Videographic Cinema: An Archaeology of Electronic Images and Imaginaries 1501362429, 9781501362422

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Videographic Cinema

thinking|media Series Editors Bernd Herzogenrath Patricia Pisters

Videographic Cinema An Archaeology of Electronic Images and Imaginaries Jonathan Rozenkrantz

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Jonathan Rozenkrantz, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image © Paolo Sanfilippo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rozenkranz, Jonathan, author. Title: Videographic cinema: an archaeology of electronic images and imaginaries / Jonathan Rozenkranz. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: Thinking media | Includes bibliographical references, filmography, and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020013007 | ISBN 9781501362422 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501362408 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501362415 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Video recording–Aesthetics. | Video recordings in motion pictures. | Cinematography–History. Classification: LCC TR850 .R675 2020 | DDC 777–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013007 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6242-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6240-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-6241-5 Series: Thinking Media Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Conditions Condition 1: What is videographic cinema? Condition 2: Archaeology how? Media archaeology as the study of media conditions Media archaeology as the study of media images and imaginaries Media archaeology as historiography theorized/theory historicized Where is video/when is video? Mapping and tracking videographic cinema

3 16 17 21 26 29 35

Part One  Emergence 1

2

Futurity effects: The emergence of videographic cinema A credible reference to a possible future: Defining the futurity effect Roll bars and roller skates: Challenges of capturing video on film A pioneer and his predecessor: Live television as condition for videographic cinema Entering the electronic labyrinth: The video utopia estranged Flickering faces and multiplied figures: Two videographic futurity effects

41

Canned life: Imagining reality TV The deadly threat of live TV: A Face in the Crowd as intermedia warfare Live loops and canned laughter: TV tools for demagoguery and deception

65

44 46 49 55 58

66 69

vi Contents The ‘social experiment’ as televised spectacle: The canned life of The Model Couple Reality as infomercial: The social engineering of ideal consumers The host as collaborator and the terrorist as clown: TV’s ‘nihilism of neutralization’ Canned death: Roddy’s TV-eye in Death Watch

3

Autopticon: Video therapy and/as surveillance Panopticism, synopticism, autopticism: Three functions of modern surveillance The emergence of video surveillance: CCTV before 1970 Paving the way for Dr Phil: American dreams of synoptic psychiatry ‘An historical breakthrough’: Discovering the autoptic function Interpersonal process recall: The therapist as interrogator Self-acceptance – self-correction: Two poles (and a Scottish poem) The psychopathology of private life: Transparency as social imperative Autopticon and on (and on): The screen is the prison of the body

78 82 85 87 93 95 96 99 100 102 104 106 107

Part Two  Remanence 4

5

Mnemopticon: Creative treatment of psychic reality The emergence of the videographic psyche: The therapist as artist Imaginary flashbacks and revelations: Video ‘dreams’ in Viva la muerte From cybernetic acupuncture to Sufi meditation: The artist as therapist Mnemopticon 79: Memory monitors in Anti-Clock

113

Vilified videophiles: Nightmares of video’s home invasion The rise and fall of home video: From highbrow promise to ‘Boston Strangler’ Long live the canned flesh: Alive on tape in Videodrome

137

114 121 128 130

138 141

Contents Patrick, Otis, Benny, and us: Shell children of the video revolution Treating erasure anxieties: From Family Viewing to The Fourth Kind Mnemopticon 97: Capturing nightmares of home invasion

6

Arrière-Garde: Videographic cinema as media archaeology From culture industry to retrospectacle: The coming of millennial time Kung Fury gets the VCR treatment: Technical failure as cinematic retrospectacle Reframing the Arrière-Garde: Media archaeology as artistic method Archival ambiguities: The uses and abuses of U-matic in No Sisyphus caught on S-VHS: The existential horror of The Private Investigators Arrière-Garde as ‘postmodernism of resistance’, or fighting a lost cause

vii

144 146 150 155 156 159 163 165 173 180

Conclusion: An archaeology of videographic cinema

183

Bibliography Index

189 205

Acknowledgements To spend half a decade exploring what constitutes the object of one’s passion is a rare privilege. For having had it, I am infinitely grateful. This book would not have been possible without the intellectual and financial support of the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University. Trond Lundemo and Malin Wahlberg, words cannot express how much you have meant for the intellectual adventure leading up to my getting to write these pages. You have been true sources of inspiration on my path towards becoming a scholar. I am also grateful to all the other brilliant colleagues who engaged with my research over the years: John Sundholm, Doron Galili, Malte Hagener, Guido Kirsten and Kristoffer Noheden provided invaluable input on the work in progress, as did Jan Olsson, Marina Dahlquist, Ina Blom, Lars Gustaf Andersson, Staffan Ericson and Patricia Pisters. In 2016, Patricia invited me to spend the spring as a visiting scholar at the University of Amsterdam, a spring that ended up lasting the whole summer since I just could not leave my new home – a city that saw the pieces of the research for this book starting to fall into place. I particularly want to thank Patricia and Bernd Herzogenrath who, as editors of the Thinking Media series, eventually made the publication of this book possible. Thank you also to Katie Gallof and Erin Duffy at Bloomsbury for guiding me through the whole process. In addition to the ones already mentioned, a number of vibrant intellectual milieux have been essential for the development of the ideas that constitute this book. Concordia University in Montreal co-funded my participation in a one-week media archaeology workshop organized by Darren Wershler, Jussi Parikka and Lori Emerson. The workshop presented me with some of the sharpest minds that I have had the privilege to think media with. FilmForum in Gorizia has been a yearly feast of food for thought and drinks for the spirit, thanks to the superhuman organizing skills of Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto and others. Key parts of this book were first presented there, their transformation into chapters thus fuelled by feedback from Simone Venturini, Pepita Hesselberth, Jan Distelmeyer and others. And two film and media studies conferences organized by Ágnes Pethö and others at Sapientia University in Cluj-Napoca have also been of great value, not least thanks to Susan Felleman who engaged with this project at its earliest stages with an enthusiasm and intellectual edge that provided me with fuel for years. Marta Mund and Oscar Rozenkrantz, my dear, dear parents. All words fade in the light of our feedback loops of love. Thank you for a life of

Acknowledgements

ix

sharing ideas and aesthetic experiences, but most of all, thank you for the unfaltering support without which I would not have made it to where I am today. I dedicate this book to my beloved parents and to my best friend Adam H. Norén – a life-long source of love, laughs, original ideas and great inspiration. We took a leap from those swings in kindergarten and we’ll land in the rocking chairs of the retirement home.



Conditions



Condition 1 What is videographic cinema?

In June 1957, at the peak of an institutional rivalry between Hollywood and broadcast TV, Warner Bros. released a powerful attack on what was seen as the deceptive nature of television. A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957) was neither the first nor the last film to show the TV industry in a bad light. By then, Universal Pictures had already produced The Glass Web (Jack Arnold, 1953) in which the researcher for a TV show, Crime of the Week, becomes a murderer.1 And less than two months after the release of A Face in the Crowd, the 20th Century Fox comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, 1957) would satirize the world of TV advertising, with playful jabs thrown at the medium’s limitations: the small size of the screen, its lack of colour and its bad signal reception. But A Face in the Crowd did not just deliver a more sombre and sophisticated punch: a warning about the dangers of a mass medium that could carry a demagogue to the top ranks of the entertainment industry and politics. It may also have been the first to incorporate actual video images in an original and conceptually charged way. If so, it marks the emergence of a new kind of cinema, one that incorporates video images to imagine the implications – future, present or past – of the various institutional practices that video technologies have engendered, from TV broadcasting to surveillance and home-viewing. Fast-forward to October 1972, and the publication of a special issue of American Cinematographer titled ‘Videotape & Film’. By that time, videotape had already been on the market for some sixteen years, first as a storage medium for broadcast TV, and then, as cheaper and handier formats were introduced, as a medium for artists, activists, therapists and other kinds of practitioners. But it was around the turn of the 1970s that video’s quality, combined with the possibility to make satisfying transfers to 35mm film caught the attention of a film industry that suddenly asked itself this question: Will videotape replace photochemical film as a production medium for For an extensive discussion of ‘TV fantasy films’ from the 1950s, and the historical context from which they emerged, see the chapter ‘The Glass Web: Unraveling the Videophobia of Postwar Hollywood Cinema’, in Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 137–91.

1

4

Videographic Cinema

motion pictures?2 The sum of contributions to said issue imply that the key question for the 1970s film industry was whether video could do what film does, only cheaper and faster. However, if there seemed to be only limited interest in the aesthetic specificities of videography vis-à-vis film,3 a different attitude was already being cultivated among artists and theorists. Gene Youngblood’s influential 1970 book Expanded Cinema not only was among the first texts to theorize the emerging field of video art but also includes a chapter specifically dedicated to the impact of videography on filmmaking. Introducing the concept of ‘videographic cinema’, Youngblood analyses a number of experimental works in which the processing and synthesis of video and film produce images that transcend the expressive capacities of each medium.4 By the early 1970s, video had thus spawned a commercially driven movement that was set on shooting motions pictures on colour video of the highest available quality, so as to look as much as possible like any other film, in order to be distributed on 35mm to be screened in US cinemas.5 At the same time, an emerging art scene was producing abstract experimental works like OffOn (Scott Bartlett, 1967): multiple layers of superimposed photochemical loops transferred to video and combined with additional video sources – a complex set-up of video processing tools involving TV cameras shooting monitors screening film loops, to the point where the images break down into the vibrant and colourful patterns of ‘video feedback’.6 A financial Knowing in retrospect that this never happened makes the almost unanimous optimism in said issue somewhat curious. It should be less surprising considering that several contributors had financial interests in promoting such a change. See John D. Lowry, ‘Electronic Cinematography … A Reality Now’, American Cinematographer 53, no. 10 (October 1972): 1128–9, 1186–7; Jack A. Mauck, ‘If Tape Had Been First’, American Cinematographer 53, no. 10 (October 1972): 1148–9, 1176; Jack B. McClenhan, ‘A New Kid on the Block’, American Cinematographer 53, no. 10 (October 1972): 1124–5. All three authors represent companies invested in video production. 3 The question of production costs runs like a thread through the various articles in said issue, making the benefits of videotape largely a financial question. For an exception, see Richard Patterson, ‘Electronic Special Effects,’ American Cinematographer 53, no. 10 (October 1972): 1160–1A, 1163, 1180–3. The article describes a variety of special effects made possible by video processing. 4 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: P. Dutton & Co, 1970), 317–36. 5 On the production of a theatrical feature film shot on videotape, Santee (Gary Nelson, 1973), see James Willcockson, ‘Shooting Theatrical Features with Electronic Equipment’, American Cinematographer 53, no. 10 (October 1972): 1140–1, 1153. 6 Video feedback is a visual effect that can occur when a video camera is aimed at a monitor that is simultaneously transmitting the image that the camera captures. A short-circuit is created between input and output, making the image multiply into an infinite loop of patterns and movements that behave autonomously, but can be controlled. Pioneers in video art were largely preoccupied with this effect and its conceptual implications. On the production of OffOn, see Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 318–20. 2



Condition 1

5

opportunity for the film industry, video engendered for the art scene a ‘metamorphosis of technologies’,7 a means for expanding the experiential horizons offered by cinema, in order to produce new forms of consciousness. It would be easy to keep defining videographic cinema according to this dividing line between its commercial and artistic manifestations. However, it would also reproduce the very gap that this book aims to fill. From Lonesome Rhodes’s (Andy Griffith) first encounter with his own image in a TV studio in A Face in the Crowd to the old VHS rental tape patina of the 1980s action pastiche Kung Fury (David Sandberg, 2015), videography provided cinema with new kinds of aesthetically and conceptually charged images that deserve to be described. A largely neglected historical presence spanning six decades, videographic cinema has become ripe for a wider study now that the obsolescence of analogue video allows for a comprehensive view. This book sets out answer three questions concerning such a corpus. 1. How has videography reconditioned the expressive capacities of cinema? Analogue video has traditionally been studied as a distinctive art discipline or a consumer-grade mass medium. Its relation to cinema has mostly been framed as functions of storage and distribution of films. Considerably less attention has been paid to video as a distinguishable element in films, and when it has, the focus has been on a small set of canonical films that reflect on dominant video practices. Engaging with a larger body of heterogeneous works, spanning from the 1950s until the 2010s, this book asks: What new images and imaginaries emerged as cinema incorporated videographic elements? But also: How and under what conditions did these change over time? 2. How can cinema reframe our historical understanding of video as a medium? Definitions of video as an art or as a mass medium have conditioned our conceptions regarding what it was or could have been. As an art, video has historically been framed as a counter-force to mass media. As a mass medium, it has often been framed as a threat. What happens if its history is written from the point of view of the plurality of conceptions that it gave rise to as an element in films? 3. What are the media conditions for the shifting expressions of videographic cinema? The scarce research on what this study frames as videographic cinema tends to focus on how certain films reflect on video spectatorship.8 Ibid., 318. See, for instance, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), and the chapter ‘The Video-in-the-Text: A Phenomenology and Narratology of Hybrid Spectatorship’, in There’s No Place Like Home Video, ed. James M. Moran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 163–203.

7 8

6

Videographic Cinema In those studies, theorizing video experience gains a privilege over studying the conditions of existence for the expressions that produce said experiences. This study shifts the vantage point from the spectator to the media themselves, asking: Under what technical, historical, and institutional conditions have specific video images and imaginaries emerged and transformed since they first appeared in cinema in the late 1950s?

These questions will be answered through a method defined as an archaeology of videographic cinema, a set of terms that require some clarification. Framed as Conditions 1 and 2 (since they constitute the theoretical and methodological conditions for the book at hand), the first two chapters will define videographic cinema, archaeology and video itself. The definitions are not to be read in universal or normative terms but as purely operative for the purposes of this study. * * * This book defines as videographic cinema theatrical films that incorporate analogue video images.9 Since the 1950s, numerous films from around the world have accumulated into a body of works that fall under this definition. Some individual cases, most notably perhaps The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), are well-known and have become emblematic of the cinematic treatment of video technologies. Others, like THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971), may be relatively well-known, but are rarely discussed from a videographic vantage point. Many more, like the French reality TV satire The Model Couple (Le Couple témoin, William Klein, 1977) or the British science fiction film AntiClock (Jane Arden and Jack Bond, 1979), are rarely ever discussed at all, as they have largely been forgotten. This book privileges the last two categories. There is a correlation between the cases that could be called canonical, their years of production and the video practices that they treat. From the fantastic like Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) and The Ring to the realistic like Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, 1992), or even the mundane like Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989), these are all films made between the 1980s and the early 2000s that reflect on then-dominant modes of home video consumption: camcorders, VCRs, videocassettes and so on. These are The definition does not exclude recent films shot on digital HD as a substitute for photochemical (35mm) film, granted they incorporate analogue video elements, nor does it exclude recent films shot entirely on obsolete analogue video formats, granted they were intended for theatrical screening.

9



Condition 1

7

also the films, the decades and the practices that have preoccupied the few published studies on the cinematic treatment of video, including James M. Moran’s chapter ‘The Video-in-the-Text: A Phenomenology and Narratology of Hybrid Spectatorship’ in his 2002 book There’s No Place Like Home Video; and Caetlin Benson-Allott’s 2013 book Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (the only English-language monograph thus far entirely dedicated to conceptualizing the impact of home video on the cinematic imaginaries).10 Besides video art, which has received considerable scholarly attention for many years, it is home video that has come to dominate the interest of scholars, increasingly so from a historical perspective. The obsolescence of analogue video has inspired several cultural histories in the recent decade, most notably perhaps Joshua M. Greenberg’s From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video; and Lucas Hilderbrand’s Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright.11 Expanding the horizons of existing research, this study shifts the focus from canonical cases and dominant modes to a larger body of works that are conditioned by and reflect on a wider range of video practices. Produced over a period of six decades, the often obscure but enlightening case studies that constitute the studied corpus – found through years of actively searching for videographic films in various databases12 – have been selected on account of two interrelated functions. They constitute nodes in a conceptual mapping of videographic cinema in its great variety, but they are also empirical examples for a historical tracking of how this ‘map’ changes over time. In the end, the aim is to provide an expanded understanding of video itself as an inherently heterogeneous, historically shifting and epistemically unstable medium.

See also Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Screen Nightmares: Video, Fernsehen und Gewalt im Film (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2010), a monograph on cinematic imaginaries of TV and video-related violence published in German a few years earlier. Both focus on a small selection of canonical case studies, including Videodrome and The Ring. 11 Joshua M. Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008); Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 12 Databases that have been used in the search for potential case studies include IMDb​.com, the databases available through the Swedish Film Institute (Film & Television Literature Index; FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals; and Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive), as well as various online forums and communities. Titles were also discovered by chance while studying written sources concerning specific cases. Not least in American Cinematographer, articles about particular films often include references to other films that have used similar techniques. Such references sometimes became new case studies for the project. 10

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Videographic Cinema

There is a serious gap in the studied corpus that needs to be addressed. The vast majority of the videographic films encountered during the research were made by male filmmakers and/or are told from a male protagonist’s point of view. If they make claims about video’s effects on human existence, they risk recapitulating the androcentric error that male experience can be substituted for a universal one. One way to remedy this problem would be to gender the material, which would require a gendering of video. Gendering video is a theoretical project that can be approached from various perspectives that will yield very different results. In Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium, Michael Z. Newman shows how the early marketing of the VCR masculinized it by highlighting its high technicity (traditionally coded as male).13 From a very different vantage point (a biologist reading of the VCR’s obsolescence), Benson-Allott’s ‘VCR Autopsy’ finds that ‘the VCR presents its surgeon with female anatomy out of order, with labia that open onto a womb that waits for another womb [the videocassette] to fill it with a video-child it will deliver through ovaries and fallopian tubes that run through a circuit board and into your TV’.14 A problem with both examples is that they solve androcentrism by applying anthropomorphic matrices of sexual difference to an apparatus that is not only non-human but also non-biological, and thus inherently sexless. This book studies videographic cinema, which already implies a dual vantage point: video’s look at cinema and cinema’s look at video. Privileging the vantage points of the two media has meant avoiding the anthropomorphism that seems to be a prerequisite for an analysis of videographic cinema as a gendered body of works. This is not to say that such analyses are irrelevant, let alone impossible. On the contrary, one aim of this overarching study is to inspire future ones that fill such conceptually charged gaps. A more active omission from the very definition of videographic cinema, and thus from the corpus with which this book is concerned, are the considerable number of films that have imagined video without using actual video images. As early as 1908, Georges Méliès’s Long Distance Wireless Photography (La photographie électrique à distance) played with the concept of television. Needless to say, these ‘TV’ images were photochemical effects. An international database edited by Richard Koszarski and Doron Galili lists more than hundred films made before 1939 that represent television.15 For Michael Z. Newman, Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 47–50. 14 Caetlin Benson-Allott, ‘VCR Autopsy’, Journal of Visual Culture 6, no. 2 (1 August 2007): 179. 15 Richard Koszarski and Doron Galili, ‘Television in the Cinema before 1939: An International Annotated Database, with an Introduction by Richard Koszarski’, E-Media Studies 5, no. 1 (2016), https​:/​/jo​​urnal​​s​.dar​​tmout​​h​.edu​​/cgi-​​bin​/W​​ebObj​​ects/​​Journ​​als​.w​​ oa​/xm​​lpag​e​​/4​/ar​​ticle​​/471.​ 13



Condition 1

9

reasons that will be discussed in detail in Chapter 1, it is highly unlikely that even the later of the listed titles would have used actual video images. While they were technically available by the 1930s, complications with capturing electronic images on film would keep most film productions from even attempting to do so, developing instead a preference for photochemical techniques like matte and rear projections, through which video images would be simulated. These techniques would still be in use in the 1980s.16 The technical definition of videographic cinema that informs this book is meant to provide a clear demarcation from the countless films that simulate videography by photochemical means. Only films that capture actual video will qualify (for a discussion about definitions of video, see ‘Where is Video/ When is Video?’). This has less to with do with the kind of ontological idealism with which theorists from André Bazin to Paolo Cherchi Usai and D. N. Rodowick have celebrated and then mourned the uniqueness of photochemical film.17 This study does not intend to establish an equivalent idealist ontology of the videographic image. It has to do with acknowledging that the material differences between videographic and photochemical images condition the expressive capacities of each medium; differences that are crucial for the tensions that their combination then provides. Fritz Lang’s last Dr Mabuse film, the black and white The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse, 1960), is a case in point for the way in which simulations of videography neutralize the tensions inherent to videographic cinema. The film unfolds in a modern hotel built by the Nazis during the Second World War to spy on foreign visitors. Around halfway into the film, as we are looking at a dialogue between two characters in the hotel restaurant, the camera slowly zooms out from what we mistook for the film’s non-diegetic frame to reveal that we have been spying on the couple through CCTV (closed-circuit television). Thus, we learn that the hotel is equipped with hidden cameras that transmit to a control room in the basement, where a mysterious figure secretly monitors everything that goes on in the hotel. This A late and particularly unconvincing simulation of a TV screen through a matte can be seen in The Osterman Weekend (Sam Peckinpah, 1983). Both parts photochemically produced, the framing part (the TV set) is a grainy and faded photograph, while the ‘TV’ image inserted into it is a crisp and colourful 35mm image. In effect, the expected contrast between a grainy, low-resolution TV image and the sharp photochemical capture of its physical surroundings is inverted. The ‘TV’ image is as sharp and colourful as only a 35mm image can be, while the TV set that is supposedly transmitting it is as grainy and faded as it might have looked if it were a cinematic capture of a TV transmission. 17 See ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray, ed. André Bazin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 9–16; Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2001); D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 16

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Videographic Cinema

moment of revelation is entirely conditioned on the fact that the video image is simulated by photochemical means (the slightly faded black and white suggesting rear projection). Captured and enhanced to theatrical screen size, a closed-circuit television image in 1960 would have looked like a pointillist grid due to its low resolution. Furthermore, the different frame rates of the TV monitor and the film camera would have been likely to generate the characteristic flickering effect known as ‘shutter bars’.18 In effect, the audience would immediately have identified an intrinsic difference within this image. While this seems to be the first book to pursue a wider historiography of videographic cinema – to track the shifting expressions of video through almost sixty years of filmmaking – a number of important attempts have been made to conceptualize the encounter between the two media. When Youngblood coined the term ‘videographic cinema’, he cited OffOn as the earliest example. According to Youngblood, true videographic cinema ‘is not filmed TV’ but is rather ‘a metamorphosis of technologies’19 – a condition that is as particular as it is vague, but which seems to mean that to qualify as such, the work requires a certain level of experimentation that pushes both film and video beyond their separate capacities. This would explain his selection of case studies: all the discussed examples are abstract, conceptual and nonnarrative works of media art.20 Notwithstanding their subordination to the framing concept of ‘expanded cinema’, the examples provided by Youngblood compress videographic cinema into a subcategory of media art, and are thus of limited use for this study, which primarily concerns theatrical features. This book’s definition of videographic cinema is thus conditioned not only on technology but also on a combination of technical, epistemic and spatial circumstances. The works in focus were made for theatrical screening, not the art gallery or museum. Without reducing the polyvocality of media art into anything akin to a unified discourse, it is the premise of this book The discrepancy between the frame rates of analogue video (25 fps for PAL; 29, 97 fps for NTSC) and photochemical film (24 fps) generates what has been termed the ‘roll bar’ or ‘shutter bar’ effect. It presents itself as flickering horizontal lines across video monitors captured on film. See Blain Brown, Cinematography: Theory and Practice: Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors (Waltham, MA: Focal Press, 2012), 310–11. 19 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 318. 20 Works mentioned include Bartlett’s OffOn (1967) and Moon (1969); Tom Dewitt’s The Leap (1968); Yud Jalkut: Beatles Electroniques (1966–72) and Videotape Study no. 3 (1968); Ture Sjölander, Lars Weck, Sven Höglund: Monument (1968); and Lutz Becker: Horizon (1966–68). Interestingly, Youngblood points out that Jud Yalkut’s works are an exception inasmuch as they were shot on video, thereby making it possible to consider them as ‘filmed TV’ (rather than as videographic cinema). This suggests that what makes videographic cinema cinematic for Youngblood has more to do with films being subjected to electronic treatments than electronic images being incorporated into cinema and/or screened cinematically. Ibid., 328. 18



Condition 1

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Figures I1.1 and I1.2  A shot in The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960) revealed to be a surveillance image as the (non-diegetic film) camera zooms out. that a closer look at videographic elements in theatrical films can provide perspectives that tend to fall outside of the scope of research on video art or the cultural histories of home-viewing practices. Here, Raymond Bellour might be among the first to approximate the focus of this book. In a series of essays written between 1980 and 1989, Bellour widens Youngblood’s scope to include theatrical features like The Mystery of Oberwald (Il mistero di Oberwald, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1980) and Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975), the last of which he credits with

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being ‘one of the works that most clearly inaugurates the transition from “cinema” toward something else’.21 In its interpenetration of human bodies made possible through ‘keying’,22 and in the lingual modulations made visible on the screen (videography not only is a kind of electronic writing in the metaphorical sense but also allows words to emerge, merge, and transform on/in the image itself), Bellour identifies what he finds to be two significant impacts that video has on the expressive capacities of cinema: it brings cinema closer to painting and literature.23 If cinema can be said to undergo a significant transformation through its incorporation of video,24 this transformation is irreducible to new semiotic structures or spectatorial modes. It is a transformation that occurs, first of all, in the material encounter between media technologies, which is to say in the image. Moran’s There’s No Place Like Home Video also discusses theatrical films with videographic elements, but conceptualizes them in a way that becomes antithetical to how videographic cinema is here defined. The framing concept of the ‘video-in-the-text’ already reveals a linguistic conception of film, within which video is ‘an imaginary apparatus: a narrative image, a semantic utterance, a dialect of expression’.25 Differences between video and film are, he writes, less conditioned by their technological constitutions than by ‘psychological and ideological connotations associated with each medium’s conventional practices’.26 The result of this shift away from the medium’s material conditions to the semiotic-phenomenological predisposition of the spectator, results in a model that makes little distinction between the therapy tapes in Next of Kin (Atom Egoyan, 1984), the family tapes in My Life (Bruce Joel Rubin, 1993) and home videos in The Simpsons (James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, and Sam Simon, 1989–). Moran does acknowledge the fact that the first were actually shot on video and the second simulated by photochemical means, while the third are animations. But the Raymond Bellour, Between-the-Images, ed. Raymond Bellour and Allyn Hardyck (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), 205. 22 Keying is the videographic version of the photochemical matte, a ‘special effect whereby the signal from one video source cuts a hole into another video source’. Types of keying include chroma-key, which ‘substitutes a particular color with an image from a different source’. Jack Keith and Vladimir Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology (Woburn, MA: Newnes, 2002), 162. 23 On his analysis of the relation between video-cinema-painting, see for instance, Bellour, Between-the-Images, 18–21, 51–56, 188–231 (including analysis of Numéro deux, ibid., 205–17). 24 Which is something else than video’s incorporation of cinema by way of its function as a storage and distribution medium for films; what could perhaps be defined as ‘cinematographic video’. 25 Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video, 171. 26 Ibid., 165. 21



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aesthetic-epistemic differences that might stem from their very different conditions are less interesting for Moran than the differences that all three evoke vis-à-vis film. What sparks Moran’s conception of the ‘video-in-the-text’ is a desire to overcome discourses that oppose video and film as ‘Oedipal adversaries’.27 His intention to acknowledge video as a meaningful element in cinema is rare and commendable. But it nonetheless results in its reduction from a distinctive technical medium to a textual signifier, a move that ‘saves’ video’s cultural significance by ‘killing’ its technicity. Even disregarding ontological arguments, neglecting the difference between a video image and its simulation is a risky move. If the aim is to understand video as a cultural phenomenon, the spectator’s predisposition to recognize certain devices as references to videography is already conditioned by video’s actual qualities. We recognize the image degradation in The Simpsons as an animated simulation of home video because video’s electromagnetic constitution conditions it to degrade in a very particular way. If, more specifically, the aim is to analyse videographic cinema, one should also acknowledge that there are differences between video and film (and even between different video formats) that give rise to very different aesthetic and epistemic expressions, and that have historically been difficult – sometimes even impossible – to achieve by other means. These include, but are not limited to, the characteristic colour, luminance, consistence and texture of the videographic image; the possibilities of producing video feedback loops and transmitting live; the seemingly infinite ways in which forms and figures can be modified in real time and keyed together; the very particular ways in which video images degrade; and also, the effect that occurs in the collusion between the different frame rates of video output and its cinematic capture. These are the flickering ‘roll bars; often seen on TV screens or video monitors in films. Moran argues that ‘medium specificity must be understood primarily as discourse, not as ontology. Distinctions among media are culturally constructed, and irreducible to the empirical. Techno-aesthetic definitions lead inevitably to determinist and essentialist prescriptions, which imply that a medium is self-identical, uniform, predictable, and predictive.’28 An archaeology of videographic cinema takes issue with a number of these claims. Medium specificity is reducible to discourse only insofar as the media conditions for discourse are acknowledged. Distinctions among media are culturally constructed at least partly on conditions set by media themselves. And techno-aesthetic definitions of media provide us with epistemological tools to investigate what Ibid., 163–4. Ibid., 31.

27 28

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media express and on what conditions they express it at a given moment. They are tools to study media in their historically shifting manifestations, which is precisely the opposite of defining them as self-identical, uniform, predictable and predictive technical forms. Neglecting technology as an important condition for media expressions risks producing the historical blind spot that Moran seeks to overcome. Moran suggests that ‘because [video’s] codes may be simulated by professional film and digital equipment, “home video” acts as a cinematic signifier untethered to a video apparatus altogether’.29 This argument is particularly curious in relation to the film that anchors it, Family Viewing (Atom Egoyan, 1987), in which the aesthetic tensions that video produces play a fundamental epistemic role. The visual composition of a camcorder capturing the bodies of an amateur pornographer (David Hemblen) and his mistress (Gabrielle Rose), who are simultaneously seen sitting in bed and on the video monitors in front of them, is conditioned on the instant feedback of live transmission. The noisy degradation of the old family tapes onto which these moments are recorded would hardly have been possible to simulate by digital means at a time when digital video was barely available.30 As Laura U. Marks has observed, analogue obsolescence around the early 2000s gave rise to a new investment in the particular ‘problems’ of analogue video, with artists importing signs of analogue decay into digital works.31 And yet, more than a decade later, filmmakers would still track down old analogue camcorders or process their material through VCRs, when they wanted to achieve a convincing look of analogue video (on videographic cinema in the digital age, see Chapter 6). Convincing simulations of analogue videography remain difficult to achieve today. Moran’s claim that a 1987 film might as well have done this by photochemical or digital means neglects the possibilities and limitations of each medium – in its historical-material specificity. Why a book on videographic cinema? Why study video through the lens of film? As Yvonne Spielmann has argued, video is perfectly capable of selfreflection; in fact, as the title of her book Video: The Reflexive Medium reveals, she argues it to be its very definition.32 On the other hand, countless cases of meta-cinema suggest that film is capable of doing the same. Media have a Ibid., 30. The first digital videotape recorder (Sony DVR-1000) was introduced in 1987, the same year that Family Viewing was released. See, for instance, Albert Abramson, The History of Television, 1942 to 2000 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2003), 215. 31 Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 152–3. 32 Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). 29 30



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tendency to highlight, and thus reflect on, their own processes of mediation. But the premise of this study is that different, no less illuminating, things occur when media reflect on each other. Productive tensions arise in the friction between media, at the level of both their (very often competing) institutional conditions and their distinctive audiovisual textures. Here, cinema has a very particular relation to video that allows such frictions to come fore in a unique way. Unlike the written text, which can only reflect on the moving image by translating it to something entirely different, language,33 film can literally incorporate videographic images while maintaining them aesthetically and epistemically identifiable as distinctive elements. And unlike the more abstract works that constitute the (self-reflexive) video art canon, cinema has also, by convention, developed a narrative form that allows for another kind of rich and explicit conceptualization of its videographic elements. The videographic films discussed in this study share many concerns with video art: questions of surveillance, therapy, mass media, memory and so on. But their narrative form provides their video images with imaginary frames that shed a different light on the epistemologically unstable conceptions of video as a technical medium.

As Bellour suggests, the moving image ‘is peculiarly unquotable, since the written text cannot restore to it what only the projector can produce; a movement, the illusion of which guarantees the reality’. Raymond Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, Screen 16, no. 3 (October 1975): 25. Film and video, on the other hand, are mutually ‘quotable’, insofar as neither one needs to ‘freeze’ the other – translate it into an entirely different order of signification – in order to ‘describe’ the other’s content.

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The meaning of ‘media archaeology’ has multiplied to the point where it is widely used as a framework for studies of historical media or contemporary media from historical perspectives.1 Important attempts to outline the contours of this ‘method’,2 ‘symptom’,3 ‘discipline’4 or ‘bundle of closely related approaches’5 include Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka; What is Media Archaeology? by Parikka; and the book chapter ‘Media Archaeology: Where Film History, Media Art and New Media (Can) Meet’ by Wanda Strauven,6 all of which bear witness to the plurality of the term as well as its inherent tensions, as it is used by scholars and/or artists who disagree on what it should entail.7 There seems to be some consensus that Michel Foucault and Friedrich Kittler constitute two key sources of inspiration,8 Thomas Elsaesser addresses media archaeology’s problem of demarcation in ‘Media Archaeology as Symptom’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 14, no. 2 (2016): 182. 2 Jussi Parikka recurrently uses the term ‘method’ in discussing what media archaeology is in What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). 3 Elsaesser suggests that media archaeology be treated as ‘a symptom rather than a method, as a place-holder rather than a research programme, as a response to various kinds of crises, rather than as a breakthrough innovative discipline, and I am asking myself to what extent is media archaeology itself an ideology, rather than a way of generating new kinds of secure knowledge’. Elsaesser, ‘Media Archaeology as Symptom’, 183, emphasis in original. 4 Geert Lovink cited in Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, ‘Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,’ in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 3. 5 Ibid., 2. 6 Wanda Strauven, ‘Media Archaeology: Where Film Studies, Media Art and New Media (Can) Meet’, in Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Julia Noordengraaf et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 59–79. 7 For instance, Huhtamo and Parikka’s summary of Zielinski’s approach is subtly critical. See section ‘Against the Grain of (Almost) Everything’ in Huhtamo and Parikka, Media Archaeology, 10–12. 8 Strauven suggests that ‘media archaeology starts where Foucault’s analyses end’, that is, with audiovisual media (as opposed to texts), which are the focus of Kittler’s analyses and the reason why he is ‘seen as the spiritual father of media archaeology’, 68. Others have been willing to pay more immediate credit to Foucault’s influence. See, for instance, Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? 6; Huhtamo and Parikka, Media Archaeology, 8–10; Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 26, 33; Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 55. 1



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but Foucault never lived to see the appropriation of his archaeology of knowledge by media scholars,9 while Kittler never wanted to be associated with the term.10 In other words, the very notion of media archaeology is plural, vague, contested and debated. Using a pragmatically assembled and modified set of approaches developed by scholars invested in media archaeology, this book defines media archaeology as a method that entails: the study of media conditions, the study of media images and imaginaries, and historiography theorized/theory historicized. The following sections will offer clarifications.

Media archaeology as the study of media conditions In this study, ‘media conditions’ are defined both as the conditions for the formation of a medium and as the conditions set by a medium in the formation of the expressions related to it. The double-meaning is intentional and is meant to overcome a tension within media archaeology itself. This tension must be addressed in order to clarify how ‘media conditions’ becomes an operative concept for an archaeology that studies the relation between actual media and media imaginaries. If Foucault and Kittler have been credited as being major influences on media archaeology, then their seemingly opposed perspectives point towards a tension within the field. Considering Kittler’s propensity for totalizing claims like ‘Media determine our situation’11 and ‘So-called Man […] is determined by technical standards’,12 his designation as a technological determinist should come as no surprise, and would seem to In their archaeology of media archaeology, Huhtamo and Parikka trace the notion back to C. W. Ceram’s 1965 book Archaeology of the Cinema; albeit with reservation: its method ‘hardly differed from the goals of traditional positivistic historical scholarship’. Instead, they cite Jacques Perrault’s 1981 book Mémoires de l’ombre et du son: Une archéologie de l’audio-visuel to engage with (media) archaeology under this label. Huhtamo and Parikka, Media Archaeology, 3–4. (Foucault died in 1984, so while, in theory, he might have had time to read Perrault’s book, he certainly did not live to see the establishment of the notion of ‘media archaeology’ based on his archaeology of knowledge.) 10 Ibid., 9. 11 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), xxxix. 12 The full quote reads: ‘So-called Man is not determined by attributes which philosophers confer on or suggest to people in order that they may better understand themselves; rather, He is determined by technical standards.’ Friedrich A. Kittler, ‘The World of the Symbolic – A World of the Machine’, in Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997), 133. 9

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be at odds with a Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge that ‘remains within the dimensions of discourse’.13 The straw man version of each might frame Foucault as the discursive determinist who reduces any technical medium to the set of statements through which it is conceptualized, and Kittler as the technological determinist who reduces any statement to the technical media that dominate the age of its enunciation. Their positions would seem antithetical and incompatible: one frames discourse as the condition for media, and the other frames media as the condition for discourse. Kittler did accuse Foucault of being too focused on the textual deposits of culture, thus neglecting technical media as determinant forces for the very discourses that he analysed.14 Media archaeologists have been quick to emphasize this criticism; Strauven even goes as far as to suggest that ‘Kittler’s technologically determined media history could be considered antiFoucauldian’.15 But the divide between the two is hardly as clear-cut. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, the oft-cited locus of Foucault’s influence on media archaeology, Foucault acknowledges that material media must be counted among the conditions of existence for any given statement. Furthermore, the ‘identity’ of any given statement changes according to its material support.16 That said, this should not be mistaken for a ‘hardware theory’ of technical determinations. For Foucault, it is not the difference between ink and electron that transforms a statement as it travels from book to TV; he finally gives less importance to the technical side of media than to their status – as granted by the economies and institutions that govern them.17 On the other hand, Kittler need not be reduced to a hardware theorist either. As Huhtamo and Parikka explain: ‘From early on he emphasized the role of institutions as nodes in the networks of technical media.’18 Furthermore, his technical determinations are deduced from texts; often literary, sometimes fictional. ‘Discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film rolls’,19 Kittler writes in his critique of Foucault. He goes on to prove this thesis through analyses of media descriptions in discourse. Kittler’s theories

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 85. 14 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 5. 15 Strauven, 68. See also Huhtamo and Parikka, Media Archaeology, 8; and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, ‘Translators Introduction: Friedrich A. Kittler and Media Discourse Analysis’, in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, xx. 16 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 112–13. 17 Ibid., 115–16. 18 Huhtamo and Parikka, Media Archaeology, 8–9. 19 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 5. 13



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on technical conditions are products of a method not unlike the one that he claims cannot account for his objects of study.20 Foucault’s perhaps most influential concept for disciplines concerned with visual media (Film Studies, Media Studies, Surveillance Studies, and so on), insofar as it concerns the relation between vision and power, is an opticarchitectural prison model.21 What is Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century ‘Panopticon’, which functions by way of the absolute division between seer and seen, and which, by this very division, produces a new kind of subjectivity, if not a visual medium that determines a situation, and sets the standard for a new relation between So-called Men?22 If so, Foucault’s concept of panopticism is already a proto-Kittlerian media theory – a study of the media conditions for the production of new forms of subjectivity. Conversely, Kittler’s own theories of the production of subjectivity acknowledge the entangled relation between technologies and institutions. Consider one of his many provocative claims: that Sigmund Freud’s conception of the ‘psychic apparatus’ was entirely determined by the media of his time; that ‘Freud’s materialism reasoned only as far as the information machines of his era – no more, no less’.23 Kittler identifies numerous technical metaphors in Freud’s own discourse to conclude that ‘the foundation of psychoanalysis was based on the end of the print monopoly and on the historical separation of different media. Telephone, film, phonograph and print […] shaped the psychic apparatus.’24 But Kittler is not one to neglect a reverse side to this causal relation. In one of many thought-provoking sections of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, he cites nineteenth-century poet and author Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who asks himself why something as simple as the phonograph took so many millennia to invent, when much more complicated inventions had been made previously. ‘Abraham might have built it’, the symbolist speculates, ‘and made a recording of his calling from on high. A steel stylus, a leaf of silver foil or something like it, a cylinder of copper, and one could fill a storehouse with all the voices of Heaven and Earth.’25 Kittler’s answer is that the invention of sound recording has a historical a priori. If the Following Winthrop-Young and Wutz, we might define Kittler’s method as a ‘media discourse analysis’. Ibid., xi, xx, xxxviii. Kittler’s affiliations are expressed no less explicitly by David E. Wellbery: ‘Kittler’s discourse analysis follows the Foucauldian lead in that it seeks to delineate the apparatuses of power, storage, transmission, training, reproduction, and so forth that make up the conditions of factual discursive occurrences.’ ‘Foreword’, in Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), xii. 21 See chapter ‘Panopticism’, in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195–288. 22 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201–2. 23 Kittler, ‘The World of the Symbolic’, 134. 24 Ibid., 135. 25 Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle Adam cited in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 28–9. 20

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invention of the phonograph engendered an analogy between the phonograph and the soul, this analogy would have been scandalous, Kittler writes, before science had reconceptualized the soul itself as the nervous system and the brain.26 The structure of the argument is questionable: Kittler speculates that the phonograph-soul analogy would have been scandalous before the ‘soul’ became a ‘brain’, and he uses this as a retroactive explanation for the phonograph’s delayed invention (as if the invention of the phonograph waited until its conceptual connotations would be deemed acceptable). Potentially a fallacy, the argument nevertheless suggests that Kittler’s reasoning is irreducible to a oneway causality of technological determinations. It seems to follow a feedback model according to which the media that determine conceptions are already conditioned by conceptions that are themselves conditioned by institutions, so that ‘thanks to the invention of the phonograph, the very theories that were its historical a priori can now optimize their analogous models of the brain’.27 Rather than emphasize their differences, this study places media archaeology at the intersection between Kittler’s media theory and Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, without subscribing to anything like an ‘orthodox’ application of either of the two. In the most general sense, Foucauldian archaeology could be condensed into ‘the systematic description of a discourse-object’ in order to uncover its ‘conditions of existence’.28 But The Archaeology of Knowledge prescribes a rigorous set of rules that unfold as a series of binaries (archaeology is/not) so numerous – and sometimes vague – that they neutralize the possibility of its doctrinal application, even more so if non-discursive expressions are to be analysed. Unsurprisingly, few if any media archaeologists have attempted such a task, opting instead for readings where selected aspects have served as inspiration.29 What this study extracts Ibid., 29. Ibid. 28 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 30, 156. A ‘discourse-object’ could be something like ‘madness’, the historically shifting conceptions of which Foucault traces in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 29 The variety of approaches defined as ‘media archaeology’ correlate partly with the aspect of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge that happens to have been deemed useful. Ernst, who represents the ‘hardware theory’ of the German kind, states that ‘by looking behind the human-machine interfaces (such as the computer monitor) and by making invisible communication processing evident, an archaeology of media, as the notion implies, follows Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge in not discovering uses of media in public discourse but instead reconstructing the generative matrix created by mediatic dispositifs’. Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 71. For Elsaesser, on the other hand, Foucault’s ‘deconstruction of linear causality, the myths of single origins, and his distrust of all teleologies of historical progress, including Marxist ones’ have served as inspiration for rethinking film history. ‘Likewise inspired by Foucault was the emphasis on institutions, customs, habits, and unwritten rules as historical agents, invariably expressing relations of power.’ Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, 32–3. 26 27



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from both Kittler and Foucault is an imperative to study (media) expressions30 from the point of view of their conditions of existence, both in terms of the media through which they are expressed, and the wider network of institutions and practices that shape the conceptions of the media in question. What is hopefully gained from this refusal to pick sides between a more emphatically technical or discursive-institutional vantage point is a multilayered analysis that avoids reducing media conditions to single determinations. What might be lost is something of the systematically defined methodological borders of either approach. Lacking methodological rigour is a problem that haunts media archaeology and that has been addressed in recent years.31 It is outside of the scope of this study to solve it, and the refusal to pick sides might even be seen as a symptom of the problem. It is nevertheless a risk worth taking to acknowledge both the institutional conditions under which a video practice can emerge and the ways in which the expressions that come out of said practice are conditioned by the technologies that mediate them. As will be shown, technologies, institutions and expressions are intertwined. To unravel their entangled relations, it is necessary to acknowledge the conditions for and the conditions set by a medium.

