described as an ‘illusion’, the product of a mechanism that exploits a ‘weakness’ of the human eye.2 Illusions are, of course, difficult to define but such a description of cinematic motion played into the apparatus theorists’ claim that cinema functions as an ideological illusion. Jean-Louis Baudry, the master architect of this theory, included the illusion of continuous motion as one of the ideological aspects of the cinematic apparatus, claiming that projection ‘denied’ or repressed the differences between individual frames in order to create an illusion of continuous motion.3 Thus the proponents of cinema as illusion claimed it makes us see motion where none exists (as it frequently makes us see 3-D where there is no actual depth or relief). Describing these appearances, whether moving or 3-D images, as if they were deceptions misunderstands the nature of the image. If we describe the means of representation as ‘illusions’, one must be careful not to identify such practices with either mental hallucinations or intentional deceptions – associations that the apparatus theorists invoke without hesitation. In this essay I hope to begin to probe the history of cinematic technology and propose an alternative view of the way cinema operates. While the possibility of ideological manipulation certainly exists due to the power and attractions of cinema, cinema’s interaction with visual perception also offers something else. I would claim that cinema is both more vulnerable, indeed more porous, less absolute in its effects –and also more open to possibilities. Cinema can stretch, extend, and play with our vision, rather than simply deceiving it. Cinema, especially as practised by the avant-garde, can open a realm of virtual perception, an aesthetic process rooted in our capacity to see and make images. Rather than an all-powerful monolith, cinema as a perceptual machine constantly reinvents itself, and therefore remains in some sense undefined. This ‘indefinite cinema’ is not simply about unmasking the cinematic illusion, but rather exploring the interface between human ­perception Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Flicker and Shutter

55

and technology. Rather than a mastery of vision or an all-powerful illusion, the cinema always has a certain vulnerability, a soft spot that allows us not only to see its effects, but also to see through them. In projected cinema the essential process of the rapid succession of stills may well, as Baudry claims, be rendered nearly invisible. But this barely noticeable mechanical and perceptual process that triggers the appearance of motion does leave its trace. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty showed us, the invisible is not the opposite of the visible, but its inner lining, implicit in the act of seeing.4 If cinema is about seeing, it also fundamentally depends on a rhythm of not seeing, a pattern of recurrent obscurity that we could call flicker. The Flicks Our names for media often lag behind technological development and become encrusted with previous histories. Can we still call electronically projected moving images ‘films’? Critics often contrast the new digital cinema with ‘celluloid’; yet no film of that chemical base has been made for decades (somehow ‘acetate’ doesn’t have the right ring to it). The names for things can preserve nearly forgotten associations. The now nearly obsolete vernacular ‘flicks’ probably evokes for most people memories of the movie-dominated youth culture of the 1960s, but its roots go deeper, back to the even older word, ‘flickers’, and the very beginnings of projected movies. Flicker was a by-product of the phenomenon of apparent motion on which cinema is based. In projected cinema, flicker is produced by the shutter that regularly conceals the moment when the filmstrip moves past the aperture, thereby eliminating the blurred image this movement might cause if it were visible. I will come back to this juncture of mechanics and perception, but first, I want to discuss the mechanism of the shutter, not only in the projector, but also in the motion picture camera and even earlier in the still camera. In the modern still camera, a shutter determines the time of exposure by opening and closing behind the aperture, allowing light to reach the negative for a precisely determined instant. Earlier in the nineteenth century the exposure time needed for the creation of the photographic image was longer, ranging from minutes initially to several seconds. Removing the lens cap while the photographer counted down the seconds was sufficient for making a proper exposure. But as the sensitivity of photographic emulsions to light increased, exposure time could be reduced until eventually, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the long-desired ideal of instantaneous photography was achieved. Brief exposures required a mechanical automatic shutter that could precisely slice time into an instant, a fraction of a second. In still photography this instantaneous photography allowed photographers Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

56

Tom Gunning

to freeze action without blurring. Thus they could photograph horses galloping or people leaping off the ground, freezing the moment. A rapid shutter created instantaneous exposures for still photography, but it also made possible the rapid succession of still images on the filmstrip on which motion photography depends. Motion picture photography produces a strip of individual still images, which appear to the viewer, when projected rapidly, as continuous motion. Flicker appeared with the projection of moving images, the product of a different automatic shutter. The shutter in the projector allows the images on the filmstrip to appear as continuous motion to the viewer. Explaining why a viewer perceives continuous motion when presented with a rapid succession of still images of successive poses has posed problems to psychologists of perception. In the nineteenth century such technically triggered perception of motion was confidently assigned to a phenomenon called the ‘persistence of vision’ which was understood as coming from an accumulation of after-images, caused by the eye’s tendency to retain a visual image for a short period after the original stimulus has been removed.5 However, more sophisticated concepts of the process of perception and the nature of motion demonstrated the fallacy of this explanation early in the twentieth century. In 1912 gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer demonstrated that rather than the simple chemical mechanics of after-images, the perception of apparent motion depended on cognitive/perceptive processes that could fill in gaps in patterns. Explanations of this phenomenon are still subject to revision and controversy; nonetheless, it is now thought that apparent motion derives from a combination of several perceptive/cognitive functions, including what is termed the phi phenomenon and flicker fusion. Without entering into the details, the principle of flicker and apparent motion can be summarised in the following manner. An intermittent illumination will be perceived as constant if the succession of flashes is rapid enough. This tendency to fuse intermittent flashes into a continuity becomes more complex when it involves images. Rapidly presented successive images (even abstract shapes such as squares or circles) in closely related positions are perceived as moving. At the risk of simplifying, we could describe the underlying principle of this pattern of perception as filling in actual gaps with virtual patterns of continuity, either a continuous light, or an actual course of motion that synthesises the successive positions. The phenomenon of apparent motion typifies the gap-filling and pattern-completing aspect of perception that Gestalt psychology emphasises. The dark phase of the flicker supplies an empty gap that our perception/cognition fills. If the shutter in instantaneous photography allowed the slicing of time into instants so brief that the photographic exposure could freeze motion, the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Flicker and Shutter

57

shutter and flicker in motion picture devices triggers the fusing of individual instants into a perception of continuous motion. A shutter or a similar device that interrupts the continuous view of moving images, transforming it into a series of discreet flashes, first appeared in visual devices decades before its use in instantaneous photography. The earliest popular device for creating apparent motion, the phenakistoscope introduced by Joseph Plateau in 1829, brought together the essential elements of later visual motion apparatuses: a series of closely related still images of stages of motion; a means of rapidly moving these images; and a means of situating a viewer so that the images are seen both through an aperture and with a shutter that interrupts the view, converting the succession of images into an intermittent series of flashes: flickers. Preceding the invention of photography, the phenakistoscope achieved the animation of drawn images. Each of these images depicted a stage of motion and a succession of them was arranged around a disc. This disc was attached to a handheld stick and could be spun in order to create the necessary rate of motion. The rotating disc was viewed through slits that were aligned with the image-bearing disc in order to intermittently break up their continuous motion. Later animation devices simply combined these essentials of the phenakistoscope in slightly different ways: the zoetrope placed drawn images on a circular strip of paper and made them visible via the slits in a revolving drum, while Reynaud’s praxinoscope used revolving prismatic mirrors to break the strip of images into separate intermittent flashes.6 In the 1880s photographer Eadweard Muybridge transferred a series of instantaneous photographs he had taken with an electrically triggered shutter onto the phenakistoscope and used a magic lantern projector to project these chronophotographic images of animals and people in motion onto a screen. Muybridge called this assemblage a zoopraxiscope. It brought together three independent apparatuses (the battery of multiple cameras that photographed the series of images; the phenakistoscope disc that revolved the images rapidly; and the lantern that projected them onto a screen).7 Thus the invention of the modern cinema needed the convergence of two types of shutters, a photographic shutter that allowed instantaneous exposures by slicing the flow of time, and the shutter of an animation device that manipulated the perception of a flow of images by breaking it into discreet flashes of vision – or flickers. In modern cinema these shutters formed essential parts of the movie camera and the film projector. Let me summarise the dual role of flicker in cinema. The flicker represents a new mastery of the flow of time and a manipulation of human perception through its interface with mechanical apparatuses, especially the automatic shutter. The shutter is a precision mechanism that can slice time into an instant, an increment of time basically beneath the threshold of human notice. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

58

Tom Gunning

In photography this led to a new class of images, capturing and displaying something the human eye could not see on its own (such as Muybridge’s photographing of all four hooves of a horse off the ground at one point of the gallop). In animation devices, the recurring brief interruption of vision caused by the shutter induces in the viewer the pattern-forming aspect of vision, which creates a virtual continuity from the flickering images, synthesising visual motion from these flashes. Muybridge’s zoopraxinoscope cobbled together various devices to project moving images onto the screen. In his documentary on Muybridge, filmmaker Thom Andersen was right to call this cumbersome assemblage ‘an invention without a future’.8 But its public exhibition convinced inventor Thomas Edison to undertake concentrated research into a motion picture device.9 His kinetograph camera replaced Muybridge’s multi-camera set up and followed instead the single camera devices of French physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey. Edison’s motion picture viewing device, the kinetoscope, followed the lead of the earlier ‘peepshow’ single-viewer visual devices, such at the phenakistoscope or the zoetrope, rather than the way opened by Reynaud’s projecting praxinoscope or Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, both of which used a magic lantern to project moving images onto a screen. Rather than an actual mobile shutter, the kinetoscope created its flicker effect through an intermittent source of illumination, inspired by Ottomar Anschütz’s similar use of flashes of light in his tachyscope.10 In the 1890s the cinema, projected on a screen for an audience rather than a single viewer, emerged as the dominant system of motion pictures, exemplified by the Lumière Company’s cinématographe (from which it takes the name). It combined projection onto a screen, a flexible roll of film as the carrier of the images and the shutter with its consequent flicker. Film historian Thierry Lefebvre describes the way the shutter functioned in the cinématographe (essentially the way it worked in cinema until digital projection): Each projected image necessitated in effect two successive phases, one of darkness, the other of illumination. During the dark phase, the film moves the space of one frame. The phase of illumination follows during which the image is projected on the screen.11

The Lumières understood that for maximum clarity and brightness these phases of movement and illumination should not be equal. Thus like most projectors, the cinématographe used intermittent motion, giving the film a brief pause at the moment of illumination, then quickly pulling it down (as the revolving shutter concealed this action) to bring the next frame into place. Intermittent motion not only made the image steadier, it increased the time of illumination, since the pause in front of the aperture with the shutter open Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Flicker and Shutter

59

allowed more light to reach the screen. But this brighter illumination also increased the contrast with the recurring darkness caused by the shutter, and therefore increased the visibility of the flicker. Projection onto a screen therefore increased the effect of the flicker as the brightly illuminated image rapidly alternated with its eclipse when the shutter blocked illumination. As projected films became longer (the average length of the films shown in the first Lumière projections was only slightly more than a minute, while Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon from 1902 lasted more than fifteen minutes), the effect of flickering became more tiring to the eyes. Thus flicker became a dominant – and frequently an annoying – aspect of early film shows. Flicker was the trace, the residue left by the mechanics of the moving image – as well as the space in which human perception filled in the gaps. As the projected motion picture began to attract mass audiences in the first decade of the twentieth century, it generated a number of anxieties: moral, social and even medical. The latter have mainly passed into historical oblivion; but perhaps the greatest anxiety about the movie as a new medium centred around the concern that the flickering moving image could damage eyesight. This was an international issue, and constituted a near panic for doctors and parents. The concern expressed in medical terms also displaced other anxieties about the new medium, which by the beginning of the 1910s attracted huge audiences composed primarily of groups that the guardians of traditional culture saw as vulnerable and in need of supervision: the working class (and, in the US, immigrants), women and children. Lefebvre has termed this medical diagnosis of cinema ‘cinématophtalmie’, a phrase coined in 1909 by a French physician, Dr Etienne Ginestous, a specialist in children’s eye diseases. Scott Curtis quotes Dr Schenk, a German physician from the same era, who warned teachers against using films in the classroom, claiming the possibility of eye damage: ‘Modern man systematically ruins his eye [. . .] The much-maligned “flicker” of the cinematic image is a malaise that presently, and probably forever, deprives the cinema of the claim to be a “hygienic” means of instruction’.12 But, as Curtis points out, the medical claims of physiological or neurological damage inflicted by the flickering cinematic image easily took on broader psychological or even moral dimensions.13 Was the panic over flicker simply a displaced fantasy of the discomfort the guardians of traditional culture felt when faced with a new popular medium? Early cinema combined a number of issues guaranteed to cause social anxieties in social conservatives: new audiences made up of ‘impressionable’ groups; the mass invasion of popular, even carnival, culture, which flouted traditional standards of good taste; and not least of all, a new technological medium, a product of the machine which traditional culture regarded as soulless. But as film historians such as Lefebvre have shown, the issue of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

60

Tom Gunning

flicker and its discomforts was not entirely imaginary. The projection speed of most early films was considerably slower than that of later periods (most obviously the sound era, when sound reproduction demanded motorised, regular speeds set at twenty-four frames a second). In the first decades (with the exception of the Edison Company, which initially shot at faster speeds) films were shot at a speed of fourteen to sixteen frames per second (many of Griffith’s Biograph films seem to have been shot as slowly as twelve frames per second). As the frame rate goes down, flicker fusion’s capacity to create a sense of continuous light diminishes. Before the coming of sound, most projectors were manually operated by projectionists, and their cranking could be uneven. These factors, combined with other irregularities frequent in early film exhibition (torn sprocket holes or worn prints) could result in unsteady images and highly visible flicker. Thus the shutter mechanism of the cinema, with its recurrent blocking of the brightly illuminated image, could cause visual discomfort. Physiological, psychological or moral, the panic over flicker posed a concern early filmmakers had to address. Technological solutions were offered, especially the introduction of two-bladed (standard in film projectors during the sound era) and three-bladed shutters (especially vaunted in the early period), as well as shutter blades that were perforated and therefore supposedly made the effect of the shutter in blocking the light less extreme. The three-bladed shutter multiplied the periods of darkness, which in effect increased the flicker rate so that it appeared less abruptly perceptible. Indeed Dr Ginestous, writing in 1909, indicated that in the best movie theatres (such as, Lefebvre notes, the Pathé theatres in Paris) the projection is managed so as to minimise flicker.14 We know that in most cases the rate of photography increased in cinema’s third decade and projectors also operated at greater speeds, and this increased rate also made flicker less noticeable. With the need to standardise and render automatic the rate of projection with the coming of sound, flicker more or less disappeared as a problem for most viewers. The legacy of flicker in cinema presents a fascinating paradox. On the one hand it is part of the basic mechanics of the cinema that appeared in the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. Flicker was the necessary condition of motion pictures. On the other hand, flicker was seen during cinema’s first decades as a major obstacle to the acceptance of the new medium, causing both physiological eyestrain and possibly even psychological side effects. The history of the elimination of flicker in some sense supports the apparatus theorist’s claim that cinema depends on a seamless illusion of continuity (although the theory effaces the complex historical and technological process this entailed). But the effect on the viewer of flicker (even as it became less consciously noticeable), that is, our perceptual ability to fuse Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Flicker and Shutter

61

separate images across a gap into a continuity, remains a locale of cinema’s indefiniteness, its range of undefined possibilities. Flicker could be seen as a wound within the continuity of images that may perhaps be sutured in most practices, but which can also be reopened and probed. If the technical/visual problem of flicker seems to have been surmounted fairly early on, the fascination of this process persists, I would claim, as a shadow that accompanies cinema. Mind the Gap: Making Flicker Visible Again Thom Andersen’s admirable 1975 documentary Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer ends with a dramatic and sensual evocation of flicker. Invoking a famous chronophotographic series by Muybridge, Andersen films in colour a pair of nude young women who approach each other and exchange a kiss. Andersen intercuts this action with sections of black leader so that the sensual scene alternates with brief stretches of darkness. Andersen progressively shortens these sections of black leader until we only see the standard, nearly imperceptible, flicker of the shutter. Andersen on the soundtrack unfortunately uses the term ‘persistence of vision’ to describe the process of generating motion from individual images. But, if his terminology is outdated, his visual demonstration remains compelling. The black leader, with its periods of darkness on the screen, invokes – and initially exaggerates – the rhythm of the shutter. Working very much within the mode of 1970s avant-garde cinema (one of the collaborators on the film was Morgan Fisher, a major structural filmmaker), Andersen in this brief sequence deconstructs the illusionistic motion of cinema through a process of interruption. Chris Marker had created a related moment in his 1962 film La jetée, a film that tells its science fiction story of time-travel through a series of still images. This use of static images is interrupted briefly in a sequence in which, after a series of dissolved-in images of the hero’s beloved, we briefly see her blinking her eyes in continuous cinematic motion. Throughout the film Marker relies on the spectator’s activity in filling in the gaps through his use of closely linked still photographs to convey his story. But here we see demonstrated the effect produced when our perceptual processes apprehend continuous cinematic motion. Like the sequence in Dziga Vertov’s 1929 The Man with a Movie Camera, where after a series of freeze frames a child blinks and the images stir into motion, Marker conjures motion out of stillness, rehearsing the initial miracle of cinema. Andersen does both, first liberating the still images out of their enthralment to the illusion of motion through their interruption with black leader, but also performing for us that full sensual achievement of motion when frames fuse together across their mechanical interruption. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

62

Tom Gunning

We could claim that the power (and, for some, the threat) of cinema as it was initially conceived pivots around the moment of flicker. Cinema is certainly an art of light: the light we see projected onto the screen and reflected back to us, the viewers, forms the cinematic image. But cinema is also an art of darkness, not simply in the darkened room necessary for the light image to become visible, but in its actual process: the rhythm and pulse of the flickering light on the screen. Steady illumination can project an image onto a screen, as in the magic lantern, but the transformation into a moving image occurs with the rapid replacement of images, a process masked by the action of the shutter, hidden from our view. In other words, if the image takes the form of light, its movement takes place with a rhythmic pulse of the obscuring shutter. The only sign of this mechanical action is the flicker on the screen. Our perception of the image in motion takes place in an act of perception, a fusion between our vision and the virtual images that occurs through that instant of eclipse. It is during this opaque gap that the image moves. In this section of my essay I want to move both forward and backward in history, back to the magic lantern and forward to the exploration of the flicker in avant-garde cinema from the 1960s on. From the seventeenth century, the magic lantern projected light-borne images in darkened rooms, virtual images formed of light. The step that brings us to cinema, animated images, was first accomplished without projection in devices such as the phenakistoscope and zoetrope. But projected still images by means of the magic lantern formed a major medium of entertainment and education for three centuries. These images were primarily static views, painted or photographic. But a popular genre of lantern entertainment offered what were known as dissolving views. As I have stressed in another essay,15 dissolving views could be seen as a sort of alternative to moving images: rather than motion they displayed a process of transformation or metamorphosis. An ancestor of digital morphing, the dissolving view dissolved one projected image into another, usually using a double-lensed lantern that could project two carefully aligned images and cause one image to slowly disappear while the other came into view. As The Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern explains: The actual dissolving could be achieved by several different methods. Originally with double lanterns and biunials, linked mechanical shutters or ‘fans’ were moved, usually by a lever, gradually obscuring one projection beam as the other was revealed. Alternatively the brass disc or ‘flashers’ on the front of the lens barrel could be swiveled, one being manipulated by each hand.16

Dissolving views became popular in the early nineteenth century, but had also played a role in the uncanny effects of the Phantasmagoria entertainments of Robertson and Philipsthal some decades earlier. One Phantasmagoria Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Flicker and Shutter

63

­ resentation gradually dissolved a projected image of a human face into a p skull. Less macabre dissolving views presented more picturesque transformations, such as a church seen by day dissolving into a nocturnal view, as the sky darkened and windows became brightly illuminated, or a landscape changed from obscure night into a colorful dawn. Such transforming views were very popular in the nineteenth century and were achieved through a variety of visual media, from tabletop peep boxes to the large-scale theatrical canvases of the diorama of Daguerre. The dissolve was also used by some lanternists as an elegant way to move from one projected slide to the next, a practice later brought to the cinema by Méliès and other early filmmakers which of course persists to this day as a form of transition in movies, often indicating an ellipsis in time. Marker uses the dissolve frequently in La jetée to shift among his still images, invoking motion. While the dissolve also involved an early use of the shutter, it contrasts with the phenomenon of the moving image. The moving image depends on an often-imperceptible rapid transition between individual frames to create a perception of motion; the dissolving view instead displayed its slow transition between images, allowing prolonged contemplation, and an invocation of time passing (from flesh to bone, or night to dawn). In this tradition the shutter or other device, instead of attempting to become unnoticeable, stages a spectacle in its own right. I introduce this tradition of visible transitions to provide a perspective on the flicker phenomenon as it emerged within avant-garde cinema from the 1960s on. The technological history of flicker in the projection of motion pictures has, as I have shown, a dual aspect. On the one hand, it is the trace of the basic process of cinema, the rapid intermittent movement of the filmstrip past the aperture and its effacement by the shutter. This rhythm of light slashed by darkness gives cinema its pulse, its process of bringing still images to life. But the primary role of the shutter was to conceal something: the actual movement of the filmstrip. The dialectic here involves the fact that as the actual movement of the filmstrip within the projector is concealed, the virtual movement appears in the viewer’s perception. The flicker caused by the alternation of light and dark in early cinema annoyed some viewers and became for some conservative critics an emblem of the frantic over-­ stimulation cinema exerted on modern spectators. Thus technology was marshalled to minimise, if never entirely eliminate, this pulsating light. Flicker: An Avant-garde Practice Some viewers and filmmakers remained fascinated, rather than annoyed, by the pulse and flicker of early cinema. Some filmmakers made flicker more Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

64

Tom Gunning

visible, as Andersen did, by splicing in frames of black leader. Vertov did this a few times in The Man with a Movie Camera. As he built one of his central analogies between the camera and the eye (which he hoped to fuse in the superior ‘kino-eye’), Vertov used brief inserts of black leader to invoke both the blinking of the eye and the dawning of consciousness. In the second sequence of the film, the awakening of a woman serves as a metaphor for both opening the film and opening the eyes of the spectator to the way the power of cinema can serve the revolution. Vertov intercuts a sequence of a simulated train wreck to visualise a nightmare that causes the woman to awake. As she quickly gets out of bed, Vertov cuts to a tracking shot of the train track punctuated by black frames, supplying as Yuri Tsivian says in his DVD audio commentary, ‘a pulse, a beat’.17 This flicker of black leader makes us aware not only of the materiality of the cinema, but also of its perceptual and mechanical foundation. A few shots later Vertov intercuts shots of Venetian blinds opening and closing with a close-up of the lens of the camera with its diaphragm opening and closing and the awakened woman blinking her eyes as she washes her face. The rapid closing and opening of the window blinds mimes the eye blinking and provides a flickering beat. Combined with the images of the camera focusing, the shots provide a powerful image of the merging of technology and vision into a new form of insight. The rapid tempo of Vertov’s editing matches the flicker of the blinds opening and closing and evokes the flicker of the cinema. A tradition began in the 1920s and re-emerged in the 1960s that combined the slow display of transformation introduced by the dissolving view with the instantaneity of the automatic shutter, its mastery of the fraction of a second and the mysteries of human perception that it triggers. While Andersen in his Muybridge documentary intends to undo the phenomenon of apparent motion by deconstructing it, Vertov seems fascinated by the effects the dialectical synthesis of motion yields. Likewise his rival Sergei Eisenstein expounded the possibilities of what he called ‘artificially produced images of motion’, founded, he claimed, in cinema’s ability to create a moving image: ‘The concept of the moving (time-consuming) image arises from the superimposition – or counterpoint – of two differing immobile images’.18 The embrace of flicker by avant-garde filmmakers in the 1960s, especially in the flicker films of Peter Kubelka, Paul Sharits and Tony Conrad, went beyond the deconstructionist impulse to destroy the cinematic illusion that the apparatus theorists called for. These films also exhibited a fascination with the power of the flicker and its possibilities of transformation and synthesis. If the clearest predecessor of visual transformation through the use of the shutter came from the dissolving view and its leisurely contemplation of the way a slow shutter can metamorphose one image into another, this Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Flicker and Shutter

65

modernist approach (announced by the Soviet montage filmmakers) rejected the romantic languor of the dissolve in favor of a truly modern tempo of the single frame and its flickering existence. When I studied with Peter Kubelka some five decades ago, he claimed that all of cinema, from his own work to DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), possessed a common pulse: the flicker of the cinema projector. He began the course I took by running the projector without any film, asking us to sense the pulse of light and darkness unburdened by any image. In most cases this flicker was visible even at the standard speed of sound projection of twenty-four frames per second. When the projector rate was slowed to the silent speed of sixteen frames per second, the flicker became more noticeable. When an adjustable speed projector was slowed below this threshold, the flicker became palpable. While this visible flicker posed a problem for the early film industry, Kubelka found in it a baseline, an inherent rhythm, from which his filmmaking was derived. More, I believe, than simply a Greenbergian modernist display of the essential données of the medium (although it was that as well), Kubelka’s lesson consisted in uncovering the sensual basis of the cinema, in two key elements: the precise mechanical slicing of the instant; and the alternation of projected light and darkness. Kubelka’s great films of metric cinema Schwechater (1958) and Arnulf Rainer (1960) each explore these aspects of cinema through a control of flicker and its patterns.19 Kubelka’s cinema intended to produce ecstasy in the viewer through an intensification of perception. In this it may recall the aesthetic delight occasioned by the dissolving view more than a simple demonstration of materialist cinema. But it also destroys the leisure of traditional contemplative reflection through the dynamics of cinema’s twenty-fourth of a second pulse. Kubelka uses cinema technology to awaken and stimulate an intensified rate of perception. He introduced each screening in our class with the exhortation ‘Speed up your eyes!’ Falling into the Shadow: the Space of a Flicker If I claim apparatus theory approached the cinema and the ‘illusion’ of continuous motion from a paranoid position, a contrary position does not embrace the industrial version of dominant cinema as a good object, but rather probes the possibility of the cinematic machine as a tool for exploring the interface between human perception and humanly devised technology. Through this approach one overcomes the fallacy of the dilemma of seeing cinema either as an enthralling ideological illusion within a determinist metapsychology, or demanding a deconstructive disillusionment that demonstrates there is nothing there but predetermined patterns which can only Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

66

Tom Gunning

deliver delight via their disappearance. The brief darkness of the flicker is more than nothingness; it rather contains an image of potentiality. The magic trick of motion is achieved in the darkness, but if we plunge into that darkness (rather than simply attempting to illuminate and erase it), what might we find? Flicker may hold not only the key to the continuity of apparent motion, but to other processes of perception that occur in the instantaneous collision between film frames at a rapid rate. The epigraph to this chapter, which I attribute to filmmaker Ken Jacobs, comes from conversations and presentations I have heard him give on his various para-cinema projections of his Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern, and his experimental (mainly achieved on digital video) work with three-dimensional images, including the process he calls ‘eternalism’. In all these processes Jacobs commandeers the cinematic apparatus, making it dance to his own tune. He manipulates frame rate, and often devises homemade shutters of eccentric shapes and improvised interactions.20 In eternalism the flicker effects are managed through the insertion of black frames between the differing frames of images caused by stereoscopic parallax. Jacobs is not only playing with the way the cinema can create motion for the perceiver through the synthesis of slightly differing frames; he also probes the creation of a complex three-dimensional space through the interaction between viewing apparatuses and the viewer herself. The visual illusion of stereoscopy, a three-dimensional image produced optically through a device usually known as a stereoscope, emerged in the nineteenth century. Techniques of the Observer, by art historian Jonathan Crary, brought the stereoscope into a new prominence. The stereoscope fuses two images photographed from two slightly different vantage points, recreating the parallax of binocular vision to create a three-dimensional effect. Crary sees the stereoscope as emblematic of a modern visuality rooted in the physiological aspect of perception controllable by apparatuses.21 The convergence between the stereoscope and early motion picture devices, as shown by the late Ray Zone, is instructive. Experiments in adapting the parallax principle to cinema occurred from the very beginning of film projection.22 Both 3-D images and motion pictures involve a technological manipulation of visual perception and the results have often been described as increasing realism. But, as Crary points out, the three-dimensional effect of the stereoscope does not truly reproduce our experience of visual depth; rather the stereoscope creates a space of stacked separate planes, a bit like the series of flats used in Victorian theatre. Motion, of course, further increases the sense of the solidity of objects. The recent re-emergence of three-dimensional viewing systems in digital projection has been greeted by concerns that recall the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Flicker and Shutter

67

early era of film exhibitions. Three-dimensional films are accused of causing eyestrain and other visual discomforts and contemporary guardians of culture are almost universal in their condemnation of the process as a gimmick (see Roger Ebert’s infamous article ‘Why I Hate Three-D Movies (and You Should Too)’23). While many commercial 3-D films may use the technique in an unimaginative manner, the lack of curiosity many critics show toward the possibilities of the process remains a sign of a general denigration of technological vision – even as it runs rampant through the culture. Jacobs often refers to the effects of his various stereoscopic devices as ‘2-and-a-half-D’, accenting their divergence from both conventional two-dimensional images and the effects of more realistically-oriented threedimensional illusions. His eternalism process animates original nineteenthcentury stereoscopic images, converting the static stacked planes of the traditional stereoscope into a forcefield of contradictory orientations. In Jacobs’ transformation the original stereoscopic image seems to vibrate, shudder, revolve in place, and to be constantly on the verge of breaking into continuous motion. As viewers, we experience a vertiginous circulation through the space of the image – until we realise nothing has truly moved. We remain stuck in the same space, only shifting about nervously, back and forth, as if undergoing some constant tremor of our muscles of perception. Jacobs achieves these extraordinary visual effects through the simplest of means and returns us to the common ground of creating visually apparent depth and apparent motion through flicker. Images photographed from viewpoints that diverge a few inches, corresponding to the parallax of binocular vision, constitute the principle of the stereoscope. The device channels each image to one eye only, allowing their perceptual convergence, which creates an appearance of depth. Jacobs rewires this principle by rapidly projecting each divergent image with frames of black between them. He replaces the stereoscopic device with rapid alternation through motion pictures, placing spaces of darkness between the images. Thus, flicker combined with the rapid succession of individual frames induces our visual and neurological process to blend these images into an often contradictory, constantly transforming space. Jacobs drives us between the two divergent views using dark frames as a wedge. I cannot claim to explain the effects of Jacobs’ eternalism scientifically. But clearly its basis lies in the synthesis forged by our perception between divergent views of space and the rapid alternation of similar, but not identical frames. The intervention of the flickering black frames corresponds to (and merges) the process of apparent motion in cinema and the stereoscopic effects of 3-D devices. Eternalism gives us another opportunity to contemplate the generative nature of the flicker in cinema (which Jacobs has shown can extend to digital media). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Tom Gunning

68

Epilogue In one of the central works of high modernism, The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot wrote: Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow

Although Eliot’s image expresses existential despair at the apparent impossibility of knowledge or action, we could use it as an image of the possibilities of cinema. The dark shadow that falls between frames enables the appearance of motion, and in Jacobs’ system an exploration of our perception of depth, rather than simple paralysis or despair. Rather than being condemned as an ideological swindle, cinema may (and in many uses may not) open new experiences of perception. These possibilities involve recognising cinema as indefinite, undefined, and constantly in a process of reinvention. The darkness of the moment of flicker, whether caused by the shutter or by cutting in frames of black leader, ushers our perceptual being into the unknown – not simply the false illumination of Plato’s cave, but the darkness of our pre-conscious and unconscious being, the physiological roots of our perceptual contact with both the visible and the invisible. The shutter continually opens and closes and projects both the light and the shadow that invite us to play among the images. Notes 1. Key works of apparatus theory would include the essays of Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus’ and ‘The Apparatus’, both reprinted in Philip Rosen (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) and the book of essays by Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 2. See for instance, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (ninth edition) (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010), p. 9: ‘our eye can be fooled into seeing movement’. 3. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus’, in Rosen (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, pp. 286–98. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 5. See Joseph Anderson and Barbara Fisher, ‘The Myth of Persistence of Vision’, Journal of the University Film Association 30:4 (Fall 1978), pp. 3–8.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Flicker and Shutter

69

6. The best account of early motion picture devices is Laurent Mannoni’s masterful The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, translated and edited by Richard Crangle (Essex: University of Essex, 2001). 7. The best account of Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope is in Stephen Herbert, Marta Braun, Anne McCormack, Paul Hill (eds), Eadweard Muybridge: the Kingston Museum Bequest (Hastings: The Projection Box, 2004). 8. Thom Andersen, spoken narration in the film Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, 1975. 9. Paul Spehr, The Man who Made Movies: W.K.L. Dickson (New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 2008), pp. 75–8. 10. Ibid., p. 133. 11. Thierry Lefebvre, ‘Une “maladie” au tournant du siècle: la “cinematophtalmie”’, Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie, Vol. 81, No. 297 (1993), pp. 225–30, p. 226. Author’s translation. 12. Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 130. 13. Ibid., pp. 130–1. 14. Lefebvre, ‘Une “maladie” au tournant du siècle’, p. 228. 15. Tom Gunning, ‘The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion’, in Suzanne Buchan (ed.), Pervasive Animation (New York: Routledge, 2013). 16. David Robinson, Stephen Herbert, Richard Crangle (eds), The Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern (Ripon: The Magic Lantern Society, 2001), p. 91. 17. Yuri Tsivian, DVD audio commentary, Man with the Movie Camera (Image Entertainment, 1995). 18. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘A Dialectical Approach to Film Form’, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1949), p. 55. 19. Peter Kubelka, ‘The Theory of Metric Film’, in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Essential Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 139–59. 20. I have profited in this section from reading the dissertation of my doctoral student Michelle Menzies, ‘On Cinema as Media: Archaeology, Experience, Digital Aesthetics’ (University of Chicago, 2015) and the interviews she conducted with Jacobs. 21. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 22. Ray Zone, Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film 1839–1952 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007). 23. Roger Ebert, ‘Why I Hate Three-D Movies (and You Should Too)’, Newsweek 5/09 2010 (available online at Newsweek.com).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Definitions

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 4

One Hundred Years of Low Definition Erika Balsom In Gamer (2007), Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s schlock allegory of the neoliberal media-industrial complex, the protagonist Kable enters the villain Ken Castle’s mansion in search of his daughter, whom he has not seen in years. He finds her sitting in an alcove made of screens, holding a doll, while an animated scene plays behind her. He runs towards her, only to hit a hard surface and fall backwards. As he pokes at the jelly-like membrane of this previously invisible screen, Castle’s voice is heard: ‘Not bad for video, huh? The latest and greatest. I defy you to tell it from real life.’ Much of Gamer consists of a hyperbolic performance of the contemporary mediascape; this scene, with its Zeuxian depiction of a level of image definition so high that it fools the beholder, is no exception. Indeed, digitisation has given new life to the old dream (or nightmare) of total mimesis. While the technological capability for high-definition imaging does not necessarily mean that its employment will become standard in all cases, the digital era has widely been heralded as a new age of sharp, high-definition clarity.1 High definition offers the promise – to remain forever unfulfilled – that the image might provide transparent, immediate access to the referent. It bespeaks a strong level of perceptual richness that aspires to the sharpness of unmediated vision, if not an ability to exceed the fallibility of the naked eye and venture into the domain of the hyperreal. It is, of course, a relative term: something can be deemed ‘high’ definition only in relation to an established norm. Whereas the notion of ‘resolution’ refers to, in the words of Giovanna Fossati, ‘the capacity of a means of reproduction to describe detail, which can be quantified by measuring the amount of smallest distinguishable elements in the image’, the concept of definition is more complex, less quantifiable, and profoundly relative.2 Though resolution and definition are terms that are often used interchangeably, it is useful to distinguish between resolution as the count of the ‘smallest distinguishable elements’ across image width and height (e.g., grain or pixel), a matter of quantity, and definition as a means of describing the degree of detail visible to the viewer, a matter of quality. Definition thus takes account of resolution as one factor influencing image clarity and sharpness, but also encompasses other factors, including the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

74

Erika Balsom

specificity of the material support and/or aesthetic choices made by the filmmaker. As Stephen Prince has pointed out, the movement of the grain of photochemical film will result in a less sharp (i.e. lower definition) image than would be possible in digital video, even if film possesses a higher resolution.3 Meanwhile, a filmmaker might choose to make use of blurred images that lower definition while rendering these images in high resolution. Definition can also vary across an image, as when one plane is in focus while others are not. Definition is thus best understood not as a stable technological capacity but as a relationship to the viewer that is distinguished by the degree of perceptual detail available within any given image. The experience of high-definition imaging is central to the rhetoric of innovation and spectacle that often surrounds tent-pole movies in the digital marketplace. Speaking of his much-publicised use of high-definition, high-frame-rate, 3-D video in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), Peter Jackson said, ‘It looks much more lifelike. Other movie experiences now look a little primitive.’4 And yet despite the tremendous currency of high-definition images produced through high-resolution technologies in the contemporary moment, they are not without their detractors and have not been embraced wholesale. Responses to this aspect of The Hobbit were lukewarm at best, with one reviewer calling the results ‘frequently hideous’, ‘a dismally unattractive movie, featuring too many shots that [. . .] were lovely at some point but are now ruined and chintzified by the terrible technology monster’.5 In the domain of artists’ moving image, Hito Steyerl has influentially argued for the ‘poor image’ of digital circulation, while many forms of practice – analogue and digital, popular and experimental – have adopted strategies that compromise the clarity and crispness of the image.6 Artists and filmmakers are keen to exploit the association of low-definition images with the unsanctioned and the authentic, with networked circulation and technological novelty. Such strategies are manifold and employed to diverse effect, but share an interest in contesting transparency and retreating from hyperreal clarity. It would be easy to assume that this tension between high and low definition is a product of the digital age, and, indeed, it is often described as such. But in fact, the notion that cinema is a high-definition medium has a much longer history than is commonly acknowledged – as does the interest in purposefully recruiting low-definition images to retreat from the precise rendering of visual detail. In the 1920s and 1930s, unease with cinema’s ability to automatically produce likeness with unprecedented exactitude permeated major attempts to theorise the new medium. Key texts of the period acknowledge the medium’s capacity for visual accuracy only to assert the need to work against it. For writers such as Ricciotto Canudo and Rudolf Arnheim, the cinema’s automatic iconic relationship to physical reality is singled out as Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



One Hundred Years of Low Definition

75

a site in need of subversion through artistic intervention. In order to create a strong aesthetic and affective impact on the spectator, they argue, cinema would have to find ways to avoid simply copying the visible. But it would also need to pursue this path to establish itself as an art, which involved staking out its autonomy vis-à-vis other art forms and physical reality alike. One way of achieving this goal rested in the creation of what would today be called low-definition images: images that do not promise transparent access to the referent, but that insist on their mediated status through the use of techniques such as blurriness and superimposition that obscure represented people and objects. At stake here is an expanded and productively anachronistic conception of low definition that goes beyond its conventional contemporary understanding – i.e., compressed digital video – to describe a broader retreat from well-modelled detail. The following pages will revisit these arguments from this side of the digital divide, finding in them a theory of the function and appeal of low-definition images. Taking a bifocal perspective on two historical moments nearly 100 years apart, I will question what relevance this earlier endorsement of low definition might have for our time, when such images proliferate across diverse media practices. ‘Hot’ Iconicity Despite the close association between high definition and the digital image, the use of the term ‘high definition’ in relation to cinema is decades old. In 1964’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan described cinema and photography as high-definition ‘hot’ media because they are ‘well filled with data’ and ‘do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience’ as would, for instance, a televisual image.7 The notion of being ‘well filled with data’ is consonant with describing a medium’s resolution, a term McLuhan never uses. This, coupled with the insistence on comparing different media in terms of their temperature, might suggest that McLuhan is making a claim about the in-built capacities of particular technologies. But in emphasising that the temperature of a medium depends on the extent to which its images must be ‘completed’ by the audience, McLuhan opens the possibility of conceiving of definition only partly in terms of inherent technological capability; ‘hotness’ is also generated by the level of detail and perceptual richness as it is presented to the viewer. As such, a bivalent understanding of image definition emerges, one that takes into account both the ‘natural’ temperature of the medium and the possibility that a filmmaker might deploy techniques to alter this temperature by controlling the degree to which the audience is called upon to ‘complete’ the image. An extensive use of close-ups in film would, for instance, heat up the already hot medium Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

76

Erika Balsom

through its force of exclusion and its surfeit of detail, while the incorporation of compressed video or out-of-focus images would cool it down, as these devices compromise the crispness of the representation and demand more from the viewer to ‘complete’ the image. McLuhan claims that a hot medium activates a single sense with terrific intensity, thus yoking a high level of rendered detail to a high level of sensory stimulation. As Francesco Casetti has suggested, McLuhan’s designation of cinema as high definition carries forth a well-established tradition, building upon the ways in which classical film theorists such as Jean Epstein and Béla Balázs described the sensory intensity of the medium.8 There are numerous aspects of the cinema that contribute to this sensory intensity, such as the gigantic scale of the image and the dynamism of montage. But what most enabled the cinema to be a ‘hot’ medium that, in Casetti’s words, would ‘give spectators the world represented in such a way that they could literally feel it at their fingertips’, was its automatic production of precise likeness.9 In comparison with the non-photographic representational media that came before it (e.g., painting, sculpture), the cinema possessed an unprecedented capacity for the accurate rendering of detail – an automatic power of iconicity that allowed it to generate striking likenesses of the visible world, unfolding over time. Discussions of cinema’s powers of indexicality have been a significant topic of debate in film theory, to the extent that its immense powers of iconicity have too often been overlooked. This is perhaps because indexicality has served as a convenient (though sometimes problematic) means of differentiating between digital and analogue images. But the relative lack of discussions of this latter aspect of the sign is also likely due to fears that it risks suggesting a belief in the transparency of the image. However, iconicity need not suggest transparency; it remains fully possible to see the image as wholly within the domain of representation without foregoing the notion that it is marked by a high level of correspondence and analogy with the real. Whereas indexicality designates an existential bond between sign and referent, it is imperative to recall that this dimension of the sign offers no guarantee of resemblance. To emphasise the cinema’s power of iconicity allows one to see it as a producer of likeness, a copyist of appearances.10 This need not imply a truth claim on behalf of the copies it produces, nor a bond to the referent. It is simply to acknowledge that a strong mimetic power has long been a central part of cinematic fascination. The notion that cinema has historically been understood as high definition is in large part due to the ‘hotness’ of its iconicity. However, whether this power is to be exploited or suppressed is a major question of classical film theory and the antecedent discourses on photography that informed it. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



One Hundred Years of Low Definition

77

A Mere Copy In his account of the Salon of 1859, Charles Baudelaire famously held that the advent of photography signalled the defeat of poetry in the name of progress – the overcoming of man by machine – and saw it as leading indubitably to the impoverishment of artistic sensibility.11 Photography was, he argued, simple mechanical duplication, devoid of the eminently human creativity that resides at the heart of true artistic production. Such a position constitutes nothing other than a rejection of the automatically-produced, high-definition image on the grounds that it is a mere imitation, a bad mimesis. Photography was indiscriminate in its registration of detail and thus seen as nothing other than a blank, homogenising copy marked by machinic stupidity. This anti-photographic discourse is echoed in Ricciotto Canudo’s theory of film, despite the fact that he was writing about a medium that took photography as its base. As early as 1911, Canudo claimed that the cinema’s capacity for indiscriminate recording would stand as an obstacle in the path to its becoming an art. In ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’, he asked, ‘Now, it is necessary to ask of the cinematograph, is it to be accepted within the confines of the arts?’ The answer: ‘It is not yet an art, because it lacks the freedom of choice particular to plastic interpretation, conditioned as it is to being a copy of the subject, the condition that prevents photography from being an art.’12 For Canudo, artistic activity was understood as a distillation of the essence of life into crafted representations. It was not enough to simply reproduce likeness; rather, one must engage in an activity of selection and synthesis in order to rescue fragmentary impressions of the world and endow them with meaning. At play here is a profound suspicion of the materiality of the readily visible and of cinema’s dependence on it. Though the new medium was grounded in the reproduction of the physical reality, Canudo saw its mandate to be the transcendence of such surfaces to reveal the invisible, to communicate the immaterial ‘soul’ of people and things. As Sarah Cooper has noted, Canudo’s understanding of the soul [l’âme] ‘combines both the life of the mind and the spirit worlds’ that come together in the French word esprit.13 One can see here an attempt to humanise the new technology of cinema, as Canudo describes what he holds to be its true function in terms closely tied to subjectivity and spirituality, thus distancing it from the modern shock of the machine. Canudo claims cinema’s specificity lies not in its mechanical automatism – its ability to produce highdefinition likenesses, images ‘cut out’ from reality, to paraphrase him – but rather in the possibility that the machine might be marshalled by a creative agent who would transcend banal objectivity and illuminate inner truths.14 This notion that the cinema might engage in the revelation of a deeper nature is, as Cooper notes, a widespread preoccupation of French film theory Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

78

Erika Balsom

at this time, appearing in the writings of Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, and others.15 While it is not always articulated alongside the explicit denigration of the copy that one finds in Canudo, the repeated invocation of the need to transcend appearance to access essence suggests that an anxiety concerning cinema’s mechanical exactitude and affinity with surface was widespread at this time. Jean Epstein argues that cinema is not ‘a reflection or a simple copy of conceptions’,16 while Abel Gance calls for the need for cinema to be ‘allegorical’ and ‘symbolic’.17 Dulac proclaims that ‘unquestionable accuracy’ should be left behind, for ‘cinema, the seventh art, is not the photographing of real or imagined life as it was believed to be up until now’.18 Rather, it should proceed by ‘agency of suggestion’ and ‘clearly defined act[s] of will’.19 The emphasis tends to fall not on the primacy of photographic capture but on the additive, transformative potential of cinematic representation, a tendency that is encapsulated above all in the ineffable term of photogénie. For Epstein, this medium-specific power of cinema provided an opportunity to transcend ‘the tyrannical egocentrism of our personal vision’.20 This decentring of the human subject is very different from Canudo’s conviction that the transformational capacity of cinema was the product of an artist who had crafted the image after his own mind. But despite this significant disagreement over whether the object of revelation was the human psyche or the world beyond it, both theorists are united in their conviction that the cinema’s disclosive faculty will not be activated simply by turning on the camera. Rather, it requires a strategic deployment of the apparatus that only a great artist can achieve. Such rhetoric might be understood as symptomatic of broader fears concerning the encroachment of machines on human creativity after industrial modernity. As Lionel Trilling notes in his 1971 study Sincerity and Authenticity, a structuring opposition took shape between authenticity and reproducibility, which correlates to a rhyming opposition between human and machine.21 French film theory in the 1920s, though by no means a unified discourse, at times attempts to provide an account of the medium that will rescue it from inauthenticity by distancing it from machinic sameness and resituating it on the side of the human. While certainly an enthusiasm for the machine does exist, alongside this perhaps more predictable gusto is a more conservative discourse, a fear of the copy from within a medium of the copy. In 1923’s ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, Canudo’s position remains consistent. Indeed, Canudo turns to the paradigm of poetry in order to explain how an artist might make use of ‘real life’ in the creative act: As Novalis says, Poetry is the absolute Real. It mobilizes the chimerical operation of artistic genius when it tears from the fabric of ‘real life’ elements Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



One Hundred Years of Low Definition

79

or details too numerous to count. From these details, genius composes a meaningful and moving work – not a mere photograph of beings and things in movement, but a synthesis of life.22

It is worth interrogating precisely what conceptions of art and the artistic subject are at play in these arguments. Canudo’s recourse to Novalis is notable, as it figures as an explicit appeal to an expressionist conception of authorship precisely at an historical moment when such an understanding of the artistic subject was being significantly re-thought, if not vehemently rejected, by avant-garde movements deeply influenced by the cinema and the new machine culture of which it formed a part. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain proposed a radical redefinition of the artistic subject, suggesting that the artist’s activity resided first and foremost in the acts of selection and framing. One could understand Duchamp’s gesture as providing a defence of photography as an artistic practice: the operations of selection and framing are precisely those undertaken by a photographer who decides how and when to produce a photograph. But even beyond Duchamp’s more polemical intervention, the early decades of the twentieth century were marked by a widespread reformulation of the role of the artist that in some circles saw an embrace of the machine aesthetic. A desacralisation of art was underway: the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 was a hymn to speed and shock, while Constructivism argued for the reconciliation of art and modes of mass production. Though working in the technological medium of film, a signal participant in this process, Canudo relies on rather traditional understandings of art and the artistic subject, already in the midst of being displaced at the time of writing. The problem of such conservatism was noticed already by Walter Benjamin, who was highly critical of what he deemed the ‘obtuse and hyperbolic character of early film theory’.23 As he wrote, ‘It is instructive to see how the desire to annex film to “art” impels these theoreticians to attribute elements of cult to film – with a striking lack of discretion’.24 Though Canudo is not named in Benjamin’s text, the former’s insistence on arguing for an expressionist, anthropocentric view of film art might certainly be seen as an attribution of cult value to a medium that might otherwise destroy it. Towards Low Definition If, as Canudo puts it, ‘cinematographic truth has nothing to do with the truth of visible reality’,25 then what form should the image, anchored as it is in visible reality, take to best communicate this truth? Perhaps unsurprisingly, he advocates for ‘alter[ing] the visual field through stylistic devices such as distortions, superimpositions, and skrims and masking effects’.26 In other Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

80

Erika Balsom

words, cinema will be elevated to the status of art by foregoing the ability to automatically produce a high-definition image and instead employing filmic techniques that will lower definition, weaken the iconic likeness to the referent, and emphasise departures from physical reality. Such strategies – frequently remarked upon as characteristic of French Impressionist filmmaking – are inevitably deployed in combination with shots that feature ‘straight’ recording, but this contrast arguably serves to draw out their status as artistic interventions even more. While McLuhan would later be keen to marry cinema’s sensory intensity to its ability to render detail in high definition, Canudo disarticulates the two, possessing the conviction that such sensory intensity would best be achieved by retreating from iconic exactitude. Notably, one finds similar strategies at play in the pictorialist photography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where they were theorised explicitly in relation to claims for photography as art. Figures such as Robert Demachy and Alfred Stieglitz (in his early period) advocated for a rejection of sharpness in favour of explicit manipulations of the pictorial surface, particularly blurred focus. Pictorialist photographers moved away from the objectivity of a point-and-shoot approach, preferring darkroom techniques that would bring the image into a closer relationship with painting. In Une Balleteuse (1900), for instance, Demachy uses the gum bichromate printing process to create a multi-layered image that renders the dancer in a hazy light, with the folds of the left side of her tutu blurring into the space around her. Demachy adds textures characteristic of painting or etching, thereby obscuring the background space with graphic marks, underlining the role of the artist in generating the image and creating an explicit analogy with established artistic media. Such techniques were thought to privilege art over fact and impart to the viewer the subjective emotions of the photographer. Though pictorialism would fall out of favour in the 1920s as straight photography came into fashion, the influence of this well-established discourse would endure, forming a basis upon which theories of the new medium of film might be built. Canudo’s advocacy of a film such as Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen, 1921), which uses up to four layers of superimposition to represent the drunken visions of the protagonist, might be seen to adapt the pictorialist model to narrative cinema. While such uses of superimposition have been rightly connected to the tradition of spirit photography,27 it is worth emphasising that the technique also recalls Bergson’s understanding of mental life as multi-layered, superimposed strata of pastness.28 Canudo explicitly ties the use of visual distortions to the rendering of memory and thought, understanding The Phantom Carriage as effectively communicating the subjective state of drunkenness. But this figuration of subjectivity must Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



One Hundred Years of Low Definition

81

be understood as conveying the subjectivity of the filmmaker as well; for it is in such moments that it is most possible to transmit an understanding of the cinema as traces of the real manipulated by an artistic sensibility rather than visible facts that have been automatically reproduced. In Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (La chute de la maison Usher, 1928), this alliance between the low-definition image and the agency of the artist finds overt allegorisation, as the filmmaker depicts Roderick’s painting of Madeleine as a blurred flux of multiple exposures. The act of painterly creation is relayed by means of a virtuosic deployment of a trope closely linked to cinematic specificity, cementing the association of low-definition images with both subjectivity and the claim for artistic value. Epstein here proposes an analogy between the act of painting and a photogenic film practice that would recruit the aesthetic and affective possibilities of low definition. Given that the cinema was able to trump painting’s ability to produce likeness, one might expect that it would be this capacity that would have been emphasised to mark out the specificity of the new medium. And yet, for Canudo the opposite holds true: cinematic specificity is aligned with a retreat from iconic accuracy through a lowering of image definition. Pursuing the notion that cinematic specificity lay in its ability to automatically render precise likeness would have put cinema on the wrong side of the perceived irreconcilability of copying and art. The struggle to establish cinematic autonomy was waged on two fronts: autonomy from the other arts and autonomy from physical reality. As Epstein’s use of blurred multiple exposure in The Fall of the House of Usher suggests, the latter took precedence since film first had to qualify as an art (and not a mere copy) before its differences from the other arts could be parsed. A Precarious Encounter In 1932’s Film als Kunst, Rudolf Arnheim, spurred by a need to address what he later called the ‘precarious encounter of reality and art’ that constituted the cinema, offered a polemical rebuttal of the notion that film might be a simple mechanical copy.29 Arnheim argues against those who claim ‘[f]ilm cannot be an art, for it does nothing but reproduce reality mechanically’ by taking inventory of all of the ways the film image necessarily diverges from such duplication.30 For Arnheim, recourse to more overt techniques such as multiple exposure need not occur; in attributes such as the absence of colour and sound, the reduction of depth, or the choice in framing, cinema is already well on its way to distinguishing itself from the reality on which it depends. However, Arnheim is keen to derive from such features principles that the cinema might best pursue if it is to establish itself as an art. He Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

82

Erika Balsom

claims a ­filmmaker should not be content with the ‘shapeless reproduction’ of the world, and should instead ‘consciously stress the particularities of his medium’ – in other words, he should push precisely those divergences from the world that constitute uniquely cinematic forms of representation, which would include the retreat from exact iconic likeness.31 Here, Arnheim is following in the tradition of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who in his 1766 text Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry argued that the proper subject matter for a given medium could be extrapolated from its form. Like Lessing, Arnheim sees film’s path to excellence – not to mention art – as residing in the pursuit of limitations. For Lessing, the notions that poetry is an art of time and painting an art of space serve to stake out the autonomous domain of each form; these first principles provide him a way of demarcating the particular subjects that deserve treatment by each medium and thereby delimit their respective areas of competence. Arnheim is certainly interested in establishing the specific capabilities of cinema vis-à-vis the other arts, but his main concern lies in fortifying its separation from a much more threatening neighbour that might compromise its artistic status: reality itself. By interrogating its differences from reality, cinema could succeed in distinguishing itself from the other arts. But much more importantly, it would perform a turn away from the world and inwards, declaring itself as engaged in a reflexive process grounded not in mimesis but in creative transformation. Certainly, Arnheim’s prescriptions might be fulfilled while retaining the sharpness of the image; the obsession with the close-up during the silent era constitutes a key example of how the mandate of creative transformation might be successfully pursued in high definition. But given the extent to which Arnheim’s arguments rest on the unchallenged assumption that art and copying are fundamentally opposed, it is no surprise that various forms of weakened image fidelity occupy an important place in his compendium of the ‘formative means’ that might be used to ‘mold reality for artistic purposes’.32 Arnheim names low-definition techniques such as superimposition (multiple exposure), special lenses, the manipulation of focus, and the use of distorted mirror images as techniques to which the film artist might turn to highlight the distance between reality and representation – though he does warn that they should be used sparingly and not for their own sake.33 As Malcolm Turvey has noted, Arnheim’s interest in medium-specific properties is not, as it was for Clement Greenberg, a purely formalist exercise of pruning away anything non-essential: ‘Instead, the artist should do this, Arnheim claims, in order to interpret what the artwork represents, i.e., organize it into balanced patterns and general forms, and thereby aid in visual understanding’.34 In line with an understanding of visual art influenced by Gestalt psychology, Arnheim saw human vision as possessing active powers of synthesis. Perception was an Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



One Hundred Years of Low Definition

83

intentional act of understanding by which fragmentary impressions of the world might be unified into a meaningful whole; when making a film, one should seek to emulate and enhance such processes. This emphasis on synthesis resounds strongly with Canudo’s conception of the role of the artist. For both theorists, the indiscriminate capture of mechanical reproduction threatened to be nothing but a blankness that would contrast starkly with the creative, meaning-making processes central to the artistic subject. For Arnheim, lowering image definition provides one possible way of interpreting the objects and situations represented onscreen, of engaging in the activity of visual understanding that the Gestaltist approach took to be the essence of art. Though Canudo was not trained in Gestalt psychology as Arnheim was, both theorists share an emphasis on synthesis as a uniquely human faculty that must serve to mitigate the stupidity of the apparatus, its inability to discriminate. Arnheim’s writings of the 1930s, like those of Canudo in the decade before, are marked by rather traditional conceptions of art and the artist. Precise iconic likeness is denigrated as a form of mere copying and the means by which the film artist might create a subjective image pregnant with meaning are specified. Though this might be less readily discernible in Arnheim’s Film as Art due to its quasi-modernist tendencies, at the heart of this theory of film one finds not a truth to materials but a truth to the human subject, with one pathway to its achievement specified as a retreat from high definition. A Century On How might one summarise the appeal of the low-definition image for Canudo and Arnheim? Such images fulfil four interrelated functions. First, they are seen to deliver a maximum aesthetic impact by successfully communicating inner truths and subjective experience. Instead of simply duplicating surfaces in an indiscriminate manner, they reveal sentiments hidden to the eye, and are particularly associated with the rendering of mental states. Second, redoubling the emphasis on subjectivity, these techniques function as evidence of the filmmaker’s artistic intervention. The image ceases to be a mere machinic copy and presents itself instead as an artifact crafted by an aesthetic intentionality. For Canudo, this is understood in an expressionist sense, as these techniques become a displaced manifestation of the hand of the artist; for Arnheim, this is understood in a Gestaltist sense, as these techniques show evidence of the filmmaker’s work of visual understanding. In both cases, this emphasis on the creative agency of the filmmaker pulls the medium away from its machinic basis and instead suggests that the apparatus is a tool for human use, much like a paintbrush and canvas. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

84

Erika Balsom

Third, low-definition images are held to be indicators of cinematic specificity, providing a way to stake out the proper domain of the cinema vis-à-vis other forms of artistic production by emphasising its unique representational capabilities. And fourth, they do so while pulling the image away from a duplication of the referent, a feat necessary if the medium is to conform to an understanding of art as tied to autonomy and creativity, as refraction rather than reflection. Theodor Adorno was not advancing an idiosyncratic position when he claimed that art ‘goes against its own essence’ when it ‘simply duplicates existence’; such a belief had tremendous currency and accounts in part for the manner in which low definition is yoked to artfulness.35 Together, these postulates form a theory of the low-definition image that aligns it with subjective intervention and medium-specific claims for the independence of cinema from both physical reality and other art forms. How do these claims appear to us today, when diverse uses of low-­ definition images proliferate? In ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, Steyerl underlines the close link between low definition and promiscuous circulation. Due to the inverse relationship between image quality and file size that inheres in digital imaging, low definition now has a relationship to image mobility that it did not have during the analogue era, as images are processed through compression algorithms that lower resolution to facilitate faster transmission across networks. The ‘poor image’ is an image optimised for travel, bearing the imprint of its movement across networks as it is compressed, uploaded and downloaded. Low definition thus now relates not only to the image’s ability to copy the profilmic, what one might term its referential reproducibility, but also points to the copying of the image that facilitates its dissemination, what one might call its circulatory reproducibility. This constitutes a significant shift in the circumstances under which low-definition images are produced and consumed. In the 1920s and 1930s, low definition provided a way of asserting a connection to high cultural forms. In the digital era this continues, as blurred images continue to suggest artistic ambitions. However, low definition is also closely aligned with rather the opposite: it occupies a position within the digital vernacular that Steyerl describes as ‘a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances’.36 Francesco Casetti accounts for the proliferation of such low-definition images in contemporary narrative cinema – whether surveillance footage, compressed video, or degraded archival images – as cinema’s response to a new media environment, but also as an instance of media hybridisation that allows cinema to ‘recuperate consciousness of itself and of the field in which it operates’.37 In this regard, one might say that in these cases, low-definition images shift from the markers of specificity they were in the 1920s to markers of intermediality and cinematic expansion. Nonetheless, they continue to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



One Hundred Years of Low Definition

85

form part of a reflection of the status of the medium’s position within a larger media ecology. This association between medium specificity and lowdefinition images produced through digital technologies also appears in the work of contemporary artists who interrogate lossy compression and glitch. Here, one sees a reactivation of the bond between medium specificity and the low-definition image that existed roughly a century ago, but the connection that existed during that period between low definition and subjectivity is severed in favour of a concentration on automatic, algorithmic processes: a truth to materials, not a truth to the subject. This is not to suggest, however, that all uses of low definition have ceased entirely to be aligned with subjectivity. Casetti also notes that low-definition images are today often called upon to relay ‘authenticity, sincerity, and even truth’, as their poor quality is recruited to emulate the precarious circumstances of production that sometimes give rise to such images in nonfiction contexts.38 Paradoxically, markers of mediation become signifiers of immediacy, taken to be more direct and true than the promised transparency of high definition. This particular meaning of low definition – widespread in today’s media landscape – is notably not a part of its elaboration in the 1920s and 1930s, since it is a result of technological developments such as the availability of mobile phone cameras and other lightweight, portable means of image capture that do not possess adequate memory to store images in higher definition. For Canudo and Arnheim, low definition provided a way of asserting a distance from the profilmic, lest the image be seen as a mere copy. Today, by contrast, it can serve to assert the proximity and urgency of this referent. And yet, though these moments differ so much from one another, in both cases low definition serves as a form of overt inscription that seeks to imbue the image with an augmented sense of authenticity. Another major paradigm of contemporary low definition, one with no necessary tie to digital technologies, consists in attempts to mitigate any impression of representational transparency through the deployment of techniques such as blurriness, superimposition, and other forms of graphic intervention, particularly in experimental practices with an investment in documentary. If in the 1920s the high-definition image was feared as appearing to be a mere copy, thus cast out of the realm of art and authenticity, today it risks suggesting a stable and immediate connection between referent and image, an illusory transparency deemed to be ideological and, at the limit, unethical. There is no claim here that departures from exact likeness are necessary in order for the moving image to attain the status of art, as there was in the 1920s. The notion that the moving image is an artistic medium has, by now, been long established; meanwhile, the old antinomy of art and the copy has been weakened – though not overcome entirely – through postmodernist Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

86

Erika Balsom

practices across media. Rather, internalising the critique of the notion that the image might function as a ‘window on the world’, many artists are keen to introduce visual markers of mediation and manipulation that will make visible the transformations that occur between the referent and representation. To do so, they turn to many of the same techniques favoured in the 1920s, creating low-definition images that have little to do with the pixelated surfaces of digital circulation, but which nonetheless may be understood as a retreat from iconic exactitude. For instance, the first section of Basma Alsharif’s O, Persecuted (2014) rephotographs obscured details of a projection of a Palestinian agitprop film by Kassem Hawal, Our Small Houses (1974), while the second superimposes black-and-white footage of a belly dancer over relatively high-definition colour video of Israeli pool parties, compromising the exactitude of the party images and suggesting that they are spectrally invaded by the lost bodies of the past. Here, this double recourse to low definition contests the belief in transparency that characterised some earlier forms of documentary. In the first section, low definition allegorises the violent oppression of the Palestinian people and their history, while in the second section it is mobilised to subject hegemonic images to a critical haunting. In both cases, it serves as an index of subjective intervention that suggests the impossibility of accessing the real in an unmediated manner. Alsharif acknowledges that not everything can be rendered visible and knowable, and insists that the achievement of clear visibility in the light of history is often a result of violence. This investment in lack of epistemological transparency is

Figure 4.1  O, Persecuted, Basma Alsharif (2014). Courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



One Hundred Years of Low Definition

87

Figure 4.2  O, Persecuted, Basma Alsharif (2014). Courtesy of the artist.

metaphorised through the use of filmic techniques that attenuate the ability to visually grasp the referent with clarity. Across the almost 100 years that separate us from Canudo and Arnheim, the techniques used for producing low definition images have shifted, as have their motivations and meanings. Gone today are the claims for autonomy that marked the 1920s and 1930s, as are the expressionist conception of the subject and emphasis on the revelation of interior states. But despite the significant reconceptualisation of low definition that occurs following its strengthened alliance with circulation and portability, some continuity does exist between its purposeful deployments today and how it was understood in classical film theory: medium specificity, authenticity and subjectivity remain consistent preoccupations even if their precise articulation varies greatly from one historical moment to the next. When new technologies are once again promising unprecedented heights of iconic fidelity, filmmakers are once again turning against the automatic production of exact likeness, in search of ­blurrier, smudgier ways of seeing. Notes 1. As Kevin J. Corbett has written, ‘The assumption is often made that, simply because a certain technology has a given capacity or the potential for a certain effect, that capacity or effect will inevitably be realized’, when in fact this is not the case. As Jonathan Sterne has written with regard to sound recording, the notion that media technologies develop along a path of progressive fidelity makes two faulty assumptions: first, ‘that increases in definition necessarily enhance end-users’ experiences’, and second, ‘that increases in bandwidth and storage capacity necessarily lead to higher-definition media for end-users’. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

88

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Erika Balsom Transposing these insights into the realm of imaging, one finds that both postulates may be true in certain instances, but are by no means always true. See: Kevin J. Corbett, ‘The Big Picture: Theatrical Moviegoing, Digital Television, and Beyond the Substitution Effect’. Cinema Journal 40, no. 2 (Winter 2001), pp. 17–34, p. 17; Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 4. Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), p. 289. Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), p. 85. Brian Hiatt, ‘Big Leap Ultra-HD Movies’, Rolling Stone 1157 (31 May 2012), p. 47. Richard Lawson, ‘“The Hobbit”: Like One Bad Video Game’, The Atlantic.com (12 December 2012), http://www.thewire.com/entertainment/2012/12/thehobbit-movie-review/59903/ (accessed 8 February 2017). Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal (10 November 2009), http : / / www . e - flux . com / journal / 10 / 61362 / in - defense - of - the - poor - image / (accessed 17 February 2017). Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press, [1964] 2003), p. 39. Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 115. Ibid, p. 119. The iconic is not necessarily associated with likeness as detail – it can also involve a production of likeness based on simplification – but the domain of precise resemblance is an important variety of iconicity, and one that is operative in the cinematic sign. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1859’, in Francis Franscina and Charles Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (London: The Open University [1859] 1982), p. 20. Ricciotto Canudo, ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’, in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907–1939: Volume One, 1907–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1911] 1988), p. 61. Sarah Cooper, The Soul of Film Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 42. Canudo, ‘The Birth of a Sixth Art’, p. 62. Cooper, The Soul of Film Theory, p. 43. Jean Epstein, ‘Bonjour Cinéma and Other Writings’, trans. Tom Milne, Afterimage 10 (Autumn 1981), pp. 9–19. Abel Gance [1912], ‘A Sixth Art’, in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, Vol. 1, pp. 66–7. Germaine Dulac [1926], ‘Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie’, in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, Vol. 1, pp. 395 and 397. Dulac, ‘Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie’, pp. 396–7. Epstein, ‘Bonjour Cinéma’, p. 19. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



One Hundred Years of Low Definition

89

21. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 126–7. 22. Ricciotto Canudo [1923], ‘Reflection on the Seventh Art’, in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, Vol. 1, p. 294. 23. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)’, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, [1936] 2002), p. 109. 24. Ibid., p. 110. 25. Canudo, ‘Reflection on the Seventh Art’, p. 299. 26. Ibid., p. 301. 27. Simone Natale, ‘A Short History of Superimposition: From Spirit Photography to Early Cinema’, Early Popular Visual Culture 10, No. 2 (2012), pp. 125–45. 28. For a discussion of the relationship between Bergson and French film theory at this time, see Cooper, The Soul of Film Theory, pp. 40–2. 29. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1932] 1957), p. 3. 30. Ibid., p. 8. 31. Ibid., p. 35. 32. Ibid., p. 127. 33. While a superimposition can be produced from two or more well-defined images, their coexistence weakens the level of perceptual detail available in each, thus creating a low-definition image. 34. Malcolm Turvey, ‘Arnheim and Modernism’, in Scott Higgins (ed.), Arnheim for Film and Media Studies (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 39. 35. Theodor Adorno, ‘Reconciliation Under Duress’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Ronald Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, [1958] 1980), pp. 159–60. 36. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’. 37. Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, p. 119. 38. Ibid., p. 121.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 5

Genres of Blur Martin Jay One of the most potent metaphors employed by social science in the past century was ‘blurred genres’, introduced in the opening essay in Clifford Geertz’s 1983 book Local Knowledge.1 Arguing against the rigid methodological and institutional segregation of the disciplines, the distinguished anthropologist urged his disciplinary colleagues, indeed all social scientists, to learn from the humanities and adopt a fruitful interdisciplinary model based on borrowing from neighbouring fields. Rather than aping the methods of the natural scientists, becoming increasingly trapped in their specialist ghettoes, they should creatively transgress boundaries and examine local cases not as instances of generic rules under which they can be subsumed, but as sites of complex interactions requiring all the hermeneutic tools at their disposal. Geertz’s exhortation was widely heard, as the centrality of something amorphous and all-pervasive called ‘culture’ gained increasing prominence even in those ‘hard’ social sciences that had sought to purify their predominantly quantitative methods of anything that smacked of ‘soft’ dilettantism.2 Extended beyond its elitist definition as, in Matthew Arnold’s oft-quoted phrase, ‘the best that has been said and thought in the world’, ‘culture’ now encompassed all practices and institutions that generate meanings and employ symbols. What became known as the ‘cultural turn’ reverberated through many different disciplines.3 With the new culturalist interest went a greater sensitivity to language and textuality, assimilating the lessons – often very different and even contradictory – of an earlier ‘turn’, this one towards language, that had gained momentum in philosophy and elsewhere in the preceding years.4 For many seduced by the cultural turn, immersion in a world replete with meaning(s) replaced the distanced gaze of the allegedly objective social scientist, assuming an external position above the fray. In the spirit of taking seriously the importance of language as a signifying medium, I want to put a little hermeneutic pressure on the metaphor of the ‘blur’ itself introduced by Geertz, and explore its multiple meanings by unpacking the very different visual experiences that produce the literal blurring of images. Although there may well be a similar pay-off in following back the metaphorical trail of ‘fuzzy’ or ‘soft’ to their origins, ‘blur’ harbours a rich Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Genres of Blur

91

enough array of different denotations and connotations to make our larger point. By bringing them paradoxically into better focus and thus performatively contradicting Geertz’s advocacy of blurring, we may gain a clearer understanding of what it means to blur scholarly genres as well. To unpack the metaphor of the ‘blur’, it will be necessary to turn to the various visual phenomena grouped under that rubric.5 I emphasis the plural ‘phenomena’ because the concept of blur, used literally rather than metaphorically, is itself fuzzy and describes a number of different visual experiences, or at least ones with different causes, each with significantly distinct metaphoric implications. Broadly speaking, they can be divided into those caused by focal discordances, those caused by the inability of the eye to register accelerated speed, and those caused by the intersection of two visual orders, as in the phenomenon of anamorphosis.6 The first follow from problems in perceiving normal three-dimensional space, the second from the effects of nonsynchronous temporalities, and the third from planar heterogeneity and the impossibility of the subject seeing with equal clarity in more than one spatial order. Let me take each in turn. For anyone, like this author, with myopia, focal blurring is a familiar experience. When I take my corrective lenses off, I cannot see objects at a distance with any acuity, but rather experience them as if in a fuzzy haze. I can, however, see very clearly objects close to my eyes in ways that people with unimpaired vision cannot. But when I put on my lenses, giving me virtually normal vision, those near objects then become themselves blurred. Although my depth of field with corrective lenses is wide enough that I rarely experience the world as out of focus, when it comes to those very near objects I can see clearly with my unaided myopic eyes, they become blurred and indistinct. And with advanced age, the onset of presbyopia, the loss of the elasticity of the lens enabling the reading of small print, has also decreased the depth of my visual field in ways that require correction in the opposite direction. The paradoxical result is that for many years – until my recent cataract operations – I had to wear reading glasses over my contact lenses to deal with the dual restrictions of my focalising apparatus. In other words, there are natural limits to visual acuity, depending on the curvature of the eyeball, the shape of the eye’s lens, and the proximity of the observed object. Even those with perfectly normal sight cannot avoid some blurring at certain distances. Not only is this the case with overly near objects, but also with distant ones, in which the imperfections of the medium of transmission of light rays can impede clarity. On the clearest of days, there is still enough dust in the air to make a difference. And of course fog, smoke and pollution can produce even greater blurred vision, as can the more proximate interference of tears washing over the surface of the eye. As artists have long Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