Media archaeology as the study of media images and imaginaries An archaeology of videographic cinema seeks to account not only for the evident differences between video and film but also for the finer ones between video formats. Family Viewing serves as an illustrative example. A symphony of visual textures, the film includes CCTV surveillance footage and VHS records shot by a private detective, both of which capture sex worker Aline (Arsinée Khanjian). There are the family tapes of protagonist Van (Aidan Tierney) and the sex tapes taped over them by his pornographer father, in a perverse game of recording and erasure. There is also the texture that isolates the family home. Not as crisp as the photochemical world outside of it nor as noisy as the family tapes, it has the soft, glowing look of professional 1980s television. The glossy, artificial look of sitcoms, porn or soap operas, it allows Family Viewing to visualize Van’s ‘canned’ life. An archaeology of

For an archaeology concerned with audiovisual materials, it is necessary to go beyond Foucault’s emphasis on ‘statements’, and include ‘expressions’ in the wider sense of aesthetics and concepts. 31 Elsaesser, ‘Media Archaeology as Symptom’, 182. 30

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videographic cinema refuses to downplay these nuances. It acknowledges that each format has its history, its aesthetics and its conceptions.32 The term ‘media images’ is here simply meant to be understood as images generated in/with technical media: photographs and photochemical film; analogue and digital video images; computer generated images; and so on. There is a vivid and important theoretical discussion regarding the ontological difference between different kinds of media images (not least between the photochemical, the electronic and the numerical image), and there are even concerns regarding whether what is visible as videographic output really qualifies as image.33 This study does not subscribe to video’s disqualification from being defined as an image simply based on its processual condition of existence; that is, the fact that both recorded and live analogue video images are visible only on account of an incessant electronic ‘writing’ of lines. The signal processing at the base of video does not exclude the designation of its visible output as ‘image’. ‘Media imaginaries’ needs a more detailed description, not least to avoid confusion with its psychoanalytical connotations. The term is not a media archaeological appropriation of ‘the Imaginary’ of Jacques Lacan. The case studies in this book are primarily fiction films that incorporate real analogue video images. While there might be instances of video being captured for pure aesthetic effect, even a seemingly random shot like the few seconds of flickering TV screens in Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) mediate connotations conditioned by their own historical time and the functions of video in it. It is the various connotations and conceptions engendered by and with regards to media that are here defined as ‘media imaginaries’. Perhaps for all media archaeology, but certainly for the kind that is invested in conceptual analyses of aesthetic objects, the notion of ‘media imaginaries’ is preferable to ‘media fantasies’ or ‘media discourses’. The former have too All case studies discussed in this book have been watched under conditions that have allowed for the discrimination of said nuances. Those that have not been available for theatrical screening have been watched in HD on a fifty-inch plasma TV (the organic colours and movement of this obsolete technology having a particularly good capacity to reproduce the looks of analogue film and video). A particular problem was caused by THX 1138. Due to George Lucas’s propensity for adding digital effects to his old films whenever they are re-released in digitally restored version, the original versions have become increasingly difficult to obtain. For this study, two versions were viewed and compared: the remastered HD edition (pristine, but with the added digital effects), and a digitized copy of an old LaserDisc release (considerably lower in visual quality, but without the added digital effects). 33 Reservations to the designation of videographic output as ‘image’ are expressed in Spielmann, 4. See also chapter ‘An Image That Is Not “One”’, in Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 131–41, in which he discusses the different ontologies of cinematic, electronic and digital ‘images’. 32



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strong connotations of being antithetical to the real conditions under which imaginaries emerge while the latter of a purely language-based analysis (that might imply the subordination of all expressions to linguistic structures).34 Imaginaries are produced as much through discourse as they are through non-discursive audiovisual elements. The notion of media imaginaries is preferable not only on account of its connotations but also on account of inscribing this study in a niche of media archaeology to which it owes much inspiration. Edited by Eric Kluitenberg, Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium is a key publication in this sub-field of research.35 In his contribution to Huhtamo and Parikka’s Media Archaeology, which dedicates a third part to imaginary media, Kluitenberg writes that the project reveals ‘how permeable the boundaries between the domains of imaginary and realized media can be’, and ‘how both domains continuously help constitute each other’.36 Siegfried Zielinski concurs in his contribution to Kluitenberg’s earlier anthology: When we set foot on the slippery terrain of media, [the relationship between what is imagined and what in fact exists] […] can no longer be clearly distinguished in ontological terms. We are dealing with readings on a scale of priorities where the needle sometimes swings more to one side, sometimes to the other. The shadowy Hadean world of advanced media technologies is a true twilight zone.37

The notion of ‘media fantasy’ is proposed by Young in The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, a book with which this study shares part of its approach: to understand specific media through their imaginary manifestations in film. For Young, ‘fantasy’ is preferable because ‘the strongest pejorative connotations of the term – delusion, impossibility – make fantasy texts all the more useful for reconstructing the forgotten futures of film and its rivals. Fantasy may be the only node of cultural practice from which we can excavate the most fervent wishes and strongly held beliefs, both destructive and socially progressive, that saturated the emergent identities of media before becoming obscured by institutional conventions and sheer, mundane familiarity.’ Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, xxiv. 35 Eric Kluitenberg, ed., Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006). 36 Eric Kluitenberg, ‘On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media’, in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 49. 37 Siegfried Zielinski, ‘Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola: A Case Study on Athanasius Kircher’s World of Apparatus between the Imaginary and the Real’, in Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium, ed. Eric Kluitenberg (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006), 29–30. 34

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The reluctance of media archaeology to define its limits is mirrored by a reluctance to provide a clear demarcation for what imaginary media actually are. Hence, Zielinski can include not only ‘impossible’ but also ‘untimely’ and ‘conceptual’ media in his definition,38 while Parikka extends it to include the ‘non-human side’ of any technical medium: ‘Technical media are media of non-solid, non-phenomenological worlds (electromagnetic fields, highlevel mathematics, speeds beyond human comprehension), and because of that ephemeral nature they are often described in the language of the fabulous, the spectacular.’39 Parikka thus defines actual media as imaginary media based on discourses conditioned by their alien quality. The problem with such a general definition is that it confuses imaginary media with media imaginaries: the former are fictions, albeit with actual as well as imaginary media conditions; the latter are the sum of connotations engendered by and with regards to an actual medium. This book deals with both categories, but it makes an epistemological distinction between them. The ‘Mnemopticon’ in the science fiction film Anti-Clock – an apparatus with the capacity to extract and display the repressed memories of a subject – is an imaginary medium. Its function is fully fictional, even if it is built from pieces of actual video equipment. The more general use of video images as metaphors for memory, however, is part of video’s wider media imaginary. It is worth noting that Kluitenberg discards Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge: given that imaginary media are irreducible to ‘discourse-objects’, their ‘systematic description’ becomes difficult to realize.40 It is a case of the object exceeding the rigorous rules of the method. But the implicit question raised is whether an archaeology of knowledge is constrained to discourse analysis, or if other archaeologies are conceivable. Foucault certainly suggests so; in a passage titled ‘Other Archaeologies’, he mentions painting as a potential object of study.41 Kluitenberg thus discards Foucault on the account Zielinski’s definitions are as follows: ‘Untimely media / apparatus / machines. Media devised and designed either much too late or much too early, realized in technical and media practice either centuries before or centuries after being invented. Conceptual media / apparatus / machines. Artefacts that were only ever sketched as models or drafted as concrete ideas on paper, but never actually built. Impossible media / apparatus / machines. Imaginary media in the true sense, by which I mean hermetic and hermeneutic machines, that is machines that signify something, but where the initial design or sketch makes clear that they cannot actually be built, and whose implied meanings nonetheless have an impact on the factual world of media.’ Ibid., 30. 39 Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? 62. 40 Kluitenberg, ‘Archaeology of Imaginary Media’, 54. 41 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 213–14. For a concrete example, see Foucault’s analysis of perspective and/as subjectivity in Diego Velázquez painting Las Meninas (1656), in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 3–16. 38



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of an archaeological orthodoxy to which not even Foucault himself seems to have subscribed, let alone other media archaeologists who have been more than willing to select useful elements from Foucault’s archaeological method.42 Discarding Foucault, Kluitenberg’s approach neglects a key task of media archaeology, namely, to study the media conditions for the imagined. His approach becomes more a cultural psychology: ‘Central to the archaeology of imaginary media in the end are not the machines, but the human aspirations that more often than not are left unresolved by the machines they produce.’43 There is nothing inherently wrong in such an approach, but it does make it more difficult to truly investigate the blurred lines between actual and imaginary media. One could perhaps call this approach a reverse engineering of Marshall McLuhan’s. Whereas McLuhan frames actual media as ‘Extensions of Man’,44 Kluitenberg frames imaginary media as ‘compensatory machines’ for humanity’s shortcomings.45 According to the former approach, actual media extend our communicative faculties; according to the latter, imaginary media are an answer to their insistent limitations. The relation between the two is discussed by Kluitenberg primarily from the vantage point of the cultural desires that unite them. A TV ad proclaiming ‘Imagine being in two places at once!’ is read side by side with the teleportation machine in Star Trek (Gene Roddenberry, 1966–9); both are used as examples of ‘an almost universally recognizable aspiration’ to transcend space.46 What remains unsaid in this reading is how television, as a historically specific medium that emerges at a particular time and that showcases a particular set of qualities, might condition said TV ad (the implications of which are a spatial split/subjective doubling); and how, conversely, the teleportation machine (or, for that matter, its mediation) is conditioned by a number of See Michel Foucault, Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan, Foucault at the Movies, ed. and trans. Clare O’Farrell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). This recent attempt to extrapolate from Foucault’s scattered comments on selected films seeds for something like an archaeology of cinematic knowledge confirms what media archaeologists like Elsaesser and Ernst have intuited: that it might be more constructive to use selected aspects of Foucauldian archaeology to study certain non-discursive objects (media and film), than to look for what Foucault himself had to say about those particular objects. 43 ‘Central to the archaeology of imaginary media in the end are not the machines, but the human aspirations that more often than not are left unresolved by the machines they produce.’ Eric Kluitenberg, ‘Second Introduction to an Archaeology of Imaginary Media,’ in Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium, ed. Eric Kluitenberg (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006), 9. 44 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994). 45 Kluitenberg, ‘Second Introduction’, 8. 46 Kluitenberg, ‘Archaeology of Imaginary Media’, 62–3. 42

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real, historically specific media technologies – including TV itself. While sharing Kluitenberg’s reservations regarding the limits of discourse analysis, this book subscribes to the questions formulated by Parikka: ‘What are the conditions for the media imaginaries of the modern mind and contemporary culture, and, on the other hand, how do imaginaries condition the way we see actual technologies?’47

Media archaeology as historiography theorized/theory historicized In a July 2011 interview published in The Guardian, Slavoj Žižek states: ‘I am a Hegelian looking for facts to fit the theory.’48 Žižek has reached an unusual level of mainstream success for a contemporary philosopher, largely thanks to his popular documentaries The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes, 2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2012). His Marxist–Lacanian–Hegelian thought is made accessible through its illustration by well-known films. In that same interview, Žižek, who also likes to fuse film analyses into his political-philosophical writings, claims to have written about Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) in his latest book before having seen the film; ‘but having seen it I was right to attack it’, Žižek concludes – the ethos of the theoretical a priori thus coming full circle.49 A very different approach to cinema can be found in the thought of another philosopher, namely, Gilles Deleuze, whose two books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image lack Žižek’s popular appeal, but have been all the more influential among film scholars.50 This work is a taxonomy of cinematic images loosely structured around an epistemic break that seems to be conditioned partly by the catastrophes of the mid-twentieth century (the Holocaust, Hiroshima). For Deleuze, movement becomes subordinated to time, freeing cinema from action and towards thought. This conception of cinema is also an imperative to treat films as generative of thought rather than as illustrations to preconceived ideas, and it is thus of methodological importance. Looking for facts to fit the theory seems antithetical to generating Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? 47. Slavoj Žižek cited in Stuart Jeffries, ‘A Life in Writing: Slavoj Žižek’, The Guardian, 15 July 2011, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/cu​​lture​​/2011​​/jul/​​15​/sl​​avoj-​​zizek​​-inte​​rvie​w​​-life​​ -writ​​ing. 49 Ibid. 50 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The TimeImage, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989). 47 48



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new knowledge, which would be the raison d’être of research itself. At best, the found facts serve a theory that can only ever confirm itself; at worst, the facts are forced to fit it. The imperative to ‘isolate’ the concepts of cinema itself rather than to apply a theory to it, thus, signals a certain research ethics as well.51 This book does not engage in an applied Deleuzian film philosophy (which would in any case be antithetical to Deleuze’s own conception of philosophy as a generative practice),52 but its approach to its empirical material is very much inspired by the imperative not to silence cinema with applied theory. Rather, it attempts to listen as closely as possible to what the films themselves have to say. Each case study thus functions as a conceptual node in a wider mapping of concerns that videographic cinema has tapped into/given rise to. But it is also an empirical object for a historical tracking of the changes that videographic cinema has undergone over time. An important guiding principle has thus been that media archaeology allows for a theorization of historiography, while, as Parikka points out, it also ‘enables a temporalization of theory itself ’.53 Media archaeology sees no contradiction between writing media histories based on empirical objects, and structuring these objects around concepts extracted from them. It allows us to rethink dominant histories with the help of theories, and to acknowledge the historicity of the theories themselves. It ‘reads media history and media theory hand in hand’.54 These guiding principles have had significant consequences for the selection of case studies and their contextualization. Considerable attention has been paid to historical sources that provide data on particular case studies and also more overarching insight into the encounter between video technology and filmmaking. American Cinematographer has been particularly informative in this respect.55 Furthermore, in writings on video art, there is a strong tradition of acknowledging video’s technicity. It dates back to the early days of theorizing video, when pioneering publications like

See ‘Preface to the English Edition’, in Deleuze, The Movement-Image, ix. Deleuze has defined philosophy as ‘the creation of concepts’. See, for instance, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 53 Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? 23. 54 Ibid. 55 The availability of data concerning a film’s production is somewhat arbitrary, and the function of the case studies has varied accordingly (some serving more as historical examples, others more as conceptual nodes). The quantity of historical sources on the production of a film tends to be relative to the importance granted the film at the time of its making. Works by famous filmmakers tend to get most coverage, but a niche journal like American Cinematographer may dedicate several pages to a film that is deemed technically innovative at the time but will end up disappearing before its release. 51 52

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Radical Software gathered artists, activists and engineers for close dialogue.56 Such writings have provided this book with technical data, historical contexts and discursive materials. A particularly useful discovery has been a category of pioneers who have largely been neglected by scholars, a loosely connected group of American psychiatrists who started incorporating video techniques in their practice, and whose now-forgotten research was published extensively between the 1950s and the 1970s. The method of this study, then, means that instead of simply applying a Freudian-Lacanian concept like ‘narcissism’ to criticize 1960s video aesthetics,57 this study has engaged in a critical dialogue with a movement of psychiatrists who actually incorporated video into their own practices. The goal has been to extract concepts that directly relate to the films that invited these critical dialogues in the first place, and that can be seen in a new light once their media conditions have been unearthed and described in detail. Another consequence of reading media history and media theory hand in hand has been that this study engages quite extensively with an intellectual tradition that went out of vogue so many years ago that it might itself be perceived as a retro scenario. If ‘media archaeology’ is a contested term, ‘postmodern’ has been applied to such a range of phenomena that it seems to have lost its meaning. This study situates the postmodern in a lineage of thought that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century and was concerned with the disappearance of reality (both as history and as lived experience) in the age of mass media. It was also a lineage of thought that identified in postmodernity a tendency towards standardization, repetition, retrospection and (whether it continued subscribing to a Marxist legacy of critical theory, or discarded it as a purely nostalgic exercise) situated part of the problem in the mass commodification of culture. If, in his 1967 protopostmodern manifesto The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord claimed that ‘everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation’,58 he was already partly referring to what Jean Baudrillard by 1981 would define as the ‘dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV’.59 Fast-forwarding a few more years, we find Fredric Jameson suggesting that video – as commercial TV and video art – is the medium best suited ‘to serve as some supreme and privileged, symptomatic, index of the [postmodern] Zeitgeist’, standing ‘as the Published between 1970 and 1974, Radical Software has provided this study with invaluable historical data and discursive materials. 57 See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64. 58 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 1994). 59 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 30. 56



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richest allegorical and hermeneutic [vehicle] for some new description of the system itself ’.60 There is some irony in that the writings most eager to proclaim a loss of historicity, have acquired a historical patina that allows them to be identified as products of their time.61 But because that time is so entangled with the impact of video and TV, because these media constitute conditions for postmodern thought no less than postmodern thought has shaped them, it also provides us with a sharp optics through which videographic cinema can be viewed. Postmodern thought can thus be reactivated as a historically localized set of discourses focalizing the conditions of life in societies saturated by televisual and videographic mediation.

Where is video/when is video? In her 2016 book The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, Ina Blom writes that video has a limited life span: ‘It begins around the time when television producers could for the first time choose to record their transmissions on videotape and ends when analog video is made obsolete by the digital platforms that reduce the difference between film and video to a question of rhetorical (as opposed to technical) formatting.’62 While this study does employ a minimum definition of video as an analogue, signal-based technology,63 and agrees that the digitization of media culture has complicated the technical distinction between video and film, it also emphasizes that the discursive life of video as a technical medium did not begin with the introduction of videotape in 1956. Rather, this constitutes its first major historical transformation. The modern meaning of ‘video’64 dates back at least to the mid-1930s. ‘The best “video,” as the experts call it’, Broadcasting, Broadcast Advertising reports in a 1936 article about the emergent medium of television, ‘was procurable when

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 69. 61 Jameson and Baudrillard repeatedly return to these notions in Postmodernism and Simulacra and Simulation respectively. 62 Ina Blom, The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 15. 63 For the sake of simplicity, ‘video’ will be shorthand for analogue video throughout the text, and when other formats are concerned (digital video; music video, and so on), this will be specified. 64 The word ‘video’ itself means ‘I see’ in Latin; the visual correlative of ‘audio’, that is, ‘I hear’. 60

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seated five, six or seven feet away from the screen’.65 This implies a definition of video as the visual output of TV reception. A 1937 article reveals video to be the visual equivalent of audio,66 but in this emergent phase of video as a discursive object, ‘video’ and ‘television’ were used interchangeably. In June 1938, for instance, ‘video receiving sets in Manhattan department stores […] were also the first television sets to be offered for sale to the American public’,67 a double designation for the same object, suggesting that the terms were synonymous at the time. The technical condition for a discursive separation between video and television seems to have been the invention of videotape – a ‘recording memory’, as Blom calls it, for broadcast TV.68 Introduced in 1956, the first black-and-white videotape recorders were developed by Ampex. RCA had developed colour video recording by 1959, but with any of these large machines selling for more than $50,000, they were only available to television broadcasting companies.69 It would take an additional decade for Sony to revolutionize the very conception of video with the introduction of a portable recorder, which, at $995 (with an additional $350 for the camera and $60 for an hour of tape) made videography available outside of broadcasting.70 Commonly known as the Sony Portapak, it has become synonymous with the birth of video art, thanks to an almost mythical video screening in Greenwich Village in October 1965, where pioneering video artist Nam June Paik showed a tape that he had recorded with one of the first Portapaks available in the United States.71 But by that time, Norelco had already loaned Andy Warhol video equipment with which he shot at least eleven tapes, one of which was used for Outer and Inner Space (1965) – a pioneering work of video-film hybridity in which actress-model Edie Sedgwick is filmed in a confrontation with her own video image.72 This circumstance complicates Martin Codel, ‘RCA Television Impresses Radio Industry’, Broadcasting, Broadcast Advertising 11, no. 10 (15 November 1936): 10. 66 ‘CBS Tests New Television Transmitter; Programming Viewed as Big Problem’, Broadcasting, Broadcast Advertising 13, no. 8 (15 October 1937): 36. 67 Bruce Robertson, ‘NBC Rebuilding Television Layout; Two Firms Offer Video Sets to Public’, Broadcasting, Broadcast Advertising 14, no. 12 (15 June 1938): 18. The article alters between ‘video broadcasting’ and ‘television broadcasting’; ‘video reception’ and ‘television receivers’, and so on. 68 Blom, The Autobiography of Video, 10. 69 Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 59. 70 Ibid., 70. 71 Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 17. 72 Andrew Sachs Collopy, ‘The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s’ (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015), 87–8; Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium, 78–9. 65



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both the designation of Paik and the Portapak as originators of video art, while also suggesting that the emergence of video as an artistic discipline is immediately intertwined with the medium of film. Meanwhile, if Portapaks made video more widely available for artists and activists, they were also the condition for its discursive separation from television. The 1970s slogan ‘VT is not TV’73 (videotape is not television) only became possible once video emerged as something more than a mnemonic appendage to the TV broadcasting system. This was when video became conceptualized as a creative medium in its own right, defined in opposition to broadcast TV, with which it nonetheless shared its technical conditions (the transformation of light into electronic signals to be transmitted live or stored on magnetic tape). And we have yet to mention videotape as a mass medium for home-viewing. While video recording had been available since the 1950s, the introduction and dispersion of consumer-grade video technology coincides with a shift in videographic cinema as well: from prospective imaginaries of surveillance and control conditioned on video as a medium for live transmission, to retrospective ones concerned with video as a recording technology. All this is to say that an epistemological instability resides within the very core of ‘video’ as a concept. This is hardly a new proposition. Scholars have expressed the problem of pinpointing video’s medium specificity. Even Jacques Derrida dedicated an essay to tackle the difficulty of finding a definition for a concept that designates everything from surveillance to ‘an’ art.74 Much later, Spielmann would comment on the impossibility of defining video as one dispositif, the way that film theorist have traditionally defined cinema.75 And it is hardly a coincidence that recent studies invested in video use intermediality and hybridity as conceptual frames.76 Not only does video seem to be an The phrase seems to have been coined by Paul Ryan in the first issue of Radical Software: ‘VT is not TV. If anything it’s TV flipped into itself. Television, as the root of the word implies, has to do with transmitting information over distance. Videotape has to do with unfolding information. Instant replay offers a living feedback that creates a topology of awareness other than the tic-tac-toc grid.’ Paul Ryan, ‘VT Is Not TV’, Radical Software 1, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 20. 74 Jacques Derrida, ‘Videor’, in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 73–7. 75 Spielmann argues that ‘there is no question of a uniform, dispositive structure […] because video does not establish any location for showing comparable to cinema’, nor a ‘systematic connection between the deployment of the equipment and the dispositive models for the construction of visibility (something that would have to imply the relational address of an observer subject)’. Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium, 9. 76 See Janna Houwen, Film and Video Intermediality: The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); and Jihoon Kim, Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). 73

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inherently heterogeneous and historically shifting concept, but its borders against other closely related media, not least film, have also been notoriously malleable. One can respond to this challenge in various ways. One way is to insist on defining video from the point of view of one practice or quality. In her 1976 article ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, art critic Rosalind Krauss provides if not the earliest then arguably the most influential critical definition of video. In Vito Acconci’s Centers (1971), Krauss perceives an image of narcissism ‘so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre’.77 Krauss’s critique is a product of its time: a definition and denunciation of video based on a small selection from a limited body of works made between 1968 and 1974.78 These are read under the conditions of thought set by the Freudian-Lacanian theories in vogue at the time. Krauss was not the last to define video from the point of view of what was perceived as its essential quality. No less products of their time,79 two of the most substantial video studies in recent years, the aforementioned books by Spielmann and Blom, both highlight a selected technical condition around which each of their definitions of video is built. For Spielmann, the defining quality of video lies in the reflexivity inherent to the processual constitution of its output. The fact that the visibility of a video ‘image (Spielmann prefers designations like ‘transformation imagery’ or ‘fluid pictoriality’) is conditioned on its incessant reconstitution from live or stored electronic signals makes it fundamentally unstable – susceptible to a variety of intentional or accidental interventions, all of which bear upon what finally emerges on the screen. The extent to which video art has affirmed this instability, so that seeing a video image becomes a reminder of its own technical conditions, renders it a ‘reflexive medium’ by its very definition, according to Spielmann.80 While Blom also takes the video image’s processual constitution into account, she does it in order to emphasize its relation to time. Video is here defined as a ‘memory technology’ with the capacity to foreground the technicity of memory itself in ways that invite us

Krauss, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, 50. Krauss also discusses, among others, Bruce Nauman’s Revolving Upside Down (1968), Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll (1972) and Richard Serra’s Boomerang 1974). 79 Both Spielmann’s Video: The Reflexive Medium and Blom’s The Autobiography of Video draw on a by-now vast body of video works, on analogue video’s obsolescence, and on the various material and technical turns in the humanities that have given rise to media archaeology itself. 80 This is also how Spielmann distinguishes video from broadcast TV; both use the same technology, but TV tends towards stability and supressing reflexivity. See Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium, 54–5. 77 78



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to reconsider memory and ‘neo-avant-garde’ art practices, both of which are conceptualized as catalysts of social invention in her account.81 Here, then, are three very different conceptions of ‘video’, which nonetheless share two significant things: they all define video from the point of view of a supposedly essential quality (whether it is intrinsic to the technology itself or, as in Krauss’s account, a product of its use), and they all implicitly equate the very concept of video with one of its institutional practices, namely, art. The equation of video with video art is so typical that the terms have been used interchangeably, historically as well as in contemporary writing.82 This implies a definition of video that excludes a range of practices, including broadcast TV, surveillance, therapy, family tapes, documentaries, amateur and professional porn production, home-viewing, storage and distribution of films, videographic filmmaking and probably more. This bias towards video as art is matched only by the scholarly investment in video as a mass medium for home-viewing.83 In 2009, when the digitization of media culture was rendering analogue video obsolete, Hilderbrand concluded, in a kind of obituary, that ‘videotape was born and now dies through derogatory definitions and discourses of infringement, danger, degradation, distortion, degeneration, inferiority, and obsolescence’.84 But again, this historical framing has a particular demarcation: video is here defined as a consumer-grade device for the illegal copying of (often illicit) content. The producers who, in the 1960s and the 1970s, briefly considered videotape as a substitute for 35mm film, hardly saw it as being at odds with the entertainment industry. And while many video artists certainly did and celebrated this tension, video as an art is irreducible to the negative connotations listed by Hilderbrand. On the contrary, video as an artistic medium emerged amidst utopian discourses of techno-spiritual enlightenment antithetical to danger, degeneration and so on. These differences hint at the difficulty of capturing video within a single conception. And even if one is willing to reduce it to an art and/or a mass medium, there are intrinsic tensions between different works, and different modes of mass media consumption. This tentative diptych of video research suggests that the question ‘What is video?’ is always already ‘Where is video?’ When we talk about video, do Blom, The Autobiography of Video, 14–16. Other recent studies of video as an art include Meigh-Andrews; and Helen Westgeest, Video Art Theory: A Comparative Approach (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016). 83 Productive overlaps can be found in Hilderbrand, who combines historical research on copyright and bootlegging practices with theoretical reflections on the aesthetic specificities of images stored on consumer-grade videotape. 84 Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice, 5, 81 82

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we talk about the gallery or the home? And what about video in the movie theatre?85 In parallel to the dominant practices are the ones that tend to fall outside of either of the two conceptual framings. Here we find, not least, videographic cinema. The most significant gain from framing videographic cinema as a body of works – and as an object worthy of study – is that the variety of ways in which video has been framed by different films at different times allows us not only to acknowledge video’s epistemological instability but also to chart a variety of its conceptions and to track their changes over an extended period of time. A precursor in spirit to this project’s endeavour is Newman’s mentioned 2014 book Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium. As Newman concludes: Video’s identity is a product of its materiality. It is not produced by this alone, though, but always in relation to other factors. Changes in video’s identity can be charted by changes in video technology. Video was different when it could be recorded than it had been before. It was different when consumers could use it in the street or at home. It was different when movies were widely accessible for sale or rental on cassette. And it was different when it could be shared online. But it was also different when it was understood in relation to radio, television, film, records, photography, and computers. It was different when TV was viewed positively than it was when TV was viewed negatively. When it was valued highly or not, when it was associated with beneficial and harmful social changes, and with audiences of greater or lesser gender or class status, video shifted its identity. All of these factors are necessary for understanding video as a medium, but no one can be sufficient.86

The aim of this book is to map and track video images and imaginaries – and their conditions of existence. It is not intended to crystallize into a monolithic definition of video in the end, but to describe a heterogeneous and shifting phenomenon. The study makes no claim to cover video in its totality, only to identify and describe a selection of nodes in video’s historical unfolding. Following the media archaeological imperative emphasized by Elsaesser and If ‘cinema’ came to connote a particular viewing situation (a mass audience in a movie theatre), its relocation onto other screens has provoked an identity crisis to which scholars have answered by asking ‘Where is cinema today?’ See Francesco Casetti, ‘The Relocation of Cinema’, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies (Autumn 2012), https​ :/​/ne​​csus-​​ejms.​​org​/t​​he​-re​​locat​​ion​-o​​​f​-cin​​ema/;​and Malte Hagener, ‘Where Is Cinema (Today)? The Cinema in the Age of Media Immanence’, Cinéma & Cie 11 (2008): 15–22. One answer would be: on video. Because video never established a singular dispositive connotation, its own relocations are less likely to be problematized. 86 Newman, Video Revolutions, 96–7. 85



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reaffirmed by Strauven, the aim is to acknowledge that to answer the question ‘What is video?’, we need to ask: ‘When is video?’87 To answer the question, this book has chosen to zoom in on one particular and under-researched body of works that capture video, quite literally, through the lens of film. In this sense, videographic cinema becomes not only an empirical object in its own right but also an optic through which video itself can be viewed in a new light and from new angles.

Mapping and tracking videographic cinema The double task of mapping and tracking videographic cinema has informed the structuring of the results: six chapters divided into two parts, one titled ‘Emergence’, the other ‘Remanence’. Each chapter is built around a concept, the formation of which the chapter tracks from the point of view of its media conditions. These concepts, after which the chapters have been named – futurity effects, canned life, Autopticon, Mnemopticon, vilified videophiles and arrière-garde – are meant to capture tensions within the studied material. The two-part structure of the book follows a temporalization in a double sense: the periods in which the case studies were made and the temporal trajectories of their imaginaries. ‘Emergence’ designates an early period (late 1950s to early 1980s) in which videographic cinema emerged though prospective imaginaries of surveillance and control. Offering critical reflections on broadcast TV, video surveillance and therapy, these cases were conditioned on video as a medium for live transmission and/or instant replay. ‘Remanence’ designates a later, albeit partly overlapping, period (early 1970s to mid2010s) in which cinema came to rediscover video as a recording medium, thus bending the imaginary trajectories backwards towards retrospective examinations of video as memory and history. The increasing presence – and later obsolescence – of home video would come to exert a significant influence over video imaginaries in this later phase. The choice of the archaic As Elsaesser observes, media archaeology ‘would try to identify the conditions of possibility of cinema (“When is cinema?”) alongside its ontology (“What is cinema?”)’. Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, 98. Strauven elaborates on the Foucauldian foundation of this turn: ‘In order to constitute “madness” as an object of knowledge, one should not only ask the question “what is madness?” but also “when is madness?”; that is, study “madness” in its historical context, in its radically different discursive formations that succeed one another through time. […] Like “madness” as an object of knowledge changes over time, so do the media. Exemplary in this respect is the history of cinema. […] Thus, in order to define the cinema, we should not only ask the Bazinian question (“what is cinema?”), but also the temporal/historical one (“when is cinema?”).’ Strauven, ‘Media Archaeology’, 60–1.

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term ‘remanence’ does deserve an explanation. Its etymological root is in the Latin word remanere, meaning to ‘remain’. The archaic adjective remanent has fallen out of use in the daily English vocabulary. What remains is a technical use in physics and geology. There, remanence means the ‘magnetism remaining after the inducing field is removed’,88 which is precisely the material condition for the storing of information on videotape.89 The process whereby videotape loses its magnetic charge can be called ‘remanence decay’: a technical term for the transience of magnetically stored information. This term thus fuses the material conditions of video recording with the video image’s connotations of memory and history established from the 1970s and on. Chapter 1 shows how video was introduced as a set of futurity effects in 1960s science fiction films and political thrillers, often reflecting on the emergence of CCTV surveillance and imminent societies of control. The chapter looks at how challenges of capturing video on film were overcome by a combination of experimentation and experience from 1950s live television. Television is the focus of Chapter 2, which spans from the 1950s to the 1980s. It looks at a selection of films that engaged in a critique of the television industry by imagining more or less outrageous reality TV formats. Revisiting historical media discourses on the idealized concept of liveness and its negative correlative canned, the chapter discusses how videographic cinema scrutinized the promises of live television as mediator of truth and reality. During the 1960s, a group of US psychiatrists inspired by perceived effects off broadcast TV, developed a set of self-confrontation techniques conditioned on the new possibility to instantly replay interviews. Chapter 3 shows how the emergence of video as a psychiatric apparatus, framed as Autopticon, overlapped with the emergence video surveillance. Autoptic imaginaries would condition films as well, even more so as videographic cinema entered its remanent phase. Chapter 4 shows how 1970s artists, therapists and filmmakers discovered/invented the videographic psyche, and how the previously discussed self-confrontation techniques, as they became fused with the reconception of video as a memory technology, subsequently gave rise to imaginaries of video as Mnemopticon, that is, an apparatus capable of extracting and confronting the viewer with repressed memories. Chapter 5 tracks the formation of a vilified figure, the videophile, who came to embody the imagined dangers of video’s ‘home invasion’. The chapter also shows how, within the various cultural anxieties provoked by the home video boom in the Oxford English Dictionary. Jim Wheeler, Video Preservation Handbook (Jim Wheeler, 2002), 18, https​:/​/am​​ianet​​.org/​​ wp​-co​​ntent​​/uplo​​ads​/R​​esour​​ces​-G​​uide-​​Video​​-Hand​​book-​​Wh​eel​​er​-20​​02​.pd​​f.

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1980s, there are traces of old mnemoptic tensions between memory and its erasure. The cultural remanence of analogue video informs Chapter 6, which looks at more recent films that incorporate now-obsolete video formats. The chapter suggests that aesthetics of remanence in the digital age perform a dual function: on the one hand as signifiers of a wider retrospectacle, on the other as tools for an exploration of the media conditions of history and historiography. Framing the latter as parts of an arrière-garde movement, the sixth and final chapter thus marks the closing of a temporal fold as it comes full circle. From an archaeology of videographic cinema, the book ends with the study of videographic cinema as a form of archaeology in itself.

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Part One

Emergence

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1

Futurity effects The emergence of videographic cinema

The future was neither the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius nor the Twilight of the Idols: no hippie Utopia on the horizon, no Nietzschean hammers in sight. Six hours to Haight-Ashbury, six months to the Summer of Love, and in the midst of anti-war protests and political violence, 22-year-old USC film student George Lucas was envisioning the emergence of a very different era. He saw a digital divine dividing itself into a thousand electronic eyes that knew of no dawns nor twilights, only of the eternal light of electric currents: the piercing whites bouncing off the walls, the vibrant blues radiating from the monitors and the infrareds probing the limits of the electronic labyrinth. Traversing these sterile spaces of variating monochromes was a running figure: at first barely distinguishable, a fleck of luminance appearing at the far end of a corridor, a mere variation in the jumpy blue depths of a video image. The fleck grew, developed limbs, emerged as a human, running towards the screen, then past it before his face became discernible. There was a sound proper to the cold blue light of this videographic future: an incessant radiophonic chatter, a stream of barely intelligible words forming fragments of quasi-information. Series of numerical and alphabetic code mixed with the occasional order: ‘THX 1138 4EB, this is Authority. You will stop where you are. You are in violation of Mercy-Op 15-16 8667.’ ‘We will start procedure 9966 on an area signal before they are able to reach emergency power switch.’ ‘Cut the power. Cut the power. Repeat. Cut the power.’ Overlapping layers of signifiers drowned in the deafening sound of sirens – it was almost as if power was so eager to exert itself that it was collapsing under the weight of its own competing operations. Within the sounds and images, there were layers of historical time: gloomy fragments of Bach’s baroque organ blended with the neo-Gregorian chants of the 1960s rock song ‘Still I’m Sad’ by the Yardbirds. Amidst the seemingly infinite identical, which is to say unidentifiable, corridors, a sudden interruption, a religious shrine (remanence of the idol): the translucent torso of Hans Memling’s 1481 ‘Christ Blessing’, superimposed over a screen of squares,

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numbers and letters. An enigmatic addition, ‘0000’, printed on Christ’s forehead, almost as if answering to Nietzsche’s anti-religious numerical pun: ‘What? You are looking for something? You want to multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You are looking for disciples? – Look for zeros!’1 No longer the son of God, certainly not the son of man, it was Christ’s second coming as the father and nadir of numerical code: the wired tyrant – a screen Saviour. And yet, neither order-words nor backhanded blessings could make the runner doubt his path. A short break to catch his breath, a doubtful stare in the face of the idol, and then off again towards new levels and corridors. Nameless zeros in front of video monitors, switchboards and mainframe computers following his every move, preparing new operations. But not even ‘mind-lock’, a paralysing signal projected right into his own coded forehead, could stop the flight of 1138. Down an elevator, into a vast space of concrete greys, the fugitive was reaching the limits of the labyrinth. One last obstacle: PERFECTBOD2180, a law enforcer with infrared vision – neutralized with hardly any effort. And the hero was free to run into a boundless whiteness coalesced into a dramatic exterior: a dark desert under a dawning red sky. * * * Shot in January 1967, Lucas’s student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB is a pioneering work of videographic cinema: a 15-minute, 16mm science fiction short tracking the escape of its protagonist through a claustrophobic future environment – vibrating with inserts of video surveillance images.2 Two years later, Lucas’s debut feature film would be in production, THX 1138 (1971), expanding the concept of his student film into a full-length narrative. But by then, the new possibilities of videographic cinema were already being pushed by several pioneers. ‘I believe we have accomplished a real live first’, cinematographer Gene Polito claimed in April 1969, ‘the capturing of a certain spontaneity of performance from the actors that could only and uniquely be achieved by capitalizing on the electronics equipment we had at our disposal’.3 Polito was referring to an array of videographic apparatuses, including TV cameras and videophones, that had been used in the production of the science fiction film Colossus: The Forbin Project Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 157. 2 Hereafter shortened to Electronic Labyrinth to avoid confusion with its full-length version THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971). 3 Gene Polito, ‘Challenges of Photographing Colossus 1980’, American Cinematographer 50, no. 4 (April 1969): 383. 1



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(Joseph Sargent, 1970). Certainly, cinema had, to borrow Paul Young’s eloquent book title, dreamt its rivals many times before. TV and video imaginaries even predate cinema’s own invention.4 By the 1900s, films were playing with the idea of electronically transmitted images over distance, including videotelephony and closed-circuit TV. And in 1927, the year that the Bell Labs performed the first actual ‘picturephone’ tests, Fritz Lang was imagining its future uses in his seminal science fiction film Metropolis.5 If, as Polito claimed in 1969, Colossus: The Forbin Project was a pioneering work, it was not because Sargent and he were the first filmmakers to imagine video, but because, unlike many before them, they had done it by capturing actual video images on film, including live interactions between actors/characters. Why did it take so long for cinema to integrate videography, and when it finally did – to what effect? What imaginaries did the video image give rise to as it first became a cinematic element? As this chapter will show, video – as a cinematic element – was established through visualizations of surveillance and control. Electrifying cinema with a new kind of realism, these vibrant new images – tangibly material yet alien in their treatment of human figure and form – provided science fiction films and political thrillers with what will be defined as futurity effects. In retrospect, Polito’s claim stands out as overly optimistic, as the pioneer status ascribed to his film is complicated by earlier ones – include Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964), which will be discussed. But the production history of Colossus: The Forbin Project, as reported by Polito, provides invaluable data as to why it would take until the turn of the 1970s for video to become a recurrent element in film, notwithstanding that the technical conditions had been available for decades. His report is finally also a keyhole into an institutional history regarding 1950s live television as a media condition for the emergence of videographic cinema.

‘Fantasies about television-like communication devices circulated as early as the invention of the telephone in 1875. An 1889 fantasy concerning the “telectroscope”, a proto-televisual device Edison was expected to invent in the very near future, presumed that the development of telegraphy and telephony would soon make “actual scenes […] visible to people hundreds of miles away from the spot”.’ Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, 16. 5 ‘Very early experiments in television were conducted at Bell Labs in the 1920s. These experiments culminated in April 1927 in the transmission of a television signal between Washington, DC, and New York City as a “face-to-face” adjunct to a telephone conversation between Herbert Hoover (then Secretary of Commerce) and AT&T President Walter Gifford. Mr Gifford at that time foresaw the day when “ordinary telephone will be provided with devices for television”.’ A. Michael Noll, ‘Anatomy of a Failure: Picturephone Revisited’, Telecommunications Policy 16, no. 4 (June 1992): 308. 4

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A credible reference to a possible future: Defining the futurity effect It is the future year of 1980, the Cold War drags on, and the US government has commissioned world-leading computer expert Dr Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden) to develop a fail-safe system for national defence; an entirely autonomous intelligent weapon with its own nuclear arsenal. Buried deep within the Rocky Mountains, and surrounded by radiation, rests a whole new kind of beast: a ‘self-sufficient, self-protected, self-generated’ supercomputer called Colossus. Introduced by Forbin and the president (Gordon Pinsent) at a White House press conference, its unique virtues have barely been listed, its absolute safety assured, before the electronic sign through which it communicates is blinking: ‘WARNING – THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM.’ The system turns out to be a Soviet counterpart: the autonomous intelligent weapon Guardian, with whom Colossus soon finds it has more in common than with the men who made them. Left to their own devices until it is too late, the supercomputers develop an ‘intersystem language’ of indecipherable code, rendering humanity deaf to their digital whispers. In some digital dimension beyond human cognition, they start plotting to enslave their old masters. They acquire electronic eyes, ears, and as they merge into one system, ‘World Control’, even a voice: An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. […] So that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the Nuclear Warheads in the two missile silos.

In a sardonic twist of fate, the machines have created a digital dictatorship with a global reach. Two Norelco TV cameras, two Ampex videotape machines, nine 21-inch colour TV monitors, one Brooks Optronics Display (‘similar to those flashing news signs in Times Square’)6 and, lest we forget, functioning computer equipment for a value of $5 million provided by companies whose names seem to be taken from cyberpunk novels: Control Data Corporation, CALCOMP and Tektronix.7 Saturated with all the quasi-sensical technical data that provides science fiction texts with their ‘reality effect’ of the future, Polito’s article almost seems to merge with the discourse of the film. The Polito, ‘Challenges of Photographing Colossus 1980’, 382, 387. Ibid., 427.

6 7



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article not only provides a detailed account of the production process of Colossus: The Forbin Project but also pays credit to the ‘massive array’ of media apparatuses incorporated.8 And for good reason: the value of the computer equipment alone exceeded the film’s whole budget and required specially trained technicians to operate it.9 ‘The overall effect?’, Polito asks rhetorically. ‘Reality!’10 With the relation between actual media captured by a film and the alleged effect so explicitly stated, Polito is unknowingly inviting us to revisit Roland Barthes’s literary concept introduced a year before.11 Barthes asks how we are to make sense of seemingly superfluous details in fictional texts – elements difficult to motivate from the point of view of the narrative’s semiotic structure. Incidentally, a technical medium serves as his example: a barometer mentioned in the passing in the description of a room in a novel by Gustave Flaubert. The piano at least serves as ‘an indication of its owner’s bourgeois standing’,12 but the barometer seems unnecessary, leading Barthes to ask what ‘the significance of [its] insignificance’ is.13 His answer is that such details refer less to a real object and more to the notion of the general ‘real’ that eludes the fiction; in other words, they are there to create a ‘referential illusion’ to support the text’s realist aspiration.14 This literary device, which Barthes calls a ‘reality effect’, seems to have much in common with the cinematic prop, insofar as it is also there to convey a convincing image of (fictional) reality. The appropriation of the term may be complicated by the fact that the prop possesses the status whose very lack the literary reality effect is conditioned on; its pro-filmic existence makes it irreducible to a referential illusion. But it is possible to distinguish between the two epistemic levels within each captured prop: its reality as an actual referent, and its effect as an element within the larger fabric of the fictional mise en scène. Insofar as this fabric has realism as its aim, the reality of the

Ibid., 382. Ibid., 427. The production reportedly cost between $2 and $4 million. See ‘The Forbin Project’, American Film Institute Catalog, https​:/​/se​​arch.​​proqu​​est​.c​​om​/af​​i​/doc​​view/​​ 17462​​11212​​/1C12​​B26AE​​98648​​1DPQ/​​1​?​acc​​ounti​​d​=108​​80. 10 Polito, ‘Challenges of Photographing Colossus 1980’, 427. 11 Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Reality Effect’ was originally published in French (‘L’Effet de Réel’) in Communications 11 (November 1968). The similar wording of Barthes’s concept and Polito’s conclusion in the end of his article is not suggested to be anything else than an epistemically significant coincidence. 12 ‘The Reality Effect’, in Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 142. 13 Ibid., 143. 14 Ibid., 148. 8 9

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props that constitute it should not nullify its chance of succeeding; on the contrary. In this sense, the physical prop is not antithetical to, but crucial for, a cinematic reality effect. That said, the aim of this chapter is not to linger on the possibility of appropriating the general concept of the reality effect for film analysis.15 The point is to expand this concept to frame a circumstance where the realistic aspirations are meant to serve a futuristic vision. If we are to take seriously Polito’s claim that the overall effect of actual technology in Colossus: The Forbin Project is reality, we must take into consideration that this reality takes place a decade after its recording. The film unfolds in a 1980 yet to come.16 The media technology that makes up its mise en scène is thus there to produce a credible reference to a possible future: a futurity effect.

Roll bars and roller skates: Challenges of capturing video on film The detailed description of the challenges that Polito faces as he tries, for the first time, to capture video images on film, suggests why most others before him have been so reluctant. The first problem is to modify the 35mm camera shutter to eliminate the roll bars generated from the different frame rates of television and film.17 (Polito forgets to mention that the roll bars remain visible on virtually all the screens in the film.) Next, there is the problem of finding the right balance between the levels of light bouncing from the actors’ faces and the ‘bombardment of electronic impulses on the face of the tube’ (i.e. the light emitted by the TV monitors).18 Since Polito has no access to data on the conditions for photographing colour TV, he is forced to experiment – a time-consuming process in an age when each screen test has to be chemically developed. A range of settings, including different combinations of exposure and development, are tested until Polito For a detailed and comparative discussion about reality effects in film and/or/versus video, see Houwen, Film and Video Intermediality, 17–75. 16 While the year is not specified in the film itself, its alternative title is Colossus 1980 (it is also the title used in Polito’s article). 17 John Frankenheimer had already solved this problem while making The Manchurian Candidate (1962), with the help of a team of TV technicians from his old network, CBS. ‘Until then, scenes showing television sets faked the picture you saw on the screen. They said you couldn’t photograph pictures on a screen. They just didn’t know how to do it.’ Frankenheimer cited in Gerald Pratley, The Cinema of John Frankenheimer (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1969), 226–7. 18 Polito, ‘Challenges of Photographing Colossus 1980’, 384. 15



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is satisfied. But the studio lights keep hitting the TV screens’ surfaces, making their displayed images disappear. Since the point is to capture dialogue – one actor in front of the film camera, the other seen on TV – the simultaneous visibility of both is crucial. The problem is eventually solved by equipping the monitors with hoods, placing ‘gobos’ between the tubes and the light sources and, finally, to rent special lamps with focused beams.19 The greatest challenge, however, is the coordination of these live closedcircuit dialogues. Given that Polito presents the achievement as a ‘real live first’, he seems to believe it to be unprecedented. As will be shown, it is not, but his account leaves us with a unique set of historical data on the experimental conditions for film history’s pioneer videographers. Two separate sets are built on Universal’s huge Sound Stage #12: a ‘video set’ for the electronic capture of one set of actors, whose image will be transmitted to the ‘film set’, where a 35mm camera will capture both the transmitted video image and the present set of actors interacting with it. With only one 35mm camera available, it has to move from one set to another, rendering their designation variable; a video set becomes a film set as the whole film crosscuts between the sets to create a full sense of simultaneity in the dialogues. The process requires not only ‘a sophisticated sound playback and recording system’ but also ‘two complete sound crews’.20 The distance between the sets and the different lighting conditions provide Polito’s account with its memorable twist. Polito has to roller-skate back and forth between the sets in order to keep readjusting the lights, a ‘visually jarring experience, like going from outdoor sunshine right into a darkened projection room’.21 He is lucky enough to discover what he describes as ‘a unique device that became a tremendous aid to me in overcoming this drastic visual accommodation’.22 It is nothing less than a welder’s mask, modified for one of his technicians to check the colour temperatures of the monitors. Trying it on, Polito is ‘struck immediately by the clarity of EVERYTHING’.23 The picture is certainly clear. During a few months between 1968 and 1969, visitors at Universal ran the risk of being run over by a fifty-year-old cinematographer frantically rollerskating between sets, wearing a modified welder’s mask for which he even has a name: The Morale Booster.24 Video invades cinema in a technical delirium

Ibid., 385. Ibid., 383. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 384. 24 Ibid. 19 20

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that befits this film’s conceptual core: the enslavement of mankind by its own technologies.25 Delirium aside, the end result is undoubtedly impressive. Colossus: The Forbin Project vibrates with electronics. The sheer density of functioning monitors, mainframe computers and various kinds of cameras that make up the mise en scène is certainly unusual for a 1960s production. It is the advantage of electronic screens over rear projections to allow for greater movement in the camera that captures them.26 The angle from which electronic screens are shot becomes less critical. This allows Polito to produce some complex mobile choreographies. Consider the White House press conference where Colossus is announced. After an establishing shot of the exterior, the film cuts to Forbin inside an elevator. The president is already heard giving his part of the speech. As the elevator door opens, the 35mm camera follows Forbin through a hall and into a conference room crawling with people and technical equipment. Some of the journalists are taking photographs, others are shooting on 16mm and two cameramen are handling the mentioned Norelco cameras. As Forbin tries to navigate through the crowd and machinery, the 35mm camera moves in and stays on a Norelco camera’s flickering viewfinder – its image duplicating the movements of some men passing by. The 35mm camera now tracks to the right, catching a glimpse of the president on the viewfinder of the second Norelco camera, before moving in on a larger colour video monitor framing his face. Finally, the 35mm camera turns to the left to catch Forbin as he sits down next to the president. All this happens in a fifty-second take through three crawling sets, multiplying the action on three different video screens. No less impressive is the way that the film merges the functions of its video equipment – as physical artefacts, visual displays and communication devices. The televised inauguration of Colossus has been watched by Forbin’s crew at its computer programming centre in California. As Colossus delivers its first words – ‘WARNING – THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM’ – and excitement turns into confusion at the White House, Forbin calls his colleagues on a video link. What follows is the first of a number of dialogues framed in an eye-catching manner. A row of five videophones of Space Age design have been distributed along the conference table. Four have been turned so that The irony is not lost on Polito, who makes a point of it earlier in the article: ‘Quite frankly none of us could escape the eerie feeling that what we were experiencing was a good example of “man versus machine” – the machine in this instance being a giant computer known as “COLOSSUS”.’ Ibid., 382. 26 ‘In [rear-screen] process you are forced to stay close to the centreline (projector-tocamera) to avoid bad fall-off in density. In the case of TV monitors you can be well off the side and suffer virtually no fall-off at all. Thus, photographing TV monitors affords a much wider range of camera movement in comparison to process even though the TV monitors pose some tough problems in lighting.’ Ibid., 384. 25



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their screen is visible from the point of view of the 35mm camera. Any person seen through the video link is multiplied all the way back to the vanishing point of the frame, heightening the sense of depth by forming a diagonal line of the same repeated image. The multiplication of human faces and figures performing identical, simultaneous movements produce a striking visual effect, made possible only by the divisibility of the video signal. As will be shown, it is found in a number of these early videographic films.

A pioneer and his predecessor: Live television as condition for videographic cinema Polito’s vivid account evokes the image of the mad scientist capturing an ephemeral substance against all odds. As compelling as it may be, there are reasons to reconsider this narrative. Towards the end of his article, the cinematographer makes a special mention of a Robin Clark, whose ‘22 years of experience in the field of live television proved invaluable’.27 Polito writes: In addition to his regular duties as an Assistant Director, Clark donned a headset and supervised all the closed-circuit television portions of [Colossus: The Forbin Project], including the cueing of the two video cameras, coordinating the Ampex tape machine in the Technicolor Vidtronics Mobile Unit, the playback operator, the Optronics Display System, the binary language reels … and a million-and-one-other logistic headaches!28

Polito’s last-minute tribute to this now-forgotten figure whose experience with live television dates back to its breakthrough days29 reveals traces of another Ibid., 427. Ibid. 29 Clark’s contribution to early TV history is virtually forgotten. An early reference mentions him among six new staff members being hired by KTLA in 1947. ‘KTLA Adds Six Staffers in Various Capacities’, Broadcasting, Telecasting 33, no. 10 (8 September 1947): 73. He would go on to direct TV shows, including an hour-long 1957 live special of the 1940s sitcom The Morey Amsterdam Show (1948–50), of which critic Leon Morse wrote: ‘Much of his material is old and some has not yet thawed out of the deep freeze, but a great deal of it is also witty’, and would-be risqué TV documentary The Nudity Thing (1970), which reportedly ‘promised far more than it delivered’. Bok, ‘Television Reviews: The Nudity Thing with Ralph Story Host. Anjanette’, Variety 258, no. 4 (11 March 1970): 44; and ‘TV Program Reviews: The Billboard Scoreboard – Morey Amsterdam Show’, The Billboard 69, no. 55 (29 July 1957): 18. An interesting detail is Clark’s curriculum is that he is credited with having directed the first videotaped show made for a major studio: a 1964 Universal-TV pilot called Celebrity Room. ‘Radio-Television: First “Celebs” Set, But Tape Hassle Goes to L’ville’, Variety 235, no. 8 (15 July 1964): 37. 27 28

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history, less concerned with the individual struggles of a cinematographer than with the wider overlap between two institutions: Hollywood cinema and broadcast TV. The professional background of the assistant director might explain a strange historical coincidence: in a film made half a decade earlier by another TV pioneer, virtually all of Colossus: The Forbin Project’s ‘firsts’ are already present, down to a scene of a presidential press conference in which the president is framed in a viewfinder.30 Seven Days in May seems to belong to a completely different ethos and era of Hollywood filmmaking. Like Colossus: The Forbin Project, it is set in a near future, but where the latter revolves around the more far-fetched imaginary of an AI gaining world control, Seven Days in May resonates more eerily with then-present and earlier events. The film explores a United States polarized by the prospect of a nuclear disarmament treaty, which is proposed by a president whose popularity subsequently plummets. Public unrest leaves the arena open for political reaction, paving the ground for a potential takeover by a fascist fraction within the US military. At the height of the Cold War, Seven Days in May thus drastically reframes the narrative of the enemy within, at the time almost synonymous with communist infiltration (Frankenheimer’s own 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate is a case in point). Where Sargent provides a more playful kind of suspense with occasional comic relief, Frankenheimer goes for a solid sense of paranoia. Instead of Polito’s subtly psychedelic colour scale, pulling towards TV shows like Batman (William Dozier, Lorenzo Semple Jr., 1966–8) and The Prisoner (Patrick McGoohan, 1967–8), Frankenheimer opts for crisp black and white. The films also differ on the level of set design. Where Colossus: The Forbin Project seeks to enhance its futurity effect by using Space Age props (in retrospect firmly anchoring the film in the era in which it is made), Seven Days in May intentionally looks backwards. Here, for instance, monitors are robust pieces of wooden furniture with mechanical controls, evoking the classic TV sets of earlier decades. But these differences in tone and texture do not change the fact that five years before Polito’s ‘real live first’, Frankenheimer and cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks were already capturing video images on film for technically advanced compositions, some of which were not only even more complex than Colossus: The Forbin Project’s but also all too similar to be so by a mere coincidence. Two snapshots from each film illustrate similarities in their compositions. Snapshot one: the diagonal row of monitors and men. The previously mentioned White House conference room in Colossus: The Forbin Project is prefigured Seven Days in May was nominated for two Academy Awards, including one for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White, which makes it unlikely that Polito et al., were unfamiliar with it.

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by the State Department conference hall in Seven Days in May. In Seven Days in May, a TV control room overlooking the hall presents a diagonal line of monitors multiplying the same figure. Like in the conference room in Colossus: The Forbin Project, men in suits are looking at the screens while talking into telephone receivers. Snapshot two: the awkwardly positioned videophone dialogue. A recurrent composition in both films, a present caller is placed in on top corner of the frame, while another is seen on a monitor in lower opposite corner. Both of them have been slightly turned towards us in order to be visible in the same shot. Their vantage points coincide in a diagonal line ascending across the cinematic frame, producing the effect of a shared line of vision. The two men thus seem to be looking at each other, albeit from an awkwardly lateral vantage point. But given that the videophone has been turned to the side to render both callers visible, its built-in camera is more likely to capture an offscreen studio corner than the caller not-so-in-front of it. A particularly complex set of compositions towards the end of Seven Days in May prefigure the TV conference in Colossus: The Forbin Project. Colossus’s inauguration and its immediate aftermath incorporates numerous electronic interfaces, including seven video monitors in the computer programming centre, five in the White House (including the row of visible videophones) and the two Norelco viewfinders. These are used in mobile compositions that sometimes have a tendency to privilege the monitored doubles of a character before his immediate 35mm image. For instance, a tracking shot from right to left lands on three Forbins. One is the ‘physical’ Forbin standing at the distant centre of the frame; the other two are live video doubles. Those are seen through the viewfinders on the back of the TV cameras towering on each of his sides in the foreground. A similar device is repeated towards the end of the scene. The president’s concluding words at the conference, a ceremonious call for world peace, can only clearly be seen on a viewfinder close to the 35mm camera. As we see the TV cameraman zoom in on it, the ‘physical’ face of the president remains a blur in the background. There is a similar conference in Seven Days in May, albeit not in the White House but in a replica of the State Department building where Kennedy used to address the press. ‘Even the placing of the television cameras was exact’, Frankenheimer has later commented. As were the ‘telescopic microphones, the directional mics, and the whole thing of everybody standing up at once and saying “Mr President”, and he points to the person that he wants to ask the question, whoever he thought was first.’31 Three monitors in the John Frankenheimer, ‘Seven Ways with Seven Days in May (1964)’, in John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles, ed. Stephen B. Armstrong (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 12.

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foreground duplicate the action in the hall, cutting between the president on the stage and the audience members facing him. As mentioned, the monitors form a diagonal line that prefigures the conference table in Colossus: The Forbin Project. The similarity is further enhanced by the fact that a row of men in suits with phones in their hands face the monitors, and that the monitors themselves show multiplications of the same televised characters. The fact that the occasional pan seen on the monitors in Seven Days in May corresponds with the movements of the TV camera down on the floor makes evident that the images are being captured and transmitted through a live signal. The scene turns out to include three such television cameras: two on the stage, pointed at the audience, and one in the back, pointed at the president. Later, as the scene cuts to a view from the back of the hall, the television camera pointed at the president becomes visible. Incidentally, the president is too far away for his features to be discernible. Just as in Colossus: The Forbin Project, he is brought closer through a medium close-up visible on the television viewfinder facing the 35mm camera. The similarities between Colossus: The Forbin Project and Seven Days in May invite us to consider the media condition that constitutes the common denominator of their mutual ‘real live firsts’. Like Clark, Frankenheimer had years of experience in live TV; in fact, he has come to be credited as one of the great pioneers of live television as a distinct art form. Frankenheimer started out as a documentary filmmaker for the US Air Force, but his intended transition to Hollywood was halted by ‘the invasion of television’.32 In the mid-1950s, the burgeoning broadcast medium was putting significant pressure on the film industry. With Hollywood more eager to fire than hire, the aspiring young filmmaker had no choice but to take a job as at CBS. In 1953, videotape was not yet available. Programming thus consisted either of filmed materials or live broadcasts. Frankenheimer quickly found himself in the second category and soon made his debut as assistant director for Sidney Lumet – another live TV pioneer soon to become a major Hollywood director.33 In practice, this meant that Frankenheimer was a cameraman.34 But by the following year, he had already been promoted to director. By the end of

John Frankenheimer cited in Russell AuWerter, ‘John Frankenheimer (1970)’, in John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles, ed. Stephen B. Armstrong (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 38. 33 Uncredited, ‘Dialogue on Film: John Frankenheimer (1989)’, in John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles, ed. Stephen B. Armstrong (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 94. 34 John Frankenheimer cited in Robert J. Emery, ‘The Films of John Frankenheimer (1999)’, in John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles, ed. Stephen B. Armstrong (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 158. 32



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Figures 1.1 and 1.2  Similar compositions in Seven Days in May (1964) and Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). the decade, he had directed approximately 150 live TV shows,35 won several awards and been hailed by critics as the wunderkind of the new medium. ‘Aiming to […] be live television’s best director, and generate shows that rivaled the movies, Frankenheimer originated and refined an unmistakable visual style’, writes Charles Ramírez Berg.36 Thus, when he launched a second career with Hollywood films like The Manchurian Candidate, he brought Numbers vary. Emery states 152 live TV shows; Frankenheimer counts ‘over 125’ in AuWerter, ‘John Frankenheimer (1970)’, 38; and elsewhere 140 live TV shows are mentioned (see Uncredited, ‘Dialogue on Film’, 94). 36 Charles Ramírez Berg, ‘The Manchurian Candidate: Compromised Agency and Uncertain Causality,’ in A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film, ed. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 31. 35

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with him an aesthetic sensibility that he had developed in, for and under the particular media conditions of live TV. Among Frankenheimer’s most notable devices is his depth of field, allowing for visually dense compositions like the one in the press conference scene in Seven Days in May, in which a TV control room overlooking the conference hall and the hall itself are equally visible. Combined with blackand-white photography, Frankenheimer’s depth of field evokes the cinema of Orson Welles, but the device is not an homage to his senior. As Ramírez Berg points out, Frankenheimer brought to cinema an aesthetic solution to a technical problem that he had faced in TV. In the 1950s, when Frankenheimer had his TV breakthrough, screens were only between ten and twenty-two inches. Deep focus ‘had the potential of “doubling” the drama because the foreground narrative plane could be juxtaposed against the background one: “two stories going on at the same time”’.37 Frankenheimer’s dense live TV drama The Comedian (1957) is a good example, as it forebodes the complex choreographies of Seven Days in May.38 Starring Mickey Rooney as an abusive tyrant of a TV star, it an impressive televisual inquiry into TV’s own media conditions. The intensity of its performances is heightened not only by the fact that they are delivered live but also by their self-reflexive setting. A large part of the fiction unfolds in the TV studio where it is enacted live – a space filled with technology, technicians, performers and staff, all of it captured with television cameras so mobile that they almost crash into each other. As the drama cuts between them, the cameras alternate between functioning as props and actual production/transmission media. Monitors occasionally flash by in the flow of pans and tracking shots. The coordination of the technically saturated mise en scène has necessarily been planned down to the finest detail, since there are no opportunities for retakes on live television. A biographer can speculate on how the many similarities between Colossus: The Forbin Project and Frankenheimer’s work came to be on an individual level. Was Polito aware that his ‘real live first’ had both a technical and aesthetic predecessor? Had Polito, Clark and/or Sargent seen Seven Days in May a few years before and decided to copy some its most striking devices? For an archaeology of videographic cinema, such questions are less important than their larger implications. In the 1960s, after years of working with live TV, some filmmakers turned their experiences from one medium into an expressive capital for another, thus turning themselves into mediators for a profound transformation of film as such: an electrification Ibid., 32–3. The Comedian was but one episode in the Playhouse 90 series of ninety-minute television dramas, of which Frankenheimer directed twenty-seven.

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of the cinematic image – marking the emergence of videographic cinema. Years later, Frankenheimer would acknowledge his debt and pay tribute to the medium he found had shaped him as a filmmaker: Let me make this real simple for you. Everything I’ve ever done in film is directly a result of my live television experience: the way I move the camera, the way I frame a shot, the way I work with actors, the way I work with writers, and the rhythm at which I work. Everything. I owe everything to live television.39

Entering the electronic labyrinth: The video utopia estranged Made only three years after Seven Days in May, Lucas’s Electronic Labyrinth is a remarkable piece of science fiction cinema, literally just a flight through a captivating future environment. A woman, ‘ClinicBod’ 7117 (Joy Carmichael) is under interrogation; her mate, an ‘ErosBod’ called 1138 (Dan Nachtsheim) is on the run. As the short film cuts between flickering blue video images of the two and grainy 16mm colour footage of the people and technology doing the tracking, a feeling of complete enclosure is achieved; the electronic labyrinth from which 1138 is trying to free himself is one large surveillance apparatus. Electronic Labyrinth would quickly be overshadowed by the huge success of Lucas’s later films, most notably the original Star Wars trilogy (1977–83). It would remain forgotten and virtually unseen until its online re-release in May 2000.40 But the fifteen-minute student film made a considerable impact upon its release, thanks to its technically virtuous vision, in which videography played an unusually dominant part.41 Today, in the Frankenheimer cited in Ramírez Berg, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, 31. Frankenheimer reiterates in a 2000 interview: ‘Every shot you’ve ever seen me do in a movie I did in live TV. That’s where I got this whole style of working with wide-angle lenses and depth of focus and fluid cameras.’ John Frankenheimer cited in Scott Tobias, ‘John Frankenheimer (2000)’, in John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles, ed. Stephen B. Armstrong (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 180. 40 Frank Houston, ‘Hollywood Flirts with Short Films on the Web’, The New York Times, 15 June 2000, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​000​/0​​6​/15/​​techn​​ology​​/holl​​ywood​​-flir​​ts​-wi​​th​-sh​​ ort​-f​​i l​ms-​​on​-th​​e​-web​​.html​. 41 It is worth noting that the surveillance images in Electronic Labyrinth and THX 1138 were shot on 16mm, transferred to video and then captured on film from the monitors. See Thomas Fensch, Films on the Campus (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1970), 54; and Albert Kihn, ‘Photographing a First Feature: “THX 1138”’, American Cinematographer 52, no. 10 (October 1971): 1074. 39

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unified light of LED TV, CGI and digital cinema projection, it is difficult to grasp the extent to which video was once considered to be the alien ‘other’ of film and an alien potential in television. The early literature of video art bears witness to the excitement with which the new medium was met, as creative experiments pushed its expressive capacities: keying, feedback loops and the live modulation of captured forms, all impossible by photochemical means, were now in the hands of artists. In Expanded Cinema, Youngblood provides a vivid description of the impact that a televised rock concert shot on video would have on young San Francisco/Berkeley filmmakers (belonging to the same production context as Lucas) in 1968: The realization that something so common and ‘public’ as a television set could be the source of virtually unprecedented visual experiences was the beginning of a new socio-technical awareness. […] Colors bloomed, flared, and melted; shapes disintegrated and intermixed; the pictureplane was demolished in a cascade of spectral brilliance – the Bonanza [(David Dortort, 1959–73)] fan, who knew that television was capable of something more, finally saw that potential in all of its phosphorescent shimmering beauty.42

That said, there is an evident tension between these discourses of technospiritual enlightenment and the way that theatrical cinema was responding to video at the time. Electronic Labyrinth resists its own era’s utopian beliefs, using video’s capacities to distort human figures into dark, dystopian estrangement. This seems to have struck a chord both with audiences and critics. Electronic Labyrinth ended up winning numerous awards,43 it was mentioned in Time magazine44 and it became one the few yearly USC student films to be blown up to 35mm for Academy Award consideration.45 The 1970 book Films on the Campus dedicated its first chapter to Electronic Labyrinth, calling it ‘the best student science-fiction film ever made’.46

Youngblood is referring specifically to a The Sons of Champlin rock concert shot on video by Robert Zagone in May, 1968. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 289. 43 National Student Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany. Cynthia Felando, Discovering Short Films: The History and Style of Live-Action Fiction Shorts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 35. 44 Fensch, Films on the Campus, 56. 45 Herbert E. Farmer, ‘Blowup Printing of 16mm Original to 35mm’, Journal of the University Film Association 24, no. 1–2 (1972): 25. 46 Fensch, Films on the Campus, 52. 42



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In 1967, USC film students were generally limited to black-and-white 16mm stock. Lucas’s entrepreneurial skills had acquired him considerable amounts of colour film.47 But the future Lucas envisioned would be dominated by neither one of the two; it was to radiate with blue monochromatic video images. Darkness opens Electronic Labyrinth, darkened further by the brooding bass of an organ. Around thirty seconds into the void, there is a first hint of lens flare. Another thirty seconds of soft circles travelling the deep surface, and then suddenly, as the bass rises to a higher octave, the emergence of a deeply alien image. A dotted, jumpy, flickering blue, an electronic landscape, negative at first, it creates the impression of positive relief. For a moment, the inversion of the videographic monochrome extracts the radiance of an alien iris staring from the centre of the screen. The transition to positive confirms it: the alien landscape is a close-up of a human face. The eye that opens Electronic Labyrinth is remarkable in itself, but it is also remarkably similar to the opening shot of another short film made the same year: Scott Bartlett’s OffOn. Youngblood designates OffOn as ‘the first videographic film whose existence was equally the result of cinema and video disciplines’.48 An abstract experimental work, OffOn opens, like Electronic Labyrinth, with the monochromatic blue video image of a human eye in close-up. The iris is soon made to radiate, albeit not simply by virtue of chromatic inversion as in Electronic Labyrinth, but through a much more complicated process that involves the keying of video feedback loops into portions of the staring eye.49 Bartlett’s investment in videographic experimentation clearly surpasses Lucas’s, whose black-and-white film footage was simply ‘run through a television monitor, and then reshot in color for the screening effect of the monitor’.50 The similarity in the end result is nevertheless too striking to be ignored, not least in the light of OffOn’s persistent status as ‘the first serious artistic use of video in film’.51 This designation is found in a 2010 book, in an entry on OffOn that is coincidentally supported by a quote from Lucas: ‘Bartlett’s impact as a filmmaker was immediate in the Bay Area. George Lucas, for In January 1967, Lucas started working as a teaching assistant for a group of Navy film students at the USC. ‘One of the benefits of working with these Navy guys was that I got to make a movie with fifteen minutes of color film, which at the time was a big deal.’ Lucas cited in Marcus Hearn, The Cinema of George Lucas (New York: Harry N. Adams, 2005), 22. 48 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 318. 49 For a detailed description of the painstaking work of making OffOn, see ibid., 218–20. 50 Fensch, Films on the Campus, 54. 51 OffOn is labelled as such in Daniel Eagan’s recent book Daniel Eagan, America’s Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry (New York: Continuum, 2010), 643. 47

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one, noted, “I grew up knowing the underground of Scott Bartlett and Bruce Connor and the whole gang of underground filmmakers in San Francisco”.’ The author then adds that ‘Bartlett’s style was imitated in light shows for rock concerts, and later incorporated into mainstream art and commercials’.52 It would thus be easy to misread this as proof that Lucas ‘borrowed’ a device from an artist who inspired him, much like Colossus: The Forbin Project seems to have ‘borrowed’ quite a few from Seven Days in May. The only problem is that the making of Electronic Labyrinth predates OffOn by several months.53 Again, the point is not to crown individual pioneers. Just as it matters less whether Polito consciously copied Seven Days in May than the fact that both films are conditioned by an overlap between cinema and broadcast TV, the similarities between Electronic Labyrinth and OffOn suggest an overlooked overlap between two institutions often framed as inherently antithetical: commercial cinema and video art. If it is necessary to complicate the persistent notion that Bartlett made ‘the first serious artistic use of video in film’, it is not to substitute Lucas for Bartlett as the true originator of videographic cinema. In any case, there is no evidence that Bartlett saw Lucas’s film first. The aim, again, is to zoom out from these individual filmmakers and/or artists in order to consider the possibility of something larger in scope, namely, that during a few months in 1967, the media conditions were ripe for an alien, blue, videographic eye to emerge in film from two institutions at once: a film school in Los Angeles, and an artist’s TV studio in Sacramento.54

Flickering faces and multiplied figures: Two videographic futurity effects The video image provided cinema with a new brand of realism: cold, distorted, vibrant, tangibly material, yet profoundly estranged. In addition to its general capacity to distort human forms, two qualities were particularly important for video’s appropriation as a futurity effect in cinema: noise and the divisibility of the video signal. THX 1138 is an expansion of Electronic Labyrinth, in essence an escape story, but the full-length version of Lucas’s student film complicates matters by making explicit the characters’ entanglement with Eagan, America’s Film Legacy, 643–4. Electronic Labyrinth was shot in January 1967; OffOn was made later during the summer. See Hearn, The Cinema of George Lucas, 22; and Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 318. 54 In the summer of 1967, Bartlett set up a ‘TV studio situation’ at a TV station in Sacramento. ‘I didn’t know what would come of it, but [OffOn] came of it.’ Bartlett cited in Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 318. 52 53



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the functions of the apparatus that monitors their lives.55 Like Electronic Labyrinth, it introduces the protagonists through haunting video images, but only after a brief prologue that enhances their estranging effect: a trailer for the 1939 science fiction serial Buck Rogers (Ford Beebe, Saul A. Goodkind). If Lucas would later be known for the revivalism of a certain matinée vibe – Jameson calls Star Wars a ‘nostalgia film’ alluding to ‘the Saturday afternoon serial of the Buck Rogers type’56 – here nostalgia is used as a set-up, luring the audience into a false sense of security before plunging it into THX 1138’s panoptic, all-but-nostalgic prison of the future. Against the friendly matinée voiceover, presenting ‘the wonderful world’ of a future where ‘our scientific and mechanical dreams come true’, the distorted video images that follow it generate an electronic cold shower. A wide blue sea with waves of roll bars; a male voice asks: ‘What’s wrong?’, and from the blue nothingness emerge the contours of a face. The contrast has been pushed up, nullifying nuances and any sense of perspective within the electronic chiaroscuro. It is as if an underwater camera pointed upwards, towards the surface from below, captured a face emerging from nowhere at the moment it was dipped into the water. But there is no water; only a sea of electron beams. We sense, and it is later confirmed, that we are looking at THX (Robert Duvall) from the point of view of his bathroom cabinet. In the twenty-fifth century, the panoptic gaze has reached all the way into the heart of the home. Male voice: ‘What’s wrong?’ THX: ‘Nothing really. I just feel that I need something stronger.’ It is the ideal answer. There is nothing wrong with you as long as you admit that there is; your plagues are the prerequisite for the perpetuation of the system’s chemical control. In retrospect, the morning ritual brings to mind the proto-panoptic plague controls so vividly described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, a seventeenth-century protocol of measures to be taken if the plague comes to town. Quarantine, inhabitants forbidden to leave their houses and every street under the surveillance of a ‘syndic’ whose task it is to ensure enclosure and to monitor the contagion. If

THX’s job is to build the police androids that eventually will arrest him for his love affair with his roommate LUH, who has secretly been denying THX the sedatives mandatory for all citizens. Ignorant of her scheme, his state deteriorates into a mix of love and withdrawal syndrome, finally making him a workplace hazard, which reveals him to the authorities. Meanwhile LUH, who is a surveillance worker, has her own crimes monitored by her colleague SEN, secretly a computer hacker whose own little scheme to replace LUH as THX’s roommate prompts the reluctant THX to denounce him. Subsequently, both SEN and THX end up in prison, while LUH is eliminated; their downfalls the result of their own confused and competing conspiracies. 56 ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 8. 55

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the inhabitants leave their homes, a death sentence awaits them. If the syndic abandons his street, he will face the same fate. Every day, the syndic, gets all the inhabitants to appear at [their] windows […]; informs himself as to the state of each and every one of them – ‘in which respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under pain of death’; if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic must ask why: ‘In this way he will find out easily enough whether dead or sick are being concealed.’ Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked – it is the great review of the living and the dead.57

One can almost see how the faces of the sickly inhabitants materialize behind the dirty windows that separate them from the street. A prison wall from their perspective; a surveillance screen from the syndics’ point of view. In the twenty-fifth century of THX 1138, the dirty window has been updated to a noisy electronic screen. A different opacity – but the purpose is the same. Same male voice: ‘What’s wrong?’ LUH (Maggie McOmie): ‘Never mind.’ THX’s soon-to-be lover is in trouble from the start. The system cannot tolerate a negative answer. Cut to a close-up of an oscilloscope as ‘Never mind’ repeats itself in a distorted loop. There is an instant record of LUH’s answer, and it is already undergoing analysis. Like the inhabitants of the plague-stricken town, the citizens of the underground city are compelled to speak the truth under pain of death.

Figure 1.3  LUH’s health interrogation through CCTV camera in THX 1138 (1971). Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 196.

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Critics have drawn parallels between THX 1138 and Alphaville, which also builds a vision of the future by capturing existing media and environments. But Alphaville is void of electronic screens, with the exception of one short sequence. As the detective hero Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is escaping from the collapsing city of Alphaville, which has been under the rule of digital dictator Alpha 60, he momentarily gets lost in a storage of sorts, a small electronic labyrinth. We see a negative image at first, a white geometric structure with black squares in it, but it then reverts to positive, and we see that the black squares are really white noise. Rows of TV screens have been turned towards the camera and tuned to a dead channel. The rhythmic pulsation of the descending roll bars, all perfectly synchronized, is hardly a coincidental detail. It is the whole raison d’être of this short but memorable shot; the art of videographic cinema in its purest form: roll bars for roll bars’ sake. If Godard already apprehended their effect in 1965, by 1969, THX 1138’s cinematographer Albert Kihn was making a diegetic point out of them: There was no effort to counter any shutter bar effect and, as you know, cameramen will go to great length to get rid of those, as in [The Andromeda Strain (Robert Wise, 1972)]. […] But we didn’t; we let it go and found that we could get by quite acceptably for our purposes because it was to look almost like an amateurish kind of television monitoring system. In the whole film, instead of a polished future of total technical control, it was a sloppy future of technical know-how in the hands of people who weren’t quite complete.58

Kihn thus suggests a correlation between the noisy video aesthetics of THX 1138, the technical limitations within its diegetic world and the dehumanization of its characters. Never does this become more painfully evident than in the tests that THX is subjected to after being sentenced to prison; his crimes – ‘drug evasion, malicious sexual perversion and transgression’ (newspeak for having made love to LUH and failing to take the mandatory sedatives). In a facility where torture, medical control and scientific research merge into one (shot at an actual tumour research centre) THX is ‘used’ rather than ‘destroyed’, as ordered by the court. A four-millionvolt linear accelerator and a laser treatment machine provide the imaginary facility with actual futuristic machines of unclear functions.59 THX is Kihn, ‘Photographing a First Feature’, 1074. ‘“THX 1138” – Made in San Francisco’, American Cinematographer 52, no. 10 (October 1971): 992.

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scanned, injected and made to ingest things through his nose: a slicker version of the psychiatric ‘treatment’ in some of the most harrowing scenes of the then-recent documentary Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967). That THX 1138 is using science fiction to make a critical social comment on the overlaps between surveillance, health care and the penal system becomes evident during the second day of tests. The scene opens in darkness: we hear the soft voice of one man addressing another; then a monitor is turned on and fills the darkness with a blue square of light. As its image tunes in after a moment, we see THX sitting on the floor, wiggling his feet in a strangely naïve gesture. The disembodied voices discuss the technical capacities of their equipment, and as one of them zooms out, THX becomes a tiny figure in a vast, empty flickering space. The flicker does more than evoke the absence of technical control. Within the context of the surveillance imaginaries from which they emerge, these roll bars come to feel like visible extensions of the surveillance apparatus. They are not just diegetically motivated blemishes, but are tangible force-fields: electronic prison bars behind which the characters are held in captivity. As the sound of the men pushing buttons is followed by turbulence, the video image goes back into noise before stabilizing over THX’s body. He is suddenly lying in a foetal position. Button-pushing is heard as information appears on the electronic interface, under which THX is seen switching between unnatural poses. Two screens next to each other duplicate his figure as some invisible force is making him switch, freeze and go into convulsions. ‘What if you put a dual display on it and I punch two up’, asks one voice; each push of the button filling the screen with new information. What renders the scene so disturbing is not only the torture to which THX is subjected but also the fact that his torturers seem to be scientists trying out the latest version of some device. To the rising pitch of an electronic signal, THX puts his hands to his head and

Figure 1.4  THX ‘used’ in THX 1138 (1971).



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yells out in pain. The consistently neutral voices of the scientists suggest that they are undisturbed by the pain that they are causing: the pain is a negligible side-effect of the technical test. THX thus becomes not only less than human but also less than guinea pig – a disposable piece of bio-hardware. If videographic noise provided science fiction cinema with a new kind of futurity effect, the divisibility of the video signal – the fact that the same image can be multiplied across any number of monitors – provided it with another. In both cases, a sense of estrangement is at work: the dissolution of human form captured behind claustrophobic flicker in the case of noise; its unnatural proliferation in the case of multiplication. One could theorize the futurity effect of videographic multiplication in the general term of the uncanniness of the ‘double’;60 certainly, seeing the same figure and/or face multiplied into a crowd of identical people making the exact same movements at the exact same time does evoke an aesthetics of fever dreams or psychoses. Or one could go in a more media-oriented direction and analyse the images from the perspective of how media transform human subjects into simulacra. The people multiplied in the discussed films are surprisingly often white men in suits and ties. As snapshots, the sum of these compositions evokes a kind of Warholian serialization of 1960s normativity: men modelled on Model Man; copies without originals.61 But, given video’s surveillant function in these films, it may be most useful to consider human multiplication here in Deleuze’s term of the ‘dividual’. Deleuze argues that in societies of control, power exerts itself not through the distribution of individuals and masses within institutional spaces (Foucault’s disciplinary society), but through the distribution of information among entities that can no longer be considered as either: ‘We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses [have become] samples, data, markets, The Freudian ‘uncanny’ denotes a frightening feeling provoked by the estrangement of the familiar and vice versa. Freud connects the uncanny to the return of the repressed. Among more specific examples, Freud cites the double or doppelgänger (and potentially the unexpected encounter with one’s own image). ‘The Uncanny’, in Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 141, 161–2. 61 Baudrillard famously described a situation where the model in no longer a model of, but is a model for a reality that subsequently can no longer be defined as such, but rather as a ‘hyperreal’, produced through signs that only refer to other signs, that is, simulacra. Simulacra and Simulation, 1–3. Where Baudrillard equated the simulacrum with the disappearance of the real, Deleuze defined it positively as an act that overturns the presupposed hierarchy between original and copy, affirming the intrinsic difference of each. For Deleuze, Warhol’s serialization was one way in which art could engender a chain of copies of copies to the point where they reversed into simulacra. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 69 and 293–4. 60

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or “banks”.’62 The concept of the dividual subverts the idealized integrity of the individual (as ‘indivisible’). In our age of CGI, it is easy to imagine spectacular visualizations of his notion: the individual dissolving into one element in a matrix of digital code rendered architectural. But in the 1960s, the videographic multiplication of a character, in the eyes of a Colossus or the anonymous apparatus that controls the world of THX 1138, evokes something similar. Not least when these images are explicitly framed within a narrative where the character’s function is reduced to data. In the eyes of the faceless scientists and the anonymous system that they serve, THX is useful because he is quantifiable. ‘Don’t let it get above 4.7’, one of the scientists says as THX is screaming out his lungs. ‘Yes, but dissolution occurred at 4.5’, the other answers, the dialogue rendered disturbing by the ambiguity of what – or whom – ‘it’ actually refers to. Unlike THX, Forbin is not born in ‘dividuality’ but becomes ‘dividualized’ when his own invention shifts the power dynamics between the two. The connotations of multiplication subsequently shift over the course of Colossus: The Forbin Project’s narrative. Early on, Forbin presents Colossus at the White House press conference, and his image is transmitted to the computer centre on a wall of five horizontally placed screens. Multiplication here effects elevation: ‘So-called Man’ as Authority. The effect is aided by the fact that he is watched by his loyal staff, all of whom seem to rejoice at their boss’s greatest triumph. But as Colossus and Guardian become increasingly authoritarian and eventually acquire electronic eyes, all the electronic images become reminders of the fact that the humans have been placed under intensified surveillance. Their multiplication now becomes an enhancement of the feeling that they might at any point be monitored.63 The Soviet and US officials discussing over video links about how to regain control are now feeble – images of the restrained panic of enemies suddenly facing their mutual defeat. Meanwhile, Forbin’s own role shifts from inventor to an object for his invention to observe to learn about human behaviour: ‘So-called Man’ as Data. The stylized sequence that closes Colossus: The Forbin Project after Forbin has sworn to resist World Control, has the protagonist multiplied into four, then thirty-six, mugshot-like close-ups. The grid-like structure evokes walls of surveillance monitors and humanity’s imminent dividuation.

Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October 59 (Winter 1992): 5. These images also function as videographic stand-ins for the ‘actual’ surveillance images, which, in Colossus: The Forbin Project, are colourful, comic-like 1960s photochemical simulations of video.

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Canned life Imagining reality TV

Claudine (Anémone) and Jean-Michel (André Dussollier) are exceptionally average, a quality that has earned them the lead in the upcoming show ‘The Model Couple’ on French television. Really an advanced consumer test – courtesy of the Ministry of the Future – they will spend the next six months under 24/7 surveillance in an ultra-modern ‘Model Apartment’, providing the ministry with data and the viewers with entertainment. Soon enough, the tests are taking a toll, and when a terrorist group infiltrates the TV studio/ apartment, the whole concept is threatened. Released in 1977, media satire The Model Couple is eerily accurate in its premonition of the look, the structure and the logic of Big Brother (1999–), the show that would epitomize reality TV and help turn it into a dominant form of TV programming. The year that Big Brother sparked the reality TV boom, Arild Fetveit wrote that reality TV […] might express a longing for a lost touch with reality, prompted by the undermining and problematizing of indexicality. Not only does reality TV powerfully reclaim the evidential quality of photography said to be lost after digitalization, it also seems to be obsessed with conveying a sense of connectedness, of contact with the world.1

The problem with anchoring the rise of reality TV in the lost indexicality of digital media is that said obsessions are inscribed in TV’s founding social function. As Young writes, already back in 1944, the ‘TV prognosticator Robert E. Lee imagines a show he titles “BACKSTAGE!” as the ultimate statement of televisual education – showing what goes on behind the scenes at “a slaughterhouse! a steel mill! an aircraft factory!”’ Its purpose: to take Arild Fetveit, ‘Reality TV in the Digital Era: A Paradox in Visual Culture?’, Media, Culture & Society 21, no. 6 (1999): 800.

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viewers ‘behind the metaphorical theatre curtain’ and provide a ‘truthful analysis of the “why” of world events’.2 Furthermore, TV’s breakthrough as a broadcasting medium was conditioned on the possibility to transmit live, a quality that separated it from film – a very much indexical medium – and that came to be framed in terms of an epistemic superiority: ‘liveness’ rendered TV inherently real. That said, such promises are bound to be scrutinized, not least when applied to a medium whose supposed transmission of reality is conditioned on the marketing of consumer goods. This chapter shows how, from the 1950s and on, commentators as diverse as critics, theorists and philosophers would engage in critical discussions for and against the broadcasting medium, and how cinema was caught up in these debates. Zooming in on three videographic films made between the 1950s and the 1980s, all of which criticize TV by imagining more or less outrageous reality TV formats, the chapter explores the broken promises of televisual liveness and the longlasting relevance of its negative correlative canned (beyond the meaning of being pre-recorded).