92

Martin Jay

known, painting three-dimensional scenes on two-dimensional canvases can rely not only on tricks of geometric perspective, but also on atmospheric effects that convey a sense of great distance. Here what is mimicked is not the blurring caused by the imperfections of the eye, but rather that due to the external environment in which objects appear to that eye through the cumulative filtering effect of dust in the air. The twinkling of stars, as seen from the Earth (although not from space), is a variant of this kind of natural blurring, produced by the refraction of light through the dust particles in our atmosphere. From outer space, they are unwavering dots of light with no variation in their luminosity. We can perhaps understand the intervening environment as continuous with the physical mediations within the eye itself – the cornea, aqueous humour, lens, vitreus humour and retina – all of which come between the object and the registering apparatus of the optic nerve at the back of the eye. In either the case of excessive proximity or too great a distance, the latter produced by the impediments in the medium through which light rays pass, focalisation is prevented from being uniform through the full depth of a visual field from eye to object and then beyond to distant background. This experience can be intensified by the intervention of certain artificial lenses that can compensate for one limitation, but throw the others into higher relief. Eyeglasses or contact lenses struggle to resolve this problem through bi or even trifocals, while other prosthetic devices deal with it in different ways. In the traditional technologies that produce photographs and movies, the existence of sharp and soft focus in the same shot can be enhanced depending on the lighting and focal point of the camera. In particular, large-aperture lenses, macro lenses, and telephoto lenses can deliberately produce images with divided focal sharpness, as can the digital cross-correlation of two original images, one in focus and one not. In fact, in the l990s it was recognised as an explicit technique, dubbed ‘bokeh’ after the Japanese word for blur, in which clarity and fuzziness are counterpoised in the same image (creating a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bokeh, depending on whether or not the results are visually pleasing). It has been employed by photographers like Kim Kirkpatrick to produce an arresting aesthetic effect.7 Deliberate soft focus lenses with spherical aberrations can also produce a dreamy, blemish-free effect, which was used in the past to glamorise moviestar close-ups. It was introduced as early as the nineteenth-century portraits, often of celebrities, of the great Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who also used long exposures to produce the blurred images she equated with aesthetic beauty. Sometimes simple contrivances like lubricating jelly on a lens or the filter of a silk stocking serve the same purpose, which sought something like the photographic equivalent of the sfumato Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Genres of Blur

93

technique of blending without sharp contrasts perfected by Leonardo da Vinci. In our own era, one of the most powerful results of digitalisation, as we know from our high-definition televisions, can be the extension of acuity within a very large depth of field to eliminate blurs entirely. But computer graphics have also been used to generate the opposite effect. What are called ‘convolutions’, using such techniques as Gaussian functions, allow the pixels in a source image to be spread over and mixed into surrounding pixels, so that each pixel in the destination image is composed of a mixture of surrounding pixels from the source image.8 In the work of artists like Chuck Close, a comparable effect is produced by magnifying the (painted) pixels beyond the point where they fuse to produce a coherent image, leaving instead a fuzzy residue that is like an analogue blur. In all these examples (the digital use of computer algorithms aside), the blur is an effect of differential focalisation in a synchronic, three-dimensional spatial field. Although maximum sharpness is often construed as superior to smudged fuzziness, it is not always self-evident that it should be, especially if the criteria are aesthetic rather than documentary. ‘What is focus’, Julia Margaret Cameron defiantly asked Sir John Heschel in l864, ‘and who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?’9 In our own day, artists like Gerhard Richter – ‘the master of the blur’, as one critic called him10 – and photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto have amply demonstrated that there is no correct answer to this question, at least when it comes to aesthetic value.11 The second major genre of blur, which can be called diachronic, is produced temporally, or more precisely, by the attempt to capture movement in a single moment. As the example of Cameron suggests, the blurs in many early soft-focus images could be inadvertently caused by the recording of subtle movement on the part of sitters, who were required to remain as motionless as possible for a long time due to the slow speed of the chemical fixing process. A comparable effect could be produced by deliberately lengthening the exposure of the film, allowing, for example, blurred images of stars streaking across the night sky, or by moving the camera as it recorded something still. Although the dramatic acceleration of film speeds allowed candid snapshots to freeze movement or even, as in the pioneering chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, to break it down into its constituent moments, blurs still occurred when movement exceeded the technical capacity of the apparatus. The early twentieth-century automobile racing photos of the celebrated French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue are well-known examples, which found their painterly equivalent in the attempts by Futurists like Giacomo Balla to capture the blur of movement on their canvases. Modernity, they sought to demonstrate performatively, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

94

Martin Jay

meant a dizzying whirl of accelerated change that overwhelmed our normal visual capacities. At times, velocity could be indexically signalled by a blurred object against a clear and distinct background; at others, by the opposite. By focusing on the moving object and allowing the background to blur, the photographer could provide a synchronic image, wrested from the flow of time, that paradoxically signified that very flow through indexical traces of movement. Well before ‘bokeh’ became a self-conscious aesthetic technique, it was employed, intentionally or not, to signal the ever-faster pace of modern life. The example of racing-car images reminds us that blurred vision was not merely recorded chemically on film but also literally experienced by passengers in the accelerated transportation vehicles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Enda Duffy notes in The Speed Handbook: [W]hile movement in speed promised that one would see more – a multiplicity of scenes replacing other scenes in an endless parade – the short time available to look at any one scene meant that the faster one moved, the less one saw. Hence blur, the effective erasure of the visible, became the dominant trope for representing the sensation of what was seen as speed, from a car, in the years between Bergson’s Matter and Memory and the Futurist Manifesto.12

Even before the automobile, the railway journey had revolutionised visual experience, as travellers ceased being connected to the landscapes which they traversed and became like projectiles hurtling along linear paths through it. Although, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch pointed out in his classic study of that radical innovation in travel, the passenger could now have a panoramic view of the distant landscape, he or she was also robbed of any firm command of proximate objects, which whizzed past too rapidly to be clearly seen: ‘the depth perception of pre-industrial consciousness was, literally, lost: velocity blurs all foreground objects, which means that there no longer is a foreground – exactly the range in which most of the experience of the pre-industrial traveler was located’.13 The experience of fugitive evanescence undermined the solidity of the material world, a sensation already registered in the steamy, swirling, dazzling world of a J. M. S. Turner landscape or seascape. New popular entertainments, such as rollercoasters, those ‘incredible scream machines’ invented in the late nineteenth century, were designed to replicate the thrill of a body hurtling through space in a blur of vertiginous movement.14 The magic of spinning aeroplane propellers or electrical fans that lose their solidity to the point of virtual transparency when they accelerate beyond a certain speed produce yet another experience of technologically induced blur. Although the naked eye cannot compensate by freezing the whirl, another technology can: the accelerated shutter speed of a camera. Ironically, manuals Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Genres of Blur

95

on aeroplane photography warn against the use of such a remedy because it robs the image of the sense of motion created by a blurred propeller. And, of course, there are numerous ways in which cinematic devices can induce an experience of blurred vision in the viewer, from hand-held cameras to accelerated film speed to filters over camera lenses. The stationary eye, staring at the screen before it or scanning it in order to follow the action, is seduced into thinking it is embedded in a rapidly moving body. Sometimes the challenge of coping with the blur even engenders a kind of motion sickness that is intensified through immersion in the scene, especially when sitting too close to the screen or in an IMAX theatre. The increasingly enhanced effects of virtual reality technologies can simulate the kinaesthetic experience of a body moving rapidly through an environment, producing the disorientation of riding a roller-coaster hurtling through space. One final source of blur can be located in the deliberate confusion of perspectival vision produced by the anamorphic images that came into vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.15 The famous distorted skull at the bottom of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) has become the canonical example. Here the blur is caused by the presence on a flat canvas of seemingly smeared forms that only compose themselves into a legible image when they are reflected back on either a convex or concave mirror or seen from a radically acute angle. Although it might be argued that the unreflected forms on the planar surface are more elongated distortions than blurs properly speaking, they often appear as such to the untutored eye. What makes them interesting for our purposes is that rather than being caused by the limits of a lens’s focal point or the inability of the recording apparatus, human eye or camera, to capture excessive velocity, they are produced by the intersection of two incompatible perspectival systems, one in rectilinear, the other in curvilinear space. The blur follows from the impossibility of a single subject seeing objects clearly in both spatial orders at once. When you move to the side of The Ambassadors to recompose the anamorphic image of the skull, you then lose the vantage point allowing you to see the standing figures above it clearly. What is re-formed – ‘ana-morphosed’ – in a convex mirror into a recognisable image is formless in a planar one. The aesthetic implications of the blur have long been debated. In painting, for example, the semiotic function of clouds has been interpreted as a way to undermine clearly defined boundaries and the regularities of perspectival space, as well as signal celestial glory.16 Although, as noted above, some modernists like the Futurists celebrated the blurs caused by speed, others, like the Vorticists, were hostile.17 Among philosophers, clarity and distinctness were often assumed to be virtues, especially since Descartes’ positing of ideas in the mind as possessing these qualities. But more recently vagueness and fuzzy Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

96

Martin Jay

logic have become terms of art to describe modes of reasoning that escape the imperative to work with crisply defined categories and firm conceptual boundaries.18 In certain traditions, for example pragmatism, vagueness has been understood not as a weakness or necessary evil, but as a strength.19 Truth, it is claimed, exists somewhere between 0 and 1, not either/or. Or at least, it does for those predicates in which variations involve gradual rather than abrupt transitions. What of the social sciences, to return to our point of departure? How does our parsing of the genres of blur help us make sense of the blurring of genres (or at least different disciplines and approaches within disciplines)? As we noted, Geertz had introduced the metaphor to urge the breaking-down of rigid frontiers between disciplines. Here the implication is that the more indefinite the boundary and fuzzier the logic, the more holistic and multisided the cognitive pay-off. Instead of a strict differentiation of approaches and methods, which ratifies unreflectively the artificial distinctions produced by historical happenstance or formal conceptualisation, we can refresh our encounter with a world that is far more interactively dynamic than the static classifications we impose on it. It is therefore sometimes argued that blurring is tantamount to ‘lumping’ together disparate phenomena rather than ‘splitting’ wholes into their discrete parts, a distinction that was popularised by the historian J. H. Hexter in the l970s.20 There are, indeed, ways in which blurring does suggest relaxing the power of sharp and impermeable boundaries between different categories, either epistemologically or ontologically. In linguistic terms, certain adjectival or nominal predicates – e.g., tall, bald, tadpole, child – are intrinsically vague, so that their borderline cases are impossible to fix with any certainty. Similarly, there are nouns that retain their cogency and can be used productively whether or not they have the same number of components, such as a ‘crowd’ or a ‘heap’, which may add or lose an indeterminate number of those components and still be a ‘crowd’ or a ‘heap’. Such terms, in other words, cannot be mapped precisely onto discrete realities in the world. What logicians call ‘the sorites paradox’ – soros is the Greek word for ‘heap’ – says that although we know the meaning of binary oppositions, it is impossible to fix precisely the moment of before and after in the transition from, say, tadpole to frog, tall to short, or hairy to bald. Or to give a familiar example, a few grains of sand do not constitute a heap, and the addition of a single grain never makes what is not yet a heap into a heap. Therefore, no matter how many single grains we may add, the result paradoxically can never become a heap. For analytic logicians, such cases raise questions about truth and falsehood when it comes to propositions that are indeterminate or whose distinctions are epistemologically unclear. The law of excluded middle in which the only choice is between Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Genres of Blur

97

A and non-A is called into question when predicates are stubbornly vague. Here blurring is basically an issue in language and logic, although sometimes it can spark discussions of what is called ‘ontic vagueness’ in the external world as well.21 But there are other ways to tease out different meanings of blurred genres, which attention to the visual origins of the metaphor will reveal. Let me begin with the metaphoric implications of the blurs caused by different focal points. Rather than a seamless integration, say, of literary criticism and sociological analysis or anthropology and history, in which one genre bleeds into the other, we often have a complicated dialectic of foregrounding and backgrounding that mimics the ‘bokeh’ photography of multiple focalisations. That is, it is often impossible to have the same clarity and sharpness in each of the differential spaces of a combined field. Take the relationship between text and context that is so much a part of the humanities as a whole. For literary critics, a close and patient reading of texts often focuses on the ways in which meaning is constituted – or thwarted – by the rhetorical and stylistic intricacies of the language, as well as on the generic conventions that inform the text as a whole. Although there are, of course, some critics who pay fruitful attention to context – think, for example, of the New Historicists or Franco Moretti’s statistically based ‘distant reading’22 – by and large the focal point of literary analysis has been proximate rather than deep or wide. Cultivating the arts of reading closely is seen as the way to tease out the meaning of the texts that are read, even if the precise nature of those arts and the interpretative theories that inform them may be in dispute. A similar inclination can be found among philosophers, who focus on the intricate steps in an argument and linger with counter-arguments that require refutation before moving on. For other fields, such as intellectual history or cultural studies, the focus has been on the larger patterns or trends that can be grasped only by turning individual texts into representative documents, often with paraphrasable content, that illustrate or exemplify a broader prevailing pattern. There is no easy way to combine the two focal points, which are like intimate close-ups and panoramic establishing shots in movies, into a single visual plane or uniformly crisp three-dimensional scene. Each by itself has advantages and disadvantages. The interaction between them can be seen as producing a productive, if sometimes disorienting oscillation of alternating clarity and blur that provide insights that one approach by itself would lack. Rather than a flaw in the smooth totalisation of knowledge into one comprehensive system, the unreconciled juxtaposition of the two might be seen as more accurately expressing what Siegfried Kracauer once called the ‘heterogeneity of the historical universe’, in which different micro and macro levels resist seamless integration.23 Global history and the history of everyday life, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

98

Martin Jay

meta-narratives of the species and micro-narratives of individual lives, grand histoire and petit histoire – all have their virtues, but defy harmonisation into one story written from one clear point of view. Here the blurring of genres – or of approaches within a complex discipline – does not imply a smooth effacement of boundaries and happy merger of alternative approaches, but rather the acknowledgement that tacking between two focal points may be more productive than seeking a mediated totality. A similar implication follows from the differential temporalities that produce blurs in the second way described above. Here the metaphor teaches us to be sensitive to the fact that we cannot smoothly pass from analyses that linger with the enduring and slow-changing patterns of social life, those ‘deep structures’ so beloved by historians of the Annales school back in the l960s, and ones that remain on the surface level of more punctual or ephemeral events. Whereas the former move at glacial speeds, the latter can arrive with the suddenness of a lightning flash and disappear just as quickly.24 Accounts that seek to make sense of entire ‘epochs’ or ‘periods’, however they may be defined and their boundaries circumscribed, are in tension with those that look at more delimited occurrences or a cross-section of them in a much more finite time period (for example, a single year).25 No seamless, unblurred transition takes us from a God’s eye view of the whole to a worm’s eye view of a life on the ground. The metaphor of blur understood temporally also allows us to accept the plural chronologies that counterpose repetition and movement, whether progressive or regressive, that may overlap simultaneously. It can make us aware of what Ernst Bloch famously called Ungleichzeitigkeit or ‘non-synchronicity’, in which the residues of a not fully dead past and the potential of a not yet realised future coexist uneasily with the time of the transient present.26 Understanding that differential times underpin the experience of blur prevents us from assuming that our focus must always be on one rather than the other, as in either case, there will be both clarity and blur depending on the focal point. Blurred genres in this sense mean accepting that there is no master temporality that subsumes all the others, and that different disciplines may linger more frequently in one rather than another. As in the natural sciences, where geological time and meteorological time follow very different rhythms, the social sciences often register change and duration in ways that produce a blurred effect, preventing an easy integration into a singular, coherent narrative or systematic analysis. Anthropology, for example, may examine enduring patterns of behavior that subtend cultures as a whole, while sociology may be more attuned to those that evolve more rapidly, and political science may focus more on trends and events that move more swiftly and erratically still. The same tensions may well exist within disciplines as well. In Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Genres of Blur

99

the historical profession, for example, ever more heated debates swirl over the virtues of ‘deep history’, reaching back before recorded time, and the advantages of longer over shorter narrative arcs.27 The final source of visual blurring, the uneasy intersection of different perspectival planes, has a somewhat more problematic implication. Anamorphosis suggests that perspectival vantage points are hard to reconcile into a normal binocular visual experience. Rather than merely an aesthetic alternative between focused and unfocused, as in bokeh photography, or a non-synchronous juxtaposition of different temporalities, as in motion photography, it suggests an antagonistic clash between points of view that defy reconciliation on principle. There is no higher third or mediating term that brings them into harmony. Not surprisingly, anamorphosis has been seen as exemplifying the tumultuous scopic regime and delirious rhetorical practice identified with the baroque by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, which challenged the ordered regularity of modern scientific rationality.28 Here blurs are indications of the limits of cognitive mastery, moving us towards a more humble recognition of the ways in which no single perspective can do justice to the world in which we are immersed. Attending to these multiple meanings of the metaphor of the blur serves to warn us against the problematic inference that Geertz’s exhortation to blur genres means seeking their harmonious reconciliation. Rather than supporting the goal of happy ‘consilience’, to cite the ideal of a ‘jumping together’ recently posited by the celebrated sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson,29 it suggests we be wary of the wholesale effacement of boundaries. Even if we include rather than exclude the middle, the result may not be a Hegelian sublation of contradictions, but rather an awareness of the mutual imbrication of oppositions that nonetheless still matter. In fact, as commentators on the great master of the blurred photograph, Sugimoto, have noted, by ridding the image of sharp detail and ornamental distraction, a blurred image can paradoxically produce an impression of essential, if soft-edged, form beneath its surface, rather than efface it entirely.30 Vagueness, it turns out, can produce a kind of clarity all of its own.31 Notes 1. Clifford Geertz, ‘Blurred Genres: The Reconfiguration of Social Thought’, in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Social Science (New York: Basic Books, 1983). The essay first appeared three years earlier in The American Scholar. 2. There were, to be sure, criticisms of Geertz’s approach as overly ‘culturalist’, abetting a regression to pre-critical Idealism. See, for example, Dominick LaCapra, ‘Culture and Ideology: From Geertz to Marx’, in Paul Hernadi (ed.), Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

100

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

Martin Jay The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989). For one salient example, the discipline of history, see Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Only ten years later, a reaction had set in, as exemplified in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). The term was popularised by Richard Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Historical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). On the multiple, often incompatible models of ‘language’ underpinning different versions of the ‘linguistic turn’, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2002). It might, of course, be possible to interpret visual experiences as themselves always embedded in culture, allowing us to distinguish between vision as a natural process and ‘visuality’ (or ‘scopic regimes’) as mediated by different cultures. See, for an early attempt to do so, Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988). The cultural turn also stimulated an enormous new interest in visual culture, as one of its subfields. For our purposes, however, it is useful to try to isolate physiological and technologically generated blurs and then turn to their cultural mediations. For accounts of how it works and its cultural applications, see Fred Leeman, Hidden Images: Games of Perception, Anamorphosistic Art and Illusions from the Renaissance to the Present, trans. Ellyn Childs Allison and Margaret L. Kaplan (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1976); and Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses ou Thaumaturgus Opticus: Les perspectives dépravées (Paris: Flammarion, 1984). A sample of his work is available on his website: http://www.kimkirkpatrick. com/ (accessed 10 February 2017). For a quick tutorial in the techniques of computer-generated blurring, see ‘Blurring for Beginners’, Java Image Processing at http://www.jhlabs.com/ip/ blurring.html (accessed 29 November 2016). Cited in Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (New York: Aperture, 1975), p. 70. Sanford Schwartz, ‘The Master of the Blur’, The New York Review of Books (11 April 2002). Students of Richter’s art have puzzled over the implications of blurring. Anthony Cascardi, for example, asks, ‘Should the “blurs” be thought of as happening on the surface of Richter’s paintings, standing as traces of the process of their fabrication? Or are they to be located on a more conceptual plane and regarded as a function of the artist’s attempt to register the difficulty of rendering the world as seen? There does not seem to be a single answer.’ From ‘The Matter of Memory: On Semblance and History in Richter and Adorno’, in Peter de Bolla and Stefan H. Uhlig (eds), Aesthetics and the Work of Art: Adorno, Kafka, Richter (New York: Palgrave, 2009), p. 173. See in particular the catalogue Francesco Bonami (ed.), Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture (Chicago: D.A.P./Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), with essays Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

Genres of Blur

101

by Bonami, Marco De Michelis and John Yau, which has ghostly blurred images of often iconic buildings. Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 175. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 63. Robert Cantrell, The Incredible Scream Machine: A History of the Roller Coaster (Bowling Green: State University Popular Press, 1987). See Note 6. See in particular Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). See the exchange between F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis recorded in the latter’s memoir Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Imperial War Museum, 1992), p. 38. My thanks to James Fox for drawing my attention to this passage. See Ermanno Bencivenga, ‘Fuzzy Reasoning’, Common Knowledge, 18, 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 229–38, which distinguishes between analytical, dialectical and gradual logics. For a more detailed exploration of current philosophical arguments about vagueness, see Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith (eds), Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). William Joseph Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). Jack H. Hexter, ‘The Historical Method of Christopher Hill’, in J. H. Hexter (ed.), On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press 1979). For a discussion, see Peter Burke, ‘Fuzzy Histories’, Common Knowledge, 18, 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 239–48. Keefe and Smith, introduction to Vagueness: A Reader, pp. 49–57. See Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013). Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). For an analysis of the tensions between contexts and events, see Martin Jay, ‘Historical Explanation and the Event: Reflections on the Limits of Contextualization’, New Literary History, 42 (2011). See, for example, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). See, Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Lord Smail (eds), Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) and Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The latter sparked a very vigorous debate in The American Historical Review, 120, 2 (April 2015). See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

102

Martin Jay

Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 1994). For an analysis of the implications of her argument for modern scopic regimes in general, see my essay ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993). 29. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1999). For a critique of his assumptions, see my ‘The Menace of Consilience’, in Martin Jay, Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). 30. John Yau, ‘The Dissolving World’, in Bonami (ed.), Sugimoto: Architecture, p. 20. 31. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Common Knowledge, 18, 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 220–8.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 6

In Praise of the Sound Dissolve: Evanescences, Uncertainties, Fusions, Resonances Giusy Pisano ‘We are blinded by an unheard world of sounds, rich in possibilities, yet still practically unexplored’1 Pierre Boulez

Blurred voices, undefined and acousmatic; noise transformed into music; the backdrop of a world of imperceptible yet present sound; gimmicks brought about as quickly as they disappear; the fading of words, noise, and music; reverberations . . . These are the common practices of the mise-en-scène of sound, both in so-called auteur cinema and in more popular cinema. Yet such practices are more generally attributed to images, while sounds are relegated to the more concrete, enclosed and well-defined. Here we will analyse those factors which seem, to me, to be at the root of this misunderstanding: the confusion of the principles of reproduction, fidelity and real sounds and the inability of theoretical categorisations to analyse the mise-en-scène of sound. The Diegetic vs The Extra-diegetic Almost since they were first established, the categories attributed to sound have clashed with certain mises-en-scène which revealed their ill-fitted nature, to the extent that new formulations kept appearing as a result of the ongoing reflection on the topic: ‘sound continuum’ (Michel Fano), ‘audio dissolve’ (Rick Altman, in reference to musicals), ‘free or associated combination’ (Dominique Chateau), ‘acousmatic sound’, ‘on the air’ (Michel Chion), ‘voice over’ (Jean Châteauvert), ‘gap between diegetic and nondiegetic’ (Robynn J. Stilwell), ‘meta-diegetic’ (Claudia Gorman), ‘para-diegetic’ (Daniel Percheron), ‘juxtadiegetic’ (Christian Metz), ‘polyphony’ (François Jost), ‘quasi-diegetic’ (Jerrold Levinson), ‘reliable/unreliable’ (Sarah Kozloff) and so many others. As Mladen Milicevic highlights: All of these film theories that attempt to classify film sound into absolute and complicated categories talk about sound which parallels or counterpoints the images, sound that is synchronous or asynchronous in relation to the images, sound that is either realistic or unrealistic, or sound that is literal or nonliteral. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

104

Giusy Pisano In order to accomplish this impossible pursuit and get to the bottom of the meaning of film sound, all of these theories needed several sub-categories which in return required their own sub-sub-categories, and so on ad infinitum. The reason why these film sound theories have difficulties lies in their attempt to get absolutely finite results beyond contingency, instead of the contextual relationships. Unfortunately, in the end they become more about making classifications than they do about understanding cinema.2

In reality, if, since the 1930s, Béla Balázs had conceived of sonic mise-en-scène as ‘a new sphere of lived experience’3 dominated by evanescences, uncertainties, fusions and openings, it is because sound has a tendency to exceed boundaries. In the cinema, it is more than just an illustration of a source on screen. A simple ‘sound of footsteps can trigger an emotional reaction (jubilation, sudden fear), a decisive action (an aggressive approach, a propitious disruption, a lifesaving momentum), even an indifference’.4 Sound, more than image, ‘is without place and without contour; object of temporal material, submitted to modulation’,5 it oversteps the boundaries of the visual cuts. Are we not talking about sound as an overlaying effect, an ambience? If it constructs the audio portrait of a character or of a place, if it can punctuate that which is shown on screen (in order, for example, to put emphasis on a given point, to attract the spectator’s attention to something with the sound of a siren or with dramatic music . . .), its presence is above all dynamic: it unifies, in order to soften the effects of rupture created by the discontinuity of images; it refers back to earlier effects, by means of repetition of the same sound, a musical motif, a singular voice, or a gimmick meant to create a sense of recognition and continuity (for example, repeating a soundscape – a train station, an airport, the seaside – that we hear without seeing the corresponding images); it announces, thanks to the overlapping of visual cuts, a new soundscape that we begin to hear before the previous shot has ended, etc. All of these functions, rendered banal since the arrival of talkies, as were their counterpart functions in the visual domain (continuity devices, camera movement, the scale of shots, etc.), go hand in hand with the timeless aesthetic choices of any given film or filmmaker, distorting, prolonging or modulating these possibilities. It is in these latter cases that the theoretical categorisations attributed to film sound are shown to be particularly ill-fitting. No wonder! Has the idea that sound should take a back seat to the visual not been theorised through the creation of categories that can only function insofar as the conventional treatment of sound maintains the image–sound hierarchy? It is a question of those much vaunted classifications ‘diegetic’, ‘extra-diegetic’, ‘on-screen’, ‘off-screen’, that are used in the analysis of film sound and which remain steadfast as pedagogical tools, notably in university teaching. As Robynn J. Stilwell affirms: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



In Praise of the Sound Dissolve

105

It is one of the most basic distinctions in film music: diegetic or nondiegetic? Is it a simple, technical matter – is the music part of the film’s story world or an element of the cinematic apparatus that represents the world? It is one of the easiest things to teach students about film music – to comprehend if not to spell (it’s getting to the point where I see ‘diagetic’ so often, it’s starting to seem right to me.6

Haven’t we conflated the physical reality of the film with a pedagogical method meant to analyse something that is difficult to name, to describe, something that is only laboriously apprehended: ‘sound is perhaps the hardest technique to study [. . .] [We cannot] lay out the soundtrack for our inspection as easily as we can [. . .] a string of shots [. . .] In film, the sound and the patterns they form are elusive.’7 If this affirmation is somewhat arguable,8 it is useful in the way it highlights our own deficiency. In their work Film Art: An Introduction, a staple university textbook, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson write, ‘to study sound, we must learn to listen to films’.9 Yet nearly twenty years after this edition of the book, despite the reworking of the ninth chapter, which is entirely dedicated to sound, the primacy of the image remains. The study of sound is thus quite precarious in their work, but it isn’t the only case, as Michel Marie and Jacques Aumont observe in reference to the ‘scarcity of analysis of film soundtracks’.10 Still, there are more than twenty years of work in the area of Sound Studies, including dozens of reference materials by authors such as Michel Chion, among others. Nevertheless, there is a big gap between praxis and theory. De facto, the fact that theory and praxis are juxtaposed as if they were equivalent is itself revealing of a substantial fissure, since film sound appears to resist any attempt at categorisation. Between Praxis and Theory: The Chasm of Mise-en-scène It should be noted that, whereas films do without, or else defy, categories (the filmmaker, the sound engineer, the director of photography and the spectator don’t generally think in terms of on-screen/off-screen or of diegetic/ extra-diegetic),11 we continue to frame them within exclusive theoretical borders. It’s high time that theory liberated sound from these limitations, as films themselves have already done. The intuition and the hope of Béla Balázs, René Clair (‘the partisans of silent film have placed their last hopes in sound film’),12 and of so many others have become a reality of cinema, in the course of sound experimentations that have led to today’s dominant model: sound design. In order to truly appreciate this process, we have to reread those wonderful pages in which Jean Epstein takes stock of the state of sound cinema, lamenting the storyboards that leave the right column practically void of sound indications. For Epstein, pure cinema should marry together Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

106

Giusy Pisano

image and sound. But far from an imitation of nature, they instead have to be combined (mixed) in such a way that all reference to the real is erased in favour of combined scores connected by endless resonances: The domain of pure cinema embraces both the image and the soundtrack [. . .] It is the scriptwriter’s job to compel the sound technicians to capture the voice – which truly exists – of a passing cloud, of a rejoicing house, of growing grass. [It’s the role of the] musician to compose a rich and multifaceted sound score for the film. Instead of only having, for example, two or three ocean sounds, all more or less in the same range of tones, at his disposition, this composer can play a piano with twelve or twenty-four or thirty-six or forty-eight (by transposing at fractions of each octave) different tonalities, which can be combined in pre-production mixing and further allow him to infinitely add variety and diversity to the resonances. Thus, it becomes possible to turn noises into chords and dissonances, melodies and symphonies, which would create a new, specifically cinematographic sort of music.13

Thirty years later, echoing Epstein’s remarks, Andrei Tarkovsky highlights the need to free sounds not only from their reference to the real but also from their relation to the source image. It is a question of selecting and then transforming those sounds which, due to their expressive quality, can most resonate with the aesthetics of the image: The sounds of the world reproduced naturalistically in cinema are impossible to imagine: there would be a cacophony. Everything that appeared on the screen would have to be heard on the soundtrack, and the result would amount to sound not being treated at all in the film. If there is no selection then the film is tantamount to silent [. . .] As soon as the sounds of the visible world, reflected by the screen, are removed from it, or that world is filled, for the sake of the image, with extraneous sounds that don’t exist literally, or if the real sounds are distorted so that they no longer correspond with the image – then the film acquires a resonance.14

The work of composer Edward Artemiev on Tarkovsky’s films Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979), and of sound engineer and mixer Owe Svensson on The Sacrifice (1986) are a concrete application of this idea of resonance that was so dear to René Clair. Here, all of the varied diegeses merge together, blurring boundaries between noises, words, music, and thus forming unknown resonances.15 Some see the continuum16 of the sound score of a film as a diversion, at best, an option for science fiction cinema; others see it as a special case in its own right, limited to certain filmmakers or composers. And thus the matter is settled: globalising categories can be applied to the majority of films. Still in 2012 we can read things such as: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



In Praise of the Sound Dissolve

107

Most nondiegetic sound has no relevant temporal relationship to the story. When mood music comes up over a tense scene, it would be irrelevant to ask if it is happening at the same time as the images since the music has no place in the world of the action. But occasionally the filmmaker may use a type of nondiegetic sound that does have a defined temporal relationship to the story.17

Yet already in 1995, Laurent Jullier had foreseen a ‘shift toward concert films’, a form favoured by a new kind of spectator.18 What had been considered an exceptional case (Bordwell and Thompson cite The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles, 1942) is nearly the norm today. The sound design of the oft-cited pioneering films (Apocalypse Now, Coppola, 1979; Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone, 1968; Star Wars, Lucas, 1977; Eraserhead, Lynch, 1977, etc.) pushed the boundaries of the diegetic with a type of sound that inflects the conception of the film from the start and henceforth throughout the entire process of making a film,19 from pre-production to post-production. Analyses of the work of filmmakers such as Tim Burton, Joel and Ethan Coen, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Clint Eastwood, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino and Gus Van Sant (who are among the most cited), and studies of digital cinema have definitively challenged the binaries of diegetic/nondiegetic, onscreen/ offscreen. As Stuart Bender observes, today, ‘paradoxically, it is Gravity’s absence of conventional diegetic sound that I believe focuses the audience’s attention onto the rich detail of the few very specific sounds that have been incorporated into the mix’.20 Furthermore, a simple keyword search for ‘extra-diegetic’ on popular internet sites reveals the perplexity of a number of internet users. For example: ‘With the evolution of cinema, conventions haven’t always remained unequivocal. Artistic creativity has incited many filmmakers to introduce a confusion between these two sound worlds, thus creating an ambiguity between situations, places, time periods, the sound and the images, the audience and the actors’.21 So, how should we explain such a wavering of theory? Are we already subject to the dictates of categories of localisation, and of the diegetic framing of a source which must always be visible in order to be diegetic? First of all, ‘source’ (in the concrete sense of the word) in the cinema doesn’t really mean anything. As a parameter, a source on screen only matters if the visual is the only referent. It is easy to forget that, in the cinema, even if the sources of particular sounds are clearly visible, they still do not manage to truly ‘frame’ the object that produces them. Sound coming from a radio for instance, transgresses its source (since even if it is captured live, there is still a second source, the microphone, that captures and reproduces it). In its final form it is also primarily concerned with recreating the idea born out Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

108

Giusy Pisano

of our experience of this sound, rather than with a faithful rendering of the radio sound. There is never an ‘absolute realism’ for film sound as there is for auditory perception in everyday life, especially in a period in which the former takes sound design as its model.22 The result, Michel Chion writes, ‘is a ball of sensations’.23 Secondly, the sound space, set to the rhythm of the onscreen/offscreen pairing, is opposed to the continuum of the sound score. When any given sound (a bus, a car, an aeroplane, a train, a factory, the wind, etc.) is on screen with its visible ‘source’ – and thus ‘in’ and ‘diegetic’ according to the categorisation scheme – and the source disappears in the next shot even though the sound persists, why should the sound be considered to have become ‘extra-diegetic’? When, in a conventional narrative film like Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015), we hear barking at the very end of the film, despite a total absence of any dog on screen, should we think that the sound comes from the dog that we briefly saw, a full hour before, prowling the streets of Berlin? It is impossible for the spectator, who is immersed in the film, to draw the link between these two moments. So, according to the existing categorisations, would this sound be described as on-screen? Off-screen? Dubbed? None of these are adequate, since, as Daniel Deshays observes, ‘the gap only exists if we consider the filmic space to be all image, conceived of irrespective of sound’.24 To reduce sound to the in/off distinction means to not take into account the space of the film’s screening and of its addressee: the spectator. Deshays explains: If the visual image in front of us remains at a distance, laid out as a flat surface, the sound is a material in which we are immersed; the object is not fixed, even if it has been affixed to a support; it is put back into play in space from the moment of its projection through the speakers. So as always, we must ask the question of the origin of the sound: where does this sound come from? And even if we know the origin of the source, mono, stereo, surround sound, in all its manifestations sound pulls us into the danger zone. Multichannel surround sound was designed to surround us, to play with our vulnerability from behind, opening up the field to other possible sources.25

It is for this reason that reproduced sounds are evanescent by nature, open to uncertainties and to a blurring of noises, words and music; as Véronique Campan has highlighted, ‘they are in syncopation with the image, they have the capability to suspend and alter comprehension. In the very moment in which sounds contribute to the development of a diegesis and of a narrative, they question their own coherence’.26 Even if we assert the possibility of a welding together, a synchresis, of sounds and images, as Michel Chion notes, it is always ‘independent of any rational logic’ and of the action shown on screen. 27 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



In Praise of the Sound Dissolve

109

Should we deduce from this that ALL film sound is extra-diegetic? Is ALL film sound-blind? It’s a paradox, but it has the merit of being more coherent than the two pairings of in/off, and diegetic/extra-diegetic. Like synchronism,28 the diegetic anchoring of instances of sound is a pure illusion. But it is this illusion itself that implies that the narrative is assumed to be true. If we take Étienne Souriau’s famous definition of diegesis literally as, ‘everything which is supposed to happen, according to the fiction that the film presents; everything that this narrative would imply if we assume it to be true’,29 then no sound is extra-diegetic! Are we still under the influence of the idea that sound would have brought (and still brings) more realism to the cinema? Yes, it seems – despite the invitation of Rick Altman to conceive of cinema as event, as opposed to the notion of film as text.30 Despite the evolution of cinematographic forms, film continues to be analysed like a text, that is, according to narratological, diegetic/extra-diegetic parameters forged over sixty years ago – parameters that have evolved and have been challenged by their very originators.31 It is, furthermore, surprising to note that a number of categories applied to film sound derive from literary analysis instead of from artistic forms which have a fundamental concept in common with the cinema: mise-en-scène. In France, recent research has shown to what degree the first fictions on the big screen borrow from the techniques that the theatre had already explored and practised since the sixteenth century and that it had finished formalising in the ninteenth century:32 examples include the dividing-up of action, directors’ comments on the movements of the actors, dialogue that is often readapted according to the desired aesthetic, dramaturgic effects and lighting aesthetics, sound, music, or even the use, in more recent times, of photographic elements in stage sets. The theatre – before the cinema – was entirely able to seize upon the dramaturgical potentialities of technologies which would allow for communication across distances, such as: the microphone and ­stereophonic listening devices experimented with by the ‘acousmatic theatre’, as introduced by the Théâtrophone system;33 and the telephone, which allowed for an effect of presence/absence, creating an apparent continuity of the various locations or situations on one stage or between the stage and the curtain. The introduction of these technologies would make possible mises-enscène in service neither to effects of realism nor to proximity between sources and the sounds that they emitted, but rather to sounds without sources, which are clearly artificial yet still claim the spectator’s attention and displace the eye in favour of the ear. Discs, cassettes, digital editing, wireless amplification and surround sound controlled by computer have all made the conception of theatrical plays evolve radically. Let us recall that the first to have been credited as a ‘sound designer’ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

110

Giusy Pisano

was Jack Mann in Show Girl, presented at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in January 1961.34 And it was in the theatre that the staging of reproduced sound was first experimented with and then fully exploited by radio. The experience of radiophonic listening is so peculiar, deprived as it is of any visual relation of cause and effect, of the body and matter that produce sounds, that it creates a different relationship to time and space. Its significance was clear to Rudolf Arnheim, who himself was best known for his reflections on the cinema; in the 1930s he dedicated a book to the study of radio, in which he analysed the aesthetic and social implications of this blind listening. Arnheim noted that a new distance between the artists and the  audience was allowed for by the microphone. Such distance comes from a paradox, which has since been totally integrated by digital techniques, the consequences of which were aesthetic as much as they were cultural. On the one hand, the distance is created by the intervention of a technical apparatus between the voice (the body which is the source of the emission) and the audience/listener, and on the other hand the same distance creates proximity ‘of spirit and of mood between the emitter and the listener’. By renouncing the eye, the listener accesses a world ‘organised by the ear’.35 Radio plays take advantage of the concept of a sound continuum which is at the root of the current notion of sound design. There is still much to be said about sound mise-en-scène in the theatre and on radio. But one point is of particular import in the context of this discussion on film sound: to examine the evolution of the mise-en-scène of sound on screen, the practices used in the theatre, on radio, on disc and in electro-acoustic music seem a lot more pertinent than those of literary texts, even though the latter is a point of origin for categorisations of sound in the cinema.36 Rick Altman boldly affirms that ‘the relationship between spectacle and spectator has a long history; in order to understand the broader importance of film sound configurations, it is necessary to understand the changing role of the audience in the overall conception of theatrical space and activity’.37 Reproduction vs Representation: ‘The Redemption of Physical Reality’ Film sound, whether on disc, film, cassette or in digital format, is always the result of many technical mediations: recording, printing onto or converting into a chosen media format (in order to more easily re-work the recorded elements) and broadcasting are the basic parameters of analogue recording, and apply also to digital formats. All of these technico-aesthetic steps have their own precise protocols. Consequently, sound reproduction is, according to Clément Rosset: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



In Praise of the Sound Dissolve

111

by definition, something that re-produces (reproduit). It marks thus a temporal gap with relation to the sound that it replays: like an echo, it comes after, sometimes a long time after, the initial sound. On the other hand and above all, it is different from the original sound by the very fact of repeating it, and every repetition implies a difference (this difference can already be sensed in the archaic form of playback, the echo).38

This statement is quite obvious, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t read (a little bit everywhere, actually . . . and sometimes in clear contradiction to the original proposition, as in Béla Balázs for example) that, on screen, there are real sounds – thus, diegetic sounds –, and others that are impossible to define because they fall under the rubric of dreams, nightmares or the unconscious . . . and thus, elude the connotations of on/off, diegetic/extra-diegetic. We can read, for example: ‘Sound effects are usually less important. They supply an overall sense of a realist environment and are seldom noticed; if they were missing, however, the silence would be distracting’.39 In other words, noises bring more realism and fill in the silence. We must ask how, after nearly a century of sound films, in the age of digital techniques, such nonsense can still be mentioned and repeated. The origin of this idea can perhaps be located in the very principle of the playing back of sound: reproduced sound would be, more than the image, a copy, a neutral repetition, identical to an acoustic phenomenon. There is, here, a distortion of terminology that, indeed, simultaneously responds to a physical reality, an anthropological, physiological, psychoacoustic and technical reality. It is necessary to remember this, even in passing, because it seems to be at the root of peculiarities, prejudices, even theoretical errors based on the principle of the realism of reproduced sound and its transcendental quality, as argued by theses which wind up side-stepping the physical and technical dimension.40 To capture the sound of the human voice, to be able to preserve it and listen to it again, is one of those dreams that brings humankind closer to the domain of the sacred and projects us into a space that is close to the mysterious forces of nature. To manipulate the human voice in order to give it a visible form is to attain the creative breath that brings one closer to the divine, since before appearing, God made himself known by the power of his voice. Better still, to reproduce the voice implies the re-actualisation of the past and consequently the power to immortalise it.41 It is for these reasons that the problem of reproducing sound appears, first of all, as a philosophical myth and literary topos before being more pertinently located in the domain of technical inventions. We can still find traces of this somewhat mystical heritage in the terminology used by technicians, experts and historians to talk about sound. Pierre Schaeffer himself writes, ‘between the experience of Pythagoras and our experiences of radio and recordings, the differences separating direct Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

112

Giusy Pisano

l­istening (through a curtain) and indirect listening (through a speaker) in the end become negligible’.42 As Brian Kane highlights, ‘the myth stages the origin of electro-acoustic music by self-identification; we see ourselves when viewing Pythagorean theatre. A scene like so many other scenes, the tale of the veil possesses many trappings of theatrical fictions: curtains, offstage voices, a darkened auditorium and the imposition of silence.’43 Scientific theories about sound have multiplied, starting in the seventeenth century and continuing at an accelerated pace from the end of the nineteenth century. Ever since, we have had a basic understanding that any sound, in order to be heard, must pass through an environment. The nature of this environment, but also the speed and the distance at which sound travels, determines its conditions and the quality of its propagation and, consequently, how it is heard. Before being directed towards the cerebral cortex, sounds picked up by the ear stimulate the auditory system by inducing sound sensations whose perception depends on psychoacoustic factors: intensity, pitch, duration, timbre. The technical reproduction of sound has, as its original model, not the human system of perception that we have just seen, itself complex and subjective, but the recording of sound by a microphone (which is far from being a neutral object)44 and its preservation in a media format (optically, magnetically, digitally . . .) that will determine the aesthetic possibilities of modulation and transformation carried out by the mixing in recording studios. It’s the fidelity to these sounds that have been manipulated through criteria of composition, of equilibrium, of definition, of stability and of reverberation, which is then pursued through ‘the mastery of the acoustics of a film theater, itself an integral part of the quality of the sound reproduction system’.45 Alain Besse, head of the diffusion sector of the Commission Supérieure Technique of sound and image (CST), could not be more explicit: The acoustic preparation of a film theater is of utmost importance in order to respect the work. [. . .] [It] consists of the diffusion and projection equipment, plus the acoustics of the room which are important. If, for example, a room has too much reverberation, the first reflex would be to lower the sound levels in the playback of the film. In this case, you lose the balance between the voices, the ambient sounds, the music, and the relationship between these that the mixer and the filmmaker had wanted; you lose 50–80% of the soundtrack all at once. [. . .] There has to be a correspondence between the mixing room and the screening room.46

Sound in the cinema is thus a reproduction as a sound score (from the recorded sound, to the mixing, to the moment it is heard) and a representation in terms of its relation to the images: there is no opposition between these two parameters. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



In Praise of the Sound Dissolve

113

We can easily understand the need of theorists in sound studies47 to highlight the second aspect more so than the first in a theoretical framework that continues to ignore the aesthetic dimension of film sound and which, at best, grants it a utilitarian function. But in reality, to attribute to sound its capacity for reproduction and representation is to restore its physical, aesthetic and anthropological specificity. More than the image, which is concerned with its aesthetic function rather than with its perception, sound is at the centre of philosophical inquiries about ‘the listening posture’.48 Since Pierre Schaeffer, the concepts of ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’, in all their variations – reduced, causal, primordial, figurative, acousmatic, blind, selective, abstract, concrete, indexical, natural, sensorial, etc. – and perceptive differences have been the subject of substantial analyses impossible to retrace within the limits of this text.49 However, it is necessary to highlight that this interest in listening is also at the centre of research on aesthetics and techniques, with a specific interest in the rendering of sound. Over decades, listening has become a fundamental concern in the screening of films because ALL sound is conceived, more and more, in terms of sound scores. If, since the 1940s, cinema screening rooms have been subject to regulation and recommendations for the diffusion of sound as much as for the diffusion of images, it is notably under the impulse of sound experimentations made possible by new technologies and techniques that rules have been imposed to regulate the steps between post-production and screening in the theatres: from this moment on, with digital technologies, sound mixing for a film must be carried out under the same conditions that will be used during projection in order to guarantee its fidelity.50 This implies taking into consideration the effects of sound on the spectator’s audio perception. Sounds are directly addressed to the spectator without necessarily being mediated through a character: it is communicated ‘from the film to the spectator’, occupying a field that Daniel Percheron defines as para-diegetic in an attempt at avoiding the diegetic/extra-diegetic dichotomy.51 Since the arrival of Dolby in 1965, new possibilities52 have been available to the pioneers of sound design (most prominently: Walter Murch and Ben Burtt) including ‘new and innovative aesthetic elements, which showcased the unique metaphoric and psychological potential of sound. [. . .] Since the 1960s, sound production, technology, and aesthetics have fundamentally changed contemporary Hollywood cinema and the filmgoing experience’.53 Subsequent years saw new possibilities for the reconstitution of sound in space and the accentuation of bass frequencies, as demonstrated by Dolby Stereo (1976), the THX system (1983), Dolby SR (1986), Cinema Digital Sound (Kodak, 1990), Dolby SRD 5.1 (1992), Dolby Digital EX 6.1 (1999) and Dolby Surround 7.1 (2010). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

114

Giusy Pisano

Last but not least is Dolby Atmos, with its numerous available tracks that allow for the multiplication of playback channels (128) and the spatial distribution of sound along a vertical axis, thanks to large numbers of acoustic speakers with up to sixty-four outputs, installed in the ceiling. Directionality was once the most sought-after quality in the microphone (omnidirectionals, hypocardioids, cardioids, supercardioids, hypercardioids) so as to be closer to the much-vaunted ‘source’. The multi-microphone recording system however, now offers a different method, combining various directionalities. Its effect in surround sound is to massively amplify the size and depth of the visual and audio space represented in the film and to ‘inscribe onto the body of the film [. . .] all the sounds regardless of their types or their locations [thus constituting] a sound continuum, a “sound modelling clay” that we feel primordially’.54 Through the ever-increasing number of channels, the sound design attempts to build continuity with our sound world, in order to make the cinematographic fiction as believable as possible. Indeed, any sound that is as sophisticated and highly mediated by vertiginous Dolby Atmos-like technologies paradoxically brings illusion to natural l­istening: in life, there is no such thing as pure directional sound; despite the efforts we might make to focus our attention in order to isolate a sound or a voice, or to separate out adjacent sounds from each other or from their backgrounds, they can resurface in order to alert us to a presence or make us aware of a space before softening again as we re-focus our ears. The mise-en-scène of film sound – playing with movement punctuated by montage and mixing – gives the illusion (we have to emphasise this word) of continuous or discontinuous sound. In order to make the illusion perfect, sounds that are inscribed onto the material of the film must be redistributed into space during the projection of a film – hence, the progression from stereophony and extended mono sound, to surround sound 5.1 or 6.1, to finally (for the time being) the immersive sound of the 7.1 system. The source gets further and further away, thus reinstating the old anthropological dream of finding once again the blind sound, void of causality, experienced by a foetus before birth. It would seem that visual observation informs us more directly than sound. We forget that our perception starts with sound and touch, and that even before birth, ‘blind listening has forged its imprints for a whole life of perception’.55 The emergence and persistence of surround sound techniques highlights the fact that ‘stereo is a living part of culture, stereo is not simply a technology. It is a constantly changing historical and cultural phenomenon. It is living stereo’.56 The sounds reproduced at the cinema have a long history made up of stutterings, questionings and experiments. ‘The history of sound reproduction’, writes Jonathan Sterne, ‘provides a uniquely powerful entry into the history of sound precisely because it is a history of attempts to manipulate, transNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



In Praise of the Sound Dissolve

115

form, and shape sound’.57 Reproduced sound thus demands that we grasp its techniques, its technologies, that we accept its simultaneously physical and anthropological essence, its undefined perception. Unlike images, reproduced sound offers no focal point which would allow an object to be neatly located within the depth of field; there is no framing to create sections of space, no possibility of synchronism. We have to free sound from the causality of the naturalist approach,58 which is refuted by the complexity of noises, words and music. This will allow us to move beyond the attempt to impose categorical/ spatial fixity, in order to hear ALL films and not just those in which the model of ‘sound design’ is on display. Freed from categorisations, a return to analogue film proves that the ‘fantastical gap between diegetic and nondiegetic’59 didn’t need to wait for the invention of digital mixing techniques in order to manifest itself. Sounds in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films were separated from the image in post-production in order to more easily modify, transform and re-work them. Because of masking, the mixing and editing of sounds disturb their descriptive character and their localisation in space: natural sounds, like the sounds of birds singing, of rain, or of trickling water, along with urban sounds and sounds otherwise made by human activity, intermingle with electronic sounds and musical quotations. Tarkovsky ‘didn’t really need a composer to write his music, but instead just a skilled mixer with a composer’s ear, an expert in sound effects, especially for rustlings, groanings, and echoes’.60 These noises create a feeling of strangeness and familiarity at the same time, because they belong to the kind of specifically cinematographic sounds, so favoured by Jean Epstein, present in films since the beginning of sound. Indeed, if in the 1960s, Michel Fano advocated for a sonic mise-en-scène which would overtake the tyranny of ‘the tripartite separation between music, words, and sound effects in favor of a progressive shift from one to the other’,61 in reality we can still find traces of these practices in cinema from 1930 to 1940, which was ‘buzzing with attempts and experimentation, in Europe as well as in America’.62 Long before Fano’s remarks, films – notably in the genres of science fiction and musicals – had already adopted a ‘decompartmentalisation’ of noise, words and music. As far as France is concerned, we can cite the experiments not only of Jean Epstein, Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir and Jean Cocteau, but also those of Julien Duvivier and Jean Grémillon. If Jean-Luc Godard, in My Life to Live (1962), delighted in disturbing the dialogue of his protagonists with the noises of cups, teaspoons and saucers, in 1932, Julien Duvivier intermingled direct sound and postsynchronised sound in La Tête d’un homme, rendering the dialogue nearly inaudible. Although the techniques of sonic superimposition and overlapping were much later attributed to the model of sound design, these techniques Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

116

Giusy Pisano

were commonly used in the early popular productions of Pathé-Natan.63 If, without any doubt, techniques and technologies allowed for sound design to become the predominant model in the 1970s, it is no less the result of desires and ambitions that can be traced back to the 1930s: ‘the emergence of sound design as a practice and stereo surround sound [. . .] signaled a reawakening and reinvigoration of cinema’s recurring aspiration to provide a total artwork of full sensory immersion. Central to this aspiration is a re-examination of the relationship between the audio-visual constructions of the cinema and the human sensorium’.64 It is now high time for the awkward pairings of diegetic/extra-diegetic and onscreen/offscreen to be rethought, so that sound can at last be analysed as the mise-en-scène of a continuum through which it resonates with images. Notes All URLs accessed 10 February 2017, except where noted. 1. Pierre Boulez, Relevé d’apprenti (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 229. 2. Mladen Milicevic, ‘Film Sound Beyond Reality: Subjective Sound Narrative Cinema’ (no date), https://filmsound.org/articles/beyond.htm. 3. Béla Balázs, L’Esprit du cinéma (Paris: Payot, [1930]1977), pp. 234–5. 4. Claude Bailblé, ‘Comment l’entendez-vous?’, Cinergon, 17/18 (2004), p. 7. 5. Véronique Campan, L’écoute filmique. Echo du son en image (Saint-Denis: Presses de Vincennes, 1999), p.74. 6. Robynn J. Stilwell, ‘The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic’, in Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard D. Leppert (eds), Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2007), p. 184. 7. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), p. 264. 8. In what way should the visual be easier to grasp? There is nothing inherent about the ABC structure of cinematographic ‘language’. We have simply learned to use this technical terminology (the techniques of montage, découpage, framing, shotcountershot, high angle, establishing shot, etc.). 9. Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, p. 264. 10. Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, L’Analyse des films (Paris: Armand Colin, [2004] 2015), p. 138. 11. See for instance the twenty-seven interviews collected by Vincent LoBrutto in Sound-On-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound (London: Praeger Publishers, 1994).To Michael Jarrett’s question ‘What are your feelings about nondiegetic music? If you could always exercise your will, would you use it?’ Walter Murch responds: ‘Do you mean ordinary film music?’, ‘Sound doctrine: An Interview with Walter Murch’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Spring 2000), pp. 2–11. 12. René Clair, Cinéma d’hier, cinéma d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 197. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



In Praise of the Sound Dissolve

117

13. Jean Epstein, Esprit de cinéma (Paris: Jeheber, 1955). See chapters: ‘Le cinéma pur et le film sonore’, ‘Le contrepoint du son’, and ‘Le gros plan du son’, citations on pp. 140–1, 148, 155. 14. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty HunterBlair (Austin: University of Texas Press, [1986] 2003), pp. 160–1. 15. Let me reference Julia Shpinitskaya’s beautiful text, ‘Approcher l’irréel: aspects du naturalisme sonore dans les films d’Andreï Tarkovsky’, in Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux and Giusy Pisano (eds), Art et Bruit (Ligeia, 23rd year, Nos 141–4, July–December 2015), pp. 136–46. 16. We understand sound continuum in the meaning given by Pierre Boulez: it ‘manifests in the possibility of cutting space according to certain laws; the dialectic between continuous and discontinuous by way of [. . .] the notion of cutting [. . .]; the continuum contains the continuous and the discontinuous at the same time (Boulez, Relevé d’apprenti, pp. 95–6). 17. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art, 10th ed. (New York: McGrawHill, 2012), p. 375. 18. Laurent Jullier, Les sons au cinéma et à la télévision (Paris: Armand Colin, 1995), pp. 120–1. 19. Randy Thom, in ‘Designing a Movie for Sound’, Iris. Revue de théorie de l’image et  du  son/A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound (1999), pp. 9–20, pointed out that  the aesthetic of sound design as practised by Ben Burtt and Walter Murch  finally  allows us to think about sound from the beginning of a film ­production. Fifteen years later, this model is upheld by the majority of film practitioners. 20. Stuart Bender, ‘“There is Nothing to Carry Sound”: Defamiliarisation and Reported Realism in Gravity’, Senses of Cinema, No. 71 (July 2014), http://sensesof cinema.com/2014/feature-articles/there-is-nothing-to-carry-sound-defamiliarization-and-reported-realism-in-gravity/ (accessed 1 November, 2016). 21. http://bruitages.be/son-diegetique-et-son-extradiegetique/ (accessed 10 Feb­ ruary, 2017). 22. Studies in acoustics and in cognitive sciences show that the system of sound signs in public spaces (like airports, train stations and museums) is organised according to the principle of sound design. William W. Gaver defines these sounds as ‘cartoon sounds: caricatures that don’t really look like (sound like) the objects that they represent, but that capture their essential features’. In ‘Everyday Listening and Auditory Icons’, thesis (San Diego: University of California, 1988), p. 89. See also Julien Tardieu, ‘De l’ambiance à l’information sonore dans un espace public. Méthodologie et réalisation appliquée aux gares’, thesis under the direction of Stephen McAdams (University of Paris 6, 2005). The bibliography dedicated to this topic is impressive. 23. Michel Chion, L’Audio-vision: Son et image au cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), p. 96. 24. Daniel Deshays, Entendre le cinéma (Paris: Klincksieck, 2010), p. 55. 25. Ibid., p. 154. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

118

Giusy Pisano

26. Véronique Campan, L’écoute filmique: Echo du son en image (Saint-Denis: Presses de Vincennes, 1999), p.75. 27. Michel Chion, L’Audio-vision, p. 55. 28. Is it necessary to remind the reader that synchronism is only an approximation of our experience of the world? The speed of the propagation of sound is much slower than that of light: from 333 to 340 m/s versus 299,792,458 m/s. Hence the clapperboard, hence the fact that, by way of the optical delay, sound is displaced ahead of the image (for 35mm, sound is 21 images ahead), hence the SMPTE Time Code (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers), LTC, VITC, etc. 29. Étienne Souriau, Vocabulaire d’esthétique (Paris: PUF, 1999), p. 240. 30. Rick Altman, Sound Theory/Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 2. 31. See Eleftheria Thanouli, ‘Post-classical Narration. A New Paradigm in Contemporary World Cinema’, thesis (Amsterdam University, 2005). And more generally: John Pier (ed), Théorie du récit: l’apport de la recherche allemande (Lille: PUS, 2007); David Herman, ‘Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology’, PMLA 112 (1997), pp. 1046–59. 32. See ‘Le cinéma a la parole: pratiques de sonorisation et de verbalisation des films muets’, CNRS, ARIAS, 2002–04 (co-directed by Giusy Pisano and Valérie Posner); ‘Intermédialité et spectacle vivant: les technologies sonores et le théâtre (XIXe-XXIe siècles)’, ARIAS/CRI, 2008–11 (co-directed by Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux and Jean-Marc Larrue); ‘La mise en scène théâtrale et les formes sonores et visuelles: emprunts esthétiques et techniques’, UPEMLV/Université de Montréal, 2011–14 (co-directed by Jean-Marc Larrue and Giusy Pisano); ‘ECHO (Écrire l’histoire de l’oral). L’émergence d’une moralité et d’une auralité modernes. Mouvements du phonique dans l’image scénique (1950–2000)’, ANR programme 2014–17, ARIAS (then THALIM, ARIAS team)/BnF/LIMSICNRS (directed by M.-M. Mervant-Roux); ‘Les Arts trompeurs. Machines. Magie. Médias,’ Labex Arts-H2H and CRIalt, 2015–2018 (co-directed by JeanMarc Larrue and Giusy Pisano); ‘Le son du théâtre: mots et concepts, glossaire multilingue raisonné’, ARIAS (then THALIM, ARIAS team) (directed by M.-M. Mervant-Roux and Eric Vautrin, LabEx TransferS, CNRS/ENS/Collège de France, 2011–18). 33. Giusy Pisano, ‘The Théâtrophone, an Anachronistic Hybrid Experiment or One of the First Immobile Traveler Devices?’ in André Gaudreault (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Early Cinema (London: Blackwell, in press). 34. Shannon Slaton, Mixing a Musical: Broadway Theatrical Sound Mixing Techniques (New York and London: Focal Press, 2011), p. 15. 35. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio (Paris: Van Dieren Editeur, [1936], 2005), p. 95 36. For further explanation, see J.-M. Larrue and G. Pisano, Les archives de la mise en scène théâtrale. Hypermédialité du théâtre (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: PUS, 2014); J.-M. Larrue, Théâtre et intermédialité (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: PUS, 2015); J.-M. Larrue, ‘Une musique qui fait voir: Fonctions et paradoxe de la musique au théâtre’, in Chantal Hébert et Irène Perelli-Contos (eds), La Narrativité contemporaine au Québec. Le Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

In Praise of the Sound Dissolve

119

théâtre et ses nouvelles dynamiques narratives (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2004), pp. 265–86; J.-M. Laurie and M. M. Mervant-Roux (eds), Le son du théâtre. 1. Le passé audible, Théâtre/Public, No. 197 (Gennevilliers, October 2010); Chantal Guinebault-Szlamowicz, J.-M. Larrue and M. M. Mervant-Roux (eds), Le son du théâtre. 2. Dire l’acoustique, Théâtre/Public, No. 199 (Gennevilliers, March 2011); Jeanne Bovet, J.-M. Larrue, and M. M. Mervant-Roux (eds), Le son du théâtre. 3. Voix Words Words Words, Théâtre/Public, No. 201 (Gennevilliers, September 2011). Rick Altman, ‘Film Sound. All of It’, Iris. Revue de théorie de l’image et du son / A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound, No. 27 (1999), p. 33. Clément Rosset, Fantasmagories (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2006), p. 52. Bordwell and Thompson (2012), p. 352. On this point, see Brian Kane’s analysis, in ‘Eleven Theses on Sound and Transcendence’, Current Musicology, No. 95 (2013), pp. 259–76. See also, on this topic: Mireille Berton and Philippe Baudouin, ‘Les spectres magnétiques de Thomas Alva Edision. Cinématographie, phonographie et sciences des fantômes,’ 1895, No. 76 (2015), pp. 66–93. Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objects musicaux (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1966), p. 93. Brian Kane, ‘L’acousmatique mythique: reconsidering the acousmatic reduction and the Pythagorean veil’, Electroacoacoustic Music Studies Network International Conference (Paris: INA-GRM et Université Paris-Sorbonne (MINT-OMF), 3–7 June 2008), http://www.ems-network.org/ems08/papers/kane.pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). See Giusy Pisano, ‘L’introduction du microphone dans le processus de création artistique: une approche anthropologique des relations entre arts et technique’, in Leonardo Quaresima, Laura Ester Sangalli and Federico Zecca (eds), The Ages of the Cinema: Criteria and Models for the Construction of Historical Periods (Udine: Forum, 2008), pp. 411–28. Pierre-Antoine Coutant, La reproduction du son au cinéma (Paris: FEMIS, [1991] 2003), p. 13. Alain Besse at conference round table ‘De la salle de cinéma au portable, la diffusion du son: nouvel enjeu?’, Quel son pour le cinéma aujourd’hui? (Paris: Ciné 104, 11 December 2008), http://www.zintv.org/Colloque-Quel-son-pour-lecinema,420. On this question, I refer to Serge Cardinal, who analyses the propositions of Rick Altman, James Lastra, Tom Levin and Alan Williams on the matter of the following questions: Is recorded sound a representation or a reproduction? Is it the imprint of an original that has since disappeared or the renewal of a material presence? ‘Médiation ou modulation sonore?’, Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques/Cinemas: Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1998), p. 3. Gérard Pelé, Etudes sur la perception auditive (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), p. 20. See, in addition to Pierre Schaeffer, the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Szendy for instance. Dolby Digital imposes very specific criteria for screening rooms: the ISO X-Curve, and the calibration and positioning of speakers, for example. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

120

Giusy Pisano

51. Daniel Percheron, ‘Le son au cinéma dans ses rapports à l’image et à la diégèse’, Ça Cinéma, No. 2, October 1973, p. 82. 52. Among these: expanding the pass-band by using it alongside a noise-reducing system; enlarging the frequency response of screening rooms, thus allowing for a better finished product and letting sound mixers put into place a separation of sounds according to their frequency; a wider dynamic track, switching to stereo surround sound, and adding additional speakers; the arrival of Sensurround (with accentuated bass). 53. William Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), pp. 1–2. 54. Antoine Gaudin, L’espace cinématographique. Esthétique et dramaturgie (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015), p. 165. The author proposes an analysis of filmic sounds in the represented space of the film and those inscribed onto the body of the film, outside the diegetic/extra-diegetic categorisation. 55. Deshays, Entendre le cinéma, p. 15. 56. Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine and Tom Everrett, Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound (New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 4. 57. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 28. 58. Michel Chion, Le son (Paris: Nathan, 1998), pp. 99–131. 59. Stilwell, ‘The Fantastical Gap’, p. 184. 60. A. Petrov, ‘Edward Artemiev and Andrei Tarkovsky [1996] , “I Do Not Need Music in Films”’, http://www.electroshock.ru/edward/interview/petrov3/ index.html (translated from the Russian by Julia N. Shpinitskaya). 61. Michel Fano, ‘Entretien sur le son et le sens’, Ça Cinéma, No. 18, 1979, p. 9. 62. Martin Barnier, En route vers le parlant: Histoire d’une évolution technologique, économique et esthétique du cinéma (1926–1934) (Liège: Éditions du CEFAL, 2002), p. 153. 63. Martin Barnier, ‘Le bruit des petites cuillères’, in Mervant-Roux et al. (eds), Art et Bruit, pp. 109–16. 64. James Lastra, ‘Film and the Wagnerian Aspiration: Thoughts on Sound Design and History of the Senses’, in Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (eds), Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 125.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Frames

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 7

Jumps in Scale Michel Chion In the beginning of Serge Paradjanov’s beautiful film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv, 1965), we hear the sound of an axe chopping wood resonating through space while titles in Ukrainian appear in red against a black backdrop. The next image is a close-up of a child’s face, little Ivan, facing left and calling out to his brother. In the background, in the blurred area of the image, we can make out a snowy slope. The following shot shows us in wide angle the child running from right to left through the forest on the slope. Just after, the face of his big brother, the lumberjack, appears very close (and in a low-angle shot), shouting to him to be careful of the tree that is about to fall. Then, from very high up, in an audacious wide point of view shot looking out . . . from the top of the tree, we see little Ivan, whom the tree surely would have crushed had his brother not pushed him out of the way; the brother takes the blow himself and dies instantly. We haven’t actually seen the axe in action, since it was not ‘visualised’; instead, favouring a change in the scale of the image, the axe remains invisible, ‘acousmatic’ (heard without being seen), a phantom axe, heard in the opening of the film, and again in a later scene. A bit further on in the same film, two children take off their clothes and gleefully go for a late-summer swim in the river amid the trees. We look on from very far away and high above – we can even follow the shadow that the crane holding the camera casts onto the trees! – as Ivan and little Marichka, the love of his life, splash each other and giggle. Then, the editing shifts to a series of extreme close-ups of the children in which we can only see their upper bodies shot from a low angle. In yet another sequence, the kindly face of a shepherd, shown in close-up as he speaks to the now grown-up Ivan, turns to face us and looks directly into the camera, and a little bit later we get a beautiful shot of a herd of sheep in the mountains, shown from a distance, which lets us take in the whole alpine landscape. What happens in these three cases (and in so many other sequences in this film)? There is no mid-range scale; we are either very close to the human body, especially the human face, or very far away, reducing the human figure to a very small scale. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

124

Michel Chion

The general idea is to show the entirety of the landscape and to situate human life within it (the lives of a pastoral people of another time, in the Carpathian mountains), as if fixed and determined by this frame. In each instance, however, the absence of ‘mid-range’ shots (with reference to the scale of the human body), takes on a different meaning: in the forest scene, it highlights the solitude and smallness of the child in the snow; then it makes it possible not to show the axe in action, creating a sort of elided ‘phantom image’ of the moment in which the brother cuts down the tree; in the swimming scene, it respects decency (the children are naked), while still expressing sensuality; in the third instance, it highlights the beauty and grandeur of nature once again. It’s the same effect, each time over-determined by the context. In the indoor scenes in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, on the other hand, the characters are more often seen in full, in mid-range shots. But these interiors, built in the studio, are harshly lit, and the characters are placed there as if in paintings and seem very cramped. Of course, this is reminiscent of iconographic conventions, especially in painting. Other outdoor scenes in Paradjanov’s film (such as the market in front of the church at the beginning of the film) do show us a few medium-range shots, but they are caught in the continuous frenzy of the moving camera and are therefore hardly noticeable. The device of using quick jumps from extreme close-up shots to extreme long shots, or vice versa, in which the human being appears small within a vast landscape and then in extreme close-up, has been used throughout the history of cinema. For example, in some of the films of French filmmaker Bruno Dumont: at the very beginning of his 1999 film L’humanité, we see, very far away, a man walking on a ridge with his silhouette standing out against the sky, despite the fact that we still hear the sounds of his breathing and walking as if in close-up. Then suddenly, an abrupt cut makes him enter the frame up close and from the right. Similarly, in the outdoor love scenes in Twentynine Palms (2003) the naked couple is seen from very far away among the rocks, and then suddenly, from very close up. Most of the scenes in both of these films are filmed according to the scale of the human body, but the splices between the changes in scale, in some of the most crucial moments of these films, are often striking. These effects are properly cinematographic; the jump or the rapid variation of size and scale of a single subject or of an object could not come from painting. This jump can be instantaneous, through an editing effect as in the case of the aforementioned Paradjanov or Bruno Dumont scenes, or it can be created by a continuous rapid variation in distance due to the movement of the camera or by an optical variation, which will be discussed below. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Jumps in Scale

125

In each instance, it is as if the mid-range scale, that of the social body, is lost, either elided or treated as a transitional state. In films, needless to say, the size of objects is not absolute, which is not the case for classical painting. At the Louvre, the dimensions of the Mona Lisa’s face are absolute, just like the dimensions of the characters in The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado. I remember my surprise at seeing the original of Bosch’s famous painting in Madrid: the open triptych measures 220 centimetres by 389 centimetres, even though I had imagined it to be much larger because of the considerable number of characters and details. In the cinema, however, size is relative to the frame of the image, which can be projected or watched homothetically in variable dimensions, especially today, with the use of phones, tablets, computer screens, big television screens, and the giant screens of movie theatres. I know of only one film example in which the size of the characters was meant to have an absolute largeness on screen, of the same dimensions as their size in reality – (‘life size’, as it were), and this is the cinematographic technique of ShowScan as imagined and tested by Douglas Trumbull, which was demonstrated in Paris in 1988. It entailed a complete re-equipping of the screening room, very precise, immutable constraints for its projection, for the size of the screen, etc., in order to achieve what, without 3-D, purported to be an absolute trompe-l’œil. A successful trompe-l’œil at that, and a striking one (alas, it didn’t manage to attract much of an audience, and the Ermitage movie theatre on the Champs-Élysées was forced to close two years later). The clever thing about the demo film, shown at the beginning of each screening, was how it used the material of the screen itself to let us see behind it as it were, thanks to the translucent quality of the screen’s fabric, the high definition of the image, and the high speed of projection (sixty images per second). You could see a technician moving around in a sort of well-lit storeroom, looking for a tool, presented in life-size proportions as if he were real. At one point, the man slices the cloth of the screen with a knife; for a couple of seconds, the actual screen and the projected image of the screen are one and the same, strikingly conflated (I don’t know if Trumbull knew the story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, with a curtain as ultimate illusion, but I cannot help but think of it here). The rest of the films screened with the same technique in this Champs-Élysées theatre did not, I should point out again, heed this constraint of life-size images. In the cinema, changes in the size of people and objects within the frame are not necessarily motivated by their distance relative to a character who is watching them; they are created by their size relative to the frame, at the level of what I call the cinematographic real. The way we see the characters – constantly from a distance, or more generally in a long shot, constantly from Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

126

Michel Chion

behind, etc. – is part of this cinematographic real. In the so-called ‘found footage’ films, however, which have existed for a long time but have become more and more common since the success of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez, 1999), we are shown something that has supposedly been found on a cassette filmed by amateurs, in a film, or in a digital file, as if it were a document. As a result, the scale of the characters falls under the category of the diegetic real because it is linked to the camera being handled by a character who is part of the action, or it derives from the placement of a surveillance camera that films automatically. If we take Jean-Luc Godard at his word, there has only been one thing that the cinema has invented: montage. Jacques Aumont ponders this in a recent essay.1 In what follows I will not contradict, but rather supplement, this idea. Why only one thing? I actually see several things, if not more – for starters, there is the possibility of poetically, rhetorically, dramatically bringing together objects from different scales within the diegetic real, which, on screen, take on the same dimensions within the cinematographic real (applying à la lettre Virgil’s words from The Georgics: ‘Si parva licet componere magnis’, ‘if the comparison of small things to large things is allowed’), or inversely, the possibility of varying an object or a character on screen which, in the diegetic real, stays the same. This effect, which I have already written about on several occasions,2 is not reduced to montage, as I have pointed out: it can also be created in continuous shots. This has been the case many times in Hitchcock’s work, when he captures an entire vast set populated with guests or with spectators, and then, with a movement of the camera, brings us up close to a detail that no one, or nearly no one, in the crowd notices until it fills up the entire impervious frame of the screen: whether it’s the tic-ravaged, painted face of a musician in blackface who proves to be the much sought-after bad guy (in Young and Innocent, 1937), or the key that Ingrid Bergman holds, which is supposed to give her access to a secret room (in Notorious, 1946). The more and more frequent recourse to digital effects beginning in the 1990s has led to the systematisation of the technique and to tracking shots which would be impossible with a physical camera, tracking shots which intensify the changes in scale, making us enter into dimensions which, in principle, aren’t possible for a camera . . . or for the naked eye. In Panic Room (2002), a thriller by David Fincher, the action primarily takes place in a splendid, multi-storey house, furnished with all sorts of surveillance and protection systems. Once night falls, when robbers try to gain access, there is a bewildering, digitally simulated camera movement that moves through the interior of the house, as if this ‘virtual’ camera were seeking out the intruders (it doesn’t represent the gaze of any character, since the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Jumps in Scale

127

protagonist and her daughter are sleeping at the time). Its movement brings about a change in scale that ends with the camera, after crossing the room and moving through the handle of a coffee pot (!), ‘entering’ from the inside through the hole of the lock – a flat key lock at that. The camera then appears to be ‘pushed back’ by a key being inserted into the lock from the other side by the intruders. As the key fails to work and the robbers move on to other access points, the imaginary camera continues to fly about in the house, in order to face off with the intruders from wherever they should try to enter. In a previous film by the same filmmaker, Fight Club (1999), the virtual camera (this is also a digital special effect) isn’t stopped by walls or human bodies: it moves through their very materials, or shows us a molecular view of the brain’s neurons; we continuously shift from the vision of the ‘naked eye’ to the vision of a microscope, and vice versa. Since this time, the cinema has continuously used such shifts, from what is accessible to our senses to what isn’t yet accessible, whether infinitely small or large. For example, just two years earlier, there was the virtual backward tracking shot in Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997), in which we zoom out from a view of Earth that looks like what a satellite would observe, or even the eye of an astronaut – an Earth grazed by the light of our Sun – to reveal a view of an undetermined number of galaxies, until we see that it is all reflected in the eye of a little girl. It should be noted that, in this example, the digital image simulates the effect of the light, as if on a real camera, by imitating the reflections of sunlight on the glass camera lens, referencing an imaginary camera in the profilmic imaginary real.3 ‘Small’ and ‘large’ are purely comparative notions. In relation to what object? To the size of an adult human body, obviously. Even our life itself takes place according to the principle of a prodigious, irreversible change in scale, starting with a minuscule egg. A part of this happens without our being aware of it, another part, after birth, happens slowly and consciously all the way until being full-grown (sometimes arrested, due to different types of anomalies or afflictions). But when we grow up, the world shrinks in inverse proportion, a change from which some of us never quite recover. Of course, these ‘jumps in scale’ that the cinema carries out so boldly also remind us of the progress of and widespread access to medical imaging (various endoscopies, echographs, etc.), as well as the evolution of technology and science and the more and more concrete awareness that this evolution affords us with regard to our modest size as compared to the solar system and the universe. At the same time, they enact on screen some of the comparisons found in poetry (the Virgil reference cited above compared the activity of bees and that of the Cyclops’ blacksmiths). But there is still something further. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

128

Michel Chion

The loss of the mid-range scale that I have pointed out in certain sequences in the films of Paradjanov or of Dumont is actually a different matter altogether: this loss doesn’t reveal any resemblance between microcosm and macrocosm; on the contrary, in my opinion, it shows that the human being is irreducible to its measurable and objectifiable corporeal manifestation of size and physical volume. This question of the jump in scale has taken up a new relevance through the popularity of 3-D films, which for the time being can only be seen through the use of polarised glasses. We know that stereoscopic cinema has almost taken off on two occasions, the first near the beginning of the 1950s, with several films such as The House of Wax (André de Toth, 1953), and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), and again, though briefly, in the 1970s and 1980s (Flesh for Frankenstein, Paul Morrissey and Antonio Margheriti, 1973; Jaws 3-D, Joe Alves, 1983). If 3-D cinema has since become quite ordinary, it’s thanks to the widespread use of digital projection, and especially to the phenomenal success of Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). Specifically, this science fiction film, which takes place in the year 2154, relies on the contradiction in scale between two species, that of the humans and that of the Na’vi, a docile and pacifist people who inhabit the planet Pandora, but who – with all of their humanoid analogies (bipedal stance, four limbs, a head with two eyes, two nostrils, a mouth) – have significant morphological differences with respect to our species, even if their throats are somehow adapted for the proper pronunciation of the English language! Among other things, they have a tail, they are entirely blue in colour, and most strikingly, they are over three metres tall. The human hero, the paraplegic Jake Sully, gets projected into the body of a Na’vi, and starts a romantic relationship with Neytiri, a Pandoran female, by appearing to her as a male of her species. The spectator obviously anticipates the moment when Neytiri will be confronted with the ‘original’ human body of her lover at the end of the film. When this does finally happen, he appears, in the arms of his lover, reduced to the size of a Na’vi child. This incompatibility in scale between female and male, which inverts the classic schema of the well-known King Kong effect, has a clear Oedipal meaning in our eyes as human children – I don’t say human ex-children here, because the child continues to live on inside us. It is Neytiri who reveals the impossibility of this love story. But once this impossibility has been shown, the filmmaker side-steps the problem by making Jake be reborn in the Na’vi ‘format’, and thus, what could have been a drama becomes a maudlin fairytale. At this stage, the film – which is otherwise very well made – disappoints us by failing to articulate the question of its diegetic real (a change in scale) with the question of its cinematographic real (for the spectators, the changes in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Jumps in Scale

129

size of the characters in the frame, according to distance). I’ve noticed on several occasions while watching 3-D films in the theatre, including more recent ones such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J. J. Abrams, 2015), that the eye doesn’t experience jumps in scale in the same way while looking at a three-dimensional image when we move, through montage, from a close-up shot to a more distant one: like early film spectators, here we also believe for a moment that we are seeing a miniaturised version of the character, reduced to the size of its own action figure (in the same way that the Star Wars characters as played by human actors are sold in ‘miniature’). Very surprisingly, this effect hasn’t worn off for me no matter how accustomed I am to it. Wim Wenders, furthermore, seems to have very cleverly taken advantage of this effect in Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015), one of the very rare 3-D films which is not documentary, nor fantasy film, nor science fiction, but rather a melodrama. In it, he shows us the heroine’s house as seen by James Franco: situated far away at the end of a road, it looks like a dolls’ house, and indeed it is a dolls’ house physically, as perceived by our ‘physiological’ eye that sees the film in relief – since the distant image of it comes right after a close-up of the hero. The effect is unfortunately lost in the ‘flat’ 2-D version of the film adapted for DVD or for conventional 2-D screens. Moreover, we might ask ourselves why movies which are filmed in 3-D adopt the same style of rapid editing as their 2-D monocular counterparts, despite the fact that, as we might reason, they could take advantage of their three-dimensionality and reinvent how films are shot. The response is simple: today’s popular films, which cost a lot of money to make and also to promote, must be compatible with all of the current means of ‘consumption’, of presentation, which are more plentiful and diverse than they have ever been; we have to be able to enjoy films in 3-D or in 2-D, on the big screen or at home, but also on a tablet device while we’re on the train or on an individual screen during a long flight, etc. – just as films must be adapted for playback in all sound conditions: mono or stereo, in the narrow field of headphones placed over our ears (without blocking out sounds around us), or inside a large room filled with high-powered speakers. What’s more, 2-D cinema has been imitating 3-D cinema for nearly thirty years now; in the space where the action unfolds, it uses all manner of movements, gyrations, turns of the camera, a camera which has been miniaturised either actually or virtually, in continuous movement around the objects it is showing us, as if to tell us: look at this volume! Will 3-D cinema inspire a new poetics specific to the change in scales? And will this poetics remain perceptible in the 2-D versions of the same films? It is too early to say. Often, the expressive power of a technique emerges precisely where we did not expect it. It will take mass quantities of 3-D or Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

130

Michel Chion

‘depth-based’ films – and not just the genius of certain filmmakers here and there – to create this poetics, just as it took hundreds, if not thousands, of 2-D monocular films to achieve the full power of the effects of ‘jumps in scale’ that I pointed out above in the films of Paradjanov and Dumont – an effect which could have been produced from the very beginning of cinema, but which would have been illegible or devoid of meaning at the time. Notes 1. Jacques Aumont, La seule invention du cinéma (Paris: Vrin, 2015). 2. Allow me to make reference to my online film courses on my site MichelChion. com, as well as to my works, such as Écrire un scénario, édition définitive (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2002) or L’écrit du cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013). 3. For more on these three categories proposed by my ontology of cinema, diegetic real, cinematographic real and profilmic real, see also my article ‘Le gorille et la fourmi’, Trafic, No. 67 (2008), pp. 5–12.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 8

Reflecting on Reflections: Cinema’s Complex Mirror Shots Julian Hanich

Introduction: A Complex Mirror, Mirror on the Wall1 Let us begin with a scene from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s superb blackand-white literary adaptation Effi Briest (Fontane Effi Briest, 1974). The camera faces a mirror that fills almost the entire screen. In the mirror – a conspicuous frame-within-the-frame – we can see the reflection of a living room. On the staircase in the background Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) leans on the shoulders of her mother (Lilo Pempeit). When Effi’s father (Herbert Steinmetz) enters with Baron von Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck) on the right of the mirror reflection, Effi moves down the stairs and kisses her future husband’s hand. Throughout the forty-six seconds of this static long-take the viewer can visually perceive the four characters as a reflection in the mirror, but the off-screen characters never enter the on-screen space between the mirror and the camera. In what follows I will pay close attention to shots like this one, which are particularly prominent in art cinema and modernist films by Dreyer, de Sica, Duras, Resnais, Angelopoulos, Tsai and many others, but can also occur in mainstream films, especially of the more ambitious kind (Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) come to mind). I call them ‘complex mirror shots’, by which I mean shots in which characters and other salient sources of attention are reflected in the mirror but remain beyond the screen frame (and hence were not placed between the mirror and the camera during shooting).2 Complex mirror shots should be distinguished from the more widespread and less demanding mirror scenes which place the source of attention between the mirror and the camera during shooting and which thus allow a character or an object to be glimpsed from different angles simultaneously. Just think of the famous monologue of Robert De Niro’s Jake La Motta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980). Similar to Michel Chion’s distinction between active and passive off-screen sound, we could argue that complex mirror shots actively raise our attention to the reflected object or event, whereas in regular mirror shots the off-screen space passively ‘describes’ the environment but does not pose any questions.3 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

132

Julian Hanich

Figure 8.1  Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974).