The deadly threat of live TV: A Face in the Crowd as intermedia warfare On 5 June 1957, the readers of Variety were greeted with some bad news for the new medium; on the very front page the headline read in big black letters: ‘Mass Media Calls TV a Mess.’ ‘There’s considerable unrest,’ George Rosen writes, ‘not to mention anxiety, in the television industry over what to all outward appearances would seem to be a concerted and deliberate attempt to downgrade the medium.’3 It was the year of The Comedian; only eight months had passed since the airing of Requiem for a Heavyweight (Ralph Nelson, 1956), and Frankenheimer had yet to direct Days of Wine and Roses (1958) – in other words, the height of what would go down in history as ‘the Golden Age of Television’. And yet, a choir of pundits were already spreading some of the ideas that would dominate discourses on TV. Max Dawson summarizes: During the 1950s and early 1960s, journalists, educators, Marxist critics, and cold war liberals turned their attention […] to what Walter Lippmann in 1959 had termed the ‘TV problem’: a confluence of social, Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, 162–3. George Rosen, ‘Mass Media Calls TV a Mess’, Variety 207, no. 1 (5 June 1957): 1.

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moral, aesthetic, and geopolitical dilemmas brought on by America’s most popular and polarizing medium. In a flurry of impassioned books, articles, and editorials, television’s detractors accused it of stupefying audiences, warping the minds of children, eroding traditional values, reducing popular tastes to a lowest common denominator, and diminishing America’s standing abroad.4

What bothered Rosen was what he perceived as an attack irreducible to specific examples. It was not a matter of this or that TV critic giving this or that TV show a bad review. There was a generalized assault on one medium by an alliance of others; an ‘editorial gangup’ conspiring with the film industry, and it was evidenced by the coinciding publication of a series of critical articles with the release of a Hollywood film that ‘indicts television’s practices of vulgarity and Madison Ave. hucksterism as perhaps no other film before it’.5 The title: A Face in the Crowd. Before taking a closer look at the film and how it unfolds, a question must be addressed. If it is true that A Face in the Crowd forms part of a largescale attack by Hollywood and the press on television as a medium, why this attack from Hollywood in particular? As Young writes, television emerged as a mass medium out of a struggle between two competing media industries: radio and film. By the mid-1940s, and with the help of the FCC, radio networks like CBS and NBC had managed to establish a monopoly over TV broadcasting, effectively crushing Hollywood’s aspirations to gain any kind of control over the new medium.6 This exclusion of the film industry from what was already sensed to become a lucrative business made TV’s growing success over the next few years a provocation by default. But the fact that its success coincided with a crisis in the film industry made the two media definite competitors. Between 1947 and 1948, the film industry saw the beginning of a steady decrease in ticket sales, while the same period saw the number of TV sets increase by 1,200 per cent.7 By 1955, with broadcasts now reaching all regions of the United States, the networks had proven TV to be profitable.8 ‘Only MGM had an official mascot’, Young puns, ‘but by the 1950s all the major studios had adopted television as a scapegoat for their

Max Dawson, ‘Home Video and the “TV Problem”: Cultural Critics and Technological Change’, Technology and Culture 48, no. 3 (July 2007): 525–526. 5 Rosen, ‘Mass Media Calls TV a Mess’, 41. ‘Madison Ave.’ refers to the heart of the 1950s American advertising industry. 6 Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, 156. 7 Ibid., 138, 139. 8 Ibid., 138, 178. 4

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economic misfortunes.’9 Whether the correlation between the rise of TV and Hollywood’s demise was actually causal is beside the point; more interesting is that Hollywood considered this to be the case, felt itself to be threatened by TV and took to a number of more or less successful strategies to launch back at the implicit attack. Among the least successful must have been studio executive Harry Warner’s ‘short-lived but passionate edict that TV must never appear in a Warner Bros. film’.10 It is difficult not to read this as a testament to Hollywood mogul megalomania lingering since the heydays, insofar as it seems to imply that the cinematic imaginary could somehow deny TV into actual inexistence. By 1957, the strategy had clearly changed. Produced by Warner Bros., A Face in the Crowd chronicles a man’s (Andy Griffith) rise from the dusty roads of rural Arkansas to the top of the American entertainment industry and/as politics. A drifting drunk sleeping it off in a county jail, his charisma and powerful singing voice are discovered by local radio reporter Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neil), who is there to record common people for her proto-reality radio show ‘A Face in the Crowd’. He reluctantly accepts a regular spot on the radio channel owned by Marcia’s uncle, and his improvised mix of folksy anecdotes, singing, raw jokes and social pathos makes him an instant success. Soon enough, ‘Lonesome Rhodes’, as Marcia nicknames him, is offered his own live TV show in Memphis. His rebellious and politically progressive on-air persona makes him a headache for his sponsor, but his popularity among his viewers rockets. He subsequently catches the attention of a New York company trying to make so-called Vitajex pills profitable. Increasingly aware of his persuasive power, Lonesome pitches a few ideas that end up making him the brand’s mascot – and this quasi-placebo a would-be-Viagra. If there were cracks in Lonesome’s persona, then the contract with Vitajex marks the beginning of his definite turn into what his writer Mel Miller (Walter Matthau) comes to define as ‘the demagogue in denim’. This happens not only because the massive increase in economic resources gives his show unprecedented reach, rendering him the number one star of national television but also because Vitajex is owned by right-wing Gen. Haynesworth (Percy Waram), who is endorsing Senator Fuller (Marshall Neilan) for the presidential elections. Lonesome, who has proven that he can even make a placebo profitable, is invited to become Fuller’s media strategist. His key role in national politics makes him more powerful than ever. A Face in the Crowd traces the thin line between the popular and the populist. First using his

Ibid., 137. Ibid.

9

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arena to prank the powerful and defend the disempowered and marginalized (housewives and African Americans), Lonesome undergoes a political reversal. The thin line is subtly captured by what is to become his theme song, performed by a fictional country band called Barefoot Baritones: ‘Friendly greeting, Sunday-go-to-meeting, just plain folks / Bible-reading, pork-chopfeeding, just plain folks.’ The celebration of ‘just plain folks’ is also a subtle specification of who might not qualify in the Rhodes-Fuller future (e.g. those who do not gather on Sundays or eat pork). Another song is used to highlight the hypocrisy of Lonesome’s increasingly reactionary persona as he rises to the top of (right-wing) politics. The day after he has proposed to Marcia, she gets a visit from what turns out to be Lonesome’s wife (Kay Medford). The wife wryly notes the song playing from Lonesome’s show on a TV set: ‘An old-fashioned marriage is my kind of marriage.’ Later, the ironies are entangled as a crowd of teenage contestants for the title of Miss Arkansas Drum Majorette celebrate Lonesome by greeting him with his own theme song, ‘Just Plain Folks’. An underage girl wins him over with her baton-wielding skills, gaining the double title of Miss Arkansas Drum Majorette of 1957 and yet another Mrs Rhodes. Lonesome’s oncecharming self-confidence turns into dangerous megalomania as he is offered a tailor-made post in Fuller’s future cabinet: a ‘Secretary for National Morale’ to ‘rally the people’ and ‘hold them in line right behind the government’, in ‘time of imminent crisis and danger’. As if the promise of an authoritarian turn in US politics was not evident, Lonesome is already about to launch a junta of military, businessmen and politicians: ‘Fighters for Fuller’.

Live loops and canned laughter: TV tools for demagoguery and deception For those of us who grew up somewhere between 1960 and 2000, when comparisons between film and TV were seldom to TV’s advantage, it may come as a surprise that there was a period in the 1950s when TV was framed as the aesthetically and epistemically superior medium. Certainly, a ten-inch TV receiver had its dimensional disadvantages vis-à-vis the silver screen, but it could offer something that cinema could only dream of: the immediate transmission of an event in its unfolding right into the privacy of the home. No matter if the event itself was staged; better yet. It was precisely the studio rendered as stage that elevated TV into an art: ‘The live hour or ninety-minute dramatic show’, Rod Serling writes in 1957, the year that A Face in the Crowd is released, ‘has a feeling of theatre, a spontaneity and an immediacy that a

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filmed show can never hope to duplicate.’11 Already in 1950, Rudy Bretz, a pioneer of the original CBS staff formed in 1939, reflects on the possibilities of TV to be considered an art form. Three qualities distinguish TV from other audiovisual media: immediacy, spontaneity and actuality.12 While live TV drama, Bretz notes, would seem to lack all three (actuality replaced by illusion, set design dissimulating the studio and actors creating the illusion of being others than themselves), what appears on TV is a performance, and a performance, Bretz writes, is inherently real. It is spontaneous insofar as it is performed for the first time; it is immediate insofar as the audience sees it at the same time, and it is actual to the extent that the actor’s personality transcends the role.13 The difference between film and television is that ‘the original performance loses none of its spontaneity or actuality when transmitted over television, whereas the translation of film loses all of this and hence the nature of the performance itself ’.14 Does this mean that TV is an art form? Bretz provides an open answer. If the audience insists on preferring to see the performance in a theatre, ‘then television is only an in-between, a medium of communication’. But if TV is preferred, ‘something must exist on the television screen that was not in the original [stage performance]’.15 Bretz suggests two such qualities – close-ups and the possibility to combine points of view: ‘The multiple eyes of television can put the viewer in many places at the same time.’16 If there is already here an implied association between liveness, reality and TV’s potential to be art, this is further emphasized by some then-recent high-points that Bretz presents to the reader: The Black Robe, which ‘injected actuality into the dramatization of night-court cases by the use of nonprofessionals as players’, and City at Midnight, which was ‘a series of dramatic shows produced on location against the real background of the city’.17 Two years later, in 1952, TV critic Jack Gould writes: ‘On every count – technically and qualitatively – the films cannot compare with ‘live’ shows and they are only hurting video, not helping it. […] In short, both the visual and aural aspects lack that intangible sense of depth and trueness which the wizardry of science did impart to “live” TV.’18 Where those who defend filmed

Rod Serling, ‘TV in the Can vs. TV in the Flesh’, The New York Times, 24 November 1957. Rudy Bretz, ‘TV as an Art Form’, Hollywood Quarterly 5, no. 2 (Winter 1950): 153–4. 13 Ibid., 155. 14 Ibid., 159. 15 Ibid., 160. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 161. According to Bretz, the shows were produced by ‘Shenk, Dahlman, and Black’ but it has been difficult to identify additional information about the mentioned works. 18 Jack Gould, ‘A Plea for Live Video’, The New York Times, 7 December 1952. 11 12



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TV do it on account of the elimination of mistakes in live transmission, Gould writes: The perfection is artificial and achieved only at the price of the reality and spontaneity that are part and parcel of the ‘live’ performance. […] There simply is no substitute for the intangible excitement and sense of anticipation that is inherent in the performance which takes place at the moment one is watching. The supporters of Hollywood films for TV are raising a false cry – and sponsors are being misled – if they think the uncertainties in a ‘live’ show are to be avoided: they are what make true television.19

The celebration of TV was thus related to a particular form of drama conditioned by TV’s capacity to broadcast live. In less than a decade, the new medium had come to challenge cinema not only economically but also artistically. Clearly, this was a provocation to producers and filmmakers alike. The critics’ celebration of the TV works of directors like Frankenheimer draws on what some have called technologically essentialist understandings of ‘liveness’.20 But we might as well phrase it as a sensitivity towards how technical conditions necessarily condition aesthetic expressions. There is an intensity, a nerve, even a stress that grants a work like The Comedian its power, and it is arguably conditioned on the constant risk of technical collapse or some other on-air failure. ‘The tension that suffuses the atmosphere of a live production is a special thing to which audiences respond’, TV critic Gilbert Seldes writes in 1952, ‘they feel that what they see and hear is happening in the present and therefore more real than anything taken and cut and dried’ (i.e. pre-recorded).21 If there is a particular relation between the TV actor and the audience, Donald Curtis writes the same year, it is because the TV actor ‘is coming into a home and joining an intimate family group’. There is thus ‘no place for acting here’. The actor ‘must “be” what he represents’.22 In other words: he can perform, but can no longer pretend. Curtis here leaves a remarkably early testament to an emergent faith in video’s revelatory capacities. His conclusion that the TV camera ‘goes inside of the actor’s mind and soul, and sends the receiving set exactly what it sees there’,23 already hints

Ibid. See William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 80–1. 21 Gilbert Seldes cited in ibid., 81. 22 Donald Curtis cited in ibid., 82. 23 Ibid. 19 20

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at a belief on which artistic and therapeutic video practices will be founded in the following two decades. Particularly relevant in these accounts is the correlation between liveness, intimacy and reality. TV was being heralded as the brave new bastion of ‘depth and trueness’.24 If the dream factory was to stand a chance, it would not be enough to attack TV’s weaknesses. Jokes about the TV set’s size or quirks of transmission were destined to miss the target,25 as these deficiencies were testaments to a much greater promise: the mediation of social reality itself.26 What cinema had to do was to send a crushing blow to television’s strongest point, which is to say precisely by puncturing its claims to being more alive, intimate and authentic than cinema. Lonesome’s transition from small-town radio to Memphis TV already showcases all the traits that will turn him into a star: a disarming combination of rusticity, sensitivity and political edge – and the capacity to turn his ignorance into an asset. More concerned with the microphone hanging over his head than with the instructions he is getting, Lonesome’s famous first words as a TV star are directed not to the audience (of which he seems unaware), but at the director (Logan Ramsey) who is signalling to him that they are live. ‘Whadd’ya want?’, Lonesome asks, and the director nervously points towards the camera. Lonesome quickly catches on. ‘Howdy’, he smiles into the camera for a moment before one of the studio monitors steals his attention. ‘I’ve never seen myself on one of these things before. So, if I stop and admire myself on this … . What do you call it?’ ‘Monitor’, the irritated director whispers. To the director’s and studio technicians’ irritation, Lonesome turns the monitor towards a camera that is capturing the image that the monitor displays, thus generating what must be cinema’s first videographic hall of mirrors – an effect impossible to achieve by photochemical means as it is conditioned on simultaneous capture and transmission. Spielmann argues that the difference between TV as a mass medium and video as an art is relative to the extent to which each represses Gould, ‘A Plea for Live Video’. Young describes how 1950s films mocked television on account of its shortcomings. See Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, 180–1. 26 Both Gould and Serling explicitly equated the potential shortcomings of live drama with its powers. ‘Whatever blemishes or rough spots exist are really more strengths than weaknesses, because they are reminders to the audience that it is watching a drama as it occurs – not several thousand feet of film made many months before.’ Serling. ‘The basic trouble with TV shows on film is the cockeyed concept of perfectionism that motivates their production. The celluloid impresarios are so preoccupied with technical factors that they are not unlike the mechanic who finds an automobile engine more interesting than its passengers.’ Jack Gould, ‘“Live” TV vs. “Canned”’, The New York Times, 5 February 1956. 24 25



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Figure 2.1  Videographic hall of mirrors in TV studio in A Face in the Crowd (1957). or affirms the reflexive capacities of their shared technological foundation.27 If so, then Lonesome’s TV debut could be said to be an injection of video art avant la lettre. A decade before video artists will discover it as one of their favourite devices, Lonesome is already turning TV against itself. Calibrated properly, Lonesome might even have triggered what Spielmann calls video’s ‘purest form of self-reflexion’,28 namely, the feedback loop of self-organizing patterns that would enchant the video artists of the psychedelic 1960s. Less concerned, however, with video’s self-reflection than with basking in the light of his own video-self, Lonesome installs himself between the monitor and the camera. A hyper-narcissistic dispositif (not one mirror but a hall of them), the effect prefigures Krauss’s critique of video as an ‘aesthetics of narcissism’. As Lonesome waves to the technicians in the control room, but also to his own multiplied backs, a striking image is produced: the playful puppy, soonto-be a dangerous beast, discovering his own tail for the first time, chasing the elusive person behind his onscreen persona into infinity.  What A Face in the Crowd intuits, as early as 1957, is that so-called reflexivity is just as prone to be used as another deceptive device as transparency might be. Lonesome’s simple but striking move of literally turning TV against itself constitutes the first of a series of spontaneous transgressions through which his apparent ignorance of how live TV is expected to work allows him to realize its ‘repressed’ potentials. The key to his success will be that he instinctively

Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium, 54–5. Ibid., 56–7.

27 28

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knows exactly how to break the rules in order to make the public accept them as the new ones. This includes a natural talent for exploiting the new media technologies at hand, and rendering their alien nature familiar. ‘You know, the director said all I had to do was to act like I was looking straight at you’, he confides in the audience. ‘But what he forgot to say was that there’d be a great big old red eye looking straight at me.’ Lonesome is referring to the ‘tally light’ that signals when a TV camera is transmitting, another device of which the audience is supposed to be unaware. But the possibility of this technical revelation functioning as some kind of Verfremdungseffekt is neutralized by Lonesome’s characteristically folksy continuation. ‘You know, that old eye does look kind of familiar, though’, he says, taking off his cowboy hat and placing it on top of the TV camera. ‘Reminds me of my old Uncle Abernathy after a night of drinking that fine old five-star corn liquor. He put a star on the bottle for every day it aged.’ The sceptical director now signals to Lonesome to play something on his guitar. He tries, but stops himself, suddenly turning serious and initiating a monologue about his uncomfortable encounter with big city life. Helen Westgeest writes: ‘One of the most powerful strategies of television is its direct addressing of the viewer’, a strategy adopted by broadcasters who realized that the domestic dispositif of TV+viewer would benefit from ‘the norms of ordinary, everyday, mundane conversation’.29 Gould’s 1956 defence for live over filmed TV is enlightening here: In the blind pursuit of artificial perfectionism, the TV film producers compromise the one vital element that endows the home screen with its own intangible excitement: humanness. […] The viewer loses his sense of being a partner and instead becomes a spectator. It is the difference between being with somebody and looking at somebody.30

There is an erotic implication to the notion of ‘being with somebody’ that Lonesome intuits. ‘Move that old red eye a little closer’, he tells a cameraman. ‘He’s only been on two minutes and he’s already telling us what to do’, one of the technicians in the control room comments. ‘I want to talk face to face with them friends of mine out there’, Lonesome tells the cameraman, then asking him which ‘hole’ to look into. Cut to a close-up of Lonesome’s face, slightly over the ‘shoulder’ of the TV camera, so that both are visible at the same time. A hand comes into the screen and points at the right lens. Lonesome’s usually loud, coarse voice goes soft, tender, almost whispering.

Westgeest, Video Art Theory, 37. Gould, ‘“Live” TV vs. “Canned”’.

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Looking straight into the camera from very up close, with a warm smile, almost as a lover about to speak in intimate confidence, he delivers a heartfelt monologue about troubled city people lingering in the Memphis streets at night. But the monologue is only a build-up to what constitutes his thus far most powerful and politically progressive transgression. Going backstage for a moment, Lonesome returns with an African American woman. ‘Hey, a coloured woman in Memphis, that takes nerve’, his clearly appreciative writer Mel smiles. Lonesome encourages the woman to tell the audience about her problem: that her house has burned down and that she cannot afford to build a new one. As it turns out, Lonesome already has a kind of crowdfunding solution to her problem in mind. He encourages his viewers to send a little money each to help her build a new house. The initiative turns out to be a success not only for the woman but also for Lonesome, who subsequently attracts his first sponsor. ‘The unforeseen occurrence or the occasional mishap on stage’, Gould writes in 1952, ‘are the best possible testaments of television’s power to transmit actuality. Take away the actuality of television and there is lost the heart of TV.’31 As Lonesome’s TV debut already shows, he instinctively knows how to exploit this power, turning unforeseen occurrences and occasional mishaps that the director and technicians have no means of editing out into his merit. But if there is merit to the claim that A Face in the Crowd is ‘the founding movie of postmodern times’,32 it is precisely that there is no true person behind this rebel persona. We get glimpses of prior lives – the first wife, for instance – but we never learn where the man really comes from, if his anecdotes are true. ‘Just be perfectly natural, easy and relaxed. And real country’, the director tells him at his TV debut, sticking a straw into his mouth. Be yourself, but on the condition that yourself is ‘Lonesome’. It thus matters little whether the crowdfunding initiative is genuinely progressive or already a populist device. In either case, it is a TV spectacle that serves the reactionary powers that will incorporate the Lonesome Rhodes brand in the long run. Five years after Curtis claimed that the performer can no longer pretend because the TV camera is some kind of X-ray into the soul, A Face in the Crowd subverts it all. It forces the audience to face the possibility that what the camera sends into the living room is not a soul but a carefully manufactured persona. It is one manufactured as much by people like Marcia

Gould, ‘A Plea for Live Video’. J. Hoberman, ‘A Face in the Crowd: A Harbinger of Things to Come’, The Village Voice, 26 February 2008, https​:/​/ww​​w​.vil​​lagev​​oice.​​com​/2​​008​/0​​2​/26/​​a​-fac​​e​-in-​​the​-c​​rowd-​​a​-har​​ binge​​r​​-of-​​thing​​s​-to-​​come/​.

31 32

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and the General, who discover it, name it and support it almost until the end, as by the television medium itself. A Face in the Crowd was made in an age of transition. Ampex had introduced the first VTR by the time of its release, and within a few years the live drama, on which TV’s discourse of superiority was largely dependent, would be a dead art. But by 1957, another TV device was already in use – and wildly debated. If A Face in the Crowd was bold enough for a frontal attack on TV’s strongest promise, it also had a cheaper, but no less effective shot up its sleeve. About halfway into the film, as Lonesome’s career is well underway, he introduces the General to his latest innovation. The look of a dishwasher and the size of an electric organ, ‘The Lonesome Rhodes Automatic Reactor’ can laugh, giggle, express wonder and so on. Marcia is sceptical: ‘Mechanical laughter and applause, what are we coming to?’ But Lonesome’s associate Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa) is already planning commercial production. The use of ‘canned laughter’ seems to epitomize the broken promise of TV as a fundamentally live and therefor true medium. While there were instances of its use as early as 1950,33 it was popularized in the years leading up to A Face in the Crowd, which was also when serious attacks began being launched against the whole concept. ‘The producer takes the place of the audience’, comedian Ray Bolger complains in 1954. ‘Relying on his own sense of humor, he decides that what he thinks if funny should also be considered funny by the viewers in the home. Naturally, he thinks everything is funny. If he didn’t he would have had the script rewritten before the show was shot.’34 As Ben Glenn II describes, the father of the breakthrough laugh machine was CBS broadcast engineer Charles Douglass who would record audience reactions from live TV shows on audiotape and then spend hours at home sampling and slicing sounds into useful loops.35 Described as a keyboard instrument, the virtuoso of the Laff Box was Mr Douglass himself: The secrecy surrounding his work is Hollywood legend. Only a very few people witnessed him using his machine, and it was always kept padlocked when not in use.  Part of this secrecy was to protect his

‘Canned laughter was used to a certain degree in radio, but its first TV appearance was in 1950, on a rather obscure NBC situation comedy, The Hank McCune Show [(1950– 1953)]. […] Shortly after the show’s debut, there was an article in Variety noting that the show’s canned laughter was a new innovation, and that its potential for providing a wide-range of reactions was great.’ Benn Glenn II in Mike Sacks, ‘Canned Laughter: Ben Glenn II, Television Historian’, The Paris Review, 20 July 2010, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​paris​​revie​​ w​.org​​/blog​​/2010​​/07​/2​​0​/can​​ned​-l​​aught​​er​-be​​n​-gle​​nn​-ii​​-te​le​​visio​​n​-his​​toria​​n/. 34 Ray Bolger, ‘TV-Films: The Last Laugh Track’, Variety 195, no. 8 (28 July 1954): 98. 35 Sacks. 33



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invention, to be sure. But part of it, too, was that […] there was a real stigma surrounding the use of the laugh track, which continues to this day. […] Producers would call Douglass into the studio to ‘laugh’ a show. Douglass would show up with his Laff Box, which he carted around on a dolly that he invented. When he was finished, he’d pack up his machine, load it on his dolly, and drive off to the next job.36

The stigma was the result of the vocal criticism raised against canned laughter, not least among comedians themselves. Among the most acerbic attacks – a colourful tirade worthy of the harshest Frankfurt scholar – must be a 1956 article by Red Skelton, whose own The Red Skelton Show (1951–71) was reportedly among the very first to be sampled for laughs by Douglass: Now they’ve got whole laugh-track libraries – canned, dehydrated, hermetically-sealed human laughter, artificially preserved … the laughter of corpses – […] one of the most shameful frauds ever perpetrated. We are being hoodwinked into laughter, at the cost of our sense of humor. The man in the [sound] booth is now the nation’s sole judge on what is funny. […] You know you’ve got a real boffo when the man leans on the button two or three extra seconds. He never laughs himself. He has the machine do it for him.37

The ending of A Face in the Crowd would be misunderstood if it was read as the revelation of Lonesome’s ‘true character’. He is nothing but a product of the medium that ‘cans’ him from the moment that he infiltrates it. Having risen to the top ranks of the American entertainment industry and/as politics,38 Lonesome’s road finally ends with a scandal. His popularity has survived bigamy and marrying an underage girl, but when Marcia finally decides to pull the plug, there is no room for redemption. As the end credits to his show are rolling over the typical TV device of a camera transmitting Glenn II cited in ibid. Reprinted as part of ‘Playback’, Broadcasting, Telecasting 51, no. 22 (26 November 1956): 86. 38 The depiction of a demagogue carried by TV to the top ranks of American politics prompted a media debate around 2016 whether A Face in the Crowd had predicted Donald Trump. See, for instance Lewis Beale, ‘Did This Movie Predict Trump’s Rise?’, CNN, 30 November 2015, https​:/​/ed​​ition​​.cnn.​​com​/2​​015​/1​​1​/30/​​opini​​ons​/b​​eale-​​trump​​ -a​-fa​​ce​-in​​-the-​​​crowd​​/inde​​x​.htm​​l; Marc Fisher, ‘The Movie That Foretold the Rise of Donald Trump’, The Washington Post, 8 February 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.was​​hingt​​onpos​​ t​.com​​/life​​style​​/styl​​e​/the​​-movi​​e​-tha​​t​-for​​etold​​-the-​​rise-​​of​-do​​nald-​​trump​​/2016​​/02​/0​​8​ /763​​58d7e​​-cb7c​​-11e5​​-a7b2​​-5a2f​​824b0​​2c9​_s​​​tory.​​html?​​utm​_t​​erm=.​​bd4fb​​c1421​​3d; Sean O’Neal, ‘Not Even a Movie as Cynical as A Face in the Crowd Could Predict Donald Trump’, The A.V. Club, 10 November 2016, https​:/​/fi​​lm​.av​​club.​​com​/n​​ot​-ev​​en​-a-​​movie​​-as​ -c​​ynica​​l​-as-​​a​-fac​​e​-in-​​the​-c​​r​owd-​​coul-​​17982​​54296​. 36 37

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the muted wrap-up, Marcia enters the control room and turns the sound back on without Lonesome realizing it. His rant about his easily manipulated audience, intended to be dissimulated by a big smile, airs across America. The wholesome aura of Lonesome’s persona is thus shattered in a matter of seconds. It will take a while for him to realize what has happened. But once he does, the film depicts it in a manner worthy of a thriller. Marcia and Mel arrive at the twenty-five-room New York penthouse in which Lonesome now lives, to the cheers and applause of guests and the coarse voice of Lonesome rallying: ‘Secretary for National Morale is a job that I was born for! In a time of crisis, who else could rally the people like Lonesome Rhodes? Who else could move the people to action like Lonesome Rhodes? You are looking at America’s answer to the crying need for national … .’ But an uncanny shot of his dark shadow projected on the white cloth of a huge ready laid table reveals the penthouse to be empty. Lonesome’s only company is his old drifter companion Beanie (Rod Brasfield), who has been given the task of conserving his delusion that his guests are coming – that he remains on top. And the device through which this delusion can be conserved is ‘The Lonesome Rhodes Automatic Reactor’. At the dawning of the age of the laugh track, A Face in the Crowd subverts its logic to sad, ironic and uncanny effect.39 Demagoguery and deception come full circle. The liveness that beamed Lonesome to the top ends up being what decapitates him, and once he has lost his head, his mind takes refuge in its counterpoint: canned reactions.

The ‘social experiment’ as televised spectacle: The canned life of The Model Couple A Face in the Crowd was released the year after videotape was introduced, a technology that would relocate live TV from the revered default mode of a new medium into its rare exception. Yet, as Jane Feuer points out in her 1983 essay ‘The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology’, the notion of liveness would insist on defining the supposed essence of the medium. Television’s self-referential discourse plays upon the connotative richness of the term ‘live’, confounding its simple or technical denotations with

The ending of A Face in the Crowd also seems to be a precursor to the psychotic stand-up comedian Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) in King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982), who performs alone to the sound of canned laughter in front of a huge tapestry of a black-and-white photographed audience.

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a wealth of allusiveness. […] The contradictory coinage ‘live on tape’ captures the slippage involved. From an opposition between live and recorded broadcasts, we expand to an equation of ‘the live’ with ‘the real’. Live television is not recorded; live television is alive; television is living, real, not dead.40

The equation of ‘live’ with ‘real life’ becomes more evident if we back the tape to the inaugural year of videotape and look at how its counterpart, canned, was framed in critical discourse. Gould opens his 1956 The New York Times article ‘“Live” TV vs. “Canned”’ with an illustrative citation: ‘In one of the better quips of the current television season [comedian] George Gobel observed, “This program comes to you dead from Hollywood”.’ Gould continues: ‘The case of natural television against canned television is up for spirited review in industry quarters.’41 If live connotes real life, then canned evidently connotes the opposite: death and artifice (‘natural television against canned television’). Through discursive hyperbole, canned thus comes to exceed its basic meaning of being pre-recorded. We recall Skelton – ‘dehydrated’, ‘hermetically-sealed’, ‘artificially preserved’, ‘laughter of corpses’.42 Gould is hardly subtler – ‘phony TV with performing half-breeds – half-live and half-dead, the zombies of show-business’.43 Like the concept of live, its counterpart thus plays upon its own connotative richness: canned means processed, branded or rendered bland: the fruits of real life packaged and sold as products. As a radio/TV format, A Face in the Crowd rests on the premise that broadcasting can make any Average Joe/Jane a star. As such, the show within the film already carries a seed of what will be termed ‘reality TV’. ‘The advent of the reality genre’, Mark Andrejevic writes in Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, ‘takes place when documentary techniques are used not to document the daily life of geographically and culturally remote peoples but to study the lives of proximal, contemporary figures as representatives of typical – hence real – people.’44 Andrejevic marks the documentary series An American Family (1973) as a defining moment. But it is worth noting that this logic can be traced all the way back to Candid Camera (1948–50, 1960–7), Jane Feuer, ‘The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology’, in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches – An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1983), 14. 41 Gould, ‘“Live” TV vs. “Canned”’. 42 ‘Playback’, 86. 43 Gould, ‘“Live” TV vs. “Canned”’. 44 Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 65. 40

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whose premiere predates the release of A Face in the Crowd by almost a decade. Incidentally, it already prefigures the discourses surrounding reality TV in the 2000s. Not only was Candid Camera deemed ‘invasive, misrepresentative, exploitative, and cruel’45 – one New York Times critic even calling creator and TV host Allen Funt ‘sadistic, poisonous, anti-human and sneaky’46 – it also answered with tactics of legitimization that resonate with later shows like Big Brother, that is, by presenting itself as a ‘social experiment’.47 The label was not only used as a marketing strategy for proto-reality shows, actual experts helped propagating the notion. As Michael McKenna observes, Candid Camera ‘found vocal pockets of interest and support in academia, particularly in the social sciences’.48 Supporters included social psychologists such as Philip Zimbardo of the Stanford prison experiment, who ‘noted the value of Americans being able to see themselves as they really are, as well as the potential clinical applications of Candid Camera’s techniques’.49 From its inception, then, reality TV seems to have existed at the intersection of social experiment and televised spectacle. It also conflated with other functions particularly susceptible to critical scrutiny – surveillance and commerce. Proven to be exceptionally average, married couple Jean-Michel and Claudine are chosen to participate in a study conducted by the Ministry of the Future. During six months, the designated ‘Model Couple’ is to live in an ultra-modern ‘Model Apartment’, a prototype for a planned urban centre in the ministry’s research facility. Under the constant watch of a group of psychosociologists, technicians, a TV host and a panel of experts, not to mention the TV audience, the couple is subjected to a number of televised experiments, the alleged purpose of which is to aid the ministry in their search for the perfect living conditions for the ‘New Man’ of the year 2000. The show’s banal premise becomes the seed for a surreal inquiry into what Baudrillard (referring to An American Family) called the ‘dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV’.50 Notwithstanding its late 1970s artgoes-pop attitude and style – a product of its own postmodern times – The Model Couple also prefigures the logic of Big Brother. John McGrath writes

Michael McKenna, Real People and the Rise of Reality Television (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), xxxix. 46 Philip Hamburger cited in ibid. 47 On the framing of Candid Camera and An American Family as social experiments, see ibid. and Andrejevic, Reality TV, 69. 48 McKenna, Real People and the Rise of Reality Television, xxxix. 49 Ibid. The second run of Candid Camera (1960–7) would actually coincide with the coming of clinical practices premised on the postulated benefit of seeing oneself on video (see Chapters 3 and 4). 50 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 30. 45



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that while Big Brother ‘was by no means the first example of what became known as “reality TV”, it was the first to centralize the concept of 24-hour surveillance as the key organizing principle’.51 But in a series of absurd, at times, outright surreal vignettes, the 1977 media satire already visualizes a critique against TV surveillance guised as ‘social experiment’. No sooner than Jean-Michel and Claudine have arrived at the facility, they are told to undress and stand before a wall to be interrogated by the two psychosociologists (Zouk, Jacques Boudet). Hands up as if at gun point, they are ‘shot’ by a photo camera while a computer analyses all of their responses (producing a very bland futurity effect through blinking texts that fill the frame). Throughout the film, there will be implicit and explicit comments on the nature of totalitarianism and the totalitarian nature of the TV show. Social psychologist Zimbardo seems to have not only defended the logic of surveillance-for-entertainment but also identified in it a potentially clinical function of confronting people with their own image. In a parody of such analyses, The Model Couple lets the two psychosociologists integrate said techniques in subtle ways. Upon arrival in their Model Apartment, a late 1970s pop art white cube, Jean-Michel and Claudine are treated to a TV dinner. (Every dinner is a TV dinner in the canned life of the Model Couple: digestion of TV in life, digestion of life in TV.) As the first psychosociologist (Zouc) turns on the TV, what the couple get to see is precisely themselves. Made to watch the introduction to their own TV show, airing simultaneously as it is being recorded, the image of Claudine and Jean-Michel eating in front of the TV is fed back to them as they are doing precisely that, causing Claudine to break down into tears and tell Jean-Michel that she is afraid. ‘This is science’, Jean-Michel, clearly amused by the ‘autoptic’ confrontation (see Chapter 3), tries to comfort her. But the legitimacy of social science-turned-TV spectacle is precisely what the film is set to deconstruct. The psychosociologists appear increasingly erratic – as power-tripping charlatans with no idea of what they are doing, other than trying to drive the couple mad. Monitoring them from a TV control room, they occasionally communicate orders through a microphone transmitting straight into the apartment; an eerie premonition of the disembodied voice of ‘Big Brother’ in the eponymous reality show. But whereas the hit show of the 2000s would come to have clearly defined goals (with the authority of ‘Big Brother’ meant to trigger competitiveness between the participants, one of whom will remain as the last contestant and win a considerable sum of money), the aim of The Model Couple becomes less and

John McGrath, ‘Performing Surveillance’, in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, ed. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 87.

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less clear as the psychosociologists deliver increasingly abstract instructions through the speakers. ‘Be happy but not too happy’, the couple are told. ‘Too happy and you’d have nothing to wish for.’ Then, ‘Tell me what you feel without using words. Express yourselves with sounds. Now calm yourselves and speak only using numbers.’ One psychosociologist assures: ‘This isn’t a game.’

Reality as infomercial: The social engineering of ideal consumers If these orders remain vague for the couple, the statement of the film itself soon becomes clear: TV is an apparatus for the social engineering of ideal consumers. Many of the ministry’s experiments turn out to revolve around domestic tools and devices – product-testing as pseudo-scientific TV spectacle. Having been divided according to the engineered gender roles that befit a Model Couple (kitchen devices for Claudine; hand tools and office devices for Jean-Michel) Claudine is introduced to her high-tech oven by the first psychosociologist before she passes the torch to a man who describes the stove. He has barely time to finish before a new man enters the frame, one after another pulling Claudine towards ever new products culminating in a potato curl cutter promoted with sexist remarks about women’s technical deficiencies. With each new device promoted by increasingly frantic men through an avalanche of quasi-information and rhetorical questions, the kitchen scene seamlessly slips into a parody of ‘infomercials’ – the very epitome of TV as a hyper-commercialized mass medium. The Model Couple hardly privileges subtleties, and the scene has yet to climax. Having fallen into her expected role as simulacral housewife, Claudine is running to and fro between the devices on the kitchen table and the stove, preparing dinner. Jean-Michel appears as if on a signal: ‘What smells so good?’ The film cuts to a close-up of the couple. ‘Ravioli!’, Claudine exclaims in a stylized voice. ‘Ravioli?’, Jean-Michel asks, and looks straight into the camera, smiling: ‘I love ravioli!’ ‘He loves them!’, Claudine confirms, and the two stare into the camera with a silly wide-eyed look. Within the diegetic frame of a film in which we have come to expect the protagonists to behave naturally in an unnatural environment, their seamless transformation into a commercial cast highlights – in a ridiculously obvious way – what Rhona J. Berenstein has identified as a key purpose of the personal address in TV performances (looking at it from a historical perspective): Intimate and immediate performances also fostered intimate and immediate contact with the products touted or used by actors […] [– a]



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signpost of the medium’s economic basis, a signifier of consumerism that was disguised, or served simultaneously, as a dramatic yet realistic art designed to speak to the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of its viewers.52

Whereas the kitchen sequence clearly mocks the commodity fetishism that is the condition for commercial TV, a similarly surreal touch is used to comment on the absurdity of TV’s artificial intimacy – and the audience’s backstage obsessions. Four decades after Robert E. Lee imagined Backstage as the epitome of TV’s true potential, Deleuze attacked how the backstage had been turned into the very essence of the medium. ‘Recent surveys’, Deleuze claims in 1986, ‘show that one of the most highly prized forms of entertainment is to be in the studio audience of a television show.’53 Deleuze discards this practice as having nothing to do with ‘beauty’ or ‘thought’; it is a ‘visit to the factory’, a purely disciplinary exercise: ‘The encyclopedia of the world and the pedagogy of perception collapse to make way for a professional training of the eye, a world of controllers and controlled communing in their admiration for technology.’54 The show The Model Couple has been running for long enough for the Model Couple to have gained fans, who now pay the Model Apartment a visit. As Claudine receives them, Jean-Michel is still half-naked in the bathroom, shaving, seemingly unaware of their presence. Suddenly, a peculiar middle-aged man appears from behind the bathroom mirror. He stands in silence for a few moments, taking a good look at Jean-Michel from very close up. Beige trench coat, dark glasses, comb-over: his stereotypical 1970s ‘raincoater’ look emphases the tableau’s voyeuristic implications. He is soon replaced by a middle-aged woman who does the same thing. One after another, visitors pass by, silently gazing at the half-naked Model Man as if he were a mannequin or an animal and the Model Apartment a ‘human zoo’ (as critics describe reality TV’s social conditions).55 In its over-the-top way, the visit reveals an asymmetry at play in the social dynamics between audiences and televised subjects. Thomas Mathiesen has suggested that the logic of

Rhona J. Berenstein, ‘Acting Live: TV Performance, Intimacy, and Immediacy (1945– 1955)’, in Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real, ed. James Friedman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 44. 53 ‘Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel’, in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 72. Essay first published in French in 1986. 54 Ibid. 55 Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn, Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 15. 52

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surveillance undergoes an inversion in age of TV: where panopticism relied on the few watching the many, the ‘synoptic’ conditions of modern mass media allow the many to watch the few.56 This relation remains invisible as long as it is interfaced: facing only the camera, the televised subject can imagine viewers, not experience the mass audience. Facing only the TV screen in the privacy of the home, the viewers share the same illusion of intimacy. As is evidenced by the expression of shock as participants leave the Big Brother house after a longer stay and meet the studio audience for the first time, it is only once the televised subject physically faces the audience that the synoptic asymmetry can be visualized and experienced. And even then, the studio audience is a mere synecdoche for the TV audience in its totality – a human mass that is almost inconceivable as a physical crowd.57 What can be conceived, as The Model Couple does, is a group of fans crowding in a Model Apartment, a mere fraction of the whole audience yet already evidently outsizing all definitions of intimacy. As the couple has TV dinner, their fans stand over the dinner table to listen in on their mundane conversation about the name of a football player or the price of Camembert. The absurdity of TV’s social asymmetry is rendered even more explicit as one fan breaks the imaginary interface by handing Jean-Michel the sauce and asking Claudine where she got the Camembert. Andrejevic’s thoughtprovoking argument that Big Brother is as real as it claims to be precisely because its artifice reflects the artifice of real life already resonates with The Model Couple.58 The canned life of the Model Couple transforms them, at once, into objects of surveillance-for-entertainment (what Andrejevic terms ‘the work of being watched’) and actors in infomercials that fuse seamlessly with their daily labour and leisure activities. It is only logical that the dinner conversation that the visiting fans listen in on concerns the price of cheese, and that the one question from the fan who breaks the invisible wall between them is ‘Where did you buy it?’

Thomas Mathiesen, ‘The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s “Panopticon” Revisited’, Theoretical Criminology: An International Journal 1, no. 2 (1997): 219. 57 The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) comes close, as the unwitting reality star (Jim Carrey) is seen being watched on huge screens by an outdoor crowd of what looks to be tens of thousands of people. 58 ‘The artificial reality portrayed by Big Brother, in which interactions are constructed, manipulated, monitored, and commodified, corresponds to the historical reality of artifice in a society permeated by commodified forms of entertainment, experience, and interaction. Similarly, the perpetually monitored reality enacted by Big Brother corresponds to the social reality of increasingly comprehensive monitoring.’ Andrejevic, Reality TV, 149. 56



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The host as collaborator and the terrorist as clown: TV’s ‘nihilism of neutralization’ The TV host in collaboration with authoritarian state power might be something of a trope in media satires: The Hunger Games franchise (2012–5) has its flamboyant Caesar Flickerman (Stanely Tucci) with his big, white trademark smile, who does not flinch at sending children to their death in televised battles, and The Model Couple has its enthusiastic host (André Penvern) who shifts between introducing, commenting live, moderating the discussions of an invited expert panel and sending his best wishes to Chilean dictator Pinochet. Airing from a studio that comes across as a parody of the 1970s TV aesthetics, with chromakeyed backgrounds pushed to an almost vulgar point, never is the host more enthusiastic, never does the banality of TV become more evident, than when the Minister of the Future (Georges Descrières) pays the show a visit. As if France was winning a World Cup, the exhilarated TV host comments live on every pseudo-event that he catches. ‘Here’s Claudine. She’s carrying what looks like a veal roast with green beans and Chatouillard potatoes. What? Sorry? I’m told it is roast pheasant with peaches and cherries. It is the Minister himself who is carving. An outstanding image!’ He cries out in excitement over the beauty of the video image as some technical failure turns it into blue noise. The canned life of the Model Couple signals our future of televisual entrapment. In a shot that begins in the apartment, Claudine and JeanMichel, seen through the viewfinder of a TV camera, are instructed to quarrel. As the 35mm camera moves around the TV camera, the couple are seen surrounded by TV monitors feeding back their own image as they argue. Cut to the studio, where a panel of experts offer critical analyses of the argument, completely engulfed in keyed-in close-ups of the couple. The experts look as if they were floating on and even into Claudine and JeanMichel’s larger-than-life TV faces while the host’s own head insists on melting away into badly handled chromakey. One expert claims that the quarrel has been scripted by the Ministry of Psychoanalysis; another that it shows that the couple has escaped the structure of the experiment. A third confesses that the whole concept frightens him: ‘I’m not saying that the Model Couple doesn’t represent something. But I’d like to point out that the trademark of all totalitarian societies is to propagate an image of an ideal couple or family.’  While the film does not yet articulate it in words, the fluid shots of these experts invited to criticize TV on TV hint at a meta-critique of the televised debate itself as a form of spectacle. Through these instances of fauxresistance and pseudo-reflection, seen through a badly-keyed interface that

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Figure 2.2  Chromakey hyperbole in TV studio in The Model Couple (1977). can no longer even stop the critics from melting into their criticized object’s faces, the film visualizes a condition that Baudrillard phrases very sharply in his essay ‘On Nihilism’: It would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality – as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning. But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.59

Towards the end, this viewpoint is spelled out: the Model Apartment is occupied by a group of ‘terrorists’ – kids who pretend to take Claudine and Jean-Michel as hostages. Fed up, the couple is more than willing to play along, albeit under the condition that their participation in the show will remain unthreatened. Up until the very end, the Model Couple will remain loyal workers in the TV factory of the future, partly because they have bought into the premise that it is an honour to be exceptionally average and a privilege to have been selected for the show, and partly because they have been promised money to participate. Decades before reality TV will have

Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 163.

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grown into a full-fledged culture industry, The Model Couple already intuits what Andrejevic will call the genre’s ‘cynical version of democratization’. The promise of participation is merely a pretext for the production of profitable content at a minimal cost, which Andrejevic describes as ‘the work of being watched, a form of production wherein consumers are invited to sell access to their personal lives in a way not dissimilar to that in which they sell their labor power’.60 Meanwhile, the terrorists’ goal is unclear, but it works miracles for the public’s interest in the show; the banal spectacle leaping to a higher intensity level. As police and journalists flock outside, the children express their demand: one hour of TV airtime. They are given three minutes, and as the camera goes on, the leader willingly wastes the opportunity by delivering some vague social statement before exclaiming: ‘And now bring on the kids!’ Cut to the ‘terrorists’ performing a chaotic circus act: juggling, rollerskating with sparklers, while the Model Couple sits in the middle holding TV monitors in their laps – each with the other’s image – slowly realizing that, again, they have become pawns for someone else’s pseudo-political spectacle. Delivered in a playful postmodern style (with the protagonists often slipping out of their roles, laughing at the absurdity of the experiments that they are performing), The Model Couple paints a bleak portrait of canned life as canned politics – TV’s nihilism of neutralization.

Canned death: Roddy’s TV-eye in Death Watch If the 2000s marks the boom of reality TV, then the turn of the 1980s can be called a foreshock. For McKenna, the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of reality TV is Real People (1979–84), which ‘featured “everyday” characters that would not be celebrated anywhere else on television’.61 Real People already gave evidence of a tension that would characterize the talk show boom a decade later – risqué content legitimized by reactionary commentary.62 It was followed by more sensationalist clones: That’s Incredible (1980–4) ‘tried to differentiate itself from Real People by focusing on extraordinary events or people, not everyday events or average people’, including people surviving life-threatening Andrejevic, Reality TV, 6. McKenna, Real People and the Rise of Reality Television, viii. 62 ‘Real People was prone to dabbling in the overtly sexual story – what critics at the time referred to as “jiggle TV”. […] Strippers of all ages, gender, and body type, including a woman who stripped for God. […] Nevertheless, the show was not a liberal playground by any means; in fact, Real People also effectively mirrored the rising tide of Reagan era neoconservatism […] celebrating and romanticizing mid-America, small-town life, and traditional values, and promoting an almost reflexive hyper-patriotism.’ Ibid., xvi. 60 61

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moments,63 and the even more extreme What’s Up America (1979–81) that ‘include[d] sexually explicit segments on pornographic film actors, strippers, prostitutes, and a nude beauty pageant’.64 A technical condition for this reality TV foreshock in the 1980s was the coming of more and more portable equipment.65 There is a trajectory towards lighter, smaller and more discreet cameras becoming available for broadcast TV, bringing production out of the studio, into the street and the home, and deeper into a logic of surveillance. The history of portable TV equipment goes back to the days of live TV. Introduced by RCA Laboratories in 1951, the ‘Walkie-Lookie’ was a fourlens turret Vidicon video camera connected to a backpack unit capable of transmitting live through microwaves. At a total of 27.2 kilograms, ‘its emergence sparked the first of portable video’s two most salient effects: the sense that television penetrates everything, goes everywhere, follows everyone’.66 It was first used by NBC to cover the July 1952 Democratic and Republican conventions in Chicago,67 and its implications for TV as a new form of synoptic surveillance are emphasized by Ricardo Cedeño Montaña: ‘TV audiences were turned immediately into intimate spectators, into a huge swarm of stalkers, who’, and here Cedeño Montaña cites a June 1952 article, ‘pursue a Presidential candidate or a delegate right up to the door of his bathroom. Practically the only dependable refuge he’ll have from the inquiring gaze of half the nation.’68 If the 1950s saw the birth of portable TV, then the 1960s saw it rendered recordable. Like its professional counterparts, Ibid., 26. Ibid., 30. 65 Andrejevic writes, with regards to An American Family: ‘Documentary was one of the staple formats of PBS in its early years, and the turn to an exploration of the private life of a contemporary family was – like the current crop of reality formats – facilitated by the development of increasingly compact and versatile filmmaking equipment. [Ilisa] Barbash and [Lucien] Taylor argue that, with the development of portable, synchronized sound-recording equipment in the 1960s, new possibilities for less intrusive forms of documentary production emerged: “Because the new equipment was so portable, new arenas of human experience were opened up to scrutiny – in particular, people’s private and domestic lives.”’ Andrejevic, Reality TV, 69. Richard Kilborn concurs: ‘Perhaps the most significant impact that new technology has had on factual programming in the 1990s […] has been the development of highly portable recording equipment. This has enabled film makers to operate increasingly as participant observers and to produce footage which creates a sense of vicarious presence.’ Richard Kilborn, Staging the Real: Factual TV Programming in the Age of Big Brother (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 19. 66 Ricardo Cedeño Montaña, Portable Moving Images: A Media History of Storage Formats (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 138. 67 Ibid., 136. 68 Ibid., 139–40. It is worth noting that the cited article was written before the convention took place. As its title ‘How TV Will Take You to Conventions’ reveals, its discourse is a prospective imaginary – an in-the-near-future kind of science fiction. 63 64



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the Sony Portapak was divided into a handheld video camera connected to a separate portable VTR. Unlike its professional counterparts that could weigh over 30 kilograms, the Portapak’s mere 7.3 kilograms allowed it to be carried and operated by non-professionals.69 While relatively cheap, the price to pay was in the quality: twenty-minute open-reel tapes of fluid black-and-white images. As Cedeño Montaña points out, the technical limitations were also what allowed artists and activists to develop an aesthetics of resistance to the canned look of studio TV: a shaky, amateurish handheld style connotative of access to raw reality.70 While professional TV would eventually appropriate the handheld style (in accordance with Baudrillard’s thesis of the system’s capacity to integrate what denies it), the revolution in portable video recording came with the integration of high-quality videotape into cassettes, and of the videocassette recorder into the camera, so that capturing and recording all occurs in one and the same portable device. Among the first of these ‘camcorders’ introduced was RCA’s suggestively named 1980 Hawkeye, which was advertised as ‘only two-thirds the weight of the lightest comparable two-piece broadcast field production system’.71 Marketed for professional news as a unit that provides video with unprecedented freedom of mobility, the introduction of the Hawkeye coincides with the imaginary integration of a TV camera and a human eye in the science fiction film Death Watch (La Mort en direct, Bertrand Tavernier, 1980). Shot in the gloomy streets of Glasgow, Death Watch revolves around an eponymous reality show that exploits what might still be one of the last taboos on television: natural death. ‘One of the marketing advantages of reality TV’ as Andrejevic points out, ‘is that its exercise in envelope pushing generates its own hype. The fact that the genre itself reinvents conventions of prime-time programming provides a ready-made media hook that encourages coverage of the latest and most outrageous formats.’72 No sooner than writer Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schneider) is diagnosed with a deadly disease, she finds herself in the web of the unscrupulous TV producer Vincent Ferriman (Harry Dean Stanton) who is already promoting her as the star of his cuttingedge reality show. Katherine has barely got the news about her illness before the city is plastered with her poster and journalists are harassing her in the streets. Reluctant to allowing her personal tragedy to become a spectacle, Ibid., 141. Ibid., 147. This was a look that reality TV (in accordance with Baudrillard’s thesis of the system’s capacity to integrate what denies it) would appropriate the moment that the technical conditions would generate the right balance between a shaky handheld look and adequate visual quality. 71 RCA Hawkeye Camcorder advertisement cited in ibid., 154. 72 Andrejevic, Reality TV, 4. 69 70

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Katherine tricks the insistent Vincent and manages to escape the city. She is soon caught up by his secret weapon: Roddy (Harvey Keitel). Kittler’s claim that the conception of what constitutes a human is determined by the technical standards of the time finds its imaginary correlative in films where bodies merge with media. In Death Watch, the core concept is vision’s fusion with video technology: Roddy, an undercover cameraman on a mission to secretly capture Katherine’s final months, has had a tiny video camera inserted in his eye. But, in what Baudrillard would surely denounce as a nostalgic exercise in posthumous humanism, the film insists on inverting Kittler’s claim. In Death Watch, it is finally not ‘so-called Man’ who is ‘determined by technical standards’ but so-called media that are determined by human nature. The TV-eye’s technical promise ‘to bring [the dying] back to us, bring them home’ – Vincent’s quasi-ethical legitimation of the show – will keep running up against the humaneness of the cameraman supposed to keep it. Death Watch opens with Roddy’s last medical examination, where his TV-eye is deemed to have healed well enough to be ready to work. But the dialogue already reveals a cost that hints at later consequences. The TV-eye, a pilot project, requires constant light. Darkness will make it malfunction within a matter of minutes, leaving the cameraman – whose vision is completely integrated with his camera – permanently blinded. Miniaturization thus comes at a price, even in the realm of imaginary media. ‘Why did you let them do that to you?’ Roddy’s nurse asks him as he leaves the clinic. ‘Let them? This way I’ll never forget how pretty you are.’ Cut to a close-up of a grainy, blue video image of the nurse smiling, then multiplied on four monitors watched by someone seen from behind – the first shot of Vincent’s TV studio. But the new condition for Roddy’s vision cuts both ways way. While he risks becoming blind, the quality of the footage is affected by his emotions. This is already hinted at as Vincent and Roddy review screen tests. The shot of a child in a swing at a playground is suddenly darkened by horizontal wipes: a lack of synching between the frame rate of video and Roddy’s slow blinking (techno-human roll bars). A moment later Vincent asks: ‘What happened there? Were you crying?’ ‘No, I had something in my eye’, Roddy responds. ‘Oh’, Vincent answers in a subtle mockery. Since tears cover the cornea, which is to say the lens, the transparency of transmission is physically conditioned by Roddy’s sensitivity. If Roddy has become the ideal cameraman, a human TV-eye capable of capturing reality with its gaze, it has thus come at a cost: he must quell his human functions – crying, blinking and sleeping – lest he risk losing a beautiful shot or, even worse, his own vision. Later on, as it becomes increasingly clear that Roddy is falling for Katherine, thus failing his mission as a human objective, his tears will have a symbolic function.



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Technically speaking, Roddy’s TV-eye is simply a smaller version of a 1950s Walkie Lookie: it has no recording capacity of its own, but it transmits whatever Roddy happens to be looking at. Therein lies an asymmetry of power that turns his monitoring function against him. Since Roddy goes blind if he closes his eyes for too long, he has no possibility of ‘editing out’ anything. Meanwhile, Vincent only needs to ‘turn him on’ to find him. We get proof of Roddy’s condition early on. Roddy visits his ex-wife Tracy (Thérèse Liotard) and their dialogue suggests that she sees him as Vincent’s guinea pig. It seems that this is not the first time that Vincent has tried out a ‘new toy’ on Roddy. As they stop arguing and he starts approaching her sexually, the scene cuts to the TV studio, where Vincent’s crew is gathered witnessing the interaction. ‘He’s going to fuck his wife’, one of them says. ‘Ex-wife’, Vincent corrects him. Another crew member asks: ‘Do you want me to cut the VTR?’ ‘No’, Vincent answers, ‘let’s wait a minute and see what happens.’ Roddy intuitively catches on to the fact that he might be watched and lets go of his ex-wife. She asks what is going on, but he cannot tell her, so she throws him out. The film now cuts to the studio where Vincent is discussing with a doctor (Eva Maria Meineke) whether she thinks that Roddy is emotionally ready to start working. She asks whether Vincent did not give Roddy the impression that he would not be monitoring all the time. ‘Well yeah … . But, he knew I would.’ There is a mutually understood distrust between the accomplices: Roddy knows all too well that Vincent cannot be trusted and Vincent knows that Roddy knows. Roddy first finds Katherine on the run at a homeless shelter; she is in pain and he starts looking after her. He seems empathetic, but everything is a calculated part of the dramaturgy, to get good footage. In a run-down area of some industrial Glasgow suburb, Katherine and Roddy get caught in a violent rally. Police cars arrive, Katherine runs but Roddy ends up getting arrested and thrown into a cell. Cut to the TV studio and a jumpy video image. Vincent: ‘What’s happening? Why’s it out of focus? Where is he? Jesus, what have we got here?’ Crew member: ‘Sure as hell ain’t Death Watch. Maybe it’s Highway Patrol.’ Cut back to cell: the guard turns off the light. Roddy starts to panic, but his screaming from the pain in his eyes gets the guard to turn the lights on again. Soon released, Roddy becomes increasingly affected by Katherine’s deteriorating state. We see her moaning with pain, the 35mm camera tilts up and shows Roddy’s eyes tearing up. Back at the studio, the transmitted video image immediately goes out of focus. The French title for Death Watch is La Mort en direct, which would translate back into Live Death. It would have been a great title, purifying the film’s critique down to the core of its existential paradox. If live equals real life, why has TV always tended to transmit the opposite? McKenna describes one of the first reality-type shows, You Asked For It (1950–9): ‘The central plot device of

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this weekly program was the ability for viewers to write letters requesting what they wanted to see in future shows. Culled from several thousand letters each week, the viewers requests fulfilled leaned toward the odd and sensational.’ However, ‘even more revealing of the audience may have been the requests that were not granted’, including ‘requests to see a man executed in the electric chair, a reenactment of the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake, and, from multiple viewers, high-speed car crashes’.73 The paradoxical concept of Live Death also brings the attention to a technical tension: nothing in Death Watch suggests that the show is broadcast live. The footage that Roddy captures with his TV-eye is transmitted to a studio where it is monitored, recorded and edited into canned episodes. The separation between his immediate, ‘live’ perception and the ‘canned’ product that is later broadcast will become increasingly acute as he starts having doubts about the ethics of the show. And yet, so powerful and insistent is the notion of live TV that even a film whose purpose it is to deconstruct the sensationalist, deceptive nature of the medium can fall for the temptation to exploit it. La Mort en direct is in essence a false promise – unsubstantiated by the film’s very own premise. The climax of Roddy’s infatuation has a flavour of Greek tragedy. Hiding in an abandoned beach hut at the countryside, Katherine has asked Roddy to buy her makeup. He goes into a fishing village and happens to catch Death Watch playing on a TV at a local pub. As he sees the images of Katherine that he saw first-hand, now edited into a canned TV product, Roddy tears up again – from sadness about losing her, but also from guilt of being accomplice to the exploitation of her death. Night is coming, and as he rushes back to the beach, he realizes that the only way for him to stop Katherine’s exploitation is by making himself go blind. He throws his flashlight into the sea, then panics and yells for Katherine to come out and find it, but it is already too late. Roddy has gone blind and the monitors have gone into static. In an ironic twist of fate, however, Roddy and Katherine are about to learn that the whole TV show is a hoax. The medicines Katherine has been given are causing her symptoms and might actually kill her if she does not stop taking them. Inverting the logic of reality TV from canned life to canned death, Death Watch thus provides critical comments on the fusion of surveillance and entertainment and on the artifice of commercial TV, both seen as the outcome of morbid audience demands and the unscrupulous TV producers’ readiness to satisfy them. In what Katherine sees as the only way to destroy Vincent, which is to say the whole media logic that he personifies, she decides to actually commit suicide, but off-camera – to cheat not death but canned life itself. McKenna, Real People and the Rise of Reality Television, xxxvii.

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Autopticon Video therapy and/as surveillance

There is something unsettling about the opening scene of Sidney Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes (1971) – an early and somewhat unorthodox example of the surveillance imaginaries that would retrospectively be labelled as 1970s paranoid thrillers.1 Too farcical to convey true paranoia, it revolves around the siege and failed robbery of a luxury apartment building in a New York City just recently flooded with electronic surveillance. The film begins in the final minutes of the ten-year prison term of criminal quasi-mastermind Anderson (Sean Connery), just in time for us to participate in the group therapy session intended to provide the closure to his correction. Anderson is introduced as a talking head canned in a metallic video monitor – an electronic cage, one could say, the very function of which is to compel its captive to talk. ‘When I first started safe-cracking,’ Anderson begins, ‘I used to rip into them. Pour in the soup and blow the shit out of them. It was like rape. It had this sexual theme running through it. I used to blow them open and plunge right in. Often, I was sexually aroused at the time.’ At this point, a 180-degree pan away from the monitor reveals a prison psychologist, a designated videographer in prison uniform and a whole audience of inmates watching the tape. ‘But as I became more technically proficient,’ the voiceover continues, ‘I learned to sneak up on them. Ferret out their secrets and caress them with my fingers; I used to have them open before they even knew I was there.’ The camera now finally lands on a visibly awkward Anderson in the audience: twisted torso, lowered gaze, as if wanting to escape from his own video image in front of him. ‘It was more like seduction than rape. The beauty of it was, I was falling in love with the whole thing.’

An earlier version of this chapter was published in German in 2018 in Montage/AV. See Jonathan Rozenkrantz, ‘Das Autopticon: Videotherapie und/als Überwachung’, Montage/AV. Zeitschrift Für Theorie Und Geschichte Audiovisueller Kommunikation 27, no. 1 (2018): 171–89.

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In fact, there are three things that unsettle this scene, and they pertain to each epistemic level with which this book is concerned: discourse, aesthetics and media technology. There is the machinic misogyny of the would-be hero: in an awkwardly earnest, almost naïve tone, Anderson recounts his development from rookie to master safe-cracker through psycho-sexual metaphors of rape, seduction and love. There is the faux-friendly, patronizing prison psychologist (Anthony Holland), whose follow-up questions are delivered in a skewed, subtly over-the-top acting style. Smug smile, intrusive demeanour and a piercing pitch: ‘In love?!’, he startles Anderson, ‘I take it you were fixating on safe-cracking as a displacement of normal sexual relations. Tell me, how was your love life at that time?’ Finally, there are the media devices that permeate the scene, from the video monitor and reelto-reel recorder replaying Anderson’s account to the video camera pointed at Anderson in the audience of inmates, while the psychologist shoves a microphone in his face to capture his response. What is the epistemic function of all this equipment, somewhat alienating for a contemporary viewer, literally an extension of the already excessive mannerisms of the therapist (to paraphrase McLuhan)? What is its role within a film that revolves around the more familiar theme of electronic surveillance? If, as Bill Nichols suggests, every film is a documentary inasmuch as it gives evidence of the culture that produced it,2 Lumet’s somewhat forgotten The Anderson Tapes constitutes

Figure 3.1 Anderson (left), inmate videographer (middle) and prison psychologist (right) in The Anderson Tapes (1971). Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1.

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a significant historical document in that it captures two media practices in their emergent phase. One will remain a key issue in contemporary society: video surveillance. The other will recede into the archives of a yet unwritten media history: video as a psychiatric apparatus – the archaeology of which this book intends to initiate from the point of view of its cinematic traces.

Panopticism, synopticism, autopticism: Three functions of modern surveillance In 1997, sociologist Thomas Mathiesen introduced ‘synopticism’ as a supplementary concept to panopticism in an answer to Foucault’s failure to address the relation between mass media and modern surveillance. Framing Foucault’s concept somewhat reductively but for (arguably) legitimate operative reasons as a ‘situation where the few see the many’, Mathiesen writes: As a striking parallel to the panoptical process, and concurring in detail with its historical development, we have seen the development of a unique and enormously extensive system enabling the many to see and contemplate the few, so that the tendency for the few to see and supervise the many is contextualized by a highly significant counterpart.3

This chapter suggests that Mathiesen’s critical expansion has its own blind spot that neglects a third function that bears upon both. To the few seeing the many and the many seeing the few, it is necessary to add seeing oneself as a third operative function – one that arises from the coming of technologies that allow for the recording and instant replay of moving images. Because psychiatry once attempted to build a whole practice on the basis of this third function, because this practice had as its condition a technical-technological configuration and because the promises of this practice itself, whether imaginary or real, were extrapolated from a very specific viewer-video situation – by all means a ‘concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up’4 – it seems legitimate to treat the video therapies that emerged in the 1960s not just as a set of methods but as a psychiatric dispositif correlative to its panoptic and synoptic counterparts. This chapter tracks the parallel emergence of video surveillance and video Mathiesen, ‘The Viewer Society’, 219, emphasis in original. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202.

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techniques in psychiatry to their intersection in what will be defined as an autoptic gaze.

The emergence of video surveillance: CCTV before 1970 As Inga Kroener points out in her 2014 book CCTV: A Technology under the Radar?, contemporary surveillance scholars tend to mistake the 1990s for the beginning of the CCTV ‘trend’.5 This historical short-sightedness is not only implied in the scholarly dismissal of earlier decades but also made explicit through some periodizations. William R. Webster divides the history of CCTV it into three eras: an ‘era of innovation’ in the early 1990s, which ‘captures the initial diffusion of CCTV systems in selected town and city centres and parks’;6 an ‘era of uptake’ from the mid-1990s, in which ‘there is widespread diffusion of technically independent CCTV systems in public places’;7 and an ‘“era of sophistication” from the late 1990s, in which uptake continues alongside the integration, expansion and computerization of systems’.8 The only problem is that the era of innovation is initiated decades earlier. A 1953 BusinessWeek article reports on how ‘Houston’s Jail is Watched … by the All-seeing Eye of TV’: Inside Houston’s new air-conditioned jail, very little goes on that the officials don’t know about. Some $45,000 worth of closed-circuit television keeps a round-the-clock check on what the inmates are doing. The jail claims to be the first in the country to use TV for that purpose. There are television cameras spotted in booking rooms, in front of cells, and in other places where trouble might break out. Receivers are located in the offices of the police chief, the assistant chief, the night inspector, and at guard stations and various other posts. There’s also a receiver in the press room.9

There is evidently a need to rewind the tape to an age before tape. Three years before Ampex would make the first videotape commercially available, Inga Kroener, CCTV: A Technology under the Radar? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 3. William R. Webster, ‘The Diffusion, Regulation and Governance of Closed-Circuit Television in the UK’, Surveillance & Society 2, no. 2–3 (2004): 238. 7 Ibid., 239. 8 Ibid. 9 ‘Houston’s Jail Is Watched … by the All-Seeing Eye of TV’, BusinessWeek, 7 November 1953. 5 6



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and some decade before handier formats started transforming video into a precautionary apparatus for evidence collection, an American jail was already extending the reach of policing eyes through live transmission. The advantages were reportedly threefold: quickly alerting police in case of a riot; cutting the number of necessary patrolmen; and, perhaps most interestingly, preventing police brutality.10 Six decades before a vast catalogue of videorecorded atrocities have proven otherwise, there was faith in the ‘all-seeing’ TV-eye’s socially self-regulating function. In fact, the suggested advantages were remarkably coincident with the panoptic ones listed by Foucault two decades later. The Panopticon ‘can reduce the number of those who exercise it’, it makes it ‘possible to intervene at any moment’ and ‘it assures its efficacity by its preventative character’.11 And, perhaps most interestingly, ‘the Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms’, since ‘the director may spy on all the employees that he has under his orders’ – while finally, ‘it will even be possible to observe the director himself ’.12 Houston’s brand new electron-Panopticon (incidentally, the term ‘Panopticon’ means precisely ‘all-seeing’), was reportedly the first of its kind in the United States, but there is evidence of other contemporary uses, and they were no less concerned with social control. One week after the Houston’s jail article, Business Week reported on a bank’s use of CCTV to control signatures.13 Things were also moving on the other side of the Atlantic, and they initially concerned the regulation of movement itself. In Britain as in Germany, CCTV surveillance was introduced as a means for traffic control; the first experiments were conducted in 1956 in Durham14 and in Hamburg.15 As the German word for television is Fernsehen, it is only right that the new surveillance cameras were termed Fernaugen – ‘tele-eyes’.16 In four years, German moviegoers would face the thousand tele-eyes of Dr Mabuse in Fritz Lang’s last film about the criminal mastermind who, as

Ibid. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 206. 12 Ibid., 204. 13 Through a CCTV system, the signature on a withdrawal slip at a branch bank can be compared with the signature card archived in the main bank forty blocks away. The financial benefits are reportedly manifold. ‘How a Bank Puts Television to Work’, BusinessWeek, 14 November 1953. 14 Chris A. Williams, ‘Police Surveillance and the Emergence of CCTV in the 1960s’, in CCTV, ed. Martin Gill (Leicester: Perpetuity Press, 2003), 13. 15 Dietmar Kammerer, ‘Police Use of Public Video Surveillance in Germany from 1956: Management of Traffic, Repression of Flows, Persuasion of Offenders’, Surveillance & Society 6, no. 1 (2009): 43. 16 Ibid. 10 11

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usual, is technically ahead of the police.17 Come 1965, and Munich could still only boast nineteen of these cameras.18 But nineteen actual CCTV cameras are more than an imaginary thousand. In fact, they are enough to monitor most of Munich’s inner city traffic at the time,19 a significant diffusion symbolically as well as in practice confirming that, long before the 1990s, CCTV surveillance was already in its ‘innovative’ phase. There was a significant development that parallels the diffusion of traffic control, and that aligns European CCTV surveillance with its American sibling. As its reach grew, the electron-Panopticon acquired a new function: the precautionary monitoring of potential criminals. But the new apparatus had a rough start. On the one hand, there was a quick development in video technology: by 1960, the cameras could pan, tilt, zoom and wipe their own lenses by remote control.20 On the other hand, their visual quality was susceptible to external conditions. Two attempts at CCTV-supported crowd control at Trafalgar Square failed that year due to rain and bad lighting. It was a humanistic triumph, albeit not the kind that defends privacy rights, but the one that advocates the superiority of human perception. A policeman wrote: ‘I know of no substitute for the experienced police eye on the spot and the ability to sense trouble in the air.’21 Notwithstanding the supposed superiority of the human eye, experiments with electronic ones continued throughout the first half of the decade. November 1964 marks a key moment: CCTV is installed in central Liverpool to monitor areas of presumably higher criminal activity,22 while a mobile system rolling through the streets of Munich initiates the tele-eye’s functional transformation. Equipped with a video recorder, the camera becomes more than a spatial extension of human perception; it becomes a means for securing audiovisual evidence.23 The year 1964 was also the one in which Vance Packard published The Naked Society, a study of the state of US surveillance. Concerning video surveillance, Packard reported that thousands of CCTV systems were sold to the US industry each year.24 But American tele-eyes had more in sight than employees. As we saw, they had been watching prisoners since the early 1950s, and by 1958, there had already been at least one failed

Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse, released in 1960. Kammerer, ‘Police Use of Public Video Surveillance in Germany from 1956’, 44. 19 Ibid. 20 Williams, ‘Police Surveillance and the Emergence of CCTV in the 1960s’, 13. 21 A 1960 police report cited in ibid., 14. 22 Kroener, CCTV, 48. 23 Kammerer, ‘Police Use of Public Video Surveillance in Germany from 1956’, 44. 24 Vance Packard, The Naked Society (New York: Ig Publishing, 2014), 58. 17 18



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experiment to detect shoplifters.25 Failure notwithstanding, a reported three quarters of all the important department stores in New York were being monitored by 1964.26 Unsurprisingly, by this time, the FBI had also added video monitoring to its methods,27 and the New York district attorney’s headquarters used hidden cameras to support the interrogation of suspects.28 Soon enough, Foucault would establish that the soul is the prison of the body,29 a poignant summary of the Panoptic logic of (self-)discipline. A Brooklyn jail nevertheless seemed to prefer the monitoring of both (better safe than sorry): one camera overviewed the chapel, the other one was placed in the prison toilet.30

Paving the way for Dr Phil: American dreams of synoptic psychiatry If there is reason to extend the history of video surveillance back to the 1950s, then the new timeline invites us to unearth another, largely neglected, video practice whose own emergence uncannily mirrors the first. Apparently forgotten even by its own field,31 video’s emergence as a psychiatric dispositif is nevertheless one of the most fruitful cases for a study of the epistemic feedback loops between actual video techniques and the conceptions of video as a new medium. Once again, it is necessary to rewind the tape to a time before tape and a seemingly banal discovery at a moment of crisis in American psychiatry. At Agnews State Hospital, 1953, the recent installation of TV sets in five of the wards had rendered the patients ‘quieter and more easily managed’.32 At a time when mental hospitals were overcrowded, understaffed and desperate to find new affordable forms of effective treatment,33 this was enough for a Kroener, CCTV, 58. Packard, The Naked Society, 109. 27 Ibid., 59. 28 Ibid., 267. 29 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30. 30 Packard, The Naked Society, 268. 31 A 2009 article on ‘video self-observation’ for insight is psychosis is presented as a pilot study, with only one mentioned precursor, a 1998 study, and no reference to the vast number of published studies in the 1960s and the 1970s on video self-confrontation techniques in psychiatry. See Sitara Vikram et al., ‘Video Self-Observation: A Means of Improving Insight in Psychosis’, Psychiatric Bulletin 32, no. 9 (2008): 341–4. 32 Hyman Tucker et al., ‘Television Therapy: Effectiveness of Closed-Circuit Television as a Medium for Therapy in Treatment of the Mentally Ill’, A.M.A. Archives of Neurology & Psychiatry 77, no. 1 (January 1957): 57. 33 Ibid., 69. 25 26

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team of psychiatrists to start studying the benefits of TV viewing on mental health. Some of the previously uncommunicative patients suddenly ‘sit and talk to the television performers, usually the newscasters, for long periods of time’; others are more prone to imitating the performers (not least the dancers). Regardless of which, most patients seem to ‘develop preferences for certain television personalities and [look] forward to seeing them each day’.34 The results are deemed positive, and by the end of 1954, sixty TV sets have been added to the original five – one for each ward of Agnews State Hospital. As Agnews transformed its patients into a collective of television viewers, the psychiatrists’ own vision widened in scope. What if watching broadcast TV is not enough for healing? What if the patients could somehow be incorporated into the programming itself? At first, this idea is primarily an answer to the economic crisis in psychiatry: the psychiatrists hypothesize the possibility of producing televised therapy sessions ‘in a simulated face-to-face situation […], giving the impression of individual therapy, while administering to a mass audience’.35 The mass audience in question is, at this point, a rather modest one: just the sum of Agnews’ mental patients. The psychiatrists envision programmes intended for internal transmission – not national TV. The terminology is nevertheless already indicative of the imminent union between two hitherto separate apparatuses: the intimate (panoptic) machinery of mental hygiene and TV as a (synoptic) mass medium. By 1968, Everett L. Shostrom will already be broadcasting group therapy sessions on commercial California TV.36 In a sense, then, the synoptic dream of Dr Tucker and team was in 1953 already setting the scene for Dr Shostrom – who would pave the way for Dr Phil.37

‘An historical breakthrough’: Discovering the autoptic function Setting up what might be the first TV therapy studio in the United States, Dr Tucker and team already noted that their patients were responding positively

Ibid, 57–8. Ibid., 58. 36 Max Rosenbaum, ‘The Issues of Privacy and Privileged Communication’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 200. 37 Dr. Phil (Peteski Productions, 2002–) is a globally distributed American talk show hosted by psychologist Phil McGraw who offers guests counselling in front of a mass audience. 34 35



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to seeing themselves on TV.38 But it was New York fashion photographerturned-psychiatrist39 Floyd Cornelison who, around the same time, discovered the definite seeds for autopticism. He found that showing psychotics their own photographic portraits provoked strong responses, from extreme anxiety to a heightened capacity for organization. The preliminary findings led to a study at Boston State Hospital in 1958, the results of which were published in a 1960 issue of Psychiatric Quarterly.40 Cornelison’s article would later be referred to as ‘an historical break-through and stimulus to other workers to use photographs, motion pictures or videotape for self-image confrontation with patients’.41 The method was simple: a photograph is taken of a patient; the photograph is shown to the patient; the experience is discussed with the patient; and the patient’s response to the photograph is observed.42 Four small steps for a psychiatrist, a giant leap for psychiatry – at least according to the ones whom it inspired to spend the next decade developing a practice around a medium that allowed for immediate confrontation with one’s own image. It may be a mere coincidence that both video therapy and video surveillance can be traced back to the year 1953, with the installation of ‘allseeing’ tele-eyes at Houston’s jail, and Agnews’ discovery of TV’s psychiatric potential. But it is hardly a coincidence that the parallel emergence of video therapy and video surveillance shows signs of institutional overlaps. As Foucault has shown, the birth of the prison overlapped with the birth of the clinic, while the emergence of the medical gaze was also conditioned on pain rendered as spectacle.43 This poignant observation was picked up by Georges Didi-Huberman in his haunting study of nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s ‘invention of hysteria’, which frames the emergence of photography in psychiatry as a blurry field between clinical gaze and theatrical spectacle.44 On the one hand, video, with its capacity to record and instantly replay moving images, provided psychiatry with an unprecedented

Tucker et al., ‘Television Therapy’, 59. ‘Video Gives Patients Clearer View of Themselves’, Journal of Rehabilitation 33, no. 3 (1967): 25. 40 Floyd Cornelison and Jean Arsenian, ‘A Study of the Response of Psychotic Patients to Photographic Self-Image Experience’, Psychiatric Quarterly 34, no. 1 (January 1960): 1. 41 Milton M. Berger, ‘Confrontation through Videotape’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 19. 42 Cornelison and Arsenian, ‘A Study of the Response of Psychotic Patients to Photographic Self-Image Experience’, 2. 43 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 84–5. 44 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 38 39

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function. On the other, its formation into an autoptic dispositif – a nodal point between psychiatry, surveillance and spectacle – recalibrated symbiotic relations centuries old.

Interpersonal process recall: The therapist as interrogator Banks, stores and buildings use closed circuit television circuits to keep an ‘eye’ on what is going on in unguarded or unobserved places. Hopefully the time will come when all patients in so called ‘seclusion’ or ‘isolation’ rooms in mental hospitals will be observed continuously through an audiovisual closed circuit television unit transmitting to the nurses’ or attendants’ station.45

The words are Milton M. Berger’s, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and leading 1960s video therapist, whose progressive ideas and affiliation with the radical video movements of the time in no way seem to exclude his vision of psychiatric surveillance. In Bentham’s original formulation, the Panopticon was more than a prison.46 As Foucault points out, it would serve as much to reform prisoners as to treat patients (and instruct schoolchildren, confine the insane, supervise workers and put beggars and idlers to work).47 It should thus come as no surprise that, conversely, autoptic treatment would immediately show signs of a logic of surveillance. Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) is an illuminating example. Introduced by psychologists in the early 1960s but appropriated by psychiatrists as well, it uses a more complex set-up than the basic self-confrontation dispositive of patient-video and therapist. As soon as a videotaped ‘interview’ is over, both ‘client’ and ‘counsellor’ are taken to separate dark viewing rooms where they are simultaneously subjected to severe self-confrontation under the firm guidance of their

Milton M. Berger, ‘Treatment: Editor’s Introduction’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 94. 46 ‘Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burthens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the Gordian knot of the Poor Laws not cut, but untied – all by a simple idea in Architecture!’ Bentham cited in David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 63. 47 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 205. 45



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designated ‘interrogator’.48 This twist already gives evidence of a tension that would become the central problem of the new psychiatric movement: on the one hand, the dream of a more emancipated and humane relation between patient and psychiatrist, achieved through their mutual subordination to the autoptic gaze.49 On the other hand, a mere reconfiguration of inequality: the authority of the psychiatrist simply extended by/into video – or outsourced to a third party. ‘We found’, co-inventor of IPR Norman Kagan writes, ‘that the third person was most effective when he aggressively and frequently encouraged the subject to stop the playback and to describe his underlying thoughts and feelings. […] Though not cruel and unrelenting, [his] role is that of a clinical interrogator and his behavior is a kind of interrogation.’50 As if the mere fact that he is labelled as such is not enough of a discursive indication of a functional overlap between psychiatry and police: therapy and/as surveillance. It is worth noting that the American penal system was quick to appropriate video self-confrontation for the rehabilitation of prisoners.51 The overlap thus extends beyond the realm of discourse; it materializes into a reciprocity of techniques. Conversely, already in the 1940s, psychiatry introduced audiorecording apparatuses for research and supervision purposes. To avoid patients’ resistance to the devices, these were carefully hidden.52 As CCTV became available from the 1950s, it was framed as a superior substitute to the well-established one-way mirror: it relieves the observers from the discomfort of having to sit quietly in dark and badly ventilated spaces

Norman Kagan, David R. Krathwohl, and Ralph Miller, ‘Stimulated Recall in Therapy Using Video Tape: A Case Study’, Journal of Counseling Psychology 10, no. 3 (Fall 1963): 237. 49 ‘As patients and doctors are experienced through television more as persons and less as objects to and for each other, the relationship between patient and doctor is coming into the foreground. […] It is hoped that sensitive, gifted, bright, humanitarian and idealistic medical students who formerly had to become hardened, detached and alienated in order to avoid becoming overly emotional or identified with their patients will no longer have to repress or deny their reactions as troubling emotions come into awareness and are made available for clarification, discussion and resolution.’ Milton M. Berger, ‘Introduction’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), xi. 50 Norman Kagan, ‘Television in Counselor Supervision – Educational Tool or Toy?’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 83–4. 51 Harry A. Wilmer, ‘Television: Technical and Artistic Aspects of Videotape in Psychiatric Teaching’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 223. 52 Peter B. Gruenberg, Edward H. Liston, and George J. Wayne, ‘Intensive Supervision of Psychotherapy with Videotape Recording’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 48. 48

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‘which may interfere with note-taking and become oppressive after a while’ (oppressive for the observers, that is; no comment on the observed).53 The number of possible observers is multiplied, not least if the sessions are transmitted to several monitors. Furthermore, CCTV cameras offer close-up views of patients’ faces.54 It is this possibility of a more thorough analysis of responses that gives rise to the remarkable mantra that the invention of video is as significant for psychiatry as the invention of the microscope was for biology.55 But for this, the possibility to record and instantly replay sessions on videotape becomes crucial. In the excited words of Ian Alger and Peter Hogan: ‘For the first time, a hitherto undreamed of quantity of objective data from a therapy session can be obtained and reviewed immediately.’56

Self-acceptance – self-correction: Two poles (and a Scottish poem) That the reviewers may themselves become reviewed is an understated given; all positions are unfixed by an autoptic gaze to which psychiatrists no less than patients are expected to submit.57 If the dissociation of seer and seen is the basic condition for the panoptic function,58 autoptic techniques like IPR render the seer–seen relation mutual and/or reversible. Everyone becomes eligible for the gift that eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns hypothesized, and that, two centuries later, video therapists appropriated as their slogan: ‘O wad some Power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us!’ (Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others

W. H. Trethowan, ‘Teaching Psychiatry by Closed-Circuit Television’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 66. 54 Ibid. 55 Variations of it can be found in Ian Alger and Peter Hogan, ‘The Use of Videotape Recordings in Conjoint Marital Therapy’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 161; Milton Berger, ‘Multiple Image Self Confrontation’, Radical Software 2, no. 4 (Autumn 1973): 8; and Christ L. Zois and Margaret Scarpa, Short-Term Therapy Techniques (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997), 34. 56 Alger and Hogan, ‘The Use of Videotape Recordings in Conjoint Marital Therapy’, 161. 57 The possibility for supervisors to confront residents (psychiatrists in training) with undeniable video evidence of their errors is celebrated by, for instance, Gruenberg, Liston, and Wayne, 53. 58 Foucault writes: ‘The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.’ Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201–2. 53



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see us!).59 Video becomes an absorbable stand-in for the social eye, and the benefits of providing patients with a more objective self-image seem to be taken for granted. But the actual effects of video self-confrontation turned out to be difficult to determine, not only due to a reported lack of empirical data to support the therapists’ ‘almost unanimously optimistic, even enthusiastic’ claims,60 but also because the therapists’ expressed aims oscillated uncomfortably between the production of self-acceptance (‘the impact of videotape self-confrontation is a powerful influence in helping patients accept the naturalness and universality of their “human nature”’.)61 and another more sombre pole. What are the wider implications of Dr Berger’s claim that video self-confrontation is important for ‘the expanding of one’s observing ego’?62 Revealing lines in a 1967 interview with his colleague Dr Alger: The objective picture, interpreted by the patient himself, ‘may make him more interested in behaving differently’, Dr. Alger believes. One of his patients, a successful businessman, cried out in disbelief: ‘My God, I look like a fruit!’ Since then, his doctor says, he has dropped many of the mannerisms that conveyed the effeminate image.63

This is not to say that autopticism is inherently homophobic. It is to say that it is as homophobic – is as anything – as the continuously internalized social gaze of the patient-subject. ‘So-called Man’ may be determined by technical standards, but no more than the standards themselves mediate already established norms. Here, then, is the blind spot of the autoptic gaze: it cannot perceive its own historical conditions. Self-confrontation cannot reveal that to see ourselves as others see us is to see ourselves as others see us at a given time

See Floy Jack Moore, Eugene Chernell and Maxwell J. West, ‘Television as a Therapeutic Tool’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 99. It is also the opening motto for Berger’s whole anthology. 60 A sixty-page 1973 literature review observes that video self-confrontation ‘seems to capture the imagination of investigators even in the face of contrary evidence. It has been credited with producing the very outcomes which have been predicted and disconfirmed.’ Frances F. Fuller and Brad A. Manning, ‘Self-Confrontation Reviewed: A Conceptualization for Video Playback in Teacher Education’, Review of Educational Research 43, no. 4 (1973): 470. 61 Milton M. Berger, ‘Legal, Moral and Ethical Considerations: Editor’s Introduction’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 185. 62 Berger, ‘Confrontation through Videotape’, 23. 63 ‘Video Gives Patients Clearer View’, 24–5. 59

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and place. The objectivity of the psychiatric microscope has as its limit the historicity of its socialized and socializing lens.