Figure 8.2  Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974).

I will show that provided the mirror and its source of reflection assume a prominent role in the shot, they can change the way spectators look onto, look into and look beyond the filmic image, but also look at it in a puzzled or questioning way. More concretely this implies that: (1) complex mirror shots Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

133

may modify how spectators look onto the picture as a flat composition by way of a quasi-transformation of the screen shape; (2) they can function as a magnetising frame-within-the-frame that channels the viewer’s look into the anterior depth of the mirror; (3) by referring us to off-screen space and thus making us look beyond the image into its lateral and posterior depth, some specific examples also allow for an intricately layered experience of perception and imagination, challenging and complicating our effort to ‘read’ the image; (4) mirrors may, finally, be a source of spatial complication and can even lead to a full-blown disorientation regarding the status of the image, thus transforming the way viewers understand, problematise and look at the filmic image as such.4 Complication is only one effect, however. In addition, I want to suggest that these mirror shots offer a simultaneous range of affordances in terms of what we can do with the filmic image or what it can ‘do’ to us. Hence, they more readily invite or even force us to oscillate between various viewing modes: from flatness to anterior depth and on to lateral and posterior depth (even though not all options will be available in all instances). Complex mirror shots thus put viewers in an equivocal and protean attitude. It is in this sense – over and above their sometimes disorienting character – that I take them to have an indefinite quality. A Shape Within a Shape: The Mirror as Pictorial Geometrical Form With the exception of a mirror reflection that fills the entire screen, diegetic mirrors always add a geometrical shape to the image. In the hands of a gifted filmmaker an immediate upshot can be a change in pictorial composition of the image and even a quasi-transformation of the shape of the screen. In his fascinating lecture on ‘The Dynamic Square’ held in 1930, Sergei Eisenstein bemoaned the ‘inflexibility of the once and for all inflexible frame proportions of the screen’.5 Unhappy with the standardised shape of the screen, the Soviet filmmaker wanted to dynamise its form, getting rid of the strong fixture on horizontalism and allowing for a vertical composition as well. In Eisenstein’s account this dynamisation is achieved through masking parts of the shape of the film screen, but one can also imagine changing the actual aspect ratio of the screen. This may be found in Glenn H. Alvey’s experimental H. G. Wells adaptation The Door in the Wall (1956)6 and more recently, for instance, in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (2014) and, through the use of the IMAX format, in some parts of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008). However, comparable to shots through doorframes or windows, an approximation to what Eisenstein had in mind becomes possible also Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

134

Julian Hanich

Figure 8.3  Gertrud, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1964).

through mirrors, even without the use of such technical devices as masking, the change of screen size or split-screen images. What is more, using a mirror shot allows for an opposition, combination, or even fusion of geometrical shapes. This can be seen in the shot from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964): against the background of a comparatively unobtrusive grey wall, the vertical shape of the mirror with its attention-grabbing Rococo frame stands in opposition to – or interacts with – the horizontal screen shape. Following Eisenstein’s (masculine) rhetoric, one could say that the screen becomes a ‘battlefield’ on which optically spatial conflicts and skirmishes are fought. Put in less martial terms: various shapes stand either in tension or harmony to each other. As Christian Metz puts it: ‘The internal frame, the second frame, has the effect of drawing attention to the main frame [. . .] of which it is, among other things, a frequent and recognizable “marker”’.7 Apart from rectangular mirrors a variety of other forms may influence the image composition as well: an oval, a circle, a rhomb etc. The mirrorobsessed Fassbinder was particularly inventive in this respect. Just take a look at the scenes shown here from Veronika Voss (Die Sehensucht der Veronika Voss, 1982), but also from Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad, 1961) or Steven Soderbergh’s Che: Part 1 (2008). Slanted angles can further modify the geometrical shape of the mirror within the overall composition, as when Theo Angelopoulos, in a bar scene in The Suspended Step of the Stork (To meteoro vima tou pelargou, 1991), films a dangling mirror slightly from the side (see below). In short, introducing a mirror as a prominent part of the mise-en-scène allows for a modification of how the viewer Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

Figure 8.4  Veronika Voss, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1982).

Figure 8.5  Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad), Alain Resnais (1961).

Figure 8.6  Che: Part 1, Steven Soderbergh (2008).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

135

136

Julian Hanich

Figure 8.7  The Suspended Step of the Stork, Theo Angelopoulos (1991).

may look onto the filmic image as a flat composition. This is by no means to imply that mirrors make viewers avoid looking into the filmic world; nor will spectators easily switch from the looking-into to the looking-onto mode – after all, a mirror in a film still gives us a Gestalt. All I am arguing is that the lookingonto mode becomes a more vital possibility, as prominent mirrors introduce contrasting geometrical shapes, thus making the image less definite. A Frame Within a Frame: The Mirror Guiding Attention However, the mirror is not a geometrical shape like any other. Again, apart from mirror reflections that fill the entire screen, diegetic mirrors always add a frame within the frame.8 With Anne Friedberg we can also speak of a ‘multiple frame’: the edges of the mirror, whether it is surrounded by an actual frame or not, are included within the master frame of the screen – be it a cinema screen, a television screen, a computer screen or any other screen on which we watch the film.9 Following a general function of frames, mirrors as frames-within-the-frame allow a channelling of the spectator’s attention to what seems salient: deliberately and artificially ‘decreasing’ the format of the film image, they momentarily magnetise the viewer’s gaze and pull it towards what is framed. In this respect the mirror resembles photographs, paintings or other static, framed representations within the diegesis to which the viewer might be attracted. In contrast to static photographs or paintings, what we see inside the mirror is most of the time not static, since the reflection contains moving Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

137

Figure 8.8  Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974).

parts. Particularly when movement within the mirror is set off from a static wall surrounding the mirror, the magnetising function will most likely increase, ‘sucking’ the viewer’s attention towards what is framed to a considerably higher degree than a photograph or a painting. This is predominantly the case with those complex mirror shots that do not contain a character between the camera and the mirror at all but restrict themselves to showing its reflection: what can be glimpsed inside the mirror remains the only moving part of the image, and the viewer therefore does not have to divide his or her attention, as in this scene from Fassbinder’s Effi Briest. Here the surrounding wall is hardly important – what counts is the moving mirror reflection of the characters, accentuated by the rectangular mirror frame. Again, the mirror resembles doorframes and windows in this respect: it is as if the mirror ‘opened up’ what would otherwise be a flat wall by inserting a visible ‘hole’ into it, channelling the viewers’ attention into its anterior depth of field. The specular depth of field can reach spectacularly far, as in the bedroom scene from Effi Briest with Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann below. Or it can remain almost on the ‘surface’, as in the mirror reflection of Emmanuelle Riva standing closely in front of a bathroom mirror in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

138

Julian Hanich

Figure 8.9  Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974).

Figure 8.10  Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais (1959).

Here it is important, however, to heed Umberto Eco’s warning that a mirror reflection is a virtual image: ‘it is so called because the observer perceives it as if it were inside the mirror, while, of course, the mirror has no “inside”’.10 One looks at the mirror reflection as if it had an anterior depth Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

139

of field ­reaching ‘into’ the virtual image and thus functions like a window or a doorframe beyond which space seems to be extending away from the camera. However, while perceptually correct, this is logically wrong: Not having depth itself, a mirror merely gives us the depth of the space it is reflecting. (And this realisation may also allow for a momentary flattening of the screen itself, because we subtly feel reminded of the fact that the screen does not have ‘real’ depth either.) At the same time, frames-within-the-frame such as mirrors tend to result in a constriction or, at least, delimitation of space inside the filmic image. By ‘devaluing’ those parts that surround the mirror frame, mirrors can have an ‘emphasising’ function, but also a ‘suffocating’ effect: what is salient is given a marked and demarcated space, but through the demarcation of the frame it also robs us of what could otherwise be a more open view. To make this more tangible, let us take a look at a shot from Hiroshima mon amour. Although the male protagonist (played by Eiji Okada) can be seen at the very centre of the image, we instantly realise that the mirror frame inside the film frame off-centres (or decentres) him and relegates him to the left edge of the mirror reflection and thereby cuts off a part of his head and torso. Following Pascal Bonitzer’s influential concept of deframing (décadrage),

Figure 8.11  Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais (1959).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

140

Julian Hanich

there is a centrifugal tendency of the mirror image toward off-screen space in as much as it hints at the parts of the character’s body that lie beyond the mirror frame.11 Or to use a phrase by Jean Mitry: ‘We know that the space seen through the frame and limited by it is in no way delimited by it’.12 Hence we encounter a curious double tendency to open up and constrict space: Mirrors seem to squeeze and box-in what can be seen inside the four borders of their frame, but simultaneously extend the space of the image to what is ‘inside’ their ‘depth’. Mitry, discussing a mirror scene in John Ford’s The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), also observes this constricting effect: ‘Whereas a total field of view would underline the relations between various points in space shown in its entirety, here, on the contrary everything is hemmed in, constricted.’13 However, for reasons we will arrive at presently, it seems wrong to me when Mitry claims that ‘space is cancelled out, since it is its reflection we see’.14 In fact, space is not cancelled out, but it is transformed. What seems clear at this point is that a viewer who looks into the depth of the mirror-as-frame naturally perceives the image differently from a viewer who looks onto the flatness of the mirror-as-geometrical-shape. A crucial shift of attention takes place, implying a reordering of the given well described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures. [. . .] The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it.15

I suggest that mirrors are the kind of diegetic object that ‘invites’ this switching of attention or even forcefully ‘imposes’ it. It would be wrong, however, to consider the two possibilities as necessarily exclusive – they can coexist, with one mode foregrounded while the other one is backgrounded and vice versa. A Space Within a Space: The Mirror and Spatial Extension A mirror is an indexical medium: it contains a causal connection between its referent and what it displays. But unlike the indexical medium of photography it is not a storage medium that allows us to retrieve what the virtual image of the mirror reflection has previously shown. This implies that if the reflected object is not located between the mirror and the camera, it must be positioned at this very moment in what Noël Burch, in his typology of off-screen space, has called ‘the off behind the camera’ (and maybe more accurately Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

141

should have called ‘the off behind and next to the camera’).16 In complex mirror shots characters are thus both present on-screen via reflection and simultaneously absent in off-screen space. Hence even though the medium of photography and the mirror share the tendency to fuse absence and presence into an image of absent-presence, they are crucially different: photography makes something present that is temporally absent (the image was taken earlier in time); in complex mirror shots the mirror makes something present that is temporally present but spatially absent (what it reflects is located at this very moment in off-screen space).17 Hence mirrors are intriguing diegetic objects, because they introduce a peculiar pluri-directionality to the filmic image, thus further rendering it more indefinite: mirrors extend space not only into the anterior depth of field discussed in the previous section, but also into what André Bazin has called lateral depth of field and even into what I want to dub posterior depth of field (with reference to Burch we could also speak of the ‘depth behind and next to the camera’).18 Umberto Eco therefore describes the mirror as a prosthesis: an ‘apparatus extending the range of action of an organ.’19 The film is thus both off-centred and centred on the off. We can make these claims more concrete by drawing on a scene from Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975), a film ripe with complex mirror shots. Roughly fifty minutes into the film, at the beginning of a static long-take of more than six minutes, the attaché of the Austrian embassy (Mathieu Carrière) stands, hands folded and without moving, in front of a piano in the big, bourgeois living room of the French ambassador to India. He stares into the upper left off-screen space behind the camera. In the background we can see a huge mirror in the shape of a big door or a passage, which covers about a third of the wall. On the left side of the mirror we see a staircase on which the wife of the French ambassador, Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig) appears in a red gown after nineteen seconds. She descends the stairs and appears in the middle of the mirror, approaching the Austrian attaché. Because of the mirror reflection and the direction of the attaché’s gaze into off-screen space, we have to expect Anne-Marie Stretter to appear from the left-hand-side of the frame, which she does thirty-five seconds into the shot. What interests me most about this shot – fully aware that I am shamefully ignoring its multi-layered non-synchronous soundtrack – is how the mirror complicates the act of viewing: during her walk towards the attaché, we can perceive the woman in red as a mirror-reflection squarely inside the image; but at the same time, guided through the attaché’s gaze, we are also asked to imagine her approaching from off-screen space outside the image. In contrast to other cases mentioned above, the attaché’s gaze into off-screen space implies Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

142

Julian Hanich

Figures 8.12–8.14  India Song, Marguerite Duras (1975).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

143

a strong deictic element, pointing in an outward direction. Over and above the reflection in the mirror his gaze adds a forceful beyond-the-frame-focus that asks for an actualisation of that space, and how else would we actualise it other than via imagination? While in the Effi Briest example at the beginning viewers will predominantly apprehend the mirror reflection, in cases with a strong beyond-the-frame-focus imagination comes into play to a much stronger degree, actualising that visible–invisible space. Hence for the viewer’s engagement with indefinite filmic images it makes a difference if the images contain (a) no character placed between camera and mirror during shooting, (b) a character that looks at the reflection in on-screen space or (c) a character that gazes at the source of the reflection in off-screen space. Take the following shots from Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) and Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, 1970): in one case we have an inward character gaze, in the other two cases we see a character looking outward. With Bazin’s distinction between a centripetal and a centrifugal image tendency in mind, we may assume that the direction of the character’s gaze may either attenuate or spur the viewer’s imagining of off-screen space.20 In the first case the viewer most likely follows the gaze direction ‘into’ the depth of the mirror; in the other two cases his or her attention may be pushed beyond the image frame into off-screen space and thus increase the reliance on his or her imagination, similar to the India Song example. For lack of a better expression we could speak of an ‘imaginative perception’, because the viewer’s perception of the mirror shot is informed and infused by imaginative elements to a more pronounced degree than usual: the imagination of off-screen space. Thus complex mirror shots not only change the way spectators look onto and into the image, but also beyond it. At the beginning I emphasised that for a mirror shot to change the way spectators look onto, into, beyond and at the filmic image the objects and events reflected in the mirror must play a prominent role. This is an important qualifier because most regular mirror shots of the Raging Bull kind also reveal some space behind the character. But the rest of Jake LaMotta’s locker room is rather unimportant to our understanding of the scene.21 As mentioned, in regular mirror shots the reflection of off-screen space passively displays the environment but does not pose questions.22 In complex mirror shots, on the other hand, a salient source like Anne-Marie Stretter in her red dress attracts our attention and therefore asks to be actively concretised in imagination, even if the content of this imagination is strongly shaped by what is given through perception in the mirror. Cognitive film theorists like David Bordwell, Edward Branigan and others have shown us that as viewers we need to mentally construct the space Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

144

Julian Hanich

Figures 8.15–8.16  Written on the Wind, Douglas Sirk (1956).

Figure 8.17  The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini), Vittorio de Sica (1970).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

145

of the filmic world: Drawing on mental schemata partly derived from our ­experience of reality we fill in the gaps that any film necessarily contains.23 Likewise, phenomenological aesthetics – think of Roman Ingarden, Mikel Dufrenne or Wolfgang Iser – has time and again underlined the active part of the recipient who has to concretise spots of indeterminacy or fill in blanks.24 Accordingly, I would argue that in order to make full sense of the actual, non-reflected spatial configuration in the living room of India Song, the viewer needs to visualise in imagination an inverse version of the reflected woman in red in off-screen space. Incidentally, and not surprisingly, complex mirror shots also imply a doubling or ambiguity in terms of sound. Even though complex mirror shots existed during the silent era, the use of sound adds another layer.25 To better describe how viewers experience sound in complex mirror shots we need to draw on an intricate phenomenon Chion calls ‘spatial magnetization’.26 The phenomenon occurs when the place of a sound source we see and the location where the sound is actually emitted do not coincide. For example, a barking dog runs from the right to the left of the onscreen image and then exits into off-screen space: We automatically and without a reflective thought mentally attach the sound to the moving dog (as the source of the sound) and not to the static speakers (as the emitters of the sound). In Chion’s elegant phrasing, ‘the image attracts the sound, as though magnetically, and leads us mentally to situate the sound where we see its source’.27 Without spatial magnetisation we would be unable to create a realistic connection between the static loudspeaker and the often moving sound sources inside and outside the image. This is particularly obvious in the case of monaural sound, i.e., when only one speaker exists behind the screen, but also when we watch a film on a computer monitor with headphones. Only because the on-screen or offscreen source seems to magnetically pull the sound in its direction can we make sense of and follow the film at all. Complex mirror shots make this phenomenon even more intriguing. All of a sudden the film doubles, as it were, its sound source. Or, to be more precise, the mirror lets the sound source appear ambiguously, because it is visible inside the frame, but has to be logically located outside the frame. Depending on what aspect the viewer focuses on, I claim, the spatial experience of sound will be different. If the viewer concentrates on the reflection and hence what goes on ‘inside’ the anterior depth of the mirror, the sound will come directly from the front. If the viewer focuses on the actual location of the characters and hence on what goes on in the lateral or posterior depth of offscreen space, the sound source will be magnetised to the imagined position of the characters. The spatial experience of sound will vary slightly, even though the emitter of sound stays, of course, the same. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

146

Julian Hanich

Doubled Depth of Field and Intensified Staging in Depth In the complex mirror shots from Effi Briest or India Song the camera is situated halfway between the mirror and the characters in the hors-champ. I have already alluded to the fact that the complex mirror shot thus may extend the depth of the image into various directions: not only into the anterior depth ‘inside’ the mirror on-screen, but also the lateral depth next to the camera and the posterior depth behind the camera off-screen. In the following I want to show how this may help us to shed a different light on the discussion of depth of field and the way it allows filmmakers to stage in depth, a stylistic device variously discussed by David Bordwell.28 Consider the following shot from Fassbinder’s Effi Briest, which shows us mirror reflections of Hanna Schygulla and Wolfgang Schenck in the background as well as Irm Hermann in the foreground. Here the mirror allows for a guided depth of field comparable to other types of surcadrages like a doorframe or a window (see the section ‘A Frame Within a Frame’ above). However, what distinguishes the complex mirror shot from regular depth-of-field shots is the space it opens up in the reverse direction. Against the background of what I have pointed out above, the

Figure 8.18  Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

147

depth of field must immediately be doubled once we take into account the posterior depth of field or ‘depth behind the camera’. The camera is centred as in the middle of a corridor. With space extending in two directions the shot yields an amplified depth of field and thus makes possible an intensified staging in depth.29 What is more, the complex mirror shot allows for an intricate editingwithout-editing. To elucidate this point let us briefly take a detour via Pascal Bonitzer’s Bazin-inspired comparison between painting and film. According to Bonitzer, paintings place the beholder in an overlooking position, whereas editing puts the film audience, as it were, inside the scene: ‘in film we are not outside but within the painting. We travel, through the different shot sizes and angles, inside a painting without edges, a painting which creates itself and is only limited by time’.30 Now, to me it seems that this is also, and particularly, an intriguing description for the mirror shot, as the mirror helps to locate the viewer in a space as if inside the scene, but without the use of editing. Via the mirror reflection we can see – all at once and without a cut – Effi and Instetten on the floor and Johanna both in profile and from the front. The temporal duration is not interrupted, and the spatial integrity remains untouched from changes in perspective.31 In his forceful critique of Bazin, Jean-Louis Comolli questions the Bazinian claim that a depth-of-field aesthetics is able to capture reality more faithfully than one based on editing. Comolli insists instead on its artificiality and constructedness: ‘We could [. . .] go so far as to reverse Bazin’s hypothesis and claim that depth of field, far from manifesting a “surplus reality,” actually enables the filmmaker to show less of the real, to play around with masking effects and visual tricks, as well as with the division and distortion of space . . .’32 If Comolli’s critique rings true – at least for some examples of depth of field – then it is all the more true for complex mirror shots. A quick glance at a highly artificial double depth-of-field shot from Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind may lend evidence to this claim: here Rock Hudson, reflected in the mirror and standing in the background, is framed four times – by the screen frame, by Lauren Bacall and Robert Stack, by the mirror frame and by the doorframe. More than in regular depth-of-field shots ‘the director and cameraman have converted the screen into a dramatic checkerboard’, as Bazin once put it.33 On top of allowing a type of editing-without-editing the mirror incidentally also enables a split-screen without the splicing of two shots via optical printer.34 Take Darius Khondji’s brilliant mirror shot at the end of James Gray’s The Immigrant (2013). What we can see is a three-part image: a flat wall on the left, an anterior depth of field outside a window in the middle, and an anterior–posterior depth of field in the mirror on the right. While in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

148

Julian Hanich

Figure 8.19  Written on the Wind, Douglas Sirk (1956).

the middle Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard) sails away with her sister into freedom, Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix) walks into a confined, narrow world, symbolised by the constricting composition with various lattices and frames-within-frames-within-frames. Khondjis’s complex mirror shot thus allows for – maybe even pushes us towards – an oscillation between the three viewing modes discussed so far: from looking onto its flat triptych composition to looking into the anterior depth of the mirror (and the window) to looking beyond the image into the off behind the camera. And the Khondji example also illustrates a specific propensity of the complex mirror shot: since it takes time to orient oneself in filmic space and to initiate the onto– into–beyond oscillation, complex mirror shots are often connected to the long take.

Figure 8.20  The Immigrant, James Gray (2013).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

149

Spatial Complication and Disorientation: Foregrounding the Mirror’s Mediation Finally, mirrors harbour a potential to unsettle the ways spectators look at the image as such by making them insecure about the status of the image or the spatial construction of its mise-en-scène. In fact, the complex mirror shot can profoundly disorient the viewer and thereby foreground the act of viewing and mediation. Here I broadly distinguish between three strategies of mirror disorientation. First, a filmmaker can use unusual mirror imagery, which due to its unfamiliarity demands a reorientation in space and thus a re-evaluation of what can be seen. Take the final scene in Tsai Ming-liang’s splendid slow film Journey to the West (2014). This completely static long-take of four minutes and thirty-two seconds complicates the viewing experience by confronting us with a huge mirror on a ceiling near the entrance of a metro station in Marseilles. Since we are much less habituated to mirrors on ceilings than on walls, both in films and in real life, this complicates our orientation in space, at least initially. Moreover, it also affects the concretisation of offscreen space, as we would have to mentally rotate the mirror reflection not horizontally but vertically. Although we might realise from the beginning that we are dealing with a mirror shot here, it needs some adjustment of the lived-body to the visual complexity of the image upside-down. In Tsai’s case the complication also derives from the fact that the mirror is not framed and only two of its four edges can be seen: the two segments of the image, the houses below and the mirror above, appear fused, almost in a collage-like

Figure 8.21  Journey to the West, Tsai Ming-liang (2014).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

150

Julian Hanich

way. The two segments thus seem assembled as if in a unitary image, but at the same time the viewer has to deal with two different spatial depths: a horizontal and a vertical one. Second, films can disorient through the sheer quantity of mirrors. Already in 1939 the director William de Mille (the older brother of Cecil B.) noted that ‘mirror shots, always the directors’ darlings, became so rampant that the audience frequently had trouble untangling the scene from its reflection’.35 Once we are confronted with an overabundance of mirrors – as in Effi Briest or Veronika Voss – taking reality for its reflection and vice versa can be a consequence. Above I have referred to the similarity of mirrors to door frames and windows: after numerous mirror scenes in Effi Briest I, sure enough, mistook a doorframe for a mirror frame and thus understood a straightforward scene filmed from one room into another to be a reflection. In contrast to the first type of disorientation the viewer is now taken by surprise about the misjudgement, with the potential effect that henceforth the status of the image will be under increased scrutiny: is this a mirror or not? The third strategy concerns the size of the mirror: sometimes filmmakers deliberately place the camera so close to the mirror surface that the mirror fills the entire screen. If a mirror stretches beyond the four edges of the screen, however, we cannot distinguish the mirror image from the ‘real’ image (unless, of course, there are straightforward signs, such as writing that appears in inverted form). The image thus lacks the guiding framewithin-the-frame composition we encountered in earlier examples. When the audience is initially not aware of the mirror and takes it to be a regular shot without reflection, the subsequent revelation of the mirror frame by way of a camera movement, a zoom-out or a repositioning of a character can have, again, a jolting effect. Here we are dealing with the opposite of the previous case: what was taken for a regular shot all of a sudden turns into a mirror shot, as in the example from India Song below. In such cases, it seems as if the filmmaker – for whatever reasons – wanted to disorient the audience, but also to let the spectators experience an unusual metamorphosis of space and a certain wonder associated with this spatial transformation. Some filmmakers even seem to play with our forgetfulness about the status of the mirror image. In video artist Ulla von Brandenburg’s Mirrorsong (Spiegellied, 2012), for instance, the mirror frame is in plain sight at first, before a camera movement toward the mirror slowly relegates the mirror frame into off-screen space. When I watched the film for the first time I was taken by surprise when the frame came back into sight: I had simply forgotten that I was watching the very mirror the title hints at. What von Brandenburg’s film Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

Figures 8.22–8.24  India Song, Marguerite Duras (1975).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

151

152

Julian Hanich

Figure 8.25  Mirrorsong (Spiegellied), Ulla von Brandenburg (2012). Courtesy of Produzentengalerie Hamburg.

teaches us is that it demands a sustained act of focusing on the status of the image by keeping the mirror in working memory. Otherwise we can easily lose the mirror image, literally, out of sight, looking into the image, but not beyond it.36 Making the audience insecure about the status of the image or the spatial construction of its mise-en-scène can lead to a rupture in perception and subsequently initiate an act of reflecting on the reflection. Complex mirror shots, in other words, allow the spectator to become consciously aware of his/her own act of viewing. At the same time, these shots ostensibly foreground the act of mediation by drawing attention to the camera and its position in the profilmic space as well as the space off-screen that can and cannot be seen at the same time. If a director aims at maximising the impression of transparent mediation, using a mirror would be counterproductive as it raises the question of why the director doesn’t show us the scene directly. It is in this double reflexivity – becoming conscious of one’s act of looking and the medium itself – that we find a reason why filmmakers like Sirk, Fassbinder or Duras are fond of complex mirror shots, over and above a thematic use of the mirror as a motif of self-reflection, narcissism or questioning of fractured identity. Although one should always be suspicious of giving too much weight to etymological arguments, it may be appropriate, at the very end, to point out that the Latin word reflectere is used both for the mirroring effect and the act of contemplation.37 Oscillating between looking onto, into, beyond and at in puzzled or contemplative ways: it is in this potentially equivoNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

153

cal and protean engagement with the filmic image that we find the indefinite character of the complex mirror shot. Notes 1. For helpful comments on draft versions on this article, I thank Tom Gunning, Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Erika Balsom, Guido Kirsten, Julian Blunk and Vivian Sobchack. 2. Complex mirror shots can coincide with, but are often something other than what Christian Metz has called a nonreflective mirror, that is, a mirror that ‘reflects something other than the person who looks at it and acts simply as a secondary screen’. Christian Metz, ‘Mirrors’, in Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, [1991] 2016), p. 61. 3. Michel Chion, Film, a Sound Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 481–2. 4. In film studies little attention has been paid to what mirrors imply for the pictorial composition, the organisation of filmic space and the spectator’s viewing activity in a given shot. For a few remarks in this direction, see Metz’ short chapter on mirrors mentioned in Note 2. For a helpful historical study, see Yuri Tsivian, ‘Portraits, Mirrors, Death: On Some Decadent Clichés in Early Russian Films’, Iris, No. 14–15 (1992), pp. 67–83. The research situation is very different with regard to painting. In art history an enormous body of work has been devoted to the function of mirrors in the image composition. Just think of the manifold discussions of Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage Portrait (1434), Diego Velasquez’ Las Meninas (1656) or Edgar Manet’s Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882). See, for instance, Jan Bialostocki, ‘Man and Mirror in Paintings: Reality and Transience’, in Irving Lavin and John Plummer (eds), Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss. Vol. 1 (New York: New York University Press, 1977), pp. 61–72. 5. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Dynamic Square’, in his Film Essays and a Lecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 48–65; p. 49. 6. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU993U_rWj4 (accessed 4 November 2016). 7. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, p. 53. 8. On frames-within-the frame in the cinema, see Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 200–2. See also Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 220. 9. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, p. 202. 10. Eco, Semiotics, p. 205. On mirrors as virtual images, see also Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1985] 1989), pp. 68–70. Here Deleuze also discusses mirror images as subtypes of the crystal image. 11. Pascal Bonitzer, ‘Deframings’, in David Wilson (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma – Volume Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

154

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

Julian Hanich 4: 1973–1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 197–203. Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1963] 2000), p. 75. Mitry, Aesthetics, p. 198. Ibid. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, [1945] 2002), p. 35. Noël Burch, ‘Nana, or the Two Kinds of Space’, in Theory of Film Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 17–31; p. 17. Eco therefore describes the photographic plate as a ‘freezing mirror’, because the reflected referent has ‘frozen’ on the surface, even after the object has disappeared. Eco, Semiotics, p. 222. Bazin coined the term ‘lateral depth of field’ with reference to Jean Renoir’s mobile camera in La Règle du jeu (1939), which according to Bazin behaves like an invisible guest in the centre of the action, revealing what is adjacent to the camera with every reframing: ‘The rest of the scene, while effectively hidden, should not cease to exist. The action is not bounded by the screen, but merely passes through it.’ André Bazin, Jean Renoir, ed. François Truffaut, trans. W. W. Halsey II and Willian H. Simon (London: W. H. Allen, 1974), p. 89. Eco, Semiotics, p. 208. See also Irving Singer, Cinematic Mythmaking. Philosophy in Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 31 and Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema. A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), p. 117. This characteristic was recognised as early as 1911 as a way to establish film as an art form in its own right. Yuri Tsivian (in ‘Portraits’, p. 70) has pointed out with regard to early Russian films that through the use of mirrors directors seized the opportunity to distinguish film from theatre. Intriguingly, Metz writes: ‘Every mirror is like a camera (or a projector) because it “projects” the image a second time, because it offers it a second shot, because it has an emissive power.’ Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, p. 63. To be sure, Bazin introduced this distinction to describe the differences between paintings and films, with the former possessing centripetal and the latter centrifugal tendencies. André Bazin: ‘Painting and Cinema’, in What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 164–9; pp. 165, 166. Additionally, we sometimes encounter mirrors as a noticeable part of the image, but they don’t give us a salient source of reflection. What makes a mirror shot complex is precisely the latter, not the mirror itself. Chion, Film, pp. 481, 482. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), especially chapter 7; Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992), especially chapter 2; Henry Bacon, ‘The Extent of Mental Completion in Films’, in Projections. The Journal for Movies and Mind, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2011), pp. 31–50. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Reflecting on Reflections

155

24. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge, 1978); Julian Hanich and Hans Jürgen Wulff (eds), Auslassen, Andeuten, Auffüllen: Der Film und die Imagination des Zuschauers (Paderborn: Fink, 2012). 25. For examples of complex mirror shots in the silent era apart from the ones mentioned in Tsivian’s article (Note 4), see the references to Urban Gad’s Weisse Rosen (1916) or Af Klercker’s Mysteriet natten till den 25:e (1917) in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 59 and 65. See also the brief discussion of Robert Dinesen’s Under Blinkfyrets Straaler (1913) in www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2010/06/14/dreyer-re-reconsidered/ (accessed 4 November 2016). 26. See Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 69–71; and Chion, Film, pp. 247–9 and pp. 491, 492. 27. Chion, Film, p. 491. For the important distinction between source and emitter of sound, see Chion, Film, pp. 247, 248. 28. David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light. On Cinematic Staging (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 29. See also Julian Hanich, ‘Complex Staging. The Hidden Dimensions of Roy Andersson’s Aesthetics’, in Movie. A Journal of Film Criticism, No. 5 (2015), pp. 37–50. 30. Pascal Bonitzer: ‘Partial Vision. Film and the Labyrinth’, in Wide Angle, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1981): 56–63, p. 59. 31. See also Tsivian, ‘Portrait’, p. 72 and Mitry, Aesthetics, pp. 198, 199. 32. Jean-Louis Comolli: ‘Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field’, in Cinema against Spectacle. Technique and Ideology Revisited (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, [1971–72] 2015), p. 180. 33. André Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, in What Is Cinema?, pp. 23–40; p. 34. 34. Similarly, Metz mentions a number of cases in which diegetic elements seem to mimic optical effects. When Sternberg or Ophüls film through semi-transparent curtains, this has a sensory effect similar to a blur. Or the doors and airlocks of the spaceship in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) are like diegeticised irises or shutters. ‘There is in sum a correspondence, both imperfect and precise, between certain optical effects and certain motifs or diegetic movements.’ Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, p. 57. 35. Quoted in Bordwell et al., Classical Hollywood, p. 98. 36. Yet another type of disorientation based on the size of the mirror can be found in a by now famous scene in Yevgeni Bauer’s last film The King of Paris (1917): Bauer wants us to believe that only half of the screen image is a mirror reflection, while in fact the mirror comprises the entire image and stretches beyond its edges into off-screen space. According to Tsivian, viewers get lost in Bauer’s mirror Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

156

Julian Hanich

game when ‘real’ figures are taken for reflections, and reflected sets are perceived as real ones. Tsivian, ‘Portrait’, p. 77. 37. Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, The Visible and the Invisible: On Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), p. 157.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 9

Cinematographic Indeterminacy According to Peter Tscherkassky: Coming Attractions Christa Blümlinger In the course of his exploration of the more or less hidden relationship between the earliest period of cinema and the cinema of the avant-garde, Tom Gunning has on many occasions cited an article from the end of the nineteenth century which appeared in the New York Mail Express. This article tried to evoke the aesthetic experience of the cinema, taking as its starting point a Biograph film showing a ‘phantom ride’, a moving picture filmed by mounting a camera on the front of a train passing through a tunnel. The journalist says: The way in which the unseen energy swallows up space and flings itself into the distance is as mysterious and impressive almost as an allegory [. . .] One holds his breath instinctively as he is swept along in the rush of the phantom cars. His attention is held almost with the vise of fate.1

In his comments on this passage, Gunning observes that ‘The experience to be reconstituted in these films is the thrill of motion and the transformation of space. The sense of penetration of space by the unseen camera gave the spectator an almost uncanny feeling’.2 His analysis lingers on the challenge inherent in describing a purely visual work of art, just as in conceiving of ‘new sites of perception, beyond the limits of representation’.3 If this commentary allows Gunning to establish a link between early cinema and avant-garde cinema (such as the work of Ernie Gehr or Ken Jacobs, for example), it also leads him to highlight another problem: the difficulty of describing the films of the avant-garde. Evidently, the question of the production of meaning seems inadequate when dealing with films that put signifying processes in peril, continuously avoiding meaning-making while at the same time referring to its processes and codes of construction. Coming Attractions (2010), Peter Tscherkassky’s found footage film, is not a montage film in the most general sense of the term, nor is it a re-edited version of an existing film, as the majority of its pre-existing material consists of out-takes which were never before used. His penultimate ‘chapter’, entitled ‘Two Minutes of Pure Cinema’, condenses elements and motifs from the nine preceding chapters and sequences. It makes explicit allusion to Five Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

158

Christa Blümlinger

Minutes of Pure Cinema (1925) by Henri Chomette, a film in which geometric flowing forms and variations in light pull towards abstraction. ‘Two Minutes of Pure Cinema’, a 2010 homage to Chomette, clearly shows that this experimentation with figuration and disfiguration, fixed forms and mobile forms, light and darkness, the defined and the undefined can also be created out of a material originally meant to make sense, namely to have specific connotations, or mythologies in the Barthesian sense: Tscherkassky uses shots which mostly come from the out-takes of advertisements from the 1960s to the 1980s. As an eminent filmmaker of the contemporary avant-garde, invitee at the biggest film festivals (Cannes, New York, Venice), and winner of numerous international awards, Peter Tscherkassky has become a sort of pioneer artist embodying the constant renewal of filmic forms through the use of preexisting materials. He has created his latest films ‘without’ a camera, in his ‘darkroom’, using developing techniques similar to the experimental work of a photographer. Tscherkassky has expanded upon the usual techniques of plastic transformation by using a very unique contact printing device which lets him create a never-before-seen type of collage within images themselves. For Coming Attractions, he combined this type of manual technique with the contact printing process of a professional laboratory. ‘Two Minutes of Pure Cinema’ begins with formless splotches of light and darkness, with blurry images and negatives. Through these unstable configurations, recognisable figurative zones suddenly form and then dissipate just as quickly. Then, a rather swift-paced montage brings together some of the previous motifs of the film: parts of an advert for laundry detergent, a close-up of a cooking dish, a model running along the edge of a forest, a woman under a hair-drying helmet at the salon, etc. It’s out-take after out-take, all coming from bits tossed aside in production, recorded during the setting-up of a shoot, or from slip-ups during filming. In ‘Two Minutes of Pure Cinema’, each appearance is brief and halting; they are punctuated by slightly longer shots which introduce a sort of slowing effect. One singular shot, jarring in its length as well as its slow-motion effect, thus combines elements of a series of shots that have already been repeated numerous times in a preceding sequence. But this time, the shot is changed on two levels. On the one hand, it introduces a new motif: two figures slowly cycling past. With regard to the source material, it is either a technical experiment unrelated to the actual content of the shot, or a small mishap that takes place as the camera follows a model running to show off her hosiery. Reconfigured by Tscherkassky’s ‘second-hand’ work, this shot becomes the sublimation of both the aleatory and the mechanical, following the tradition of 1920s avantgarde movements. With regard to rhythm as a motif, the bicycles embody Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

159

Figure 9.1  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Figure 9.2  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

160

Christa Blümlinger

the mechanical variation of speed, already at work, though in a different way, back in the seventh sequence. On the other hand, with reference to the composition itself, the shot of the bicycles differs from the multiple repetitions of the film shoot that Tscherkassky reconfigures, recomposes and recombines with other elements and motifs in the seventh sequence, entitled ‘Cubbhist Cinema N.3, The Path is the Goal (Natura morta with Tulips, Guitar, Pork Roast and My Wife in the Bush of Hosts)’. Focusing on the human figure, medium and long panning shots show a model running across a late-summer sunny field. The stationary shot of the bicycles passing by, however, introduces a blurriness to the shot, where the unplanned appearance of the cycling figures ‘clog up’ the neat background which had been carefully prepared for the sequence of the model’s run. This purely functional shot (which had probably been created while checking for the proper movement of the film through the camera) thus introduces a disturbance in terms of its photographic transparency. ‘Cubbhist Cinema N.3’ deals with certain principles of the advertising genre, especially the ellipsis and the notion of seriality, and transposes them into a whole other system: that of art and film history. We see the model running endlessly toward a goal which always remains off-screen. The editing

Figures 9.3–9.6  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

Figures 9.7–9.9  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

161

162

Christa Blümlinger

works both through a serialisation of the mobile poses of the model and through a complex combination with other source material and motifs, in homage to Cubism and Futurism (a guitar, a vase, a page of sheet music), to scientific imagery (the enlarged structures of plants evoking micro-cinematography), or to the mythologies of daily life, just as the advert stages them (a plate of food, a lunch in a garden). In the beginning, we see a re-linking of the figure to itself, by means of superimpositions, negatives, high-contrast prints and other techniques that highlight its contours. This effect is based on a notational conception of the speed of movement which is presented as a homage to the 1920s avantgardes. We find, for example, this type of horizontal multiplication in Futurist painting’s search for a plastic dynamism,4 itself inspired by the chronophotographic recordings and physiological experimentations of Étienne-Jules Marey. In terms of sequentiality, ‘Cubbhist Cinema N.3’ also establishes a serial form. The vertical multiplication of shots creates a repeating chain of certain movements and a repetition of gestures, producing an effect that we could relate back to what Gilles Deleuze called, in reference to Pierre Boulez, ‘generalised serialism’, and in reference to Godard, ‘a cinema of bodies [. . .] in which it is only the postures that form the series [. . .] All successive images

Figure 9.10  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

Figures 9.11–9.13  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

163

164

Christa Blümlinger

form a series insofar as they tend toward a category of self-reflection, the passage from one category to another which determines a change in intensity’.5 (Deleuze distinguishes, here, the vertical construction of the montage, on the one hand, and superimposed categories of a horizontal order on the other hand, ‘order’ referring to, for example, the coexistence of the categories of pictorial and musical.) If Coming Attractions makes explicit reference to Fernand Léger in its fourth sequence, entitled ‘Le ballet monotonique’, by taking the well-known montage loop of Ballet mécanique (1923–4) to its extreme, the seventh sequence reiterates this homage to ‘cubist cinema’ (to use the title of Standish Lawder’s book on Ballet mécanique).6 Tscherkassky preserves Léger’s quick editing, his fracturing of the filmic image (which Léger, who used a prism for this, called ‘the multiplied transformation of the projected image’), his use of domestic objects isolated in space and enlarged7 (a principle he also applies to the fragmentation of female bodies), and his exploration of a variety of cinematographic rhythms and lighting effects.8 The indefiniteness here is not located in the sharpness of the shots or of their components, but rather in their accelerated articulation. In both cases, the creative process9 implies techniques of randomness, of the aleatory and of indetermination. For Tscherkassky, the effects of cutting come from the multiple techniques of the contact printing process – the superimposition and the i­solation

Figure 9.14  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

165

of prints, as well as the possibility of using the film stock as an object of actual imprinting. The highlighting of details, the fragmentation and the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements even within the photogram itself are obviously reminiscent of collage and photo-montage techniques. It is, nonetheless, still not a question of creating what Moholy-Nagy called, in the 1920s, ‘a very precise meaning, a centre of construction that allows for a clear, immediate comprehension’,10 but instead, it is the general dissolution of the space of recognition, informed by what Moholy-Nagy elsewhere called ‘“drunken” screens’.11 Tscherkassky proposes an open, non-hierarchical, and omni-directional field of perception, inside which the forms of compositions are discordant and linked to the processes of montage and collage. What Pierre Boulez called, with reference to Klee, ‘the lateral optic’, a stratified temporal composition,12 could be described as one of the principles of Coming Attractions. Thus, the film establishes relations not only according to a successive ordering of images, but also between their different strata, for example, through the oppositions of light and darkness. The superimposition of layers creates a temporal depth that abolishes the logic of vertical montage. We can also explain this, in the words of John Cage, as a question of creating an ‘indeterminate’ form of writing. The soundscape, conceived by Dirk Schaefer, contributes, moreover, to the plastic transfiguration of images and to the reconfiguration of the shots. It’s here that we can see an effect that, in terms of its relation to the visual image, is not exactly parallel to but still has a lot in common with Tscherkassky’s fragmented and looped composition. In the ‘Cubbhist Cinéma N.3’ sequence, the sounds of a ticking clock and of its rewinding accompany certain camera movements, which do not even stop at the end of the panorama as expected, but instead pivot again towards the original starting point in order to recapture the shot. It’s a question of a sort of musique concrète which remains abstract and autonomous in terms of its relation to the visual image. Dirk Schaefer’s musical work does not replicate the figurative logic of the source material, but by way of a displacement, it shares in its secondary effects: it seems to provoke not only the repetition of the camera movements, but also the multiple sequentialisation of these shots. We might say that, insofar as it is a displaced sign, the mechanical sound of clocks anticipates the slow-motion shot of the bicycles that will later call this particular chapter of the film to mind. Its rhythmic variations on the ‘theme’, more and more complex as it progresses, match the compositional structure of the sequence, corresponding neither to something that would fall under the regime of representation, nor to a metrical logic of images, understood in terms of temporality. In this way, a relationship of contiguity – and not of correspondence – is established between images and sounds. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

166

Christa Blümlinger

The sound is not synchronous: it falls under the tradition of a ‘silent-withsound film’ (according to Fred Camper’s expression), a tradition that had its origin before the beginning of talkies, namely as silent film accompanied by asynchronous sounds and by music.13 Dirk Schaefer conceives of sound in a tradition of ‘noise-ism’ and of music that is concrete and acousmatic, as if produced by a sort of sound sampling reminiscent both of indefinable machinic noises and of what we call ‘white noise’ – the result of an aleatory process where the same spectral density applies whatever the sound frequency. There is not any subordination of the sound to the image or vice versa, but instead a sort of polyphonic conception of two autonomous regimes. If Tscherkassky, in his artist’s statement, explains that ‘his’ version of pure cinema makes reference to John Cage, it is no doubt because of his taste for indetermination and randomness. He calls the forms that he makes out of this material ‘unintentional cinema’.14 The unexpected sequence with the two cyclists, the appearance of the cameraman in a mirror, the bored gesture of a model waiting for filming to begin – these are all slip-ups, if you will, or else the result of equipment checks that have only a functional goal in relation to the making of the film. In Tscherkassky, these out-takes are proof of an inscription of reality upon the film, not only because of the motifs and unexpected gestures of the actors, but also because of the variations in lighting, moments of dazzling white or total darkness, or other types of partial disfiguring. These out-takes highlight the emptiness, the non-signified, a part of the photographic sign that does not yet reveal form or representation but simply light or darkness, or even just pure movement. Accidents and photographic (or filmic) blurring produce not only what Heidegger called a ‘disturbance of reference’;15 they also point to the very expression of the technical error, as Geimer understands it, ‘the affliction of the image by its own materials’.16 Blurring, for Geimer, is not a deficient mode of photographic representation, but simply one of its possible manifestations. As an event, the error is not without natural reference, he explains, since the goal of the photograph is double: it transmits natural phenomena (for example, light), and is, itself, a physical and chemical phenomenon.17 What characterises the technical error above all is the absence of intention in the taking of the photo. This relates to Cage’s ideas about noise. Cage reconsiders the very definition of the notion of silence, as a musical sign, and points out that in the supposed emptiness of the classic definition of silence, the event of the real still happens: ‘Thanks to silence,’ Cage comments, ‘noises can definitively enter into my music – and not just a selection of certain noises, but the multiplicity of all of the noises that exist or come into play.’18 In John Cage’s conception, silence has a Proustian dimension because of its relationship to time, and it refers not to an absence of sound, but rather to an absence of intention.19 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

167

Figure 9.15  Motion Picture (La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière à Lyon) (installation, in detail), Peter Tscherkassky (1984). Image courtesy of the artist.

Boris Porena adds that it constitutes ‘an ear open to the sounds that the world makes’.20 With his predilection for the blurry, the shapeless, and the study of the fundamental components of the photographic code (black and white), Tscherkassky was looking for something that approached Cage’s notion of ‘silencing’ – something that corresponded not to the silence itself but to the separation of sound elements attributed to the musical event. It was a question of attaining something short of filmic-photographic representation. Something that could be situated within the regime of noise, in the sense meant by Foucault when he said, ‘in order for there to be any “message,” there must . . . first be noise’.21 Tscherkassky had produced, with his most conceptual archival film, Motion Picture (La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière à Lyon) (1984), a sort of programmatic theoretical proposition. He had projected a photogramme of the famous Lumière Brothers film onto an assemblage of fifty blank pieces of 16mm film stock, all pinned next to one another on a wall. Put up piece by piece, this created a three-minute film showing only the most basic, primary elements of a photographic image. This gesture, Tscherkassky said, was inspired by reading Umberto Eco and by the idea that we could isolate light-versusdarkness as the fundamental code of photography, analogous to the phoneme in verbal languages, situated at the level of pre-signification. ‘It’s only thanks Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

168

Christa Blümlinger

Figure 9.16  Motion Picture (La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière à Lyon) (installation, pictured together), Peter Tscherkassky (1984). Image courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

169

to its combination with other meaningless particles that the different photographic values of grey can be configured into meaningful elements’.22 Coming Attractions in general and ‘Two Minutes of Pure Cinema’ in particular develop, at the level of the photogramme, superimpositions and transformations of parts of the filmic image, pointing to its instability and figurative variability. In terms of the initial figuration of the source material, the most striking visual motif of this sequence embodies, in a sense, the plastic system of the editing and collages of the entire film: on several occasions (no doubt these shots had initially been planned by a production assistant to be used as signposts), we see a hand held out in front of the camera very close to the lens, hiding a part of the filmed subject, already establishing the object of desire of a future consumer-spectator. The future attraction is under preparation, and Tscherkassky’s film work shows to what extent it is based on a Freudian Fort-Da system, playing with the presence and absence of the figure, which is moreover a fundamental principle of all classical fiction films. Through these slightly monstrous silhouettes, we can only guess at the postures of the bodies posed in the back of the workshop space. This enigmatic and unstable presence of the hand or of a body coming between the camera and its object takes on a metaphorical dimension here: the outstretched fingers, filmed from up close and very out of focus, partially mask the view. This recalls techniques of retouching and cutting, within the images themselves, that the filmmaker performs with a laser pen or with a small flashlight in his darkroom. The recycling of these marginal gestures from out-takes – meant

Figure 9.17  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

170

Christa Blümlinger

in their source material only to denote the signs of production, addressed only to the production’s technicians and aimed at assisting in the editing process – underlines the haptic dimension of the ‘second hand’, ‘handmade’ film. In this way, we could say that Tscherkassky ‘thinks in cinema’23 (in the Deleuzian sense) by introducing the figurative potential of the original film to the material, plastic manipulations of the resulting film. In ‘Two Minutes of Pure Cinema’, the gesticulations are variable but look alike. The act of putting these similar shots, fragmented and separated by moments of black and white, into a series draws out a certain recurrence of specific codes of filmmaking in the second film. We see in it further signs of the filming process, such as the clapperboard at the end of a shot, or the camera and its operator reflected in a mirror, the accidental appearance of a technician, abrupt passages of black or of white – all sorts of leftovers from the production and the editing that were never meant to be shown. Tscherkassky’s methods (and he is obviously not the first filmmaker to re-edit this type of footage) fall under the category of ‘meta-historical’ work, in the sense that Hollis Frampton gave to the term; Frampton invented a tradition by curating and then defining a domain of art. The canon of a meta-historian, according to him, should be constructed like a chessboard, each film being a final step toward virtually arriving at an ‘infinite film’, which would be the be-all and end-all of processes, a sum of all knowledge.24 From this point of view, we could reconstruct the chessboard of Coming Attractions like a stream of interlocking homages. The re-edited elements of ‘Two Minutes of Pure Cinema’ refer back to the now-classic found footage film Standard Gauge (1984) by Morgan Fisher, in which we see the out-takes of Hollywood editing rooms parading by on a lightbox. The title of Tscherkassky’s film also makes reference to another great classic of the genre, already referenced by Morgan Fisher’s film and based on the idea of recreating the logic of a film trailer. A Movie (1958), by Bruce Conner, recycled films of all genres and used, through principles of repetition, the codes of advertising for coming attractions. With his ultra-quick editing of high-contrast images and his model of assembling shots, A Movie was itself already inspired by Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique. If A Movie is, thus, a sort of meta-film25 about American cinema, whose material and textual components it reveals by way of its dadaist inspirations, Tscherkassky’s Coming Attractions is a meta-film which establishes a deep connection between advertising, the films of the earliest period of cinema and the films of the avant-garde. ‘Two Minutes of Pure Cinema’ echoes the beginning of the film, in particular its ‘credits’, which (pre-)condense some of the elements of the films, advertising them as motifs of a coming ‘attraction’. This overture begins and ends according to a principle of repeated montage, reinforced with a score Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

171

Figures 9.18–9.19  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

that produces a regular beat and the repetition of minimalist motifs. On the visual level, we find an editing technique that can be described as ‘point of view’, namely the creation of a link between the subject who looks and the object that is seen: we see a close-up of the eyes of a man, reflected in a rear-view mirror in a negative image, alternating with a close-up of a smiling Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

172

Christa Blümlinger

Figures 9.20–9.21  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

woman nodding her head. The incertitude of the figuration is articulated here in relation to the principle of an off-screen space. In the middle of this credits sequence, the image is divided into two vertical strips, provoking a peculiar sort of lateral montage within the legacy of the split screen. The woman, filmed frontally, shakes her head, repetitively nodding at an off-screen that remains invisible. To the left, in the other part Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

Figures 9.22–9.24  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

173

174

Christa Blümlinger

of this fractured shot that she gestures towards very expressively, a series of motifs accumulates, pointing out, as it were, the figurative composition of the film which comes from all of those commercial film shoots meant for advertising: a vase of tulips, a tractor, glasses of milk, the legs of a running woman, gestures associated with doing laundry, etc. The vertical fracturing is, in part, highlighted by a black bar that creates a tearing effect and exposes the collage technique, borrowed from the tradition of Cubist painting and cinema, a legacy that the film alludes to in a series of film intertitles.26 This collage produces a rupture in the scale of figuration. The horizontal juxtaposition within a divided shot, opposed to the vertical juxtaposition of the point of view, exposes the virtuality of film editing. The notion of the off-screen, lying in narrative cinema within a combinatory dialectic that connects what is visible and what is not, is abolished here. These advertising shots, as they are linked together and juxtaposed, refer, because of their frontality and their direct address, and because of the stationary camera, to the aesthetic of films of the earliest period of cinema, which were still ignorant of the possibilities of editing and its effects.27 Following Tscherkassky’s conceptions, the contemporary found footage film is a meta-film both in the aesthetic sense and in the semiological sense of the word. This applies as much to its materiality and forms as to what Tscherkassky has called ‘latent’ signification,28 thus revealing an analytic dimension to the language of the film (in the same way that Freud spoke of dream analysis). By giving intertitles to its sub-chapters, Coming Attractions refers both to classic avant-garde cinema and to early cinema, a type of cinema that is commonly referred to as the ‘cinema of attractions’, more tightly linked to the idea of the spectacle than to narrative logic. The ironic transformation of certain titles of avant-garde films or early films, or even of works about these film traditions, shows the displacement that Tscherkassky deploys, both in terms of the material he chose and the techniques of his editing. In his artist’s statement for Coming Attractions, Tscherkassky returns to one of the intertitles of the film by drawing out the connection between the ‘cinema of attractions’ (in Tom Gunning’s sense29) and the advertising genre, especially in terms of the uniquely direct relationship between actor, camera and audience.30 By suggesting a resemblance between early cinema and avant-garde cinema, Gunning is above all interested in the representation of space.31 Contrary to the later practices of narrative cinema, Gunning explains, the earliest cinema conceptualises its means of presentation and the way it addresses the spectator in terms of astonishment and curiosity.32 Hence the notion of a ‘cinema of attractions’ that Gunning and André Gaudreault have attributed to a certain class of cinema previously considered ‘primitive’.33 ‘Rather than create imaginary constructions for a diegetic presentation of action’, Gunning Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

175

Figure 9.25  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

writes, ‘[the attractions] openly display their own process of presenting and situate the spectator as a distant observer instead of incorporating them into the fictional universe.’34 Thus, the close-up does not have the function of transmitting a reaction or a character’s affect or of highlighting an important detail, as in later narrative cinema; instead it constitutes what Gunning calls a ‘visual moment’, a means of calling attention to a special effect or to something grotesque.35 The notion of ‘attractions’ that Gunning proposed, in a series of texts, as a new approach to early cinema36 can also be applied to the advertising genre. Gunning himself brings up this connection as a historical relation, with the cinema situated at the intersection of various manifestations of modernity.37 Among the common denominators that the editing of Coming Attractions establishes between advertising, early cinema and avant-garde cinema, the direct address to the spectator is the most obvious element. It is about presenting the attraction. The reference to Méliès’ films by at least two titles, moreover, refers to the techniques themselves which constitute the attraction. Méliès’ use of space, as Gunning rightly points out, establishes a space of impressions, of strata, and of superimpositions – a space of collage.38 By explicitly staging a revisiting of an early cinema that he cites in his intertitles through the recycling of shots taken from a different period Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

176

Christa Blümlinger

Figure 9.26  Coming Attractions, Peter Tscherkassky (2010). All images courtesy of the artist.