The psychopathology of private life: Transparency as social imperative It is from this perspective that Berger’s postulates on privacy become dubitable. At a time when more and more psychiatrists were collecting video records of their patients’ intimate accounts, while TV therapy had made the transition from the clinic to commercial television, Max Rosenbaum raised a number of concerns regarding patients’ privacy. Berger, a key figure in the video therapy movement and editor of the book in which Rosenbaum voices his concerns, introduces Rosenbaum’s chapter by subtly discarding it as advancing the conservative mainstream position.64 Against this, Berger contrasts his own supposedly progressive ideal, beginning by pathologizing Rosenbaum’s critique: ‘I feel it is of value for the reader to ask: “Is much of what is considered an invasion of privacy really an invasion of privacy or a disrespect for secrecy with its bedfellow shame which have for so long masqueraded under the rubric of privacy?”’65 The twist of terms is a tricky variation on a more common theme: the person who has done nothing wrong has nothing to hide – and thus no reason to worry about surveillance. But Berger’s argument follows a more complex chain of premises, echoing the ‘humanist’ appeal with which Shostrom defends his therapy TV broadcasts.66 Simply put: the desire for privacy is already a consequence of shame, which is itself derived from the failure of self-acceptance. Opposite to Foucault,67 Berger claims that opacity is the trap: psychiatrists who defend privacy as an ideal are really reinforcing their patients’ ‘sense of pathological uniqueness’.68 Healing comes from screening one’s pain to an audience of peers, whose acceptance leads to the realization that one’s perceived deviance is really Berger, ‘Legal, Moral and Ethical Considerations’, 185. Ibid., 184–5. 66 Shostrom defends his broadcasts with the argument that he is ‘humanistically oriented and believe[s] that television viewers will not grossly misuse therapeutic data and are potentially able to constructively use what they see and hear’. The implication is that the defence of patients’ privacy is an anti-humanist stance inasmuch as it reveals a mistrust of the public. Shostrom cited in Rosenbaum, ‘The Issues of Privacy and Privileged Communication’, 203. 67 In the Panopticon, Foucault concludes, ‘visibility is a trap.’ Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200. 68 Berger, ‘Legal, Moral and Ethical Considerations’, 185. 64 65



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an expression of a universal human nature.69 One cannot help but wonder how the ‘effeminate’ businessman’s encouraged self-correction of his socially undesirable ‘mannerisms’ fit into this utopian frame. Self-correction in compliance with the social norm, then, is that sombre second pole towards which autopticism oscillates. Berger’s pathologization of privacy cannot be considered without bringing this historical context into view. In 1964, Packard writes about visiting one of several hundred companies specialized in the interrogation of job applicants on behalf of prospective employers. The interrogators are usually trained psychologists. Hidden behind a oneway mirror, Packard watches men strapped to lie-detectors and questioned about various intimate circumstances. In at least one case, suspicions of a young man’s homosexual inclinations are enough for the interrogator to warn the prospective employer.70 In 1965, a congressional inquiry reveals a nationwide concern with this explosion of psychological testing.71 By 1970, Rosenbaum believes that the growing protests are likely to lead to inquiries into the videotaping of patients as well. In a disguised reference to Berger, Rosenbaum writes that while ‘some therapists at this time question whether the culture supports the “old norm” of privacy’, those who use video ‘are in the avant-garde’ and ‘may not sense the conservative patterns of the U.S.A’.72 His point is that Berger’s ‘progressive’ pairing of privacy with conservatism fails to acknowledge a historical context in which revealed deviations from the norm continue being punished. In retrospect, we see that normative patterns were reproduced by autopticism itself.

Autopticon and on (and on): The screen is the prison of the body ‘You can’t do shit! I’m not on parole, I’m finished here, there’s nothing you can do to me, not anymore.’ Anderson’s last therapy session in The Anderson Tapes ends with a verbal outburst, as the would-be hero responds to a threat made by the therapist. However, no sooner than Anderson has uttered these words, the film cuts to a shot of the prison ward – seen through another monitor that mirrors the first on which he was introduced. An implicit connection is thus established between video therapy and video surveillance. As Anderson is

Ibid. Packard, The Naked Society, 73–96. 71 Rosenbaum, ‘The Issues of Privacy and Privileged Communication’, 204. 72 Ibid. 69 70

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seen leaving the prison, flipping off a surveillance camera as a last rebellious gesture, electronic sound effects add a futuristic touch that points towards an outside situation of which Anderson is unaware. Kept behind bars for the last ten years, he has yet to find out that during this time, the radius of the prison has expanded infinitely. In New York-turned-Panopticon, parole is the default status. The opening scene of The Anderson Tapes shows two emergent video practices that share several technical and historical conditions, as well as real and imaginary functions. With a simple cinematic technique, a 180-degree pan from Anderson’s face in the monitor to Anderson facing himself in the audience, the scene captures the technical basis of the autoptic dispositive. An extended montage that associates the therapy monitor with the surveillance screen reveals its ideological function. Thick flickering roll bars ascend over Anderson’s face during his interview, evoking a force-field emphasizing Anderson’s own state of capture. An unintentional futurity effect, the flicker finally gives rise to an autoptic formula: roll bars equal prison bars in facilities for self-correction monitored by therapist-interrogators. The Autopticon reveals itself as an electronic correction facility for the self, where the screen is the prison of the body. Autopticism appropriates and reconfigures both synoptic and panoptic functions. The idea that video allows us to see ourselves as others see us implies that, confronted with our video image, we internalize the gaze of a presumed audience. The video therapists seem to extrapolate this audience as much from the group therapy context from which self-confrontation practices largely emerge, as from a cross-over between therapy and broadcast TV, traceable at least back to Agnews State Hospital, 1953. At the same time, and insofar as the aim of self-confrontation is to compel self-correction, autopticism perfects the panoptic dream of self-regulating subjectivation. That is, if panopticism functions on account of potentially constant but unverifiable surveillance, whereby the subject eventually comes to supervise itself, the autoptic dispositif immediately positions the patient as its own supervisor. The fact that this self-supervisor is produced by a medium associated with a mass audience is likely to give the autoptic gaze a synoptic weight. The psychiatric movement that the emergence of video gave rise to has largely been forgotten, which is not to say that autoptic conditions have disappeared. Media history gives evidence of repetitions, as much as it does of radical breaks. When Jennifer Ringley launched JenniCam in 1996, the sudden possibility for millions of internet users to gaze into the private life of a college girl made the old question of privacy topical again. Ringley’s response was Bergerian: the concept of privacy only serves to hide things that we should either accept or change. Hiding is really the harmful thing to



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Figures 3.2 and 3.3 Anderson undergoing autoptic treatment in The Anderson Tapes (1971). which ‘owning up to things’ (in public) is the answer.73 Webcams evidently entered their synoptic phase with autoptic beliefs as fuel – as did reality TV.74 ‘Voluntary submission to comprehensive surveillance becomes a therapeutic experience’, as Andrejevic critically frames the reality TV logic.75 Before Jennifer Ringley cited in Andrejevic, Reality TV, 85–6. Andrejevic’s book repeatedly returns to the ‘therapeutic ethos’ expressed by hosts, producers and participants of Reality TV shows like Temptation Island (2001–) and Big Brother. 75 Andrejevic, Reality TV, 86. 73 74

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leaving Big Brother, participants are compelled to watch a medley of their time in the house, and the selected highlights tend to be the most speculative moments that the production can extract from previous episodes: fights, sexual encounters and chaotic parties – the video Id of the participant. This autoptic rite of passage takes place in front of the studio audience, lending it a touch of public shaming. Do you watch the one you are ‘skyping’ with, or are you watching the square that mirrors your own transmitted image? Why are you there, in your own Skype interface? ‘Broadcast Yourself ’, but make sure to watch your self before you broadcast it. You would not want your YouTube video to get you demonetized. (And in the age of the front-facing camera on every other smartphone, Autopticon even comes pocket-sized.)

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4

Mnemopticon Creative treatment of psychic reality

In 1979, videographic cinema reached some kind of experimental peak with the release of Anti-Clock, a highly abstract psychological science fiction film made by Jane Arden and Jack Bond. Its designation as a theatrical feature was more or less only revealed by its feature film length. Almost everything else, from its non-linear, conceptually driven narrative to its disjunctions of image and sound and heavy use of video processing, suggests that it belongs in the art gallery. Significantly, this soon-to-be-forgotten film was inspired by the equally forgotten practice discussed in the previous chapter, namely, video therapy. ‘Video therapy is with us now’, Arden explains in a 1980 interview. ‘The TV screen is the perfect metaphor for the unconscious. Life is going by one frame after another. The slowing-down process of video is exactly what happens if you slow down the psyche with breathing.’1 In fact, the whole film revolves around a series of fictional video therapy sessions involving a suicidal man, who is subjected to an imaginary medium with the capacity to literally extract and confront him with his own repressed memory images – an Autopticon extended into the realms of memory. We could call it a Mnemopticon. Anti-Clock’s mnemoptic imaginary was not born in a vacuum. Its historical condition was two decades of videographic experimentation in mental hospitals and medical schools, as well as in art and filmmaking. From these institutional overlaps a long-lasting conception of video arose – that the video image is analogous to the images of the mind. Placing two films from the period, Viva la muerte (Fernando Arrabal, 1971) and Anti-Clock, within their larger context of video experiments in art and/as therapy, this chapter charts the discovery/invention of a videographic psyche, through which videographic cinema initiated its turn towards retrospective imaginaries.

Jane Arden cited in Bruce Apar, ‘Anti-Clock: A Video Movie’, in Anti-Clock: A Film by Jane Arden and Jack Bond (London: BFI, 2009), 11. DVD booklet.

1

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The emergence of the videographic psyche: The therapist as artist In the autumn of 1973, Radical Software released a special issue focusing on the connections between video art, social activism and therapy.2 Among the contributors were philosopher-turned-family counsellor Victor Gioscia, and front-figure of the autoptic movement Milton Berger. Founded three years earlier by artists and activists Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny and Ira Schneider, and introduced with contributions by the likes of Jud Yalkut and Nam June Paik, Radical Software was a considerably different venue than the scientific journals in which the autoptic movement had previously published their findings. If autopticism emerged out of US state psychiatry allied with the penal system, and if the autoptic imaginary was conditioned both by panoptic and synoptic dreams, then Radical Software would seem to represent the precise opposite side of the ideological spectrum. Its founders and contributors were largely a collective of countercultural ‘videofreaks’ rebelling against such institutions.3 At the same time, the autoptic movement’s self-identification as a progressive avant-garde already indicated a perceived affiliation with video artists. In fact, a whole section of Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment is dedicated to ‘Technical and Artistic Considerations’. As every other section, this one is introduced by Berger, who takes the liberty to compare his latest dispositif with an installation by Les Levine: ‘Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture’ (1969). With four television cameras capturing the spectators as electronic images to be immediately transmitted in random sequences on a back-to-back wall of two-times-nine monitors, ‘Contact’ is considerably larger and more complex than Berger’s two-camera/four-monitor Autopticon. But if, as Levine states, his installation ‘is a system that synthesizes man with his technology’ so that ‘the people [become] the “software”’,4 then this transformation occurs on the basis of an autoptic logic that Levine shares with Berger. This allows Berger to

On the history of the founding of Radical Software, see Davidson Gigliotti, ‘A Brief History of RainDance’, Radical Software, 2003, http:​/​/www​​.radi​​calso​​ftwar​​e​.org​​/e​/hi​​sto​ry​​ .html​. 3 A central antagonist of the radical video movement was broadcast television. Understood as a tool for social control, this function was determined by its reliance on one-way communication rather than on feedback forms. Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television (New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 9. 4 Les Levine cited in Milton M. Berger, ‘Technical and Artistic Considerations: Editor’s Introduction’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 207. 2



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make the comparison and, conversely, this allows Radical Software to invite Berger as a contributor three years later. If Berger caught the attention of the Raindance crowd, it was because the emergence of autopticism in psychiatry was paralleled by a very similar investment among early video artists. Outer and Inner Space, Andy Warhol’s ground-breaking video-film hybrid (dubbed by Spielmann as the ‘hour of video’s birth as a medium’),5 is essentially a staged confrontation between actress-model Edie Sedgwick and her own videotaped image. It is an autoptic dialogue captured on two reels of black-and-white 16mm film, to be projected side by side in a kind of doubled doubling. Andrew V. Uroskie writes that ‘the videotape recorder allowed Warhol to take up the idea – ambivalently a fantasy and a nightmare – of seeing, and being forced to respond to seeing, one’s own image on TV’.6 He thus points towards a difference between the psychiatrists’ and the artists’ experiments. Whereas the autoptic movement engaged in the promotion of a miracle cure, the art scene allowed for a more ambiguous exploration of autoptic practices. A great example of autoptic ambiguity is Paik’s 1974 installation ‘TV-Buddha’. An antique bronze Buddha sculpture is placed in front of a video camera, and its meditative pose is mirrored on the monitor facing it. Here we have one of the most iconic figurations of spiritual enlightenment caught in an autoptic dispositif, contemplating its own closedcircuit reflection. The blessing of TV? Or a curse upon Buddha? Sean Cubitt captures the ambiguity of Paik’s installation when he writes that its ‘closed loop puns across the contemplative mode of Zen and the “couch potato” image of the TV consumer’,7 but he loses sight of the crucial fact that Buddha is a consumer of his own video image rather than the flow of broadcasting (caught in an autoptic rather than a synoptic dispositif). The installation thus seems to be a direct reflection on self-confrontation as a spiritual device, well-established by 1974 in both art and therapeutic practices. But it would take some effort to read ‘TV-Buddha’ as a straightforward celebration of the inherent spirituality of TV. There is a subtle provocation in the figure of the motionless Buddha who seems to have abandoned the doctrine of non-self in order to bask in the electronic light of his own glory – an anticipation of Krauss’s critique that video engenders narcissism. But it is worth noting that Spielmann, Video, 78. Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 186. 7 Sean Cubitt, Timeshift: On Video Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 87. Zielinski, however, reads the closed loop of ‘TV-Buddha’ as a serious techno-spiritual reflection on ‘the figure of magical time’. Siegfried Zielinski, [... After the Media]: News from the SlowFading Twentieth Century, trans. Gloria Custance (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013), 149–50. 5 6

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Krauss’s critique, which builds on the Freudian notion of narcissism as a kind of self-enclosure, is antithetical to the autoptic imperative of seeing ourselves as others see us. Likewise, the dignity of the Buddha sculpture resists the reduction of its situation into something like a critique of mass media as spiritual simulacra. ‘TV-Buddha’ is left in the ambiguous position of selfliberation as self-preoccupation – an aesthetics of nirvanarcissism. The artists and psychiatrists cannot easily be divided into two ideological camps: one progressive, critical towards repressive uses of audiovisual media, the other merely feigning a progressive stance to promote repression. The autoptic movement was inherently ambiguous, oscillating between selfcorrection and self-acceptance as its aim. An institutional enigma, autoptic treatment emerged at a moment when progressive ideals swept through social institutions steeped in repressive techniques. Berger’s discourse embodies this contradiction. On the one hand, he assures that autoptic treatment leads to self-acceptance by revealing that our imagined deviance is really an expression of our universal human nature. On the other hand, Berger concludes, video is great for monitoring mental patients locked in psychiatric wards. ‘Hopefully’, he writes in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ‘the time will come when all patients in so called “seclusion” or “isolation” rooms in mental hospitals will be observed continuously through an audiovisual closed circuit television unit.’8 In hindsight, it is hard to reconcile Berger’s promotion of a psychiatric Panopticon (the conditions of which are ‘isolation’ and ‘seclusion’ – repressive techniques that he seems to take for granted) with his tractates on video-induced liberation, not least as he identifies less with a Bentham than with a Les Levine. But the point here is not to point fingers at contradictions on an individual level. Such retroactive criticism would merely obscure the larger picture: the complexity of a historical situation in which the novelty of video as a medium creates a general confusion with regard to its repressive and progressive potentialities – that is, with regard to which practices qualify as which. Consider Paik’s idiosyncratic discourse, as he speculates on potential crossovers between medicine and media art. If it is characterized by a certain ‘ecstasy of communication’,9 then this is fuelled by an ecstasy of Communion, a desire to transcend institutional boundaries to collectively explore any and all possibilities provided by new media:

Berger, ‘Treatment: Editor’s Introduction’, 94. Implies saturation ‘to the point that sometimes it no longer communicates at all’. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 121–32. The critical notion is relevant for the, at times, unfiltered flow of techno-spiritual terms that constitute the discourses of the 1970s ‘video freaks’.

8 9



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Medical electronics and art […] can also change each other’s fruits, e.g. various signals can be fed to many parts of head, brain, and bodies, aiming to establish s [sic] completely new genre of DIRECT-CONTACTART, and this artistic experiment can bring some scientific by-product for this young science in electro-anesthesia, electro-visual tranquilizer, electronic hallucination through the film for closed eyes, electro-sleep and other electro-therapy. Electro-magnetic vibration of the head might lead the way to electronic zen.10

It is under these conditions of carefree connectivity that a psychiatrist can promote panopticism and identify with a countercultural artist-activist movement, just as it is under these conditions that an artist can speculate about paths towards ‘electronic zen’ and elsewhere present video as a means to ‘see your picture instantaneously and find out what kind of bad habits you have’11 (in other words, as an autoptic apparatus, and presumably of the selfcorrective kind). Finally, it is under these connective conditions that a groovy magazine like Radical Software can invite a psychiatrist to promote his latest dispositif, ‘Multi Image Immediate Impact Video Self-Confrontation’, and that the psychiatrist can not only accept the offer but also give himself the liberty to adapt his own discourse to the ‘rap’ of his readers. ‘Simultaneously experienced’, Berger writes in a convoluted sentence, ‘multiple impact multimages of self presented for introspective exploration and awareness can lead to a person’s acceptance of the fact that his self is fluid and in process and that his multiple self-concepts, self-aspects and self-functionings do coexist in and alongside each other in conflict, contradiction, harmony or paradoxically.’12 In 1970, Berger compared his two-camera→four-monitor dispositif to a four-camera→eighteen-monitor installation by Les Levine. At that point, he was nevertheless quick to make an epistemological distinction between the psychiatrists’ and the artists’ aims. The first were interested in ‘exposing distortions of reality’, the second in creating them.13 Their kinship was merely based on their shared interest in self-confrontation techniques in general. The

Nam June Paik cited in Blom, The Autobiography of Video, 62. Paik cited in Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 17. 12 Berger, ‘Multiple Image Self Confrontation’, 9. Berger continues: ‘Energies potentially available to the total self of each person can be more constructively and creatively used for the benefit and growth of self and others and a person can achieve a deeper sense of self-acceptance without guilt as he realizes and assumes full responsibility for concurrent or alternatingly experienced different aspects of self without necessarily feeling he is split, schizophrenic or fragmented.’ 13 Berger, ‘Technical and Artistic Considerations’, 207. 10 11

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psychiatrist exposes, the artist creates – but the distinction, which is already inherent to age-old debates in media history, is complicated by Berger’s increasingly creative interventions. Like many other technical innovations, the one introduced to the Raindance crowd in Berger’s Radical Software article is discovered by accident. In early 1972, a split-screen generator allows Berger to capture and simultaneously display a series of partial images of his patients. The effect is soon lost to him, and it takes him months to learn to recreate this technical condition. Once he does, he terms its effect ‘Multi Image Immediate Impact Video Self-Confrontation’. I bring to the attention of the patient anywhere from two to six to ten or more partial images of himself on two or more closed-circuit monitors while these pictures are being videotaped for immediate or later replay. As they are presented in tandem-series on the monitor the pictures are intermittently made increasingly unclear, distorted or blurred through camera movement or by my increasing or decreasing the lens light aperture or altering the focus.14

The psychiatrist exposes distortions, the artist creates them – but the idea of Berger gradually breaking down his patients’ images evokes some kind of clinical VJing. ‘Through electronic means I as therapist have an ability to magnify, focus on and distort aspects of a patient’s body just as people do to themselves with their inner “eye” and “I”.’15 The therapist-VJ: a great 1980s cyberpunk concept, only that it happens to be a very real 1970s phenomenon. By 1973, Berger is not only capturing and multiplying the likeness of his patients but also creating distortions for the sake of exposing a psychic reality to which the video images are supposed to correspond. The analogy between medium and mind has its own genealogy in the history of modern media.16 Lev Manovich rightly questions its premise: an isomorphism of visual techniques with mental processes, as if the mind already worked by ways of dissolves, superimpositions, montages and so on.17 The tension between the ‘discovery’ and the ‘invention’ of the videographic psyche (a creative treatment of psychic reality, to paraphrase John Grierson Berger, ‘Multiple Image Self Confrontation’, 8–9. Ibid., 9. VJing entails visual performances, often for music events such as concerts or rave parties. 16 It can be traced back at least to the composite photographs of Francis Galton in the nineteenth century. See Lev Manovich, ‘From the Externalization of the Psyche to the Implantation of Technology’, in Mind Revolution: Interface Brain/Computer, ed. Florian Rötzer (München: Akademie Zum Dritten Jahrtausend, 1995), 90–100. 17 Ibid. 14 15



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definition of documentary) becomes evident in the artistic aspirations of Berger et al. There is something in the video image that seems to correspond to a conception of how psychic reality looks. The premise for Berger’s analogy is shared by Bellour, who expresses it explicitly. The video image, he argues, ‘is one of the keenest manifestations of thought, of its jumps and disorderliness. Through thought as image, it gives us an image of thought, vibrant, and unstable.’18 It nevertheless seems unlikely that the qualities of this ‘image of thought’ would prefigure their videographic manifestation. Rather, video is appropriated for the treatment of psychic reality because it finds new means to express a common idea among psychiatrists and artists, namely, that psychic reality is inherently unstable and essentially ‘disfigured’ (vis-à-vis ‘objective’ reality). If the unfixed nature of the video image makes disfiguration its default mode, then this corresponds to the basic condition of psychic reality as it is imagined by psychiatrists and artists. Together, then, both psychiatrists and artists participate in the simultaneous exposure and/ as creation of the videographic psyche. Epistemological endeavours beget aesthetic expressions. The desire to expose a psychic reality leads the psychiatrist to create a reality of his own. The border between capture and manufacture breaks down, and with it the line between psychiatrist and artist. This process is hardly limited to Berger. Harry A. Wilmer – ‘well-practiced master video therapist’, according to Radical Software,19 ‘one of our most creative and imaginative workers’, according to Berger20 – experiments with split-screen and other techniques by 1967. If the small size of 1950s TV screens compelled Frankenheimer to invent televisual deep focus, Wilmer meets a similar challenge a decade later. How is one to display ‘the total group process and atmosphere’ on a small TV screen with a low-resolution picture?21 One cannot. But one can approximate it – albeit less through the use of split-screen, which allows for the display of a combination of participants at the cost of a disjunction that ‘undermines the feeling of circular encompassment’ in the group.22 (If Berger becomes captivated by the possibility of fragmenting individual patients’ bodies, Wilmer here strives towards framing a whole group as a collective one.) Better, then, to proceed through the use of superimposition, whereby a transparent close-up of the face of one participant can be seen over at least

Bellour, Between-the-Images, 319. Harry A. Wilmer, ‘Feedback: TV Monologue PsychoTherapy’, Radical Software 1, no. 4 (Summer 1971): 11. 20 Berger, ‘Technical and Artistic Considerations’, 207. 21 Wilmer, ‘Television’, 221. 22 Ibid., 222. 18 19

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part of the rest of the group, a framing that ‘graphically reproduces one of the cognitive perceptual mechanisms of the therapist – seeing and hearing one person clearly and simultaneously attentive to the others’, Wilmer argues.23 There is an imaginary a priori to the video images produced by the psychiatrists: the mental images as they are imagined by the psychiatrists themselves. Their videographic experiments are meant to approximate the supposed ‘look’ of mental materials, what could perhaps be called an aesthetics of the psyche. But in doing so, the psychiatrists become engaged in the creation of new images, which then feed back into whatever the psyche may have ‘looked’ like in the first place. The dichotomous formula exposure/ creation becomes a chain – exposure←→creation←→exposure←→and so on – in which even IPR, the therapeutic interrogation tactics developed by Kagan, is caught up. At some point Kagan’s team realizes that their treatment is inhibited by irrational fears; some patients, for instance, fear that an honest confession will make their therapists abandon them in disgust. These ‘interpersonal nightmares’ of abandonment and/or lost control can be elicited under certain conditions: if the ‘interrogator’ is ‘skilful’ enough; if the client is susceptible; and if the videotaped interview with which he is confronted stimulates the nightmare in question. But the need for more reliable ways to tap into what is ‘experienced by [the clients] only in their own most inner thoughts’,24 paradoxically leads the team away from the psychic microscope, towards the art of filmmaking. In essence, Kagan and team are updating a decade-old hypothesis: in the late 1950s, the psychiatrists at Agnews discovered their patients’ incapacity to discriminate between an actual encounter and the personal address of TV performers. This led them to speculate on the possibility of using CCTV to simulate individual therapy for a ‘mass audience’ of patients. The dream of psychotherapy as one great synoptic apparatus seems to linger in the update of IPR, as the complex dispositif of client, counsellor and interrogators gains an additional component: actors. Their role is to evoke ‘universal nightmares’ in filmed performances abstract enough to work on a variety of clients. The actor is instructed to talk straight into the camera; the viewer will be told to imagine that he is personally addressed, all to create the illusion of a real interaction. This interaction is, in turn, captured using two video cameras and a split-screen generator. In IPR 2.0, the videotape with which the client is finally confronted during his ‘interrogation’ is no longer simply an interview with a counsellor. It is a virtual interaction with a filmed actor playing out

Ibid. Kagan, ‘Television in Counselor Supervision’, 90.

23 24



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some abstract kind of ‘universal nightmare’ postulated, a priori, by the therapist. The nightmares can include an actor tearing up after looking into the camera for a few seconds, while asking the client: ‘Why did you want to do that to me – I did nothing to you.’ ‘In another vignette’, Kagan writes, ‘a pretty girl slowly licks her lips and tells the viewer that if he doesn’t “… come over here and kiss me pretty soon I’m going to go out of my mind”.’25 The viewer in question can be several; the intentionally abstract and general nature of the vignettes make them useful for group situations. ‘Most subjects have little difficulty getting deeply involved in the process even when the films have been used for large groups of subjects in well-lit rooms.’26

Imaginary flashbacks and revelations: Video ‘dreams’ in Viva la muerte Around the time that Kagan was busy incorporating video and film into psychotherapy, filmmaker Fernando Arrabal was incorporating video into a cinematic exploration of his childhood psyche. Bleak desert of greys and browns, a watery blue sky above the curvy horizon. The camera pans right as a dusty trail tracing a barely visible road reveals a vehicle approaching at full speed. A megaphone magnifies the announcement that the ‘Red Army’ has been defeated. General Franco’s Nationalists have won the Spanish Civil War. ‘Traitors will be relentlessly hunted down’, the military voice exclaims. ‘If necessary, we will kill half the country. Viva la muerte!’ As if on cue, a boy sitting by the roadside takes off the moment the truck rushes by, the camera now framing his face in extreme close-up. His inner voice cries out ‘Papa, papa, I don’t want them to kill you!’, and then a radical change occurs in the quality of the image. The washed-out 35mm colour is replaced by extreme chiaroscuro: a grainy black-and-white video negative. The semi-abstract silhouettes of two hooded figures turn the wheels of some primitive execution device. The visual force of their rotation is enhanced by the rhythmical sound of a locomotive. As the camera zooms in on the man slowly being crushed, presumably the boy’s father, the video image undergoes a series of smooth changes. From negative to positive, from black and white to purple, from purple – following a cut to a low-angle shot of the man’s last cry – to red. By the end of its opening scene, Viva la muerte has introduced the viewer to the aesthetic-epistemic device around which the whole film is structured; Ibid. Ibid.

25 26

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it is the first in a series of delirious video ‘dreams’27 cutting into the flow of the film’s 35mm ‘reality’. Emanating from the mind of the protagonist, young Fando (Mahdi Chaouch), these images are clearly distinguishable from the rest of the film – shaky, noisy and, most importantly, prone to a flow of monochromatic transitions. As a theatrical feature film, this is a pioneering work. As was shown in previous chapters, videographic films of the early 1970s were primarily concerned with surveillance and control; the video image thus functioned as a futurity effect evoking an imminent techno-social reality. But Viva la muerte makes use of the possibilities of video recording and processing for something else: the creative treatment of psychic reality, a psychic reality that fuses the parallel presents of imagination with delirious inquiries of possible pasts. In a 1976 interview, Arrabal described Viva la muerte, his debut film, as ‘an intense record of what happened to me’,28 a cinematic rendition of an autobiography he had already written and published, Baal Babylone (1959). It is the story of a young boy growing up in the years after the Spanish Civil War, in a conservative family hiding a dark secret: that the absent father fell victim to the fascists’ purges after having been reported by his own wife, Fando’s deeply conservative mother. But the laden concept of the ‘record’ as a faithful document is complicated by the film’s emphasis on psychic reality. If the book was a poetic treatment of actual events as remembered by the author, charged childhood memories related in a touchingly subtle matterof-fact style, then the film is an increasingly delirious descent into this child’s psyche. ‘Social reality and private nightmare fuse’, Peter L. Podol writes, ‘primarily through the figure of [Fando’s] mother who comes to incarnate the worst aspects of Church and State.’29 But as crucial as the mother is here, the fusion of social reality and private nightmare primarily occurs not through a figure but through a mode of figuration – that is to say, a medium. Twenty-eight times, the flow of Fando’s 35mm ‘reality’ is interpolated with his half-inch video ‘dreams’.30 These altering monochromes will here be divided into two categories: imaginary flashbacks and revelations. The former

Arrabal calls them dreams but they are more akin to fantasies and, eventually, hallucinations. See Fernando Arrabal, Peter Brunette, and Gerald Peary, ‘“The Future of Cinema Belongs to Poets”: An Interview with Fernando Arrabal’, Cinéaste 7, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 23. 28 Ibid. 29 Peter L. Podol, ‘The Grotesque Mode in Contemporary Spanish Theater and Film’, Modern Language Studies 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 203. Podol is analysing Viva la muerte. 30 The video sequences were shot with half-inch video cameras from Sony (possibly Portapak). Arrabal, Brunette and Peary, ‘The Future of Cinema Belongs to Poets’, 23. 27



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are hypothetical excursions of the past through which Fando tries to make sense of truths being kept from him. The latter are visions triggered by his observations. Fando’s main neurosis is his father’s fate; it constitutes the leitmotif of his videographic psyche, which insistently returns to scenarios of the father being betrayed, tortured and executed. These sequences function like videographic flashbacks, albeit located in the realm of possible pasts. Here follow two examples of the video-35mm interplay: 35mm reality – Fando receives a toy from prison. His mother (Núria Espert) immediately takes it away. He finds it nonetheless and reads the inscription: ‘Remember your father.’ Imaginary flashback (triggered by the father’s plea): Fando is holding the toy in his hands. His eyes are covered by black cloth. The father (Ivan Henriques) emerges from a tunnel pulling a horse attached to some primitive mechanism. Fando’s mother sits in a tub, enjoying the water provided by the husband-horse-well machinery. The father as slave; the mother as master; the video image shifting from yellow to blue. It is an early and relatively merciful treatment of the power dynamics in their marriage. Later on, 35mm reality: Fando finds the letter that reveals his mother’s betrayal. Cut to an actual flashback of the father’s brutal arrest, apparently witnessed by Fando (its status as real is signalled by the use of 35mm). Then the film cuts to an imaginary flashback: the father buried up to his head in red desert sand. Unable to move, he can only hear the four horsemen approaching from behind to trample him. But by then, we have already seen the father being crushed in some kind of medieval torture device (the opening scene cited earlier). Insofar as no man can die twice, the two scenarios are mutually exclusive. They can coexist only in the imaginary pasts of a videographic psyche that keeps testing death as a series of hypotheses. Fando’s revelations can be distinguished from his imaginary flashbacks by their temporal frame and epistemic function. Rather than testing possible pasts, they treat the impossible present: internal responses to the mother’s lies, the grandmother’s (Suzanne Comte) abuse and the repression of the church and the military. More than pure fantasies, these revelations are like videographic distortion mirrors that paradoxically uncover something true about the oppressive and hypocritical social conditions of Fando’s life. In a key scene, Fando is trying to find out whether his father is really dead. His mother tells him to forget the father; as a ‘Red’ and an ‘atheist’, she argues, he has ruined both Fando’s future and his own. Cut to a flashback of Fando sitting on a sunny beach, the father covering his feet with sand. The flashback is real as signalled by 35mm. In Baal Babylone, the symbolic significance of this scenario is emphasized by the fact that it is the only memory Fando has of his father – real, but idealized and instrumental.

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Drawing on Gilbert Simondon, Trond Lundemo argues that memory is not the ‘storehouse’ of the Freudian unconscious, but a processual form of imagination through which consciousness and subjectivity is formed: ‘Memory is a medium where images act upon each other, agglomerate and multiply, and modulate the present as well as the past for the purpose of future action.’31 Insofar as it implies that memory is not only generative but also potentially political, the same idea is manifested in the interplay between psychic images in Viva la muerte. Recharged by the power of his revelations, Fando’s flashbacks constitute conditions for his political awakening. The mnemonic retention of fatherly love through the flashback of the beach becomes an act of political resistance against the family’s attempts at the father’s erasure. The purity of the image becomes all the more striking as it is juxtaposed, through a videographic revelation, with the mother’s hypocrisy. Fando asks: ‘Did atheists kill Jesus? Don’t Reds burn churches?’ His mother answers: ‘Yes.’ Fando asks: ‘I’ll be an atheist when I’m big? I’ll be a Red?’ She answers: ‘No!’ As she kisses him and tells him that he is a good boy, the camera pans up and lands on an icon of baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary – an allusion to the mother’s sacrosanct love. But this blatant symbolism is immediately subverted as the film cuts to a video revelation. Mother-asMary holds a baby Fando-as-Jesus in her hands, but something is off with the mobilized icon. There is a friction between the sacral organ and the sickly videographic green, momentarily bleached as Mary hands the baby away. Now Mary emerges on an altar to give Communion. Imaginary time has apparently moved forward, as Fando is his present age. Instead of altar bread, Mother Mary places a snail in her son’s mouth. Holding a knife in her own, she looks into the camera and winks: a hint at the saint’s imminent betrayal. Cut back to Fando, now facing his father as the video camera zooms in. The tip of their tongues meet in what seems like a videographic paraphrase on Michelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam. Both imaginary flashbacks and revelations are infused with idiosyncratic renderings of religious rituals – perfectly logical for the psyche of a boy brought up in a strictly Catholic milieu. Ironically, Fando’s religious indoctrination is corrupted by the sadomasochistic desires of/for the most devout member of his family: a fanatically Catholic guilt-ridden aunt (Anouk Ferjac) – who lures him into a relation of incestuous flagellation.32 Overwhelmed Trond Lundemo, ‘Mapping the World: Les Archives de La Planète and the Mobilization of Memory’, in Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology, and the Social, ed. Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, and Eivind Røssaak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 214. 32 The incestuous implication of their relationship is even more explicit in the book, which also insinuates that the mother was complicit – aware of what was going without intervening. 31



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by the double binds of repression and desire, Fando’s revelations become, at once, increasingly delirious and clairvoyant – the birth of a political consciousness that blends with his more personal dilemmas. During a walk in the countryside with his maternal grandfather, the only family member who shows a subtle sympathy for Fadon’s father’s plight, Fando observes a group of muzzled farm workers. The grandfather explains that they are muzzled to keep them from eating the grapes that they are harvesting. After a moment of contemplation, the film cuts to a revelation in red: a group of boys chanting ‘Down with the muzzles!’ before being gunned down by the military. The body of a dead boy is raised by the crowd now chanting ‘Assassins!’ The revelation is immediately followed by a 35mm scene of Fando and his mother watching a fascist propaganda film in a cinema. It is one of a few instances in which Arrabal makes use of archive footage, and it is worth noting how he subverts its traditional authenticating function by juxtaposing the ‘truth’ of Fando’s videographic revelation with the falsity of the ‘authentic’ propaganda film. It is a revelatory moment of the logic under which Viva la muerte operates. In the words of one critic writing at the time, Viva la muerte is ‘a film in search of a reality beyond the world of appearances; it splits the façade of verbal hypocrisy and reveals the inner world of Arrabal’”33 The protesting boys will return in another red revelation, which is connected to the first not only through colour but also through a vulgar inversion of its premise (the farm workers denied of the grapes that they are harvesting). A priest handing out guns for Communion to the military is caught and castrated by the mob of young protesters, who feed the priest his own testicles – much to the priest’s own delight. It is a not-too subtle allusion to the church’s support of Franco’s repression, in a typical Arrabalian mixture of sharp observation and vulgar excess.34 Conversely, the imaginary flashbacks become points of contraction for excess and idiosyncratic spirituality. The father’s infallibly stoic acceptance of his various tortures and executions lends him a Christ-like aura that subverts the accusations of ungodliness that Fando’s mother makes against him. Meanwhile, it is Mother Mary herself who is revealed to be a Judas in disguise. In a yellow video sequence, the parents are kissing – a joyful embrace were it not for the fact that the father is strung to a cross. Mother Judas covers the eyes of

‘Viva la muerte est un film a la recherche d’une realité au dela du monde des apparences; il fend la facade de l’hypocrisie verbale en revelant le monde interieur d’Arrabal.’ Bettina L. Knapp, ‘Review’, The French Review 47, no. 2 (December 1973): 482–3; my translation. 34 Podol is right in that the horrors of Arrabal’s imaginary are ‘partially mitigated’ by the author’s ‘acerbic wit’ – dark humour is an essential element of the Arrabalian grotesque. Podol, ‘The Grotesque Mode in Contemporary Spanish Theater and Film’, 204. 33

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Father Christ before jumping onto a loaded cannon. By now she is not only complicit but also the one to give the fatal order. Arrabal was not alone in inventing the videographic psyche. The videomind analogy emerged in overlapping configurations of art, therapy and filmmaking. As was shown in Chapter 2, there were even hints at such conceptions in early discourses on live TV, with the camera understood as a soul scanner. But Viva la muerte may be the first narrative film to make the notion of the videographic psyche its whole structuring principle. What might, on first viewing, seem like a confusing onslaught of surreal imagery, does in fact follow a rather clear-cut pattern: 35mm film equals ‘reality’ while half-inch video equals ‘dream’. It is only once Fando has contracted tuberculosis that this signifying structure breaks down and hallucinations appear on 35mm, most importantly the film’s shocking climax: an imaginary flash-forward to a blood-soaked Oedipal ritual involving the actual slaughter of a bull.35 Why did Viva la muerte make video the key device in its creative treatment of psychic reality – a pioneering move? Perhaps the question can be answered by way of aesthetic comparison. The most evident difference between Fando’s reality and dream is chromatic. Unlike the natural colours of 35mm reality, the video sequences appear in monochromes: red, blue, green, yellow, grey and so on. Only in a few cases do several videographic colours coexist. There is an instability at work due to the analogue process: no two reds or blues are selfidentical, while one can at any moment undergo a smooth transition into the other. The specificities of the colourization process are shrouded in mystery. One source suggests that Arrabal and his team developed a new technique,36 another that it had already been used by Sheldon Rochlin.37 Podol mistakes it for a photochemical process, with colourized film simply shot off a video

The scene is unique in the film, and not only because it is particularly violent but also because it is a 35mm reverie by the hospitalized child, who, awaiting his surgery, hallucinates himself as an adult. Hence, an imaginary flash-forward to a possible future where the mother has compelled Fando to castrate his father, symbolized by a bull, and quite literally take his place. The actor playing adult Fando is sewn into the emptied carcass of the bull just slaughtered in front of the camera and whose blood Núria Espert, the actress playing the mother, has covered herself in. 36 According to Edward G. Brown, ‘Arrabal and his technicians developed a special process of injecting color onto black and white videotapes’. Edward G. Brown, ‘Arrabal’s ‘Viva La Muerte!’: From Novel to Filmscript’, Literature Film Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1984): 141. 37 But according to André Cornand, the same process had already been used by Sheldon Rochlin for Paradise Now (1970). André Cornand, ‘Viva La Muerte’, in Theatre IX: Le Ciel et La Merde: La Grand Revue Du XXe Siècle, by Fernando Arrabal, ed. Christian Bourgois (Paris: Bourgois, 1972), 14–15. 35



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monitor,38 while Arrabal’s recent account (in a personal email exchange on the topic) suggests that he discovered it by accident, having been left to his own devices to edit the videotapes in a London lab.39 If there is a signifying structure behind the electronic palette, it remains somewhat opaque to the observer. With the exception of the equation between red and pain/death/ political resistance, the correspondence between colour and content seems arbitrary. On the other hand, an analysis of one of the chromatically most complex dreams reveals a structural kinship with Arrabal’s repetitive prose. Where Baal Babylone proceeds through a repetition of selected sentences, this particular dream works through the repetition of a chromatic sequence: from green to grey to purple to grey; again, from green to grey to purple to grey; finally, from green to blue to red.40 As Podol points out, Arrabal has a propensity for naming his works after paintings: the play Le jardin des délices (1969) after Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (painted around the turn of the sixteenth century); the film L’arbre de Guernica (1975), after Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and so on.41 But Arrabal’s investment in painting goes beyond these references. Supported by Arrabal’s statement that his writing is influenced less by literature than by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya and René Magritte, Edward G. Brown, suggests that Arrabal’s dramas ‘have consistently stressed the visual over the verbal’.42 He even used to include slides of art works in his plays,43 an intermedial approach that certainly informs Viva la muerte. In addition to the video sequences that already function like slides, inasmuch as they cut into the flow of 35mm drama, the dreams are themselves supplemented by actual ‘art slides’ inserted into the film: Bosch-like nightmares drawn by Podol erroneously writes that Arrabal shot the dreams ‘in 35mm black and white film’, ‘then washing the colors over them while monitoring the process on a television screen’. Podol, ‘The Grotesque Mode in Contemporary Spanish Theater and Film’, 207. 39 ‘I spent to two days in a London laboratory alone with [co-scenario writer] Claudine Lagrive […], without producer nor technicians. Desperate the second day, given the impossibility of editing my images, and without anyone’s help, I made use of, for the first time in history (I think), the “ghost image,” much to the surprise of the employee. I loved the “discovery”, exactly what the film required, it was what I would have looked for had I known it existed.’ Fernando Arrabal, email to author, 24 June 2016; my translation. In a subsequent email, Arrabal clarifies that ‘no one knew anything about [the colourization process]; during the two days in the London lab, the colours appeared in the image without [me/us] knowing why’. 40 The chromatic pattern identified in the mentioned dream indicates that the colourizing process was not quite as accidental as Arrabal’s emails suggest. 41 Podol, ‘The Grotesque Mode in Contemporary Spanish Theater and Film’, 206. ‘Guernica (Picasso), The Garden of Delights (Bosch), Concert in an Egg (Bosch), The Burial of the Sardine (Goya) and The Tower of Babel (Bruegel).’ 42 Brown, ‘Arrabal’s “Viva La Muerte!”’, 136. 43 Podol, ‘The Grotesque Mode in Contemporary Spanish Theater and Film’, 206. 38

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Arrabal’s artist-in-arms Roland Topor.44 In fact, the opening scene described earlier is preceded by almost four minutes of opening credits, a sequence in which the presentation of names seems like a pretext to show one of Topor’s drawings in detail. Later we see that some of these details directly mirror details in Fando’s videographic dreams. Quite literally, then, Viva la muerte becomes a nodal point for film, video, painting and literature, exemplifying Bellour’s claim a decade later that video grants cinema passageways to these arts. Video’s chromatic fluidity allows Arrabal (alongside other artists just discovering the electronic canvas) to explore the painterly qualities that already inspired his prose, in the same move as he translates his prose into moving images.