Figure 9.27  The Man With the Rubber Head (L’homme à la tête en caoutchouc), Georges Méliès (1901). Image courtesy of the artist.

altogether, Tscherkassky reformulates the position of the meta-historian. Today, the meta-historian cannot ‘invent’ a tradition which has already been established by two successive avant-gardes, that of the 1920s and that of the 1950s. Coming Attractions thus proposes an anachronistic position. The essential gesture of the film resides in the paradoxical promise of its title, which advertises a coming film by returning to the history of the cinema and to the archive. Through such an anachronistic position, Tscherkassky criticises, like Gunning, a teleological vision of film history (including that of the avantgardes). In order to avoid aporias and myths of originality, this successor to the first avant-gardes simply reminds us that montage and collage have always been used, since the beginning of cinema, not only in the production of meaning but also for examining the very conditions of filmic creation. For the aesthetic experience of film resides above all in its ‘invisible energy’, its rhythm, its changing light and its possibilities for conceiving of the image in strata, in series and without hierarchy. The non-synchronicity of images is, at the end of the day, not so much about the destruction or the deconstruction of meaning, but about examining this permanent slippage at the heart of what Thierry Kuntzel called ‘film work’. What Tscherkassky has called – drawing on John Cage – a ‘non-intentional’ cinema would, in this sense, constitute a sort of intensive practice of degrees of indetermination or of indefinition which is the basis of all figurative dynamics. Notes 1. Quoted in Tom Gunning, ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and its Relation to American Avant Garde Film’, in John L. Fell (ed.), Film Before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 363. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

177

2. Tom Gunning, ‘Cinéma des attractions et modernité’, in Cinémathèque, No. 5 (Spring 1994), pp. 129–39. 3. Ibid., p. 138. 4. For example, Giacomo Balla, Effets dynamiques d’un chien en laisse (1912). (Telephone interview with Peter Tscherkassky, January 24, 2011). 5. Gilles Deleuze, L’Image-temps. Cinéma 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985), p. 361. 6. Standish Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1970). 7. Ibid., pp. 120–1. 8. Fernand Léger highlights the value of the object, put on display, through contrast, fragmentation or close-ups. See also Fernand Léger, ‘Autour du ballet mécanique’, in Sylvie Forestier (ed.), Fonctions de la peinture (Paris: Les éditions Gallimard, Folio, [1927] 1997), p. 127. 9. The found footage film always picks something up from its creation, even though it’s being used as a second-hand material. On this point, allow me to make reference to my own study, Kino aus zweiter Hand: Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2009), p. 288. Translated into French by Pierre Rusch and Christophe Jouanlanne under the title Cinéma de seconde main: Ésthétique du remploi dans l’art du film et des nouveaux médias (Paris: Klincksieck, 2013). 10. László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung’, in Patrick de Haas (ed.), Cinéma integral: De la peinture au cinéma dans les années vingt (Paris: Transéditions, [1928] 1985), p. 81. 11. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald & Co., 1947), p. 289. 12. Pierre Boulez, Le pays fertile: Paul Klee, ed. Paule Thévenin (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 55. 13. In order to distinguish between historical forms and the varied techniques of image–sound relations, see also Gabriele Jutz, ‘Not married: Bild-TonBeziehungen in der Filmavantgarde’, in Cosima Rainer et al. (eds), See This Sound: Versprechungen von Bild und Ton/Promises in Sound and Vision, exhibition catalogue (Linz: Lentos Kunstmuseum, 2009), pp. 68–75. Here, Jutz refers to Fred Camper’s notion of ‘silent-with-sound film’. 14. In his artist’s statement, Peter Tscherkassky says, ‘You might also call it an “unintentional cinema”, which is as pure as you can get – a wink to John Cage.’ Peter Tscherkassky, ‘Coming Attractions, Notes by the director’ at http://www. tscherkassky.at/content/films/theFilms/ComingAttractionsEN.html (accessed 15 January 2011). 15. Martin Heidegger, ‘Störung eines Verweises’, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, [1927] 1993), p. 74. 16. Peter Geimer, ‘Was ist kein Bild? Zur “Störung der Verweisung”’, in Peter Geimer (ed.), Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit: Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2002), p. 341. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

178

Christa Blümlinger

17. Geimer shows that, in the history of photography, the epistemic status of such errors varies; an error of reference can even produce an excess of meaning. Ibid., p. 340. 18. John Cage, Pour les oiseaux, ed. and trans. Daniel Charles (Paris: Belfond, 1976), p. 31. 19. If we look at his famous piece, 4’33” (1952), which anticipates certain actions of a pianist who doesn’t play in front of their audience, then it isn’t actually an instance of silence but, instead, of the silencing of certain sounds. Cage was, in turn, influenced by Erik Satie’s works on music and background noises, his genre of furniture music and his composition Cinéma (1924). See also Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 161. 20. Quoted in Daniel Charles (ed.), ‘John Cage’, Revue d’Ésthétique, Nos 13–14–15 (1987), p. 121. 21. Michel Foucault, ‘Message ou bruit?’, in Dits et Écrits, I, 1954–69 (Paris: Gallimard, [1966] 1994), p. 558. 22. Peter Tscherkassky, ‘Epilog Prolog: Autobiografische Notate entlang einer Filmografie’, in Alexander Horwath/Michael Loebenstein (eds), Peter Tscherkassky (Vienna: Filmmuseum Synema Publikationen, 2005), p. 131. 23. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création’, in Trafic, No. 27 (Autumn 1998), pp. 133–42. 24. Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video: Texts, 1968–1980 (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983), p. 116. 25. See David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 156. 26. In his artist’s statement for Coming Attractions, the filmmaker reclaims this legacy explicitly: ‘Another chapter title that refers to Standish D. Lawder’s influential book, The Cubist Cinema (New York, 1975). Meanwhile it also represents a playful allusion to the buddhist [sic] saying that the path is the goal. It is based on a commercial for stockings. We see a woman running across a meadow over and over again, seemingly without a goal she could ever attain. The imagery makes use of common motifs in cubist [sic] paintings (mainly Braque and Picasso), and playfully refers to that wonderful record by Brian Eno and David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) – one of the best pop records of all time. I inserted some Brakhage-Mothlight bushes into the meadow, some coffee party hosts, some “dead nature” in the form of cooked food – and I got my lady running.’ Peter Tscherkassky, http://www.tscherkassky.at/content/films/theFilms/ ComingAttractionsEN.html (accessed 27 January 2017). 27. Embedding a fragment of a shot from fiction cinema is an exception here: Robert de Niro, in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), talking to himself in a mirror. The re-use of this rare frontality is, without a doubt, due to its figurative power, in the rhetorical sense, as a figure of reflexivity beloved of Hollywood cinema. 28. See also Peter Tscherkassky, ‘Rekonstruierte Kinematographie’, in Alexander Horwath, Lisl Ponger and Gottfried Schlemmer (eds), Avantgardefilm: Österreich 1950 bis heute (Vienna: Wespennest, 1995), p. 84. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Cinematographic Indeterminacy

179

29. One of the intertitles of Coming Attractions, ‘An unseen energy swallows face’, is a homage to Tom Gunning, specialist of early cinema and the avant-garde. 30. Peter Tscherkassky, http://www.tscherkassky.at/content/films/theFilms/ ComingAttractionsEN.html (accessed 27 January 2017). 31. Furthermore, Tom Gunning compares American avant-garde cinema with early cinema by highlighting that it isn’t about a true relationship but rather a resemblance. The two practices, he writes, restructured the traditional representation of space as well as a unique relationship between the audience and the spectacle. Gunning, ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space’, pp. 355–6. 32. Gunning, ‘Cinéma des attractions et modernité’, p. 130. 33. See Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault, ‘Le cinéma des premiers temps: un défi à l’histoire du film?’ in Jacques Aumont, André Gaudreault, Michel Marie (eds), L’Histoire du cinema: nouvelles approches (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1989), pp. 49–63. 34. Gunning, ‘Cinéma des attractions et modernité’, p. 130. 35. That said, if attractions can be opposed to the narrative system, both means of address can respond to each other within a single film, ibid., pp. 130–1. Gunning adds that there have always been attractions throughout the history of cinema, allowing for the interaction between cinema and other types of spectacles. 36. A series of texts published around 1990; for a brief bibliography, see also Cinémathèque no. 5 (Spring 1994), p. 129. 37. Gunning, ‘Cinéma des attractions et modernité’, p. 137. 38. Gunning, ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space’, p. 358.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 10

Partying in The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime Carol Vernallis The Great Gatsby’s (2013) ‘arcadian’ party sequence counts as one of the most opulent, densely articulated, and extravagant in film history.1 On its release critics noted its ‘frenetic beauty’, ‘orgasmic pitch’, and ‘Vincente Minnellistyle suavity with controlled vertigo’.2 Décor, costuming, sound, movement, and colour come to the fore because the sequence’s spatial layout cannot be determined. The mélanged soundtrack too refuses to grant the viewer a sense of ground: who is performing and who is not? To which period and community does this music speak? Why this snippet against that? Sound-sources and imagined locations seem to cross and overlap in elaborate vectors. Against a sonic barrage, finely wrought, densely articulated visual details make every instant potentially riveting: within swarming crowds, every extra’s headturn and feather boa seems carefully considered. Fairytale tableaux of hired performers merge with party guests who mimic these tableaux. Ornaments, from paper birds to balloons, are thrown up as complicating scrims. A sense of musicality is carefully established: background performers pop up or flare their arms in response to musical cues, and the speed of moving bodies showcases the music. But even within the spectacle, story both recedes and advances: the crowd’s engagement builds to a moment of class solidarity, but moneyed patriarchy (Gatsby) is offered as a substitute. Meanwhile,

Figure 10.1  Spectacular effects. The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

181

African-American performers and music appear to be prized but linked to an underclass.3 Expertly realised by an arsenal of technicians, the scene’s excessive display speaks to today’s neoliberal order; its extravagant rhetoric feels appropriate for our unfortunate gilded age.4 Indeed, Gatsby’s director, Baz Luhrmann, and others like him, are arguably suited to our current moment of fluid global capital and post-Fordist, neo-liberal, just-in-time labour.5 Luhrmann is one of a group of emerging impresarios: artists who have multiple skill sets, the vision and charisma to engage talented fellow practitioners, an ability to work across platforms and negotiate many markets, and a style that carries across media. He has worked in sound production, and with dance, opera, commercials, music videos, department store windows and more. His aesthetic approach is both an expression and an excavation of the multifarious, highly commercialised mediascape that plays host to these formats and genres. A handful of close analyses consider musical-film numbers in which digital technologies shape both sound and image (Buhler, Kerins, Ashby).6 None considers the kind of opulent aesthetics Luhrmann flaunts. I will show the ways a multitude of techniques in concert present an unassimilable ‘toomuchness’, even jouissance – an overload of pleasure and pain to the point of unbearability. Sensations offered to viewers are both so subtle and fleeting that they sneak in beneath the attentional threshold, and so overwhelming and massive that they stretch beyond it. Musical spectacles have long embodied a kind of surplus, which Richard Dyer argues is comprised of abundance, energy, play, intensity, excitement, transparency, clarity, community and immediacy (the Gatsby party sequence possesses these features too – with clarity and transparency delegated to the lead characters).7 We might trace the party sequence’s lineage from the Tiller Girls and Busby Berkeley through Minnelli, Fosse and Bollywood. But the sheer excess of this sequence contends with these and others. Other postclassical films, musical though not belonging within ‘the musical’, share some of this scene’s aesthetics: the highway battle in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014); the quaaludes-party scene in Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street (2014); and the Mexico City sequence in Sam Mendes’s Spectre (2015). But these examples lack the density of unfolding material and the integration of musical cues; they’re not really that close.8 The scene’s kaleidoscopic, overwhelming aesthetics are enabled by Luhrmann’s concerted honing of his ‘red curtain style’ and his longstanding collaborations with his wife Katherine Martin on set and costume design, and friends Craig Pearce and Anton Monsted for scriptwriting and soundtrack design.9 The film’s development was atypically synergetic. Martin and the other craft departments began design while the script was being written, and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

182

Carol Vernallis

the soundtrack was built before the image. Just as crucially, the heavy use of pre-vis, 3-D and compositing technologies enabled what has been called machinic vision. As Steen Christiansen has said: Instead of a cinema based on human perceptual structures, we now have a ‘post’ cinema based on non-human perceptual structures. Motion capture cameras, virtual cameras, and synth cameras all produce images that go beyond the human sensorium and reconfigure it in the same process.10

This scene offers much more than a first- or even a twentieth-time viewer can absorb. The film’s strategies for what Mark Wolf has called ‘world building’ also contribute to the scene’s overwhelming, sublime aesthetics.11 Its transmedial approach draws from many external sources and reconfigures them. Luhrmann fastidiously adapted Fitzgerald’s book, for example, using the original dialogue for Nick Carraway’s introduction to Jay Gatsby at that first extravagant party in Gatsby’s mansion. Luhrmann and his team referenced jazz-era sound recordings, films and photographs as well as drawing on academics and the general public (the latter through a website that solicited comments and feedback). Through these contributions, Luhrmann was able to create a responsive historical document. But he was just as willing to distort – the costumes have been contemporised, hip hop and EDM have been mashed up with jazz. Careful reproduction along with the willingness to displace contributes to the scene’s disorienting effects. Analysing this scene provides secondary gains: an opportunity to extend the growing field of audiovisual relations, from writings on commercials, music videos, television title-sequences and narrative-film soundtracks, to the more purely spectacular. The Gatsby sequence seems unique, but it may augur a new style. Some of my approaches and methods, both parametric and temporal, developed for music video, post-classical cinema and YouTube analyses, can be applied to this scene, but not all. I’ve claimed that music video’s image aims to draw our attention to aspects of a song – ‘here’s what’s special about a rhythmic detail, a timbre, a hook’. Now it feels as if to analyse music video is to harvest low-hanging fruit: find the multitude of relations between sound and image.12 But Luhrmann’s sequence aims for barrage and bedazzlement. It buries its processes and techniques, especially those meant to establish audiovisual relations. Still, a parametrically-based approach lends insight. I will spend the bulk of this chapter describing the ways nineteen techniques pull the viewer affectively and proprioceptively in different directions. Towards the end of this chapter I will aim to place these techniques in relation to each other, with a particular attention to moments when things come forward temporally, but Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

183

I encourage readers, as they move through the chapter, to try to do so as well. How much weight does a particular technique carry at a particular moment? I am often unsure; for me, finding the structure for the party sequence has often felt like being the security person watching the X-rays of suitcases go by. It can be hard to find patterns. Many features contribute simultaneously to a texture that can only be understood in retrospect, if ever. Perhaps eyetracking software, MRI and EEG, for both new and repeat viewers, might tell us something. But remove one or more of these nineteen techniques and my guess is we would not have our effect. We would have something blunter, more like a scene directed by Michael Bay, Peter Jackson or Martin Scorsese. We would lose that overwhelming ‘wow’ that fixates us, for ten long minutes, like a deer in headlights. 1. On the Surface: Spectacular Overload Gatsby’s first party sequence showcases a dazzling variety of ornamentation: snowflake-speckled orbs, enormous white balloons, pastel-coloured confetti, metallic streamers and drizzling glitter, paper birds, girls on swings and girls

Figure 10.2  Spectacular overload. The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Carol Vernallis

184

pouring wine, fans of water and fans of feathers, ostentatiously dressed faux-sailors and navigators, lovers and revellers peering out of windows and archways ornamented with ivy, fully dressed partiers diving into pools with inflatable zebras, a few older women, virtually no African-American males, and, one notes, too many white, elderly, privileged men – with young ladies to assist them. In the moments when these amass, viewers-experiencers may perceive a blurring of vision. 2. The Monumental, the Miniature and the Stochastic This scene foregrounds three deformations of classical spatial relations: 1) some of the background’s details resemble the miniaturised tableaux of Fabergé eggs; 2) large chunks of architecture and human forms loom in the foreground; 3) between the large and the small, the overall swirl of paper and confetti, streamers and miniature cut-out butterflies, along with multitudes of people, pushes the scene toward the stochastic.13 The viewer cannot shift perspectives quickly enough, subsequently experiencing a sense of aural and visual fixation as well as misdirection. 3. A Prismatic Landscape The depiction of Gatsby’s chateau contributes to a sensation of kaleidoscopic overload. ‘It’s like an amusement park,’ says Nick, ‘wow.’ The mansion’s long rectangular ballroom abuts an impossibly long entrance hallway; one of the ballroom’s lengthy sides connects to this main entrance and the other provides an exit to the bay. Once inside, it seems we are led straight back – past the winged and pedestalled woman – to the organist. In truth we veer sharply right. Before we can orient ourselves, we cut quickly to three performers – a Cab Calloway-like band leader and twin dancers – whom we might assume are performing in the hall. But here we’ve somehow been transported outside the home onto a lower patio. Suddenly we’re ferried down again, to a patio with a pool ringed by an orchestra, and the pool’s centre, a small musical ensemble that inexplicably vanishes. From there a vertiginous drop leads to the bay. Next, up again, to a second-storeyed library. The camera shifts unpredictably among five tiers. The party’s terrain does not become clear until nearly dawn, when the servants, Nick and Gatsby are left to survey the evening’s wreckage.14 Both steadying and disorienting the viewer, the camera cuts away repeatedly and briefly to a new location before we shift to it. During Nick’s name-checking of the grand hall, two gossip columnists dance on the pool’s star-patterned mosaic, but not yet having seen the pool, we cannot get our Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

185

bearings. Some of Nick’s and Jordan’s trajectories are also confusing. The two walk to the patio and then decide to search for Gatsby. Suddenly they are two floors up, with ‘Owl Eyes’ in the library, and then three flights down at the pool. Transported? Absolutely.15 Many side patios and antechambers too cannot be placed in clear spatial relation. A steadying moment seems to appear at the midpoint, when the camera makes one rapid downward tilt, but the scene’s content is too ornate. The four flights of Gatsby’s chateau appear veiled behind lace and nets comprised of various-sized butterflies, spangles, miniature lights, larger orbs and spider web-like tree branches – a fairy-tale-like Amazonian jungle with its own produce, plants and birds, densely entwined.16 And how many revellers are in attendance? A ‘jelly beans in a jar’ approximation might suffice, but the jar’s size cannot be determined. Still, by the scene’s end, formal divisions based on stylistic approach and location might be determined. These work in contradictory ways based on a viewer’s attention. Reading 1: starting from the clip’s end and reading backwards: Gatsby’s bay is a site of drowning, desire and loss. The poolside provides possibilities for decadence and sexuality. The performance patio and great hall are a space for community and engagement. The high library stands for social climbing, knowledge and patriarchy. Reading 2: after subsequent viewings, an audience-member might notice the ways sections have themes and their abutments generate a frisson. The drive to the mansion and the revellers tumbling out of cars could be said to

Figure 10.3  The mansion: layout cannot be determined until the scene’s end. The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Carol Vernallis

186

be like a Warner Brothers cartoon;17 the name-checking of revellers in the grand hall has a nineteenth-century feel, with small-town folk viewed through stereoscopes; the first patio is more modern (the Cab Calloway ensemble), and the instant when Jordan and Nick first meet is more urban still (note the Noel Coward references); the patio below suggests old money and east-coast primness (a kind of display that might steal Jordan away). The pool is kaleidoscopic and decadent.18 This sequence resembles director George Cukor’s famous parties, when, after the industry brass had headed home, the gay and socially progressive guests would get drunk in his pool. The scene’s closing brings lead actors and crowds into more ordered formations. 4. Audiovisual Trajectories (Large-scale!) The camera and soundtrack take paths that reassure and disorient us. At the scene’s opening the camera tracks behind cars, and over a ring of trees. A crescendo of organ, drums and trumpets speeds past them until it is overwhelmed by the jazzy wail of a single trumpet. A similar climb closes the scene: we make our way up a tremendous flight of stairs, to Gatsby’s introduction of ‘I’m Gatsby’, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and a trumpet’s split note. We also swoop up to the dubious descendant of Beethoven, organist Ewing Klipspringer, and to our sudden meeting of Owl Eyes on top of a ladder in the upstairs library. There’s Jordan’s and Nick’s climb to the grand hall’s high balcony, and dancer Gloria Gray’s luminous entrance established more aurally than visually.19 Audiovisual drops feel even more vertiginous (the crane shots and overheads of the pool). 5. Splintered Narratives Within the spectacle, narrative unfolds, realised primarily as struggles for status.20 Nick Carraway, the only reveller to receive an invitation, must find Gatsby; ‘Why me?’, he wonders, as he searches among the crowds. Jordan materialises as a potential lover, and she and Nick flirt, but then she’s stolen quickly by a rich man. Perhaps Nick’s bruised ego can be salved if he deciphers the party’s mysteries. How is it that, like the enchanted monster from ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Gatsby has not been seen by anyone, and everyone from all of New York can party every weekend at his home, in his absence? As Nick watches, the partygoers’ dance unfolds with a radical potential for social transformation – a new classless solidarity. How might the rapscallions and ne’er-do-wells introduced at the scene’s opening help facilitate this radical transformation? Who is ‘Owl Eyes’, lurking in Gatsby’s library and inciting Jordan and Nick to ever more Scooby-Doo-like investigations? After Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

187

Jordan has been stolen away, and the crowd’s moment passes, is Gatsby the paternalistic figure who will bind Nick’s wounds? And what about other narrative trajectories – those white bankers and their African-American mistresses? The clutch of gay men gathered by the pool? The gamblers, senators and executives who might make secret deals that entangle everyone, or the vice squad that might shut everything down? Will all become distracted by the faux movie stars? Multiple branching narratives can disorient a viewer. Is she attending to the best one? 6. A Postmodern Soundtrack The soundtrack contributes additional layers of phrasing, the strongest pulling towards four orgasmic explosions: 1) ‘Bang!’ and the whiteout of the chandelier; 2) ‘Shot my baby, bang!’ and the camera’s rocketing over East Egg’s peninsula; 3) Fergie’s ‘A Little Party Never Hurt Nobody’, and bursting streamers over at the pool; 4) Gatsby’s, ‘I’m Gatsby’ and the trumpeter’s split note. Complicating the image, Gatsby’s soundtrack suggests a celebration of the potential power of the masses, the hope for democracy and community. Many musical styles coexist – baroque, classical, EDM, rap, pop, honky-tonk, Dixieland, modern jazz. Though cuts between musical segments are often sharpened and jarring (an ‘extra’ 2/4 measure appears unpredictably),21 added sonic details and heightened audiovisual relations grant the segments equal play. The descending melodic line into Fergie’s ‘A Little Party Never Killed Nobody’ suggests a search for a habitus, where everyone might participate; the split note before Rhapsody in Blue takes away some of its overblown grandiosity; the lowered volume of the Dixieland music ameliorates the showy displays of wealth on the patio; ‘A Little Party Never Killed Nobody’’s hard four-on-the-floor beat might overwhelm listeners, but the arrangement breaks down in the library scene. Musical segments also share material, creating a sense of conviviality. The organ cheerily takes up a counter-melody against will.i.am’s tune ‘Bang Bang’, and the Dixieland clarinet and trumpet continue to riff on it. The soundtrack’s musical samples foreground odd, misplaced details that create an additional charge; when one abuts another, the lack of clear genre boundaries adds an edge. Alongside the famous Bach toccata in D minor that heralds our entrance to Gatsby’s chateau, ululations appear uncharacteristically in the mix. The vocal sample from ‘Bang Bang’ devolves into a nervous, reiterating ‘ang’, as if both the singer and the sample had become infected. Several musical cues accompanying the grand hall’s notorious guests belong to the carnival, and one becomes so parodic it sounds like a hurdy-gurdy. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

188

Carol Vernallis

The soundtrack is haunted by the spectre of automation. Especially at section endings, a sample speeds up and repeats, as if jammed in a mechanical device (the ‘bang, bang, bang’ vocal fragments before the camera takes flight over East Egg; or the sudden ‘whir-whir-whir’ as flapper Gloria Gray takes centre stage). We are not watching a party scene, but rather a mechanical phantasmagoria. Musical cues can also reassure the viewer: in the grand hall, generic associations with musical cues inform relations between notorious guests. With music, Klipspringer becomes more clearly ridiculous; boss Walter Chase seems more comical; the heiresses comparing inheritances are cunning and modern; the high school dropouts and morality protectors become more quaint and absurd. Viewers experience a kind of hide-and-seek with the mysterious soundtrack as they 1) see and hear performers, 2) hear music without seeing performers and 3) see performers playing instruments not on the soundtrack. Music often leapfrogs the performers, reaching us from distant locations. Musical cues also collide in midair, as if Gatsby’s sonic space might need a sonic air-traffic controller: the poolside performing group soars over Cab Calloway’s music to reach the organist in the grand hall, for example, while we remain on the patio. The visible and audible trumpeters on the patio provide the clearest sense of stability (their music connects with the scene’s opening blare, as we swoop up to Gatsby’s chateau, and later to Gatsby’s self-introduction and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue). The organist Klipspringer might seem like our guide, but he remains uncanny, his goofiness discrediting him. (Music arrives from outside his aural peripheries – the patios – and his riffing feels beyond the performerly-virtuosic; he thereby seems even more Looney Tunes ­cartoonish. Non-diegetic drums pound underneath him.)22

Figure 10.4  Varieties of musical performance: some we see; some we hear; some we see and hear. The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

189

The images of musicians who perform but lack sound are disorienting – a flautist, banjoist and harpist, and the small ensemble with a handsome singer, who appear in the pool’s centre, to then quickly vanish. Also ghostly are the musicians we do not see – a pianist on an out-of-tune bar piano and an ukuleleist – but especially the female divas. (Where might Scherzinger and Fergie perform? Large mics in front of the Cab Calloway figure and small ensemble’s bandleader suggest that sounds carry, but we never discover where they go.) Though we might assume that Fergie’s ‘A Little Party Never Killed Nobody’ is a live event, like the EDM music playing by the driveway and the upstairs library, it has no verifiable source. The mash-up of musical materials may contribute to the viewer’s sense of being under barrage; the indeterminate sourcings of sound can also elicit a viewer’s anxiety that she’s attending to the wrong events. 7. Emphatic, Sing-songy Dialogue Dialogue is repetitive, alliterative, and phrased to resemble song lyrics embedded within a music video.23 Over time, dialogue winnows to ‘I’m Gatsby’. Our quest to know Gatsby provides a recurring goal, but as John Belton has noted, Nick’s first voice-over resembles the news reporter’s description of Citizen Kane’s (Orson Welles, 1941) Xanadu. We seek a man who lacks a centre.24 Nick says of the crowd, ‘Billionaire play-boy publishers, and their blond nurses . . . Heiresses comparing inheritances on Gatsby’s beach . . . My boss, Walter Chase, losing money at the roulette tables . . .’ Later, revellers proclaim: ‘He was a German spy during the war’ . . . ‘No, no, no, no. He’s the Kaiser’s assassin’ . . . ‘I heard he killed a man once’ . . . Owl Eyes muses: ‘You won’t find him . . . ! This house and everything in it, are all part of an elaborate disguise. But Mr Gatsby doesn’t exist’ . . . ‘Which one; the prince, the spy, the murderer?’ Then, Nick says, ‘They say he’s third cousin to the Kaiser and second cousin to the devil!’, and Gatsby replies, ‘I’m afraid I’m not a very good host, old sport . . . I’m Gatsby’. 8. Daubed Colour The scene’s colour arc, described schematically, includes a background of teal blue and blueish green, an early instance of a very large blot of bright, yellowy orange, dabs of magenta purple with pink, crossing into the scene’s end, with a darker, congealed blood-red (also featured a bit in the beginning). White sets off sections and establishes phrasing. At the scene’s end, the colour palette Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Carol Vernallis

190

reduces to white and gold with a spot of blue. As such, the scene moves from energy to quietude (and at a subconscious level, provides a process a viewer might follow). Dabs of colour create flow and visual interest. The oomph of the tracking shot with its corresponding line of millionaire trust-fund women with their orange martini glasses and fans projects because suddenly, at the previous shot’s end, a woman with a fantastical, ornate Egyptian headdress in bright orange momentarily steps into view. The late-evening, varied reds around the pool are also striking. Suddenly an obese woman in a deep red bathing suit and cap, a more brilliant and brighter red-dressed couple on a raft, and the performers’ dark red masonic hats appear. Often colour patches seem out of reach, perhaps encouraging the viewer to strain past where she is (while the green silk wallet a woman presses to her breast as she gazes at Gatsby seems close, the iridescent green dancing on the bay’s surface is much further away – Gatsby’s green light). It takes a lot of blue, white, silver and gold to close the scene and the colour arc’s trajectory. Overall, colour helps tell time (from a night that’s young to one that’s past). Colour dabs also create a sense of futurity; the viewer’s eye reaches out to grasp them. 9. Cinematographic Rhythm The multi-angled shots are rapidly edited. As the seemingly weightless camera drifts while it subtly reframes, it seems slightly dazed. But when striking musical material comes forward (the bass line against the appearance of heiresses with inheritances, or the horns filling in the arrangement of Fergie’s ‘A Little Party Never Hurt Nobody’), the camera suddenly snaps to, tugging a bit harder and showboating with a tracking or moving crane shot. This is what I’ve called mixing board aesthetics, a stylistic approach common in music video and much post-classical film. Here audiovisual elements unpredictably come to the fore and recede, suddenly claiming a viewer’s attention, much as a record producer brings elements forward and back by raising and lowering faders at the audio mixing board.25 The uncertainty of unfolding events can itself elicit a viewer’s engagement with both the image and the soundtrack. 10. Emergent Tableaux One of the party sequence’s most striking features, the deployment of crowds, can be understood more deeply through two overlapping, non-simultaneous perspectives: as collections grouped into larger crowds, smaller groups of people, pairs, and individuals; and as tableaux and the people around them. Here I define a tableau as an allegorical and/or picturesque disposition of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

191

people and objects. These tableaux momentarily crystallise and then disappear. Let me discuss tableaux first. Fairytale tableaux are staged, with musicians playing instruments appearing on the soundtrack or not. Other employees, dressed in bird or marinethemed costumes, pose or perform brief routines. A giant, female firebird at the scene’s beginning beckons guests. Near stairs, a magenta and pink peacock-dressed ballerina spills glitter from a giant champagne bottle. Two women with headdresses ride blown-up balloons of white geese and wear darting silver fish around their necks (a confusing pairing). In the far distance, blue-green mermaids – or sirens – perch on rocky outcrops. But then the party guests engage with tableaux in ways that lend them a fairytale ambience too. A tanned blonde androgyne of Gatsby who says ‘I heard he killed a man once’, steps back with two upper-crust boys into a tableau. These guests suddenly look like they’re posed on a parade float. Tableaux contribute to a sense of charm, romance and magic. In the grand hall, female twins encircle and then pass an elderly gentleman, while another man looks on enviously. Behind this scene of unrequited desire, a giant sculpture of a woman’s head underscores the women’s allure. When two fratboys in pinstripe suits run past a waiter, another two wield an overhanging garland-frame behind them; next to them, three ingénues dance in formation, as if echoing Botticelli’s Spring (or a Victorian restaging thereof).26 The boundaries between tableaux and the crowds are porous. Tableau elements disperse and mingle among the crowd. Next to the bird-woman who pours glitter are two more revellers with hats resembling whole birds nesting on their heads. A woman’s fantastic orange-bird headdress also appears, suddenly suggesting a miniature aviary. One of Nick’s name-checked guests, the movie star, wears a spiked headdress so enormous that she seems to become one of the ornamental displays. Behind her, in the recesses of a smaller room, are her African-American ladies-in-waiting. For a moment we sense we’ve peered into a private world. Tableaux also adopt larger forms. In the grand hall, guests line-dance in giant S-shaped patterns, and on the patio, the audience masses and builds up to a circular, centripetal, tiered structure topped by a bird-winged woman. A multi-spoked constellation! This image of celebratory community is wide. Additional resonance is gained through the soundtrack’s retro disco swoops.27 Most densely articulated is Nick’s fantastical climb to see Gatsby, like in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), with Gatsby resembling the Statue of Liberty. Nick ascends as partiers stream downstairs, but the upward sweep remains prominent. Nick must bypass a cluster of four women, some with silver caps and silver shawls, like minarets. In the distance the bandleader encourages Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

192

Carol Vernallis

Figure 10.5  Tableaux momentarily crystallise. The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013).

him on with gesticulations of ‘up, up!’ while wielding his baton, musicians pop out of their chairs and a streak of white light cuts a path towards them. A man with an unbuttoned white shirt raises his bottle emphatically toward the sky. Upward and out, the scene moves towards closure as crowds stand in more regularised formation with arms raised skyward. Throughout the scene, tableaux, as they crystallise, create momentary senses of enchantment. 11. Narrative Emerging out of Tableaux A more modern sexuality becomes available to Nick and Jordan as narrative elements cross between them and events in the background. In an alcove, a gentleman surrounded by folds of white fabric jumps up as if he’s had his pants pulled down; next, a woman on a swing comes forward with her legs splayed. Jordan confirms this bequeathed sexuality by languorously lifting her veil before her eyes, while an elderly white businessman tenderly draws a woman of colour closer to him. Later on the patio three incidents in the background bring Jordan and Nick even closer together: 1) an exoticised, seemingly torso-less woman (the camera’s framing reveals hips and legs only), wearing zebra-striped tights, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

193

appears on a ledge (though these legs may be enormous, artificial leaves); 2) an African-American woman, with eyelids painted silver, passes next to them, as revellers criss-cross behind her. She also wears the scene’s only other iteration of the silent film star’s dress. That moment seems charged with racial ambiguity. What lingers now? 3) Head-dressed dancers next to the bandleader cross their legs directly over his lap, creating one three-figured composite. Jordan and Nick now seem like predestined lovers. The party scene’s merging of tableaux and attendees is facilitated through contagion, repetition and foreshadowing. 12. Contagion Music video’s aural and visual elements often seem to seep across borders. There might be a band performing followed by an inset narrative featuring a couple’s trials. Suddenly, the colour or a prop next to the band might appear in the inset narrative. It seems as if the music could be responsible for these permeable boundaries.28 In music video I call this process contagion. In the party sequence, champagne bubbles poured on the ground turn to gold. Floating up and morphing into gigantic orbs, they reassert themselves as enormous sky-placed ovaries, fertilised by the fireworks behind Gatsby, to then take leave through the night. Martini glasses tinkle like the piano’s keys. Confetti assists with narration. A gentleman lands a blue piece of glitter when he finds a young miss; similarly Jordan, dabbed with a red blotch of metal, grieves over Barton’s theft of her (why might confetti tell a story?). Revellers and employees also seem to shift racial categories. The Cab Calloway figure should be African-American, but he’s white. There should be some AfricanAmerican musicians playing (they’re on the soundtrack and many perform at Gatsby’s second party, but they remain unseen). One African-American male wears a stovetop hat, an accessory typed as European American. The organist is dubiously descended from Beethoven, but really belongs in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Yet the evening’s end turns stolid – glitter and fireworks shift to gold and silver, and even the tubas’ open bells and the jellyfish-like umbrellas bobbing on the horizon become more shinily metallic. The first half of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is digital rather than performed by live musicians. Miniature beachcombers are digitally composited in. Everything hardens into currency. 13. Foreshadowing and Underscoring The modes of what theorists and I term foreshadowing and underscoring ground and yet destabilise the viewer. These techniques, because they work in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

194

Carol Vernallis

the service of form, feel authorial, yet they also bewilder because they unfold near or below the level of conscious perception.29 Luhrmann acknowledges the effectiveness of partially revealing a motif before its primary appearance (foreshadowing). Gatsby’s spectacular entrance at the close of the party scene is prepped for by many devices, including not only of his ring (and a corresponding metallic sound), his female lookalike (who says, ‘I heard he killed a man once’) and dialogue, but also additional subtle effects. At the scene’s opening, pinstriped men toss hats back and forth. The flat straw hats, and many waiters’ platters hoisted above the crowd, prepare for Gatsby’s palming of a waiter’s silver dish. A white directional light often appears in key moments in the scene, as does a ‘whiteout’ of the full frame. The great displays of light before and behind Gatsby upon his spectacular appearance seem prefigured. Other touches also provide continuity for the scene. Martini glasses piled up in tiers on books on the library’s table seem like a memory of the multilevelled spaces below. The ‘orb theme’ (culminating in those fertilised skybound ovaries) continues through the library scene (a large orb-like sculpture stands behind the table). Enormous feather fans of the pedestalled bird-woman wave in-sync with activities in the foreground (underscoring). As the party scene closes, fan-shaped fireworks appear over the lake. As the camera turns back to the chateau and we spy a duplicate of Jordan heading out of the door and another duplicate, this time of Gatsby in the other direction, the fountain’s fans embrace us from both sides. A little earlier, men with red-striped jackets had seemed to enclose the viewer in a ‘cupping’ gesture. Now, gazing at Gatsby, a woman pulls a green purse to her chest. On the other side, the lake takes on the same soft green – the narrator’s green light. In multiple ways, we’re embosomed. Gatsby tells Nick, ‘If there’s anything you want, just ask for it, old sport’. 14. Patterning: Follow the Zebra Stripes How finely detailed is the party scene? Follow the zebra stripes – which form a line running through the scene’s entirety. A clutch of pinstripe-suited men leap through the mansion’s front doors – sporting white, red and multicoloured lines. Nick wears a striped bowtie. The torsoless woman’s zebra-striped tights complement the zebra pool-toys and similarly striped floats. Helping to form the large circle of dancers, a red-haired man, wearing a red and white pinstriped jacket, gesticulates in the foreground. Late in the revelry the party’s few African-American women congregate at the pool’s lower edge, and one Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

195

Figure 10.6  Follow the zebra stripes. The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013).

dances with a red-and-black-striped, enormous plush boa. Earlier, another had worn a similar one – and these two fashion moments secure a sort of closure. As Nick climbs to encounter Gatsby, stripes return with a vengeance. Several men in red-striped suits suddenly encase him. Do patches of stripes, black and white provide an image with the means to accommodate a wider range of colour and finer detail?30 Jagged shaped stripes may shift register, foreshadowing the sharp turns and zig zag gestures that crowds, and most particularly Jordan, make. These complement the larger circular patterns. 15. Foley Sounds and Post-production Effects In the main hall a ‘swish’ sounds on the fourth beat, and then makes its way to the downbeat, thereby contributing to the scene’s sense of revving acceleration. This sound’s indeterminate source may be glitter poured from the feathered woman’s enormous, blown-up champagne bottle. Suggestive of an antiquated camera mechanism, the ‘swish’ triggers shifts among Nick’s series of characters. There’s also a sound like a blade against a knife-sharpener that conjoins with Gatsby’s ring in close-up before we meet him. A sense of regular rhythmic sound-effects returns when revellers take Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

196

Carol Vernallis

dives into the pool. Crowd sounds run nearly continuously through the scene. Especially through Fergie’s ‘A Little Party Never Killed Nobody’, crowd sounds build in waves. The vocal in the song ‘Bang Bang’ gradually becomes thinner and more mechanical, perhaps signifying young, wealthy women’s robotic qualities, or an embrace of the modern. With Fergie’s ‘You’re Either Mine or You’re Not’, the song pans hard right and then left, with the volume brought up and down, to accentuate the crowd’s surges. Through an intermedial blurring, revellers seem to toss music among one another. Small phrases of overlapping bands can also be heard (will.i.am’s patter subtly rises in the mix when Jordan talks to Nick). Sound effects are often disjunct from their sources, creating a jarring, often disorienting effect. Yet the repetition of some sound effects establishes a pulse, providing a momentary sense of a ground. Sound effects often intimate a sense of the mechanical. 16. Directing Actors, Gesture and Movement: Crowds, Groups and Individuals Luhrmann’s parents were competitive ballroom dancers. Luhrmann may have drawn on these experiences when choreographing actors and crowds. Moulin Rouge! (2001) has a spectacular can-can sequence: equal care would likely have been taken for Gatsby’s party sequence, especially since, as Fitzgerald’s novel notes, it was Gatsby’s means of luring Daisy. How Luhrmann achieved his choreography has not yet been documented. Most likely he began with full-colour drawings; blocked his costumed extras as avatars in pre-vis 3-D software; gave performers eyelines to match, marks to hit, and simple gestures to perform in rehearsal; and then rearticulated performers’ bodies in post-production (it is now technically possible to move figures in space – after filming – to tug an arm this way or that, turn a head further to one side or another). Luhrmann’s crowds look different from the elaborate CGI-enhanced sequences we see in today’s films, or of crowds in photographs and films from the Prohibition era. As mentioned, rivulets of subgroups cut through larger bodies of people; people cross in multilayered patterns behind key performers; heads turn in alternating directions for heightened intensity. Stills reveal how the extras in Gatsby depart from what we see in other films: faces suggest a blend of the Sgt. Pepper’s cover and German expressionist painting. Each is intricately rendered and, in relation to one another, impossibly in focus. Considering individual key figures, Luhrmann moves them around as if they were dancers, even in the most ordinary scenes. Later, Gatsby, readying Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

197

for his rendezvous with Daisy at Nick’s house, turns 360 degrees before stepping up to Nick’s porch – a superfluous gesture, but executed so seamlessly it reads as poetic. In the party sequence’s library scene, Jordan and Owl Eyes carry on a conversation while ‘dancing’ – Jordan, stagily flicking lights on and off while flaring out her arms and fingertips, and Owl Eyes rhythmically wobbling. In the party sequence, Luhrmann moves larger groups of figures in surprising ways. In the grand hallway, performers pour forth like lava. Men in striped suits cut a faster rivulet (what a detail, a sudden line of white pearls and flowers in women’s hair form a second line). For contrast, ‘bang!’, a glowing chandelier fills the frame, intercut with a winged, pedestalled goddess – the lava-like crowd combusts. On the patio, as the MC announces ‘a jazz history of the world’, the crowd bursts forth. Now crowds and their dance-influenced choreography: in the stairwell two women kiss one another twice, and one raises her palm in a salute. Oddly gestured, the couple’s movements may have been choreographed as patterning to lead into the second Cab Calloway dance number. As the Calloway figure starts dancing, two men behind him toss their arms skyward, leaping in the air and then turning in pursuit of a woman to their right. A second row of men, two rows back, follow suit. These gestures help trigger the dance movements in the foreground, almost like a shudder. And again, this time from an unknown trigger, a shuddering movement ripples through the crowd: a sea of hats turns, beginning from the foreground and then sweeping towards the back, most likely to pick up the soundtrack’s staccato ‘bang-bump bump’. The bandleader and his dancers also rotate their heads in subtle jerking motions (resembling birds?).31 In sped-up motion, near Gatsby at the scene’s close, two flapper women run nervously past him as if guests had finally morphed into birds. Again there’s a concerted pattern at the pool, when revellers alternate diving in: first, in plunges a fully dressed diver, then another from the side. The third holds her handstand through the showy athletic event, then leaps backwards, feet first, into the water. The timing of the dives must have been practised. Choreographer Doris Humphrey has claimed that a dancer’s gestures cut clearly phrased visual lines in space.32 As Nick dances at the pool, counting off each beat, he twirls like a top while using his foot as a break. It’s not a pattern a dancer might choose, unless it’s for the camera.33 While the line of musicians in red hats step forward, hold still, and then bob together on the beat, one couple whirls through the crowd from the frame’s left to its right. They’re close enough to the pool’s edge to put themselves at risk; it’s not something dancers might deploy at a party in the absence of judges to impress. Almost unseen, it’s a beautiful visual effect. The subtle play between moving line and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Carol Vernallis

198

staccato articulation shows off much of the music, but the patterning is so subtle it feels almost below the level of conscious perception. Overall, the scene’s carefully choreographed dance gestures create a sense of fascination. 17. Individual Figures Crowds sort from smallest to largest. The party scene foregrounds performers resembling figures from 1920s magazines, like Vogue and The Atlantic (note the man who holds a sleek cigarette-holder, and the pale pink-turbaned woman on the patio when Jordan and Nick first meet), as well as movie-star lookalikes of Lady Gaga, John Waters, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Christina Ricci, Matt Damon, Jar-Jar Binks and even Luhrmann himself. These momentary appearances of faux star performers, as Laura Mulvey has noted about entrances of Hollywood celebrities in cinema, seem to momentarily fix the moment, imbuing it with a sense of celestial transfixion.34 18. Small Groups Patterns in crowds also develop because people cluster. Groups include 1) The bird-hatted white women 2) The gold-and-black-dressed white women who step onto the dance floor from the frame’s lower left. 3) The clutch of bathing-suited white men. 4) The African American women who party together by the pool. Like the individuals, the moment of recognition of a group produces a sense of frisson. 19. Costumes As with the music, the costume’s historical deformations contribute to the viewer’s sense of disequilibrium and delirium. Gatsby’s necklines plunge lower, and the shoes are narrower than those of the 1920s; the fabulous hats would only have been worn on fashion runways. Costuming also provides some of the ‘arcadian’ scene’s greatest charms, as well as contributing to an image of democracy (every human performer counts). Each outfit is beautifully shaped for its wearer, as if she had chosen how she might wish to be represented; each clothing ensemble (dress, hat, shoes, jewellery and accessories) works as a unique voice, within a small group, and as part of the whole. The scene’s real stars may be the costumes.35 * * * In summary, nineteen basic techniques pull the viewer affectively and proprioceptively in different directions: 1) the periodic white-outs of confetti Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

199

Figure 10.7  Individuals, groups and crowds. The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann (2013).

and tinsel induce a momentary blindness, even a brief amnesia; 2) tableaux elicit a sense of enchantment but dissolve quickly; 3) the mise-en-scène’s deformations of scale (from the miniature to the monumental) provide excessive demands on the viewer’s attention; 4) spatial layout is indeterminate, and the camera’s exploration of it further obscures vision; 5) the camera’s high angles and sudden drops, and the music’s peaks and dips, induce a state of vertigo; 6) the camera’s gaze often feels distracted and sometimes obsessive, even as edits are rapid and the framing is mobile, moments of tighter sync occur unpredictably; 7) the music refuses to provide a sense of ground; 8) sound effects provide a pulse that roots the viewer in the blizzard-like detail, but their sources again produce a sense of uncertainty; 9) the flow of crowds and the sudden emergence of shared dance-gestures create the sense of being pulled along; 10) the scene’s colour arc encourages the viewer to grasp at spots of colour; 11) the zebra stripes provide direction, like a train track, but they quickly fall apart to reappear at different scales and in other domains; 12) miniature people, rendered as if in a dolls’ house, invite the viewer’s focus; 13) faux-celebrities and small groups produce shocks of recognition and excitement; 14) narrative trajectories involve foci dispersing a viewer’s attention; 15) dialogue bleeds into music and sound effects as much as it advances story; Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

200

Carol Vernallis

16) contagion, foreshadowing, underscoring and patterning contribute to cross-medial smoothing, but also indistinct boundaries; 17) and 18) a viewer’s eye drifts as we sort figures into individuals, groups and crowds; 19) costumes fix attention. How do all of these effects work together? It’s hard to say, because simultaneous unfoldings of processes become so densely layered that few produce particularised sensations. Their importance can only be understood hypothetically and in retrospect. A viewer can sometimes identify techniques combining and pulling together. In the grand hallway, the pinstripes of the zebras become more multicoloured before they merge into the phoenix-like, variously hued, pedestalled woman. A viewer can feel riveted by the complicated deployment of a crowd (suddenly disposed like a painting), while still sensing other processes already underway, soon to become emergent, and to recede before they can be identified (like the corresponding soundtrack’s disco swoops). A viewer’s attention might shift rapidly among various effects – an extra with a striking costume, a crowd formation, a dab of colour, a sound effect, a juxtaposition of musical samples, a moment crystallising into a tableau – though the relative weights of these elements are difficult to ascertain. Postclassical cinematic aesthetics have been described as media intensified across every single parameter.36 But this sequence, again, feels post-post-classical. This scene showcases transmedia aesthetics. Luhrmann’s background in music production, music video, commercials, theatre, opera and department store window design shapes this scene.37 Luhrmann’s signature style seems to project past his own craftsmanlike touches to those of his many collaborators. This scene conveys a vision of information and power flowing across social structures; the film takes place in the 1920s but it feels like 2013. As in today’s media swirl, highly individualised figures in crowds attempt to project themselves. Ideas coalesce around small groups and ripple or shudder across the whole. Each participant stands three degrees from everyone else.38 Celebrities and small groups function like magnets. Global capital seems both everywhere and invisible.39 Ultimately, however, old money seems to run the show, and the billionaire is the face for us all. Even though this film’s budget is less than half that of most Hollywood tent-pole productions, the resources expended – glitter, champagne, fireworks, an enormous cast of extras – might feel obscene, a wasted bubble of dreams. Further reflection may help us see how much the scene offers a prescient image of new subjects (and consumers) in an era when wealth and global capital have run out of control. I’m haunted by the care with which Luhrmann documents the tear-down of the scene, as if the spectacle’s destruction is integral to its momentary emergence. But for now we might try to make good on Richard Dyer’s suggestion that the musical can give us Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

201

what utopia feels like. Now that we can experience a variegated and capacious world more clearly, let’s go out and realise it. Notes All URLs referenced in this chapter were accessed 20 April 2016. 1. Tony Assness, one of the designers for this scene, has described it as arcadian. It contrasts sharply with the second party, which is depicted as dissolute (and as such, features more African-American performers and extras). Luhrmann drew often on Fitzgerald’s favourite phrase, ‘vergilis et in arcadia ego’. One of this scene’s inspirations was Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’. Philippa Hawker, ‘The subtle art of staging Gatsby’s lavish parties’, The Sydney Morning Herald (26 May 2013), http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/ movies/the-subtle-art-of-staging-gatsbys-lavish-parties-20130523-2k4ok.html. 2. Richard Lawson, ‘The Tragic Emptiness of The Great Gatsby’, http://www. thewire.com/entertainment/2013/05/great-gatsby-review/65020/; Richard Corliss, ‘Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby: From Jazz Age to Baz Age’, http://enter tainment.time.com/2013/05/09/luhrmanns-the-great-gatsby-from-jazz-ageto-baz-age/#ixzz2SpJfRPZZ; A. O. Scott, ‘Shimmying Off the Literary Mantle: “The Great Gatsby”, Interpreted by Baz Luhrmann’, http://www.nytimes. com/2013/05/10/movies/the-great-gatsby-interpreted-by-baz-luhrmann.html 3. See http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/30000-hollywood-film-charac ters-heres-many-werent-white/; http://www.bunchecenter.ucla.edu/wp-con tent/uploads/2014/02/2014-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2-12-14.pdf. 4. In an interview, Luhrmann stated, ‘The ’20s was a time [. . .] that there was confusion in the national moral dials so to speak. [. . .] Fitzgerald [. . .] can see that something is corrupt morally in society and it is going to come crashing down. And I think to a certain extent we have gone through that ourselves recently. Since 9/11 there has been an added slight moral rubberiness in our world, and we all know that things came crashing down. And it is this that makes the Gatsby story especially relevant today.’ http://lifeandtimes.com/director-bazlurhmann-speaks-on-directing-the-great-gatsby. 5. As Alain Lipietz notes ‘Fordism was Taylorism plus mechanization’. Taylorism signified a separation between the organisation of the production process (which was the task of technical offices), and the execution of standardised, prescribed tasks. Fordism implied a long-term contractualisation of the wage relationship, with a monitored increase in salaries indexed to prices and general productivity. In the 1980s, policies of ‘liberal flexibility’ were put in place by the governments of the UK and the US, eventually followed by most OECD countries. Workers were encouraged to practise ‘responsible autonomy’, particularly when putting new technologies into operation, and to practise ‘just-in-time’ labour to assist corporations in managing the production cycle. Alain Lipietz, ‘The Post-Fordist World: Labour Relations, International Hierarchy and Global Ecology’, Review of International Political Economy, 4:1 (March 1997), pp. 1–41. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

202

Carol Vernallis

6. Jim Buhler, Hearing the Movies, 2nd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Blooming­ ton: Indiana University Press, 2010); Arved Ashby, Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV (New York, Oxford University Press, 2013). 7. Richard Dyer, ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader 2 (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 373. 8. Spectre’s opening draws on the kaleidoscopic cornucopia of Día de los Muertos festivals, but the varied parts aren’t as subtly coordinated as Luhrmann’s party sequence. Bay’s warring robots in Transformers 4 present more than viewers can take in, but their visual density doesn’t sweep across the entire frame. Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street showcases multiple unfolding tempi, but these strata feel relatively accessible. 9. Luhrmann’s first three films have been called the ‘Red Curtain Trilogy’. All draw on motifs from the theatre: Strictly Ballroom emphasises dance; Romeo and Juliet, prose and poetry; Moulin Rouge! (2001), singing and music. 10. Steen Christiansen, ‘Things Gone Wild: The Movie Camera in the Drone Age’, at the SCMS conference (Seattle 2014). 11. Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 16–17. 12. My approach to analysing music video involves considering visual, lyrical and sonic parameters in isolation – colour, harmony, props, song form, lyrics, a hook, a timbre, and then seeing how each connects with another feature within a corresponding medium (music to lyrics, lyrics to image, image to arrangement and so on). Connections abound on many levels. The next step involves discovering how these processes unfold temporally. With music videos, an experienced viewer can carry herself through the video as if dancing along with the song – soaring above it, anticipating a peak, collaborating in a slowdown. The Gatsby party sequence reveals fewer strongly demarcated experiential paths for a viewer. See Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Carol Vernallis, Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video and the New Digital Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Jim Buhler and Alex Newton, ‘Outside the Law of Action: Music and Sound in the Bourne Trilogy’, in Carol Vernallis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Charles Kronengold, ‘Audiovisual Objects, Multisensory People, and the Intensified Ordinary in Hong Kong Action’, in John Richardson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Holly Rogers, Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 13. With determinate chaos, stochastic behaviour occurring in a deterministic space produces the highest level of dispersion within an available space. See Monika Gorska-Olesinska. ‘Polish Digital Poetry: Lack of Prehistoric Artifacts or Missing Narrative’, in Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas (eds), Relive: Media Art Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), p.156. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

203

14. Tiered spaces abound in Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and Australia (2008) as well, each with their own narrative connotations. 15. As in Moulin Rouge! our location often remains indeterminate. 16. Much of the ornamentation appears overgrown (broadly striped leaves, tangled  brush and butterflies), but its miniaturisation gives it a storybook-like quality. 17. Luhrmann acknowledges this kind of aesthetic for Moulin Rouge!. 18. Note: in the pool, extras’ appearances alternate between shots. Some wear calflength dresses to accentuate the risks of immersion. 19. Here the feeling of motion is established more through music and lighting than physical distance. The music descends and accelerates, and several patches of white create a sense of passage. The ways materials cross sensory modalities and media makes Gatsby difficult to describe – light and sound should not feel so spatial, but here they do. 20. Geoff King has described the ways narrative can continue through spectacular scenes, most particularly with action films. Geoff King, ‘Spectacle, Narrative and the Spectacular Hollywood Blockbuster’, in Julian Stringer (ed.), Movie Blockbusters, (New York: Psychology Press, 2003), pp. 119–25. 21. Two examples of added 2/4 measures include during Klipspringer’s introduction and Nick’s decision to get roaring drunk. 22. At the pool’s centre, one member of a small performing group plays a conga, but it looks like it is out of audio range. 23. In the party scene, dialogue is shaped to the soundtrack and vice-versa. After Jordan says to Nick, ‘let’s go find him, and you can ask him yourself’, the opening of Fergie’s ‘A Little Party Never Hurt Nobody’, takes up her line’s rhythm and contour. See Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, chapter 7, on lyrics. 24. John Belton, email correspondence with author, 6 February 2016. 25. See Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, p. 2. 26. When Nick first meets Daisy, an odd moment of running and dancing between Jordan and Daisy (‘we’ll put you off into boats’) unfolds. Perhaps this sets a stage for these courtship displays. 27. Disco has progressive connotations, both through its inclusive group of practitioners and fans (gays, African-Americans, urban working-class youth) as well as its placement within an economically less stratified era before neo-liberalism took hold. 28. See Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, p. 29. 29. See Stefan Sharff, The Elements of Cinema: Toward a Theory of Cinesthetic Impact (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 17, 56, 87. 30. In an interview Luhrmann explained that he wanted to use stripes even before he found a historical correlate, but he aimed to be historically authentic, so he and his team scoured the historical record, and after surveying thousands of drawings and photographs, they found their inflatable zebra toys. Looking down on the mishmash of colour, tinsel and noise, it seems stripes do a great deal of work. Kelsey Egan, ‘Film Production Design: Case Study of The Great Gatsby’, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

204

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

Carol Vernallis Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 5:1 (2014) http://www. studentpulse . com / articles / 968 / 2 / film - production - design - case - study - of - the great-gatsby; Peter Howell, The Star.com (5 May 2013) http://www.thestar.com/ entertainment / movies / 2013 / 05 / 05 / baz _ luhrmann _ jazzed _ about _ the _ great _ gatsby.html; Charles McGrath, New York Times (3 May 2013) http://www. nytimes . com / 2013 / 05 / 05 / movies / baz - luhrmann - adds - 3 - d - and - hip - hop - to the-great-gatsby.html?pagewanted=all. The dancers wear yellow headdresses, perhaps they resemble nervous finches or parrots. They nicely integrate with the scene’s flora. Doris Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances (New York: Grove, 1959). I have not seen dancers execute these moves. Partygoers most likely wouldn’t attempt them (I don’t think they read well except when captured by an overhead camera). I encourage readers to try them out themselves. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), p.7. Or maybe the stars are the balloons. There were over 1,000 translucent, silvery balloons and a crew to keep them inflated. Perhaps the balloons stand for the extras of the extras. Hawker, ‘The Subtle Art’. Steven Shaviro, ‘Post-Cinematic Affect’, in Shane Denson & Julia Leyda (eds), PostCinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016), http:// reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/contents/. See Vernallis, Unruly Media. Baz Luhrmann’s reports of childhood suggest he had a rich, multidisciplinary artistic training. His mother was a ballroom dance teacher and dress shop owner; his father ran a petrol station and a cinema. He studied acting in high school and college. In 1993, he staged Benjamin Britten’s opera, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 2002, he brought Puccini’s opera La Bohème to Broadway. He has written and produced soundtracks for several artists, directed music videos and commercials, designed shop windows and murals, and assisted in election campaigns. Holly Rogers, Lisa Perrott and I are currently co-editing a collected volume entitled ‘Transmedia Directors: Sound, Image, and the Digital Swirl’. In this project, I hope to trace Luhrmann’s artistic practises and influences across his work. Says Luhrmann suggestively about Gatsby, ‘That film [Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder] proved for me, how fundamentally different 3D is in terms of dramatic staging [. . .] It has a force that is born quite simply from its ability to capture great actors playing against each other in a tight space and toward the camera, something like the theatre.’ Adrian Pennington, ‘Wealth and Decadence’, British Cinematographer. co.uk (nd), https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/simon-duggan-acs-the-greatgatsby/. See Ruth and Sebastian Ahnert, ‘A Community Under Attack: Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I’, ELH, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 1–33. Consider the soundtrack’s EDM elements and the ways they appear and disappear before coming to the fore. Steve Shaviro cites Robin James’s claims that this style of music directly registers ‘neoliberal ideology’. The prototypical EDM track, according to James, much like a Goldman-Sachs trader, amps up its Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

205

cutting-edge technology to the point of flirting with overload, ‘pushing the edge of burnout and exhaustion’. But in the end, this transgressive drive beyond all limits is recuperated as a new source of accumulated value; neoliberalism works through ‘a sort of transformation of Nietzsche’s “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” into a universalizable maxim’. The process is particularly effected through EDM-pop’s use of soars and drops. Together, they trace a movement of rupture followed by recuperation; the soar/drop structure mimics something like capital accumulation and depletion in the realm of finance. Steve Shaviro, ‘Cyborg/Goddess: Dawn Richard, “Calypso”’ (unpublished). Robin James, Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism (Zero Books, 2015).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Temporalities

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 11

The Force of Small Gestures D. N. Rodowick

When visible sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, sensation releases force as something that might destroy it, or become its ally or friend. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation With the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement-Image

I begin with two quotes from Gilles Deleuze, including one from his book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Nothing is further from painting than camera-works. Yet one way of justifying images as painterly is to understand the spectrum of possibilities for altering space with the hand, especially if the results are textural and haptic. Call this turning figures into figuration, where producing effects of blotching, smearing, smudging, torqueing and blurring make zones of indiscernibility emerge through and across lines, movements, volumes and colours, which gain therein new intensive variations. My main inspiration here is that there is a powerful link between certain strategies of non-figurative painting and related processes in experimental film and video. In neither case am I referring to pure abstraction. Rather, I am interested in the spectrum of questions and problems raised by Deleuze’s account of sensation. Speaking from a personal perspective, the logic of sensation defines the singular point where my philosophical commitments to a vitalist materialism influenced by Bergson and Deleuze intersect most intimately with my own creative moving image practice, and with the work of contemporary artists to whom I feel most closely allied. Many years of acculturation have led us to believe that the Ideal image in film or video is meant to be in clear focus from foreground to background, that the frame line is fixed along a stable horizontal line and at the average height of the human eye, that sound is inseparable from image, and that recorded motion and sound are continuous as if corresponding to an equally idealised arrow of homogeneous and linear time. The aim of these conventions is not to reproduce the world as humanly seen but rather as we believe Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

210

D. N. Rodowick

it to be experienced. In other words, the lure of the Ideal image is to convince us that through the image we see the world as it is in itself. For Kant, this attitude, whatever its origins, expresses one of the greatest illusions that limit or cloud human reason. Thus the aim of the first Critique is to show how our inner faculties shape human perception and experience. As knowledge of the thing-in-itself is foreclosed to us as finite creatures, philosophy can only perfect human knowledge of the world by fully accounting for the powers and limits of our inner mechanisms for constructing experience. I believe another view is possible and desirable. From Hugo Münsterberg to Dziga Vertov and Jean Mitry, the history of film theory is strongly influenced by a modified Kantianism which assumes that our machines for reproducing and interpreting the world, and which thereby shape our perceptual experience, are themselves simulacra of our inner powers and our limits. Like Kant, these thinkers are testing the limits of human sensory experience in the hope of progressively improving our capacities for knowing the world. However, whether conceived as a projection of inner capacities or as a more perfect extension of our perceptual and interpretative powers, once invented the camera seems to become a static object, fixed in its basic aims and elements. Media archaeology has shown convincingly that this is not so. Whatever elements, technological or not, that make up moving image media at any given time are highly dynamic, both adding and subtracting resources of technique and form in novel and unpredictable ways. Considering the apparatus of camera and projection as dynamic and malleable makes of it less a simulacrum of our brains than a mechanical virus or bacterium evolving in a symbiotic relationship with human desire and imagination. Nevertheless, as has often been noted, the historical norms governing the evolution of cameras and their uses have been constrained by a regulative idea of the standard image as limited by the horizon of ordinary human perceptual experience. My point here is that dominant cultural contexts for imagining what cameras are limit our sense of what cameras do. (And one might say the same for the compositional traditions and automatisms of any art.) Moreover, if one wants to take the chance of thinking of cameras as something like philosophy machines, what other domains of perceptual experience may remain to be uncovered or discovered? ‘Amateur’ or small format cameras exemplify the hold of the Ideal image in developed societies. I am thinking in particular of a possible genealogy that passes into and through Super 8 and Polaroid cameras, to HandyCams and other forms of consumer video, Flip cameras and GoPro cameras, and finally to smart phones and tablets. In spite of the intense technological inventiveness that goes into manufacturing these devices, and all of the innovations Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Force of Small Gestures

211

arising from new processes of digital capture, the fundamental automatisms underlying the structure of the Ideal image have remained remarkably stable. Even the GoPro camera, which is attached to bodies undergoing extreme velocities and movements, and is meant to vary the axis of vision as radically as possible, is limited to a small set of variables – fixed focal length and effective shutter speeds set for maximum clarity, depth of field and image stability; naturalistic colour rendering and normative white balance, continuity of movements in a single duration; synchronisation of sound to image – all of which are meant to record the dynamic vision of human bodies travelling through space. In other words, while GoPros are designed to record extreme human vision, the human body remains the anchor and limit of all they are expected to do, and the image is limited to natural perception though pushed to extreme limits. Understood in this way, the camera is a device constrained by a limited number of automatisms, which in turn shape the image in terms of baseline ideals of clarity, stability and continuity, indeed as an image of perceptual experience as continuous and anchored in the human body. The human eye, or an idealised version of it, is the measure of all things. The baked-in automatisms of amateur formats are meant to make of the world an image. But this is a standard image, a limitation of perception that is illustrative and narrative. Or, as Deleuze might say, this is a figurative image from which one must release a Figure, that is, a perceptual image from which one must release sensation. This has been one of the principal aims of my own creative practice. Take for example a short work from my ‘walking series’, Waterloo, shot in London in 2012.1 Just under four minutes long, the work captures in ‘real-time’ a thoroughly mundane location and situation – two circular trajectories through an underground passageway between the London IMAX theatre and Waterloo station. The time of the work is the time of the walk. Using an iPhone on a hand-manipulated monopod, I follow a figurative line drawn by the electrical conduit running along the top of the tunnel walls. Of course, this is not what one sees in the image. Waterloo is recorded in a single take though using a capture rate of one frame per second. Moreover, as I move through the space, focus, exposure and effective shutter speed are allowed to float. The initial images begin as almost abstract colour fields that are blurred, textured and fluid, passing in pastels of yellow-green, watery lime, light and dark blue and fuchsia with blue blotches, before resolving into a new series of volumes that emerge as if extracted roughly from the electrical conduit: jagged tubular shapes expand and contract while dissolving and reshaping themselves unpredictably against the varying and textured colour fields. These tonalities emerge in response to the shifts in colour temperature and luminance Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

212

D. N. Rodowick

­ roduced by the tunnel’s sources of artificial illumination. The sound is p captured in real-time along with these images – distant traffic, rumblings, drunken laughter and snippets of animated conversation. The off-screen presence of real-time synchronised audio is an important temporal marker, for the staccato succession of apparently still images is shaped by a duration every bit as real as the sound. No device is more familiar than smart phones, which capture daily millions of normatively documentary images, both still and in movement, whether intimate or catastrophic, through the physical and computational automatisms of natural perception baked into the designs of lenses and recording programs. But what I seek experimentally is to push these automatisms past their limits, though not with the goal of achieving abstraction. Rather, despite the abstract, painterly and conceptual character of my process, these works are meant to be understood as documents responding to specific environments, actions, situations, movements, trajectories and durations. In fact, I believe there is no power or interest in abstraction in film and video that is not based on their capacity as recording – or if you will, documentary – media. Everything presented in Waterloo is data drawn from the actual environment – volumes, movements, surfaces, light intensities, colour temperatures. This is the prosaic world in which we situate ourselves, but it is not the world of so-called natural perception. Rather, it is the domain of sensation that lies beneath, over or inside quotidian vision as if in another dimension of intensive qualitative experience masked by habitual perception. Even if all of these normative automatisms have evolved technologically to produce a particular kind of image and world belief, and even if these mechanisms shape the a priori limits of the perceptual phenomena recorded and projected by cinematographic means, many different varieties of sensory experience might still be imagined. Consider situations, then, where no shutter and claw control the passage of the filmstrip through a camera, or that images are recorded at intermittent intervals, that no lens is used or that space is rendered through anamorphic effects rather than linear perspective, or that the frame line is released by random movements of hand or body. Experimental filmmakers have spoken of these strategies for many decades, and in this respect, texts like Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision and Hollis Frampton’s Circles of Confusion remain powerful manifestos. Moreover, even Brakhage was keenly aware that these devices are aimed less at abstraction than at shifting our terms of belief for how the world is experienced. Perhaps all experimental films are documentaries in this sense. Works like Michael Snow’s La région centrale (1971) or Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012), Ernie Gehr’s Glider (2001), and even the Prelude to Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961) ask that we readjust our terms Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Force of Small Gestures

213

for engaging with the world as visual experience. However, they are no less for that engagements with the world. When did we come to believe that phenomenologies of the blotch, the blur, the smear and of wild rotations of space or disjoined intervals of time and stuttering lines of sound, were less valid than those of clarity, stability and continuity? Or why do we not value instead what I would like to call a-subjective or even inhuman perception? What kinds of worlds and experiences are these? The time has come to speak more fully of the matter of sensation. The universe, in fact, is full of inhuman images. This is the great lesson of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory.2 Bergson’s philosophy is meant to be a reversal of Kantianism. Kant’s position aims at drawing the perimeters of our interiority in terms of how it frames and filters the outer world. In mapping a path alternative to both realism and idealism, Bergson’s picture of vitalist intuition and la durée depicts a world where relations between exteriority and interiority are fluid and part of a single material continuum, though an endlessly varying one. Human perception, however, is only one very small segment of this continuum – a point within a regime of universal variation of constant selfdiffering movement without centres or horizons, or a small window onto a cosmos of fluid matter and radiating energy mutually interacting at all scales and on all points of contact in a creatively evolving open Whole. Bergson calls this the ‘present Image’, or a cosmos of universal variation where matter is the whole aggregate of images.3 Deleuze calls this the plane of immanence and describes it as the ‘exposition of a world where IMAGE = MOVEMENT’.4 In Bergson’s (and Deleuze’s) view, matter is luminous in the sense that it is a fundamental appearing. All that can be perceived or described in it is always there. This is no simple empiricism, however. From the point of view of human consciousness, this replete state of the Image is virtual to the extent that the body and its needs place limits on what actually can be apprehended in matter. As I explained in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Bergson begins with the idea that matter and image are continuous with, yet distinct from, human perception.5 While Bergson accepts that perception is subjective – a human picturing of matter, movement and time – this distinction is one of degree, not kind. Human sight is materially restricted to radiation propagated at wavelengths from 390 to 700 nm; human hearing is limited to frequencies of 16 to 20,000 Hz. In both cases the body is only an information exchange acting and reacting to the propagation of energy, matter and movement. An image is nothing more than this propagation where the body serves equally as screen, filter and relay. Similarly, one may speak as if there were two ‘systems’ of images: one that is bodily and filtered by physiological limits and human needs, and one that is universal and immanent in matter (the Image as plane of immanence). Here there is neither transcendence nor externality, and no Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

214

D. N. Rodowick

substantial division between mind and body, but only a qualitative and selforganising process of self-differentiation in a ceaseless state of becoming. The plane of immanence is thus the expression of a radical empiricism. And here one might give a first definition of sensation as the apprehension of forces acting on and through the body and nervous system. Coextensive with the domain of perception that organises the perceptible world into a geometry of rational forms is the pre-rational domain of sensation – of felt intensities, energies, movements, forces and becomings. What would it mean to speak of an art of sensation as distinct from one of perception or reflexive perceptual experience? The human body, eye and nervous system would need to adapt themselves to new procedures of relay, transformation, translation and retransmission that respond to the intuition that all matter is fluid and luminous, and that the human body is only another set of systems multiply connected, internally and externally, to this field of forces. An art of sensation also embraces contingency and becoming in a process that makes of the hand and body of the artist, and the techne of brush or camera, an energetic relay that translates matter and light into an Image or Figure, rather than duplicating natural perception or projecting interior experience. Among many possible examples, I am thinking here of Ernie Gehr’s formidable Glider (2001, DV, 37m). Without detracting from the formal beauty and inventiveness of this work, in my view one of its many powerful consequences is to open us to the universe of experience depicted by Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory. In documentation for the New York Film Festival in 2002, Gehr described his work as ‘a voyage into a pictorial space-world that seems to be governed by extra-terrestrial optical and gravitational laws’.6 Glider is organised into approximately eleven segments of roughly equal length; each segment is continuous and forms a unique duration without cuts. The work begins with a movement that resembles a camera trajectory above flowing waves, but already there are cues that these images depart from our standard perceptual experience. The apparent camera movement is uncannily smooth and steady, as if unhindered by human motor imperfections. Moreover, as further segments appear, one feels less that the apparatus is moving than the captured images are themselves revolving or rotating under it. And in fact, this uncanny smoothness and regularity of motion is in constant tension with the twisting, torqueing and fluidity of matter. Depth relations are uncommonly flat, and the initial images of water appear as if projected onto the inner surface of a torus. The fluidity of waves is textured in a way that makes them seem more like liquefied matter. While this is an uncommonly strange world, it is not an unfamiliar one. One recognises sea, land and sky, then buildings, and people or vehicles in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Force of Small Gestures

215

movement, birds in flight. However, all of these elements are flattened onto a single plane, which appears to be neither precisely one-dimensional nor two-dimensional, but rather fluctuates between these dimensions, not unlike the moving images transmitted by the lenses of camera obscuras. Neither abstraction nor figuration dominate; rather, it is as if our perceptual experience has been opened onto an inhuman dimension where force, matter, energy and light interact dynamically and with perfect indifference to human needs and interests. As one segment replaces another, variations in direction of rotation are introduced. And as I have already suggested, this rotation of surfaces takes place as if within the inner or outer surface of a tube or torus, rather than on a globe or a ground. Sometimes, one can only ascertain with difficulty whether these rotations are on a horizontal or vertical axis; indeed they seem to occur as if from any direction imagined from within the interior of a sphere. Surfaces twist, blur and spiral, and matter flows down, up and across the frame, or collapses toward a centre – gravity and horizon cannot hold or direct the flow of matter and light. In this situation, Glider’s lateral, spiralling, and rotational movements present space as if being continually bent or folded by the direction of otherwise unseen forces. The flow of matter is translated into light, and vice versa, in a perceptual space without stable horizons; or rather, the horizon continually turns on an axis which itself rotates independently of a ground. One profound effect of these dynamic forms is to present water, land and air as flowing indiscernibly one into the other, or as being levelled onto a single plane or dimension wherein each expresses variable intensities of matter, energy, light, tonality and force. It is less important to speak of the technical mechanisms that achieve these effects than to account for their sensory impact. Gehr accomplishes in Glider, I believe, something analogous to what Deleuze describes as the achievements of Cézanne or Bacon in The Logic of Sensation. The logic of sensation is not a replacement for natural perception – one is not separable from the other in human terms. The pre-rational sensory experience of intensive forms, movements and colours is neither better nor more ‘real’ than perceptual experience; rather, it is only the expressive acknowledgement of a domain otherwise obscured by habit, doxa and cliché, where one might achieve the intuition of a more intensive world of becoming and ceaseless self-differentiation. The logic of sensation is part and parcel of our world as lived. One might say that sensation is immanent to our perceptual experience as force is immanent to matter. Through sensation, a world is created and I encounter another world as if another dimension were hovering beneath ordinary perceptual experience. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

216

D. N. Rodowick

Sensation might seem to emerge from chaotic or obscured images, whorls of colours and flowing forms as in Glider and La région centrale, or in paintings like Bacon’s Jet of Water (1988). Indeed, this is often the case, but such images are not purely formal and abstract. In Deleuze’s view, all the plastic arts, no matter how abstract, must deal with the figurative world, and all are anchored in the world as lived. For example, in an argument that reappears in the cinema books, Deleuze asserts that there is no such thing as a blank canvas waiting to receive creative marks. Modern painting is already populated with clichés that proliferate across the virgin surface even before the painter begins to work. The painter must find her way into and through a canvas already infested virtually with clichés – standard, normative and banal images and modes of seeing where the world has come to look like ‘bad cinema’, and to be experienced as such. Bacon’s own attraction to photography and cinema (the films of Eisenstein are a noted influence) acknowledges that this image-world is our world as lived, both within and without. Whatever figures are produced on the canvas must not recoil from or ignore this world but pass directly through it. In addition, Bacon relates that photography is not simply a figuration of what one sees, it is what and how modern man sees – only photographs, that is, clichés or snapshots produced under the ideal of ‘natural perception’. Modern vision has become photographic vision, and our modalities of seeing must be transformed no less than the image itself. In the logic of sensation, this is a question of passing from the figurative to the Figure. Brush or camera: both acts of creation must turn reproduction into expression. In this respect, the moving image faces the same problem as painting: how to extract a figural Image by moving beyond illustration and narration, and how to produce resemblance through non-imitative or reproductive means. In Deleuze’s account, resemblance in the Figure appears analogically through the action of force in and on the Image, and in their temporal becoming these actions are guided by a ‘diagram’. (I will return to this later.) Perhaps the problem for both painting and cinema is how to see time and force differently, and how to release the figural force of sensation in the image. Here Deleuze reprises Paul Klee’s maxim on the problem of creation: ‘non pas rendre le visible, mais rendre visible’.7 Any translation would be inexact, but the sense of the statement is this: rather than painting the visible world, to make visible another world. This other world is the domain of sensation, and perhaps sensation is another name for the movement-image as plane of immanence? Indeed, Logic of Sensation anticipates the cinema books in asking what constitutes movement in relation to an Image? Or how does movement subsist in an Image as force? In broaching these questions, art makes common cause with philosophy. Rather than reproducing forms, the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Force of Small Gestures

217

aim of art is to capture forces, and not only as energy, light or movement, but also through the force of time as change and as the agent of anticipatory forces that are becoming but not yet arrived. I have said that sensation is immanent to our perceptual experience as force is immanent to matter. In passing from the figurative to the Figure, what one ‘sees’ in the image is not form but force; or better, what one sees is the moving action of forces that make form yield to a Figure. Force is not perceptible in itself but movements are, and movement relates to force as those dimensions and effects of force that are capable of being captured by and rendered as and in images. Movement is immanent to the image both as a unique force that encompasses the duration of the whole, and as the multiplicity of compositional elements that are decomposable and re-composable as formed series within the image under action of this force. In other words, there is both a duration of the image imagined as an open whole, and series of time rendered through the heterogeneous and uneven intensive rhythms of the picture’s constitutive marks, intervals and colours. There is a time of the Figure, and time of the intensive series that flow through it. What Deleuze calls the Figure in Bacon’s paintings might be thought of as the dominant central image – the torqued or twisted body on a chair or at a wash basin; a jet of water spurting from right to left in the frame; the blurred, spiralled, and spiky mass of Landscape (1978) – but this would be inexact. The Figure must not be separated from other dimensions and aspects of the image, though it might be thought of as the focal point where form yields to force and conveys the intensity of force to the body and nervous system. Deleuze writes of three fundamental elements in Bacon’s paintings – the material structure, the Figure, and the contour – as domains or orders of sensation. I do not want to strike equivalencies between Bacon and Gehr here, but interesting analogies are possible. The material structure is the supporting armature of an expressive image. Deleuze suggests that the structure serves as a virtual mirror to the extent that instrumental deformations find themselves immediately transferred into the Figure. In Glider the projection of forms onto the rotational torus serves in this way as the underlying dynamic architecture of the work. The contour is comprised of curving lines and marks that frame the Figure and/or flow around it and connect it to other pictorial elements. Again, in Glider, the contours are shaped by the underlying structure as water, sky and land are bent, curved and made to flow in the image as if projected from varying directions onto the interior of a virtual sphere. And here the Figure of Glider is perhaps more complex and more intense than what might usually be achieved in painting. The Figure here is the accumulated series of forms – people, cars, buildings, beach, sky, ocean – that are being continually deformed, twisted, blurred and shaped by the dynamic action of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

218

D. N. Rodowick

the ­underlying structure of movement and transformation. There are series of time here expressed by the individuated intensive transformations taking place within each of the separate segments along the lines of the contour, and there is the time of the whole of the work whose accumulated duration coalesces moment by moment into the Figure called Glider. In one of its dimensions, sensation appears as effects of decomposition and re-composition in forms, objects and bodies – an often unpredictable action on the surface of things. In Deleuze’s account, this translation of force into movement through or in an image takes place through actions of either transformation or deformation. The former produces abstract or dynamic figures as in geometric abstraction. Alternatively, the latter expresses action on a body where deformation subordinates movement to force and abstraction to the Figure. Deformation requires a discernible ‘figure’ as the target or background of figural action. Here again, Deleuze is insisting on something like a non-reproductive mimesis. The blurring, smudging, twisting and partial erasure of a figure, then: does not give birth to an abstract form, nor does it combine sensible forms dynamically; on the contrary, it turns this zone [the Figure] into a zone of indiscernibility that is common to several forms, irreducible to any of them; and the lines of force it creates escape every form through their very clarity, through their deforming precision.8

In a similar way, Deleuze says of Bacon that the blur is not a mark of indistinctness but of an operation that ‘consists in destroying clarity by clarity’.9 The blur is a zone of passage marking intervals in series of decomposed and recomposed elements of figures; each series traces lines of force acting on bodies and intensities while passing indiscernibly into other compositional zones. What Deleuze calls the Figure, or what I refer to as an Image, emerges in these zones of indiscernibility that relate differentiated series of compositional elements without making of any one of them its tangible sign. There is nothing to be seen in the Image but differentiation and relationality produced through, as Deleuze writes, ‘A deformed and deforming movement that at every moment transfers the real image onto the body in order to constitute the Figure’.10 Here sensation flows not from a unique form or figure, but rather from the multiplicity of compositional elements and traces of actions – lines, curves, colours, random or accidental marks, blurs and erasures – that populate the picture plane as lines of becoming. It is curious that Deleuze writes of deformed and deforming movements on the one hand, and resemblance or analogy on the other. The logic of sensation makes the world of force appear in the varied movements of matter, and no matter how distorted the Figure that appears, is neither Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Force of Small Gestures

219

abstract beyond recognition nor so recognisable that it serves as a token or a copy of some external reference. The Figure hovers between abstraction and cliché – neither absolute difference nor degraded repetition. Deleuze’s characterisation of non-imitative mimesis as a new kind of semblance seems counter-intuitive on the face of it; in actuality, it is a novel theory of representation. Resemblance in Deleuze’s view is produced by creation through analogy – the translation of one world of sensory experience by and into another aesthetic world. Whether we are considering painting or cinema, the technical process or apparatus of creation no longer functions as a subtractive filter reproducing or replicating semblances through formal procedures of composition; in other words, the image is not produced by sets of coded transformations. Rather, creation through analogy aims to produce an open and variable modulation of sensory elements. Modulation must act as a continuously variable mould whose operations are guided neither by the norms of realism nor by the conceptual or spiritual aims of pure abstraction. What is required here is a new model of mimetic actions. What Deleuze calls aesthetic analogy is at once non-figurative and noncodified – there is neither primary resemblance nor pre-given code. Or as Deleuze might put it, the logic of sensation is not that of the code, but rather, the sense of a diagram. A Figure or Image so produced is open and variable, but it is not chaotic and disorganised. Rather, one might say that it has sense and consistency, or perhaps, that it is in-formed by an Idea. The shape of this Idea is given in the diagram. The diagram is virtual and ideational. Think of it as a kind of conceptual modulator – the unseen but ever-present Idea informing the compositional process as a kind of open architecture. Unlike a code it cannot be given in advance (although it might be understood retroactively); rather, it arises in and shapes a singular and immanent process of becoming. And if aesthetic analogy is capable of producing Figures that are at once non-figurative and non-codified, this is because the direction and contours of the diagram are shaped moment to moment by reactions to chance operations. Throughout The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze suggests that the formative powers of the diagram are less a matter of the head than the hand (less optic than haptic), and less a matter of enacting intention than improvising with contingency. In Bacon’s process this often means disordering forms by quickly wiping or partially effacing them, splattering paint on the canvas, or reacting to and building new lines and forms from random traces and marks. (In my own work with handheld devices in Waterloo and other works, contingency relates to improvisational reactions to randomly discovered environments, and performative movements of the hand guided by a dual vision – of the unaided eye to the light environments and to the screen of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