From cybernetic acupuncture to Sufi meditation: The artist as therapist If the autoptic avant-garde in psychiatry engendered at least a few aspiring artists (Berger and Wilmer, to mention two), the video art scene emerging at the time functioned as its mirror image. Numerous artists and activists praised video’s therapeutic potential, and even framed their practices in such terms. In his 1971 Guerrilla Television, a seminal publication for radical video artists and activists, Michael Shamberg praises live and short-term video playback as ‘powerful tools for self-analysis’.45 Shamberg was a co-founder of the Raindance Corporation with, among others, Frank Gillette, an artist and activist experimenting with what he called the ‘self-portrait on videotape’. In a form of self-confrontation that pushed the feedback logic to extremes, Gillette used four cameras and tape to record himself looking at himself looking at himself to a point where ‘the gradual alienation from one’s previously considered image [turns] into an entirely redefined image of oneself ’.46 It should be stressed that this was not a critique of the implications of autopticism. Nor was Gillette a laissez-faire postmodernist just playing around with ideas. He was invested in developing alternative forms of treatment – and not just for himself. During this time, Gillette also experimented with the effects of videotape on a group of teenaged ‘kids with bad trips’ – ‘burnt-out acid cases’, who, he writes, feel ‘alienated from their Arrabal and Topor founded an avant-garde performance art group called the Panic Movement together with Alejandro Jodorowsky in Paris in 1962. 45 Shamberg and Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television, 30. 46 Yud Yalkut, ‘Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, Parts I and II of an Interview’, Radical Software 1, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 9. 44



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shrinks’.47 The inner circle of the Raindance crowd also included Paul Ryan, a video artist and prolific contributor to Radical Software. Through articles like ‘Self-Processing’ and ‘From Crucifixion to Cybernetic Acupuncture’, Ryan insists on video’s power as a therapeutic tool, albeit through shifting metaphors and functions. Like a ‘Moebius strip’, videotape ‘gives us [the power] to take in our own outside’.48 Meanwhile, he suggests that the dots of the TV screen stimulate our nervous system, like electronic needles in a ‘cybernetic acupuncture’.49 Considering the dominance of dystopian imaginaries in videographic cinema at the time – with works like THX 1138 and The Anderson Tapes hardly framing video as a tool for psycho-spiritual liberation – video arttherapy-activism would seem to belong to an entirely separate cultural sphere. But there is at least one theatrical film that clearly bridges this gap, the forgotten British science fiction film Anti-Clock.50 Like all Arden-Bond films, Anti-Clock engages in the visualization of mental states, but it is preceded most specifically by Vibration (Jane Arden and Jack Bond). This 1975 short film was their first to visualize the mind by videographic means. Vibration coincides with a spiritual turn in the Arden-Bond collaboration, following their introduction to Sufism.51 Their previous nightmarish explorations of women’s oppression and socially induced schizophrenia, gives way to dreamlike meditations on the path to liberation for all of humanity. Introduced as ‘a Sufi meditation’, Vibration opens with a shot of the Sahara Desert with two figures walking hand in hand. An electronic sphere is pulsating in the sky, as if the sun was attuned to the rhythm of their heartbeat. The voice of Arden’s Sufi guide Cherif Abderahman Jah can be heard talking in French, his words translated: ‘Yes – the whole system changes, an electronic process, a signal out of space. […] The awakened heart itself directs us like the signals of a conductor.’ His metaphors resonate with the techno-spiritual

Ibid. Paul Ryan, ‘Self-Processing’, Radical Software 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1970): 15. 49 Paul Ryan, ‘From Crucifixion to Cybernetic Acupuncture’, Radical Software 1, no. 5 (Spring 1972): 38–40. 50 Anti-Clock received limited attention at the time of its release, after which it remained unseen for decades. Jane Arden committed suicide in 1982, and her long-time collaborator and partner Jack Bond withdrew all their works from circulation, including Separation (Jack Bond, 1968, written by Arden) and The Other Side of the Underneath (Jane Arden, 1972, produced by Bond), until he was ready for BFI to re-release them in 2009. See Alex Miller and Ben Rayner, ‘Jack Bond’, Vice, 2 November 2009, https​:/​/ww​​w​ .vic​​e​.com​​/sv​/a​​rticl​​e​/ppz​​bwz​/j​​ack​-b​​​ond​-1​​44​-v1​​6n9. 51 Penny Slinger, ‘Vibration’, in Anti-Clock: A Film by Jane Arden and Jack Bond (London: BFI, 2009), 19; and Michael Brooke, ‘Jane Arden (1927–1982)’, in Anti-Clock: A Film by Jane Arden and Jack Bond (London: BFI, 2009), 29. 47 48

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vocabulary that permeates Arden’s writing. ‘Tired computer’, we soon hear her own voice coming from an open-deck audiotape recorder, ‘shuffles cards at the end of the day; solves little puzzles; sees around – sees about, but not through.’52 Arden and Jah pray together, and engage in Sufi breathing exercises that become part of the rhythmic soundtrack of the film. Bond, Penny Slinger and Arden’s son Sebastian Saville appear, engaged in meditative visualization exercises lead by Arden. As in Viva la muerte, chromatic video processing allows for a visualization of their mind’s perception. ‘What do you see?’, Arden inquires. ‘A red glow’, Slinger responds, and the film cuts to a montage of glowing reds: a bouquet of flowers, sunlight on wavy water, an abstract shot of a rolling audiotape deck, a seemingly gratuitous image, until it returns to the rhythmical sound of an invocation – ‘Allah, Allah’ – the circular movement suddenly evoking the devotional dance of a Dervish. Shot on Super 8 film, recorded onto 2-inch tape, and finally transferred to ¾inch U-matic,53 the image’s transfiguration allowed Arden and Bond to use a variety of new devices: feedback loops, a cosmic backdrop of star-like dots keyed into Slinger’s abstract body sitting naked in front of a revolving sphere and a bus altering smoothly between varying polychromes – less evocative of Fando’s unsavoury ‘dreams’ than of psychedelic bliss.

Mnemopticon 79: Memory monitors in Anti-Clock Made four years after Vibration, combining colour film, colour and monochromatic video, Anti-Clock is in many ways a continuation of the exploration of video as a tool for self-liberation. But the spiritual warmth of the Sufi meditation has been changed for a cold, blue, clinical depiction of a therapy that fuses actual techniques like biofeedback and autoptic confrontation with an imaginary video device to which the patient is wired with electrodes, and that has the capacity to read, process and confront the patient with his own mental images. Often, this apparatus – which will be defined as mnemoptic since it so clearly constitutes an extension of the autoptic logic into memory – involves dual monitors (and presumably a camera), making the patient watch his own wired face on one monitor, while his mental images emerge on the other. Captured memories are replayed for the patient, sometimes in slow motion, or even put to a vibrant pause, until

Lines from Arden’s poem ‘Poem from Vibration’, in Anti-Clock: A Film by Jane Arden and Jack Bond (London: BFI, 2009), 24–5. 53 Anti-Clock: A Film by Jane Arden and Jack Bond (London: BFI, 2009), 35. 52



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Figure 4.1  Sapha undergoing mnemoptic treatment in Anti-Clock (1979). the device indicates that the mental images no longer affect him. ‘The object of biofeedback is complete emotional freedom’, an ‘Alpha therapist’ soon informs us.54   If, as Kittler reminds us, psychoanalysis was itself conceived as the revelation and neutralization of memory images,55 then mnemopticism, as imagined by Anti-Clock, takes this function literally. Under the guidance of a Prof Zanov, the suicidal young Sapha is subjected to a series of mnemoptic sessions at a symposium at the Portman Hotel in London in order to desensitize him to the mental images of his own traumas and to liberate him from his social programming. The autoptic implications of the treatment are emphasized by the fact that both characters are played by the same

The therapist is played by actual therapist Don Wilde who was called in as a biofeedback expert and ended up performing in the film. Jack Bond, email to author, 12 April, 2018. 55 ‘Once a picture has emerged from the patient’s memory, we may hear him say that it becomes fragmentary and obscure in proportion as he proceeds with the description of it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid of it by turning it into words. […] “Look at the picture once more. Has it disappeared?” “Most of it, yes, but I still see this detail.” “Then this residue must still mean something. Either you will see something new in addition to it, or something will occur to you in connection with it.” When this work has been accomplished, the patient’s field of vision is once more free and we can conjure up another picture.’ Freud cited in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 141–2. 54

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actor (Saville, who already appeared in Vibration, albeit fitted with a beard and a German accent in his role as Zanov). In a combination of existential questions and observations revolving around social indoctrination and how to free oneself from it, most of Zanov’s lines are taken from You Don’t Know What You Want, Do You?, Arden’s own book published one year earlier. It constitutes a hard-to-define mix of radical philosophy, poetry and selfhelp,56 and the film’s greatest ambiguity stems from this circumstance. The authoritarian, passive-aggressive and, some might say, dangerous Zanov, who could be seen as the object of a critical statement on psychiatry (and even as a negative stereotype, with his Eastern-European name and his thick German accent), is really a mouthpiece for Arden’s own philosophy. It is a philosophy for which the unfixed nature of video functions as an effective visualization – as Sapha works through the scrambled tapes of his psyche, moving in a non-linear fashion towards what Bond would later call a breakdown, but that Arden implicitly frames as a breakthrough.57 The fact that a significant portion of Anti-Clock’s imagery is composed of one or two video monitors captured on film within a dark void makes it tempting to cite Numéro deux as a point of reference. The two films even start the same way: a montage of historically charged mass media images flashing by on the monitors-within-the-screen. Yet the two films could not be more different in terms of ambience. Compared to Godard’s cold, crude, and one might even say cruel dissection of the plights and perversions of a workingclass home, Anti-Clock tends towards an idiosyncratic kind of metaphysical materialism revolving around issues of mind, matter, space and time. Part of its vibe is attained by verbal means and part through its particular way of processing its video images. The characters do not so much talk to each other as they tell us about a state of affairs, their reflections more or less verbatim citations from You Don’t Know What You Want, Do You? In this sense, AntiClock constitutes a polyvocal monologue: Arden’s ideas are distributed to the characters, who function as her avatars. But the audiovisual medium of video allows for the manipulation of their/her words; the monologue is scrambled, looped, fragmented, tweaked into electronic noise – making its address as much acoustic as it is verbal. Within the corpus of videographic cinema, there are few if any narrative films that engage in video processing to the extent that Anti-Clock does. Some of Sapha’s mental images that appear in the film

Jane Arden, You Don’t Know What You Want, Do You? (London: Polytantric Press, 1978). Bond describes the dynamics of the treatment as a therapist ‘forcing’ Sapha ‘into total breakdown’. Jack Bond, ‘Anti-Clock: A Journey through Inner Space’, in Anti-Clock: A Film by Jane Arden and Jack Bond (London: BFI, 2009), 5. This designation clearly conflicts with Arden’s own perspective on the paths to self-liberation.

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are fluid white-and-blue video utopias with contrasts pushed to maximum: a white dove held in Sapha’s hands, its flapping wings leaving white luminous trails across the video screen as if it was painting an electronic canvas. Others are in coarse, grainy colour, such as Sapha’s Oedipal memories of seeing his mother masturbating, or shooting his own father to death during a hunting trip. These images are as much part of Sapha’s personal history as of the ‘past to future programming’ of social indoctrination to which we all are subjected, as Arden explains in her book, explicitly defining the medium of indoctrination as ‘talking-machine-tapes’.58 But most mental images in AntiClock are somewhere in between: recent memories of banal everyday spaces and occurrences, the uneventful unfolding of time, sometimes repeated in slow motion. These shots are nevertheless rendered strikingly aesthetic thanks to the effects of video processing. A tea set brings new meaning to the concept of ‘still life’: the mobile moiré patterns circling its edges turn it into something like the breathing flowers described by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception: becoming rendered visible.59 When Bellour suggests that video provides cinema with passageways towards painting, he is neither the first nor the last to draw a parallel between the two. As Gregory Zinman observes, ‘it is striking how often [video] artists describe their craft, goals, and art not in terms of film or even television but, rather, painting’.60 For Bartlett, ‘video becomes a paint on the palette […] that can be put onto the canvas of film’;61 while Tom DeWitt calls the synthesizer ‘the paint and palette of the video artist’.62 Zinman’s list goes on. Colour video, with its pull towards oranges and pinks, tends to extract the fleshiness of humans. Combined with distortions through video processing, the colours might evoke the fleshy figures of Francis Bacon (a reference specifically mentioned by Bellour, in relation to the mutation of bodies in Numéro deux).63 Anti-Clock, however, was largely shot with fifty black-and-white CCTV cameras acquired from Dixons (the electronics chain) and distributed in and around the Portman Hotel. As Bond writes, ‘The crew liked to tweak the gain on the TV cameras until the images looked startling, with the whites pushed to the purest white and the blacks to the starkest of blacks, a sort of video impressionism.’ The sensitive cameras were destroyed ‘at the rate of a Arden, You Don’t Know What You Want, 79–90. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (New York: Harper, 2004), 17–18. 60 Gregory Zinman, ‘Analog Circuit Palettes, Cathode Ray Canvases: Digital’s Analog, Experimental Past’, Film History: An International Journal 24, no. 2 (2012): 145. 61 Bartlett cited in ibid., 135. 62 DeWitt cited ibid., 146. 63 Bellour, Between-the-Images, 209. 58 59

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dozen or so a day’.64 At some point, this footage was processed into a metallic blue: an electronic paint with the viscosity of quicksilver. It is a look difficult to describe, but the modernist exteriors that it often captures – roads, cars in motion leaving linear trails in the air – evoke Gerhard Richter’s black-andwhite ‘photo paintings’. It is worth noting that both Bacon and Richter used photographs as sources for their paintings, and invented different techniques to evoke or enhance the way in which photographs convey movement.65 Both used methods of distortion and blur, but where Bacon’s bodies tend to express a whirlwind of forces going in multiple directions, a Richter photo painting like ‘Two Fiats’ (1964) emphasizes unilinear movement by smearing the cars into blurry flecks with horizontal lines. Contrasted against the vertical trees perfectly visible in the background, a strong effect of fast movement is achieved. The video monochromes in Anti-Clock are dominated by horizontal lines (scan lines, tracking lines and lines resulting from processing), and their cold, blue look often evokes Richter’s sterile photo paintings. Evoking ‘Two Fiats’, moving cars captured by CCTV cut straight lines into the spaces they traverse, while a staircase cuts horizontal lines into Sapha’s descending figure. It is as if the moving objects tend towards becoming space while space itself insists on being changed by the movement. But these processed blue images also bend, blur, break down and are caught in that characteristically vibrant state of an analogue video image put to a pause; a so-called freeze-frame, but more violent than if the videotape is left in peace to run its natural course. There is no stillness in Anti-Clock’s video images, since there is no stopping time. ‘The mind is never peaceful’, as Sapha will conclude. ‘And dawn’s already here as the stars appear.’ The fluid, abstracted blue video long shots of Sapha aimlessly wandering the streets of London become a recurrent motif in Anti-Clock. Shot with the distributed CCTV cameras, the cameras’ omission from the diegesis is in itself significant. In fact, not once does a video camera appear in Anti-Clock – understandably so, since most of these images are supposedly extracted directly from Sapha’s mind.66 This includes the CCTV footage, which thus turns into a poignant visualization of Berger’s claims that self-confrontation

Bond, ‘Anti-Clock’, 5. See Martin Harrison, In Camera – Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006); and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ed., Gerhard Richter (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). 66 Since Anti-Clock insists on avoiding establishing shots during the therapy sessions, the audience is left to guess which ones are supposedly mental images and which ones are to be read as recorded with a camera. The close-ups of Sapha’s wired face on one of the monitors, as well as some shots of the therapists, are the only ones that can almost certainly be read as ‘actual’ or ‘objective’ video images. 64 65



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is important for ‘the expanding of one’s observing ego’.67 As Lundemo writes, ‘Images of places format memory’,68 while ‘modes of memory and processes of individuation are subject to alterations and transformations due to changes in image technologies’.69 Insofar as the CCTV images are to be read as mental, Sapha’s memories take on a surveillance footage quality because they are processed by a psyche already conditioned by its videographic monitoring. That is, Sapha’s psyche frames its own memory images according to the new parameters set by the apparatus to which he is subjected – the Mnemopticon, which models the networks of memory directly on networks of surveillance.70 Towards the end of Anti-Clock, Sapha’s treatment has taken all the expected turns. His neuroses stem from his struggle to repress the central pieces of the Oedipal puzzle: desire for his mother; aggressions towards his father. ‘I can’t remember!’, he yells at Zanov, while the memory monitors prove otherwise. But if Anti-Clock contains elements of psychoanalysis, then its conception of what constitutes a breakthrough twists the film in an ‘anti-Oedipal’ direction.71 A slow-motion close-up of Sapha’s sad face with a halo of luminance signals the beginning of a crucial monologue leading up to his revelation. ‘And it descends upon me’, he says, while one monitor shows his tall black figure descending a flight of stairs and walking towards the camera, his face evoking a death skull, ‘the realisation, that I am not my emotions, thoughts, perceptions or beliefs. I am not what I have done right or wrong, achieved or failed to achieve. I am not a conglomerate of voices of instruction, education, doubt or derision. But’, he concludes, and his close-up freezes with a hissing sound, while thick, skewed tracking lines obliterate his eyes, ‘this “I” is simply space. And where the strands of energy cross is a dot. And this dot is the delusion called my identity.’ If, as Lundemo writes,

Berger, ‘Confrontation through Videotape’, 23. Lundemo, ‘Mapping the World’, 213. 69 Ibid., 216. 70 ‘Images are pre-individual and autonomous beings forming networks of memory through association and propagation.’ Ibid., 214. 71 This concept is here borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari’s psycho-philosophical approach of ‘schizoanalysis’, the aims of which are ‘anti-Oedipal’ in the sense that its purpose is not to ‘resolve Oedipus’ but to ‘de-oedipalize the unconscious in order to reach the real problems. Schizoanalysis proposes to reach those regions of the orphan unconscious – indeed “beyond the law” – where the problem of Oedipus can no longer even be raised.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley, and Mark Seem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 81–2. The resonances between Arden’s work and schizoanalysis can be explained by their common foundation in the anti-psychiatry movement to which Guattari belonged, and with which Arden was affiliated. Arden was reportedly a close friend of R. D. Laing. See Patti Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 106. 67 68

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Figure 4.2  Sapha’s breakthrough/breakdown in Anti-Clock (1979). ‘media and memory always entertain complex relationships with places and their history’ and if mnemotechnics are thus ‘about assigning what should be remembered to a place and about performing a spatialisation of the past’,72 then the opposite should be true: the liberation from what Arden defines as ‘past to future programming’ (social indoctrination) must proceed through an erasure not only of the networks of memory but also of their spatial nodes. In Anti-Clock, the use of CCTV would connote self-control, but the fluid spaces and figures at display are connotative of the opposite. In the end, Sapha reaches his breakthrough by becoming space, but this means de-identifying space in the same process – which here amounts to erasing memory. The streets of London melt into quicksilver blues of abstract motion: quasi-cars, quasi-people; a city once familiar estranged into what Deleuze calls an ‘anyspace-whatever’ – a space that has lost ‘the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways’.73 In that sense, the mnemoptic apparatus, as it is imagined in Anti-Clock, encourages reminiscence only as a means; its end is to function as a technology for forgetting.

Lundemo, ‘Mapping the World’, 217. Deleuze, The Movement-Image, 109.

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5

Vilified videophiles Nightmares of video’s home invasion

‘I like to remember things my own way. Not necessarily the way they happened.’ It may not be the most memorable line in Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), but it is crucial. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) have just received the second of three anonymous VHS tapes. The first only showed a panning shot of their façade, but the second continues into their home. Hovering through the house, the camera stops in an unlikely position above the sleeping couple. The police do not know what to make of the grainy, blue-grey footage, and they inquire whether there is a camcorder in the household. ‘No’, Renee answers for them both. ‘Fred hates them.’ ‘I like to remember things my own way’, he explains. ‘Not necessarily the way they happened.’ The line is crucial because once the third tape arrives, the cumulative trajectory of their content, a gradual invasion into the private life of the Madison couple, culminates with noisy footage of a frantic Fred sitting half-naked by Renee’s severed torso. Tape three, viewed by Fred alone, confronts him with the repressed memory of having murdered his wife – a deed that his mind has somehow edited out. But its relation to the first two tapes forms an impossible temporal structure. If the first tape already unsettled Renee, it was because the footage was a premonition, each tape being a kind of extended cut of the previous one. Their cumulative structure suggests that the first tape contained a foregone conclusion that was edited out, revealed only when the third arrives, at which point Renee, the one whose death it captures, is no longer alive to see it. In one sense, Lost Highway simply updates the mnemoptic concept of Anti-Clock. But in this simple update, from Mnemopticon 79 to Mnemopticon 97, lies a world of difference: the ‘home invasion’ of video, as it transformed from a medium for professional uses to a consumer device. This chapter shows how the home video boom gave rise to cultural anxieties concerning the medium and its users, and how this reconception of video from the 1980s and on came to be entangled with cinema. As Hilderbrand writes, playing on the double-meaning of ‘vice’ as the material degeneration of videotape and its

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illicit uses, videotape ‘has always been a deviant technology, one connotative of vice, at odds with the entertainment industry, a technology in which users can witness the literal degeneration of recordings’.1 While partial (videotape has been many things and, as this chapter will show, even home video was first seen as promise), Hilderbrand’s description is also very poignant when it comes to the cultural connotations that home video acquired in the 1980s, and that were to reflect negatively on its users. The ‘inherent vice’ of home video came to be embodied in an imaginary figure whose interactions with the medium were inherently degenerated. This vilified videophile embodied discourses on the dangers of home video’s greatest promise: ‘Watch Whatever Whenever’ (the Betamax slogan).

The rise and fall of home video: From highbrow promise to ‘Boston Strangler’ By the early 1960s, the ‘Golden Age of Television’ was coming to an end. The critics who had hailed the powers of live TV drama were turning their backs on the mass medium’s increasingly canned content.2 In a 1961 speech Newton Minow, chairman of the FCC, described TV much like A Face in the Crowd had depicted it a few years earlier: as a ‘“vast wasteland” of mindless sitcoms, formulaic Westerns, violent gangster shootouts, and offensive commercials’.3 Dawson writes that the speech became a ‘cultural touchstone’ followed by a new wave of TV criticism.4 The sentiment that videotape was partly to blame for TV’s cultural decline was shared by some critics and TV producers/directors. Frankenheimer expressed it explicitly: after having directed some 140 live TV dramas, ‘tape was invented and that ruined it for all of us’.5 But a new cultural function of videotape was already on the horizon, and with that, the video problem was to be seen as its own cure. In 1963, Ampex introduced a videotape recorder for home uses. Marketed as an ‘unforgettable Christmas treasure’, this 9-feet, 900-pound, $30,000 apparatus ‘combined a 21-inch color television, Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice, 34. Dawson, ‘Home Video and the “TV Problem”’, 530. 3 Ibid., 531. 4 As Dawson writes, this new criticism had anti-communist anxieties at its core: Minow and others equated TV’s lowbrow content with a socialist disregard for traditional taste hierarchies and feared that TV ‘had produced a population that was flabby in mind, body, and morals and consequently lacked the resolve to wage war on communism’. Ibid., 531. 5 Frankenheimer cited in Uncredited, ‘Dialogue on Film’, 95. 1 2



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AM-FM radio, stereo amplifier, automatic turntable, audio tape recorder, stereo speakers, black-and-white video tape recorder, and video camera in its elegant oiled walnut cabinet’.6 Needless to say, during a time when the average American earned around $4,400 a year, the home video recorder was aimed at a very particular class of consumers, and this is likely to have influenced the cultural connotations that it was to gain at this earliest stage.7 In 1964, critic Howard Kline heralded home video as a great new promise for the highbrow consumer, a medium that would allow viewers to select and collect the few gold nuggets that the cultural wasteland had to offer.8 Others critics were less convinced. Gould, prominent defender of live TV in the 1950s, envisioned an indiscriminate home video consumer recording lowbrow content for repeated viewing. His position changed as a market for pre-recorded content entered his horizon.9 The word had spread by 1970. Home video was being predicted to become a cultural saviour. According to Edward Kern in Life magazine, home video would rescue the TV viewer ‘“from the wilderness of mass programming”, making for “a revolution in quality”’.10 The same year, a former CBS Labs president went as far as to call it ‘the greatest revolution since print’.11 And then the anticipated saviour actually became available for the masses and everything changed. In 1975, Sony introduced the Betamax videocassette recorder. It was followed by VHS, introduced by JVC in 1976. By the 1984, 68 million households across the globe owned VCRs of Betamax or VHS formats.12 Back in 1970, Sunday Review column ‘The Video Revolution’ had claimed: ‘You are no longer to be merely a televisual receptacle, fit to be programmed from headquarters. Your will can be in command.’13 As Newman points out, the Betamax’s commercial slogan ‘Watch Whatever Whenever’ recapitulated this promise of democratization made by TV critics years before.14 From a commercially, not to mention morally, protectionist perspective, however, it is easy to see why some came to perceive such a promise as a threat. If there is one quote that captures the imaginary complex of the cultural vilification of home video in the 1980s, it is the statement that ‘the VCR is to the American Dawson, ‘Home Video and the “TV Problem”’, 524. An average yearly wage in the United States in 1963 was $4,396.64. See ‘National Average Wage Index’, Social Security website, accessed 5 December 2019, https://www​.ssa​.gov​/ oact​/COLA​/AWI​.html. 8 Dawson, ‘Home Video and the “TV Problem”’, 524. 9 Ibid., 532, 539. 10 Edward Kern cited in Newman, Video Revolutions, 25. 11 Charles Burk cited in ibid., 28. 12 On the first decade of Betamax and VHS, see Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, 71–5. 13 George Movshon cited in Newman, Video Revolutions, 28. 14 Ibid., 37. 6 7

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film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone’.15 Made by then-president of the MPAA Jack Valenti at a 1982 hearing on home recording of copyrighted works, the argument went as follows: the raison d’être of home video, proven by its advertising, is to record copyrighted content from TV. Meanwhile, the technology allows viewers to skip through TV commercials. The whole financial logic on which ‘free television’ rests is thus threatened. Lost revenue for advertisers and producers leads to decreased investment, and thus to a decline in the quality of content, finally making the consuming public the biggest loser in the equation. As infamous as Valenti’s analogy may be, it is in fact partly grounded in video practices and discourses. The introduction of the Betamax in 1975 produced a ‘booming subculture’ of self-proclaimed ‘videophiles’ whose common denominator was an ‘active and enthusiastic relationship to the new technology of home video’.16 Gathering around The Videophile’s Newsletter (which would reach 8,000 subscribers at its peak moment), the videophiles would trade taped TV content.17 As Greenberg points out, their practices included editing out ads, thus ‘reshaping the broadcast feed to match their idealized vision of what the program should be’.18 Needless to say, this vision was in conflict with Valenti’s take on ‘free television’. On the level of discourse, it is also worth noting that Valenti’s analogy had its precursors in technical jargon. The videophiles’ descriptions of their ‘taping parties’ are rich in techno-fetishist connotations: Taping parties were common: ‘a dozen people or more would bring over their VCRs, they would daisy chain them together with one master machine feeding a half dozen or a dozen slave machines […].’ The Videophile’s Newsletter later published an article about how to organize a video convention […] reminding organizers that ‘these VCR’s and TV’s suck a lot of juice […]. Overloaded circuits go “pop” and multiple machines suddenly go dead.’19

Jack Valenti cited in William Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 145. For a detailed critique of Valenti’s intervention into the home video market argument, see Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, 139–58. 16 Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster, 18. 17 Ibid., 37. 18 Ibid., 28. 19 Ibid., 24–5. For a critical essay on the history and implications of the master/slave analogy in technology, see Ron Eglash, ‘Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature’, Technology and Culture 48, no. 2 (2007): 360–9. 15



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A complex of controversies is at the core of home video’s cultural decline from a highbrow promise to a metaphorical killer. As Valenti claimed and Hilderbrand recapitulates, home video was introduced ‘as a bootleg technology, for the purpose of recording television without permission’.20 But the home video boom is also inseparable from a boom in the porn industry. As Frederick Wasser points out, X-rated tapes appealed to consumers who found it unthinkable to watch porn in an adult movie theatre. This, in turn, made pornography ‘a major propellant in the development of prerecorded videocassettes’.21 By 1980, pornography reportedly accounted for 60 per cent to 80 per cent of video sales in Germany, Great Britain and possibly in the United States as well.22 That year in Sweden, where theatrical films were subjected to state censorship, the possibility to buy or rent unclassified horror films initiated a moral panic of national scale, while in Britain a similar panic was caused by what the British media dubbed ‘video nasties’. The changes that videographic cinema would undergo in the 1980s and the 1990s can best be understood against this more or less global background noise, stemming from cultural anxieties related to the threatening promise that people could from now on ‘Watch Whatever Whenever’.

Long live the canned flesh: Alive on tape in Videodrome With the home video boom, videographic cinema entered what could be called a ‘lateral’ phase of video imaginaries, that is, a period in which the increasing presence of video in daily life gave rise to concerns regarding its imagined side effects. Released in 1983, the year that Feuer wrote her critical essay on the concept of live television, Videodrome exemplifies a period in which the novelty of home video inspired nightmares of an era to come, while already turning towards archival anxieties of video recording. The film offers hyperbolic comment on the reconditioning of life in the home video era, and is among the first to explore the theme of real death on tape.23 Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice, 6. Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, 93–4. 22 Ibid., 94. 23 Videodrome was preceded by exploitation films like Snuff (Michael Findlay and Horacio Fredriksson, 1975) – promoted as an actual snuff movie, the poster promised to deliver ‘the bloodiest thing that ever happened in front of a camera’ – and thrillers like Hardcore (Paul Schrader, 1979), where a Calvinist’s search for his disappeared daughter leads him to the underbelly of the Californian porn industry. Neither of these were however, concerned with video as a medium. 20 21

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Max Renn (James Woods) is the president of a sleazy TV station in Toronto. Always in search for qualitative content, he comes across a show called ‘Videodrome’. No storyline, minimal production cost; just rape, torture and murder: the show is ideal for his station. What Max has yet to realize is that the show carries a kind of ‘influencing machine’24 for the electronic age: a video signal that will make him hallucinate his own fusion with the medium, eventually developing a slit in his stomach through which he is force-fed brainwashing Betamax tapes. Media guru Prof Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley), typically identified as a parody of McLuhan, heralds the coming of a brave new age in which the television screen has become ‘the retina of the mind’s eye’, rendering the reality of TV more real than reality itself (making him resonant with Baudrillard as well). O’Blivion has a number of quirks worthy of a media guru: ‘I refuse to appear on television, except on television’, he reveals during his participation in a TV talk show where Max is also a guest – O’Blivion seen through a monitor placed among the interviewees in the studio. ‘The monologue is his preferred form of discourse’, his daughter Bianca (Sonja Smits) will later note in passing. But the guru’s idiosyncrasies turn out to have a crass material explanation. O’Blivion has been dead for a while, killed by a brain tumour caused by the ‘Videodrome’ signal. He survives himself only in the matter of the ‘New Flesh’, a vast archive of videotaped monologues. If ‘live on tape’, as Feuer suggests that year, constitutes a contradiction, Videodrome literally imagines life being canned in a taped format: alive on tape. ‘Imaginary media mediate impossible desires’, as Kluitenberg suggests.25 But they also mediate cultural anxieties. Extending one’s life by its technical recording certainly has its existential appeal, but in Videodrome it comes at a price: insanity, murder and suicide. By the time that Max realizes that he has also been subjected to the video signal that killed O’Blivion, it is already making him go insane and turning him into an assassin for some reactionary faction. All he can do is team up with Bianca who is carrying on her father’s legacy, turn against the organization that is controlling his mind and, like O’Blivion, consummate his transformation into the ‘New Flesh’. As is already inscribed in Max’s face before he shoots himself, his parting words, ‘Long live the New Flesh’, are a prayer more than a promise. The longevity of his tape-

The ‘influencing machine’ was a technically conditioned paranoid delusion that emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century and posited a machine with the capacity to ‘insert’ and ‘broadcast’ thoughts into/from the mind. See Jeffrey Sconce, ‘On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine’, in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 70–94. 25 Kluitenberg, ‘Archaeology of Imaginary Media’, 48. 24



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based evolution is relative to the speed of degeneration of the ‘canned flesh’ of his video body. Videodrome’s concept of violence spread by a video signal, in a straight line from screen to psyche to action, may sound like a reach. But in 1983, one did not have to reach very far. Around the world, video was being treated as an existential threat. In Sweden, a campaign launched by the state TV in 1980 generated a national mobilization against the video rental market. Leatherface became the face of ‘video violence’, and other news media caught on.26 By 1983, serious (non-tabloid) Swedish newspapers were suggesting that horror films on video can turn people into murderers.27 In Britain, ‘video nasties’ entered popular parlance through The Sunday Times, in the 23 May 1982 article ‘How High Street Horror is Invading the Home’. The article warned that uncensored horror videos had become ‘available to anybody of any age’.28 That year, Labour MP Gareth Wardell called the VCR ‘a potential weapon that may be used to attack the emotions of our children and young persons’.29 As Julian Petley writes, ‘one phenomenon becomes linked to others and all them come to be seen as working insidiously together to pose a threat to “life as we know it”’. Petley also points out that the ‘video nasties’ panic was ‘particularly rich in convergences’.30 Video consumption was projected onto ‘the anti-social family’, distribution became linked with organized crime. On 30 June 1983, the Mail editorial ‘Rape of Our Children’s Minds’ compared video nasties to events in Nazi Germany.31 The intended outcome of these campaigns was the imposition of state video censorship. The Mail, 29 June 1983: ‘If video censorship of the most stringent kind isn’t brought in pretty damned quick we’re going to have an upsurge in violence and terror and abuse in our land and homes the like of which we never suspected in our wildest terror.’32 National anxieties travel fast in a globalized world. In November 1984, Cinema Canada reported: ‘Censors attack “video nasties” in Toronto at international meet.’ The

Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) is the iconic chainsaw-wielding murderer in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), a film that became a synecdoche for video violence in Sweden. On the Swedish video violence debate, see Ulf Dahlquist, Större våld än nöden kräver? Medievåldsdebatten i Sverige 1980–1995 (Umeå: Boréa, 1998). 27 ‘Janne varnar för videovåldet: Kan göra folk till mördare’, Dagens Nyheter, 7 February 1983. 28 Cited in Julian Petley, ‘“Are We Insane?”. The “Video Nasty” Moral Panic’, Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques 43, no. 1 (30 June 2012): 35–57, https://journals​ .openedition​.org​/rsa​/839 (page numbers omitted from online version). 29 Gareth Wardell cited in ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Lynda Lee Potter cited in ibid. 26

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International Meeting of Film Regulators gathered behavioural scientists, film critics and censors from eleven countries around the world to discuss the impact of video and potential measures against it. Ontario’s Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations Robert Elgie assured that Canada was also taking actions to stop the ‘increasing flow of worse and worse stuff across borders around the world’.33 The feedback loops between home video anxieties and cinema is evidenced by Videodrome, a film made by the Canadian Cronenberg to see if ‘what the censors were saying would happen, did happen’.34

Patrick, Otis, Benny, and us: Shell children of the video revolution ‘There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of abstraction’, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) explains by way of a voiceover, while we see him exfoliating his perfectly groomed face, gazing into his own ocular abyss through his bathroom mirror. ‘But there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours – and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable – I simply am not there.’ The protagonist of American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) is, as the title reveals, a psychopath. He is also obsessed with maintaining appearances – a perfectly fit, groomed and dressed narcissist embodying the yuppie era. The fact that he is a serial killer goes without saying, and as if this was not bad enough, he shows clear signs of videophilia. By the 1980s, when this dark satire of yuppie culture unfolds, violent crimes were habitually linked to the supposed videophilia of the perpetrators. A standing joke throughout the film, then – the serial killer’s standard answer whenever he needs to dodge social commitment or legal scrutiny – is that he has been or will be ‘returning some videotapes’. Not necessarily a lie, we actually get to see the muscular shell of a man doing frantic sit-ups in front of a VCR playing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Later, Bateman will copycat the film in an over-the-top chain saw murder. Incidentally, his victim (Cara Seymour) is one of two women whom Bateman engaged in a homemade video porn shoot in an earlier scene, and in which

‘Censors Attack “Video Nasties” in Toronto at International Meet’, Cinema Canada, no. 112 (November 1984): 31. 34 David Cronenberg, Cronenberg on Cronenberg, ed. Chris Rodley (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 94. 33



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he seemed more interested in how the camcorder captures his impeccable pecs, than in the women. From the 1980s and onwards, cinema would connect videophilia with psychopathy and murderous inclinations. In Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986), Henry (Michael Rooker) and his partner Otis (Tom Towles) acquire a camcorder, killing the garage salesman in the process. Later, one of the film’s most disturbing murder scenes is seen entirely through raw video footage. Henry and Otis invade a family home in order to murder a couple and their teenage son. Once the deed has unfolded on the screen that displays it, the film cuts to a different living room where we see that the two killers are watching their own footage on a TV. Rewinding and repeating the murder in slow motion, Otis comes to embody the ‘inherent vice’ of videophilia, understood as an obsessive interaction with video images of violent acts. In a similar way, Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, 1992) opens with lowresolution footage of men leading a pig to the slaughter. The camcorder follows them out to a yard, where a bolt gun is put to the animal’s head. As the pig is shot, the video is paused and rewound. The moment of death is then replayed in slow motion. We learn that the footage was shot and is being played by Benny (Arno Frisch), an emotionally detached fourteenyear-old living in a cold bourgeois home. When Benny is not in school or with his friends, he is watching video rentals or his own footage. With the blinds pulled down and video mediating his window view, Benny’s room is a Platonic video cave. The latent violence of his extreme videophilia comes into view when he invites a young girl (Ingrid Stassner) home. Having seen her by the rental store where he is a regular, he seems to assume that she shares his interest. He shows her his footage of the pig’s slaughter, including the slowmotion replay. When she asks him if it bothered him, he gives a non-sequitur answer: a pig is only a pig, and in action films they use ketchup and plastic. Later that day, after a game of dare, Benny shoots the young girl with the same bolt gun, capturing the act on tape. Haneke has explained that Benny’s Video was inspired by actual cases where first-time killers motivated their crimes by simply stating that they wanted to know what it is like to kill. In Haneke’s view, excessive media consumption is to blame for a feeling of exclusion from a reality whose appeal remains so strong that the subject is ready to kill to get to experience it.35 It is a sophisticated take on a familiar argument: video can turn people into

Benny’s Video: Entretien avec Michael Haneke par Serge Toubiana, available on Michael Haneke Collection (DVD box set, Noble Entertainment, 2009).

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murderers. Like Bateman, Benny shows a narcissistic interest in his video Self: he tapes himself smearing the girl’s blood on his naked body. Like Bateman, Benny is portrayed as an empty shell, unbothered by the murder. But if this makes it easier for the audience to distance itself from his behaviour, the film has a surprise in store. As Benny travels with his mother (Angela Winkler) to Egypt while his father (Ulrich Mühe) stays home to cover up his crime, Benny brings his camcorder in order to produce generic vacation videos. The familiar type of footage would be in conflict with the previous tapes, were it not for the fact that all three are shot in the same detached tone. Haneke spells out his message in an interview: filming vacations is a ‘completely perverse’ practice stemming from a desire to control reality. The filmmaker assures that he never indulges. It is a desire, he says, created by the media themselves, insofar as we encounter reality through them.36 The connection between the three tapes thus implies a fourth – between Benny and ourselves. Temporary or permanent vacations make no difference for a videophile drained of his capacity to experience reality directly; in Haneke’s eyes, we are all shell children of the video revolution.

Treating erasure anxieties: From Family Viewing to The Fourth Kind Less of a shell and more of a victim, Van is a first-generation home video child. Eighteen years old in 1987, he is among the first to have had access to his own childhood memories on home video. The memories are sweet and unspectacular: Van playing ball with his father in the garden and playing with his mother and grandmother – singing a song in his mother tongue, Armenian. It is the context in which the footage is viewed that corrupts its meaning. Eighteen-year-old Van lives in a sterile Toronto apartment with his father Stan and Stan’s lover Sandra (with whom Van also seems to have an affair). Shot with professional TV cameras, the home has an ambiguous porn/ sitcom/soap opera look. Stan, who has been in the home video business since the early days, has developed a fetish for recording sexual acts (somewhat irrespectively of his lovers’ own passions). And for undisclosed reasons, he uses old family tapes as a recording medium. ‘It’s a thing he has. He likes to record’, Sandra explains, after having assured Van that she had no idea that Stan was effectively taping over Van’s childhood. ‘And erase’, Van adds. ‘He prefers to erase.’ We see family footage of Van sitting in his mother’s lap Ibid.