220

D. N. Rodowick

the device used as a digital palette.) These are often involuntary but always improvisational manual operations using chance procedures to break open the geometry and tonality of figures, thus freeing lines and colours for modulation in previously unforeseen ways. As Deleuze describes the process, one has to start rapidly making free marks in the interior of the image in order to destroy a nascent figuration and to give a chance to the Figure, which Deleuze calls ‘the improbable itself’.11 In experimental film and video, free marks relate to random movements of hand and body, and to sometimes recording without active and attentive framing. These chance marks designate a type of choice of action without probability. The marks are non-representational because they depend on contingent actions and add nothing to the figure – they concern the hand, not the eye. Their only value is having been used and reused by the hand, which begins to extract an Image from the nascent cliché with its illustrative and narrational qualities. The diagram does not pass from one form or element to another. Rather, the passage between figures and elements occurs in intensive series, and the series or figural whole constitutes the aesthetic analogy. There comes here not another form but rather entirely different relations that engender in the whole a Figure where the diagram introduces another time into the becoming-Image. The diagram expresses change by imposing a zone of objective indiscernibility or indetermination between two or more forms or elements of which one is not any longer and the other not yet. From the figurative to the Figure, the diagram initiates and gives shape to the processes of deformation, temporal passage, becoming and change passing into and through the Image, which give it its singularity and intensity. To organise in series is to pass from one domain, set or distinct element to another. Within the frame and duration of an image, one easily imagines these elements and relations as formal: from one colour value to another, from flat to deep space, from distinct line to rough blur, from legible to deformed forms, from rest and continuity to complex rhythm, and so on. But these ‘horizontal’ relations are dynamically related to ‘volumetric’ transformations where the eye and hand of the maker serve as relays passing sensation into the image and making of it a Figure, and in turn, producing and conveying sensation in the experience of looking. From world, to Image, to receptive looking are transmitted a discontinuous and complex play of forces that create a new sensorium in which the separation of object to subject (whether conceived in relation to the artist or in relation to the viewer) becomes meaningless. Sensation, in Deleuze’s perspective, has a face turned towards the subject (nervous system, vital movement, instinct) and a face turned towards the object (fact, place, event). Or rather, sensation has no facets at all. Sensation is two indivisible things as a phenomenological being-in-the-world: at one and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Force of Small Gestures

221

the same time, I become in the sensation, and something happens through sensation. Whether artist or beholder, the same body gives and receives, and is object and subject. And in this manner, the problem of sensation expresses one of the most profound intuitions of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Here Deleuze writes that: [I]f the living being is a whole and, therefore, comparable to the whole of the universe, this is not because it is a microcosm as closed as the whole is assumed to be, but, on the contrary, because it is open upon a world, and the world, the universe, is itself the Open. ‘Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed’.12

There is more to be said about sensation. But here I will conclude by returning to Bergson and asking: What does philosophy want from the Image? In his deeply provocative lecture on ‘Philosophical Intuition’, Bergson rebukes Kant in writing of a particular paradox of normative perception: it cannot release itself from time nor grasp anything other than change and becoming. Yet we have developed habits of seeing, and vision machines to reinforce those habits, which dilute or camouflage this experience. At the end of his lecture, Bergson doubts that art will ever give us the satisfaction of a philosophical intuition that apprehends all things sub specie durationis. At the same time, the point of Bergson’s lecture is to depict fully the closeness of Image to an intuition of the vital and deep time of duration. However, we only have two means for capturing this intuition and making it real for us. We can express it in concepts, but the more artificial and doctrinal the concepts, the more we reify and spatialise time, forcing it into artificial geometries and causalities. Alternatively, the Image that arises in philosophical intuition flows out of and back into la durée in singular and non-generalisable instances. It is neither wholly physical nor wholly mental. Rather, Bergson characterises it as an image moyenne: an image that is almost matter in that it still allows itself to be seen, and almost mind in that it no longer allows itself to be touched – a phantom which haunts us while we turn about the doctrine and to which we must go in order to obtain the decisive signal, the indication of the attitude to take and of the point from which to look.13

In these paragraphs, Bergson challenges us to comprehend the continuous and dynamic line that runs between intuition and philosophy, Image and Concept. If we can find a medium in which to hold on to these two dimensions of experience, not to reconcile them but to let them flow one into the other, our acts of perception, intuition and thinking may be brought back to a real duration whose vital life and knowledge of things is already philosophy expressed as the intuition of: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

D. N. Rodowick

222

one identical change which keeps ever lengthening as in a melody where everything is becoming but where the becoming, being itself substantial, has no need of support. No more inert states, no more dead things; nothing but the mobility of which the stability of life is made. A vision of this kind, where reality appears as continuous and indivisible, is on the road which leads to philosophical intuition.14

Instead of discontinuous moments replacing one another in an infinitely divisible time, we will apprehend the ceaseless becoming of qualitative time. And, pace Bergson, the multiple arts of sensation can guide us to this road. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Waterloo may be viewed online at https://vimeo.com/81893325. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1990). Ibid. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 58. D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). New York Film Festival, Views from the Avant-Garde 2002: http://www.waysofseeing.org/struct.html. I would like to thank Ernie Gehr for his generosity in loaning me this work and answering my questions about it. I first saw Glider at the Harvard Film Archive in 2012, and it was one of my principal inspirations for returning to creative work. Cited in Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 58. I would also like to express my debt here to Martine Beugnet’s Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), and to the path-breaking work of Nicole Brenez on Deleuze and experimental film. Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, p. 50. Ibid., p. 9. Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, p. 18. Ibid., p. 76. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p 10. The interior citation is from Bergson’s Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983). Henri Bergson, ‘Philosophical Intuition’ in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Carol Publishing Group, [1934] 1992), p. 118. Ibid., p. 127.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 12

Bill Viola and the Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli Silent Mountain (2001) is a diptych of a woman and a man shot on high-­ definition video mounted side-by-side on separate plasma screens. The woman and man appear to mirror each other: they are dressed in a similar fashion, with a plain grey T-shirt and black pants; both actors are shot from the waist up in high-key lighting and placed against a black background, which has the effect of foregrounding their bodily features but also decontextualising their actions and reactions; and both express the physical intensity of agony. Silent Mountain traces the arc of emotional anguish that seems to build and overtake each figure bodily. This forty-five-second performance is slowed down to last eight minutes and is displayed in complete silence. The two figures are isolated in their respective frames and seemingly absorbed

Figure 12.1  Silent Mountain, Bill Viola (2001). Colour video diptych on two plasma displays mounted vertically on wall. Photo: Kira Perov. Courtesy of Bill Viola Studio.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

224

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

in their own performance of overwhelming suffering. The lack of sound is unsettling: it has the effect of distancing the actors from the viewers, and forcing the viewers to give their attention to how the body communicates that it is in pain. The articulation of anguish is unique to each figure: while the man’s despair explodes outward beyond the confines of his body – with arms raised he clasps his head, bends backwards and thrusts himself forwards – the woman, on the other hand, seems to collapse inward – she twists sideways, bends at the waist and cradles herself in her own arms. Yet both figures seem to reach the climax of this emotional cycle simultaneously – with an arched back and head facing the sky the woman releases a violent yet silent scream; at the same time, the man lurches forward and directs his mute scream toward the camera. Stunning in its synchronicity, this doubled movement suggests that the two share this extremely singular experience. But it is not just the temporal correspondences to each enactment of anguish, as much as it is the coupling of this double performance with the indeterminate gestures and expressions caught on high-definition film that make this video-installation so uncanny. The uncanny emerges out of the mixture of seemingly uncontrollable contortions of the body and the technical precision of the cinematic apparatus that both slows down and coordinates the visceral images made by the entrained bodily performances of these two skilled actors. This combination of technological control and surprisingly wild modulation of images is disorienting. It is no longer clear if the images refer to a passing emotion (like anguish), the return or reenactment of an iconic image of suffering, or the onset of an indeterminate emotional state – one that is made present only through technological mediation. Silent Mountain, like the other works that comprise renowned video artist Bill Viola’s The Passions series, is more than a simple representation or embodied performance of extreme emotional states. It is also a study of the relation of emotion to motion, and embodiment to perception. What is rendered visible in Silent Mountain are the twists in the tendons of the woman’s hand, the small muscles activated in the man’s face as he releases his most forceful cry, the slow, languid movement of their hair as their heads are tossed backwards and forwards, the veins that bulge out on the man’s neck and on the woman’s brow.1 But it is only through the development of these sophisticated digital video technologies that we can see and possibly experience these other topographies and sensual expressions of the body. Uncanny gestures (those that are embodied but unreadable) emerge as the film is transferred to digital video and dramatically slowed down. Once visualised through the process of slow-motion photography, we can recognise emergent gestures as ones that we have made, but they cannot be recalled bodily. The fact that we cannot reenact or remember the embodied experience of these gestures points to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience

225

something uncanny about gesture and its relation to affect, perception and the practice of image-making itself.2 The moving image – shot at the speed of 324 frames per second and slowed down to such a rate where it seems possible to watch blood flowing under the surface of the skin – becomes as uncontrollable as the emotion it attempts to capture. In this essay I take up the problem of confronting an embodied gesture as a ghostly gesture that we cannot consciously experience. The ghostly gesture is not one produced through product and interface design – such as double-clicking or swiping one’s finger over the screen to turn a page. Reanimating shapes, film turns the uncanny into entertainment. As Friedrich Kittler notes: ‘The age of media renders indistinguishable what is human and what is machine, who is insane and who is faking it.’3 With digital media, memory becomes tertiary (that is, non-lived), the real cannot be clearly distinguished from simulation, and the human returns as an aggregate of images, events, gestures and emotional intensities. But unlike the magnification of the microscope or the telescope, these visualisation technologies read and record micro-gestures, micro-expressions that cannot be consciously reproduced; nor do they correspond to the iconography of human facial expressions and emotional gestures. Digital technologies instead produce their own definitions of expression and emotion through the analysis and modelling of massive datasets, rather than simply recognising defining features as analogical images. What Walter Benjamin once called the ‘surgical gaze’ that amplified a truncated and isolated fragment of reality, has come to characterise the gaze of all of the devices through which we now define and discover new forms of ‘human’ intimacy. Highspeed motion capture, artificial intelligence devices and data aggregators are better at reading humans than humans are at reading themselves. Unlike Google Analytics, we are not capable of retracing our own comments, selections and purchases in, and movements through, digital and social media, nor are we able to calculate and anticipate our next moves by correlating, measuring and interpreting all of our moves against those belonging to others. But these mechanical acts of ‘reading’ (as analysing and quantifying data) have also transformed the way we define the human, and the way we experience intimacy. Like experience, intimacy has become tertiary. Devices that record, trace and analyse minute details about our behaviours capture experiences and intimate moments that are beyond human perception. Rather than offering us a new understanding of human interiority or making sense of the uncanny relationship we have with those very devices we used to know ourselves, Viola’s use of film and digital media leaves us only with uncertainty as a visceral affect. Works like those that make up The Passions confound our sense perception by feeding back to us a sense perception Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

226

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

that is generated through various types of technological mediation but which is beyond our conscious awareness. The Passions marks a turning point in Viola’s career. His video and installation art has always been characterised by its attempt to stretch and suspend time (through slow motion) to a point at which it reaches a stillness so attuned to detail that it reveals otherwise imperceptible gestures and expressions. This series of works instead focuses on the intersections of new media and experiences like death, consciousness, spirituality and emotion. Many of the installations that make up The Passions manipulate our sense of time by using a special high-speed camera and slowing down the rate of projection. It is not enough to say that these works are untimely: they open up time, making present a sense of non-human time that is fluid and malleable but can capture the most intimate details of human expression – a timeliness that is beyond human perception. Viola likens his use of high-definition video technologies to a mode of revelation that allows him to ‘work with an emotion as it manifests itself in the human body’.4 But The Passions does not simply capture the real-time expression of extreme emotional states as they take hold of, or ‘wash over the body like a wave’,5 as Viola aptly puts it. This series of works, instead, marks a return to the iconographic history of the passions found in the devotional paintings of the fifteenth century, while simultaneously invoking a more scientific study of facial expressions and bodily gestures from the Renaissance to the work of nineteenth-century evolutionary psychologists, neurologists and those chronophotographers (like Étienne-Jules Marey, Albert Londe, Eadweard Muybridge and Ottomar Anschütz) who mapped the kinetic movement of humans and animals. The fact that the gestures of the actors in The Passions can be said to resemble medieval, Renaissance and photographic, observational, images of gesture and movement indicates that there is something more than a ‘natural’ or normative relation of an emotional expression or a state of mind to movement. There is a learned bodily gesture, the gesture or pose of anguish – what Marcel Mauss called ‘techniques of the body’.6 The Passions does not conjure up the ghosts of the past to ground these works in an aesthetic or scientific tradition as much as it reveals the blurring of aesthetics and science and the overturning of those traditions once they have been drawn into the present and perceived through digital technologies. In this sense, The Passions does not represent a turning point, rather it becomes a turning (a returning and an overturning) as a continuous movement that draws together and examines the relation of gestures to images, images to movements and embodied perceptions to affective experiences. Embodied expressions cannot simply be understood as the representation of emotion or state of mind, they can instead condition and produce this state of mind. Unlike the eidos (a setting of the idea into form) that is meant Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience

227

to configure systems of ideas and communicate experiences by standing in or standing still, the gesture is fundamentally unstable.7 Vilém Flusser argues that a gesture functions like an interface that simultaneously ‘represents a state of mind as a codified symbol’ and expresses an uncontrollable bodily experience.8 However, ‘states of mind’, ‘codified symbols’ and embodied expressions are themselves forms of mediation. Because they mediate between ‘acting out’ and ‘reacting to’ specific stimuli, as well as mediating between what we understand as sense perception, emotion and sensation, they do not necessarily reveal any hidden truth. Similarly, there is a possible discrepancy between the state of mind and its symbolic codification: the symbol may exaggerate, understate or simply falsify a state of mind; the state of mind, on the other hand, may be self-deceptive, hyperbolised, played down or simply a misunderstanding. While indexical, the embodied expression may reveal automatic responses to stimuli in the form of habits, entrained bodily techniques (conforming to cultural norms), exaggerations, falsifications, or unreadable traces of affective phenomena. We can assume that the actors who perform Silent Mountain are conscious of their performance of anguish, but it is not clear if this performance is simply an act or if the act has itself produced the affective state of anguish embodied in the image, the actor and possibly the viewer. As interfaces, gestures open themselves up to a myriad of possible and even contradictory relations, effacing our distinction of truth and lie (authentic and inauthentic) as well as our understanding of time and space. For instance, the figure of the man in Silent Mountain has been likened to Laocoön (the Ancient Greek statue c. 40–30 bc), Il Giovane’s painting of St Sebastian (1590), Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s St Teresa in Ecstasy (1647–52), Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) and an example of Aby Warburg’s ‘pathos formula’ – the copying of images that express emotion that are either taken directly from ancient models, or reappear as mnemonic traces of physiognomic expression.9 These mnemonic traces of Classical despair, mannerist and baroque Christian suffering, and modern symbolist lament seem to produce a sense of coherence, under the guise of formulaic gestural expressions of incommensurable pain. For Viola, like Warburg, this formula has a protective quality – giving a tangible image to a traumatic event – thereby demonstrating to us that we have the ability to survive both the chaos of the world and the violent embodied experiences that such a world generates. The repetition of these images in motion (image-gestures), however, offers no cathartic release or soothing compassion. In other words, there can be no empathy (no sharing one’s pain with others or feeling another’s pain), only a recognition of the repeated eruption of uncontrollable affect. And it is these ‘fleeting but undiminishing movements, which haunt the action of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

228

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

s­ignification and sabotage it’.10 Even for Warburg, pathos cannot be fixed in an image. The pathos formula always refers to an image-gesture that may capture the arc of experiencing a violent emotional state (in material or video form) but it cannot shield us from the immanence of uncontainable affect. While we may not be able to identify with the image, or empathise with the expression visualised in the image, these image-gestures touch us by ‘looking back at us across the distance of time, answering to the gaze of the later beholder’.11 Or as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, ‘The image makes an image by resembling a gaze.’12 The image is therefore also a gesture. The Gesture as Moving Image Gestures are signs of presence that function like indices: establishing existential relations to things (people, events and objects). For Charles Sanders Peirce, the index is both the trace of an action, event or physical existence – like a footprint in the sand, a bullet hole, a death mask, the sound of thunder, a photograph – and a gesture (deixis) that establishes spatiotemporal relations of proximity and distance – such as a pointing figure, a nod of the head indicating a direction, the spin of a weathervane, and shifting pronouns such as ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘I’, ‘someone’, ‘everyone’, etc. The trace does not always resemble the object that was present in the event, as for example the bullet hole that marks the impact and trajectory of the bullet. But, the trace is also an icon since it functions like an image that represents something that is not present.13 On the other hand, the deixis embodies a sense of relationality, yet its bodily expression, its gesture, is also recognisable as a trace of bodily techniques. The index as both trace and gesture are forms of mediation. As indices they constitute material traces of an encounter with the subject or, as deixis, the pointing finger that indicates ‘this’ or ‘that’, ‘here’ or ‘there’.14 In photographic theory, the trace is a physical record (like the footprint or the death-mask) that makes evident a gesture of encounter but the deixis is a culturally recognisable embodied gesture (the wink of an eye, the pointing finger) that sets up a relation. These two types of indices suggest two different temporal relations: the trace makes the past present by the conjuring up of an image or sound that was but is no more (the bullet hole in the wall). The deictic gesture, instead, points to a set of relations that are present in and persist with the sound or the image (the wink of an eye that signals sly or humorous intent, or possible sexual innuendo). As such, deictic gestures do not always constitute resemblances or forms of representation that bear meaning. Rather, the deictic gesture can also perform (act out) a spatial and temporal relation. These gestures are not opposed to one another, but they do present us with two different experiences of time – the trace points to the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience

229

withdrawal or disappearance of the past and the deixis elicits its continued sense of presence. The work of Viola often simultaneously invokes both types of indices and experiences of time. The collision of these two types of gestures and experiences produces uncanny affects where our bodies and our bodily responses feel alien as they are re-experienced through motion capture and sound recording technologies. The Passions produces a sense of timeliness – a sense of mortality that accompanies the temporary nature of life, events, experiences, feelings and situations – that is made to confront the untimely – notions of the eternal and ghostly coupled with time-based media’s capability to record and reanimate the past, which is presented as a time-loop. Viola insists on framing his work in terms that are very similar to Freud’s definition of the uncanny as both a ‘harbinger of death’, and a symbol of immortality (albeit as the ego’s delusion of grandeur). Yet unlike Freud, Viola does not read immortality as a delusion of grandeur; rather he suggests that works like Ocean Without a Shore (2007) and Three Women (2008) present us with the experience of confronting death, which is a threefold process, involving first the intellectual and emotional confrontation with the fact that we are going to die some time in the future, and second the confrontation with death itself (that is, dying). It is this second act of dying that theorists like Blanchot and Heidegger see as an impossible experience, one that cannot be understood or represented. The third act

Figure 12.2  Ocean Without a Shore, Bill Viola (2007). Video/sound installation. Colour highdefinition video triptych. Installation view, Church of San Gallo, Venice. Photo: Thierry Bal. Courtesy of Bill Viola Studio.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

230

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

involves an encounter of the living with the dead (those who have already passed). This is not a simple encountering of one’s memories of the past, the remembering of the dead. Instead, Ocean Without a Shore makes it very difficult to tell what is past from what is present (what is alive and what is dead), and just who is experiencing what, suggesting that the ghosts of the past can confront those who are among the living. Viola, however, likens this experience of the dead to media’s potential to reanimate the past. Viola’s ghosts function less like Freud’s neurotics, who create delusions of immortality to defy the inevitability of death, than they do like Derrida’s revenants – spectres whose comings and goings cannot be controlled ‘because [they] begin by coming back’.15 Works like Ocean Without a Shore directly evoke a sense of the ghostly presence of the dead in the lives of the living.16 Ocean Without a Shore, first presented at the Church of San Gallo in Venice, Italy, consisted of three looped videos installed behind the three altars in this fifteenth-century church. In each video an individual human figure appears out of the darkness and approaches the spectator (who stands at the altar). After a brief virtual encounter with the spectator, this figure then turns around and returns back into obscurity. Each figure first appears in low-resolution analogue video (shot in black and white) but transforms into high-definition colour digital video once he or she comes closer. This transformation into the light and back to darkness is marked by the figure’s passing through what Viola calls ‘an event horizon’ – a cascade of transparent water. It is not clear, however, where we locate the ghostly. Does the ghostly emerge as a figure appearing in grainy analogue video that bears resemblance to outdated CCTV (surveillance) footage of the last thirty-five years, or the one that approaches us in vivid colour? It is not clear whether this entrance is simply a performance of an icon in a church or meant as a virtual encounter with a spectator. Furthermore, the figure is only marked as a ghost by passing through a material threshold (the passage through water). This suggests that the ghostly is only a special effect produced by the seamless superimposition of a high-definition digital video onto low-resolution analogue video tape, all set in slow motion. It is the slow motion coupled with the looping of the installation that makes us think about remediation as itself a ghost effect. It is only by looping, by coming back that the revenant can be recognised as a ghost effect. The use of slow-motion, looping and high-speed cameras recalls the work of other artists, like Martin Arnold and Douglas Gordon, that feature repetition (looping), the high-speed or ‘phantom’ camera, and the manipulation of time. Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) slows down Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) so as to last twenty-four hours instead of the 109-minute playing time Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience

231

of the original film, also revealing through the manipulation of time the emergence of many unexpected gestures and possible films within Hitchcock’s film itself. Similarly, Arnold’s Pièce Touchée (1989) reanimates a previous film (The Human Jungle, 1954). Rather than reproduce the whole film, Arnold manipulates only eighteen seconds of it, stretching it into a sixteen-minute film that loops. But the film produces loops within loops by multiplying and reordering frames. Arnold uses an optical printer to reproduce and reposition each frame, yet he focuses on the interval, or the relation of one frame to the next. With this obsessive focus on sequencing, micro-gestures emerge as obsessive-compulsive acts. Each movement appears as a syncopated but convulsive gesture. These obsessive gestures seem to arrest time rather than meditating on its passing. With the work of Viola, Gordon and Arnold, the loop is said to extend the spectators’ experience of duration by asking them to attentively focus on time that endlessly repeats.17 The instantaneous presence of the image is extended by its repetition, and each return does not produce the same experience of timeliness (presence) but a sense of time out of joint, an extended time replete with alien gestures. The human figures in works such as 24 Hour Psycho, Pièce Touchée, Ocean Without a Shore and Three Women appear out of joint. They are both actual and virtual: they are images of actual people who performed before the camera and they are virtual or uncanny – they are decoupled from any narrative meaning or subjective identity but they present us with an infinite potential to produce new relations, meanings and situations. Viola seems to integrate both the emergence of alien gestures and images from slow motion (like Gordon) and the collision between frames (Arnold), or at least the collision of digital and analogue media. Viola adds another dimension to some of his works by asking his performers to enact either a ‘near death experience’ or the encounter with a ghost. The actors perform themselves as if they were no longer there (no longer among the living). What emanates from these performances are uncanny gestures, reaching beyond the living to a performance of the dead. These are simultaneously the imaginary gestures of death made by living actors, an image of the living in death, and the gestures of editing, processing and manipulation of time and images. The collision of such gestures makes it unclear whether the spectator is meant to encounter the living who pass into death, the dead who return to the living, or the co-presence of the digital and the analogue. The gesture made by performers shot on two types of imaging processes can also be seen as a mode of communication (video) that has been spiritualised. Even on the level of representation, it is not clear if these mediated figures come back to life or ‘pass to the other side’. If they are passing to the other side or even if they are returning to the living, then why do they turn around Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

232

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

and go back into the shadows? It is the repeated coming and going that makes these figures unstable. The invisible but material sheet of water seems to be the only marker that regulates this coming and going. The humanist spirituality that underpins Viola’s work – especially pronounced in Ocean without a shore – is both endorsed and undermined by the digital technologies used to present us with a visualisation of the afterlife. The ‘spirit images’ neither represent being nor non-being; they are both there and not there. They come and go on a loop. If they are ghosts, they are either mechanical ones (spiritual automatons) or they must rely on technology to communicate with the living. It is the confusion of the spiritual with modes of communication that produces an uncanny experience. Ocean Without a Shore asks us to think about what it means to communicate with visual or sonic objects as opposed to working them or manipulating them.18 They trouble modes of representation that seek to use them in the place of a human encounter with death, the dead or the image of the living who are now dead. The passage through water also marks another ghostly image, the superimposed image of the analogue that is revealed next to the digital video at the moment that the body of the ghostly figure encounters the water. This juxtaposition demonstrates new media’s ability to capture what is beyond perception like presence itself – the seamless transformation of one medium to another. The juxtaposition of black and white and colour produces spectral effects. Here the uncanny is a media effect, but one that does not return to preconceived icons of reanimation of the dead (resurrection or the afterlife), or of death itself. These gestures of encounter (digital to analogue) are not readable as signs in the same way the human subjects’ hand gestures and facial expressions can be read. They remain uncertain but at the same time they cannot be decoupled from the movement of the actors. Remediating the Uncanny As Freud observed, the meaning of heimlich (homely, native) moves towards what is taken to be its opposite, the unheimlich (foreign, strange or uncanny). Heimlich and unheimlich are not simply opposites; heimlich itself is the repository of ambivalent meanings, signifying on the one hand the familiar and domestic, and on the other the concealed and the hidden.19 The uncanny is both familiar and strange; a doubling or redoubling of past events, figures, phrases or images. Freud repeatedly refers to Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as that ‘which ought to have remained secret and concealed, but which has come to light’20 – linking the uncanny to the problematic relationship of being and non-being, the ‘reality or pleasure principle’ and the ‘death instinct’: Freud literally tells us that ‘the pleasure principle seems to actually serve the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience

233

death instinct’, and it does so by linking pleasure to the act of consumption or destruction of the object of desire, but also by expressing pleasure as the feeling of discharge or expenditure.21 Being is thereby installed into a primary model of conflict, where all relations are seen as forces of opposition (between desire and its own expenditure). Ironically, however, the death instinct serves as a positive (transcendental) principle for repetition, whereas the pleasure principle becomes solely psychological – an emotional feeling of familiarity that produces a sense of comfort.22 The image of death that permeates the works of Viola questions the binary logic of Freud’s subject–object relations, since it presents us with a passage (a turning and returning) between life and death. Rather than presenting two opposing forces or drives (pleasure and the death instinct) that consume and expend objects, Viola’s images pass between the dead and the image of the living, confusing their respective borders. The body of work that comprises The Passions alludes to some of the same motifs – the image of death, the dopplegänger, the doubling and redoubling of uncanny experiences, déjà vu. But The Passions does not depend on relations between sensory perception and a predetermined symbolic order – the return of repressed traumatic events that arrive in the form of castration anxieties, the fear of death and the paranoia of being watched, etc. Viola is interested, rather, in the technology of expression, its re-enactment or performance, which can reveal hidden micro-movements that fall outside the iconography of human experience. The Passions was shot on 35 mm film at a very high speed (324 frames per second), transferred to digital video, slowed down once transferred to digital video to be projected at thirty frames per second and then displayed on an LCD screen. It is both the speed of the film and the slowing down of the projection (the manipulation of time) that displays what Viola calls ‘an unexpected field of action’. The series of video installations that comprises The Passions visualises what we cannot experience as ‘embodied perception’ – but the slow-motion photography seems to visually relink motor memory to self-awareness and emotional intensity. The mediation of embodied perceptions of joy, sorrow, anguish, fear and anger through high-speed film and high-definition video results in the uncanny disappearance of the readable (intentional movements, iconic gestures and performative emotions) as much as the appearance of otherwise imperceptible localised micro-movements (facial tics and gestural twitches). Yet The Passions does not produce a subjective encounter (the reaffirmation of the self), but a semi-autonomous encounter between the lived and the non-lived. What makes The Passions so uncanny is that it points to what is both embodied and unlived (that is, not consciously experienced) – what Viola calls ‘the presence of the dead in the living’. The Passions reworks the story of Christ’s death and resurrection, but it does not reproduce the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

234

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

visceral sense of suffering conveyed by the Renaissance paintings on which this series is modelled.23 Instead the excruciating amount of detail in these moving images produces a disturbing theatricality. Shot on high-speed film, permitting the action to be dramatically slowed down when played back, this series of videos presents intense tableaux of shifting and momentary emotions. Like Silent Mountain, the Quintet of the Astonished (2000) (the first of the video installations to make up The Passions), stretches time – what took one minute to act out was stretched into sixteen minutes of high-definition video. Quintet of the Astonished depicts the life-size figures of four men and one woman, who envision and act out the range of emotional gestures used in Renaissance and medieval paintings of Christ’s passion. Viola directed the actors to recreate, as live tableaux, devotional paintings from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Unlike Silent Mountain, the actors who perform Quintet of the Astonished act in concert with one another. Their performances are captured and displayed in the same frame, giving the appearance of some cohesive movement to each micro-gesture. In an interview with Hans Belting, Viola remarks: I was most interested in opening up the spaces between the emotions. I wanted to focus on gradual transitions – the idea of emotional expression as a continual fluid motion. This meant that the transitions, the ambiguous time when you shift from being happy to sad, is just as important as the main emotion itself.24

The Passions slows down the rapidly shot images so much that emotions become indeterminate, but the micro-movements of the face and body become hypervisible, which leads us to reconsider what constitutes both performance and experience. Viola’s work has attracted critics interested in cognitive science – particularly in affective computing designed to understand and mimic human emotions, and neuroscience that seeks to understand the neural basis for human social identification. But his work troubles the way such scientists construe empathy as an arousal and response to the perception of action and affect, as the ability to read and control emotions. Viola’s work questions how we define empathy as a common human experience, one that is passed from person to person via unconscious forms of imitation. His work points to the disconnect between the way that we experience such sensations and how cognitive scientists in the last thirty years have attempted to describe how empathy physically takes place. There is an assumption on the part of cognitive scientists like Vittorio Gallese, Alvin Goldman and V. S. Ramachandran that there is a correspondence between the physical and the emotional – between the recognition of others’ actions, the ability to comprehend and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience

235

emulate these actions mentally, and the capability of emotionally relating to others.25 Aside from the problems in correspondence (between action and emotion, and self and other), Viola asks us to think about those sensations and gestures that we cannot recognise. Experiments with actors and actresses conducted by cognitive scientists suggest that affect is performed and such a performance can be visualised by neuroimaging techniques like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). These tests use such images as evidence of how the brain relates to stimuli, suggesting watching and listening to outside stimuli establishes internalised relations to those stimuli. Our brains record what we see and hear not as information, but as a relation to ourselves. According to the mirror neuron theory, our brains mimic what we perceive. We have learned from the recent fMRI tests given to actress Fiona Shaw as she performs T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, that her performance of the many voices in the text can be seen in the functioning of her brain.26 The fMRI operates by measuring cerebral blood flow. Since blood flow is coupled with neurological activity in the brain, the fMRI can map out what areas of the brain are activated when presented with external stimuli – such as the reading of ‘The Waste Land’. Those same centres of the brain activated by witnessing someone else perform an action – such as those areas associated with arm, leg and upper body m ­ ovements – were activated when Shaw performed the various voices contained in the poem. Shaw’s mental visualisation of T. S. Eliot’s phrases produced actual neurological stimulation that could in turn be mapped (or visualised). Like artists and critical theorists, cognitive scientists have applied ‘the Uncanny’ to the gap between kinesthetic gestures and emotions, emergent and categorical brain and neurological responses – particularly the ‘uncanny valley’ and what has been called the ‘mirror neuron system’. Using fMRI visual mapping technologies, cognitive scientists have shown that when we watch someone playing music or expressing emotion, those centres in our brain that control our motor functions (arms, legs, facial expressions) are stimulated. According to the argument, our brain mirrors what we are watching, even though we do not act it out. This is not, however, a case of simple recall: we do not need to have actually experienced any of the things we witness in order to have our brains ‘mirror’ them or to at least give us a positive result. What these images suggest is that when we watch others, we create a phantom sense of embodiment and that we conjure up phantom memories. These impulses are then read as empathetic (that is, affective) – they appear to express psychological empathy, but they are really indicators of some form of physiological empathy (that is, they occur without any emotional response). The fMRI cannot show or locate any emotional or empathetic responses, only the triggering of those centres of the brain that are already Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

236

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

associated with an understanding of gross mechanical movements – such as grasping for an object. While the fMRI can show that there is a correlation of stimulation to brain functioning, this does not translate into understanding the motivation for these same actions – actions like grasping for objects or the wink of an eye.27 The problem for many other cognitive scientists is that the understanding of intention requires that the observer be able to recognise an action and already be able to qualitatively judge such actions. But this does not explain how we come to understand expressions and gestures that we cannot recognise. The experience of both acting and witnessing is presented in the work of Viola as a form of uncanny embodiment – at once embodied and not embodied. The performers do not consciously experience the micro-­ movements of their bodies as they perform The Passions – those movements can only be perceived by the spectator. What the performer can perceive (in real time) are only his or her bodily sensations.28 Viola’s focus on the in-between or the interval produces a new form of affectivity. Whether kinesthetic or affective (the lived), the performer would have difficulty reproducing such gestures in real time. Self-awareness or consciousness ‘has been taken over by technology, that is, by tertiary memory (the non-lived experience). This only becomes a problem when Viola’s videos contaminate our perception with the recurrence of a tertiary past (the non-lived).’29 The phantom camera and its ability to capture micro-movements and gestures fills in for memory with alien and indeterminate experiences. Yet this recorded image does not function like memory. It is understood as empirical evidence (an image-fact) that confronts the way we process and retrieve memories. According to cognitive scientists, the brain fills in for what we do not or cannot remember, or for what we do not see.30 The brain does not have total recall, rather it fills in with what we already know about navigating space, actions, colours, sounds and visual experiences. Hence the brain is more speculative and creative than the technologies we are relying on to record and remember ourselves. But where do we then locate these emotions that have been made visible only through such technologically sophisticated processes when emotion itself simply simulates (or mirrors) the very technology that records, identifies and feeds us back these emotions as images or our own micro-gestures? The Passions does not represent human emotion as much as it calls attention to the gestures of grief, loss and trauma that have themselves become iconic – this means that technological consciousness is limited to or pertains to the recalling of the already iconic. But how then do we account for the emergence of imperceptible expressive movements of the body once slowed down and repeated? These movements are unsettled and unsettling, and therefore, they Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience

237

cannot be perceived as iconic, since they do not resemble anything. The speed of the recording and the subsequent confrontation with the recorded gestures does something unique. Rather than trying to capture some spiritual moment outside time, Viola’s work demonstrates how such gestures are timely and point to the mechanical re-animation of trauma or grief rather than to an internal expression. These resurrected and embalmed gestures, performed before the camera, constitute an instruction manual on the aesthetics and visual grammar of gestures of grieving, joy, anger and frustration. But by pointing to their own theatricality or spectrality, they decouple gestures from subjective experience, revealing the emotive gesture as a mechanical bodily expression rather than an intense emotional one. Like the uncanny itself, The Passions undermines those stable subject positions that would allow us to interpret gestures, emotions and embodied perceptions as having specific symbolic meaning. The return of an embodied perception is itself uncanny: the body only registers the reflection of a gesture when it returns in the form of a ghostly image. But the return always takes the form of difference. In the case of Silent Mountain and The Quintet of the Astonished, theatrical reanimations of iconic but imaginary stagings of gestures of grief, trauma and Christian spirituality are linked to indecipherable bodily expressions that are spectral. By uncoupling bodily experience from bodily expression, and with them bodily images and affective embodiments, the image of body and our experience of the body are themselves rendered indeterminate, ungrounded and uncanny. Notes All URLs referenced were accessed 29 January 2017, except where noted. 1. Charles Darwin named these tiny movements associated with expression, ‘accessories’. Although they make up the emotional expression, they had to be captured and arrested via photography to be studied as complementary movements to human expression. See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (first published 1872) found on Project Gutenberg, EBook #1227, released March 1998, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1227. 2. Mark Hansen, ‘The Time of Affect or Bearing Witness to Life’, Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004): p. 613. He argues that: ‘. . . in the case of Viola’s work, we are exposed to affective nuances that are properly imperceptible to the human eye and that can only be presented through the mediation of technology and only assimilated through the modality of affectivity’. 3. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 146. 4. Bill Viola, Public Lecture, ‘Video Art, Sense Perception and Human Experience’, for the Series the Felix Burda memorial lecture series, the ‘Iconic Turn’, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

238

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli 16 November 2006, http://www.iconicturn.de/category/autor/viola_bill/. His lecture can be watched on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= IY13ZocVePU. Ibid. Marcel Mauss, ‘Les techniques du corps’, originally published in the Journal de psychologie, XXXII, Nos 3–4 (15 Mars–5 Avril 1936), pp. 271–93. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) where he argues that the idea (eidos) may provide a ground, but it is itself a gesture of enfolding an active look (resembling the gaze, setting itself outwards) and a passive one (self-presenting). He writes (p. 98): ‘The image contains the index of its frozenness (its form, its present, its representation) and at the same time the index of movement (force, appearing/disappearing). That is also why it engages both the indefinite proliferation of images as well as each image’s isolation and enframing, its being hung on the wall.’ Vilém Flusser, Gestures, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2012), pp. 1–9, and p. 161. See John Walsh, ‘Emotions in Extreme Time: Bill Viola’s Passions Project’, in Bill Viola: The Passions (Los Angeles: The Getty Project & The National Gallery London, 2010), pp. 44–5; Sabine Flach, ‘Lament in Contemporary Art’, in Sabine Flach, Daniel Margulies and Jan Söffner (eds), Habitus in Habitat 1: Emotion and Motion (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 181–206; Ladislav Kesner, ‘Showing Images of the Mind in Dresden and Brno’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 38.3 (2013), pp. 232–46; Shao Yiyang, ‘From Painting to Video – Three Fragments in the Digital Times’, at CAFA Art Info (25 March 2013), http://en.cafa.com.cn/frompainting-to-video-three-fragments-in-the-digital-times-part-ii.html. Adi Efal, ‘Warburg’s “Pathos Formula” in Psychoanalytic and Benjaminian Contexts’, Assaph: Studies in Art History, No. 5 (2000), p. 227, https://arts.tau.ac. il / sites / arts . tau . ac . il / files / media _ server / Arts / Research / Journals / asaf / arthistory/pdf/art_book2000.pdf. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 120. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 87. See Mary Ann Doane’s introduction to a special issue of differences on the index, ‘Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction’, differences, 18(1) (2007), pp. 1–6. Charles Sanders Peirce, “‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’, in Justus Bucher (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 104– 115; Mary Ann Doane, ‘The indexical and the concept of medium specificity’, differences, 18(1) (2007), pp. 128–52. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 11. Ocean Without a Shore took its name from Andalucian Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi (1165–1240): ‘The Self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no beginning or end, in this world and the next.’ It was originally installed in a fifteenth-century chapel for the fifty-second Venice Biennale in 2007 and directly incorporated the church’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

The Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience

239

internal architecture by using three existing stone altars as recesses for video screens. See Christine Ross, ‘The Temporalities of Video: Extendedness Revisited’, Art Journal, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2006), pp. 82–99. Sande Cohen, ‘Digital Critical’, unpublished paper delivered at the ‘Recoded: Landscapes and Politics of New Media’ conference, Aberdeen University (25–26 April 2008). He writes: ‘Manovich thoroughly confuses communication with image presence; electronic telecommunication is said to be “two-way” in contrast to photography and film, thus the overcoming of distance. But the idea that one communicates with a screen is already crazy-making, since exactly how does one communicate with a visual object as opposed to working it, manipulating it?’ Samuel Weber, ‘The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment’, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 88, No. 6 (1973), pp. 1102–33, p. 1104. Quoted in Weber, ‘The Sideshow’, p. 1105. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 57. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 16–17. See also Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 57. For a longer discussion of Viola’s interpretation of devotional and religiousthemed Renaissance art in his video art work see Nancy Keefe Rhodes ‘How Video Became Art: Bill Viola and David Ross Return to the Everson Museum’, in Stone Canoe Journal at http://www.stonecanoejournal.org (accessed May 2016). Bill Viola, ‘A Conversation’, interview with Hans Belting, in John Walsh (ed.), Bill Viola: The Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 200. See Vittorio Gallese’s ‘The “Shared Manifold” Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (2001): pp. 33–50; Vittorio Gallese and Alvin Goldman, ‘Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2 (1998), pp. 493–501; Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The new science of how we connect with others (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008); Vilayanur Ramachandran, TED Talk, ‘The Neurons That Shaped Civilization’, November 2009, http://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization?language=en (accessed 3 April 2016). In the autumn of 2009, as part of an exhibition on human identity at University College London, actor Fiona Shaw performed T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ while being scanned by an MRI by the cognitive neuroscientists in the psychology department. The Identity Project was funded by the Wellcome Trust. Vladimir Kosonogov, ‘Why the mirror neurons cannot support action understanding’, Neurophysiology, 44: 6 (December 2012), pp. 499–500. See also Greg Hickok who argues that the mirror neuron has never been adequately tested in ‘Eight problems for the mirror neuron theory of action understanding in monkeys and humans’, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 7 (July 2009), pp. 1229–43. Critics of the mirror neuron theory, says Kosonogov, ‘use the term “action Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

240

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

understanding” to emphasize that not only the sensory and motor aspects of an action, but also its goal and intention’ are misleading since ‘it can be recognized by an observer . . .’ This is based on ‘the apparent internal logic of inconsistency’. 28. Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures, Producing Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 72. 29. Hansen, ‘The Time of Affect or Bearing Witness to Life’, p. 599. 30. Eric Kandel argues that the brain ‘obtains incomplete information from the outside world and completes it’ and that our brain fills in information into an otherwise incomplete impression. Furthermore, Kandel argues, ‘these insights into perception serve as a bridge between the visual perception of art and the biology of the brain’. The question returns us to the Derridean problem of beginning by coming back. That perception is somehow contingent on something that is an already formed image. See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/ opinion/sunday/what-the-brain-can-tell-us-about-art.html. See also Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 75–122.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 13

Slow Looking: Confronting Moving Images with Georges Didi-Huberman Catherine Fowler ‘In order to know, we must imagine for ourselves.’1

By definition the term ‘moving images’ suggests instability. Because change happens in the frame and across frames, as Sean Cubitt puts it, ‘cinematic movement is a fundamental challenge to the concept of wholeness and integrity’.2 Because change happens, when classical film theory developed, other models for looking at images – whether paintings, drawings or photographs – did not quite fit for the busy cinematic frames of movies. One key task for film scholars was to find methods for analysing change, hence mise-en-scène analysis developed to read cinematic movement in the frame while theories of montage developed to understand change across frames, through the cut. However, amongst all of these efforts to understand change did we forget to really look at moving images? To look without seeking motivations, to look abandoning method, in other words to look and be open to ‘not knowing’? The question of ‘really looking’ at moving images arises out of an apparently growing interest in using long takes to decelerate the viewing process in contemporary art and filmmaking. Film-makers have often used long takes to slow down changes in the moving image;3 examples include the ‘sparse cinema’ of Ozu4 and Bresson and Dreyer’s transcendental cinema as identified by Paul Schrader.5 Among more experimental practices we can count the static frames of structural films6 alongside a sub-set of 1960s avant-garde: ‘properly durational films [. . .] that [. . .] foreground time as a formal element of cinema’.7 More recently, Michel Ciment’s 2003 diagnosis of a ‘cinema of slowness, of contemplation’ that has since become known as slow cinema8 seems to have sparked an interest in both the variety of speeds of change in the cinematic frame and how we conceptualise looking, duration and economies of attention. Critical engagements with slow cinema tend to take as a starting point the assumption that for the viewer slowness adds time to think. For Martin Brady, Straub and Huillet borrow from Brecht the notion that ‘slowness is instructive and enlightening’;9 while William Brown finds that, watching Lav Diaz’ Melancholia (2008, 450 min) he begins to see ‘beauty [. . .] derived from the smallest of things’10 and for Asbjørn Grønstad slow cinema Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

242

Catherine Fowler

can provide a space for ‘intrinsical ethical acts, such as recognition, reflection, imagination and empathy’.11 Whatever their individual agendas, engagements with slow cinema traditions converge around the conviction that through diegetic variations in speed viewers who engage will start to see things differently (both intellectually and perceptually). Having begun by asking about how we really look at moving images, this detour through slowness and the long take adds questions about seeing and thinking to my opening question. I would argue that it is difficult to ‘just look’ at moving images because we have developed expectations about what we should be looking for. The flurry of scholarship around slow cinema traditions provides a renewed interest in looking because, I would argue, writers have explored what happens when we get to spend more time than usual with a moving image, or, to look for longer. In this chapter I want to add to this work on slow cinema traditions contemporary artists’ moving images shown in galleries. The work I discuss has much in common with slow cinemas, including an emphasis upon minimal movements, minor elements and the apparently undramatic. However, because it is conceived for contemporary art spaces, this work commonly adopts the short form or operates through a looped format. As a consequence of these differences I will argue that a new critical trajectory is opened up by artists’ moving images in which it is less duration that is of interest – or how seeing is produced by a sustained look – and more visuality or how really looking can produce a different kind of engagement with the visual. To start, it seems wise to pin down the notion of ‘really looking’. The kind of looking I am thinking of is developed by art historian Georges DidiHuberman; it is looking without expectation.12 If I turn to Didi-Huberman for help it is for several reasons; the first is because the epistemological position from which he writes is that we should not attempt to define images. For him definition is a synonym for attempting to ‘know’, about which he laments: [h]ow can we know an image if the image is the very thing [. . .] that imperils – through its power to take hold of us, which is to say its call to imagine – the positive or ‘objective’ exercise of knowledge? If the image is what makes us imagine, and if the (sensible) imagination is an obstacle to (intelligible) knowledge, how then can one know an image?13

Didi-Huberman argues that in his discipline scholars always have a definition or interpretation in mind when they look at images; hence, the act of looking has a certain pre-determination about it as art historians look for something. For Didi-Huberman there are several problems with this ‘expectative method’; the first concerns how it has limited the ways in which we can think Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Slow Looking

243

about the visual into two stable positions: the visible and the invisible.14 As he puts it, ‘a visibility can acquire all its value not from what it shows but from the expectation of a visibility it does not show’.15 In other words, if we expect to see something, we may overlook something else. The second problem follows from the first: when expectation directs our gaze, we may overlook visual aspects of images and have no time to ‘imagine for ourselves’.16 Hence the problem with an expectative method is that it has limited the task of the scholar to ‘grasping’ the image, thus restricting our ability to be ‘grasped by’ it.17 It may seem paradoxical to call upon Didi-Huberman, who has not had to tackle the busy cinematic frames described above, in order to address the question of how to really look at moving images. As an art historian, his scholarship has most famously included the photographs of Charcot,18 the painted frescoes of Fra Angelico (1995) and more recently the work of Aby Warburg (2001; 2010); only rarely has he considered moving images.19 Yet I call upon Didi-Huberman because I believe he brings something new to discussions of slowness in cinema. In this chapter I am interested in moving images that are indefinite in the sense that they attempt to resist the urge to define: whether ‘to state or describe exactly’ or, drawing on the word’s etymological origins, to ‘express [. . .] completion’ or ‘bring to an end’ our engagement.20 Didi-Huberman provides language through which we can express a wider range of engagements with visuality. Borrowing from Didi-Huberman we can re-cast the gains of slowness in the cinema, as theorised above, in terms of a breaking-down of the expectative gaze. For example, directors Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman and Michael Haneke, each of whom have tendencies towards slowness, have spoken of using long takes to push the endurance of the viewer in some way. Early on Tarkovsky said: ‘If you extend the normal length of a shot, you get bored; but if you extend it further still you become interested in it; and if you extend it even more a new quality, a new intensity of attention is born’.21 Tarkovsky’s three different levels of engagement with moving images: boredom, interest, intensity of attention, speak to Didi-Huberman’s thoughts about the expectative method. The implication is that boredom is a reaction to not getting what we expected: that is, a shot which is held just long enough for us to get the information we need to remain engaged, but no longer. In Tarkovsky’s films change happens before our eyes as much as or even more than it happens in the cut. Both Chantal Akerman and Michael Haneke, also known for their extended long takes, concur with Tarkovsky and his emphasis upon the levels of engagement that viewers go through before they stop looking ‘for’ something. Early in her career Chantal Akerman observed: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

244

Catherine Fowler When you look at a picture, if you look just one second, you get the information, ‘that’s a corridor’. But after a while you forget it’s a corridor; you just see that it’s yellow, red; that it’s lines; and then again it comes back as a corridor. If you don’t stay long enough, if you don’t stare, you will never forget that this is information about a corridor. I want people to lose themselves in the frame, and at the same time to be truly confronting the space.22

Akerman’s reference to ‘truly confronting the space’ aligns with Tarkovsky’s notion of an ‘intensity of attention’. It is worth pointing out that DidiHuberman’s work can also be associated with the act of ‘confronting’ images; this is the title of the book in which he makes the assertions above. While the French title is ‘Devant l’image’ the English translation strengthens ‘in front of’ to ‘confronting’, making the stand-off between looker and image more explicit. Coming to our third example, Michael Haneke also admits to pushing beyond a threshold when he imagines the spectator’s responses to one of his long-take sequences: ‘I get it, next scene [. . .] Then, it amuses me. Then, it infuriates me. Then, it tires me. Then, I say, “Let’s see where this goes.” And at one point, I begin to watch’. In other words: ‘Because the scene lasts as long as it does you come to another understanding’.23 In each of the examples from Tarkovsky, Akerman and Haneke, the long take challenges the expectations of viewers in the cinema and demands an adjustment to pace that, the directors assume, may meet with resistance.24 Admittedly, each director has different reasons for inviting us to look for longer. For Robert Bird, Tarkovsky created a ‘cinema of the elements’,25 that makes ‘use of cinematic narrative to cultivate new types of attention in the viewer’ but also involves ‘the study of atmospheres as conditions of experience’.26 If spirituality and the mystical have often been associated with Tarkovsky’s slower pace, then for Akerman taking our time with images is often a minimalist move that is about disrupting the hierarchy through which we value the dramatic over the mundane.27 While for John David Rhodes, Haneke’s long take is a critique of our inattention toward images in general, hence it is needed ‘for watching itself to die as consumption (“I get it, next scene”) and be reborn as actual watching’.28 Because Tarkovsky, Akerman and Haneke challenge both the forward drive of narrative and the linkages of cause and effect, their words reveal how the simple act of looking has rarely been thought of on its own as a motivation for viewing moving images.29 The contemporary artists I discuss seem to be channelling the techniques of Tarkovsky, Akerman and Haneke above. Yet because their work circulates in the visual arts rather than in film culture, viewers’ expectations are slightly different, for as Matthew Barney once put it (in relation to his polymorphous Cremaster Cycle, 1994–2002), in the art world films can ‘move at the speed of art – which is slow’.30 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Slow Looking

245

Generally, those artists who favour long shots over editing are intent upon asking us to look longer at a scene. How does this work differ from the myriad of examples that exist in the cinema? The first answer to this question is that our motivation for looking is not clearly articulated. In Sharon Lockhart’s artworks: Nō (2003), Double Tide (2009), Exit (Bath Iron Works, July 7–11, 2008, Bath, Maine) (2008) and Pódworka (2009), human figures perform modest tasks against rural and urban backdrops.31 In Pódworka children play with cars, balls and bikes in the mucky alleyways between cramped Polish apartment buildings. In Exit workers are observed strolling towards the Massachusetts Bath iron works, swinging their lunchboxes. In Double Tide and Nō respectively a woman extracts cockles from New England mud and a Japanese couple carefully arrange and then spread out hay across a bare ploughed field. In all cases, the ‘actions’ framed are small, insignificant, nonevents; and they are filmed with a supportive formal quietude using long takes and an unmoving camera. As the examples above suggest, Lockhart favours choreographed and repetitive actions of some kind. In other artists’ work the static camera frames public space: in Bantar Gebang (Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, 2000), an inhabited Djakarta rubbish dump; in Zocalo, May 20, 1999 (Francis Alys, 1999), a plaza in Mexico City. This static camera also frames people, as in Uomoduomo (Anri Sala, 2000), in which a man apparently drifts in and out of sleep in an Italian cathedral; or natural occurrences, as in The Green Ray (Tacita Dean, 2001), which observes the last rays of the sun, and Bordeaux Piece (David Claerbout, 2004), in which actors rehearse the same scenes over and over across thirteen hours, during which daylight dwindles.32 To visit and view the moving images of Lockhart and others in museums and galleries is to experience uncertainty in relation to the visual, because their visions attempt to resist the urge to define; critic Diedrich Diederichsen senses as much when he writes of de Rijke and de Rooij’s Untitled (2001) that: ‘One’s gaze is concentrated on an image in which the merest movement in the planar, geometric layout becomes an abstract art [. . .] the eye is being put to work in different ways than called for by narrative film’.33 Another way of putting the difference that Diederichsen experiences is to say that we cannot approach this body of work through an expectant gaze. So how can we approach it? An encounter with Lockhart’s film installation Double Tide will provide our example. Double Tide takes as its subject a worker whose job is defined by the most elemental and unchangeable forces of nature. Lockhart aims to capture Jen, the subject, cockling on a rare day when there are two low tides. While when shown in a theatre the film runs for ninety-nine minutes, in art spaces the installation is divided spatially between two films running for half that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

246

Catherine Fowler

Figure 13.1  Sharon Lockhart, Double Tide (Jen Casad, South Bristol, Maine, July 22, 2008, Sunrise (detail) 2009. 16 mm colour/sound film transferred to HD (two-channel installation). 46 minutes. Installation view: Sharon Lockhart: Double Tide, Espai D’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló, ES, 2012. Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin.

Figure 13.2  Sharon Lockhart, Double Tide ((Jen Casad, South Bristol, Maine, July 22, 2008, Sunset) (detail) 2009. 16 mm colour/sound film transferred to HD (two-channel installation). 50 minutes. Installation view: Sharon Lockhart: Double Tide, Espai D’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló, ES, 2012. Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin.

length – one filmed at the beginning of the day, the other at the end – each architecturally installed at the end of a different tunnel-like space, as if to channel our attention.34 The installation of the tunnel-like constructions is such that viewers are very aware that they do not belong in the gallery. When first encountered, their sculptural properties are immediately evident, and when seen from the outside they could exist as artworks in their own right. Once visitors find the open end to the structures, so their tunnel-like effects become evident, as does the way in which they frame the act of looking, almost like quotation marks. They are long, with benches in their middle and a screen at their end. The visitor may enter at any point in the films, which run on loops, and the ‘action’ remains more or less the same, differing mainly in terms of Jen’s progress. On the screens at the end of the tunnels we observe how, equipped with a small boat, metal basket and wellington boots Jen sinks her foot into thick mud, forages around for cockles and deposits them in her basket before looking for the next good patch and inching her basket forward. Her work is repetitive and unchanging, marked by the same gestures – of plunging her hand into the mud, striding, balancing, stretching and retrieving. Around these repetitive and simple human actions a whole natural drama is taking place, as dawn or dusk overtakes Jen – depending upon Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Slow Looking

247

which of the two films one is watching. Akin with Diedrichson’s references to ‘the merest movement’, the visible signs of the day encroaching or retreating are very subtle and easy to miss. The light – and especially the greyish colour palette – changes very little; a veil of mist slowly lifts or falls; birds are occasionally glimpsed darting past. While the ‘action’ we see is sparse, the sound track is relatively busy, densely mixed and varied. Hence without seeing them we hear boats out at sea sounding their horns, birds constantly squawking, rattling and chanting and a dog barking. All of this background noise is interwoven with the overly loud squelch, suck and ooze as Jen’s boots and hands push their way into the thick mud to retrieve their quarry. The advice of Tarkovsky, Akerman and Haneke could certainly apply to Double Tide. Coming across this installation, which appears to operate like two short films, it does take a while to adjust to their pace; and viewers may also struggle to cede any expectations of standard dramatic structure, of action and of being led somewhere via editing. The fact that there are two films and that they oppose one another – one filmed at the start of the day, one at the end – plays some part in shifting the dramatic shape of this installation in our minds, for the stereotypical use of dawn or dusk as beginnings/endings is instead cancelled out. In Lockhart’s Double Tide, it is hard to know where our gaze should settle. Akerman’s desired effect – of losing oneself yet also confronting the landscape – is present throughout. Depending upon when we enter the space where it is installed Jen may be in the foreground, or she may be less prominent, in the background. While her actions are repetitive, around her the world moves to a different rhythm. After a while she loses her human form and becomes indistinct colours, lines, a shape of which we are vaguely aware. This may sound like what Akerman describes (the corridor becoming abstract), and indeed viewers may both lose themselves in the frame of Double Tide and confront the space; however there is also time for other effects. Turning again to Didi-Huberman we can recognise how a different kind of change is happening if we adopt what he calls a ‘suspended attention’. If the first reason I turn to Didi-Huberman is because he insists that we should not attempt to define images and points out the problems of the expectative method, the second is because he offers us words to express the long look that is invited in front of the moving images of Lockhart and others. A ‘suspended attention’ involves ‘a prolonged suspension of the moment of reaching conclusions’.35 As we have seen, it is in the nature of the linear experience of the movie theatre that the expectative gaze of film viewing eventually has to move on to the next image. For Tarkovsky, Akerman and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

248

Catherine Fowler

Haneke this means that viewers have to be gradually disappointed before the desired effects of confronting the space, an intensity of attention or another understanding can be reached. In their work, though, looking is accompanied by more conventional expectations, as the long take must take its place amongst other shots. By contrast, in the singular long takes of Lockhart and others there is only the shot, with its distinctive pace. Here, suspension of expectation is what allows us to just look, and really look. And if we do – since we can always desist, resist and walk away – then there is, as it were, no end to what we might experience. More importantly, if we do, we might also be grasped by moving images as they call us to imagine. According to Didi-Huberman, art history has resisted the impulse to allow oneself to be grasped by the image; yet imagining is something that he has practised from the start of his scholarship. When it comes to film scholars, however, being grasped by moving images is an altogether more complex process. For Kaja Silverman, because it is filled by images that move constantly forward, cinema ‘induces a certain amnesia’,36 equally Christian Metz suggests: ‘we see a new image only at the cost of a certain “forgetting” of one which preceded it’.37 For Silverman and Metz then, the linearity of the film experience means that there is no chance of staying with and continuing to look at the cinematic image. While the art historian became someone with historical knowledge who had learnt the secret (symbolic, iconographic, semiotic) language of pictures and could interpret objects, almost in the blink of an eye, the film theoretician’s task was more complicated, since first she or he had to find a way of stopping the images, so as to have time to add to them. Hence, a film, averaging ninety minutes and with many hundreds of different shots, is necessarily more demanding on our time than a still image – painting, photograph – or object. For Raymond Bellour in his essay on ‘the pensive spectator’38 and Garrett Stewart in a longer book,39 adding to images occurs either through freeze frames or through photographs occurring in the frame; while for Laura Mulvey, in her book Death 24x a second,40 the fact that we can pause the image and institute a delay is what allows us to think about it. For these scholars, stillness and pensiveness separate out the act of viewing and the act of thinking (we have to stop the image in order to think about it), hence, I would argue, limitations still exist upon whether we can be grasped by the visual. The second space for pensiveness in film is achieved by invoking the notion of the ‘interval’, an imaginary spacing that occurs between cuts. Both these conceptualisations are problematic in the current context, for in both we lose the image from in front of our eyes and the process becomes more of a suspension of perception (as Jonathan Crary might put it41) than a suspension of attention. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Slow Looking

249

For those who conceptualise the interval the cinematic image is forever imaginatively added to, since they are interested in the space of comparison that is introduced by the cut. Timothy Corrigan’s conceptualisation of what happens in the space of the cut is enlightening in this respect. In an essay exploring Chris Marker’s photo-essays and essay-films Corrigan notes ‘the possibilities of creating space and time for thought between the images of a moving world’.42 Corrigan borrows Deleuze’s notion of the ‘interstice’ to express this in-between space. In the interstice the spectator is neither absorbed in the image nor distanced from it ‘[r]ather this is a suspended position of intellectual opportunity and potential’.43 Immediately, Corrigan’s proposal seems promising in relation to Didi-Huberman’s similar advocacy of a ‘suspension’ until, that is, Corrigan clarifies what he means by this: ‘a position within a spatial gap where the interval offers the “insight of blindness,” where thought becomes the exteriorization of expression’.44 Hence, it is clear from Corrigan’s language that the call to imagine of the interval/cut happens at the cost of our relationship with the image, which we must surrender. Our attention is not suspended, able to take its time in front of the image, rather it is truncated, and we lose our developing relationship with the visual. In the slow cinema tradition, the long take offers a way to explore the impact of duration, therefore there exists the potential to produce boredom as well as the kind of renewed attention that Tarkovsky, Akerman and Haneke call for. In the work of Lockhart and others long looks provide a different economy of attention altogether on the part of the artists, the work itself and the viewer; for the artists this begins as a kind of labour of looking. Such an attitude has been associated with the film-makers mentioned above45 as well as with artists such as James Benning, hence Volker Pantenburg observes: ‘[t]he idea that the shooting of a film is merely a productive extension of concentrated and observant perception [. . .] continues to be one of the main principles to which Benning’s films are indebted’.46 Lockhart also spends a great deal of time observing and planning her projects and living with her subjects. Double Tide came about when she was embedded in Massachusetts, researching a project around a particular factory. Her visit yielded a whole exhibition around the workers of the factory. She met Jen, the cockle picker, and spent months at the location, walking and even working with her. Jen’s routine is therefore very familiar to Lockhart before she films it. Whilst I implied, at the start of this chapter, that our attempts to understand how change happens in moving images may have been at the expense of really looking at them, in fact the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Suspending our attention and postponing the moment of reaching a conclusion may do away with motivations and methods, yet it also makes Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

250

Catherine Fowler

way for a different kind of change to happen that can make us more open to the visuality of images. Visuality goes beyond visible and invisible because it relies not upon making a detail legible, or saying what it ‘is’, rather it relies upon us ‘giv[ing] our response only to what we see’.47 Hence we return to the distinction that ‘a visibility can acquire all its value not from what it shows but from the expectation of a visibility it does not show’.48 It is here that artists’ moving images develop upon the slow cinema tradition. When it comes to moving images, the removal of the aim for definition allows us to approach them differently. So my description of Double Tide, which was divided between Jen and the landscape, was effectively ordered according to figure/ ground models, which are driven by assumptions of discernibility. As DidiHuberman puts it, the figure ‘supports meaning’ while the ground ‘merely “contains” this meaning’.49 Yet in fact the minor quality of Jen’s activity, the way in which it goes on and on, and the way that audio-visual details draw our eyes away from her, challenge habitual ways of making meaning, establishing more of an equivalence between figure and ground. This shift in definition shares both similarities and differences with the filmmakers discussed above. Tarkovsky’s interest in the elemental and use of ‘atmospheres as conditions of experience’ points to how setting and mood – created by lighting, rain, mist and water – are crucial to his film practice. Similarly, it is interesting that Akerman refers only to space – that information that we must forget – and not to figures; this raises the possibility that our resistance to ‘confronting the space’ involves yielding our attachment to the figure, or at least recognising the inter-dependence of the two. In Tarkovsky’s and Akerman’s practice slowness, in the form of the long take, brings elements that are typically in the background momentarily into view in a way that an edited sequence could not achieve. In Lockhart’s Double Tide it is harder to distinguish back/ground and figure because change happens at different speeds in the same image. For while Jen works steadily and methodically, creating a trail of footsteps that linger in the mud and provide traces of her progress before gradually disappearing, other elements (mist, wind, birds, boats, dust, voices) come and go unexpectedly. This combination of tight choreography and loose actuality or of design and chance is what helps create uncertainty in relation to the visual. So much is changing in Lockhart’s Double Tide, yet also, at times, it seems that nothing is changing because the pace of change is almost imperceptible to us. In this chapter I have been interested in the assumption made by slow cinema scholarship that the slowness of long takes has the potential to help viewers who engage to see things differently. I’ve argued that one aspect of seeing things differently might be that of ‘really looking’ at images. By examining the efforts of several filmmakers to get viewers to really look at their Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Slow Looking

251

images the complexity of such an intention becomes evident. For Tarkovsky, Akerman and Haneke, their long takes push viewers past a threshold beyond which there is the risk that they may disengage but also the chance that they will re-engage in a different way. In the words of these three we glimpse the battle that filmmakers fight on the one hand with the expectative gaze and on the other with a struggle between the experience of duration and a deeper engagement with the visual (or, visuality). Both art historian Didi-Huberman and artist Sharon Lockhart have offered examples of strategies that can be adopted, by writers and practitioners, which engage with this battle. In Didi-Huberman’s writing we find, first, someone who helps us to come to terms with images that resist definition, since his scholarship originated in the view that we should not attempt to define images. Second, his notion of looking without expectation provides a way of thinking about how we can ‘really look’ at images, and third, he helps us conceptualise the time we spend with contemporary artists’ moving images in terms of a ‘suspension of attention’. Meanwhile Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide coheres with a body of contemporary artists’ moving image work that shares some preoccupations with slow cinema traditions but whose starting point is that of the end-point of Tarkovsky and Akerman. In the work of Lockhart and others the acts of viewing and thinking are not separated out, as happens with pensive viewing (Bellour), stillness (Stewart) or the interval (Corrigan). Instead, as I have attempted to show, we confront moving images; standing (or sitting) in front of them for as long as we like. Particularities of framing and mise-en-scène in this work call for a kind of slow looking. With slow looking the instability of moving images remains, but we are more able to ‘imagine for ourselves’ and more open to not knowing.50 Notes All URLs referenced accessed 29 January 2017, except where noted. 1. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 3. 2. Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 7. 3. See David Campany, The Cinematic (London: Whitechapel, 2007), p. 11: Campany reminds us that ‘[r]esistance to speed was [. . .] at the heart of the experimental films of Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, Danièle Huillet and JeanMarie Straub, Hollis Frampton and others, all of whom took cinema into direct dialogue with the stillness of the photographic image’. 4. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fictional Film (Wisconsin: University of Wisconisin Press, 1985). 5. See Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 10: according to Schrader, ‘elements of the transcendental style Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

252

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

Catherine Fowler can be detected in the films of [. . .] Antonioni, Rossellini, Pasolini, Boetticher, Renoir, Mizoguchi, Buñuel, Warhol, Michael Snow and Bruce Baillie’. As Peter Kubelka famously declared, ‘Cinema is not movement. Cinema is a projection of stills – which means images that do not move – in a very quick rhythm.’ Jonas Mekas, ‘Interview with Peter Kubelka’, in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Cooper Square Press, [1970] 2000), p. 291. Michael Walsh, ‘The First Durational Cinema and the Real of Time’, in Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds), Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 59. Note that in his chapter Walsh also posits a ‘second durational cinema’ consisting of the work of Jacques Rivette, Jean Eustache, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras. This second wave can be distinguished by its commitment to both feature-length explorations and to political modernism. Ciment’s words come from an address to the San Francisco film festival. His term has more recently been taken up by critic Jonathon Romney, who observes that an ‘intensified sense of temporality’ is characteristic of a tendency, increasingly evident since 2000, that he calls ‘slow cinema’ (Romney, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, Sight and Sound 20:2 (February), pp. 43–4). Publications on slow cinema are proliferating and include Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds) Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and I. Jaffe, Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (London: Wallflower Press, 2014). For broader engagements with motion and slowness see also J. Remes, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) and L. Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Martin Brady, ‘“The Attitude of Smoking and Observing”: Slow Film and Politics in the Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’, in de Luca and Jorge, Slow Cinema, p. 80. William Brown, ‘Melancholia: The Long, Slow Cinema of Lav Diaz’, in de Luca and Jorge, Slow Cinema, p. 121. Asbjørn Grønstad, ‘Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration’ in de Luca and Jorge, Slow Cinema, p. 274. As I clarify below, Didi-Huberman refers to ‘expectation as method’ across his work. For specific examples where he engages with and outlines expectation in relation to Charcot and photography, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 102–7; upon the expectative look and Fra Angelico’s frescoes see Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 76. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. xvi. Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, p. 106. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

Slow Looking

253

Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, p. 76. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, p. 3. Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 16. Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria. Didi-Huberman includes Godard’s Histoires du Cinéma in his book Images in Spite of All. However, his consideration of films and filmmakers has featured more in as yet unpublished talks and art exhibitions. In 2009 he was filmed in conversation with Harun Farocki (see https://vimeo.com/102407717); while in 2013 he participated in a conference at l’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, on the theme ‘Cinéma de poésie et politique du cinéma. Pasolini face à Godard’ (22 October 2013 at Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, see https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Zhmo4nJ_hNc). Equally he gave a lecture at the Faculté des arts de l’Université du Québec à Montréal entitled ‘Pleurs, peuples. Roland Barthes et les pleureuses d’Eisenstein. Les oscillations du motif émotif et des figures du peuple’ (11 November 2014), https://vimeo.com/122535214. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/define. Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Tarkovsky: Collected Screenplays, trans. William Powell, Natasha Synessios (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 6. Gary Indiana, ‘Getting Ready for the Golden Eighties: A Conversation with Chantal Akerman’, Artforum (Summer 1983), pp. 55–61, 58. This quote is taken from Serge Toubiana’s interview ‘71 Fragments d’une Chronologie du Hasard: Entretien avec Michael Haneke par Serge Toubiana’, available as a DVD extra on The Michael Haneke Trilogy (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) (Tartan Video, 2006). It is also worth mentioning that Tarkovsky can be distinguished from these other two because he makes great use of camera movement. Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), p. 10. Ibid., p. 16. For more on Akerman’s associations with minimalism in art see Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996). John David Rhodes, ‘The Spectacle of Skepticism: Haneke’s Long Takes’, in Brian Price and John David Rhodes (eds), On Michael Haneke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), pp. 92–3. See also Toubiana, ‘71 Fragments d’une Chronologie du Hasard: Entretien avec Michael Haneke’. See as a starting point P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, 1943–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Matthew Barney and Nancy Spector, Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle (Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 2002), p. 76. The full details for these films are as follows: Nō, 16mm colour film, optical sound; 32:30 min, loop; Double Tide, 16mm film transferred to HD (high definition), 9 min; Exit (Bath Iron Works, July 7–11, 2008, Bath, Maine), 16mm film transferred to HD, 40 min; and Pódworka,16mm film transferred to HD, 31 min. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

254

Catherine Fowler

32. Bantar Gebang, 35mm film; Zocalo, May 20, 1999, mini DV, single screen projection with soundtrack; Uomoduomo, colour video, 1:40 min; The Green Ray, 16mm colour film, 2:30min; Bordeaux Piece, single channel wide screen video projection, DV-cam transferred to hard disk, colour, 13 hours. 33. Diedrich Diederichsen and Georg Schüllhammer, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem De Rooij: Spaces and Films 1998–2002 (Eindhoven and Nice: Van Abbemuseum and Villa Arson, 2003). 34. Lockhart has worked with the Los Angeles architecture firm Escher GuneWardena since 2006. 35. Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 16. 36. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 200. 37. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 158. 38. Raymond Bellour, ‘The Pensive Spectator’, Wide Angle 9:1 (1987), pp. 6–10. 39. Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 40. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006). 41. See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 42. Timothy Corrigan, ‘The Forgotten Image between Two Shots: Photos, Photograms, and the Essayistic’, in Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (eds), Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 49. 43. Ibid., p. 54, my emphasis. 44. Ibid. 45. In addition to the labour of looking being associated with Tarkovsky, Akerman and Haneke in a chapter on Pedro Costa Nuno Barradas Jorge argues that through his use of low budget digital cameras Costa finds a new filmmaking practice ‘defined by the long time put into its making’. Nuno Barradas Jorge, ‘Living Daily, Working Slowly: Pedro Costa’s in Vanda’s Room’ in de Luca and Jorge, Slow Cinema, p. 177. 46. Volker Pantenburg, ‘Encyclopedia Americana’, in Barbara Pichler and Claudia Slanar (eds), James Benning (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, SYNEMA – Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2007), p. 183. 47. Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, p. 20. 48. Ibid., p. 76, my emphasis. 49. Ibid., p. 15. 50. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, p. 3.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Materialities

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 14

(Re)visioning Celluloid: Aesthetics of Contact in Materialist Film Kim Knowles Tracing a line from the playfully subversive visual distortions of the early Dada films to recent explorations of abstraction in both film and digital media, the history of experimental cinema can be told as a history of unstable or indefinite vision. Despite their differing origins, frames of reference and ultimate landing points, the search for alternative ways of understanding the world to those that dictate our social and cultural experience has been the single most enduring concern of experimental artists, propelling them into a multitude of aesthetic modes and theoretical formulations. ‘Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic’,1 Stan Brakhage famously wrote in his 1963 treatise on cinematic vision – an ideal that became a mantra resonating through decades of subsequent reflection on representation in the arts. The force of Brakhage’s theory lies in its emphasis on a pre-linguistic state, a form of pure perception that is also pre-hierarchical, both in terms of the senses and in the ‘sense’ of the relationship between the human being and its surroundings. In film, one of the primary strategies of problematising and defamiliarising conventional visual regimes has been the foregrounding of materials and materiality, which brings about a tactile engagement with the image, or what Laura Marks refers to as ‘haptic visuality’.2 Since the turn of the millennium, the predominance of digital technology has given rise to an increased sensitivity to celluloid film as a tangible medium – its unique capacity to record the indexical traces of the filmmaker’s hand, as well as other physical encounters, distinguishes it from these newer forms of image making and creates a framework for rethinking film in a digital era. Although proclamations about the imminent disappearance of photochemical film were frequent during the early years of technological transition, a sustained wave of interest in 16mm production has, for the moment at least, guaranteed the medium a second life on the margins of mainstream film production. It now flourishes in the field of experimental and artists’ film, offering a playground for exploration and innovation facilitated by the increased availability of outmoded equipment and a culture of DIY chemistry and skills sharing. From within this context of artistic autonomy emerges a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

258

Kim Knowles

new aesthetic of materialism that both draws and expands on its historical roots. It looks backwards in order to project forwards, cognisant of its liminal cultural status that plays out in the methods employed and the forms of vision to which they give rise. This chapter maps out directions for a (re)new(ed) approach to materialist film that locates contemporary engagements with the physicality of celluloid within emerging theories of new materialism. I argue that this field opens up productive avenues for exploring current trends in photochemical film practice where alternative forms of vision are a key concern. Central to this investigation is the growing contemporary interest in film’s ability to reveal haptic forms of knowledge that transcend the purely optical and negotiate the space between the visible and the invisible. In its desire to subvert traditional forms of cinematic representation and to engage the viewer on the level of process, recent experimental filmmaking represents a historical lineage that leads back to earlier theoretical framings by filmmaker-theorists such as Peter Gidal, whose account of ‘structural/materialist film’ has, along with Brakhage’s theory of vision, had a lasting impact on the field. I will use Gidal’s theory as a reference point in building a new approach to materialist film, where the politics of representation extends beyond techniques of distanciation and seeks to engage the viewer through practices of contact. Focusing primarily on bodily and earthly engagements, I seek to show how contemporary materialist film is located within discourses on the environment and ethical modes of being in the world. From Materialist Film Theory to New Materialism Before embarking on a discussion of this work, it is important to briefly consider the formulation of materialist film in the 1970s as a political gesture founded on the refusal of representation, and to consider its relevance to contemporary processes and practices that may be considered political in quite different ways. I am interested, here, in teasing out some of the resonances between the two periods, whilst also contemplating the clear shift in aesthetic and intellectual reference points. Since the publication of Gidal’s founding essay ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’ in 1975, few attempts have been made to renew or reframe his approach from a contemporary perspective or to modify the terms of his argument in order to create new paradigms for understanding materialist engagements with photochemical film in a digital era. Gidal was one of the first filmmaker-academics (along with Peter Wollen, author of ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’3) to theorise experimental film practice and to grant intellectual legitimacy to an area that had hitherto been overlooked by traditional film theory of the time.4 Although his Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



(Re)visioning Celluloid

259

article – which was subsequently developed into the book-length Materialist Film – was heavily criticised in the wake of its publication,5 it nonetheless continues to be the landmark text in the field of materialist aesthetics. The driving force of Gidal’s theory derives from its fierce criticism of mainstream cinema techniques, namely representational illusionism and narrative devices that ‘suture’ the spectator into the ideological fabric of the world presented on screen. Referring largely to a body of work emerging from the London Film-Makers Co-operative, an artist-run organisation that brought together production, distribution and exhibition under the same roof and facilitated artistic autonomy from industrial processes, Gidal posited a political practice whose goal was the total rejection of representation. ‘Each film is a record (not a representation, not a reproduction) of its own making’, he stated, drawing attention to the technical process by which the film comes into being, those processes that are traditionally hidden from the viewer in order to strengthen the identificatory mechanisms based on the content of the images.6 By contrast, ‘Structural/Materialist film must minimize the content in its overpowering, imagistically seductive sense, in an attempt to get through this miasmic area of “experience” and proceed with film as film.’7 Gidal’s own films, as Steven McIntyre has pointed out, ‘were typically nonnarrative and explored the limits of image legibility via manipulation of focus, framing and exposure, or by the repetition of simple shot units intercut with sections of black’.8 Prevented from a passive identification with the content of the images, the viewer is forced into a confrontation with the technical means of reproduction. This act of defamiliarisation equated, in Gidal’s view, to a destruction of imagistic pleasure and a radical political gesture designed to overthrow the ideologically corrupt foundations of conventional filmmaking. What is clear from this account is that materials and material interventions are simply a means to an end. When Gidal speaks of ‘film as film’ he is not, as one might initially deduce, especially interested in the expressive potential of film, nor in its mechanical or chemical specificities. All representation is repugnant, shot through with the toxic weight of a repressive ideology. Where contemporary practice picks up on these ideas is in the foregrounding of materials to disturb conventional forms of representation, yet process is emphasised here as a productive field of enquiry in itself. Unlike Gidal’s emphasis on process as a negatively inflected refusal of identification, recent understandings of materialist film work with, and through, the potential of film’s tangible properties to bring about a tactile rapprochement, or interconnection, between the spectator and the physical world of matter. In this sense, film is a communicating vessel, capable of opening up rather than closing down the possibilities of representation. As Jennifer Barker argues in relation to Carolee Schneemann’s film Fuses (1965), interventions on the surface of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

260

Kim Knowles

the filmstrip ‘make vision difficult and thus invite the viewer to feel rather than see the film, to make contact with its skin’.9 It is, in fact, this acknowledgement of the body, and of film as a potential site of sensuous exchange, that is absent from Gidal’s theorising, enmeshed as it is in the structuralist politics of the time, which gave little credence to embodied experience. And it is here that contemporary theoretical perspectives invite an investigation of materialist film practice as physical, embodied and anchored within a world of fleshly encounters. The increasing awareness of celluloid film as a living (and dying) body, thrown into relief by its digital counterpart, creates a context for revised formulations about its representational capacities. That film has a certain material ‘life-force’ is what ties it specifically to a wave of theoretical work that attempts to understand the world as an interconnected web of energies, ‘a multitude of interlocking systems and forces’,10 where animate and inanimate matter, the human and the non-human, exist in a constant non-hierarchical dialogue. Postulating a post-human perspective (Braidotti 2013) and loosely assembled under the umbrella term ‘new materialism’,11 these theories focus attention on the concept of agency, challenging the commonly held assumption that objects, things, matter are passively acted upon by the human subject.12 By arguing that the physical world is constituted through a process of continuous change that plays out both within and beyond the realms of human intervention, new materialism forces us to reconsider the physical world as fundamentally unstable and thus unknowable to us through vision alone. This is important to contemporary reflections on and experiments with film as a material substance that seek to uncover its hidden agential capacities and its ability to dialogue with other tangible matter. In the works discussed in this chapter, process rises to the surface as evidence of the often invisible chemical encounters that take place on the filmstrip, allowing the spectator to move between the layers of representation – from an immersion in the image to a contemplation of the materials and gestures involved in its coming into being. It is through the performativity of process, therefore, that new forms of experience and modes of contact with the world are translated and celebrated. Matter, Agency and Performativity In Esther Urlus’s Konrad & Kurfurst (2013–14) the fragmented image of a horse shifts in and out of view, struggling against a bubbling viscous background. The figurative image hovers in a space of indeterminacy, revealing itself fleetingly, only to be dragged back into the sticky stuff of the film material. Urlus describes the film as a fictional re-enactment of a five-minute Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



(Re)visioning Celluloid

261

incident in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, in which Konrad Freiherr von Wangenheim was thrown violently from his horse Kurfurst, but, wounded, nonetheless went on to win a gold medal. However, the home-brewed film emulsion that the artist fabricated after consulting numerous technical manuals of early film and photography ultimately constitutes the main focus of the work, functioning, in the filmmaker’s words, ‘as a fragile metaphor for the heroism of Konrad and his horse Kurfurst’. Urlus is also clearly referring to the fragile cultural status of celluloid and the pressing need for artists to explore alternatives to the dwindling commercial manufacture of film stock. Konrad’s fall, and ultimate unforeseen triumph, could be read as a reflection on the narrative of film itself and its potential surmounting of the challenges of obsolescence. The struggle is an allegory – the fight to stay alive against all odds – and from this perspective the foregrounding of the material is multilayered in all senses of the word. The emulsion is subject to constant change through time, eluding a stable perceptual ground against which the figure might be distinguished and fixed. Movement animates the dried bubbles of emulsion and in the moment of projection appears to turn them back into liquid, reversing time in the process of moving the film forwards. Through a series of chemical interactions, then, attention is shifted to the surface of the filmstrip and its material presence/ present, but this is by no means an end in itself. In other words, vision is not rendered problematic simply that we might consider its ideological

Figure 14.1  Konrad & Kurfurst, Esther Urlus (2013–14). Courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

262

Kim Knowles

c­ onstructedness (as per Gidal) or fetishise the tactility of film in a disembodied digital era. My argument here is that it is the performativity of matter that is at stake in Urlus’s film, and indeed many others that I will go on to discuss in this chapter. By bringing the support – the handmade film emulsion – into the visual field Urlus arguably stages what Jane Bennett describes as the ‘vibrancy of matter’13 and illustrates Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt’s assertion that ‘art is a co-collaboration [. . .] and matter as much as the human has responsibility for the emergence of art. In other words, matter has agency’.14 This is indeed the perspective taken by the two chapters on experimental film practice in Barrett and Bolt’s collection of essays on art and new materialism. Whilst they open up new theoretical perspectives on materiality in the ruin film and the found footage film (by Nicholas Chare and Liz Watkins, and Dirk de Bruyn respectively), the focus of both chapters paradoxically lies in getting beyond the matter of matter to fix meaning and restore a sense of interpretational certainty. Chare and Watkins, for example, refer to the ‘bubbling, troubled, troubling images’ of Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) and argue that the viewing process consists of ‘mak[ing] the mess mean’.15 Linking the materiality of film with processes of memory (privileging the physical over the intellectual), their discussion moves towards building concrete reasons as to ‘why spectators are disturbed, troubled, repulsed by the seething maelstrom of the footage’.16 With a hypothesis as troubling as the blurred and scarred images to which they refer (that the assault on identity is comparable to the horrors of the Holocaust and the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the authors effectively move the focus away from matter itself by imposing limited (and limiting) interpretations on the supposed negative connotations of its visible manifestation. The association of matter with trauma – an approach that also characterises de Bruyn’s discussion of Martin Arnold’s and Peter Tscherkassky’s found footage films – offers some useful perspectives on material decay, but it does little to open up understanding about the ways in which the performativity of matter challenges pre-existing material ontologies.17 In many ways, these accounts effectively reinstate the idea of matter as passive, onto which fixed meanings may be placed. By ignoring the actual material processes involved in these films, and by turning illegibility into legibility (through interpretative assumptions about what ‘the viewer’ experiences), we invariably bypass the complex ways in which matter acts and is acted on by other human and non-human bodies. What is significant about Konrad & Kurfurst in this context is the insistence on process as the site/sight of meaning. If the film tells a story, it is one that repeatedly brings us back to material relations. The shifting effervescence of emulsion on the surface of the film frustrates vision in order to call attention Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



(Re)visioning Celluloid

263

to material instabilities and contingencies and asserts its own agency beyond the controlling hand of the artist. In the spirit of experimentation and (re) discovery, current DIY film culture, of which Urlus’s film is a part, opens up to chance and accidental occurrences, taking film chemistry back to its primitive origins not as a nostalgic exercise of longing for the past, but as a playfully progressive act that challenges traditional values of perfection and stability and sets out possible pathways for future explorations of analogue film. As Urlus states in the booklet that emerged from her research into handmade film processes: ‘For me film is a lot more than the representation of what a camera has recorded – exposure and development. It’s important for me that the emulsion has its own texture and can respond to chemicals differently than expected’.18 The filmmaker thus privileges a process in which her own artistic agency gives way to the eventualities of these material encounters. Texture, in the form of material presence, is the means by which the film communicates, as it represents the meeting point of the chemical transactions and transformations – a process that, whilst invisible to us as viewers, is nonetheless contained in the images we see and also sense. The recent wave of handmade film practice demonstrates a deep investment in exploring how film responds to other matter. West Coast film artist Jennifer West, for example, marinates film in food substances before submitting it to numerous material interventions that are signalled in playfully irreverent titles such as Whatever Film: 16mm film leader soaked in lots of coffee and espresso, taken on a power walk, rubbed with sweat and inscribed with the word “whatever” written in purple metallic eyeliner (2007). In other areas, professional chemicals and equipment are replaced or supplemented with everyday, and seemingly unlikely, household items – bleach, coffee, vitamin C, icing sugar, yeast, shoeboxes, hole punches, garden hoses, and bathtubs, subverting the function and use value of those products whilst turning the contemporary filmmaker into a resourceful inventor-bricoleur-alchemist.19 As West’s title suggests, the human body also becomes a site of material exchange. In works such as Thorsten Fleisch’s Bloodlust (1998) and Vicky Smith’s sobbingspitting​scratching (2011) bodily waste products are applied to the surface of the film, reanimating liquid secretions and providing a means to render visible (and sensible) the internal flux and flow normally hidden by the reversible layer of skin that simultaneously connects and separates us from both ourselves and the world.20 The ‘skin’ of the film therefore acts as a mediator, bringing the two bodies into unison, with each enacting physical change upon the other. Like the buried films I will go on to discuss, this form of material engagement draws on the power of the indexical trace to extend the representational spectrum to phenomena that traditionally exist outside our visual field. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

264

Kim Knowles

Figure 14.2  sobbingspittingscratching, Vicky Smith (2011). Courtesy of the artist.

These body fluid films, as I have argued elsewhere, shed light on the general status of waste in contemporary society.21 Rejected from the social sphere and relegated to geographical peripheries, waste is the invisible residual, the abject other side of capitalist consumption from which we must separate ourselves in order to maintain a sense of bodily unity. As John Scanlan points out, waste reminds us too much of our own mortality, and our ultimately perishable nature. ‘[T]he creation of garbage,’ he argues, ‘results from a more or less imperceptible contest between life and death – because death constitutes the human return to matter.’22 New materialist theory takes important steps towards understanding the matter of waste from a productive perspective, delineating this liminal space between life and death (the space that film itself occupies) as replete with a vibrant force that emanates from and sparks between discarded objects wrenched from their original context. Describing an encounter with a littering of disparate items on a street in Baltimore – a plastic work glove, a chunk of oak pollen, a dead rat, a plastic bottle cap, and a stick of wood – Bennett argues that the affective draw of such a scene demonstrates how ‘thing power [can rise] from a pile of trash’.23 In fleshing out this idea of ‘thing power’, Bennett draws on Louis Althusser’s notion of ‘aleatory materialism’ as a means to reconceptualise our material world as a state of flux rather than consisting of stable entities, and to support the idea that ‘so-called inanimate things have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy’.24 Althusser’s theory is an attempt Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



(Re)visioning Celluloid

265

to develop a framework for thinking about the positioning of the historical subject in relation to systems of power and state control, but its engagement with materialist philosophy as the foundation for understanding structures of being allows it a wide-ranging application in contemporary considerations of matter. Important to the present discussion of physical interactions in film is Althusser’s assertion that: [E]very encounter is aleatory in its effects, in that nothing in the elements of the encounter prefigures, before the actual encounter, the contours and determinations of the being that will emerge from it [. . .] no determination of these elements can be assigned, except by working backwards from the result to its becoming, in its retroaction.25

This has very particular implications for a new conception of materialist aesthetics that does not presuppose the existence of material specificities but rather redirects attention towards film as an alchemical process with indeterminate outcomes. The practices discussed here foreground this working backwards, inscribing temporality and change into the experience of the work. The fixed notion of what film is no longer holds the centre of interest; it is rather the question of how film becomes, in relation to other material phenomena, that animates the field of celluloid practice and propels it into new areas of visual exploration. As Pip Chodorov states, ‘we don’t work with “images,” but with organic, physical material that comes from the earth: salts, silvers, minerals’.26 The material substrate of film is therefore always already a complex combination of elements – an amalgam of vibrant matter whose chance constellations lead to a continually changing granular make-up. Chodorov’s connection of film with earthly matter ‘touches’ on issues largely absent from Gidal’s account of process, that is, the very grounded – in a literal sense – nature of film as a substance that holds within it the possibility for opening up new modes of vision, where the figurative image collapses into its material make-up. It is here that we find the most fertile terrain for unravelling the relevance of Althusser’s concept of the encounter, and for exploring the relationship between the ecological concerns of new materialism and the increasing interest in the environment within contemporary materialist film practice. Ecological Engagements ‘For the current cinematic avant-garde,’ states Tess Takahashi, ‘it is less film’s ability to produce recognizable iconic images of the natural world indexically that is emphasized, than its ability to physically record the influence of the material world on its celluloid body’.27 As Takahashi’s overview Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

266

Kim Knowles

illustrates, cameraless engagements with the environment have become a mainstay of experimental film practice since the rise of digital technology at the turn of the millennium, and emerge partly from the drive to differentiate the physicality of film from the comparative intangibility of digital. In this sense, the alignment of film with the natural world might be seen as a defensive strategy on the part of film practitioners – a way of carving out a position of autonomy for a precarious medium On a slippery slope to obsolescence that hinges on associations with purity, integrity and ethics. It is impossible to avoid such associations, contentious and divisive as the film–digital debate tends to be, but this should not preclude a serious contemplation of these engagements since the new forms of vision and tactile knowledge to which they give rise transcend any simplistic claims about nostalgia and media fetishism. In particular, the new aesthetics of contact that arises from these contemporary collaborations with the environment offers a more multi-faceted approach to medium-specificity, where attention is displaced from the film itself to the processes and encounters involved in its material transformation. An early example is David Gatten’s What the Water Said, Nos. 1–3 (1997), in which several unspooled rolls of film were placed in a crab trap and thrown into the sea. The abstract images in/on the film are nothing other than a register of a dialogue between the film material and the changing conditions of the sea depending on weather and tidal movement. Using single-perforation sound stock, the filmmaker was able to create a corresponding sonic record of the encounter, which recreates for the viewer the experience of being submerged in water. In his discussion of the film, Scott MacDonald points to a crucial shift in perspective away from content and towards process, arguing that ‘[w]hatever the effects of Gatten’s flinging the crab trap into the sea would have created’, the act itself reveals ‘a faith in the possibility of collaborating with the environment in a more direct way’.28 The image is therefore secondary to the gesture, or, rather, it exists primarily as a record – a trace – of a physical encounter that is both durational and, importantly, inaccessible in its complexity to both the filmmaker and the viewer. The film can be understood as working on two interrelated levels: on the one hand it forges a deeper material (embodied) engagement with that which it represents, and on the other it testifies to an experience (a process) that cannot easily be turned into an image, cannot be owned, penetrated and thus commodified – in this, the film both alludes and eludes. The other side of the film’s refusal of perceptual clarity is its embrace of the unknown – that which escapes vision but not representation. Another filmmaker to have interrogated the layers of representation in relation to the environment is Emmanuel Lefrant, whose Parties visible et Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



(Re)visioning Celluloid

267

invisible d’un ensemble sous tension (2009) is directly inspired by Maurice MerleauPonty’s 1964 text Le visible et l’invisible (The Visible and the Invisible).29 Lefrant uses the process of making the film as a way of directly illustrating MerleauPonty’s theory of perception, in which the body and the world, subjective experience and objective existence, are interwoven. This new conception of the body that emerges in the philosopher’s later work is an attempt to articulate the relationship between ‘what seeing is, and what thing or world is’.30 Vision, for Merleau-Ponty, is inseparable from touch: ‘The look, we said, envelops, palpitates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them’.31 In Parties Visible et Invisible material processes are employed to translate – through touch – an earthly experience that demonstrates the reversibility of perception. On one roll of 16mm film Lefrant shot a single static image of a landscape seen from a window: a bush in the distance, with the horizon line between land and sky splitting the image in two. Another roll of film was buried in the ground at the same site and then unearthed several weeks later – enough time for the biochemical breakdown of the emulsion to be visible on the surface of the filmstrip. The two images and their negative versions are sandwiched together and interlaced through the process of bipacking, an optical printing procedure that superimposes the details of one image onto another. The end result is a startling animation of the figurative image by the colourful degradation and decomposition of the buried strip. The transposing of these qualities – the invisible (underground) onto the visible (overground) – is emphasised by the visual impression of flipping that caresses the eye as a tactile flicker. Lefrant refers to the film as ‘a bipolar world, where the invisible takes shape within the visible, where the first dissolves into the second and vice-versa’.32 As the different sections of the film become interlaced, subjective becomes objective, inside becomes outside, and invisible becomes visible. Running under the surface of Lefrant’s film, as well as his more recent works such as Le pays dévasté (2015) and I don’t think I can see an island (2016), is the theme of environmental catastrophe in the age of the Anthropocene. The fragility of the filmstrip and its susceptibility to physical intervention finds its analogy in the images of barren landscapes ablaze with energy and urgency. There is something deeply apocalyptic about these films that undermines or at the very least problematises a straightforward appreciation of pleasing visual effects and material specificities. As beautiful as they might seem on one level, it is impossible not to read the fiery explosions of colour in Parties visible et invisible as a deterioration not just of the filmstrip, but of the Earth itself, and the destruction of the natural world. Like Gatten, Lefrant draws on the potential of film to communicate forces that elude traditional methods of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

268

Kim Knowles

Figure 14.3  Parties visible et invisible d’un ensemble sous tension, Emmanuel Lefrant (2009). Courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



(Re)visioning Celluloid

269

representation, where the gap between visibility and invisibility is narrowed through the process of tactile translation. In Timothy Morton’s account of ‘hyperobjects’, this gap is a crucial part of how environmental change brought about by commercial and industrial activities appears to be insurmountable or even incomprehensible to human consciousness: Hyperobjects are real objects that are massively distributed in time and space. Good examples would be global warming and nuclear radiation. Hyperobjects are so vast, so long lasting, that they defy human time and spatial scales. They wouldn’t fit in a landscape painting.33

But they might fit on a roll of celluloid, as Tomonari Nishikawa’s short handmade film sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014) attempts to do. The process of making the film involved burying a 100ft roll of 35mm negative film under fallen leaves fifteen miles from the site of the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station, a gesture that can be read as an attempt to penetrate the hyperobject of nuclear radiation by rendering visible its effects on the physical environment. The title of the film is highly significant in this respect, bringing together the microscopic and the macroscopic, and thus drawing attention to the interconnectedness of matter and the interrelated energies that elude human understanding. The three minutes of the film pass by in a flurry of scratches and unidentifiable forms against a black background, much like Gatten’s What the Water Said: an abstract film that is also, in its gesture at least, political. It attempts, as do many of the films discussed here, to connect with matter, to use the film as a metaphor for our own bodies. ‘We are stuck with hyperobjects,’ according to Morton. ‘They stick to us, literally: our bodies absorb nuclear radiation and we are totally surrounded by global warming. Hyperobjects have the property of being viscous’.34 Although we do not see, in a literal sense, the effects of radiation in Nishikawa’s film or global warming in that of Lefrant, we can understand the process as an attempt to make ‘sense’ of the physical world by other means, giving, as the title of Gatten’s film suggests, voice to the environment and allowing it to speak through the medium of film. If Peter Gidal’s theory of structural/materialism emphasises real time as a 1:1 relationship between the viewer and the viewed, and highlights process as a way to close the gap between the time of making and the time of viewing, then contemporary practice extends this formulation to incorporate and translate other temporal regimes that reflect current representational concerns. As Bennett argues, ‘the claim to a vitality intrinsic to matter itself becomes more plausible if one takes a long view of time. In adopting the perspective of evolutionary rather than biographical time, for example, a mineral efficacy becomes Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

270

Kim Knowles

Figure 14.4  Priya, Alia Syed (2011). Courtesy of the artist.

visible’.35 In Alia Syed’s Priya (2011), strips of film containing the figurative image of a dancer are buried in the filmmaker’s garden for varying lengths of time, spanning a few weeks to several months. These individual sections were edited together to show the gradual biochemical breakdown of the film, with the layers of deterioration that render the image imperceptible, representing the layers of time that rise visibly to the surface, drawing the viewer from one temporal register to another. Here, the time of matter is expressed through a sensuous dialogue between the earth and the celluloid material, where a form of creative agency – engineered but not controlled by the artist – emerges in the space between. The emphasis on ecological time shifts the politics of experimental filmmaking towards a deeper connection with materiality and opens up a space for reflection on how form and ethics collide in a medium that may not yet have exhausted its creative potential. I have suggested in this chapter a number of ways to consider contemporary uses of photochemical film as developing new modes of physical engagement and haptic vision. The discussion has focused particularly on artisanal, handmade and cameraless film, which although by no means representative of all current analogue practice, nonetheless constitutes a significant wave of activity emerging partly as a response to the medium’s now marginal cultural position. Working by hand is both an economic and an aesthetic decision that allows the artist an increased sense of creative freedom and autonomy from industrial processes. However, it also, as we have seen, facilitates direct engagement with other material phenomena such as chemicals, food, household products, body fluids, soil and water – an amalgam of ‘stuff’ that is ripe, in the hands of the experimental filmmaker, for tactile investigation and reappropriation, resonant with vibrant energies that speak to and through the celluloid substrate. This account only scratches the surface of such possibilities, and is designed to open up avenues of thought and forge new connections rather than provide an exhaustive survey. I have referred to Peter Gidal’s theory of materialist film not to close it down as irrelevant in the contemporary context, but to juxtapose it with new perspectives that represent shifts in ways of thinking about the politics of representation. Crucial here is the intervention of new materialism in staking out modes of enquiry into how Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



(Re)visioning Celluloid

271

we experience and interact with the world, giving rise to new subjectivities that complicate the human/non-human hierarchy. As much scholarship in this area points out, in an age of environmental decline and the worrying cycles of production and disposal that give rise to increasing quantities of material waste, appropriate ethical positions are required to reinstate a sense of responsibility. Employing the concepts put forth by Jane Bennett, I have argued that the foregrounding of materials and materiality in contemporary works demonstrates new forms of embodied knowledge through the sensuous encounter with matter. We might, in this sense, connect these gestures with a form of political thinking that starts with a reconsideration of how we view and interact with the physical world. These interventions depart from Gidal’s assertion that materialist film should not ‘represent or document anything’ by shifting the very terms of documentation and representation.36 Embracing indefinite vision as a way of making visible the invisible is one of the strategies used by contemporary materialist filmmakers to problematise accepted hierarchies of human encounters with a fragile world. Notes 1. Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Film Culture Inc., 1963), p. 29. 2. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 3. Peter Wollen, ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’, Studio International 190, No. 978 (November/December 1975), pp. 171–5. 4. Steven McIntyre, ‘Peter Gidal’s anti-narrative: An art of reprisal reappraised’, Moving Image Review and Art Journal 2:1 (2013), pp. 26–37. 5. Peter Gidal, Materialist Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). For the criticism of Gidal, see, for instance, Anne Cottringer, ‘On Peter Gidal’s Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’, Afterimage 6 (1976), pp. 86–95; she takes issue with his rejection of narrative, as well as his restrictive notion of materialism. 6. Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’, Studio International 190, No. 978 (November/December 1975), p. 189. 7. Ibid. 8. McIntyre, ‘Peter Gidal’s anti-narrative’, p. 28. 9. Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 23. 10. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 9. 11. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). 12. See also Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); William E. Connolly, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

272

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Kim Knowles The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2013); Coole and Frost, New Materialisms. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (eds), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013), p. 6. Nicholas Chare and Liz Watkins, ‘The Matter of Film: Decasia and Lyrical Nitrate’, in Barrett and Bolt, Carnal Knowledge, p. 77 Ibid., p. 81. Dirk De Bruyn, ‘Recovering the Hidden through Found-Footage Films’, in Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (eds) Barrett and Bolt, Carnal Knowledge, pp. 89–104. Esther Urlus, Re:Inventing the Pioneers: Film experiments on handmade silver gelatin emulsion and color methods (Rotterdam: Filmwerkplaats, 2015), p.2. For an overview of DIY film culture see Kim Knowles, ‘Self-Skilling and HomeBrewing: Some Reflections on Photochemical Film Culture’, Millennium Film Journal 60 (Fall 2014), pp. 20–27; and Steven Woloshen Recipes for Reconstruction: The Cookbook for the Frugal Filmmaker (Montreal: Scratchatopia Books, 2010). Barker, The Tactile Eye. Kim Knowles, ‘Blood, sweat and tears: Bodily inscriptions in contemporary experimental film’, NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies 4 (2013), pp. 447–63. John Scanlan, On Garbage (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), p. 9. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 6. Ibid., p. 18. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Early Writings, 1978–87 (London: Verso, 2006), p. 193. Pip Chodorov, ‘The Artist-Run Film Labs’, Millennium Film Journal 60 (Fall 2014), pp. 2014, p. 36) Tess Takahashi, ‘After the Death of Film: Writing the Natural World in the Digital Age’, Visible Language 42:1 (January 2008), pp. 44–69, p. 49. Scott MacDonald, Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration: Essays/Interviews (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2009), p. 375. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1964] 1968). Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 133. http://lightcone.org/en/film-5833-parties-visible-et-invisible-d-un-ensemblesous-tension (accessed 28 September 2015). Timothy Morton, ‘Zero Landscapes in the Time of Hyperobjects’, Graz Architectural Magazine 7 (2011), pp. 78–87, p. 80. Ibid., p. 83. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 11. Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition’, p. 189. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 15

Seeing through the Fingertips 1 Emmanuelle André

Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage), Jean-Luc Godard, We Can’t Go Home Again, Nicholas Ray At the end of the nineteenth century, the development of the telephone coincided with the introduction of a new idea of visibility. Invented as a means of transporting sound and creating dialogue between voices, this device established a relationship of paradoxical proximity: henceforth, presence and visibility would no longer coincide. In the cinema, this corresponded to forms of the then-nascent montage (the découpage of space and time), and initiated a new portrait of man: connected, and submitted to inquisitive surveillance. Today, the relationship that the telephone has with the visible has changed platforms. In the cinema, a touchscreen doubles the screen, occupies the gaze, and transforms it into another surface of projection. The appearance of telephone screens has thus become the ensign of a new flattening of space,2 accompanied by a series of never-before-seen gestures, which, themselves, impose a regime of vision governed by a subject now reduced to their fingers. This subject is a sort of ‘Thumbelina’, in the words of Michel Serres, in a ‘nod to the mastery with which messages streamed forth from those fingers’. It is this ‘new human’ that is born ‘out of the development of new technologies’3 – technologies that include the 3-D that Jean-Luc Godard experiments with in Goodbye to Language. A Digital Way of Seeing At the beginning of the film, the act of leafing through the pages of a book is paralleled to the act of swiping on the screen of a mobile telephone. A portrait of Solzhenitsyn appears on the diminutive screen, followed by the title of Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons, which echoes the gestures of the characters, who are feverishly waggling their fingers as they swipe the screen. Their heads are cut off by the frame, and visibility is afforded only to their hands, which, via their swiping actions, then produce a diminutive portrait of Jacques Ellul, sociologist and theologian, famous for his ecological views. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

274

Emmanuelle André

This leafing gesture, habitus of reading, immediately suggests ‘anything but the book, anything but the transhistoric format of the page. It is a thing which remains to be discovered. Thumbelina can help us with this’.4 And, in fact, digital manipulations do bring about a contemporary regime of vision which demands the reframing of an image, for which the portrait provides the model. The finger’s leafing gesture goes together with a singular placement of the screen, filmed here in wide angle: the proliferation of little squareshaped icons occupies the space and recomposes it in a way that the rest of the film also takes up, playing with double framings of the television screen within the composition of the shot. Goodbye to Language thus offers itself as an observation about our contemporary practices: the flat screen of the mobile phone imposes the use of a particular gesture, a leafing gesture which goes with swiping, that implies a ‘digital’ way of seeing, no longer via the eye, but rather via the finger. In analysing the modes of articulation between the hand and the eye, Gilles Deleuze had already grasped that, with the digital, ‘the hand is reduced to the finger which acts upon the keyboard. That is to say, it’s the digital hand. It’s the finger-without-hand’.5 But for Deleuze, it was also about describing ‘the ideal of abstract painting’, in other words, ‘a pure optical space’.6 This was before the era of Thumbelina, capable of making an image appear by tapping a flat screen with the tips of her fingers. Must we subsequently consider that the arrival of a digital vision within the surface of film is opposed to sight, knowing that the latter is historically laid out according to the terms of ‘a spectacular depth [. . .] organised according to the laws of perspective’?7 Perhaps this is what is suggested, toward the middle of the film, in the very short scene in which a metro train arrives at the station. This is first visible, as in the vision of Lumière, from the point of view of the enlarged train platform in the foreground, through the effect created by perspective. The linear movement of the trajectory is opposed to the slightly jerky passage of the train, which crosses the frame horizontally. At first, the train occupies the entire frame, but in the following shot it is juxtaposed with the figure of a dog, whose silhouette is cut out, as if stuck onto the edge of the image as the train passes by. Depth of field is thus opposed to the flatness of a scrolling movement, which includes three brief discontinuities as if to evoke the repeated rhythm of the leafing gesture. It is noteworthy that the variation of point of view takes the dog as its subject, and that the arrival of the metro in the station is interrupted by inserts of the muzzle of the animal. Maybe the dog is like the brother of Thumbelina here, the animal-subject of the variations in depth paradoxically associated with this new technology of seeing.8 Its presence would help resolve the opposition between two regimes of vision, deep and flat, optical and digital, by taking responsibility for the ambiguity of sight. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Seeing through the Fingertips

275

Certainly, the cinema did not wait for the twenty-first century in order to play with depth. There exist many examples of swiping in films that evoke the gesture of leafing through pages. We can cite, among the most famous examples, the series of wipes used during the projection of the news in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), and the repeated appearance of the figure who sweeps the image from left to right, evoking the mechanicity of the reading gesture; the ‘moving split screen’ so common in Brian De Palma’s work, that can be found for example in the murder scene in Carrie (1976): an image slides onto another at the precise moment in which the young girl, gifted with a strange telekinetic power, takes possession of the stage. Or further, we can consider the ‘scrolling transparencies’ in The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949), in the car ride that takes the old architect to the hospital. Associated with the flat, horizontal succession of windows, all cleanly separated from each other, the verticality of the towers of the city appear cut out of the depth of the urban landscape and yet stuck onto the window itself. These examples point us in the right direction. Here, we would have to re-trace the genealogy of such a figure,9 which would show how much the gesture of leafing with the finger, in nearly every instance, is virtually contained in sight, how much this leafing is also a sweeping of the gaze. To See Nothing But Gazes, and To Paint That Which We Do Not See And yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, mechanically reproduced vision was distinguished by the absence of manual intervention10 – still referencing reality, in this manner, as objective. If, as Georges Méliès reminds us,11 the first cinematographic images were filmed outdoors, they are nonetheless in opposition to the landscape, historically defined as an optical space with reference to its distance from the subject. In Goodbye to Language, which opens with a first chapter dedicated to nature, the landscape is not always defined by the distant gaze of its observer. On the contrary, it is inhabited by the dog, whose gaze punctuates numerous scenes,12 or it is flattened by the absence of any perspective to which classical vision might be attached. Instead of figuring the projection of a subject in space, the landscape reduces nature, here, to the dimensions of the frame in a compression of depth that permits a point of view which is ‘naturally’ not accessible to me, to echo Marcel Proust’s discussion of Monet’s canvases, quoted by Godard in the film: ‘In this place on the canvas, paint neither what one sees, for one sees nothing, nor what one does not see, for one must only paint that which one sees. And paint that one does not see’13 – to render, that is, the ‘flatness of landscape’ in bursts of colour, disfiguring the shapes of the forest that suddenly appear in front of the spectator’s eyes.14 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

276

Emmanuelle André

Figure 15.1  Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage), Jean-Luc Godard (2014).

We know that vision is not a pure space of visibility. In the nineteenth century, a new perceptual paradigm emerged that took the observer’s body into its account of vision, which was thus redefined by its ‘carnal density’.15 Vision is endowed with a physical dimension that modifies the nature of the gaze. Instead of contemplating, from a distance, that which is available to their gaze, the observer henceforth participates with their entire body in that which they see. This transformation of the modern subject raises once again the question of the classical separation between the flat and the deep – one of the figurative problems that Edouard Manet worked on in his paintings. Along with Manet, there is that which Jean Clay calls ‘the definitive flattenNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Seeing through the Fingertips

277

ing of the painting’.16 Clay’s work is about ‘going beyond the problem of the surface in order to reach [. . .] the category of that which can be leafed through, of layerings, of thickness. [. . .]’,17 it’s about producing ‘aberrations and distortions of perspective’, ‘a multitude of small, geological dramas, of textural liftings up’.18 All of these visual experiences also describe Godard’s shots. We recognise the director’s voice at the end of the film: ‘I think it’s necessary to start at the bottom and work our way up to the surface.’ And in his commentary on the film he adds: ‘I said in the film what Céline has said: what’s difficult is trying to render flatness in depth. Technicians, on the other hand, they try to render depth in flatness’.19 The lack of opposition between the flat and the deep is a criterion of modern painting. In reference to Pollock’s work, Clement Greenberg puts forth the hypothesis of a ‘flat depth’.20 But he means this is in a more general sense; as Michael Fried comments, ‘flatness could [also] signify modernity, with the surface meant to conjure up the mere two dimensions of posters, labels, fashion prints, and photographs’.21 In Manet’s paintings, this questioning of depth and of flatness brings about never-before-seen relationships between the eye and the hand, gestures and gazes. Already, in reference to Balcon (1869), George Bataille notes ‘a sly quartering’ coming from the ‘divergence of gazes’, and a ‘flight into insignificance’ that ‘the big eyes of Berthe Morisot’ lead towards; he speaks of a ‘hallucinated painting’ whose subject ‘is both given and taken away from us at the same time’.22 Talking about the same painting, Foucault would say that ‘we don’t see anything, we only see gazes, not a place but rather a gesture, and always a gesture of the hands; [. . .] so many divergent elements of a painting which is none other than a burst of invisibility itself’.23 Henceforth, gestures and gazes would no longer be indicative as they were in classical painting, in which they showed and pointed (with the finger) in a given direction. Rather, they now participate in a dispersion of the point of view, as we also see in Le Chemin de fer (Manet, 1873), which brings to mind a repeated shot in Godard’s film, in which the woman in front of the lake is also behind the metal gate, doubly surrounded by the mountains behind her and the bars which hold her back. Her gaze is fleeting, masked by the brim of her hat, while she holds onto one of the bars, in the foreground, with her hand; another hand, that of a man standing outside of the frame, also meddles in the foreground of the shot. The depth produced by Godard’s use of 3-D is at odds with the horizontal bar of the grating, which cancels out the separation between the sky and the water of the lake and accentuates the disconnection of the eye and the hand which Bataille’s ‘flight into insignificance’ would describe as symptomatic of the absence of the subject. By depicting ‘disturbances of depth’, Godard inaugurates a new usage of multidimensionality. The film abounds with these passages, in which the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Emmanuelle André

278

effect of depth doesn’t simply make do with attaching its figures to backgrounds that receive them, but instead superimposes them one onto the other, or rather, stratifies them, if we consider the way in which the decomposition of movement divides representation, which itself is detached for a brief instant, producing the impression of a general dysfunction in our vision. Ocular Vertigo We know that stereoscopy consists of returning to the source of the gaze, by reconstituting the principle of binocular vision discovered in Antiquity (we do not see exactly the same thing with each of our two eyes). Depth perception is, in fact, provoked by the juxtaposition of two different images of the same object or landscape from different angles. Jonathan Crary reminds us: If perspective implied a homogeneous and potentially metric space, the stereoscope discloses a fundamentally disunified and aggregate field of disjunct elements. Our eyes never traverse the image in a full apprehension of the three-dimensionality of the entire field, but in terms of a localized experience of separate areas. When we look head-on at a photograph or painting our eyes remain at a single angle of convergence, thus endowing the image surface with an optical unity. The reading or scanning of a stereo image, however, is an accumulation of differences in the degree of optical convergence, thereby producing a perceptual effect of a patchwork of different intensities of relief within a single image. Our eyes follow a choppy and erratic path into its depth: it is an assemblage of local zones of three-dimensionality, zones imbued with a hallucinatory clarity, but which when taken together never coalesce into a homogeneous field. [. . .] Part of the fascination of these images is due to this immanent disorder, to the fissures that disrupt its coherence.24

This is what Godard chooses to reproduce by turning to 3-D: not the synthesis that our gaze uses our two eyes to execute,25 but rather the psychical and cerebral operation that determines the conditions of this synthesis. That which is described by the film images is precisely this progression of the eye ‘from one isolated zone to another’, this ‘jerky and irregular path leading to the background of the image’, which produces perceptual micro-shocks – namely, the temporal dimension that is included in the mechanism of sight. Now, the representation of time seems, thus, dependent on the disequilibrium of our gaze, hence the striking impression, in these passages of the film, of an ocular vertigo, as if the images end up reflecting the very physiological function of our faculty for seeing. Technically, ‘Godard substitutes for the digital stereoscopic camera (with its two coupled lenses) the assemblage of two cameras, mounted on rigs or on wooden vices built especially for the occasion’.26 And it is in this way Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Seeing through the Fingertips

279

that ‘Godard juxtaposes the unified system of digital technologies for the visualisation of depth with techniques of découpage from the source’,27 as we can see this time not in Goodbye to Language, but in The Three Disasters (Les trois désastres), a short film shot two years earlier which was also released in 2014.28 If, from one film to the next, many familiar images return, sometimes even identical shots, this time it is a question of the techniques of the image and of 3-D which appear over and over again. Now, these are associated with the repeated diffraction of the gesture and of the gaze, of the eye and of the hand: as, for example, in the shot which shows the camera lens being manipulated by five busy hands; or in the passage in which an eye is analysed in close-up, under the scrutiny of medical observation, a shot that is soon followed by another in which we see hands typing at a typewriter. Relayed by tools or by gestures, the eye and the hand thus accompany the physiological disturbance of vision which is at the heart of the act of seeing, and whose separation is recalled by the shot of the two cameras, slightly displaced from one another, that are used to produce the 3-D effect. In other words, the optico-manual discord – that is, if we follow the Deleuzian typology, not the subordination of the hand to the eye, but, rather, a general disconnection of

Figure 15.2  The Three Disasters (Les trois désastres), Jean-Luc Godard (2014).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

280

Emmanuelle André

their usages – works in service of the act of seeing. A bit later on in the film, the two cameras are seen reflected in a mirror, inserted between photographic portraits of cinema’s two great one-eyed men, John Ford and Nicholas Ray. Another figure of disjunctive vision thus resurfaces in the film by way of the (flat) image of the portrait: one-eyedness and the hidden eye. Nicholas Ray himself had already experimented with simultaneous projection, long before it was used by the first simultaneous stereoscopic systems29 for We Can’t Go Home Again, one of his most beautiful films, which is about fragmented vision and the dispossessed subject. One-eyed vision thus becomes a metaphorical model for a type of experience which radicalises the heterogeneity of vision and associates it with the decomposed portrait of a search, in vain, for identity. The Disjunction of Images: Watercolours We Can’t Go Home Again, Nicholas Ray’s last film, was made in unusual conditions: it happened as part of the filmmaker’s teaching in the early 1970s at Harpur College (Binghamton University, upstate New York). Ray believed that, in order to learn cinema, one had to make a film: so he assigned the key roles of filming, editing and camerawork to his students who would, in turn, come into direct relation with the image. In Ray’s own words, We Can’t Go Home Again is a film that ‘talks about that which we’re looking for. We’re looking for ourselves, we’re looking for our identity’.30 Ray uses his daily life as well as that of his students, their fantasies and their desires, to flesh out fiction according to an overlapping of intimacies across the grand history of the United States. ‘It was the subject of the film: intimate, emotional life, as it connects with grand history’, one student recounted. ‘We lived the film in order to say as much. And as a by product, we learned to make a film with a story’.31 The filmmaking apprentices filmed protests (like those of the prisoners at Attica), and added archival images (about the protests in Washington against the war or the trial of the Chicago Eight) at the editing stage: ‘We lived as if in a mirror’, Richie Bock added, ‘We lived our own story, and that was the subject of the film: this period of regression in American history. We brought that to the screen. Nick truly understood us. And he also understood himself, the lost soul that he was’.32

Thus the film articulated questions of identity, developed via the genre of the portrait – of a filmmaker, of a youth in his/her prime – with a singular composition of spatiality. Ray decided to simultaneously project the recorded scenes together on one screen, sometimes up to six at the same time, in such Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Seeing through the Fingertips

281

a way that the fragmentation of the frame organised the connections between images, executed according to variable proportions. We see right away the affinities with Godard’s practice, Godard being a great admirer of Nicholas Ray.33 Like Godard, who films using GoPro cameras, smartphones and still cameras, Ray used a wide variety of techniques, incorporating ‘all of the formats of film and video that exist at the moment of filming’.34 Both Godard and Ray attempt to mix different types of images (cinematic, photographic or archival footage) as well as to shatter the frame: Godard deframes his images, reversing and inverting them (turning them upside down so that the ground takes the place of the sky), while Ray explodes them by multiplying and superimposing his shots. The two filmmakers thus engage in a refusal of visual synthesis that coincides with the notion of doubled projection, such as that of the 3-D apparatus itself. Ray asks, indeed, ‘what must be done in order to put all of these multiple images on a single piece of film stock. [. . .] The idea was to create a back projection with all of the projectors and to film that onto a single piece of film stock’.35 This refusal of synthesis goes hand in hand with an accumulated interest in everything having to do with the haptic texture of the image, according to a single pictorial model: watercolours. Ray painted a watercolour of what the film was to look like. His wife notes that he often said: ‘This is what it should look like. With lots of little images’, adding: ‘He would describe his vision to us, not only of the film, but of the whole future of cinema that was in these stories and these parallel images’.36 From this painting technique that he had mastered, Ray drew effects of luminous intensity, the liquid quality of motifs, and the crushing of pigments. These effects were produced with the help of a s­ ynthesiser,

Figure 15.3  Aquarelle, Nicholas Ray (1973).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

282

Emmanuelle André

Figure 15.4  We Can’t Go Home, Nicholas Ray (1973).

developed by Nam June Paik, which allowed him to produce electronic images. In Goodbye to Language, water as a recurring motif organises the surface of the image, giving a pigment-like quality to colour and a physical intensity to light, so much so that both films produce a ‘hallucinatory clarity’. In other words, a way of seeing emerges from a way of doing: the multiple projection and the repetitive frames that inaugurate an aesthetic of banality in We Can’t Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Seeing through the Fingertips

283

Go Home Again are reactivated by the introduction of flat screens in Goodbye to Language. It is as if Ray’s film was reattributing its lost meanings to the yetto-be-invented icons of the mobile phone, reminding us that the coexistence of windows on one surface is also inscribed in a visual history of knowledge. For if the origin of the act of leafing in Godard’s work is located, once and for all, in the book that we see manipulated by the characters at the beginning of Goodbye to Language, it is brought back in Ray’s work in the iconography of the atlas: the political horizon of our daily screens which give us today a very impoverished version of it. ‘A House for Images’ Why an atlas? First, because of that which jumps out from the opening sequences of Ray’s film: images set against a black backdrop and the open form of montage that allows us to access the work from any given point – We Can’t Go Home Again does not have a true beginning or end. Indeed, the film is based on multiple takes and Ray would never truly finish it. ‘He couldn’t finish it,’ a witness recounts, ‘he wouldn’t stop adding in modifications, reediting, re-shooting.’37 We also recognise the figure of the atlas itself in the film as the introduction of a principle of hybridity and multiplicity.38 The form of the atlas is in evidence in the editing’s espousal of the hybrid and multiple, its combination of images of historical upheavals with shows of personal emotions. Archival footage is mingled with shots of live performance so that global events are presented alongside expressions of intimacy. It is this great gap between the plurality of the juxtapositions and the singularity of what is being expressed which allows the film to reach a mythical dimension, like that of the atlas; in numerous episodes the actors are shown wearing masks. The filmmaker himself stakes a claim on the contributions of anthropologists, notably Margaret Mead. In Ray’s film, one of Mead’s former students discusses her interest in psychology, in the complexity of the human being and in means of communication.39 For Ray, the camera allows for the recording of ‘the range of human emotions’ – the ‘recording of what remains of oral traditions in our societies’. He adds, ‘it has magical qualities. It can photograph thought itself. I want it to be in service of this’.40 Hence, the use of the fragmented screen that allows for the ‘creation of free associations’,41 in service of a nonlinear thinking, as ‘celluloid doesn’t recognise time or space, but only the limits of human imagination’.42 Baudelaire reminds us about this, that ‘it’s an almost divine faculty that perceives, outside of philosophical methods, intimate relationships and the secrets of things, correspondences and analogies’43 as evidenced in the film through the fragmentation of the frame. The impact of cinema on the unconscious is one of Ray’s o ­ bsessions.44 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

284

Emmanuelle André

This focus on the relationship between feelings and the unconscious of forms, and the sensation of history that flows through the film by means of formulae of pathos and gestures of love and war (the idea that images can transport us) calls to mind Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–9). An atlas is meant to be leafed through, by the hand, with the finger. Furthermore, the screen in We Can’t Go Home Again resembles, on many occasions, the page of a book, a table or a board; in any case, it looks like a flat platform that images are stuck onto or suspended above. Instead of considering the atlas as giving form to a cinematographic notion of montage,45 it seems, rather, that the contemporary use of screens links the wandering gesture of the gaze with the act of leafing, which finds its place of poetic and anthropological expression in the cinema, and in this film. The film, obviously, does not show the flat screens of mobile telephones. However, in the background of the image, maps of urban areas are projected, and we can often make out connecting lines drawn between rooftops, looking like wire mounts holding up separate screens – like so many little scenes, little images that, just like in watercolour paintings, show the intimate and collective life of a community and of a time period. ‘In one instance,’ a student recounts, ‘Ray started to break down, and the film broke down even more.’46 We Can’t Go Home Again thus presents a portrait of Nicholas Ray as a scattered subject, a man isolated in historical time and in the history of cinema. Serge Daney comments that: [T]his film [is] unique [because] it shows the disintegration of its own filmmaker, whose pieces were recomposed to form the material of his film. The screen is populated with tiny images that quiver, coexist, and bleed together. Screams and confessions float upon a black backdrop, but this black backdrop is sometimes the shadow of a house, with a roof, just like a child’s drawing. Not a house for the characters to live in, but instead a house for images who no longer have a home: the cinema.47

The atlas as a home for images? It would have to be, all at once, the architectural point of origin, the stage of a past model and a sort of screen that we, in the future, would like to manipulate according to gestures of the hand – the act of leafing through pages or of hanging on a wire – that would bring together otherwise disconnected motifs, pinning them to the thread of thought. Notes All URLs referenced accessed 29 January 2017, except where noted. 1. This text was first presented as a talk given at the ‘Écrans exposés’ conference, organised by Riccardo Venturi and Geraldine Sfez (20 May 2015, INHA). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Seeing through the Fingertips

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

285

A  different version (‘Images et visions mutantes’) was published in French in Vertigo no. 48 (Autumn 2015). This flattening of space has often been studied in photography. See Éric de Chassey, Platitudes. Une histoire de la photographie plate (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Michel Serres, Petite Poucette (Paris: Éditions Le Pommier, 2012), back cover. Ibid., p. 32. Gilles Deleuze online courses, http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article. php3?id_article=48. See also Gilles Deleuze’s chapter ‘The Eye and the Hand’, in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 154–61. http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article=48. Rosalind Krauss, Le photographique: Pour une théorie des écarts, 2nd revised edition (Paris: Éditions Macula, [1990] 2013), p. 61. Here I have in mind Raymond Bellour’s chapter on the animal and technique: ‘Homo Animalis Kino’, published in this volume, pp. 288–96. It is also used in examples of video work. See, for example, what Raymond Bellour calls the ‘scroll form’. Raymond Bellour, ‘The Shape of my Gaze’, in Marcel Odenbach, Dans la vision périphérique du témoin (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1986). See Rosalind Krauss, Le photographique, p. 62. Georges Méliès, ‘Les vues cinématographiques’, in André Gaudreault, Cinéma et attraction. Pour une nouvelle histoire du cinématographe (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2008), pp. 195–222. See Youssef Ishaghpour, ‘Image du monde disloqué’, Trafic, No. 92 (Winter 2014), p. 16. This translation is based on the unfamiliar grammatical form of the original ­sentence: ‘peindre que l’on ne voit pas’. Other forms of flat images must be added to this, such as those produced in the film by ‘barrels, metal grates, the surface of water, the surface of gravel’. See Bidhan Jacobs, ‘Découpler la visualization 3DS’ in La Furia Umana, No. 24, http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/54-archive/lfu-22/290-bidhan-jacobsdecoupler-la-visualisation-3ds-jean-luc-godard-adieu-au-langage. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 150. Jean Clay, ‘Onguents, fards, pollens’, in Catherine David et al. (eds), Bonjour Monsieur Manet, Exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), p. 14. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 21. In Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard. Filmmaker Extraordinaire, http://cpn.canoneurope.com/content/Jean-Luc_Godard.do. Greenberg picks up on a ‘fundamental characteristic of Pollock’s system: the invention, thanks to the stratification of the latticework and their distribution, of a “flat depth” (spatium), exclusively determined by its (linear-chromatic) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

286

Emmanuelle André

plastic ­constituents’. Jean Clay, ‘Pollock, Mondrian, Seurat: Flat Depth’, in Hans Namuth (ed.), L’atelier de Jackson Pollock, 2nd edition (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1982), unpaginated. 21. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 16. 22. Georges Bataille, Manet, Oeuvres complètes, IX (Paris: Gallimard, [1955] 1979), p. 153. 23. Maryvonne Saison (ed.), Michel Foucault, La Peinture de Manet (Paris: Seuil, [1971] 2004) p. 43. 24. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 125–6. 25. On this subject, see also Mathieu Capelle, ‘Quelques hypothèses sans grande logique, d’après Adieu au langage’, Trafic, No. 92 (Winter 2014), p. 30. 26. See Bidhan Jacobs, ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. The Three Disasters (Les trois désastres) is one of three film segments which together are known under the title 3X3D. The other two films were made by Peter Greenaway and Edgar Péra. 29. Bidhan Jacobs explains that ‘Until the middle of the 2000s, stereoscopic ­projection systems used two reels (right eye, left eye), two film gates, and two separate lenses. D-Cinema projectors allowed for stereoscopic projection from a single source, however, for all 3DS solutions (. . .)’, in ‘Découpler la visualisation 3DS’. 30. Citation from the documentary Don’t Expect Too Much (Susan Ray, 2011). 31. Ibid. 32. Words of Richie Bock, as told by Bernard Eisenschitz in Roman américain. Les vies de Nicholas Ray (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990), p. 488. 33. Godard has said that ‘if the cinema no longer existed, only Nicholas Ray appears capable of reinventing it and, even more, to want to do so’. Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Rien Que Le Cinéma’ (1957), quoted byAlain Bergala in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma and Éditions de L’Étoile, 1985), p. 96. 34. Bill Krohn, ‘Nicholas Ray: dernières oeuvres’, Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 460 (October 1992), p. 77. 35. Citation from Don’t Expect Too Much. 36. Ibid. 37. James Gutman’s notion, as told by Bernard Eisenschitz in Roman américain, p. 499. 38. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet. L’Oeil de l’histoire, 3 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2011). 39. Citation from Don’t Expect Too Much. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. As quoted in Susan Ray, Nicholas Ray, Action: sur la direction d’acteurs (Paris: Yellow Now, Femis, 1992), p. 281. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Seeing through the Fingertips

287

43. Charles Baudelaire [Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, 1857] quoted in Georges DidiHuberman, ‘Atlas: comment remonter le monde’, interview with Catherine Millet, Art press no. 373 (December 2010), p. 52. 44. See Bernard Eisenschitz, Roman américain, p. 489. 45. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1998). 46. Quotation from the documentary Don’t Expect Too Much (Susan Ray, 2011). 47. Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde, 1. Le temps des Cahiers, 1962–1981 (Paris: P.O.L. Trafic, 2001), p. 309, reprinted from ‘Nick Ray et la maison des images’, Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 310 (April 1980).

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 16

Homo Animalis Kino Raymond Bellour Let’s begin with the last shot of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014), that is to say, with the last avatar in a series of films through which America has, since the end of the 1960s, sought out a sense of self-recognition and identity between its unquenchable thirst for primitivity, for wilderness, and its inexorable transformation into science fiction interlaced with counter-culture. This last shot is an extreme close-up of the eyes of Caesar, the pacifist leader of the apes. Once the murderous and cathartic conflict between his people and the small society of American survivors of the Catastrophe has been overcome – a conflict which constitutes the body of the film – this shot serves to materialise the process of mediation established between the human and the animal, of which such a parable gives us both a renewed image as well as a classical exemplar. It is because these eyes, bursting with sudden clarity and thus practically emptied of any trace of animality, are clearly human eyes. These are the eyes of Andy Serkis, the actor hidden behind the ape mask, mirroring as if in response the eyes of Jason Clarke-Malcolm, the hero of this story, forever willing to recognise the human in the animal – to its furthest extreme, as an innate human excellence reduced to its least common denominator. For this spontaneously Oedipal primate people is defined by three principles which, when confronted by the sudden risk of having to face off with the humans, they have constructed for themselves and which they do not want to lose: Home, Family, Future. In the universe of cinema, there is no anthropological theme more pointed than that of the mutual self-definition and definition-by-opposition that takes place between Man and animal. In fact, the apparatus of the cinema is also revealed in this way, through the body of the spectator. In order to highlight its persistence beyond the numerous works of the distant or not-so-distant past, we might attempt to grasp this through three films, each very recent, each thoroughly unique, but all having in common a specific concern, belonging just as much to the preoccupations as to the virtualities of the present time. In each of these films, the deployment of animal presence is linked either to a meditation on, or to a setting in motion of, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Homo Animalis Kino

289

technological mutations through which the cinema, according to the words or the mood that one might adopt at any given moment, perishes or survives, but survives only by transforming itself. This is what clarifies these three films and at the same time what makes them so enigmatic. Notably, none of these films are American, at least in the trivial sense of the term – even though the second one comes from a research laboratory at the most prestigious university in the world. They write themselves into an alternative history, parallel to the one that, in Hollywood cinema, has so often linked technological development to the ‘exacerbation’ (magnification, exaggeration, intensification) of animal figures, from King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933) to Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002), by way of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), just to name a few. This is a parallel, more insightful history, commensurate with exceptional works such as the superlative film Au hasard Balthazar (1966) which, in its time, dealt with the animal as such and without further mediation. These three films are Holy Motors by Leos Carax, Leviathan by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, and Goodbye to Language by Jean-Luc Godard, released in 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively. *** Each of these films received plenty of critical writing right away, to the point where it is more the kind of montage that such interest generated between the three films, than the attention to individual films, dependent on pre-existing elements, that reinforces the hypothesis they have come to emblematise. 1. Holy Motors Denis Lavant’s dialogue with Michel Piccoli (the man with the bloodstained face) in Holy Motors has been commented upon at length. The exchange occurs in a corner of Mr Oscar’s white limousine, as he takes off his makeup in order to transform from one role into another (of which there will be eleven), as part of the film’s vast parable about the calling of an actor and the degree of belief he can be granted still today. He says: ‘I miss cameras. When I was young, they were heavier than we were. Then they became smaller than our heads. Today we don’t even see them anymore. So, yes, me too, sometimes I also find it difficult to believe’. And to the next question – ‘What pushes you to go on, Oscar?’ – he answers: ‘I keep going just as I have begun. For the beauty of the gesture.’ To which his interlocutor replies: ‘Beauty, we are told, is in the eye of the beholder.’ These words, framed in terms of the achievements of an actor, directly implicate the spectator in a film in which the opening sequence stages the movie theatre itself, with its audience Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

290

Raymond Bellour

plunged into darkness. ‘And if no one watches anymore?’ Oscar replies; this time his voice is superimposed over the image of the limousine, filmed in long shot, in real time, as it drives imperially along the bank of the Seine. The film’s beautiful final shot has also been written about in detail: in the immense limousine garage (there are no fewer than twenty-two limousines, aligned in two rows), after the lights have been dimmed, the ‘holy motors’ talk about their day, their rear lights blinking with each exchange of words, until the final judgment of the last two voices is heard: ‘It won’t be long before we head to the scrap yard./People no longer want visible machines./They don’t want motors anymore, they don’t care about action.’ But little has been said about the extent to which this film about the destiny of cinematic images is punctuated by instants, moments in which animal presence suddenly prevails without further justification other than that of pure presence, subsequently creating more than a mere echo of all that the fiction orchestrates. a) First comes the prologue, enigmatically set as a counterpoint to the rest of the film, where the filmmaker puts himself in the spotlight before he gives up his place to his character. We have to go into detail in order to see how man and animal are cinematically inscribed together. A shot that might recall a Marey film introduces him, a naked man with cyclical movements, as in the beginnings of cinema (there will be two other such moments interspersed through the film, and one in the credits). Then, we see a crowd of film spectators, filmed from behind, very still, grazed by tiny variations of light from the projected images. The sound of cars (the title of the film appears), the sound of footsteps, the voice of a man: ‘No, no, no’, a shot rings out, a boat siren, the squawks of birds. The second shot shows someone sleeping, sprawled out on a bed, a big white dog at his feet. Off-screen are the same sounds of sirens and birds, maybe a train. The man gets up, walks towards a window lit up by the distant nocturnal city, followed by the same audio background; he arrives in front of the thin trunks of abstract trees (reminiscent of Max Ernst’s forests), tries to see through, feels with his hand around the curtain of trees and inserts a key into a lock. As he pushes the door with apparent difficulty, the dog suddenly appears at his feet and follows him. Now they are in a room where the sound of the film increases in volume; the man is struck by the intermittent light of the projection. The sound of birds intensifies. The man pushes the door of a balcony overlooking the audience. In the aisle that descends between the rows of seats, on the left, a small naked child appears suddenly from behind, running, disappearing into the distance. And it is in a counter-shot, zeroed in on the same aisle, that the dog descends slowly among the spectators, coming upon us in a close-up shot. The siren rings out again, over a high-angled counter-shot of the man, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Homo Animalis Kino

291

who seems to follow the animal with his eyes from the balcony before settling his gaze on the screen again. Suddenly, an enigmatic counter-shot of a little girl who seems to be suspended against a backdrop of trees, behind a circular glass pane that the camera discovers while retreating, as the sound of the siren rises again. And with the following shots, Mr Oscar appears, the first of the characters incarnated by Denis Lavant. He waves to his family and leaves for work. Thus, in eleven strangely joined shots, this prologue emblematically ­associates – self-evidently but also with a sovereign enigmatic force – the body of the filmmaker with the body of the film by way of the double mediation of the dog and the child. b) Much later, in the hotel room, where the hero has become an old man nearing death (it’s the second-to-last episode), a big dog is sprawled on the bed he lies in. The animal remains at his side, his silent partner, all the way until the end of the long, dramatic scene played out between the Dying Man and a young woman. This time it’s a black dog instead of a white dog. c) Even later still is the final episode, the last role in a long day of work: Mr Oscar, turned ‘house husband’, returns ‘home’ as a song recapitulates at length and with melancholy what will turn out to be the stock-taking of a life. He is welcomed by his chimpanzee ‘wife’, who takes him by the hand; he asks after ‘our baby Luce’, the baby chimpanzee that he takes in his arms, proposing to go see ‘Aude’. And thus the film comes to an end, with the persistent, hallucinated vision of an animal–human nuclear family, crowned by pink clouds spotted with white holes around the frame of the window, in front of which all four of them hold onto each other for a long time, like an idea, like a symptom. All of this occurs before Céline – played by Édith Scob, the mythical heroine of Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face (1960), in which she finally becomes the famous white mask – the driver of the limousine-studio where the hero accomplishes all of his metamorphoses, returns the car to the garage to allow for the final dialogue already mentioned to take place. The function of these three moments seems clear: in this film which, regardless of what its author says (he declared to the journal Libération: ‘This is not a film about cinema’1), is nonetheless a film about the destiny of cinema. As the hero – a new Mabuse tirelessly living to excess his calling as an actor – finds himself so often, and in so many of his roles, bordering on an animality of which he delightedly performs various states, these three moments come to emblematise the animal dimension of the cinema–machine. Hence as a reflection of the actor, this animality, complemented by childhood, emerges as that which constitutes the body of the spectator and permeates the entire apparatus. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Raymond Bellour

292

2. Leviathan It is also just as clear that the now invisible cameras whose advent Mr Oscar laments are the same ones that made Leviathan possible. This is a difficult-to-describe film. In the elliptical opening sequence, we are faced with an ink-black background on which fragments of figures in striking colour emerge intermittently, constantly tottering one on top of the other, appearing, disappearing. Trying to make an image of it, one wonders: ‘Is it a space ship launching itself into the void? A city on a nocturnal horizon or the mirage of a city? Is it only a reflection on the water?’2 We later understand that we are aboard a fishing boat, illegally trawling up and down the east coast of the USA. In effect, this specific description is only deduced from the end credits, as well as everything that the authors have said, for the film’s fragmented hyperrealism, practically disintegrating away from representation, appears to be beyond any reference. In this nearly wordless film, with the exception of a few rudimentary words exchanged between the fishermen, which is nonetheless saturated with a sort of sonic vertigo, as variable as it is constant, the image is agitated by a movement, a trembling, a swaying, an incessant wobbling. The only true counterpoint stands out, a clue about a much more classical film, or perhaps a film excessive in the opposite way, that could have come into existence: a very long shot fixed upon the captain shows him sitting in the cabin, eating, with his eye staring at an invisible television. The filmmakers have recounted on occasions how, as they started working on a documentary film about the fishing port of New Bedford – formerly the biggest port in the US for whaling and the mythical point of departure for The Pequod in Moby Dick, destined today for semi-abandonment – they had been invited by the captain of the fishing trawler The Athena to join in a fishing expedition. They became immersed in an experience so extreme, so harsh, that it went beyond anything they could have conceived – to the point of describing it as ‘a foretaste of hell’.3 They quickly abandoned the classic cameras that they had planned on filming with in order to use, almost exclusively, small GoPro cameras that they could attach to their or to the fishermen’s bodies, as well as to any part of the boat, and that they could even throw underwater. They were thus able to move towards what Jean Rouch called ‘shared anthropology’, and make a film not about fishermen but with fishermen. It was out of the question to make the fishermen believe that they were becoming filmmakers; rather, the aim was to let their bodies, their lived experiences, come to the fore in a more or less conscious way, in order to obtain a film that plunges us into the heart of it all with the men, ‘as if the sea, the birds, the fishermen were writing the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Homo Animalis Kino

293

film with us’.4 They add, ‘After days at sea, you lose all of your bearings. We were having an experience that was simultaneously interior and exterior to the body, in which it became impossible to distinguish up from down, the sky from the sea, night from day, rain from the sun’.5 They explain further: Little by little, it seemed to us that our cameras were replacing the human at the heart of all of that immensity, that we were filming mankind, but as reduced, flattened, fragmented among all the other species. Man connected to his bestiality. Humans are the only animals who don’t see themselves as animals, who don’t even consider themselves a part of the natural world. It interested us to create another representation, in which humans were, in some way, put back in their place’.6

Thus, we see on many occasions, but especially in one very long moment in the middle of the eighty-seven-minute film, the two main animal species that seem to haunt the film, for they continually appear as if they were ghosts floating one into the other, at the whim of the shifting blurred line between them: fish and birds, captive animals, dying or already dead animals and wild ones free to roam and hyper-alive, the former ripped brutally from the sea, while the latter furiously inhabit the sky. And all becoming fragmentary motifs in extreme images, hovering at the limits of representation. It is the most vivid memory I have of birds in flight, other than in Hitchcock, during the attack scenes in The Birds (1963), with the added, improbable, fictional dimension produced by the succession of still photograms on the editing table or on the computer. What’s impressive is that, from the mini-cameras used in the filming to the digital montage which made it possible to gain control over more than 150 hours of rushes accumulated in the most extreme conditions, the intensified use of new technologies allows for the orchestration of a real body-to-body encounter between humans and animals. The shared anthropology proves itself to be, through Leviathan, an effect of machines, allowing the cinema to go beyond itself, but it also becomes one of their achievements. It does not seem necessary to insist, as so many have, on the extraordinary, unclassifiable character of such a film. More simply, and regardless of how excessive the result might seem, what is at stake here is the subversion of documentary exteriority by a sensory immersion that comes close to experimental cinema’s endeavours. We can also imagine that such a study could have been carried out on other objects or materials: it could have been about the labour of the working class in a factory, for example. The machine of cinema would have found itself confronted with other machines, and the human body with this assembly of machines, as has happened so many times in history. But the animal would have been missing, the animal in all of its states, from the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Raymond Bellour

294

massacred animal to the animal full of life, on the double horizon of the sky and the sea. Missing would be, in fact, everything whose palpable presence is multiplied by technology used in this way; this perceptual extension of the cinema–machine captures in this most intimate way the body of the spectator as the body of a captured animal. 3. Goodbye to Language And that’s what can be said, all things aside, of the last film of Jean-Luc Godard – his greatest masterpiece since Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) and Puissance de la parole (1988), a fictional essay inspired by the invention of the satellite telephone. Any commenter who knows a bit about Goodbye to Language insists on the two forces that bring it to life, so much so that we must return to this idea. On the one hand, thanks to all sorts of small machines (smartphones, GoPro cameras, still photography cameras), 3-D can be used to create never-beforeseen images (moving from two images to one image, or changing the image by keeping one eye open or closed, etc.). On the topic of one of these shots, Jean-Michel Frodon writes: ‘For this single shot, researcher Godard could have won the Nobel Prize in cinema – but that doesn’t exist’.7 But 3-D privileges above all a more-or-less constant individuation in the assemblage of shots, which collide with each other as if they were disjointed individual cells, frustrating any formation of totalities, either representational or ideological. It is, it would seem, the radical newness of this film, which still borrows some of its motifs from history and remains irrigated by semblances of stories, yet ceaselessly dissolves, amid the words of Joyce and Khlebnikov, in the discontinuity of the fragments of absolute present that it is composed of. On the other hand, the omnipresence of the dog Roxy has been pointed out – Roxy Miéville, the dog of the house who incarnates the simultaneously painful and pacified passage from History to Nature which takes place in the film. Thus, as the names of the actors and the crew appear in the end credits in white against a black background, Roxy, both last-name and first-name, is the only one to appear in red, becoming a separate entity that transforms the film into a unique work. A dog – the most lively dog, the most moving, metaphysical, poetic dog to have ever been filmed: something like the gigantesque, marvelous, simple and definitive introduction in western cinema of the animal according to Montaigne, Derrida, and Peter Singer. If people on Cannes’ Croisette had any sense, they would have given Roxy the Palme d’Or for acting – he becomes the autumn leaves, he becomes an old sage and an old chimpanzee, he becomes a torrent, he becomes the summer light that yellows the yellow Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Homo Animalis Kino

295

flowers, he becomes the wind that agitates the blood red poppies on the side of the road.8

Between these two forces – 3-D and the Animal – what is essential is obviously the codetermination, the interlocking mechanism, the continuous productivity. As if the effects of one manifested in the body of the other . . . So much so that these two new things – one, technological; the other, figurative-figural – naturally go together and accomplish a great feat together. There are few landscapes without Roxy, a landscape that would be seen by a subject, even if only by the outside gaze of a dog. These aren’t seen landscapes, but inhabited ones: the animal doesn’t ‘see’ the openness, he is the very link to the openness (in the vein of Rilke). The 3-D distends the centrality of the gaze, overflowing or hollowing out the frame. Levels and angles of shot disturb the homogeneity of ‘natural perspective’ and the rational relationship between the near and the far, so much so that many of the images, the intensity of which appears beyond the normal capabilities of the naked eye and older technologies, seem open to the domain of the improbable. It is a world whose secret is revealed only to the animal. It is maybe ‘the other world’, the reconciled one for which the beauty of nature is the promise, the one inhabited by ‘God’, since in the moment when the water talks to Roxy, we hear what seems to be a religious epiphanic chant. The other world being this world, as revealed by art.9

It does not seem useful to conclude on the way in which these three films work together; suffice it to say that they draw an image of man whose science comes from the mutations of technique, just as the figurations of the animal become a condition of the art of cinema. Notes 1. ‘Que sont mes amis devenus? Je dirais: des films’, interview by Olivier Séguret, Libération (3 July 2012), ‘Cinéma’, p. 3. 2. Jean-Michel Frodon, ‘A Monster Rises from the Abyss’, on DVD of Leviathan (Dogwoof, 2014). 3. Marie Lechner, ‘Chalut la compagnie’, Libération online (22 January 2013), http:// next . liberation . fr / cinema / 2013 / 01 / 22 / leviathan - chalut - la - compagnie _ 875902 (accessed 30 November 2016). 4. Laurent Rigoulet, ‘Sur la mer agitée de “Leviathan”’, interview with the filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, Télérama (28 August, 2013), http : / / www . telerama . fr / cinema / sur - la - mer - agitee - avec - lucien - castaing - taylor et-verena-paravel-realisateurs-de-leviathan,101522.php (accessed 30 November 2016). 5. Lechner, ‘Chalut la compagnie’. 6. Rigoulet, ‘Sur la mer agitée de “Leviathan”’. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

296

Raymond Bellour

7. Jean-Michel Frodon, ‘Godard, un chien dans le jeu de Cannes’, Slate (Fr.) online (22 May 2014), http://www.slate.fr/culture/87407/cannes-godard-adieu-langage (accessed 28 November 2016). 8. Pierre-Yves Quiviger, published on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/ pages/Pierre-Yves-Quiviger/47886860987. 9. Youssef Ishaghpour, ‘Image du monde disloqué’, Trafic, No. 92 (Winter 2014), p. 16.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Glitches

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 17

Temporalities of the Glitch: Déjà Vu Sean Cubitt The word ‘glitch’ refers to any form of electronic interference, especially those that become audible or visible in transmission. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word appeared for the first time in the 1960s as astronaut slang for a sudden surge in current. The term swiftly permeated the world of electronic as well as electrical engineering so thoroughly that now, in everyday English, a ‘glitch’ is any accident that is trivial enough to be overcome, creating minor disturbances without actually damaging major functions. Electro-magnetic media have always been susceptible to electric pulses and magnetic fields, often coming from the equipment they have been produced, stored or played back on. Glitches do not stop transmission: they merely make it scrappy, dirty or noisy. Many digital artists have embraced glitches. For such artists, a glitch is evidence that control is never complete. Glitches come as a tactical revolt of the material against its organisation. To the extent that it is a refusal of the maker’s intent, it is at once a material event and a moment in which authorship is in question. A film, or indeed any communication, typically establishes its source as in some way human, whether imaginary, fictional or determinate, and whether posed as equal, as dependent or as authoritative. The glitch indicates an other subject in the medium, a ghost in the machine, an inhuman in our communications. Regardless of its internal structures and its success or failure with audiences, any film is a proposition in a wider communication: a commodity in a system of exchange. This system, which we know as The Market, in the economic discourse of neo-liberalism is deemed to be a vast and complex accumulation of exchanges that sum to a perfect expression of human affairs. Any individual film proposes itself as an act of communication within this system, as well as within the codes of filmmaking and the cultural codes it mobilises, often enigmatically, so that the perfection of communication aspired to in its commodity form is constantly contradicted by its imperfect communication as bearer of meaning, its use value. At the same time, however, this communicative use-value is also at risk from the materiality of the audiovisual media. But since the Market cares only for exchange, these tribulations disappear in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

300

Sean Cubitt

the circulations of perfect communication. This belief that the whole overcomes and assimilates all difference has a much-disavowed archaeological forebear. Some 200 years ago, Hegel proposed the thesis of ‘the cunning of Reason – that it sets the passions to work for itself, while that through which it develops itself pays the penalty and suffers the loss’.1 Each of us suffers and dies, so that Reason can pursue its own self-development. We individuals will be consumed, and the future will not come back to rescue or justify our sad existence, save as necessary sacrifice in which even our virtues played no more part than cogs in clockwork. Contemporary philosophy and ethics reject Hegel’s vision as barbarous and totalitarian, yet today we witness the return of a universal Subject of history in the form of the Market, whose selfsufficient Reason trumps all individual misery. The Market as pure Reason depends upon perfect communication. Financialisation, which no longer requires material grounds but only the ‘confidence’ of investors, reveals the increasingly communicative nature of the economy. The Subject of market communication is, however, not investors but the Market itself: individual investors, losses and gains are evened out in the cunning of the Market. (There is only one small difference: today the emotional and cognitive costs of marketisation have not been entirely ignored, as they were by Hegel’s Reason, because they are now operationalised as raw materials for the reproduction of a capital which, having completed its geographical expansion, now colonises the minds and bodies of its inhabitants. Whether as consumers of therapies and pharmaceuticals, or as the necessarily damaged creatives who feed the maw of fashion, the production of unhappiness is integral to the reproduction of capital). In such perfect communication, any interruption is blasphemy. Where the world is constituted as the self-realisation of the Market, any other goal, desire, tendency or indeed any accident to the contrary is not only illicit but both shameful and doomed to failure, since no other can exist that is not the perfection of the Market. In the glitch there emerges what, from the point of view of this now dominant Subject of history, must be that unthinkable thing, evidence of an other. The pure unity of perfect communication produces its own unconscious. The unconscious of perfect communication is the glitch. This unconsciousness of an inhuman exterior to the Market proposes itself as noise, opposed to the total signal of smooth-running communicative perfection. In the first instance, noise is the primal mediation from which communication must bootstrap itself. Electromagnetic noise fills the radio spectrum with the detritus of time, from cosmic radiation’s echoes of the Big Bang to the ephemeral crackle of lightning. We may therefore understand glitches as epiphenomena of the material and temporal substrate of electronic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Temporalities of the Glitch

301

transmission, and by extension understand the priority of dust, for example, over film, that struggles so hard to exclude it, and encourages its audiences to ignore it when it does appear. Glitch, in this perspective belongs to universal entropy against which we drag our messages into existence and strive to retain their integrity. As noise, glitch can then be seen both as primeval nature and as the entropy that threatens every act of order, every emergence of life, insofar as life is negentropic, striving against chaos, gathering materials and energy to protect itself from dissolution. This certainly was the standpoint of the first cyberneticists like John von Neumann.2 At the same time, as Michel Serres argues, without this ground of random and non-human a-signifying, signification itself cannot take place.3 Not simply a raw material transformed into communication, Serres’ noisy ‘parasite’ is no leach sucking the life of order, but the fabric on which meaning embroiders its patterns. Meaning constructs itself by distinguishing itself from the dirty, noisy world around it, which it ejects as mere environs, mere externality. Thus noise as primal a-signifying material is both subsumed and rendered of no account. Glitches then need to be acknowledged as liminal events, thresholds between internal and external: primordial, not chronologically but pervasively: the irreducible accompaniment to the production of communicative order. Observing that ‘Modern scientific technologies tend to work toward eliminating accidents’, Masaki Fujihata has written that: Complete control requires anticipating and preventing the unexpected, thus precluding any element of discovery or surprise. But for humans to remain creative, we cannot do without the stimuli of the unexpected – which is ultimately what leads us to scientific curiosity in the first place.4

A problem arises, however, when human agents actively pursue glitches as a means to renewing creativity. Programming the unexpected is already contradictory, since, as Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin point out: [F]rom the point of view of the file, whose genetic predispositions are rigid and fixed, there is nothing random about glitching. ‘Open 57904.jpg >> replace all Q with 9hJ’ produces exactly the same results every time. Alternately, we could say that glitch practice is pseudo-aleatory, since results which appear random are in fact entirely reproducible.5

Noise can be generated as code as well as revealed as damage. Thus the glitch operates both as a proof of the limitations of communication – its encoding – and at the same time as a quality of communication – its ground in entropy. In feature films, this contradiction appears as the paradoxical evidence of the truly mediated status of fictional interchanges. In Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State (1998) for example, glitches mark the point of view of an omnivoyant surveillance system. Like the Adobe Photoshop lens flare filter, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

302

Sean Cubitt

which produces the illusion of a real lens in an unreal image, glitches have become the hallmark of a fictional mediation within a fictional diegesis. The doubling of the mediation produces an effect of authenticity, traceable as far back as the mimicking of long-lens camera snooping in Citizen Kane (1941) that Garret Stewart refers to as ‘authentication by disrepair’.6 In Enemy of the State, the extra layer of mediation provided by the glitched surveillance images mimics a primary mediation, one effect of which is to present the deliberate and supplementary damage to the image as if it were a natural effect of filming, so providing it with the (pseudo-aleatory) feel of documentary authenticity. In archival handling of film, disintegration of the image is evidence of the integrity of the medium itself as inhabitant of history. We can gauge the authenticity of a particular print by the scars left on it by its travels through the years. The deliberate production of glitches is a different matter. Filters that allow editors to add dust, hairs, scratches and other damage to digital video files produce exactly the kind of predictable glitching of video signals that Manon and Temkin are concerned about. Common in experimental media like structural materialist film, such experiments would include many effects undertaken for mainstream film, such as heads-up displays and data overlays. They are in this instance no longer either instances of technical irruptions from within the operating systems, hardware and software of machines, nor of either ontological or communicative noise, but of labour. Rosa Menkman distinguishes ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ variants of glitch as deliberate labour on the image.7 A hot glitch focuses on producing an end product which satisfies some aesthetic criteria: she gives the example of Nabil Elderkin’s 2009 video for Kanye West’s ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’. Cool glitch, on the other hand, is a process, an exploration. Menkman’s taxonomy sits on top of an older one that distinguishes intentional from accidental, where the intentional is ultimately instrumental while the accidental involves at the very least a share of creativity taken up by either natural processes or technologies or both. The instrumental, ‘hot’ glitch, with its restriction to the human, is a work in which work itself is evaporated, subsumed into intention, while excluding also the labour of the technology (Marx’s ‘dead labour’) and of natural processes, here electricity and the electro-magnetic spectrum. Cool glitch re-engages technology and nature as partners in creation. The surface of a physical photograph is vulnerable to the grease on fingertips, its meniscus marked with the identity of those who have touched it. A digital image pretends to absolute autonomy from its making and its passage through time. By excluding itself from history and divorcing itself from life, it aspires to the purity of a wholly rational existence. But if it were possible for digital images truly to separate themselves so absolutely from time, they would be empty. This is indeed a possibility: that they persist not Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Temporalities of the Glitch

303

as images but as code, in which case they are dependent on specific software for their display, and to that extent ephemeral. Asserting this dependence, glitch denies to digital artefacts the autonomy that would destroy them. This contradiction between autonomy and dependence is, however, not resolvable in a synthesis in which freedom is necessity. Rather the two coexist in the mutual antagonism expressed in glitches, constantly threatening the progress of digital rationalism towards completion through a glitch that turns them into sites in which they work and are worked upon by human, non-human and no-longer-human living labour. Since the technical media, from clockwork to Herzian cycles, rely on repetition, they also congeal in their particular assemblage not only of the repetitions of natural laws but of the dead labour of factory discipline. In Shannon and Weaver’s proto-cybernetic theory of communication, repetition is a form of noise and hence of entropy, allying technical and natural repetitions with the entropic function of Freud’s death instinct. Thus the model of the archive as site of eternal repetition of the same allies itself with a necessarily noisegenerating and entropic system which, to that extent, excludes the human from its ideal operation. This is why the work of the archive always interrupts pure repetition. Glitches similarly disallow pure repetition, in which time is erased from the equation, because whether they arise at the moment of representation, of storage or of transmission, they are always temporal phenomena. Against the indifference of repetition they assert ‘the difference that makes a difference in a later state of affairs’ by which Gregory Bateson defines information.8 Moreover, glitches, whatever their provenance, are also phenomena perceptible to the three phyla, human, machinic and natural. In this they differ from nature as it exists now for technical purposes: as source not simply of raw materials but of data. The becoming-data of nature – already externalised and alienated as environment – is stripped back in digital reason to numerical symbols. The pattern-seeking predisposition of digital reason leads, in a second stage, towards averaging out the exceptional, which is excluded from communication under the label of noise. As a general rule glitches can only work on this second operation, reasserting the numerically exceptional in order to reveal the normative techniques of domination, but without being able to crack open or sabotage the arithmetic principle on which it is founded. To the extent that it concerns only the recording of the numerical measure of phenomena, not the phenomena themselves, the statistical functioning of digital reason is invisible unless actively visualised, unheard unless sonified. This is why the perceptible nature of audio and video glitches is in the end more than simply a punctuation of norms. Their liminality operates between the smooth, insensible operation of numerical code and the eruption of code Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

304

Sean Cubitt

into sensation. Not itself a site of meaning, the glitch exposes the a-signifying code underneath the symbols constituting not only digital presentations (films, images, music . . .) but of the world, the human, technical and natural environments, as constituted in the form of pure data. Nor is it the site of pure difference, from which meaning might arise. On the contrary, to the extent that digital reason runs precisely on the measurement and manipulation of difference, the glitch reveals the pure indifference underpinning the logic of exchange on which it is founded. In the first instance, the labour of the glitch is legible as a work of undoing the exchange relation as it dominates conceptions of digital communication, and specifically of the reduction of nature to communication and norm in digital rationality. In the second, as limen, it mines the rift between sensible and insensible to expose the indifference on which their distinction is based, and with it the grounds of the ascendency of abstraction over the actual in the operation of the Market. As labour, glitch operates then as a form of aletheia, revealing, which however reveals not being but indifference in the threshold between perceptible and imperceptible. Like any labour, to be worthwhile it must be useful. The use-value of those glitches that are knowingly produced as specifically human labour is simply to emulate accidental glitches. Alternatively, they can produce deliberate disruptions, recruiting the contingent labour of physical (natural) and technical processes as collaborators in the work. The first of these categories, the emulated glitch, foregrounds mediation in order to materialise it in the diegetic world of the narrative. In this case it extends the realist project of persuading audiences of the materiality of the world they see represented. In the second category, which I will refer to as collaborative glitch, the foregrounding serves as interruption of exactly this realist project. The remaining question concerns whether the accidental, unplanned glitch, the work of both natural and technological agency, can in some sense be said to involve useful labour. Some glitches configured in the production process are undoubtedly human labour, oriented towards the semantic plane even if they work towards disrupting it. It is in the working life of media artefacts and in the archive that the bulk of accidental glitches occur – the scratches and physical imperfections acquired through transmission and display, and the dust and electro-magnetic scars accumulated in storage. In these instances, I want to argue, physical and technological processes constitute labour on the body of the film, a labour whose first task is to establish the impermanence of the film. We think of exhibition – in the broad sense covering all audiovisual media – as a showing of the integral work, or something as close to it as circumstances allow; and of the archive as an institution dedicated to maintaining that integrity. Actually every screening places demands on the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Temporalities of the Glitch

305

materials involved, including digital packages, to the extent that lower-quality showprints were the norm in the celluloid era, while the maintenance and operation of projectors, lenses and screens today is often marginalised in the theatrical cinema business. Meanwhile, every archivist knows that they must prioritise available funds for specific projects, and must frequently make the decision to abandon the historical artefact (celluloid, tape, file) in favour of digitised documentation of it, a process that always involves loss, and indeed the creation of new effects occurring at the interface between different material substrates, formats, operating systems and codecs. Many of these effects are unwilled, accidental, unavoidable. They become integral to the new form archived works take, just as conditions of screening overdetermine the presentation and therefore the experience, the phenomenality, of film, TV, video and digital visual works. As Renate Ferro and Timothy Murray suggest, we are best understanding these processes in terms, deriving ultimately from Freud, of a work of forgetting that is integral to the work of remembering. To remember is always to recall otherwise: a relationship to the past rather than a more or less accurate statement of it, arising ‘from within the legacy of ruptured teleologies, whether the forgetful field of what Derrida understood as the erasures of archival fever, or from what Foucault applauds as the modifying thickness of archival accumulations’.9 A first useful labour of collaborative, natural and technological glitching is to promote forgetting, and to integrate forgetting into the fabric of the texts and objects in the electronic archive. Among many uses of glitches in recent cinema, many indicate a pseudo-realistic account of long-distance communications, as in Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), while others communicate plot points, such as the transmissions from the orbiting Tet in Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013). Imaginary media, such as the holograph in the first Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), frequently display glitches, intended to communicate archival, experimental or endangered transmission. All of these characteristics are involved in the trans-temporal medium at the centre of the plot for Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006). Agent Doug Carlin is investigating a bomb on a New Orleans ferry when he is invited to join a task force using a new device capable of viewing the past. Following a lead, he falls in love with Claire, whose body has been identified at the scene, but who he can watch through the film’s ‘Snow White’ device. Scott’s effects team used lidar (‘light radar’), a system using beams of light to measure relative distances, rather like the laser tape measures used by estate agents. To create the effect of a 3-D medium capable of peering back into a specific but unstill moment in the past, the team combined lidar recordings of the spatial dimensions of key locations and actors with the use of a then state-of-the-art high-definition (HD) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

306

Sean Cubitt

camera, the Panavision Genesis, to give the footage applied to the lidar data an aura of hyperrealism. Scott was notably interested in retaining many of the artefacts produced by these technologies, including 3-D stutter, ghosting and smears, and in the artefacts generated by combining them with both highdefinition cinematography and still-camera rigs of the kind used in The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999),10 which he preserves into the final composites in order to create a hallucinatory impression in the cinema audience of a second mode of vision within the otherwise realist diegetic cinematography of the detective-protagonist’s present. Scott’s film is especially interesting because it deals with the temporality of seeing, so deeply encoded in both cinema as recording and television as live broadcast. The phenomenon of déjà vu, which Paolo Virno describes as ‘memory of the present’, gives us the uncanny sense of having lived a moment already, at the point when we are experiencing it for the first time, in a process in which we experience both the moment and its representation as memory simultaneously.11 The uncanny arises because of the doubt it places in us that the present as we normally accept it is not-present or already over. Those who suffer déjà vu constantly report a terrible dislocation from this eternal non-present presentation. For Virno the phenomenon operates as a metaphor for the dislocation of our conjuncture in history. In Scott’s Déjà Vu, that dislocation operates as a liminal terrain through which the protagonist will be able to rescue the girl and stop the bomb. In the first encounter with the Snow White program, which allows operators to look at a travelling moment in time always four days and six hours in the past, we shift from ultra-rapid pans round a New Orleans ferry, the scene of the bomb plot, via a montage of satellite and GIS images, to the lidar-scanned interior of a New Orleans apartment, its walls part data-cloud, part photographed. Inside the apartment, the second protagonist, Claire Kuchever, is presented in a similarly complex mode, assembled from a variable density of lidar data points and interpolated imagery from a still camera array to provide a 3-D portrait. The audience already knows, like Agent Carlin, that Claire is dead in the diegetic present. When, after a cutaway to Carlin, we return to the Snow White imagery, we see a ghostly extension of her movements through the room, like those left on photographic plates by movements too quick for the shutter. Most crucially of all, to establish the bond between living and dead, Claire’s Snow White screen image then fills half the actual screen, with Carlin in the other, both sides speckled with reflections of highlights from the laboratory set. At 57'40" another lidar sequence establishes the police headquarters in the past. Watched in slow motion or in screen grabs, the image is a bewildering version of a glitched CADCAM or Google Street View screen, an exploded Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Temporalities of the Glitch

307

Figure 17.1  Déjà Vu, Tony Scott (2006).

architecture of partially transparent, partially wireframe and partially data point visions which, after two brief moments when the image and sound crashes completely, resolves into a quasi-photographic rendition before we switch to a steadicam account of the dialogue scene between Carlin and his partner in the past. For the antagonist, the past is origin and therefore destiny; in these glitches we see into the past as raw material, as a potential, only some of which is realised. If on the one hand the narrative is a rewriting of the Orpheus myth in which Carlin goes back to rescue Claire from death, on the other it concerns the structure of obligation, which concerns the relation of what should be to what must be repaid: relations of debt. In the normative structuring of time now dominated by the construct of debt, the present owes the future. In the case of Déjà Vu, then, logically Claire’s past owes Carlin’s present. But that is not how it appears to Carlin. To him, his present owes a debt to her past. In what sense do we owe the past anything? Because it was the past that formed the actuality of our present. We are, in Benjamin’s sense, the posterity whose task is to justify the sufferings of the past. Beyond that, the ‘dead labour’ of our ancestors is the technology we use today: the fictive technology of Snow White and the real technology of cinema. The crashed imagery through which Carlin perceives the past and ultimately remakes it, exchanging his death for hers, is a direct image of debt as it runs counter to its current construction, in which the originary loan institutes a condition of permanent and unpayable debt. This is the formative structure Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

308

Sean Cubitt

of the Market’s construction of time as destiny, and it is this temporal artefact, this normative governance of time, that is glitched in the sequences where location, persons and events pass into a hyperreal hinterland. Rather than perceiving himself in action, Carlin becomes the spectator of his actuality, a condition parallel to that of the debtor. But the magic Snow White medium depicted in the glitch sequences allows him to restructure debt as what the present owes the past rather than what the past owes the future, while simultaneously freeing him to become an actor rather than a mere spectator in his own life. The trajectory goes from spectacle to action, from imprisonment in a state of debt to the construction of a means to repay it. By these means debt, which has always played the role of representation, that is as a deferral of presence, is converted into presentation, in which debt’s temporal structure, as representation of a subject position and a fixed value which, however, accumulates interest to the extent that it is never payable, is paid before it is established, creating then a presence which can be the basis for a future other than that of the destiny debt creates for the indebted. Ethical obligation operates across this temporal disjuncture, as the shadow of debt as the dominant regime of time today. The word ‘debt’ has more than one valence. Positively, we feel gratitude to parents, teachers, friends and say we owe a debt to them. Negatively, we feel shame and anxiety about owing more than we can pay. The poor are taught to be ashamed of their poverty. Debt as condition is a positive human experience – the debt to Mother Nature – and a negative instance – the debt crisis of 2008. In its positive form, it binds us to the social, but in the negative ejects us from the social emotionally and legally. It is an instrument that ties us to time: the debt incurred today we promise to repay in the future. In the era of financialisation, debt unties the social bonds to past and present and commits us to future repayment. But the condition of finance capital is that that future is endlessly deferred. Debt financing is premised on the principle of interest, so that we obtain credit only on condition that we continue to pay interest without ever coming to that lonely hour of final reconciliation that never arrives. To the extent that finance capital is the purest form of the perfection of communication, the glitch erupts as an insistence not only on the material substrate, not only on entropy, but on the absolute priority of the present. As presentation rather than representation, as signifier only of its own existence, glitch is able to escape the permanently deferred arrival of a representation at the precise place of its referent. It is capable, therefore, in a rather specific sense explored by the Swedish critic and curator Pontus Hultén, of becoming a symbol. Writing in the pages of the review Kasark in the mid-1950s, Hultén proposed that the age of representation was over, that contemporary art had Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Temporalities of the Glitch

309

to present itself instead as object in the world, and therefore proposed that ‘chance enters as a symbol for the tie to reality in which contingency rules’.12 Reality is here defined as the zone of contingency, which has the double weighting in English of randomness and of being contingent upon, that is of being caught inside causal networks. To call this practice ‘contingent’ has the double sense of relinquishing control in favour of accident – the kind of accident generated in Déjà Vu’s constructed glitches, and at the same time permitting natural and technical processes to enter into the creative work of art-making, the kind of pure accident that Menkman seeks, and which becomes possible as films travel through both transmission and storage. Secondly, such chance procedures are points of entry, in which chance acts as symbol. ‘There is no model for the one who is seeking that which he has never seen. The pictures that are symbols for the reality he wants to construct cannot be restricted to space or time. The symbols for his freedom have to be even more liberated than he himself has the power to be’.13 Hultén embraced cinema as he did kinetic art as machines which already are capable of generating symbols, and indeed of being symbols in themselves in their entanglement in chains of contingent causes and effects. Their strength is not only that they are autonomous of institutional, or indeed of human constraints, but that that autonomy allows them to act as symbols, that is, as things which act back on the human, but from outside it. This reciprocity between human and non-human actors is a distinctive feature of modern art, which began to incorporate real objects in place of representing them even before WWI, during which conflict, however, collages of found objects began to crack open the civilisational claims of the representational. At the same time, cinema operated as a system for discovering found objects (‘scenes’) and montage a means for constructing alterity from the ostensibly integral moments seized in the shot: a system for revivifying the symbolic order of industrial modernity by using its own technical dispositif to create means for extra-human intervention in the processes of meaning-making. To break the unity of the screen-image system through the materiality of segmented flow is the revenge of the rationalised on their rational progenitor. What results is an unsettling of the work, ‘definitively unfinished’ as Duchamp is said to have remarked of the Large Glass after its cracking. Or as Ryszard Kluszczyński says of hypertext: [T]he ultimate object of analysis is not the work itself [. . .] but the field of interactive artistic communication, where the work, along with other elements (the artist, the recipient/interactor, the artifact, the interface) becomes entangled in an intricate, multidimensional complex of communication ­processes.14 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

310

Sean Cubitt

What in Duchamp is still an authorial statement, subordinating technical and natural processes to the overarching control of the artist, moves in Hultén to a liberation of the artist from himself, and in hypertext as Kluszczyński sees it to a liberation of the artwork from the very object status which, for Hultén, was the means to human liberation. Kluszczyński marks the integration of the artefact and the interface, as technologies, into creation; what remains to be undertaken is the integration of nature. Yet Kluszczyński is correct in implying that the resulting communicative nexus is not in fact integrated into an artistic whole but completes the move from representation to presentation by alleviating the work of the burden of presence. We have only to add the presence of air, dust, ambient daylight, exhibition acoustics, machine noise or microbes to begin to understand the full complexity of the unintegrated work as work continuously undertaken by multiple agencies. The collaborative glitch operates in this becoming of the work. It acts in those works that present themselves as both authorial and complete to indicate that neither attribute is stable: that it is not only the human interpreter who is active in the art experience but the work too. In Déjà Vu’s moments of real synthesis between image regimes, notably between lidar and cinematography, are intimations of the possibilities for inter-medial communications exclusive of human intervention that open up the possibility of a more-thanhuman communicative regime. At the same time it is worth noting Wolfgang Ernst’s warning that: the unexpected corresponds to the disturbance that is television proper: the paradoxical structure of the medium demands extraordinary events that can appear only within the ever-same schematics; live broadcast would then be the condition of possibility of disrupting an otherwise imperturbably streaming flow. [. . .] It is precisely [such disturbances’] exhibition within their own genre that makes the paradox of television as a medium apparent: constantly having to provide the unexpected.15

Like Kluszczyński’s hypertext, broadcast television is not an object but a communicative nexus, dedicated to homeostatic regulation of difference. In the authoritative mode of broadcasting, in which continuous transmission takes precedence over all other priorities, the glitch provides evidence of the ongoing event of television: even in its failure, TV manages to continue. It carries on through the glitches, assimilating them into its regime of onward flow and indifferent differences. The deployment of glitch, either in fully digital cinema productions, or emulating electronic media in analogue film, runs counter to this ideal, premising both perceptual values and narrative turns on the fact of interruption. This is not, however, the end of the story. The art world is even more devoted to shocks and innovations, all of which Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Temporalities of the Glitch

311

function smoothly within the ever-expanding sphere of art’s sophistication, its ability to assimilate n’importe quoi.16 The disruptions themselves are part of the continuity, the homogeneity, of art, broadcast and popular culture in the era of the Market. This is the point at which Hultén’s insistence on the symbol becomes invaluable. The symbol is not a signifier, locked into a lexicon and a grammar and severed from its referent or even its semantic signified. A symbol, as Hultén proposes it, is the privileged technical and material form marking the passage from non-human to human. As long as a glitch can be treated as a signifier – when for example it operates as ‘authentication by disrepair’ – it can be assimilated. When, however, it marks the presence of mediation as material praxis beyond the human, it becomes symbol in Hultén’s sense. Only to the extent that it marks the threshold between human and non-human, contingent reality and system of signification, is it capable of the kind of liberating autonomy Hultén celebrated, and which forms an integral part of the ontology of audiovisual media and the media arts.17 The symbol belongs not to the presence of the work, nor even to its becoming, but to its latency. In wet photography, the latent image is the state of the exposed frame prior to fixing, which acts as a chemical amplification of the initially very small number of reactions triggered by light reaching the negative. The parallel in digital photography is the stage between the accumulation of charge on the exposed chip and its amplification, digitisation and removal into storage. In computer systems more generally, latency is the time taken to relocate any item of data, such as the time it takes to download, or to access a file from a hard drive. As the temporal dimension in any retrieval, including the retrieval of the effects of light through the chains of post-exposure procedures in both analogue and digital imaging, latency parallels the time of perception, which is always in hock to its pasts. Unlike the Peircean symbol, formed in the relation of word to word, but equally distant from Peirce’s index, which sees a causal relation between referent and sign, Hultén’s symbol is the actual presence of some thing, whose actuality is a matter of its contingency vis-à-vis human temporal structures – of syntax and of debt among them. Hultén’s symbols are always irruptions into a lexicon that bring with them evidence of its externalities and therefore of its incompletion. Among those externalities, the temporality of perception draws on both remembrance and forgetting, misremembering and misforgetting. The glitches of memory defer and disorient when they drag up the unrecalled, in the manner of Freudian slips, jokes and dreams. Such glitches may perhaps draw on upwellings of the animal nature in humans, as accidents in language and signifying systems. They also drag back, deformed, those externalised and repressed histories which Hegel’s Reason triumphed over. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

312

Sean Cubitt

In Déjà Vu, the glitch acts as a marker of this threshold over which the contents of the past must be dragged to bring them back into the present, the field of action. The film’s fantasy is that the past is merely latent, and that by handling it differently in a kind of ontological darkroom, it can be developed otherwise. To this extent, it confronts the primal fantasy that so often hovers over time travel films with its opposite: the fantasy of bringing the beloved back from the dead.18 The temporality evoked in the film is not that of the detective investigating the past, but the mythic time of an archetype. Thus what we see in the glitches is at once a mimicry of authentic time (time as the mode of destiny inscribed by debt, where the plenitude of the romantic couple is forever displaced) and at the same time a time of absolute presence, in which the glitch testifies not to the imaginary plenitude of communication or the imaginary permanence of loss incurred as debt, but instead the active participation of the media of communication in communication itself, a participation whose engagement with the non-human is precisely what allows a form of humanity unburdened by negative debt, and therefore capable of the social. The glitches we are seeking out here, those stemming from technical and natural processes, are upwellings of contingencies, not only as the noise integral to all technologies, especially those of communication. Those technologies that have become second nature, whose existence is so deeply embedded we no longer perceive them, return in their malfunctioning as evidence of their ongoing exploitation, as the repression of the colonised returns in racist ‘jokes’ and pornography, or reversed in sports fandom and identification with film and music stars. Technologies are similarly thematised in contemporary film and television, but equally rarely are the media technologies invited to participate in the production of the audiovisual except as the unseen supports, the screens through which we look rather than active participants in the production of signs. Glitches, like dead pixels or the stutter of scratched optical media, not only foreground the technical infrastructure but intervene in the production of signification. It is important then to recognise in Hultén’s symbol that signification is only one plane of its activity: the symbol is an act. It has material consequences. A glitch in code, whether its source is human error, natural contingency or technical artefact, changes the performance of the program: it is performative. It is a kind of feedback loop stitching together the repressed past with the future of the unfolding signification and communication process. It is in this respect the emergence of mediation within communication, where mediation is the primal connectivity of everything, and communication the reduction of mediation for purposes of control (at first for survival, now for domination). At the same time it indicates a concatenation of human and non-human action, the conditions for the existence of useful Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Temporalities of the Glitch

313

labour in Marx. To the extent that contemporary communication is enfolded in the operations of Market rationality, the a-subjective glitch is counterfoil to the Market as Subject. In this it is rather more than sabotage, rather more than a disruption of domination. Because they come from externalities, such a-subjective glitches take on the job of mediating – without communicating – between the dominated and the autonomous orders created by those processes of environmentalisation and externalisation. The natural and technological can no longer be abstracted as environments and externalities from the human polis but must be recognised as having their own claims to act – to labour towards producing the common – even as their actions produce differentiations within the common. Therefore as a preliminary conclusion, while some glitches operate within existing regimes of signification, other glitches – a-subjective, unintentional, accidental and collaborative – are symbolic acts which work towards the common, a renewed mode of mediation engaging human, natural and technological processes in their differentiation. Signifying glitches struggle to normalise the interruption, to sweep past it and assimilate it into a certain normality, even if, in the case of Déjà vu, that normalisation crashes into its own internal contradictions to reveal the a-signifying potential in the glitched sequence. In evacuating intention from the flow of signification, accidental and a-subjective glitches on the other hand not only undermine the intentionality of instrumental communication but replace it with another logic which belongs to the autonomous interactions of the common rather than to the undifferentiated and indifferent freedom claimed by the Market. What makes Déjà Vu such an interesting exemplar of glitch is that it sets out to deploy such signifying glitches, only to reproduce through them an actual breakdown in communication, one in which the physical properties of the image (and the sounds associated that for reasons of space have been omitted in this analysis) assert themselves through the paradoxes of time travel, as configurations of alternative modes of time. If, as I have argued here, debt is the formative structure of time in the era of financialisation, then Déjà Vu, even despite its own status as commodity in the circuit of exchange, and perhaps especially because it does not seek to do so, articulates the communicative and temporal irrationalities, inefficiencies, disruptions, interruptions and breakdowns which debt must ignore in its erasure of presence under the tyranny of an ineluctable but nonetheless endlessly deferred future. To express the paradox of debt as integral to the making of contemporary (inter) subjectivity comes both in the plot’s discovery that true debt is not owed to the future but to the other, and in the film’s picturing of this paradox as a crisis of communication whose testimony takes the form of a crisis in the image, the critical glitch. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

314

Sean Cubitt

Notes All URLs referenced accessed 29 January 2017, except where noted. 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 44. 2. John von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, in Arthur W. Burks (ed.) (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1966). 3. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1982] 2007). 4. Masaki Fujihata, ‘Cameras, Augmented Reality, and the Accidental’, in Accidental Tools (Yokohama: Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Film and New Media, 2014). 5. Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin, ‘Notes on Glitch’, in World Picture, No. 6 (Winter 2011), http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/Manon.html. 6. Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 51. 7. Rosa Menkman, ‘A Vernacular of File Formats: A Guide to Databend Compres­ sion Design’ (August 2010), http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/ vernacular-of-file-formats-2-workshop.html. 8. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemol,ogy (London: Paladin, 1973), p. 351. 9. Renate Ferro and Timothy Murray, ‘Archival Accumulations as the Erasure of Memory’, in Brad Buckley and John Conomos (eds), Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory (Faringdon: Libri Publishing, 2015), p. 80; citing Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Harper Colophon, 1972). 10. Tara DiLullo, ‘“Déjà vu”: Time Tripping to New VFX Heights’, Animation World Network. (22 November 2006), http://www.awn.com/articles/reviews/idejavui-time-tripping-new-vfx-heights. 11. Paolo Virno, Déjà Vu and the End of History, trans. David Broder (London and New York: Verso, 2015). 12. Cited in Lars Gundolf Andersson, John Sundholm and Astrid Söderbergh Widding (eds), A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture: From Early Animation to Video Art (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2010), pp. 94–5. 13. Ibid. 14. Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, ‘From Film to Interactive Art: Transformation in Media Arts’, in Oliver Grau (ed.), MediaArtHistories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 223. 15. Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Between Real Time and Memory on Demand: Reflections on Television’, in Jussi Parikka (ed.), Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 105–6. 16. Thierry de Duve, Au nom de l’art: Pour une archéologie de la modernité (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, [1989] 1998). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Temporalities of the Glitch

315

17. It is possible that media arts are distinguishable from contemporary art by their surrender of agency to non-human forces; and by their commitment to working within certain frames of materiality (film, video, network). Contemporary art of the n’importe quoi celebrates indifference as the summum bonum of pointlessly proliferated difference. It is the perfect market, in which anything can be exchanged under the token of universal uniqueness – in this respect it forms the high-cultural expression of the cultural configuration of Facebook. Media arts, retaining the respect for materials that art abandoned along with modernism, foreground the commonality of their frames and supports – screens, interfaces, code – in order to propose a commons unavailable to the exchange structure of contemporary art, which can only imitate it, as in Bourriaud’s relational aesthetic. 18. Constance Penley, ‘Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia’, Camera Obscura 5 (3 15) (Fall 1986), pp. 66–85.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 18

The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision Steven Shaviro Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Gregory Plotkin, 2015) is a recent low-budget exploitation film that distorts and destroys its own images. Though such a practice is better known in gallery art, it is also found at the opposite end of the aesthetic and economic spectrum, in a crassly commercial venture like Ghost Dimension, whose mission to turn a quick profit is not mitigated by the aesthetic concerns of gallery art, nor even by mainstream Hollywood concerns with cultural prestige. I cannot discuss Ghost Dimension, however, without considering the whole series of which it is a part. The six Paranormal Activity movies (2007–15) are works of what Caetlin Benson-Allott calls ‘faux footage horror’.1 That is to say, they consist entirely of (fictional) found footage: video sequences ostensibly shot by the protagonists themselves, and discovered and compiled after their deaths. The characters, settings and plots of these movies are entirely generic. Though some attempt is made to provide an overarching backstory for the series, there is no real narrative progression from one instalment to the next. Each movie follows the same predictable pattern. Strange events take place: odd noises are heard at night, and objects shift around inexplicably. At first, the disruption is fairly vague and low-key: things just don’t seem entirely right. But the incidents escalate both in frequency and intensity. The residents try to get to the bottom of whatever is going on, by recording the life of the household on video. The disturbances escalate over time, especially at night. Nevertheless, the people in the household are slow to accept the truth: that their home has been invaded by an invisible demon. Even when they finally do realise this, their efforts to resist are too little and too late. By the end of the movie, all of the characters have either been killed or possessed by the demon. Each movie in the series is set in a single location: usually a comfortable middle-class one-family home in Southern California. As Julia Leyda puts it, ‘everything in these movies appears unremarkable, even generic – from the houses themselves, newly built suburban tract homes, to the standard bland furnishings and costumes’.2 Each movie also takes place entirely in its Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Glitch Dimension

317

assigned domestic space. We never get beyond the single house and grounds – except when the demon opens up an interdimensional portal.3 Like so many low-budget horror films before them, the Paranormal Activity movies find ways to generate scares and thrills without resorting to complicated, high-end special effects. They work mostly by hinting at sinister processes, which are never quite shown to us directly. The movies are filled with disturbing sounds and ominous shadows. We hear creaks, bumps and crashes whose sources we are unable to discern. And we view violent effects – doors opening and closing, objects falling onto the floor, people being pushed around or dragged down corridors, even the camera itself being knocked askew – without being able to see the causes that produce them. The demon itself remains invisible. It interacts with the physical world, but apparently it is not itself physical. It enters intimately into the lives of all the family members, and yet they are never able to grasp and confront it directly. The Paranormal Activity movies also create suspense by manipulating time. We always have to wait for the inevitable bad things to happen. We watch these movies in a state of heightened, but unfocused, anticipation. We know that there is going to be something horrible; but we do not know just what it will be, or where and when it will take place. As we wait to find out, we are compelled to sit through long sequences in which literally nothing happens. The shocks, when they finally arrive, are heightened by our prior unease and uncertainty. Empty time of this sort has rarely been drawn out to such excruciating lengths as it is in the Paranormal Activity series. As Janani Subramanian puts it, ‘the curious experience of watching’ these movies is that they are ‘based on a great deal of waiting and watching, a viewing experience fairly rare in mainstream, effects-driven horror films’.4 The Paranormal Activity movies work, quite brutally, to entrain us to temporal rhythms that are alien to and discordant with our own. The time of the secret life of things – or the time of Paranormal Activity’s demon – cannot ever be mine. Its rhythms cannot be integrated into my own ongoing sense of the present moment. I can only experience these rhythms indirectly, in the form of a diffuse physical discomfort. Along with their reliance on indirect suggestion, their manipulation of time, and their use of boredom and shock to arouse the audience, the Paranormal Activity movies also foreground the very devices and procedures with which they are made. This befits their status as ‘faux footage’ films. Throughout the series, the protagonists record their experiences with handheld video cameras, home surveillance cameras, laptop webcams, phonecams and even (in Paranormal Activity 4) a Microsoft Kinect body-tracking rig. And these are presented as the sources of the footage that we see. All the devices being used are common consumer items, rather than high-end professional Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

318

Steven Shaviro

equipment. Their employment of course adds to the (fictional) impression that the events we are witnessing really happened, and really were recorded by the people to whom they happened. But this is more than just a matter of verisimilitude. The Paranormal Activity movies never let us forget that we live in a world that is permeated by image- and sound-recording devices – not to mention speakers and screens. We all own such devices, and we all consult them continually. Today, digital and informatic machines do not just keep a record of what happens; they themselves are directly involved in the events they register. There is no distinction between the real and its representation; the latter is best understood as a portion of the former, a particular way in which it gets folded and elaborated. And so we find these sorts of devices in action throughout the Paranormal Activity movies. We continually see and hear them, and we remain oppressively aware that we are seeing and hearing everything through them. There are even frequent scenes in which the levels or folds are multiplied, as the protagonists review their own footage by playing it back on viewfinders, video monitors and computer screens. This obsessive foregrounding of cameras and other digital devices5 in the Paranormal Activity movies endows them with a high degree of cinematic (or better, post-cinematic) self-reflexivity. We see and hear, along with the supernatural events themselves, the activity of capturing the traces of such events (though little attention is paid to the editing process). The protagonists’ obsessive need to record ‘paranormal’ occurrences largely drives the plots of all the instalments. Cameras and computers are themselves, in their own right, characters in these movies. Their powers determine what we can and cannot discern. In addition, the technical conditions of their use, more than any subjective considerations, motivate the very points of view from which we have access to the action. When the footage runs out, or when the cameras are turned off or destroyed, the movie necessarily comes to an end. Precisely because the characters and plots of these movies are so generic, their modes of production are able to come to the foreground in a way that is rarely the case in more mainstream Hollywood films. Each entry in the series is centrally concerned with the processes by which its footage is ostensibly captured. Each of them is thereby a media allegory, presenting its own construction as an exemplary instance of the ways that new electronic and digital media pervade, participate in, and largely produce our social world in general. The Paranormal Activity movies use two main types of recording devices. In the first place, they all feature footage taken by handheld video cameras. When such devices are used, we get lots of wobbly and jerky shots, together with frequent swish pans, hasty zooms and misframings. Motion blur is common. This sort of camerawork is usually associated, as Benson-Allott Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Glitch Dimension

319

points out, ‘with authenticity and violence in reality television’.6 More generally, it connotes amateur, real-life videomaking, in contrast to the far more polished work of film professionals. It also implies that things are happening too quickly and unexpectedly for anyone to be able to record them in an orderly manner. In these handheld sequences, the jittery movements point up the camera’s physical presence within the very locations that it shows us. We also often hear the voice of the person behind the camera, talking with the people who are in the frame. The moving video camera thus takes an active part in the action that it is recording – rather than viewing that action from a distance, or from the outside. It is much more a participant than it is an impassive observer. The handheld camera may of course be regarded as a prosthetic extension of the protagonist who is holding it; but its own formal ­characteristics – what it observes, and how – seem to supersede and replace the subjectivity of the human operator. At the same time, the Paranormal Activity movies also prominently feature unmoving cameras, ones that do in fact observe the action impassively and from a distance. These cameras are either fitted onto tripods by the protagonists, or installed on walls, tables and other fixed locations throughout the house. They are placed in otherwise empty rooms, or set to run in the bedroom all night while the people are sleeping. Such cameras capture all their footage automatically and unceasingly. With their fixed locations, and their broad views of the rooms they overlook, they bear witness to the mechanical passage of time. Moreover, these devices do not give us any clues as to which details within the frame are most important, or most worthy of our attention. As Leyda puts it, ‘the visuals produce a particularly enervating form of suspense since the viewer must constantly scan the frame in the absence of any seeming guidance from a director or editor or even (it seems) an actual cinematographer’.7 We just have to keep on looking, trying to remain alert, until something untoward finally happens. And even when it does, it may be so subtle that we do not notice it right away; or else, on the contrary, it may take place so quickly that it is over before we are able to get a proper sense of it. It is almost as if these surveillance sequences provided a parodic reductio ad absurdum of André Bazin’s famous dictum that unedited deep-focus long takes are to be preferred to other types of shots and sequences, because in such long takes, ‘the viewer has a more active intellectual approach, and even makes a real contribution, to the mise en scène [. . .] The meaning of the shot depends in part on the viewer’s attention and will’.8 In the fixed-camera portions of the Paranormal Activity movies, the need for close attention is pushed far beyond anything Bazin ever imagined, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

320

Steven Shaviro

while at the same time the will of the viewer is frustrated. We do not get to choose among different elements within the frame; rather, we strain to find anything at all that is worth attending to. This odd experience is still further heightened when – as Nicholas Rombes puts it, describing a sequence from Paranormal Activity 2 (Tod Williams, 2010) – all we get, for a period as long as six minutes, is ‘a series of carefully modulated medium-long takes from various fixed surveillance cameras the family has had installed’, with the shots alternating among six locations in a regular, repeated order: ‘The rhythm of the sequence – almost suggesting the slow, rhythmic changing of traffic lights – creates a sort of structural tension that outstrips the more generic screw-tightening of the film itself, which is fully within the haunted house tradition’.9 Here suspense seems to become an autonomous formal parameter in its own right, no longer reducible to the functional need to set up the viewer for an eventual shock. For the Paranormal Activity movies, just as for Bergson, duration is ontological as well as psychological. Rombes therefore suggests that ‘under slightly different historical circumstances, we could see [the Paranormal Activity movies] as avant-garde’ in the manner of works by Andy Warhol or Michael Snow.10 I think that these formal parallels, both to Bazinian realism and to cinematic avant-gardism, are quite apropos. But the actual ‘historical circumstances’ of the Paranormal Activity movies are such that they are in fact exploitation products, rather than avant-garde films or video installations. The Paranormal Activity movies are designed from the get-go as disposable products, with a short shelf life, equally suited for viewing in movie theatres and streaming on home devices. Because they are not sheltered by high-culture institutions from the marketplace demands of immediate profit and quick turnover, they do not exhibit any critical distance from the media glut and multiplication of devices that we experience today. They are simply one more highly selfconscious instance of this glut and multiplication. If they offer a commentary on our contemporary media situation, this is because – and precisely to the extent that – they are themselves entirely embedded within this situation.11 The duality between hand-held cameras and fixed surveillance cameras is also a split between the two deep tendencies of contemporary media that Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter call immediacy and hypermediacy. These opposites are mutually determined by a ‘double logic’.12 The hand-held cameras suggest the fiction of direct, immediate real-time experience. The surveillance cameras, in contrast, suggest an endlessly mediated mode of seeing, one that is not human at all. These cameras have a fixed physical location, but they do not and cannot correspond to any particular subjective point of view. By pulling us at once to the opposed extremes of immediacy and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Glitch Dimension

321

hypermediacy, the Paranormal Activity movies elide whatever middle ground might lie between them. In concrete terms, this means that the ‘found footage’ conceit of the Paranormal Activity movies leaves little room for the traditional logic of continuity editing, as it works in mainstream Hollywood films. For instance, neither camera mode permits anything like a shot-reverse shot structure. Also, while the handheld camera can zoom in or out, and the operator can physically move closer to or further away from what is being photographed, such lurching movements do not create anything as stable as the conventional alternation between establishing shots and closer shots in classical continuity editing (or even in the more recent mode of ‘intensified continuity’).13 We are forced to follow the immediate reactions of the diegetic cinematographer, who is sometimes distracted, other times oblivious to what he or she sees, and still other times in a panic about it. We hear a sound, and the camera turns quickly in the direction it seems to be coming from, only to show us impenetrable darkness. Or the operator jerks the camera erratically from one place to another, desperately seeking to capture the image of something that isn’t there. These sorts of movements are too skittish to guide our gaze in the orderly manner that continuity editing does in more mainstream films. As for the fixed camera sequences, they are also obviously incapable of producing any such alternation, since their field of vision never varies; all the movie can do is to switch mechanically between them. Neither sort of camera gives us the raw material needed for the conventional continuity style. In all these ways, the Paranormal Activity films exemplify what I have elsewhere called post-continuity.14 The Paranormal Activity movies’ premise of diegetic cameras and other devices therefore compels the filmmakers to strip the Hollywood continuity system down to zero – and then to rebuild it from scratch, as best they can. In each film, the filmmakers can only follow the technological affordances of the particular devices that are available to the protagonists. At the same time, each instalment also strives against the previous ones, seeking somehow to alter and expand the series formula. As Bordwell puts it, ‘filmmaking becomes a kind of gamelike performance that coaxes us to ask: How will they deal the cards this time?’ Bordwell usefully works through the formal inventions that mark the first four entries in the series. The Paranormal Activity movies display a ‘tendency to explore, sometimes exhaustively, all the possibilities of a single premise’, Bordwell says, because of how they are ‘obliged to innovate within very tight limits’.15 The first Paranormal Activity film (Oren Peli, 2007), for instance, only features a single camera, which is hand-held during the day and placed on a tripod to run autonomously at night. The fixed-camera sequences, however, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

322

Steven Shaviro

feature numerous fast-forwards and jump cuts. These are made evident not only by abrupt changes in the image, but also by the ubiquitous time codes in the corner of the screen. Paranormal Activity 2 increases the number of cameras, allowing for the sequencing of multiple static views. In Paranormal Activity 3 (Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, 2011) – a prequel set in 1988, and whose technology is therefore limited to VHS cameras – the protagonist sets up one of these cameras on a chassis taken from an oscillating fan. The camera slowly and repeatedly pans between the living room and kitchen. It continually follows the same back-and-forth rhythm, regardless of what is happening in either of these rooms. The avant-garde feel (as noted by Rombes) of many sequences in the Paranormal Activity movies is thus a consequence of the fact that the filmmakers respect the severely constrained formal limits imposed by their protagonists’ equipment. They only give us a limited number of scenes, shots and set-ups, and they often switch among the various fixed views in a regular pattern. But we could just as accurately say that these movies have an archaic feel, rather than an avant-garde one. For instance, as Bordwell notes: [T]he distant framing of the surveillance shots revives classic staging techniques in a cinema that seems largely to have forgotten them. Instead of the barrage of close-ups and rapid shot changes we get with today’s intensified continuity style, we get lengthy, static, often indiscernible images we have to scour for clues [. . .] For the most part, the static framings yield deep, dense compositions reminiscent of 1910s tableau cinema.16

It is almost as if the filmmakers, with their low budgets and limited means, were recapitulating the history of formal invention in early cinema. As the series progresses, they find ways, one by one, to reintroduce the strategies of cinematography and editing that were initially developed between 1895 and 1915. Thus in Paranormal Activity 4 (Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, 2012), we finally get – for the first time in the series – something like a shot/ reverse shot set-up. This is possible because the teenage girl in the household talks to her boyfriend via Skype. Of course, the two people talking are not in the same physical space, and their interchange is mediated through a laptop screen. Bordwell calls this ‘a sort of virtual shot/reverse-shot’;17 we might describe it as what Bolter and Grusin would call a remediation of the conventional set-up. In any case, the Paranormal Activity producers and filmmakers are not averse to using the illusory techniques of the continuity system. It is simply a matter of finding the right ways to sneak them in. As Bordwell notes, the filmmakers sometimes cheat by ‘using sound bridges to present the illusion of continuous time’ over discontinuous shots.18 In contrast to avant-garde and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Glitch Dimension

323

high-modernist works, the Paranormal Activity movies are not really formally rigorous. They are opportunistic, rather than programmatic. They are not geared towards critical reflection. They simply exploit the affordances given by the new digital technologies, and reproduce the ways that these technologies are embedded within everyday life. The Paranormal Activity movies are simply indifferent towards structures like the continuity system, rather than seeking self-consciously to disrupt them.19 The most striking effects produced by the Paranormal Activity movies are therefore directly the result of their underlying commercial imperatives, as well as of the imperatives built in to the equipment that they use. These imperatives should be distinguished from the ones that characterise artistic and philosophical metacritiques (like avant-garde practices on the one hand, and Frankfurt School reflections on the other). If the Paranormal Activity films are radical – and I am trying to suggest that they are – this is because they are so urgently compelled, both by the pressures of commercial distribution and exhibition, and by the technical features of digital recording devices, to be (as Lenin put it) ‘as radical as reality itself’. As Shane Denson argues, following on from media theorists like Vivian Sobchack and Mark Hansen, the most recent (twenty-first-century) digital devices display a ‘post-perceptual sensibility of the video camera that distinguishes it from the cinema camera’.20 In such a post-perceptual mode, immediate and hypermediated at once, I cannot ‘identify’ with the camera as I am generally solicited to do in more traditional forms of cinema.21 Instead, these movies present us with a sensibility that might well be described as ‘paranormal’, because it is ‘completely discorrelated from human perception’, even though it remains ‘very much involved in the temporal and affective vicissitudes of our daily lives through the many cameras and screens surrounding us and involved in every aspect of the progressively indistinct realms of our work and play’.22 Leyda notes, along similar lines, that the view from fixed cameras in the Paranormal Activity series is entirely ‘unlike conventional horror cinema’s use of point of view [by] filming a sequence from the killer’s perspective observing the unsuspecting victim’. For the discorrelated digital camera ‘does not represent any human point of view’ at all. Instead of standing in for the POV of the killer – as was commonly done with first-person shots in 1980s slasher films – the fixed surveillance camera remains entirely impassive.23 In other words, these cameras do not lead us to identify, even ambivalently, with the demon, so much as they themselves, as Rombes puts it, ‘are agents of possession, literally: they possess those who happen into their gaze’.24 By possessing us, in a monstrous or demonic sense, these cameras thereby dispossess us, separating us from our powers of acting or even perceiving. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

324

Steven Shaviro

This effect of dispossession and disidentification is further heightened by the way that the Paranormal Activity cameras – both handheld and fixed – often feature special, technologically advanced modes of seeing, like night vision, that allow them to register things that are invisible to the naked human eye. Rather than just being prosthetic extensions of human perception, the video devices in the Paranormal Activity movies push beyond the limits of such perception altogether. On all fronts, they work to record presences that we do not and cannot perceive directly: whether because we are not there, because we are asleep when they manifest themselves, because we lack certain sensory modalities, or because the subtlety of the physical disturbances being recorded evades our immediate direct notice. The demonic forces in the Paranormal Activity movies are beyond our ken, we might say, because they have no particular points of view of their own: no angles of vision with which we might identify. There’s nothing for us to model, imagine or empathise with. The demon is diffuse, nowhere and everywhere at once. In registering its actions, Leyda says, the fixed camera ‘produces an uncanny sense of helplessness [. . .] An almost sadistic tone emanates from this kind of enforced and hobbled surveillance’.25 The cameras watch over us in much the same way that Amazon or Google or the NSA do, accumulating data on every last one of our actions, no matter how trivial or minute. Leyda therefore suggests that we may regard the demons in these movies as ‘digital forms’ that ‘are only possible in an increasingly data-driven, disembodied, financialized world’.26 A demon is something like computer code; more specifically, like one’s credit rating and other abstract financial records. It is a formal pattern, a ripple of energy, an ordering of data – but not a discrete material entity. It is dedicated to, or targeted at, you in particular; but it is not anything you can claim as your own, or incorporate as part of yourself. It causes trouble by instantiating itself in a specific situation and place; but it cannot be identified with, and cannot be pinned down to, the physical medium in and through which it acts. The demons, together with the cameras that relay their activity, might be said to constitute a new sort of post-cinematic – and post-phenomenological – apparatus. The Paranormal Activity movies exemplify, and allegorise, what Mark Hansen calls twenty-first-century media: ‘networks of media technologies that operate predominantly, if not almost entirely, outside the scope of human modes of awareness (consciousness, attention, sense perception, etc.)’. According to Hansen, these media ‘broker human access to a domain of sensibility’ that profoundly influences and affects us, but that we cannot grasp directly on our own account.27 In other words, the demon domain in the Paranormal Activity films condenses and figures what Hansen more generally calls the domain of worldly Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Glitch Dimension

325

sensibility: ‘the general sensibility of the world prior to and as a condition for impacting human experience’.28 This domain constrains, influences and inflects our subjective experience, without ever being directly available to that experience. Its causal power is subliminal, and all the more effective for that. According to Hansen, twenty-first-century media allow us, for the very first time, to trace the workings of these shadowy forces that otherwise act entirely outside our awareness. But such access still remains indirect and retrospective. The devices used by the protagonists in the Paranormal Activity movies can only show us what the demon has already done; we find out by playing back the video. However, Hansen adds a second dimension to his account: the same technologies that apprise us of these indirect effects also amplify them. The apparatus ‘adds to this domain of sensibility’, Hansen says, in the very process of recording it. ‘Revelation and intensification’ go together.29 This is why – as the male protagonists of the Paranormal Activity movies are continually being reminded – any attempt to capture the demon’s image on video, and more generally to ask it what it wants, only encourages it, makes it feel welcome, and amplifies its power. As a priest tells the terrified couple in Ghost Dimension, ‘demons feed on fear. The more attention you give, the stronger it grows, the bigger it grows’. Vampires and other such old-fashioned monsters are only able to haunt us in our own homes if we have invited them in. But today, we cannot use digital devices at all without having already agreed to all sorts of intrusions and violations of our privacy. This may be why, in the Paranormal Activity movies, the surveillance cameras and other such monitoring devices in fact call forth and strengthen the very forces that they are supposed to guard us against. All this brings me back, finally, to Ghost Dimension, the sixth and supposedly last entry in the Paranormal Activity series. This movie, like the previous ones, recapitulates the basic formula while offering incremental changes. For instance, at one point it offers us a perfect match cut. One shot, from outside the daughter’s room, shows the mother opening the door and going in; the next shot, from inside the room, picks up the action as she enters. In terms of conventional continuity editing, this is entirely banal; it is something that every Hollywood movie does many times. But in Ghost Dimension such a match is unique; and it only appears because it is made to coincide, as if by accident, with the switch from one fixed surveillance camera to another. The advertising for Ghost Dimension promises one significant innovation in the series: we are told that ‘for the first time, you will see the activity’ of the demon itself. This might seem to go against the grounding premise of the whole Paranormal Activity franchise, which is that the demon remains invisible, and is only manifested through its effects. But of course, nothing is ever Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

326

Steven Shaviro

really made explicit; our glimpses of the demon are few and far between. We only see it in passing, for a few moments at a time. And although it eventually takes on a human form and face, it remains vague and shapeless for most of the movie. The demon is still more a process than a fixed entity. We do not see what it actually is, so much as we see its ongoing activity of localising and materialising itself. The protagonists endeavour, with the help of a priest, to capture the demon and send it back to Hell. They succeed for a moment in trapping it under a sheet in humanoid form. But the banishing ceremony ultimately fails; the demon breaks free again, losing its fixed outline, as one of the characters literally pukes it out of her mouth, directly towards the nightvision camera. The visualisation of the demon is justified within the diegesis by the introduction of a special video device. In addition to deploying his 2013 state-ofthe-art cameras and computers, the main male character also uses an old VHS camera, which he finds in the basement of his house. Apparently it was left behind by the protagonists of Paranormal Activity 3 (set in 1988). It has an odd design: six picture tubes instead of the usual three, and ‘multiple focus rings’ as well. It turns out that this special camera is able to see the ‘ghost dimension’, and thus to pick up traces of the otherwise invisible demons. Once again – and even more radically than in the earlier movies in the series – vision is thus prosthetically extended beyond human limits.30 In movie theatres, the footage from this special camera is rendered in 3-D. As one reviewer complains, every time this device is used, ‘the image goes into 3-D as ectoplasmic entrails and other random items are hurled before the camera’.31 But Ghost Dimension is unique in the way that ‘the 3-D is diegetic’;32 the output of the special camera exists within the story-world of the film, and is viewed by the protagonists. Of course, this is a fabrication. Some 3-D movies, watchable with special glasses, were in fact released on VHS tape in the late 1980s. But they were not shot on VHS camcorders, which have never had 3-D capabilities; and they were only viewable through special glasses. For the first time in the Paranormal Activity series, then, the story turns upon the output from a technical device that does not exist in actuality, and whose powers are not available to ordinary consumers. But this still makes sense in terms of the technological allegory of the entire series. The special camera in Ghost Dimension hyperbolically enacts the process by which audiovisual recording and rendering devices permeate the world in which we live. Such devices both change the nature of that world, and give us new forms of mediated access to it: and this is all the more the case when it comes to Hansen’s subperceptual twenty-first-century media. Unsurprisingly, the 3-D effects are not replicated in the digital streaming and DVD versions of Ghost Dimension, which are the ones that most people Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Glitch Dimension

327

will eventually see.33 But even in these cases, the special camera is marked. Its footage is far grainier, and also a bit darker, than that from all the other devices. It is sufficiently low-resolution that you can see the scan lines; and it often displays the interference patterns typical of analogue videotape. In both theatrical and home-release versions, then, the special camera’s magical power to see beyond the humanly visible also entails a pronounced disruption of visual representation altogether: between the natural murkiness inherent with the [3-D] process, the attempt to recreate the sometimes smeary look of early-90s VHS technology, and the fact that all of these sequences take place at night with minimum lighting at best, there are long stretches of time when the on-screen results are almost literally unwatchable.34

In other words, the special camera’s feed consists of glitches and interruptions, more than it does of solidly rendered objects and deep, threedimensional space. The demon first manifests itself in the form of scattered, transparent, swirling patterns that seem to overlay, or permeate, the whole field of the image. The characters themselves wonder as to whether this is an actual ghostly manifestation, or ‘just a camera glitch’. Subsequently, the demon appears in the form of dark blotches that ooze across the frame, expanding slowly, bulging outwards, or extending tentacles through the space. It is only after this that the blotches take on a roughly human shape, although its outlines usually remain indistinct. Several times, the special camera shows us a fuzzy mass of darkness that lurks behind, and then passes through a human character: the victim does not see this mass, but feels its passage as a blow, or as a wrenching, horrific squeeze. In Ghost Dimension, distortion of the image – interference or ‘noise’ – is not confined only to the output of the special camera. Many details of the nighttime scenes are barely visible in high definition, and lost entirely if the movie is watched at a lower definition. (I confirmed this by watching both the ‘high definition’ and ‘standard definition’ digital streams of the movie.) In addition, the balance between the multiple output sources differs from that in the earlier entries of the series. Compared to Paranormal Activity 2 and 3, Ghost Dimension is much more ‘shaky-cam-laden’,35 and does not have anywhere near as many sequences switching among the output of multiple fixed cameras. This stylistic alteration is explicitly signalled at one point, when the special camera, fixed at the foot of the stairs, is knocked over by the demon. Murk flows towards the camera, engulfing the whole image; after a moment of violent shaking and banging, the murk disappears and the image is now askew. There are also more jump cuts, and more uses of sound bridges to cover over these cuts, in Ghost Dimension than in any earlier instalment. The images Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

328

Steven Shaviro

Figure 18.1  Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Gregory Plotkin, 2015)

Figure 18.2  Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Gregory Plotkin, 2015)

Figure 18.3  Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Gregory Plotkin, 2015)

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Glitch Dimension

Figure 18.4  Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Gregory Plotkin, 2015)

Figure 18.5  Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Gregory Plotkin, 2015)

Figure 18.6  Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Gregory Plotkin, 2015)

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

329

330

Steven Shaviro

are darker and shakier as well, and more prone to be disrupted by static. At times, it becomes hard to tell just where the moving, hand-held camera is located. In addition, what I have metaphorically called ‘noise’ in the video image is often accompanied by (literal) noises on the soundtrack, like low electronic rumbles, that are hard to identify: we cannot even answer the question as to whether these sounds are diegetic or non-diegetic. Throughout the Paranormal Activity series, the manifestations of demonic activity extend beyond the limits of what can be registered by natural (or ‘normal’) perception. Such manifestations can only be detected by nonhuman (or indeed, superhuman) audiovisual devices. But in Ghost Dimenson, there is something new. It is no longer just a matter of prosthetically extending the range of our senses, in order to capture images and sounds that subsist beneath, or stretch beyond, the threshold of our unaided senses. Rather, paranormal forces are now negatively registered by the movie’s audiovisual devices. That is to say, they are evident as failures or breakdowns of the image (and of sound as well). Even the special camera does not capture images and construct representations of the demon, so much as it finds its images and representations disrupted and distorted by the activities of the demon. In the digital era, film and video makers often deliberately include glitches, and artifices of the production process, within the final product. Paradoxically, this self-conscious acknowledgement that the images are constructed becomes a way of signalling the supposed ‘authenticity’ of the work. For instance, think of all the films that digitally incorporate lens flare, in order to (falsely) suggest that the scene was really recorded by a real camera. In a similar way, as we have seen, the Paranormal Activity movies connote their ostensible realness by using – often in ostentatiously unprofessional ways – devices that are present within the diegesis. But Ghost Dimension goes even further than this. Instead of using occasional glitches to authenticate the medium, it pushes glitches to the point of a breakdown and incapacity of the medium. Where the previous Paranormal Activity movies seem to emulate late-­ modernist self-reflexivity and minimalism, then, Ghost Dimension rather displays an affinity with the more recent experimental trends of glitch art and machine art (or with the so-called ‘new aesthetic’, which involves collecting and displaying ‘the failures of machine processing, and failures of machine displays built for human vision’36). If the earlier films in the series were about the real phantoms that are generated by surveillance and self-surveillance technologies, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is correspondingly about the real phantoms that are generated by the intrinsic limitations and inevitable breakdowns of these technologies. In both cases, of course, the Paranormal Activity movies seek to exploit the very tendencies that experimental Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



The Glitch Dimension

331

works rather seek to elucidate and critique. However, as I have been suggesting all along, the explicit display of our entanglement with new (and often oppressive) technologies may well offer us more comprehension, and more opportunities for change, than critical reflection on these technologies does. In any case, Ghost Dimension reorients the Paranormal Activity series, offering us something that was not present in the earlier instalments. For the film suggests that, contrary to what we are often led to believe, the data technologies that encompass and circumscribe our lives today are not ubiquitous, and not flawless. We are affected (and oppressed) as much by their glitches, gaps and limitations as we are by their successful operations. Indeed, the film suggests that such media malfunctions are not a bug, but a feature. The ghost or glitch dimension surrounds us and engulfs us, whether or not we are made aware of its intimate more-than-presence. Notes All URLs referenced accessed 29 January 2017, except where noted. 1. Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 168. 2. Julia Leyda, ‘Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as Recessionary Post-Cinematic Allegory’, Jump Cut, 56 (Winter 2014–15), https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ jc56.2014-2015/LeydaParanormalActivity/text.html. 3. The movies provide variations on a theme. The couple in the first Paranormal Activity movie (2007), for instance, do not have children. The fifth movie in the series Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Christopher B. Landon, 2014) – described as a spin-off, rather than a sequel – has Latino characters instead of whites who live in apartments rather than single-family homes. But the generic characteristics remain mostly the same throughout the series. 4. Janani Subramanian, ‘Fairly Normal Activity: Horror and the Static Camera’, Flow (December 2010), http://flowtv.org/2010/12/fairly-normal-activity/. 5. Paranormal Activity 3 is a prequel that takes place in 1988; it therefore features analogue VHS cameras and videotape, instead of digital devices. VHS tapes from this earlier episode also play a crucial role in The Ghost Dimension; the protagonist discovers them in his house, and watches them on an old VHS player. He even points out how this is an anachronism, by remarking that his eight-yearold daughter cannot possibly have any idea of what VHS is. The technological self-reflexivity of the Paranormal Activity movies is not just a matter, therefore, of digital versus analogue; the earlier historical shift from the mechanical technology of film to the electronic technology of (even analogue) videotape also needs to be taken into account. I discuss these distinct moments of transformation in ‘Splitting the Atom: Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision’, in Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (eds) Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

332

Steven Shaviro

6. Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, p. 179. 7. Leyda, ‘Demon Debt’. 8. André Bazin, What is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: caboose, 2009), p. 101. 9. Nicholas Rombes, ‘Six Asides on Paranormal Activity 2’, Filmmaker Magazine (10 May 2011), http://filmmakermagazine.com/23766-six-asides-on-paranormalactivity-2. 10. Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, and Steven Shaviro, ‘The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2’, in Denson and Leyda (eds), Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016), p. 842. 11. It is worth noting that Paramount distributed Ghost Dimension under very different conditions from those of the earlier movies in the series. For Ghost Dimension, Paramount offered cinema chains a portion of the revenue from digital streaming, in return for allowing this streaming to occur only a few weeks after the movie’s theatrical run, instead of the usual six months. Several major cinema chains refused the deal; as a result, the movie opened on far fewer screens than its predecessors. While its opening-weekend earnings per screen were high, it therefore earned far less on its opening weekend than any of the earlier films in the series. At this writing, it still remains to be seen whether Paramount will recoup the lost revenue from digital rentals and sales (Todd Cunningham, ‘Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension Suffers Worst Opening in Series History – Blame VOD’, The Wrap (25 October 2015), https://www.thewrap.com/paranormal-activityghost-dimension-has-worst-opening-in-series-history-blame-vod/). If nothing else, this shows how high-speed internet streaming is changing the conditions under which movies become available, and arguably also changing the movies themselves. Ghost Dimension was released in cinemas in 3-D, but this is not available when the movie is streamed at home. 12. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 5 and passim. 13. David Bordwell, ‘Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film’, Film Quarterly 55.3 (Spring 2002), pp. 16–28. 14. Steven Shaviro, ‘Post-Continuity: full text of my talk’ (26 March, 2012), http:// www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1034. 15. David Bordwell, ‘Return to Paranormalcy’ (13 November 2012), http://www. davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/11/13/return-to-paranormalcy/. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. ‘It is not that continuity rules are always being violated or ignored; nor are the films made in their absence simply chaotic. Rather, we are in a “post-continuity” situation when continuity has ceased to be important – or at least has ceased to be as important as it used to be.’ Shaviro, ‘Post-Continuity’. 20. Shane Denson, ‘Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

The Glitch Dimension

333

Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect’, in Denson and Leyda (eds), Post-Cinema, p. 202. The classic discussion of ‘identification with the camera’ is of course that by Christian Metz; see The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 49–51. Part of my larger argument here is that the forms of identification that organised classical and modernist cinema are no longer active in the same way in post-cinematic media. Denson, ‘Crazy Cameras’. Leyda, ‘Demon Debt’. Rombes in Grisham et al., ‘The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2’, p. 850. Leyda, ‘Demon Debt’. Ibid. Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., pp. 5–6. The creation of a technology that makes it possible to see invisible, monstrous dimensions whose space overlies our own is a staple of the horror genre. The most famous example is H. P. Lovecraft’s story ‘From Beyond’ (1920), later made into a film (1986). But the concept already appears in Lovecraft’s likely inspiration, Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894). Peter Sobczynski, ‘Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension’, review, Roger Ebert.Com (23 October 2015), http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/paranormal-activity-the-ghost-dimension-2015. Jason Shawhan, ‘Why Is It So Hard to See Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension?’, Nashville Scene (23 October 2015), http://www.nashvillescene.com/ countrylife / archives / 2015 / 10 / 23 / why - is - it - so - hard - to - see - paranormalactivity-the-ghost-dimension. The movie is available in 3-D on Blu-ray, for a price well above the normal Blu-ray edition. Equipment for home 3-D viewing, too expensive and cumbersome to be widely adopted, has remained a niche market. In a recent development, all major TV manufacturers have opted not to continue with the production of 3-D-capable sets. Sobczynski, ‘Paranormal Activity’. Shawhan, ‘Why Is It So Hard to See Paranormal Activity?’. Bruce Sterling, ‘An Essay on the New Aesthetic’, Wired (2 April 2012), http:// www.wired.com/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

CHAPTER 19

Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image Allan Cameron Digital forms, anchored by the discrete logic of numerical codes, open nonetheless into uncertainty. One of digital media’s most distinctive forms of irresolution involves the ‘glitch’. Although the term ‘glitch’ has analogue origins (referring originally to a spike in electrical signal), it has come to be associated with digital errors and their resulting effects.1 In digital video, its characteristic features include the appearance of hard pixelated edges, the abrupt flickering of pixels as underlying values shift, and a steep divergence in colour values within the frame (glitched images can often be strikingly garish). Exploring the deliberate ‘glitching’ of digital moving images across a range of artistic contexts, I will demonstrate how such practices produce an ambiguous disfiguring of the image. The effect of the glitch is not simply to produce distortion or noise (resembling equivalent effects in analogue media), but to generate artefacts that are specifically to do with the image’s basis in binary code. In this way, glitch aesthetics can offer a visual manifestation of algorithmic processes that would otherwise remain invisible. Focusing specifically on the trope of glitched faces, I will suggest that such images provide opportunities for ‘reading’ the digital. Indeed, representations of the glitched face display a peculiar dynamic of unmasking and effacement that also functions as a metonym for glitch aesthetics itself: that is, the glitch seems at once to render the image transparent (providing a glimpse of its material underpinnings and structural logic) and opaque (obscuring the profilmic object of vision).2 Glitched faces thus raise questions of both structure and interpretation: what is the fundamental make-up of the digital image/face, and what concepts does it summon up? As Goriunova and Shulgin point out, ‘Artifacts that look like glitches do not always result from error’.3 Indeed, the works I will be discussing all involve the deliberate production of glitch effects. Glitch aesthetics became prominent in left-field electronic music during the mid to late 1990s (including artists such as Alva Noto, Pole and Oval – famously, Oval’s creative process involved marking and scratching compact disks, then basing compositions around the resulting clicks, whirrs and stutters). Since the turn of the millennium the phenomenon has migrated to visual art and video. In video Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Facing the Glitch

335

art, one of the most common techniques for producing glitch effects exploits the workings of video compression. In compressed video files, not every frame is recorded in its entirety. Instead, only periodic keyframes contain complete image data. The colour values of pixels in the intervening frames are determined in relation to their difference from the previous keyframe. By tinkering with digital code in order to remove selected keyframes, glitch artists produce striking differential effects, in which images break apart and bleed into each other. Known as ‘datamoshing’, this practice is the dominant mode of video glitching, and it is used in the examples I will address in the later parts of the essay. In datamoshed works, time seems to stall, streak or speed ahead in unpredictable ways. At the same time, the effect on physical forms is intensely ambiguous, causing bodies and faces to hover between the visceral and the abstract. The face in particular becomes a measure of the image’s deformation, raising questions of whether and how to ‘read’ the image, both for forms and for meanings. The Digital Face and its Con-texts: From Glitch Art to Gifs Why concentrate on the face, though? It is certainly not the only, or even the primary, focus of visually-based glitch art. Indeed, any images can function as raw material for this kind of work. Contemporary glitch art often involves a certain facelessness: there is a preponderance of stark, blocky patterns, and in many cases an avoidance of the figurative. For example, Tim Barker remarks that Glitch, Ant Scott’s series of still images, ‘consists of brightly colored geometric forms, assembled in rhythmic compositions, that on the surface appear to be in the mold of Frank Stella’s linear works or Bridget Riley’s Op Art’.4 Yet glitch artists and theorists have also highlighted significant links between the face and the digital image. First of all, the face is a peerless index of visual transformations. In her ‘Vernacular of File Formats’, Rosa Menkman demonstrates the distinctive effects produced by glitching different types of digital image, using a photograph of her own face as the raw material: in some cases, it is overlaid by regular and repeating patterns, whereas in others the entire visage is warped out of shape.5 Here, the face as a recognisable figure serves as a particularly sensitive measure of the image’s deformation. The artist’s face becomes a medium for registering the strikingly different results produced by tinkering with various codecs.6 Secondly, there are underlying parallels between the face and the digital image that have to do with the relationship between whole and part. As the sociologist Georg Simmel argued, the face is defined by its ‘inner unity’: a change to one of its elements ‘immediately modifies its entire character and expression’.7 As a result, ‘there is no other part of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

336

Allan Cameron

body whose wholeness can as easily be destroyed by the disfigurement of one of its parts’.8 As Menkman’s typology of digital errors demonstrates, this is also true of the digital image: tinkering with small elements of code produces drastic and fundamental alterations to the whole. Accordingly, Menkman has elsewhere suggested that ‘Glitch artists make use of the accident to “disfigure” flow, image and information’.9 Viewed in terms of this fundamental ‘disfiguration’, the glitched face can be viewed as a paradigmatic instance of the digital image. Of course, these digital transformations also call to mind earlier manifestations of the face, from the jagged or composite faces of cubism and surrealism to the flickering and stuttering faces of experimental film and video art.10 Yet the glitch reveals qualities that are quite specific to the digital image, in particular a mode of abstraction that is indexed to the invisible yet crucial function of underlying codes.11 Rather than simply disordering the face, these glitch works highlight another type of order underpinning the image – they show, in other words, that the structure of the digital image is not the structure of the face. Videos by Rosa Menkman and Nick Briz demonstrate the encounter between these two structures. In Menkman’s Dark Waters (2012), a face is gradually dissolved by glitch effects, appearing to turn to liquid. Dear Mister Compression (Menkman, 2011) features an i­ndistinct,

Figure 19.1  Dear Mister Compression, Rosa Menkman (2011). Courtesy of the artist.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Facing the Glitch

337

shifting figure facing us, while messages are typed out on the screen, in a situation that evokes the communicative frame of a video chat interface. Here, the communicative capacity of the face, interface and typeface are all compromised by visual errors. Nick Briz’s Binary Quotes (2010) also mimics Skype’s face-to-face dynamic. Here, the filmmaker reads out the binary code underwriting the video itself, as his voice and face are distorted and occluded by digital artefacts. These videos highlight the glitch’s capacity to strip the face of its distinctive features, emphasising non-human agency and turning signification into signal. In the process, they reveal latent forms of abstraction underlying the digital image. However, abstraction belongs not only to the digital image but also to the face itself. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the ‘social production of face’,12 through which signification and subjectification are united, is achieved via the ‘abstract machine of faciality’.13 The abstract machine brings together projection and concealment, resembling a white wall with black holes. It fixes identity, investing the head and the body with meaning: ‘The face is produced [. . .] when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face’.14 The glitched face therefore represents an encounter between two modes of abstraction: the undercoding of the digital image and the overcoding of the face. Menkman and Briz’s works would thus seem to aim at a critical defacing of the image, a revelation of and resistance to abstraction that recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s wishes for the face: ‘The face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective’.15 In both Dear Mister Compression and Binary Quotes, the disruptive encounter between facial and digital abstractions is accompanied by an emphasis on text: in the first example, typed messages appear on the screen, broken and obscured by the same glitching process that affects the face; in the second, Briz dictates aloud the video’s own binary code before both his face and voice are muffled by digital noise. Each one thus reminds us that form is written into the images. In other words, these works gesture towards the images’ basis in digital code, but also towards the fact that images in digital contexts rarely exist independently of text: these digital faces occupy environments bounded by multiple frames and traversed by textual trails. They can therefore be counterposed productively with theorisations of the cinematic face, which have often grappled with the question of text. For early film theorist Béla Balázs, cinema heralded a movement away from a print-dominated era, which had ‘gradually rendered the human face illegible’.16 Under film’s benign influence, argued Balázs, ‘The whole of mankind is now busy relearning the long-forgotten language of gestures and facial expressions’.17 Furthermore, Jacques Aumont writes of the gradual emergence in early cinema of what he calls the ‘ordinary Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

338

Allan Cameron

face’, a concept of the face that operated ‘[b]y refusing to read in order to be better able to see’.18 This movement beyond simple legibility is also enabled by the face’s capacity to express different emotions simultaneously: ‘the face in film can say several things at a time because, playing in space and in time, it is not condemned to the linearity of writing’.19 By contrast, the glitched faces in Menkman’s and Briz’s works suggest that text has returned with a vengeance, and in a very literal way, but precisely at the point where the face itself becomes unreadable. These faces are underwritten by the operations of digital code and the scanning process of the electronic image, and overwritten by textual signifers that refer reflexively to their material form. Tampering with the image’s textual base means tampering with the coherence of the face. Yet despite the strong emphasis on abstraction in these pieces, there is another strand within glitch culture which aims at a more visceral treatment of the digital image. As I will discuss in the following sections, certain films and video works seize upon the glitch as a way of suggesting intensely physical relationships among faces, bodies and environments. Indeed, many discussions of glitch aesthetics evoke, deliberately or not, an oscillation between abstraction and fleshly materiality. Manon and Temkin for example, describe the glitch aesthetic as ‘the blocky, layered, decomposed underside of digital transcoding’,20 while Rosa Menkman writes that the removal of keyframes in datamoshed videos produces ‘the visualisation of the indexed movement of macroblocks, smearing over the surface of an old keyframe’.21 Such descriptions imply the potential for glitch aesthetics to evoke disgust – an affect that manifests very strongly in the examples I will go on to discuss later in the essay. Writing on the place of error in digital culture, Mark Nunes has suggested that glitches are in themselves abject. The network society, according to Nunes, functions according to ‘a control logic in which everything that circulates communicates [. . .] or is cast aside as abject’.22 For Nunes, glitch culture’s ‘asignifying poetics of noise, marked by these moments of errant information, simultaneously refuses and exceeds the cybernetic imperative to communicate’.23 Although Nunes does not elaborate on the concept of abjection, he is clearly drawing on Julia Kristeva’s argument that it is caused by that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’.24 The abject is ‘radically excluded’ in order to preserve the autonomy of the subject, but also ‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’.25 That is to say, abjection involves both the assertion and the crisis of identity. As Eugenie Brinkema puts it, abjection is characterised by its ‘undoing of any attempt to render it fully other to the subject’.26 Kristeva’s account emphasises the processual element of abjection – the ‘spasms and vomiting that protect Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Facing the Glitch

339

me’ from a loathed object,27 while also leading towards a becoming in which ‘I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit’.28 This alwaysincomplete process of casting out the extraneous, the a-signifying, the nonidentical is strongly evoked by the characteristic forms of glitch aesthetics. Although this is demonstrated by the works I have already discussed, it takes on a much more obvious manifestation in popular forms of datamoshing. As I noted earlier, datamoshing involves the creation of differential effects through the removal of video keyframes, so that images seem to break through or fold into one another. The result is a kind of peristaltic convulsion of the image, which erupts into new forms even as scraps of prior forms refuse to disappear. Using this process, numerous amateur gifs (short video loops) have been created from sampled sequences of films, television shows and commercials, showing performers’ faces grossly distorted by datamoshing, breaking down into comical and outlandish expressions. These works arguably function as glitch culture’s own ‘abject’, since glitch artists have often reacted negatively to the migration of glitch effects into more popular forms (music videos in particular).29 In any case, whether the result of accident or design, these examples of ‘digital gurning’ invite us to take delight in the extraordinary expressions created as eyes drift sideways, mouths turn into quivering lines, necks telescope upwards and chins tip into foreheads. The abstraction of the digital is visible here, in the flickering blocks of pixels and sudden appearance of straight lines, but these are also manifestly abject images, which show faces mutating into grotesque forms. As such, their effect is not only to glitch the face but also, by asking us to read for expressions, to ‘face’ the glitch, to give the glitch a face.30 This effect is also deployed, in a more sophisticated and ambivalent fashion, in the video works to which I will now turn. In the following sections, I will discuss three works that renovate the horror genre for the digital moment, all of which play upon digital images caught between abstraction and abjection. Abstract–Abject Oscillations: Untitled (Silver) and Long Live the New Flesh Some of the most arresting examples of glitching faces are to be found in videos where the face is not necessarily the primary focus, but appears instead as a fleeting, evanescent element. In such videos, the image of the glitched digital face brings together a particularly intense confrontation between abstraction and embodiment. In this section, I will focus on two such videos: Untitled (Silver) by Takeshi Murata (2006), and Long Live the New Flesh by Nicolas Provost (2009). The first thing to be said about these videos is that they revolve around bodies rather than faces, or rather, bodies melting Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

340

Allan Cameron

into their immediate environments, through movements that can be abrupt or fluid, violent or graceful. Each video is a remix work, which takes extracts from popular feature films and subjects them to glitching processes. This emphasis on the body is further underlined by the source texts, since they are all body-oriented horror films. Murata’s Untitled (Silver) recycles material from Mario Bava’s horror classic Mask of Satan (aka Black Sunday, 1960), while Provost’s Long Live the New Flesh revists sequences from a selection of well-known examples, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) and American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000). Playing upon the physical shocks and deformations that affect the characters in these horror films, these remix works generate their own set of supplementary transformations. In each case, there is a blurring of the boundaries that separate bodies from their environments. The distinction between figure and ground collapses, while the boundaries between the profilmic and the medial are also blurred: objects in the frame become surface artefacts; surface artefacts become objects in the frame. These videos thus provide the digital counterpart to Bill Morrison’s found-film masterpiece Decasia (2002), in which the deterioration of celluloid stock produces patterns that often seem, in their density and volume, to inhabit the very space of representation. Similarly, in each of these videos, the process that turns filmed objects into abstract patterns also, conversely, produces a distinctly embodied, dimensional effect.31 Bodies seem constantly to be breaking down, decomposing, turning to liquid. The term ‘pixel bleed’, sometimes applied to glitch visuals, offers an appropriately visceral evocation.32 Particularly in Long Live the New Flesh, which features scenes of bodily mutation as well as blood pouring from an elevator (borrowed, of course, from The Shining), it appears that Provost is making media bleed too. At the same time, the smearing of bodies and colours in Long Live the New Flesh produces a distinctly faecal aesthetic. Here, abstraction produces not only crisp detachment but also has the potential to evoke disgust. These transformations of the digital image indicate not simply dematerialisation (or a sense that physical objects have dissolved into tidy abstractions) but also a logic of extrusion and overlap, through which everything within the frame appears to be made of the same stuff. Where, then, does the face figure amongst all of this roiling, turbid materiality? In Murata’s Silver, the face is mutated, anonymised and folded in on itself. Barbara Steele (who plays both the Gothic heroine and undead witch in the sampled film, Mario Bava’s Mask of Satan) is briefly recognisable, but for the most part she is woven into the shifting abstract movement of the pixels. The face thus becomes a problem involving pattern recognition. We are conNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Facing the Glitch

341

Figure 19.2  Untitled (Silver), Takeshi Murata (2006). Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. http://www.eai.org

stantly on the lookout for both bodies and faces within the swirling trails of pixels. In particular, a tantalising sequence towards the beginning of the video lingers on the face of Barbara Steele. Steele is rendered as a ghostly presence which refuses to take definitive shape. Her face shifts between stillness and movement. Trying to track the eyes, I lose sight as they streak upwards, and am surprised to see them reappear once again lower in the frame. The face melts into the body and into the background, and yet glimpses of facial detail motivate the ongoing search for a pattern. A similar effect is visible in Long Live the New Flesh. The video’s unsettling pixel shifts, rendering physical forms as raw media material, seem most pronounced when applied to the face (or, rather, they register as a new effect, as opposed to simply embellishing the film’s images of visceral embodiment). In a sequence excerpted from Videodrome, James Woods’s mouth stretches across his face and his neck telescopes backwards, layering green matter across his nose and cheek. Later, his eyes turn to streaks of matter. These sometimes fleeting images are fascinating, first of all, because they suspend the face between stillness and movement, or, rather, between two types of movement (the original movement of the filmed face, and the uncanny movement of the glitch). Movement is therefore both internal and external to the face itself. Secondly, and more importantly, these images suspend the face between abstraction and embodiment. As an abstraction, these faces demonstrate the non-anthropomorphic tendency of the glitch. Although the effects in these films are produced deliberately, they evoke the glitch’s original basis in error and randomness, and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

342

Allan Cameron

hence its lack of expressivity. The glitch always gestures towards noise and non-signification, and these pixelated faces accordingly seem to slip towards a kind of abstraction that moves beyond human language and visual grammar. Yet in each of these videos, the face tends not only in the direction of abstraction but also embodiment. Indeed, we could go further than that and suggest that we are presented with ‘enbodied’ faces – faces that are folded into bodies, but which also provide the visual ground from which bodies emerge. In this respect, there are parallels with the distorted and malformed faces of Francis Bacon’s paintings. Gilles Deleuze argues that Bacon ‘pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face’.33 Yet Deleuze also argues that Bacon’s work aims not at ‘the transformation of form’, which ‘can be abstract or dynamic’, but instead at ‘deformation’, which ‘is always bodily, and it is static, it happens at one place; it subordinates movement to force, but it also subordinates the abstract to the Figure’.34 By contrast, in the works I have been discussing, the face cannot remain still: it moves beyond deformation into abstract transformation and then shifts back again, smearing and dissolving across bodies and spaces before returning as emergent form. As Laura Marks writes in her analysis of Silver, the result is ‘morphing without morphology’:35 while the initial resemblance is to digital morphing, the ‘transformations keep going’.36 We thus move from disfiguration into defiguration, before repeating the process. These oscillations between abstraction and embodiment produce, in turn, an ambiguous vantage on the abject. For Deleuze, in Bacon’s paintings ‘Abjection becomes splendor, the horror of life becomes a very pure and very intense life’.37 By contrast, the constantly transforming faces and bodies in Murata’s and Provost’s works are undecidable, moving both towards and away from abjection: they encourage us to read the abject both forwards and backwards.38 Indeed, the datamoshed images in these works are arguably performances of abjection par excellence, since they continuously generate and retain their own waste (in the form of errant pixels). These images are formed by an incessant casting-out of digital difference that simultaneously gives them form, a peristaltic movement that resembles the movement of abjection. This sense is amplified strongly in both Silver and Long Live the New Flesh, as they gesture towards abject modes of embodiment by actively blurring the boundaries between the living and the dead, the clean and the dirty, the proper self and its excrescences. This invocation of the abject is suggested in particular by their recycling of elements from horror films. Bava’s Mask of Satan, the source material for Untitled (Silver), revolves around abject faciality. At the beginning of the film, the accused witch Asa, played by Barbara Steele, is subjected to a horrendous torture: a mask, filled with large spikes, is hammered into her face. When this character later returns Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Facing the Glitch

343

from the dead, her face bears the marks of these spikes. A second face has thus been imposed, in a horrific realisation of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘abstract machine’, with its system of white wall and black holes.39 Indeed, this example seems fully to justify Deleuze and Guattari’s declaration that ‘the face is a horror story’.40 This particular mode of abstraction complements, rather than contradicts, Kristeva’s framing of the abject: both the imposition of the abstract machine and the casting out of the abject aim to secure identity, and both are grounded in horror. The abject implications of the white wall/black hole are explored in one of Mask of Satan’s most memorable sequences, as a drop of blood from a foolish nobleman’s wounded finger falls into one of Asa’s facial cavities, reviving her. As she returns to life, her moist eyeballs are pushed up from inside the skull, finding their way back into the sockets. Yet this is not Barbara Steele’s only face in the film: she also plays the innocent heroine Katia, from whom Asa wishes to extract blood in order to complete her revivification. Steele’s face therefore hovers between two registers, embodying both luminous beauty and grotesque threat. In Silver, Murata recycles a sequence which features Katia playing the piano and wandering slowly around the house. There is nothing grotesque or horrific about the source sequence, and Murata makes no direct reference to the narrative context. Nonetheless, by retaining traces of the original work and by incorporating radical facial transformations, Silver evokes Mask of Satan’s oscillation between luminous and abject faces. Subjecting Steele’s countenance to ambiguous digital distortions, Murata leaves it suspended between identities. In Long Live the New Flesh, Nicolas Provost samples and repurposes the framing of abject faciality in Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which includes a facialised television that throbs and pulsates with sexual desire (and into which the protagonist eventually disappears). By blurring the boundaries between face, body and screen image, Provost creates an uncanny extrusion of Cronenberg’s own aesthetic project. Memorable moments of facial distortion in Long Live the New Flesh include: the ‘final girl’ in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre disfigured by the breakthrough image of a fiery oven, The Fly’s Seth Brundlefly regurgitating food as his countenance dissolves into that of his girlfriend, and the face of a panicked victim ‘erased’ by bodily gestures in American Psycho. Provost also creates disturbing new images from Kubrick’s The Shining by glitching the scene in which Shelley Duvall’s character cowers in a hotel bathroom as Jack Nicholson breaks down the door with an axe. At one memorable point, Nicholson’s pixelated grimace, thrust into the hole his character has hacked in the door, bursts out of Duvall’s face. For a brief moment, their mediated faces become coterminous, as her expression of abject terror aligns with his expression of abject savagery. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

344

Allan Cameron

Figure 19.3  Long Live the New Flesh, Nicolas Provost (2009). Image copyright Nicolas Provost, courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And yet this rendering-abject is not the endpoint for either of these works. For the cyclical movement from abstraction to enbodiment and back again suggests that the horror and violence of the source films is never to be taken at face value. Instead, the dissolution of Barbara Steele’s face in Untitled (Silver) has an otherworldly beauty and grace to it, as it is transformed into abstract swirls. Long Live the New Flesh seems much more directly engaged with the abject connotations of its source material, yet as its title (borrowed from a line in Videodrome) indicates, this video also offers a celebration of faces and bodies in the process of becoming media. In both films, the sound design supports this sense of an oscillation between abstract and visceral. Silver makes use of a composed soundtrack consisting of shimmering metallic tones which glide elegantly alongside the images but are also attended by a low bubbling sound suggesting the dissolution of physical forms. In Long Live the New Flesh, digital stutters and squelches support the film’s deliberate elision of the technical and the physical. Ultimately, these works can be viewed as an attempt to bring viewers face to face with digital materiality and its shaping of forms and relations. If digital errors, as Nunes asserts, are positioned as ‘abject’ in relation to the systemic operations they disrupt, then these works perhaps provide a visual index for this abjection, excavating the workings of digital code to produce a moment of uncanny recognition. And yet, as I have been trying to indicate by emphasising the oscillation between abstraction and embodiment in these videos, this moment of recognition involves not simply unmasking but also effacement. These remix videos operate in quite a different way from the works of Martin Arnold, the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Facing the Glitch

345

Austrian video artist who loops tiny segments of Hollywood films into stuttering rhythms. In Arnold’s videos, one always gets the sense that something hidden in the original work is being revealed. An innocent glance between characters, for example, repeated over and over again, becomes loaded with sexual meaning. In these glitch-based works, however, the unmasking of the digital face is accompanied by a follow-on movement of concealment or effacement. The cyclical movement between abstraction and enbodiment may serve to underline the digital provenance of the images, but it also overwrites and obscures them with their own materiality. Type-faces: Unmasking Abjection in Unfriended Whereas the previous two examples pull horror cinema out of its context, turning film images into digital artefacts, my next example takes the contemporary field of digital communication and multimedia interaction, and makes it into horror cinema. Unfriended (Leo Gabriadze, 2014) is a ‘foundfootage’ horror in which a group of high school friends, communicating via Skype, Facebook and instant messaging, find their conversation shadowed by an unidentified party. Attempts to get rid of the imposter prove futile, as the students discover that all available interfaces have been hijacked. Eventually, they begin to receive direct threats from this mysterious presence, and attempts to exit the discussion culminate in fatal acts of unwilled, self-directed violence for any erstwhile deserter. It is ultimately revealed that the figure ‘haunting’ their chat session is Laura Barns, a former student who committed suicide as a result of cyberbullying. The entire set of actions and interactions is displayed for us via the laptop screen of Blaire, one of the students. Her interlocutors appear in Skype windows, and also communicate with her via text-based messaging. The stakes are raised as the students are picked off one by one, and the truth regarding Laura’s public shaming and their complicity in it is revealed. Faces are absolutely central to the film’s formal logic, particularly given the fact that direct visual interactions between characters take place entirely via the square windows of the Skype interface. Towards the beginning of the film, Blaire and her boyfriend Mitch attempt to turn this interface towards another purpose, as he persuades her to bare her breasts for him. Before she can do so, however, they are interrupted by friends entering the conversation, necessitating a frantic scramble to put their faces back in the frame. In a story revolving around issues of shame, appearances and ethics – of face, in other words – the social context demands that each of the characters place their countenance in full view. At the same time, this tight framing of the characters’ faces produces a sense of confinement and unease, in accord Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

346

Allan Cameron

with the genre’s affective profile. Indeed, I would argue that faces are a key element of the production of horror in Unfriended. James Elkins, working within a broad and speculative frame, muses on whether ‘the face’ should be considered as a primal source of power and fear: ‘A face is a terrifying thing, perhaps the terrifying thing’.41 Here, he overstates the case, suggesting that the primary object of fear ‘is a face or has a face’, including the ‘usual horrormovie creatures’.42 Unfriended suggests something quite different, however: here, the victims are defined as vulnerable by the presence of their faces, while the mysterious presence actually lacks a face (and a voice) altogether. This presence (eventually revealed to be the vengeful spirit of Laura Barns) is instead represented by the generic, faceless Skype icon that stands in for the absence of a portrait image. All of the interactions with ‘Laura’ take place through text (via the Skype pseudonym ‘billie227’ as well as Laura’s still-active Facebook account). To have a face, in this context, is to be at a disadvantage. Unfriended makes ingenious use of its formal limitations, building tension in the interplay between audiovisual and textual interactions, as well as investing the media interface itself with a generalised sense of menace, in particular through the use of glitch effects. As Marc Olivier points out, the glitch has become a key signifier in contemporary ‘found-footage’ horror, working to evoke both the transparency of media ghosting and the opacity of technical materiality.43 In Unfriended, the glitch works similarly, acting both as a ghostly signifier of characters’ fates and flaws and as a technical artefact. It also signifies abjection, in ways that are tied to the moral failings and shame of the various characters. Early in the film, as one of the characters expresses his disgust for an absent member of the group, his own face is suddenly disordered by a datamoshing effect. As the film progresses, characters who are agitated, fearful or facing imminent death are subjected to the same effect. In each case, the face, trapped within the tight frame of the video interface, is smeared and disarranged before reconstituting itself. These disfigured images are linked, obliquely but unmistakeably, to the abject secret at the centre of the narrative: it is revealed, finally, that Laura’s suicide was in response to the posting of a YouTube video showing her passed out drunk, having soiled herself. The excremental connotations of datamoshing, hinted at in Murata’s and Provost’s works, are here made explicit: this abject image of soiling has been prefigured in Unfriended’s gallery of smeared faces. In the YouTube video, a final revelation is provided as the camera pans up from Laura’s supine body to reveal Blaire’s laughing face. Blaire, the film’s moral centre up until this point, is unmasked as one of Laura’s tormentors. From here, Blaire’s panicked face in the Skype window becomes increasingly glitchy as her own moment of reckoning looms. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Facing the Glitch

347

Figure 19.4  Unfriended, Leo Gabriadze (2014).

In this way, Unfriended not only co-opts the glitch but, more emphatically than any of the examples I’ve discussed, lends it meaning. The glitch serves to unmask these characters – to suggest that they should not be taken at face value, and also that they will be unable to escape the abject, even within the tightly defined windows they occupy. In this way, Unfriended might seem merely to have colonised the glitch, to have used it in the most conservative way possible by rendering it legible and giving it a ‘face’. However, I would argue that the film productively extends the work of glitch art by exploring how the digital image functions within the scaffolding of multiple frames and textual overlays. Once again, the abject emerges in relation to the abstract: in particular, via the symbolic operations of text (the code underpinning the images, but also the characters’ typed messages, which re-code and infiltrate the moving image). The characters in Unfriended are constantly typing, and their private messages to each other often give the lie to what they are expressing via the video interface. We are privy to all of Blaire’s typing, including messages that she deletes or revises in order to present herself in the best light (both to Laura and to her other friends). Text is also the vehicle for all of Laura’s faceless threats (which, in turn, are registered in the fearful expressions and facial glitches that plague the other characters). Text in Unfriended does not function as a ‘clean’ abstraction in relation to the image: rather, it too constitutes a glitched field. For example, when Blaire tries to archive Laura’s Facebook page (on the basis that its user is deceased), the fields fill up with random text: ‘I GOT HER I GOT HER I GOT HER’. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

348

Allan Cameron

Added to this, the contractions and errors of text-speak distort linguistic expression, parallelling the glitching of the image (Unfriended thus recalls the image–text relations of Menkman’s and Briz’s videos). The glitching of both code and language encourages consideration of the parallels: we can view glitch itself as a form of visual overwriting that smears the image with abject forms even as it indexes the underwriting of digital code. These screen-faces are thus opened into abjection by being rendered as type-faces: the image is undone by text. Accordingly, the YouTube video exposing Laura Barns’s abject state is overlaid with the words ‘Leaky Laura’, a textual intervention that insists on an abject reading of the images. This resonates with the leakiness of the interface’s various frames, from which all of the characters’ secrets spill forth and into which Laura herself can intrude at will. Importantly, it also recalls the ‘leakiness’ of the glitch itself, which is captured by Manon and Temkin’s characterisation (borrowed from tech blogger Joel Spolsky) of the abstractions underpinning digital code ‘as “leaky”’.44 Viewed from this perspective, the glitch is an abstraction that leaks. Unfriended thus reflects on the significance of glitch as a relationship between image and text. Its framing of the digital image parallels Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of video’s singular logic of ‘incrustation’: ‘Not only the incrustation of words in the image, but incrustation of the image itself’.45 Nancy’s analysis suggests that the visual itself becomes textual in video’s ‘flaky and granular matter of a vision turned into itself, onto itself’: here, ‘the distinction between text and image is virtually effaced’.46 Moreover, the two media modes each undermine the other’s autonomy, producing mutual instability: ‘What Image shows, Text demonstrates. It withdraws it in justifying it. What Text exposes, Image posits and deposits. What Image configures, Text disfigures. What the latter envisages, the former faces down [dévisage]’.47 Unfriended takes up this relationship and renders video’s text–image relationship both explicit and abject through the frame(s) of contemporary communication interfaces. Rather than establishing clean boundaries and clear channels, these interfaces become the conduit for a terrible transmissibility.48 Pursuing the visual ‘glitch’ across a range of moving image media (from glitch art to gifs to horror cinema), I have explored how it lends itself to the thematics of abjection. Although there is in fact nothing inherently abject about a glitch, it has often been culturally framed as such: whether as a general threat to system and order, or as a means of producing aesthetic effects (such as digital video’s ‘pixel bleed’) that evoke the breakdown of bodies and faces. Moreover, the glitch provides a distinctive challenge to the coherence of the face, in ways that reflect on the abstract ‘structure’ of both face and digital image. Staging confrontations among these structures, glitch video produces modes of defacialisation (running the gamut from deformation to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Facing the Glitch

349

t­ransformation) that open out into both non-figurative and visceral forms (and often fluctuate between the two). As my examples illustrate, these multilayered operations of the glitch work by unmasking (revealing the image’s basis in code), effacement (showing its dependence on technical materiality), and in some cases facing (giving the image an identity and meaning, whether abject or otherwise). In this oscillation between different forms, codes and meanings, the digital image belies its ostensible basis in discrete certainties, turning instead towards the indefinite. Notes 1. According to Goriunova and Shulgin, a glitch is ‘a short-term deviation from a correct value’, and is thus applicable both to hardware and to software. See Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin, ‘Glitch’, in Matthew Fuller (ed.), Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 110. In its contemporary manifestations, the glitch reveals a slippage between analogue and digital signals, resulting in distinctively ‘digital’ artefacts. For more detail on this point, see Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin, ‘Notes on Glitch’, World Picture, No. 6 (Winter 2011), http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/Manon.html (accessed 5 November 2016). 2. The partial nature of this unmasking is captured by Goriunova and Shulgin: ‘Although a glitch does not reveal the true functionality of the computer, it shows the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digital spaces are organized.’ See Goriunova and Shulgin, ‘Glitch’, p. 114. 3. Ibid, p. 111. 4. Tim Barker, ‘Aesthetics of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant’, in Mark Nunes (ed.), Error: Glitch, Noise and Jam in New Media Cultures (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 44. Indeed, the glitch in moving images art often makes momentarily visible the rectangular ‘macroblocks’ that are a feature of video compression, as if seeding multiple miniature frames across the image. 5. Rosa Menkman, ‘A Vernacular of File Formats’ (2010), http://rosamenkman . blogspot . co . nz / 2010 / 08 / vernacular - of - file - formats - 2 - workshop . html (accessed 5 November 2016). 6. Manon and Temkin, in ‘Notes on Glitch’, point out that some artists display ‘a tendency to post online a Warhol-like series of glitches all based on the same image’. This approach lends itself to facial subjects. For a fine example, see Sabato Visconti’s series of glitched frames from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), ‘Vertigo by Alfred Glitchcock’, http://www.sabatobox.com/vertigo-by-alfredglitchcock (accessed 5 November 2016). 7. Georg Simmel, ‘The Aesthetic Significance of the Face’, trans. Lore Ferguson, in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), Georg Simmel, 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), p. 276. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

350

Allan Cameron

8. Ibid. This emphasis on the face as unified form carries over into writing on its cinematic manifestations: from Béla Balázs’s discussion of the expression on a face as ‘complete and comprehensible in itself’, to Deleuze’s framing of the face as an ‘Entity’. See Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), p. 61; and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 98. 9. Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um) (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011), p. 33. Menkman connects glitch art to the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists, drawing on Paul Virilio’s argument (in The Accident of Art) that the ‘broken faces’ of World War 1 find their expression in Cubist techniques of fragmentation and reconstruction, and that much of this work should be seen as ‘disfigured art’. See Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), p. 32; and Sylvère Lotringer and Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art, trans. Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005), pp. 15, 18. 10. Carolyn Kane connects digital glitch to numerous examples of what could be called proto-glitch, suggesting that modernist painting introduced ‘a set of glitches relative to classical aesthetics’, and that structuralist cinema has ‘an intrinsic capacity to push color and image to the extreme of perception, engendering conceptual and physiological glitches’. See Carolyn Kane, 2014. ‘Compression Aesthetics: Glitch From the Avant-Garde to Kanye West’, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, No. 21 (20 October 2014), http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/compression-aesthetics-glitch-from-the-avant-garde-to-kanye-west/ (accessed 6 November 2016). 11. See Benjamin Mako Hill, ‘Revealing Errors’, in Nunes (ed.), Error, pp. 27–41. Hill argues that computer science itself ‘might be described as a process of abstraction’ (p. 38), an abstraction which is at the same time a masking: ‘programming is just a process of taking complex tasks and then hiding – abstracting – that complexity behind a simplified set of interfaces’ (p. 38). The significance of errors is thus to ‘render invisible technologies visible’ (p. 40). 12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 181. 13. Ibid., p. 168. 14. Ibid., p. 170. 15. Ibid., p. 191. 16. Béla Balázs, ‘Visible Man, or The Culture of Film’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Marc Fursteneau (ed.), The Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), p. 69. 17. Ibid., p. 70. 18. Jacques Aumont, ‘The Face in Close-Up’, trans. Ellen Sowchek, in Angela Dalle Vacche (ed), The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 127. 19. Ibid., p. 130. 20. Manon and Temkin, ‘Notes on Glitch’. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Facing the Glitch

351

21. Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), p. 54. 22. Mark Nunes, ‘Error, Noise, and Potential: The Outside of Purpose’, in Nunes (ed.), Error, p. 5. 23. Ibid., p. 14. 24. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Léon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. 25. Ibid., p. 2. 26. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 138. 27. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2. 28. Ibid., p. 3. 29. Nick Briz, using an abstract metaphor to underline the distinction, has argued that the work of established video artists ‘is on a very different plane from the Kanye video’ (comment on John Michael Boling, ‘Pixel Bleed’, Rhizome blog (25 February 2009), http://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/feb/25/pixel-bleed/ (accessed 6 November 2016). Rosa Menkman writes that ‘The technique that was used to critique popular culture, by artists like [Sven] König or [Paul] Davis, was now used to generate live visuals for the masses’. See Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), p. 55. 30. Jussi Parikka, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theorisation of faciality, has complained about the general tendency to impose faces and identities on technological processes, including computer viruses. See Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 144. 31. See Gregory Zinman, ‘Getting Messy: Chance and Glitch in Contemporary Video Art’, in Gabrielle Jennings (ed.), Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). Zinman characterises Murata’s work as a kind of ‘“messy” abstraction’ (p. 98), which takes the form of ‘a mutant mosaic of runaway pixels’ (p. 100). Yet while ‘Murata’s resultant abstractions thus appear messy [. . .] they are not so much concerned with disorder as they are with a reordering: quite literally, telling the video software to reorder a sequence of images’ (p. 110). 32. As Brown and Kutty note, datamoshing suggests the operation of ‘glitch-like errors’, but is then used ‘expressively so as to create new meanings via the “bleeding” of one image into the other’. See William Brown and Meetali Kutty, ‘Datamoshing and the Emergence of Digital Complexity from Digital Chaos’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (15 February 2012), p. 168. 33. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 20–1. 34. Ibid., p. 59. 35. Laura Marks, ‘Takeshi Murata’s Automated Animations’, Millennium Film Journal, No. 53 (2010/2011), p. 14. 36. Ibid., p. 13. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

352

Allan Cameron

37. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 52. 38. In Silver, Laura Marks detects ‘a feeling of perversion’ as ‘human and inanimate forms merge together’. See Marks, ‘Takeshi Murata’s Automated Animations’, p. 13. I would argue that this feeling of perversion is closely aligned with the dynamics of abjection. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 168. 40. Ibid. 41. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (San Diego: Harvest Brace, 1997), p. 170. 42. Ibid. 43. Marc Olivier, ‘Glitch Gothic’, in Murray Leeder (ed.), Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 256. 44. Manon and Temkin, ‘Notes on Glitch’. 45. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 73. 46. Ibid., p. 74. To some degree, Nancy’s argument aligns with D. N. Rodowick’s analysis of digital images, which highlights operations of scanning and notation: ‘Unlike the film screen, which passively receives images, the electronic display actively constructs images in time, or, more correctly, it displays signals that produce an image through sequential scanning’. See D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 137. According to Rodowick these operations are, in turn, underpinned by the ‘symbolic and notational’ basis of digital information (p. 114). 47. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, pp. 77–8. 48. As I’ve noted elsewhere, zombie films also commonly link communication and the communicable: media and the zombie ‘virus’ are aligned in their logic of transmission and their threat to meaning. See Allan Cameron, ‘Zombie Media: Transmission, Reproduction, and the Digital Dead’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 66–89.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Index

Note: italic signifies illustrations 2-D, 129 3-D, 66–7, 182, 196, 306 in Ghost Dimension, 326–7 3-D films, 4, 66–7, 74, 128–9, 277–80, 294–5 24 Hour Psycho (Gordon), 230–1 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick), 45–6, 49 abjection, 342–4, 348 Abrams, J. J., 23, 129 absence/presence, black as, 38, 39, 41, 47–8, 49–50 abstraction, 212, 257, 277 geometric, 158, 218 and the glitch, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339–45, 347–8 see also expressionism accidentalness, 34 accidents, filmic, 23, 24, 25–6, 28, 166 new materialism, 263 acousmatic sound, 103, 109, 123, 166 Adorno, Theodor, 84 advertising, 6, 158, 159, 160, 162, 173, 174, 175 codes of, 170 of Ghost Dimension, 325 aeroplane photography, 94–5 aesthetics, 3, 83, 157, 174, 176 aesthetic analogy, 219, 220 of banality, 282 and blur, 93 glitch aesthetics, 334–5 materialist, 257–72 of sound, 106, 112, 113 transmedial, 181, 182, 190, 200 African Americans, 181, 184, 191, 193, 194–5, 198 Agamben, Giorgio, 9–10 Age of the Earth, The (Rocha), 17 agency, concept of, 260–5, 310 Akerman, Chantal, 243–4, 247–8, 250, 251 Aldrich, Robert, 18 Alphaville (Godard), 47 Alsharif, Basma, 86, 87 Althusser, Louis, 264–5

Altman, Rick, 103, 109, 110 amateur cameras, 85, 210–11 amateur filmmakers, 24 Ambassadors, The (Holbein), 95 American Psycho (Harron), 340, 343 analogue, 3, 23, 263 and digital, 230, 231, 232 glitch in, 310 VHS, 322, 326–7 analogy, 218, 219, 267 anamorphosis, 91, 95, 99, 212 Andersen, Thom, 58, 61, 64 Angelopoulos, Theo, 134, 136 animal figures, Hollywood, 128, 289 animals and humans theme, 288–96 animation, 41, 42 cartoon motif, 193 devices for, 57–8, 62 of drawn images, 57 see also eternalism anthropology, 98, 283, 288, 292 apparatus theory, 53–4, 60 Aquarelle (Ray), 281 archive, 28, 29, 283, 303, 304–5 Argento, Dario, 22 Aristotle, 9 Arnheim, Rudolf, 74–5, 81–3, 85, 110 Arnold, Martin, 230, 231, 262, 344–5 Arnulf Rainer (Kubelka), 65 art antiquity, 227 Bergson/philosophy on, 221 and film, 78–85 modern/contemporary, 93–4, 308–9 Renaissance, 92–3, 95, 125, 226, 227, 234 and the senses, 3, 217 see also Bacon, Francis; Cubism; expressionism; glitches; video art art cinema, 4, 40; see also art, and film art galleries, 46, 49 Artemiev, Edward, 106 artists, role of, 79, 83 audiences, 110, 150–2, 175; see also spectators

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Index

354

auditory perception, 108, 112, 213; see also sound/ soundtrack Aumont, Jacques, 38, 43, 44, 46, 105, 126, 337–8 authenticity, 78, 85, 87 authorship, 9, 79 automatism, 5, 9, 32–3, 77 avant-garde, 54, 61, 79, 157, 174, 175, 176, 241 and the flicker, 63–5 homage to, 162 and Paranormal Activity, 320, 322 Avant-Garde Home Movie, An, 28 Avatar (Cameron), 128–9 Bachelard, Gaston, 6 Bacon, Francis, 216, 217, 218, 219, 342 Baillie, Bruce, 27, 28 Balázs, Béla, 76, 104, 105, 337 Ballet mécanique (Léger), 164, 170 Balleteuse, Une (Demachy), 80 Bantar Gebang (de Rijke and de Rooij), 245 Barker, Jennifer, 259–60 Barker, Tim, 335 Barney, Matthew, 244 baroque, 99, 227 Barrett, Estelle, 262 Bataille, George, 277 Bateson, Gregory, 303 Bathing in the Sea (Lumière), 1, 2 Baudelaire, Charles, 77, 283 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 54, 55 Bay, Michael, 181 Bazin, André, 25, 141, 143, 147, 319 becoming, 214, 217, 222, 265 Bender, Stuart, 107 Benjamin, Walter, 79, 225 Bennett, Jane, 264, 269–70 Benning, James, 249 Benson-Allott, Caetlin, 316, 318–19 Bergman, Ingmar, 32, 41, 46 Bergson, Henri, 80, 209, 213, 214, 221–2, 320 Besse, Alain, 112 Big Swallow, The (Williamson), 40–1, 45 Binary Quotes (Briz), 337–8 Birds, The (Hitchcock), 293 Black (Sie), 42 Black Maria studio, 43–4 black screens, 38–52 forms and functions, 38–41, 43–6, 49–50 techniques for, 40, 44–5, 46 and white, 38, 41, 42–3, 46–9 Blair Witch Project, The (Myrick and Sanchez), 126 Blindness (Meirelles), 31 Boccioni, Umberto, 31 bodily postures, 162–4, 169–70 body fluid films, 263–4 ‘bokeh’, 92, 99 Bolt, Barbara, 262 Bonitzer, Pascal, 139–40, 147

Bordeaux Piece (Claerbout), 245 Bordwell, David, 105, 321, 322 Bosch, Hieronymus, 125 Boulez, Pierre, 103, 162, 165 Boy With Green Hair, The (Losey), 40 Boyd, Russell, 22 Brady, Martin, 241 Braidotti, Rosi, 260 Brakhage, Stan, 28, 41, 212 Brandenburg, Ulla von, 150–2 Bresson, Robert, 35, 241 Bridge of Spies (Spielberg), 108 Briz, Nick, 336, 337–8 Brown, William, 241 Brown Bunny, The (Gallo), 34 Bruyn, Dirk de, 262 Burch, Noël, 140–1, 141 buried film, 30, 263, 267, 269 Cage, John, 165, 166, 176 camera movement, 124, 126, 129, 321 cameras and acculturation, 209–10 small format, 85, 210–11, 281, 292, 294 VHS, 322, 326 virtual/motion capture, 182, 229 Cameron, James, 128–9 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 92, 93 Campan, Véronique, 108 Campus, Peter, 10 Canudo, Ricciotto, 74–5, 77, 78–80, 81, 83, 85 capitalism, global, 200; see also Market Carax, Leos, 289–91 Cardoso Pereira, Paula, 4, 8 Cartesian model of knowledge, 2, 4 Casetti, Francesco, 76, 84, 85 Cassavetes, John, 21–2 Castaing-Taylor, Lucien, 289 CCTV see surveillance films celluloid film, 5, 257, 260, 261 Chare, Nicholas, 262 Che: Part 1 (Soderbergh), 134, 135 Chemin de fer, Le (Manet), 277 Chion, Michel, 103, 105, 108, 131, 145 Chodorov, Pip, 265 Chomette, Henri, 158 choreography, 196–8, 250 Chott-el-Djerid (Viola), 33 Christiansen, Steen, 182 chronophotography, 93, 162, 226 Ciment, Michel, 241 cinema (early), history of, 1–3, 55–61, 77 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze), 221 ‘cinema of attractions’, 174–5 cinématographe, 35, 58–9 cinematographic real, 125–6, 128–9 Circles of Confusion (Frampton), 212 Citizen Kane (Welles), 275, 302

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Index

Claerbout, David, 245 Clair, René, 105, 106 Clay, Jean, 276–7 Close, Chuck, 93 close-ups, 75–6, 82, 123, 124, 129, 171–2 in early cinema, 175 Cocteau, Jean, 43, 115 cognitive science, 234–6, 235–6 collage, 41, 165, 173, 174, 175, 176 colour in Gatsby, 189–90, 199 reproduction of, 29 temperatures, 211–12 Coming Attractions (Tscherkassky), 157–79 commercialism, 323; see also advertising communication, and mediation, 312–13 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 5, 147 complex mirror shots, 131–3, 141–5, 141–53 compressed video, 76, 84; see also datamoshing concert films, 107 Conner, Bruce, 33, 170 Conrad, Tony, 42, 46, 64 Constructivism, 79 Contact (Zemeckis), 127 contagion, music video, 193 context, 97 contingency, 214, 219–20, 309, 312 continuity, 60–1, 194, 325 black for, 39, 40–1 indifference to, 321, 322 Cooper, Sarah, 77–8 copying, film and, 77–86 Corrigan, Timothy, 249, 251 costume design, 181, 182, 198 counter-culture, 288 Crary, Jonathan, 66, 278 credits sequence, 170–4 Cries and Whispers (Bergman), 41 Cronenberg, David, 340, 341, 343 Cubism, 162, 164, 174 Cubitt, Sean, 47–8, 241 Cukor, George, 186 Curtis, Scott, 59 cyberneticists, 301 Dada, 47, 170, 257 dancing, 47, 196–8 Daney, Serge, 284 Dark Waters (Menkman), 336 darkness, 9–10; see also black screens datamoshing, 11–12n, 335, 338, 339, 342, 346 Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Reeves), 288 de Mille, William, 150 De Palma, Brian, 275 de Sica, Vittorio, 131, 143, 144 de Toth, André, 128 Dear Mister Compression (Menkman), 336–8 death, 226, 229–30, 231–3

355

debt, 307–8, 313 Decasia (Morrison), 29, 262, 340 decay, film stock, 28–30, 53, 267, 340 Deep Red (Profondo rosso), 22 definition, 73, 75–6; see also high definition (HD) deformation of body/Figure, 217–18, 220, 335–6, 340, 342, 348–9 of costume, 198 of space/scale, 184, 199 deframing, 139–40 Déjà Vu (Scott), 305–8, 307, 309, 310, 312, 313 Deleuze, Gilles, 39, 162–4, 209, 213, 215–17, 219–21, 249, 337, 342, 343 Demachy, Robert, 80 demon, 324, 325–6 Denson, Shane, 323 depth perception, 277–80 Derrida, Jacques, 230, 305 Deshays, Daniel, 108 Dial M for Murder (Hitchcock), 128 dialogue, 109, 115, 199 in Gatsby, 189, 194 in Holy Motors, 289–90 Dickson, W. K. L., 43–4 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 3, 35, 242–54 Diederichsen, Diedrich, 245, 247 diegesis, 126, 128–9, 141 definition, 109 vs extra-diegetic, 103–5 in Ghost Dimension, 326–7 diegetic sound, 104–5, 107, 108, 111 Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), 31 diffraction, 21 digital composition, 193 digital editing software, 41 digital media, 3, 23, 55, 128, 224–5 3-D, 66–7 and analogue, 230, 231, 232 on blackness, 49–50 definition, 74 and the glitch, 302–3, 334–52 and image control, 34 and the imagination, 6 intangibility of, 266 sound mixing for, 113 special effects, 126–7 technologies of, 10, 191 video, post-perceptual, 323–4 digital streaming, 326–7 dioramas, 63 dissolves, 32–3, 39, 62–3, 64 Godard’s, 294 sound, 103–20 documentary films, 39, 85, 86, 212, 292–3 Dolby, 113–14 domestic objects, as motifs, 164 dopplegänger, 233

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Index

356 Doubletide (Lockhart), 245–7, 250, 251 doubling, 145, 232, 233 drawing(s), 34, 57, 196 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 31, 32, 33, 131, 134, 241 Duchamp, Marcel, 79, 309, 310 Duffy, Enda, 94 Dulac, Germaine, 78 Dumont, Bruno, 124 Duras, Marguerite, 141–3, 151 Duvivier, Julien, 115 DVD, 28, 64, 129, 326–7 Dyer, Richard, 181, 200–1 dyes, black, 44, 45

Easy Rider (Hopper), 20, 21 Eco, Umberto, 138, 141, 167 Edison, Thomas, 43, 58 Edison Company, 60 editing, 64, 124, 162 in Coming Attractions, 169–70 continuity, 39, 40–1, 60–1, 194, 325 and the cut, 249 digital, 41 mirrors, 147 in Paranormal Activity, 322, 325, 327 point of view, 171, 323 post-production, 5, 105, 115, 195–6 quick jumps, 123, 124, 129 rapid, 164, 170, 184–5, 190 virtuality of, 174 Effi Briest (Fassbinder), 131, 132, 137, 138, 143, 146–7, 150 Eisenstein, Sergei, 64, 133, 134 Elderkin, Nabil, 302 Eliot, T. S., 68, 235 Elkins, James, 346 ellipsis, 7, 160, 292 emotions, 227, 234, 235–7, 283 empathy, 234–5, 242 Enemy of the State (Scott), 301–2 environment, the, and film, 265–71 Epstein, Jean, 10, 25, 76, 78, 81, 115 on image and sound, 105–6 erasure, of image, 32, 33 Ernst, Wolfgang, 310 error, etymology of, 8 errors see accidents, filmic eternalism, 66, 67 evanescence, 104, 108 Every Thing Will Be Fine (Wenders), 129 Exit (Lockhart), 245 experimental films, 4, 30, 66, 209, 212–13, 219–20 as critique, 257, 330–1 and glitch, 302 materialist, 258 and slow looking, 241 veils in, 27 exploitation film, 316, 320, 330–1

exposure time, 27, 55, 259 expressionism, 45, 79, 83, 196 Eyes without a Face (Franju), 291 eyesight, 31, 59, 91 Facebook, 345, 347 faces and datamoshing see datamoshing in early cinema, 337–8 in glitch art, 334, 335–8 in horror genre, 339–52 facial expressions, 223, 225, 226 fades, 38, 39, 41, 49 Fall of the House of Usher, The (Epstein), 81 Fano, Michel, 103, 115 Fantasia (Disney), 29 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 146–7, 150 Faust (Murnau), 18–19, 21 Fellini, Federico, 19, 21 female bodies, fragmentation of, 164 Ferro, Renate, 305 fiction film, black screens in, 39 Fight Club (Fincher), 127 Figure, 216–20 film and acculturation, 209–10 and art, 78–86 as copy/reproduction, 77–86 early (1890s), 1, 2 as text, 109 see also archive; cinema; photography; specific film genres Film als Kunst (Arnheim), 81 film stock, decay, 28–30, 53, 267, 340 film theory, 76, 77–8, 210, 241 film trailers, 170 filters, camera, 4, 21, 95 Fincher, David, 126–7 fishermen, 292–3 Fitzgerald, Scott, 182, 196 Five Minutes of Pure Cinema (Chomette), 157–8 flares, 20–1, 23, 35 Fleisch, Thorsten, 263 flicker (filming), and shutter, 55–70 Flicker, The (Conrad), 42, 46 Flicker Film, The (McLaren), 42 flicker films, 64–5 Flusser, Vilém, 9, 227 Fly, The (Cronenberg), 340, 343 focus, manipulation of, 82, 259 Ford, John, 140, 280 Forty Guns (Fuller), 31 Foucault, Michel, 167, 277, 305 found footage films, 126, 157–79, 345–9 faux, 316, 317–18, 321 materiality and, 30, 262 found objects, in art, 309

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Index

Fountainhead, The (Vidor), 275 frame line, 209, 212 frames and blackness, 48–9 fragmentation of, 281 rate of, 60, 66, 67 and whiteness, 47 see also mirrors frame-within-the-frame, 131–3, 136–40 Frampton, Hollis, 212 France/French film sound design in, 115 film theory, 77–8 Impressionist film, 80 theatrical techniques, 109 see also individual directors/artists Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze), 215–17, 219 Franju, Georges, 291 Freeze Frame (Tscherkassky), 32–3 Freud, Sigmund, 229–30, 232–3, 305, 311 Fried, Michael, 277 Friedberg, Anne, 48, 136 Frodon, Jean-Michel, 294 From the Life of the Marionettes (Bergman), 32, 46 Fujihata, Masaki, 301 Fuses (Schneeman), 27–8, 259–60 Futurism, 79, 93–4, 95, 162 Gabriadze, Leo, 345–9 Gallo, Vincent, 34 Gamer (Neveldine and Taylor), 73 Garden of Earthly Delights, The (Bosch), 125 Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The (de Sica), 143, 144 Gatten, David, 266, 269 gaze, 275, 277, 284; see also ocular vertigo Geertz, Clifford, 90, 96, 99 Gehr, Ernie see Glider (Gehr) Geimer, Peter, 166 Genealogy (Im Kwon-taek), 28 genres of blur (visual), 91–6 Gertrud (Dreyer), 32, 33, 134 Gestalt psychology, 56, 82–3 gestures, 284 in classical painting, 277 deictic, 228–9 swiping, 273–5 uncanny, 223, 224–5, 226, 227, 228–32, 235–7 ghosts, 24, 28 Gidal, Peter, 258–60 Ginestous, Étienne, 59, 60 Glazer, Jonathan, 45 Glider (Gehr), 212–13, 214–15, 216, 217–18 glitches, 8–9, 20 as entropy and code, 301–2 and forgetting, 305 in Ghost Dimension, 327, 330, 331 glitch art and gifs, 334–9

357

in horror genre, 316, 339–45 as labour, 304–5 in Paranormal Activity, 316–33 temporalities of, 299–315 in video art, 334–5 global warming, 269 Godard, Jean-Luc, 126, 162, 281 films, 27, 47, 115, 274–80, 289, 294–5 Gombrich, Ernst, 6 Goodbye to Language (Godard), 274, 275–6, 277–9, 283, 289, 294–5 GoPro cameras, 210–11, 281, 292, 294 Gordon, Douglas, 230–1 Goriunova, Olga, 334 Grandrieux, Philippe, 40 Gray, James, 147–8 Great Gatsby, The (Luhrmann), 180–205 Greek myths, 43, 45, 307 Green, Eugène, 35 Green Ray, The (Dean), 245 Greenberg, Clement, 45, 277 grey, 48–9, 169 grief, 236, 237 Grønstad, Asbjørn, 241–2 Guattari, Félix, 337, 343 Gunning, Tom, 157, 174–5, 176 handheld video cameras, 317, 318–19, 320 handmade film emulsion, 261–2 Haneke, Michael, 243, 244, 247–8, 251 Hansen, Mark, 323–5 Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai), 21 haptic visuality, 4 Harvey, Richard, 48 Haskin, Byron, 33 Hawal, Kassem, 86 Haze (Tsukamoto), 40 hearing, 112, 113, 213 Hegel, G. W. F., 300, 311 Heidegger, Martin, 166, 229 Hexter, J. H., 96 high definition (HD), 4, 5, 6, 73, 74, 75, 80, 93, 223, 226, 230 high-definition cameras, 305–6 high-speed cameras, 226, 230, 233 Hiroshima mon Amour (Resnais), 137, 138, 139–40 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard), 294 history, and ‘blur’, 97–9 Hitchcock, Alfred, 126, 128, 191, 230–1, 293 Hobbit, The (2012), 74 Holbein, Hans, 95 Holy Motors (Carax), 289–91 Hopper, Dennis, 20, 21 horror films, 40, 339–52 House of Wax, The (de Toth), 128 household items, 263 Huillet, Danièle, 39–40 Hultén, Pontus, 308–9, 311

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Index

358 humanité, L’ (Dumont), 124 humanities, 90, 97 Humphrey, Doris, 197 Hunger, The (Scott), 31 Huppauf, Bernd, 6 hyperobjects, 269 hyperrealism, 292, 306 hypertext, 309–10 iconicity, 75–6, 82 Ideal image, 209–11 ideology, and cinema, 53–4 Im Kwon-taek, 28 Imamura, Shôhei, 24, 25, 26 immediacy, 85, 320, 320–1 Immigrant, The (Gray), 147–8 imperialism, 53 indeterminacy, filmic, 157–79 index/indices, 24, 25, 32–3, 76, 228–9 India Song (Duras), 141–3, 146, 151 Interstellar (Nolan), 305 interstice/interval, 39, 248–9 Ivan’s Childhood (Tarkovsky), 41 Jackson, Peter, 74 Jacobs, Ken, 66, 67, 68 Japan, 24, 44 Jaws 3-D (Alves), 128 Jetée, La (Marker), 61, 63 Joost, Henry, 322 Journey to the West (Tsai Ming-liang), 149–50 jump cuts, 322, 327 Kane, Brian, 112 Kant, Immanuel, 210, 221 Khondji, Darius, 147–8 Killing of a Chinese Bookie, The (Cassavetes), 21–2 kinetoscopes, 58 Kiss (Warhol), 25–6 Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich), 18 Kittler, Friedrich, 225 Klee, Paul, 165, 216 Kluszczynski, Ryszard, 309–10 Konrad & Kurfurst (Urlus), 260–3 Kosinski, Joseph, 305 Kovács, László, 20 Kracauer, Siegfried, 25, 97 Krasker, Robert, 49 Kristeva, Julia, 338–9, 343 Kubelka, Peter, 64, 65 Kubrick, Stanley, 45–6, 131, 340 Kuntzel, Thierry, 48 Kuveiller, Luigi, 22 language, and blurring, 96–7 language, and the glitch, 347–8 Last Wave, The (Weir and Boyd), 22 Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais), 134, 135

latency, 311–12 LCD monitors, 49 Lefebvre, Thierry, 58, 59 Lefrant, Emmanuel, 266–9 Léger, Fernand, 164, 170 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 2, 3, 4 lenses, camera, 5, 23, 82, 92 lenses, corrective, 91, 92 Leonardo da Vinci, 6, 93, 125 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 82 Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel), 289, 292–4 Leyda, Julia, 316, 319, 323, 324 life-size images, 125 light/lighting, 17–18, 166 blinding, 19 vs darkness, 167–9 effects of atmosphere on, 91 in foreshadowing, 194 and shadow, 43 as sphere, 21–2 transcendent, 18–19, 21 as veil, 22–3 see also white screens limitations, pursuit of, 82 liquidity, 44–5 listening see auditory perception literary analysis, 97, 109 Local Knowledge (Geertz), 90 Lockhart, Sharon, 245–7, 249, 250, 251 logic, and blurring, 96–7 London Film-Makers Co-operative, 259 Long Live the New Flesh (Provost), 339–40, 341, 343–4 long takes, 124, 241, 243, 244, 248, 249, 250–1 in Ghost Dimension, 319–21 Losey, Joseph, 40 Louniverse, The (Toledano), 41 low definition, 74–89 Lucas, George, 46, 305 Luhrmann, Baz, 180–205 Lumière brothers, 1, 58, 59, 167 machines, and sameness, 77–9 machinic vision, 182 magic lanterns, 57, 58, 62, 63 Magnificent Ambersons, The (Welles), 107 Man with a Movie Camera, The (Vertov), 61, 64 Man With the Rubber Head, The (Méliès), 176 Mandala (Im Kwon-taek), 28 Manet, Edouard, 276, 277 Mann, Jack, 110 Manon, Hugh S., 301, 302, 338, 348 Manovich, Lev, 10 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 1, 58, 93, 162 Marie, Michel, 105 Marilyn Times Five (Conner), 33 Marker, Chris, 39, 61, 63, 249

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Index

Market, 6, 299–300, 311, 313 Marks, Laura, 342 Martin, Katherine, 181 Marx, Karl, 313 Mask of Satan (Bava), 340, 342–3 masking effects, 79, 133 Masters, Tony, 45 match cut, 325 materialist films, 257–72 materiality, 30, 64, 77, 262 Matrix, The (the Wachowskis), 306 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 214 Mattushka, Mara, 44 McIntyre, Steven, 259 McLaren, Norman, 42 McLuhan, Marshall, 75–6, 80 Mead, Margaret, 283 meaning, and the glitch, 301 meaning, making, 157, 250, 309, 347 medical imaging, 127, 183, 235 medium specificity, 85, 87 Meirelles, Fernando, 31 Mekas, Jonas, 24, 25 Melancholia (Diaz), 241 Méliès, Georges, 59, 63, 175, 176, 275 memory, 236, 305, 311 Mendes, Sam, 181 Menkman, Rosa, 302, 309, 335, 336–8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 36, 55, 140, 267 meta-films, 170, 174 Metaphors on Vision (Brakhage), 212 metric cinema, 65 Metz, Christian, 103, 134 microphones, 109, 110, 112, 114 Milicevic, Mladen, 103–4 mimesis see copying Mirror, The (Tarkovsky), 106 mirrors, 23, 82, 131–56 complex mirror shots, 131–3, 141–53 and disorientation strategies, 149–53 as indexical, 140 as pictorial geometrical, 133–6 and space, 140–5 Mirrorsong (von Brandenburg), 150–2 mise en scène, 241 of scale, in Gatsby, 184–5, 199 of sound, 103, 104, 109, 110, 114, 115 Mitry, Jean, 140, 210 mixing, sound, 112, 113, 114, 115 Mnemosyne Atlas (Warburg), 284 mobile phones, 85, 273–4 modernism, 68 modernity, 78, 93–5, 175, 277 Moholy-Nagy, László, 165 Monsted, Anton, 181 montage, 41, 76, 126, 129, 158, 163, 164, 165, 170, 172, 173, 176, 241, 284, 309 digital, 293

359

Morrison, Bill, 29, 262, 340 Morton, Timothy, 269 Moses und Aron (Straub and Huillet), 39–40 motion, 54, 55, 56, 157; see also speed motion capture technologies, 182, 229 motion picture camera, invention, 58 Motion Picture (Tscherkassky), 167–9 motion pictures see cinema; cinématographe; film Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann), 196 Movie, A (Conner), 170 MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), 183, 235 multimedia interaction, and horror, 345–52 multiple focalisations, 97 Mulvey, Laura, 197, 248 Münsterberg, Hugo, 210 Murata, Takeshi see Untitled (Silver) Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18–19, 21 Murray, Timothy, 305 music, 106, 186, 188 and the glitch, 334 nondiegetic, 107 soundscapes, 165–6 music videos, 182, 190, 193 musical spectacle, 181; see also Great Gatsby, The musicals, 115 Muybridge, Eadweard, 57, 58, 61, 93 My Life to Live (Godard), 115 mysticism, and sound, 111 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 228, 348 nanoblack surfaces, 45 narrative, 80, 174, 175, 259, 302 black screens in, 39, 40 contemporary, 84–5 in Gatsby, 186–7 and the glitch, 310 low definition, 84–5 and sound, 108–9 and tableaux, 192–3 neoliberalism, 73, 181, 299–300 Neveldine, Mark, 73 new materialism, 260–5, 270–1 night vision, 324 Nishikawa, Tomonari, 269 Noguez, Dominique, 28 noise see glitches; sound/soundtrack Nolan, Christopher, 305 Nostos II (art installation), 48 Notorious (Hitchcock), 126 Nunes, Mark, 338, 344 O, Persecuted (Alsharif), 86, 87 Oblivion (Kosinski), 305 Ocean Without a Shore (Viola), 229, 230, 231, 232 ocular vertigo, 278–80 Ode an IBM (performance art), 44 Oedipus Rex (Pasolini), 20–1 Olivier, Marc, 346

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Index

360 One P.M. (Godard), 27 optical printing, 42, 43 Orphée (Cocteau), 43 Othello (Welles), 44, 46 Our Small Houses (Hawal), 86 out-of-focus images, 76 out-takes, 158, 166, 169–70 painting, 82, 209 techniques of, 80, 281 paintings, 81, 147, 226 black paint in, 45 classical, 125 clouds in, 95 as influence (on film), 124 modern, 216–17, 276–7 and veils, 31–2 see also art; Bacon, Francis; expressionism Panic Room (Fincher), 126–7 Pantenburg, Volker, 249 Paradjanov, Serge, 123–4 parallax principle, 66 Paranormal Activity movies, 316–33 Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Plotkin), 316, 325–33, 328–9 Paravel, Véréna, 289 Parties Visible et Invisible (Lefrant), 266–9 Parville, Henri de, 1, 2 Pasolini, Pier Paulo, 20–1 Passion of Anna, The (Bergman), 32 Passions, The (Viola), 224, 225–37 pastiche, 34 pathos formula, 227, 228 patriarchy, 180, 185 patterning, 194–5, 197 Pearce, Craig, 181 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 25, 228, 311 perception, 2 auditory, 108, 112, 213 experiments in, 35–6 and latency, 311 limitations of, 211 Merleau-Ponty’s theory of, 267 non-human/virtual, 182, 323–4, 330 and sensation, 214 visual, 54–5, 56–61, 66, 82–3, 213 see also depth perception; senses/sensations Percheron, Daniel, 103, 113 Perconte, Jacques, 10, 12n performance art, 44 performativity, 260–5 Persona (Bergman), 46 perspective, 95, 99 Phantasmagoria entertainments, 62–3 Phantom Carriage, The (Sjöström), 80 Phase Loop (Sherwin), 47 phenakistoscopes, 57, 58 phenomenology, 4, 25

philosophy, 2, 4, 9–10, 210, 221–2, 300, 311 photography, 55, 141, 311 and art, 77–85 photography code, 167 Picabia, Francis, 47 pictorialist photographers, 80 Pièce Touchée (Arnold), 231 pixels, 93, 334, 335 Plateau, Joseph, 57 pleasure principle, 232–3 Plotkin, Gregory, 316, 325–33, 328–9 Pódworka (Lockhart), 245 poetical film, veils in, 27–8 poetry, 78–9, 82, 127 Porena, Boris, 167 portraits, photographic, 92, 280 ‘post’ cinema, 182 postmodernism, 29, 34 potentiality, 9–10, 66 pragmatism, 96 praxinoscopes, 57 primitivity, 288 Prince, Stephen, 74 printing process, contact, 158, 164–5 process, 157, 259, 260, 262–3, 266, 269 production costs, of Gatsby, 200 projectors, slow rate of, 60, 226 Provost, Nicolas see Long Live the New Flesh Puissance de la parole (Godard), 294 Quintet of the Astonished (Viola), 234 racial ambiguity, 193 radio, 110 Raging Bull (Scorsese), 131 Ray, Nicholas, 280–4 realism, 108, 109, 111, 304, 306, 309, 320 reality, and film, 81–3, 84 real-time, 226, 269 Reble, Jürgen, 30 recycling, filmic, 169–70, 170, 175–6, 342 Reed, Carol, 48–9 Reeves, Matt, 288 reflections, mirrors, 131–56 Région centrale, La (Snow), 212–13, 216 Reinhardt, Ad, 45 Relâche (Dada ballet), 47 remix videos, 340–5 Renaissance art, 92–3, 95, 125, 226, 227, 234 repetition, 98, 170, 230, 233, 245, 259 and the glitch, 303, 345 representation, age of, 308 representation, rejection of, 259 Resnais, Alain, 131, 134, 135, 137, 138 resolution, 75 defined, 73–4 low, 230, 327 resonance, 106

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Index

Rhythmus 21 (Richter), 42–3 Richter, Gerhard, 93 Richter, Hans, 42–3 Rijke, Jeroene de, 245 Rocha, Glauber, 17 Rohmer in Paris (Misek), 49 Rombes, Nicholas, 320, 323 Rooij, Willem de, 245 Roslyn Romance (Baillie), 27, 28 Rosset, Clément, 110–11 Ruban, Al, 21 Rumpelstilzchen (Reble), 30 Russian Ark (Sokurov), 34 Salt, Barry, 39 Sans Soleil (Marker), 39 Satyricon (Fellini), 19 scale, 76, 184–5, 199 jumps in, 123–30 Schaefer, Dirk, 165–6 Schaeffer, Pierre, 111–12 Schenk, Dr, 59 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 94 Schmelzdahin, 30 Schneeman, Carolee, 27–8, 259–60 Schrader, Paul, 241 Schulman, Ariel, 322 Schwechater (Kubelka), 65 science fiction, 33, 106, 115, 128 scientific imagery, 6, 127, 162; see also MRI Scorsese, Martin, 131, 181, 183 Scott, Ant, 335 Scott, Tony, 31, 301–2, 305–6 screen size, 5 screens, fragmented, 283; see also split screen sea/seascapes, 1–3, 10, 266 senses/sensations, 2, 181, 191, 209, 212, 213–22, 236; see also perception; sound/soundtrack; vision serial killer film, 40 seriality, 160, 162 Serres, Michel, 301 sfumato, 32, 92–3 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Paradjanov), 123–4 Shannon Slaton, 303 Sharits, Paul, 64 Shaw, Fiona, 235 Sherwin, Guy, 47 Shining, The (Kubrick), 340, 343 ShowScan (technique), 125 Shulgin, Alexei, 334 shutter (camera), 94–5, 211 and flicker, 55–70 Sie, Susi, 42 silent film era, 3, 82, 166, 174–5 Silent Mountain (Viola), 223–5, 227 Silver see Untitled (Silver) Simmel, Georg, 335

361

simulacra, 24, 35, 210 Sirk, Douglas, 143, 144, 147, 148 Six Feet Under (TV series), 41 Sjöström, Victor, 80 Skype, 322, 337, 345, 346–7 slow cinema/looking, 241–51 slow motion, 224–5, 226, 230, 233, 234, 236–7 smart phones, 210, 212, 281 Smith, Vicky, 263, 264 Snow, Michael, 212–13, 216 sobbingspittingscratching (Smith), 263, 264 social sciences, 90, 96–9 Soderbergh, Steven, 134, 135 soft focus, 92–3 Solaris (Tarkovsky), 106 Sombre (Grandrieux), 40 sound of a million insects (Nishikawa), 269 soundscapes, 104, 165–6 sound/soundtrack, 103–20 categories, 103–5, 106–8 design, 105, 107, 109–10, 113, 114, 115–16 diegetic/nondiegetic, 104–5, 107, 108, 111 Doubletide, 247 in Gatsby, 180, 181–2, 186, 187–9, 195–6 and image, synchrony, 4, 212 lack of, 224 media formats, 109, 110–11 mixing, 112, 113, 114, 115 in Paranormal Activity, 322, 327, 330 post-production, 5, 107, 115, 195–6 real-time, 212 reproduction vs representation, 110–16 scientific theory of, 112 sources, 106, 107–9, 114, 145, 196 in Untitled, 344 see also music Souriau, Étienne, 109 spatial magnetisation, 145 spatial relations, deformation, 184–5, 199 spectators, 6, 53, 54, 75–6, 248 and the ‘attraction’, 175 and long takes, 250–1 and mirrors, 136–7, 150–2 see also audiences Spectre (Mendes), 181 speed, 79, 93–5, 160, 162, 211 Spielberg, Steven, 23, 108 spirituality, 77, 226, 227, 237, 244 split screen, 133, 147, 148, 172, 173 Stalker (Tarkovsky), 106 Standard Gauge (Fisher), 170 Star Trek (Abrams), 23 Star Wars: A New Hope, 305 Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, J. J.), 129 Steele, Barbara, 342–3, 344 stereophony, 114 stereoscopy, 66, 67, 128, 278 Sterne, Jonathan, 114–15

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

362

Index

Steyerl, Hito, 74, 84 Stieglitz, Alfred, 80 stillness, 61, 226, 248, 341 Stilwell, Robynn J., 103, 104–5 Straub, Jean-Marie, 39–40 structural film, 241, 257–72 subjectivity, 77, 80–1, 83, 85, 87 Subramanian, Janani, 317 Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 47, 93, 99 sun, 17, 20–1, 24, 127 Super 8 (Abrams), 23 superimposition, 3, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 162, 164–5, 281 of sound, 115–16 surround sound, 114 surveillance films, 8, 84, 126, 230, 301–2, 319–24 Suspended Step of the Stork, The (Angelopoulos), 134, 136 suspense, 317, 319, 320 Svensson, Owe, 106 swiping (digital), 273–5 synaesthesia, 4 synthesis, 82–3 tableaux, 190–3, 234 tachyscopes, 58 Takahashi, Tess, 265–6 Tanizaki, Junichiro, 44 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 41, 106, 115, 243, 244, 247–8, 250, 251 Taylor, Brian, 73 telephone, 109, 294; see also mobile phones television, 310 Temkin, Daniel, 301, 302, 338, 348 temporality and change, 265, 269–70 Tête d’un homme, La (Duvivier), 115 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (Hooper), 340, 343 text, film as, 109 texts, literary, 97 text-speak, 345, 346, 347–8 Theaters (Sugimoto), 47 theatrical techniques, 109–10 Third Man, The (Reed), 48–9 Thompson, Kristin, 105 Three Disasters, The (Godard), 279 Three Women (Viola), 229, 231 THX 1138 (Lucas), 46 Time Machine (Deleuze), 213 Tiny Deaths (Viola), 46, 48 Toledano, Phillip, 41 touch, 267 tracking shots, 126, 127 transformation, 112, 157, 218, 340, 349 Transformers: Age of Extinction (Bay), 181 trauma, 262 Trilling, Lionel, 78 Trip to the Moon, A (Méliès), 59

trompe-l’œil, 125 Trouble Every Day (Denis), 34 Trumbull, Douglas, 125 Tsai Ming-liang, 149–50 Tscherkassky, Peter, 157–79, 262 Tsukamoto, Shinya, 40 Turner, J. M. S., 94 Twentynine Palms, 124 uncanny, the, 224–5, 231–7, 306 unconscious, 283–4, 300 Under the Skin (Glazer), 45 underscoring, 193–4 Unfriended (Gabriadze), 345–9 Untitled (de Rijke and de Rooij), 245 Untitled (Silver) (Murata), 339, 340–1, 344 Uomoduomo (Sala), 245 Urlus, Esther, 260–3 vague, la, 2–3 Vague, La (‘The Wave’), 1 veils, 22–37 accidentalness and, 34 chemical, 28–30 digital cinema and, 34 light/optical effects as, 22–3, 32–3 painting and, 31–2 vision, loss of, 31 veronicas, 31–2 Veronika Voss (Fassbinder), 32, 134, 135, 150 Vertov, Dziga, 61, 64, 210 VHS, 322, 326–7 video art, 42 compressed see datamoshing and the glitch, 334–5, 336–7, 344–5 and mirrors, 150–2 remix, 340–5 slow motion/long takes in, 241–54 Viola’s, 33, 46, 48, 223–40 Videodrome (Cronenberg), 340, 341, 343 videotape see VHS Vidor, King, 275 Vie du Christ, La (Gaumont), 39 Viola, Bill, 33, 46, 48, 223–40 Virno, Paolo, 306 virtual cameras, 126–7, 182 Visible et l’invisible, Le (Merleau-Ponty), 267 vision binocular, 278 and blinding light, 19 and cinema, 54–5 modern, 216 and motion/speed, 56–61, 93–5, 211 physical dimension of, 276 problems/loss of, 31, 60, 91, 92 and touch, 267 and veils, 31 see also ocular vertigo

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



Index

voice-over, 39, 103, 189 Vorticism, 95 Walden (Mekas), 24, 25 ‘walking series’, 211–12 War of the Worlds (Haskin), 33 Warburg, Aby, 227, 228, 243, 284 Warhol, Andy, 25–6 waste products, 263–4 water, as motif, 282 watercolour, 281 Waterloo (Rodowick), 211–12, 219–20 Watkins, Liz, 262 wave, as motif, 2–3 We Can’t Go Home Again (Ray), 282–3 web videos, 41 Weir, Peter, 22 Welles, Orson, 44, 107, 275, 302 Wenders, Wim, 129 Wertheimer, Max, 56 West, Jennifer, 263

West, Kanye, 302 What the Water Said (Gatten), 266, 269 Whatever Film (West), 263 white screens, and black, 38, 41–3, 46–9 Whole Town’s Talking, The (Ford), 140 Wong Kar-Wai, 21 Written on the Wind (Sirk), 143, 144, 147, 148 Wulf, Christof, 6 Wyeth, Andrew, 31 Young and Innocent (Hitchcock), 126 YouTube, 8, 346, 348 Zemeckis, Robert, 127 Zerené Harcha, Joaquín, 4, 8 Zocalo, May 20, 1999 (Alys), 245 zoetropes, 57 Zone, Ray, 66 zoopraxiscopes, 57, 58 Zurbarán, Francisco de, 31

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

363