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dissolve into noise, before being reconstituted again, but this time as one of the cold sex tapes with Stan and Sandra. In Family Viewing, familiar themes of home video as an inherently perverse medium are fused with reflections on the dynamics of video recording and erasure – of memory and its loss. Stan’s revisionist rationale remains vague, but the film implies ethnic tensions. Van’s mother is absent and grandmother hospitalized. The tapes are Van’s only connection with his Armenian roots, which – as some videos suggest – were always a problem for his EnglishCanadian father. ‘Family Viewing had a lot to do with notions of generational loss and recovery’, Egoyan has explained, thus making explicit the relation between the film’s theme and its technical conditions.37 The technical term ‘generation loss’ denotes the way in which information degrades from one copy (generation) of analogue videotape to another, gradually rendering the content unintelligible. In this videographic concept, Family Viewing finds a metaphor for how cultural knowledge that should have been passed on from one generation to another gets erased. Family Viewing is not the first film to connect a videotape’s erasure with memory loss. As was shown, Anti-Clock mnemoptic imaginary already worked with a similar concept. But Sapha’s memory is erased within the clinical context of a therapy method meant to liberate him from his social programming. Van, on the other hand, is robbed of his cultural memory through a perverse game that finally explains why his mother left: towards the end of the film, a video reveals that Stan already used family tapes to record his wife in not-so-consensual BDSM acts. Analogue video is an unstable storage medium. The estimated life expectancy of a VHS tape is around a few decades under favourable conditions.38 External conditions can shorten its lifespan considerably. As the very point of magnetic tape is to be re-recordable, it is also easily erased at will or by accident. It should thus come as no surprise that video’s fusion with the daily life of consumers would give rise to anxieties related to its frailty as a memory medium. Some videographic films treat such anxieties with humour. In Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008), clumsy conspiracy theorist Jerry (Jack Black) gets magnetized in an attempt to sabotage a power plant in New Jersey. Unbeknownst of his bizarre condition, he accidentally demagnetizes the video rental store where his best friend Mike (Mos Def)

Atom Egoyan cited in Timothy Shary, ‘Video as Accessible Artifact and Artificial Access: The Early Films of Atom Egoyan’, Film Criticism 19, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 9. 38 The Council of Library and Information Resources suggests a five- to thirty-year life expectancy for a Hi Grade VHS tape depending mainly levels of humidity. See ‘Appendix 2: Estimation of Magnetic Tape Life Expectancies (LEs)’, CLIR website, accessed 5 March 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.cli​​r​.org​​/pubs​​/repo​​rts​/p​​ub54/​​estim​​ati​on​​_of​_l​​es/. 37

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works. While a human is unlikely to become a magnet, a strong magnet will erase a videotape, and this mixture of imaginary and material conditions has symbolic value in the film. The erasure of the store’s rental stock becomes part of the film’s bitter-sweet reflection on the ‘death’ of the video store and the format that gave rise to it.39 But erasure also initiates the DIY remaking enterprise that leads to the rebirth of Passaic, New Jersey, as a videophile collective of creator-consumers – ‘stockholders to their own happiness’, as associate Alma (Melonie Diaz) phrases their ethos. A darker treatment of erasure anxieties, The Fourth Kind (Olatunde Osunsanmi, 2009) revisits and subverts the videographic medium’s double promise of being a tool for therapy and/as surveillance. Dr Tyler is a psychologist trying to recover from a trauma: seeing her husband being murdered by a killer whose face she cannot recall. As she travels to the Alaskan town of Nome to finish her husband’s research project on sleeping disorders, she stumbles on a strange coincidence: under hypnosis, her patients/informants seem to recover the frightening memory of having been watched by an owl. As the sessions proceed, the owl itself turns out to be a screen memory for their more profound trauma of being alien abductees.40 As Dr Tyler’s probes her patients’ psyches, this summons the alien entity itself: a destructive force that pushes one patient to commit suicide and breaks another one’s neck during a session. With the sheriff (Will Patton) convinced that Dr Tyler is to blame, Dr Tyler becomes desperate to prove that the alien is behind everything – including the disappearance of her own daughter. A significant portion of The Fourth Kind consists of alleged archival footage claimed to have been gathered by the director, mainly from Dr Tyler’s video-recorded hypnosis therapy sessions and police tapes. These tapes are One critic complained that ‘the mere existence of a vid-only store (unlike, for instance, a vinyl LP specialist) is a total anachronism; moving back the time frame 15 or 20 years would have removed a big credibility issue and sacrificed nothing except the absurdist dimension’. Todd McCarthy, ‘Be Kind Rewind’, Variety, 20 January 2008, https​:/​/va​​riety​​ .com/​​2008/​​film/​​marke​​ts​-fe​​stiva​​ls​/be​​-kind​​-rewi​​nd​-2​-​​12005​​48940​/. 40 Freud defines as ‘screen memory’ ‘one that owes its value as a memory not to its intrinsic content, but to the relation obtaining between this content and some other, which has been suppressed’. In relation to the ‘objectionable’ and therefore by the psyche suppressed memory, the screen memory ‘may well seem banal’. ‘Screen Memory’, in Freud, 7, 19. The notion of screen memory is sometimes applied to the mediation of memory by technical means. See, for instance, Marita Sturken, ‘The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions’, in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–2; and Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 15–16. 39



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easy to distinguish by their characteristic VHS texture, as opposed to the digital HD image of the parts framed as ‘dramatization’. Furthermore, key characters have been divided into two sets of actors, the ‘real’ Dr Tyler played by then-unknown actress Charlotte Milchard, while her ‘dramatization’ is played by Milla Jovovich. Within the diegesis, the therapy tapes are initially only meant to serve as a documentation of Dr Tyler’s research project, but as the alien entity starts wreaking havoc and Dr Tyler is accused, monitoring the hypnosis sessions also becomes an attempt to capture the entity in action. Ironically, what prevents Dr Tyler from gathering the evidence that she needs to free herself from suspicions boils down to the material conditions of electromagnetic recording. Not only does it seem as if the very fact that she is attempting to capture the entity on tape is making it increasingly violent, but the gradually intensified force that it exerts on the bodies of Dr Tyler and her patients is also scrambling the recordings. The alien’s force thus becomes the negative correlative of its intended figuration, and as far as evidence goes, it renders the footage useless. Mixing the material conditions of magnetic recording with an alien abduction imaginary lends The Fourth Kind to some of the most extreme instances of video processing seen in film. Its study in disfiguration become a reminder of a key notion in the history of video art, a kinship between video and painting. Bellour, who repeatedly returned to the idea that video provides cinema with passageways to painting, compared video processing in Godard’s Numéro deux with the works of Francis Bacon, both of which show ‘the interiors of a face and of a body in the unfolding of its exterior movement’.41 There is an unmistakably Baconian quality to the use of video in The Fourth Kind as well, bringing it in touch with what Deleuze (also with regard to Bacon) identified as the key task of art: capturing forces and rendering the invisible visible,42 which is to say rendering forces visible by capturing their violent effects on visible matters. Defined this way, the Baconian peak of The Fourth Kind is Dr Tyler’s last encounter with the invisible force: a combination of VHS noise and digital effects that results in the most striking videographic disfiguration of a human body in cinema since Sapha became space in AntiClock. With her daughter apparently abducted, Dr Tyler decides to summon the alien. She is put under hypnosis, and as the entity’s presence is registered in the violent convulsions of her body, the VHS image goes into wavy chaos. We catch her body bending backwards and floating upwards as her mouth is Bellour compares Bacon’s bodies and faces with the video processing in Godard’s Numéro deux. Bellour, Between-the-Images, 209. 42 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), 56–7. 41

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stretched out in a horrifying scream. Dr Tyler’s scream, dissipated into VHS noise, is so similar to the right-hand panel of Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), down to the orange-grey colours, that it is unlikely to be a coincidence. ‘The mouth’, as Deleuze writes in another analysis that captures this image in The Fourth Kind as well, ‘then acquires this power of nonlocalization that turns all meat into a head without a face. It is no longer a particular organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes. […] This is what Bacon calls the Scream, in the immense pity that the meat evokes.’43 Already intuiting her defacement to be more than a mere effect of scrambled video signals, we finally catch a glimpse of Dr Tyler lying lifeless on her couch as the entity withdraws and the image calms down. Her mouth is still open in an unnaturally dilated and unimaginably painful gape – her body being as susceptible to harm as the magnetic base of its videographic capture.44

Mnemopticon 97: Capturing nightmares of home invasion In a kind of extra-diegetic prologue, The Fourth Kind lays out its false premises that it constitutes a dramatization of real events and that the video sequences are authentic documents. ‘In the end’, Jovovich says as she introduces herself as herself (an actress about to dramatize the allegedly real Dr Tyler seen in the video sequences), ‘what you believe is yours to decide’. Regardless of what we decide, in the end the film has twisted so many threads around itself that we barely know what to make of its plot: the owl is a screen memory for an alien that may be a Sumerian deity or demon, that may be a screen for a more mundane but less tolerable trauma – that Dr Tyler’s husband killed himself. Turning the whole murder-by-alien-forces mystery on its head and casting a shadow of doubt over the daughter’s disappearance, this final plot twist suggests that the alien scenario might be Dr Tyler’s deluded way of dealing with the intolerable truth that she lost her husband and daughter. Ibid., 26. Deleuze is referring to the interviews with Bacon conducted by David Sylvester and published as a book in 1975. Bacon explains: ‘I could say that a scream is a horrific image; in fact, I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror. I think, if I had really thought about what causes somebody to scream, it would have made the scream that I tried to paint more successful.’ David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 48. 44 For earlier version of this analysis, see Jonathan Rozenkrantz, ‘(Pro)Creative Encounters: From Photo-Painting to Video-Film’, Film International, 14 December 2012, http:// filmint​.nu/​?p​=6482. 43



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But if this is the case, then the alien force must be read as a symbolization of Dr Tyler’s trauma itself, in which case its capacity to erase the video image gains a psychoanalytical touch. Kittler already compared captured noise – ‘the fuzziness of cinematic pictures, the hissing of tape recordings’ – with the Lacanian concept of the Real.45 Summarized by Andrea Hurst (through a case study on the loss of a child), the Real is the event that due to its traumatic nature cannot be represented other than negatively, ‘as failures, ruptures and inconsistencies’, ‘as that which hollows out all attempts at the representation’.46 Videographic noise as the non-representation of the Real returns in Lost Highway. The film’s labyrinthine logic can be unravelled as the story about jazz saxophonist Fred who murders his wife Renee and her lover Dick Laurent (Robert Loggia). The videotapes are the recording media of his psychic apparatus, repressed memories materialized, but their return proves to be intolerable and triggers a full-blown psychosis. Arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to death, unable to integrate what he has done, Fred reimagines the whole narrative and its intrinsic relations. His dead wife Renee becomes Alice, the involuntary mistress of Laurent, now a mobster named Mr Eddy. Meanwhile, Fred transforms into another character played by another actor: the charming young car mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), with whom Alice initiates a love affair. The impotent, jealous and guilt-ridden murderer thus reimagines himself as a young hero – the virile lover and presumptive saviour of his wife-turned-mistress. But his transformation is far from waterproof. At one point, Pete hears Fred’s frantic saxophone (noise jazz) on radio; at another point, noisy video images of Renee’s corpse assault him. Radio noise, video noise – all flashes of the Real – threatening the integrity of his self-deluded story. The steady pan of Fred’s façade in the three tapes evokes the mechanical arm of a CCTV camera, immediately bringing surveillance to mind. As the camera roams the halls in an eerily hovering manner, the violence inherent to the invasion, combined with the grain of the handheld shots, evoke a ‘snuff ’ aesthetic that already hints at the inevitable outcome: Renee’s murder. But the strangely disembodied movement of a camcorder capable of hovering above a couple’s bed, combined with noise and recurrent dropout, suggests that the footage emanates from the videographic psyche. Fred hates camcorders because he prefers to remember things his way, because the way that they

See, for instance, Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 14, 15–16. Kittler emphasises the accidental as well as lack of meaning in this equation (as opposed to the Symbolic and the Imaginary in Lacan’s three-part structure of the psyche). 46 Andrea Hurst, Derrida Vis-à-Vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 45

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Figures 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 Invasion on Fred’s house/home/psyche in Lost Highway (1997). happened are too traumatic for his conscience to bear. In this formula lies the conception of videotape as a storage medium for an intolerable reality. As in The Fourth Kind, the tapes are a technical rendition of the Real, the traumatic event that can only be represented through failures, ruptures and inconsistencies. As they effect a gradual invasion – tape 1, house; tape 2,



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house→home; tape 3, house→home→psyche – this correlates with increasing levels of grain and noise. Recurrent zooms and sudden blow-ups create an invasive feeling within single shots, but they also make sure that the closer we get, the less we can say what we are looking at. Not only does each tape reach a little bit further into Fred’s mind, then, but each approximation also brings us closer to the gritty, grainy, intolerable – and un-representable. Within this symphony of noise and subjective transmutations, there is one static, albeit ephemeral figure. With his pale face and huge piercing eyes, the Mephistophelian Mystery Man (Robert Blake) introduces himself to Fred at a house party. Time seems to stop as the music fades out, isolating the two characters. Mystery Man claims that Fred and he already met at Fred’s house. He momentarily confounds Fred by telling him: ‘As a matter of fact, I’m there right now.’ As he compels Fred to call his own house and Mystery Man actually answers, Fred’s disbelief turns into contained fear. ‘How’d you do that?’ Fred asks. ‘Ask me’, Mystery Man commands. ‘How’d you get inside my house?’, Fred asks into the phone. ‘You invited me’, Mystery Man answers from the other side of the line, ‘it’s not my custom to go where I’m not wanted’. ‘Who are you?’, Fred asks, and the Mystery Men burst into an impossible duet of uncanny laughter. While Mystery Man lives up to his name all the way to the end, the ending does bring some clarity to his function. We have seen him in various situations through the film: superimposed over Renee’s face in a kind of night terror sequence, doing the inexplicable phone trick at the house party and making a threatening phone call to Pete on Mr Eddy’s behalf. He seems to be an evil presence, a demonic character conspiring with Fred’s/ Pete’s antagonist. But with Fred back in his body, confronted by Mystery Man in a desert lodge, the film provides us with a highly significant clue. ‘Where is Alice’, Fred asks. ‘Alice who? Her name is Renee!’, Mystery Man answers aggressively. ‘If she told you her name is Alice, she’s lying.’ Cut to Fred’s bewildered face, then back to Mystery Man who now raises a camcorder to his eye and points it at Fred. ‘And your name? What the fuck is your name?!’, he yells before he starts approaching Fred, camcorder still pointed at him. As Fred runs out of the lodge and into his car, Mystery Man follows, capturing him in a video shot, the grainy, noisy, blue-grey surface of which we have come to associate with the memory tapes in the beginning. Mystery Man, the ephemeral entity capable of being in two places at once, turns out to the force behind the tapes: a mnemoptic operator, catalyst for Fred’s realization that he is Fred and that he murdered Renee. Repressed memories ‘caught on tape’ – we recognize the idea. In a sense, Lost Highway simply updates the concept explored in Anti-Clock. But in the update from Mnemopticon 79 to 97, from a clinical tool to a consumer device – from quicksilver blues to white noise – lies a world of difference. Video’s

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market penetration occurred at a speed that took the world by surprise. In 1979, an estimated 0.5 per cent of US households owned a VCR. By 1989, the numbers were 65 per cent.47 It should come as no surprise that the profound change in daily life that home video brought about gave rise to invasion anxieties that cinema took to treating in creative ways. In Videodrome, Max’s transformation into a VCR designed for gastric tape insertions is preceded by more subtle penetrations. The film opens with a title screen that suggests that we are looking at a TV broadcast, ‘Civic TV: the one you take to bed with you’. But the video cuts to an announcer who addresses the implied viewer by name. ‘Max, it’s that time again. Time to slowly, painfully ease yourself back into consciousness. No, I’m not a dream. Although I’ve been told I’m a vision of loveliness.’ The announcer is Max’s secretary (Julie Khaner) and the video is a pre-recorded wake-up call. Subverting the synoptic logic of mass communication, where the illusion of personal address is premised on an addressee left unnamed, the scene is a premonition of the moment when Max definitely loses his mind. At home, watching one of O’Blivion’s taped monologues, Max is once again addressed directly and by name. ‘Max’, we hear O’Blivion’s drone of a voice, its previously taped sound suddenly richer – as if coming directly from the room. ‘I’m so glad you came to me. I’ve been through it all myself, you see. Your reality is already half video-hallucination. If you’re not careful it will become total hallucination. You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world.’ There is an irony in the suggestion that Max came to O’Blivion, when in fact it is O’Blivion who is intruding. It is hardly a coincidence that video penetrates Max’s home long before it penetrates his body. His transformation could be read as the final stages of a psychosis whose media conditions are real: that illusion of intimate communication that emerges as a mass medium penetrates the private. Simondon provides a suggestive metaphor for the image that resonates with how home video operates in these discussed imaginaries. The image, he writes, ‘refuses to let itself be directed by the will of the subject, and presents itself according to its own proper forces, inhabiting consciousness like an intruder who comes to upset the order of a house he was not invited to’.48 In the age of VCRs and videotapes, of vilified videophiles and/as Mystery Men armed with all-seeing camcorders, the dream of psychic surveillance returns as nightmares of home invasion.

Bruce C. Klopfenstein, ‘The Diffusion of the VCR in the United States’, in The VCR Age: Home Video and Mass Communication, ed. Mark R. Levy (Newbury Park, London, New Deli: Sage Publications, 1989), 25. 48 Gilbert Simondon cited in Pasi Väliaho, Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 93. 47

6

Arrière-Garde Videographic cinema as media archaeology

Home video barely had to time established itself as a mass medium before its imminent death was announced.1 By the mid-2000s, there were frequent media reports on the matter. Behind its universal death sentences, one often found rather specific circumstances: this department store’s decision to phase out VCRs; that department store’s decision to decrease their VHS film stock.2 But the obsolescence of VHS as a mass medium was gradually coming into consciousness, and the cultural ambiguity towards this standard, infamous for its technical insufficiencies, became evident in ironic obituaries like ‘VHS, 30, dies of loneliness’.3 And yet, at the same time, a tendency in the emergent field of digital video art suggested a culture that was not entirely ready to let go. In the early 2000s, Marks already noted how artists were importing analogue ‘problems’ into digital works: dropout, decay, snow and chromatic noise – errors now recuperated as expressions of ‘a sort of longing for analog physicality’.4 She termed this longing ‘analog nostalgia’, defining it as retrospective fondness for analogue video’s technical shortcomings.5 Two decades later, these effects have become so widespread that they might be recognized even by those who have never held and actual VHS tape in their hands. From music videos to horror films, a ‘VHS style’ has established itself

Predictions regarding the death of video can already be found in Pam Horovitz, ‘Commentary: Evolution, Growth Will Mark Vid In ’90s’, Billboard, 23 December 1989. 2 See, for instance, ‘Death of Video Recorder in Sight’, BBC News, 22 November 2004, http:​ /​/new​​s​.bbc​​.co​.u​​k​/2​/h​​i​/bus​​iness​​/4​031​​223​.s​​tm; and Mark Chediak, ‘As DVD Sales FastForward, Retailers Reduce VHS Stock’, The Washington Post, 15 June 2005, http:​/​/www​​ .wash​​ingto​​npost​​.com/​​wp​-dy​​n​/con​​tent/​​artic​​le​/20​​05​/06​​/14​/A​​R200​5​​06140​​1794.​​html.​ 3 Diane Garrett, ‘An Obituary: VHS Tapes Die of Loneliness at Age 30’, Variety, 14 November 2006, https​:/​/va​​riety​​.com/​​2006/​​digit​​al​/ne​​ws​/vh​​s​-30-​​dies-​​of​-lo​​nelin​​es​s​-1​​ 11795​​3955/​. 4 Marks, Touch, 153. 5 Ibid., 152. 1

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as a dominant signifier of what tends to be framed as ‘retro’.6 What happens with videographic cinema when analogue obsolescence has rendered video aesthetics retro by default? This chapter will suggest two responses to said condition. On the one hand, a short film like Kung Fury (David Sandberg, 2015) shows how videographic cinema can be absorbed into a wider cultural tendency that will be defined as retrospectacle.7 On the other hand, No (Pablo Larraín, 2012) and The Private Investigators (Hassel – Privatspanarna, Måns Månsson, 2012) – both of which were shot on obsolete analogue video formats (U-matic and S-VHS), both of which revolve around real historical events, both of which blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, make use of re-enactments and integrate or emulate archival footage – suggest the emergence of an arrière-garde of videographic cinema for whom video invites a kind of media archaeology in practice.

From culture industry to retrospectacle: The coming of millennial time In 1944, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer introduced the term ‘culture industry’ in an essay that would have a great impact on latetwentieth-century thought.8 While later conceptions of the postmodern could carry seeds of approval within their critique, the Frankfurt scholars uncompromising attack on mass media and entertainment culture leaves no space for recuperative readings. It is with pure contempt that they launch out against what they perceive as a causal link between the growth of the culture industry and the rise of fascist power. Under these new media conditions, fun becomes a fraudulent ‘medicinal bath’ that the ‘pleasure industry never fails to prescribe’ and laughter a disease that draws true happiness ‘into its

Not only do many of the videos in the ever-growing YouTube archive constitute VHS rips; VHS aesthetics are remediated or simulated in everything from horror films to music videos. See, for instance, Daisy Jones, ‘The Greatest Music Videos Shot on VHS’, Dazed, 19 October 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.daz​​eddig​​ital.​​com​/m​​usic/​​artic​​le​/26​​896​/1​​/the-​​ great​​est​-m​​usic-​​vi​deo​​s​-sho​​t​-on-​​vhs. Apps like Retro VHS (Venn Interactive, Inc) even encourage users to recreate the VHS look with their smartphones. 7 For a discussion about the wider implications of analogue aesthetics in digital media culture, see Jonathan Rozenkrantz, ‘Analogue Video in the Age of Retrospectacle: Aesthetics, Technology, Subculture’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 12 (2016): 39–58. 8 ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), 120–67. 6



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worthless totality’.9 Simply put, pleasure means complicity; entertainment ‘is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance’.10 By the early 1980s, postmodern thinkers like Baudrillard had abandoned these ascetic ideals, or at least abandoned themselves to the idea that it had become impossible to develop any real resistance. Not because fascism had triumphed (it had not), but because the culture industry had trumped everyone. If the Frankfurt scholars considered modern media consumption as a correlative to fascism’s ideological growth, the postmodern condition was framed as the media’s autonomous triumph. In postmodernity, every ideology was neutralized by a system with ‘the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference’.11 While not all postmodern thinkers would frame the situation in such absolute terms, the difficulty to conceive of an alternative to global capitalism – with cultural standardization as a seemingly inevitable consequence – was consistently articulated as a key problem, perhaps most poignantly so in the sombre observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.12 The concern for standardization can be traced back at least to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the modern culture industry, and this chapter will show how it continued to be relevant decades after the label postmodern had gone out of style. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry’s incessant promotion of new ideas really dissimulates its reliance on ‘the constant reproduction of the same thing’.13 From this image of modern society as a creative short-circuit, a figure of time arises. Adorno and Horkheimer already noted that a ‘constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well’,14 an early observation of the basic function of what will here be called the retrospectacle. But it was Guy Debord who paved the way for this concept by making explicit the connection between the carousel of cultural production, the artificial cycles of commodified time and the absorption of life into ‘an immense accumulation of spectacles’.15 Reality itself pushed back by the force of commodified media images – first published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle, marked a key moment for the emergence of postmodern

Ibid., 140–1. Ibid., 144. 11 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 163. 12 Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review, no. 21 (June 2003): 76. 13 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 134. 14 Ibid. 15 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 7. 9

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thought.16 In this new society, whose conception of time was determined by cycles of labour and leisure, the consumption of certain images became dominant: images of future weekends and vacations ‘whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to’ while ‘all that is really happening is that the spectacle is reproducing itself at a higher level of intensity’.17 By the mid1970s, an additional tendency had appeared – a propensity for retrospection. The cyclical figure of commodified time evoked by the Frankfurt scholars and developed by Debord thus literally changed its temporal direction. Baudrillard was among the first postmodern thinkers to zoom in on this tendency: in his 1977 essay ‘History: A Retro Scenario’ he observed how films like Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), with their meticulous reproduction of historical styles, engaged in a kind of whitewashing of the past. As a consequence, he argued, history itself was dissolving into simulation.18 A few years later, Fredric Jameson would frame such ‘fashion-plate, historicist films’ as ‘nostalgia films’, while making clear that the ‘nostalgia’ in question was not to be mistaken for feelings of longing but now designated a depersonalized style ‘without affect’.19 While the term ‘postmodern’ eventually went out of style, a considerable number of the tendencies that it connoted remained stable and even intensified. Pop-cultural retrospection belongs to the latter; so much so that music journalist Simon Reynolds came to frame it as a cultural psychopathology of the 2000s: ‘retromania’. In his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, he argued that in the 2000s, and much thanks to the breakthrough of the internet, ‘the sheer mass of past accumulating behind the music began to exert a kind of gravitational pull’ and the feeling of cultural movement could more easily be satisfied by going backwards.20 The correlation between the circular form of cultural production and the cyclical form of commodified time had transformed the culture industry into a millennial retrospectacle. Two important changes occurred along the way, both of which followed changed media conditions. Debord and Baudrillard’s cultural diagnoses, emphasizing reality’s dissolution into spectacle/simulation, were conditioned on the emergence and dispersion of TV and computers. The tendency

The famous first paragraph is ‘In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.’ Ibid. 17 Ibid., 89. 18 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 43–8. 19 Jameson, Postmodernism, xvii. The notion of ‘nostalgia film’ appears in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Jameson, The Cultural Turn, 7–10. 20 Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), xx. 16



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towards retrospection identified by Baudrillard and Jameson suggested that the historical real was dissolving as well. With the coming of the internet, the logic of the nostalgia film expanded into a generalized cultural form that turned out to be perfectly compatible with the circular movement of cultural production. It was the constant reproduction of the same thing rendered fashionable: remakes, remixes and revivals.21 This also marked the reversal of Debord’s model of pseudo-cyclical time, since the spectacle no longer required the feigning of futurity. The moments to which we most eagerly came to look forward stopped being manifestations of a prospective imaginary (the utopia of all tomorrows parties) and became the retrospective joy of yesterday’s parties made to look as if they took place decades ago: Polaroid apps, retro blogs and ‘New Age fun with a vintage feel’, as the 2010 YouTube song Being a Dickhead’s Cool went at the peak of hipster culture.22 The society of the spectacle had entered a time of retrospectacle.

Kung Fury gets the VCR treatment: Technical failure as cinematic retrospectacle In 2013, a prospective Kickstarter trailer for a planned 1980s action pastiche quickly attracted 17,713 backers who raised US$630,020 to see the film made – three times the expected figure. An unknown Swedish debutant named David Sandberg thus saw his dream project rocket onto one of the top spots among Kickstarter’s most funded film projects.23 The fact that Kung Fury was a hit before it even was made is indicative of the cultural demand for retrospectacles, and the twenty-nine-minute result delivers more than the prospective trailer promised. Set in an imaginary Miami in 1985, Kung Fury depicts a world in which violent gangs rule the streets, arcade games turn out to be murderous Transformers and an action hero can take on an infinite number of enemies yet fail to deliver a single decent one-liner. Saturated with references to 1980s media culture, the plot of Kung Fury is like a concentrated pastiche of every action film and video game from the

Ibid., xi–xii. Reynolds summarizes: ‘Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the “Re” Decade.’ Ibid., xi. 22 ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘Reuben Dangoor’, produced by Reuben Dangoor and Raf Riley, 9 September 2010, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​ =lVm​​​mYMwF​​j1I. 23 ‘Kung Fury’, on Kickstarter website, accessed 26 December 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.kic​​kstar​​ter​ .c​​om​/pr​​oject​​s​/kun​​gfury​​​/kung​​-fury​. In December 2019, it remained the sixteenth most funded film of 72,639 Kickstarter film and video projects. 21

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era. While fighting a mysterious kung fu master who just killed his partner, a cop is struck by lightning, bitten by a cobra and turned into Kung Fury, master of the eponymous fighting technique. This makes him the target of none other than Adolf Hitler, who in the film’s retrojective re-imagination of twentieth-century history is an evil time-travelling ‘Kung Führer’ seeking to secure the secrets of the legendary technique for himself.24 With the help of his friend Hackerman, Kung Fury travels back in time to Nazi Germany to kill Hitler – but not before an accidental visit to a prehistoric Viking Age, in which warrior princesses with machine guns ride dinosaurs, and where Kung Fury finds an unlikely ally in Thor, the Norse god. Kung Fury’s intentionally silly and blatantly anachronistic plot is an unapologetic celebration of retro-referentiality. Baudrillard could hardly find a more accurate case for his complaint that history no longer has a relation to a historical real but only to the representative styles of earlier epochs.25 Its referents are not the Second World War, the Viking Age or even 1985, but a retrojective rendering of 1980s media culture – the way that its intended audience wants to remember the decade. There are plot devices reminiscent of supernatural martial arts films like The Last Dragon (Michael Schultz, 1985); an animated sequence evoking series like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (Lou Scheimer, 1983–5) and Thundercats (Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr., 1985–9); anachronistic combinations of futurist technology and extinct species bringing 1980s toys like Dino-Riders to mind; and Fury’s humanoid dinosaur partner Triceracop, recalling some creature from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. Kung Fury is a tour de force of referential ingenuity – an oxymoron proper to a cultural condition in which creativity collapses into the constant reproduction of past cultural artefacts. Significantly, obsolete media get caught up in the process. Perhaps more than anything, Kung Fury appeals to the retro-gaming community, whose nostalgia for old video games has found a new outlet on YouTube where countless videos of gamers unboxing, testing and commenting on retro games can be found. Gary Cross has coined the term ‘consumed nostalgia’ for ‘a longing for the goods of the past that came from a personal experience

The basic definition of ‘retrojection’ is ‘to project into the past’, but in medicine it can also be used for the ‘washing out a cavity from within by injection of a fluid’. Together, the two definitions capture the notion of projecting back idealized images into an infected past, washing out the troubling elements that do not fit into its nostalgic conception. See ‘retroject’, Merriam-Webster; and ‘retrojection’, Donald Venes, Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 2017), 2055. 25 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 45. 24



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of growing up in the stressful world of fast capitalism’.26 One can add that few goods seem to age faster than electronic media, which is why video games so quickly gain a nostalgic appeal. In an attempt to relieve nostalgia of its negative connotations, Cross emphasizes the fun and even liberating aspects of its ‘consumed’ kind.27 The retrospectacle is quick to capitalize on this by advertising retro games as a return to a simpler, hence more playable, hence more pleasurable era in video game history.28 But in its appropriation of digital video games and analogue video aesthetics, Kung Fury nevertheless points towards an overlooked paradox of nostalgia for obsolete media. Consider Hackerman’s time machine: it is an imaginary media hybrid of old MicroBee computers, archaic arcade game graphics and, not least, the notorious Nintendo Power Glove. Introduced in a shot that references a typical 1980s TV advertisement, with the camera frantically zooming in and out to a heavy synth soundtrack, the Power Glove becomes the synecdoche for the kind of retrospectacle that Kung Fury represents: a playful recuperation of a technological past neither too pleasurable nor very playable. A Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) controller introduced in 1989, the Power Glove was supposed to revolutionize gaming with its state-of-the-art gesture-based technology. The marketing strategy followed the typical 1980s testosteronefilled more-is-more strategy. The campaign promised: ‘The Power Glove – everything else is child’s play’,29 a slogan suggesting not only that the gadget would satisfy older consumers but also that it signalled the introduction of a new, more mature, more serious kind of gaming. Unfortunately for Nintendo, it backfired. Not even the most virtuoso gamer could figure out how to get the Power Glove to work properly. It lasted less than a year on the market. The Power Glove nevertheless enjoys its own cultural remanence thanks to the retro-gaming community. Today we find several YouTube videos in which ageing retro-gamers either recount their frustrating memories of the glove’s notorious lack of precision30 or pretend to be testing it for the first time only

Gary Cross, Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 10. 27 Ibid., 14. 28 Jaakko Suominen, ‘The Past as the Future? Nostalgia and Retrogaming in Digital Culture’, The Fibreculture Journal, no. 11 (2008), http:​/​/ele​​ven​.f​​i brec​​ultur​​ejour​​nal​.o​​rg​/fc​​j​-075​​-the-​​ past-​​as​-th​​e​-fut​​ure​-n​​ostal​​gia​-a​​nd​-re​​troga​​m​ing-​​in​-di​​gital​​-cult​​ure/.​ 29 ‘Power Glove Commercial’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘lingpanda101’, 27 January 2008, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=SAK​​​btJjA​​V18. 30 ‘Power Glove (NES, 1989) Feat. Mike Matei – Video Game Years History’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘Pat the NES Punk’, 27 November 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​ atch?​​v​=wQu​​​_zVrY​​65E. 26

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to find out the hard way.31 The role that the Power Glove gets in Kung Fury is an extension of this subcultural investment. The way that the community holds on to one of its failed devices points towards the paradox that even negative experiences seem to be able to evoke consumed nostalgia on the mere account of electronic media’s fast obsolescence. While the premature Power Glove failed on its release, not least due to the slow response of the controller, ‘fast capitalism’ finally makes it triumph precisely as a tool for slowing down time. The paradoxical sentiment of pleasurable frustration is mirrored by Kung Fury’s analogue video aesthetics. The film is coated with a patina of remanence decay. Right before it starts, the 1980s logo for Swedish Public Television flashes by amidst electronic turbulence: a manufactured trace of a previous recording on a faux-VHS tape. As VFX supervisor Cameron Scott explains, Sandberg’s core concept was to make the film look like a VHS tape accidentally found in an old grandmother’s attic. The texture, which is meant to look like an old rental copy played countless times, was primarily achieved through digital software. It is nevertheless worth considering that the process was not entirely digital: ‘Someone brought their old VHS player into work and we tapped a feed from that into the computer and recorded some of that. We got the rolling bar effect, the dirty head VHS reading head look, and all that kind of stuff.’32 Lest we forget that we should think that we are looking at Kung Fury on an old VHS tape, the image repeatedly goes into a fit at strategically placed moments. It is no coincidence that Kung Fury’s first fight, as he takes on the rampaging Transformer-like arcade game, is plagued by serious dropout. Blocking out climactic moments of action, these analogue errors mirror the film’s ironic recuperation of the Power Glove. What would have been a frustrating malfunction in the VHS era now turns into a playful signifier of the same; an original loss of entertainment value returns as nostalgic surplus. Kung Fury’s technological failures finally fill the double function of aesthetic component and narrative device. As Hackerman manoeuvres his time machine to send Kung Fury back to Nazi Germany, something goes wrong. There is a glitch in the system, and an error message on a jumpy computer screen is aesthetically augmented by VHS tracking lines. The hero ends up in some kind of Jurassic Asgard. We, in turn, end up identifying a key feature of

‘NES Power Glove Demonstration’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘Thomas Mason IV’, 20 September 2013, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=Ire​​​PSVBU​​3G0. 32 Scott cited in Neil Bennett, ‘Kung Fury VFX Behind-the-Scenes: How Fido Blew Up Everything for This Year’s Most Over-the-Top Film’, Digital Arts, 1 June 2015, https​:/​/ww​​ w​.dig​​itala​​rtson​​line.​​co​.uk​​/news​​/moti​​on​-gr​​aphic​​s​/kun​​g​-fur​​y​-beh​​​ind​-t​​he​-sc​​enes/​. 31



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the retrospectacle: the undermining of medium specificity for the sake of a hybrid aesthetic – a nostalgic alloy of analogue and digital problems.

Reframing the Arrière-Garde: Media archaeology as artistic method Parikka has argued for ‘a need for a stronger articulation of media archaeology not only as a textual method, but also as an artistic methodology’.33 His call hardly emanates ex nihilo. While media archaeology has mainly designated a set of academic practices, several of its key proponents have actively included artistic practices in its definition. Scholars like Zielinski and Huhtamo have identified certain media artists as media archaeologists, while they themselves have worked primarily in art institutions.34 Media archaeology gives evidence of a productive overlap not only between historiography and theory but also between academia and art. If Parikka’s definition of art-based media archaeology becomes somewhat too general,35 his case studies mirror the problem identified in recent studies of video as a medium: a bias towards art works in a more traditional sense, that is, for the (physical or virtual) gallery. The possibility that popular media forms such as videographic cinema can engage in media archaeology is left unexplored. Among Reynolds’s many laments regarding millennial pop culture’s addiction to its own past, there is a demographic observation that concludes with a concept worth revisiting from a historical perspective. What Reynolds finds is that it is precisely the ‘cutting-edge class’ of creators and consumers (what would be called ‘hipsters’ around 2010), that constitute the hardest retro addicts: ‘Instead of being pioneers and innovators, they’ve switched roles to become curators and archivists. The avant-garde’, he concludes, ‘is now an arrière-garde.’36 There is little doubt as to the negative connotations

Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?, 141. Ibid., 136–7. Some of the artists mentioned are Paul DeMarinis, Bernie Lubell, Zoe Beloff, Catherine Richards, Perry Hoberman and David Link. 35 Parikka’s tentative list of works that could be considered archaeological recapitulates the problem of demarcation. It includes works that visually engage historical themes; that invoke alternative media histories; that engage with obsolete media; that involve imaginary media; that are informed by archival work and historical materials; and that explore the inside of media technologies. In what sense should any work that visually engages with historical themes be understood as archaeological, rather than just historiographic in a more general sense? See Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?, 138– 41. 36 Reynolds, Retromania, xix–xx. 33 34

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of the use of the term ‘arrière-garde’ here. For Reynolds, it seems to capture a pop-cultural elite’s pathological fixation on the past – the art of looking back instead of forward. This conception itself is a recapitulation of criticism at least half a century old. The concept of ‘arrière-garde’ dates back to the 1930s, when a neutral term for the rearguard of an army was appropriated by the art world and turned into an insult. It was a discursive strategy that allowed the avant-garde to distance itself from, and discredit, artists or movements that it deemed to be reactionary.37 Popularized in the extended decade after the Second World War, ‘arrière-garde’ would come to connote an ‘anguished temporality, whereupon progress is seen to turn backwards and inwards’,38 as Natalie Adamson writes in her article ‘“The Serpent Eats Its Tail”: AvantGarde and Arrière-Garde in Paris, 1943-1953’. The title of Adamson’s article refers to a 1953 quote by French art critic Pierre Descargues who was already by that time complaining about how modern art ‘goes in circles’ – the relation between the avant-garde and the arrière-garde thus being akin to a ‘serpent [that] eats its tail’.39 The temporal implications of the concept of the arrière-garde thus seem to prefigure and bear upon the circular time of Debord’s spectacle and the postmodern critique of retrospection. However, for William Marx, concerned with the cultural movements of the twentieth century, arrièregardes are by definition fringe phenomena that appear under a very specific set of conditions: when the modern ideology of artistic progress makes deep inroads with the masses, when the masses, caught up in the irresistible momentum of the movement, divorce themselves ipso facto from residual elements that remain behind, when the people sincerely believe in progress in the arts. […] The arrière-garde appears as the inevitable consequence of the development of modernity, materializing at a specific stage in the latter’s advance.40

Marx distinguishes between two types: the ‘qualified’ or ‘post’ arrière-garde of the cultural latecomers, that is, artists or movements who cling on to once William Marx, ‘The 20th Century: Century of the Arrière-Gardes?’ in Europa! Europa?: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, ed. Sascha Bru et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 62–3. 38 Natalie Adamson, ‘“The Serpent Eats Its Tail”: Avant-Garde and Arrière-Garde in Paris, 1943–1953’, in Europa! Europa?: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, ed. Sascha Bru et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 74. 39 Descargues cited in ibid., 72–3. 40 Marx, ‘The 20th Century’, 63. 37



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progressive, now-dated aesthetic ideals; and an ‘absolute’ or ‘neo’ arrièregarde, for which cultural retrospection is a conscious and deliberate ideal.41 That said, regardless of type, Marx frames the arrière-gardes as symptoms of modernity, visible only against the larger canvas of an overall progressive culture. If so, it soon becomes necessary to ask: What happens to the arrièregarde under the conditions of a postmodern retrospectacle, in which cultural retrospection has replaced modernity’s progressive ideal? An easy answer would be that it marks the triumph of the ‘neo’ arrière-garde (the deliberately retrospective type), but Marx’s definitions complicate matters. The problem with simply ascribing Marx’s concept of a neo arrière-garde to the retrospectacle is that cultural retrospection around the turn of the 2010s was no longer a fringe phenomenon; it had become a mainstream ideal, much like avant-gardism eventually became in an earlier era. What is more: the notion of ‘avant-garde’ itself had become retro, a concept connotative of the artistic movements of the last century. For Reynolds, the triumph of the arrière-garde marks the U-turn of the avant-garde down into a ditch – a pop culture incapable of progression. While this might be a valid use, it recapitulates the historically negative conception of the term in a somewhat un-productive way. If it only makes sense to talk about the avant-garde as long as it connotes ‘cutting edge’, the concept of arrière-garde also loses its edge as it becomes generally applicable – which is what happens if it is used to define a cultural tendency that has become mainstream. It is thus more productive to ask: Is it possible to find an arrière-garde that is not simply addicted to its own past but that questions the past’s – and present’s – media conditions? And more specifically: Has videographic cinema the potential to produce such an arrière-garde – one that questions rather than recapitulates the pleasures of a retrospectacle like Kung Fury?42

Archival ambiguities: The uses and abuses of U-matic in No In 1988, the totalitarian rule of Augusto Pinochet ended with a national referendum, the conditions of which had been set by the regime itself. The Ibid., 64–5. Rethinking the concept of the arrière-garde in more productive terms is not new and can already be noted in postmodern writing on architecture. See, for instance, Kenneth Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 20.

41 42

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people of Chile were given the choice to vote ‘SI’ to have eight more years under Pinochet’s rule, or ‘NO’ to end the dictatorship that had held the country in a fifteen-year grip. Pablo Larraín’s No is a semi-fictional account of the production process behind the television campaign that helped to overthrow the dictator. At the centre of the narrative is advertising executive René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), loosely based on a number of reallife publicists behind the campaign.43 The film’s celebration of Pinochet’s downfall is conditioned by its critique of the late capitalist logic behind Chile’s transition from a right-wing dictatorship to a neoliberal democracy. This ideological ambiguity is mirrored by the film’s ambiguous combination of archival footage and newly shot sequences. The opening scene sets the tone. An intentionally amateurish title sequence shot on analogue video has informed us about the historical background to the story that we are about to see: in 1988, a twenty-seven-day campaign to get people to vote for or against Pinochet aired on Chilean TV, consisting of daily fifteen-minute ads for each side respectively. We encounter Saavedra as he is about to deliver a grandiose speech at the office of the advertising company where he works: What you’re about to see fits within the frame of the current social context. We think that the country is prepared for a message of this nature. One mustn’t forget that the citizens have raised their demands with regards to truth, with regards to what they like. Let’s be honest here: today, Chile is thinking of its future.

The title sequence has already set the stage for us to read Saavedra’s speech as a pitch for the ‘NO’ campaign around which the film revolves (and from which it borrows its title). The sardonic little joke, the first of many, is that it is a sales pitch, not for political freedom but for ‘Free’ cola, an actual 1980s Chilean Pepsi clone for which Saavedra has been hired to create a TV ad. Archival footage of an actual 1980s Free commercial, complete with young attractive people drinking Free from the bottle, an arena rock band delivering a cheesy jingle, and, lest we forget, the obligatory mime, are thus woven into No’s introduction in order to set up the larger, and many times more sardonic, punchline: namely, that the actual ‘NO’ campaign, which we eventually see both as a final historical product and through a fictionalization of how it was

Teresa Delgado, No + Pinochet: Documentación, Publicidad y Ficción En Torno Al Plebiscito Chileno de 1988 (Berlin: Jakob Kirchheim Verlag, 2013), 8–9.

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supposedly made, is virtually indistinguishable in tone and style from the Free cola commercial. Introduced with handclaps and the a cappella chant ‘Chile, la alegría ya viene’ (Chile, happiness is coming), an idealized Chilean man ascends from the horizon against the blue sky. A joyful commercial-like jingle soon follows to the images of idealized Chilean-ness: huasos (Chilean cowboys) on horses, mountain climbers, workers, intellectuals, dancers and a mime. Saavedra, who in the film’s fictionalization is the brain behind this real historical campaign, will receive severe criticism from his considerably more radical ex-partner (Antonia Zegers): ‘Rainbows, beautiful people, blond children running around happy celebrating I don’t know what? A guy who’s about five meters tall … . Where did you find him, in Denmark?’ She calls his vision ‘a copy of a copy of a copy’ (the very definition of a Baudrillardian simulacrum). But Saavedra is set on winning, and the film covers the tension between his adman ethos and the leftist fractions within the collective by which he has been employed, who want to take the opportunity to finally speak out about their suffering during the Pinochet years. The conflicts capture the overall point that the film is trying to make: the ideological ambiguities of a TV campaign that succeeded in overthrowing a fascist dictator with the promise of a Pepsi Utopia. No thus makes an attempt at a politically risky move: to criticize the media conditions for Chile’s transition to democracy by selecting the most artificial of its authentic archival traces and turning them into seeds from which the story and the whole aesthetics of the film are cultivated. It is a risky move because by focusing on the aesthetic banality of the TV campaign, No risks trivializing a relatively recent historical episode that remains highly charged for those who had an existential stake in it. Although No was wellreceived worldwide, and even nominated for an Academy Award, it stirred considerable controversy in Chile. Teresa Delgado is among those who criticize how the film reduces years of collective work involving politicians, artists and thousands of door to door campaigners to the flash of genius of one ad executive.44 Following its premiere, cabinet minister Francisco

For instance, in Larrain’s film the neat logo/slogan ‘No +’, whose double-meaning allows it to be read as ‘No more’ in Spanish (as in no more dictatorship), was invented by team Saavedra. In reality, the ‘No’ campaign had appropriated this concept from Colectivo de Acciones de Arte who had introduced it already in 1983. During the years leading up to the 1988 referendum, the concept had spread all across Chile, with various artists and citizens appropriating it to express their feeling towards Pinochet. The ad executives behind the ‘No’ campaign simply realized that the logo acquired an additional connotation in its similarity with the cross mark written to vote in the referendum. Delgado, No + Pinochet, 10–11.

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Figures 6.1 and 6.2  Authentic 1980s Free cola ad and ‘NO’ campaign as seen in No (2012).



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Vidal of the socialist government tweeted: ‘To believe that Pinochet lost the plebiscite because of a TV logo and jingle is not to grasp anything of what occurred.’45 In a similar vein, Genaro Arriagada, director of the actual ‘NO’ campaign, called the film ‘a gross oversimplification that has nothing to do with reality’.46 The idea that, after 15 years of dictatorship in a politically sophisticated country with strong union and student movements, solid political parties and an active human rights movement, all of a sudden this Mexican advertising guy arrives on his skateboard and says, ‘Gentlemen, this is what you have to do’, that is a caricature.47

The film’s satirical scrutiny of the media conditions for Chile’s transition to democracy have a very particular media condition of their own – an ambiguous use of authentic archival footage. In The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History, Jaimie Baron suggests that the very concept of the ‘archival document’ should be redefined as ‘an experience of reception rather than an indication of official sanction or storage location’.48 For media archaeology, such a suggestion immediately raises a follow-up question. If ‘archival’ is to be defined as an experience of reception, what Baron calls an ‘archive effect’, on what conditions is this effect produced? To generate an archive effect, the audience must first identify the footage as being ‘archival’, and granted that this can be done without access to meta-data concerning the origins and storage location of the footage, the ‘archival’ seems to constitute a set of perceptible qualities that are at least partly inherent to the footage itself. For Baron, the first condition for the archive effect is ‘the juxtaposition of shots perceived as produced at different moments in time’.49 But again, recognizing that shots were made at different moments in time can depend on our ability to identify the visual qualities of the media with which the images were shot. No’s most original move, then, is that it works against this temporal discrimination. The whole film has been made to look like its estimated 30 per cent of archival footage, which is thus

Francisco Vidal cited in Larry Rohter, ‘One Prism on the Undoing of Pinochet’, The New York Times, 8 February 2013, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​013​/0​​2​/10/​​movie​​s​/osc​​ar​-no​​ minat​​ed​-no​​-stir​​ring-​​deb​at​​e​-in-​​chile​​.html​. 46 Genaro Arriagada cited in ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 7. 49 Ibid., 17. 45

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seamlessly fused into it.50 The consequence is counter-intuitive but makes perfect sense. If the basic condition for the production of the archive effect is our ability to perceive juxtaposed shots as having been produced at different moments in time, then a film that emulates the look of its archival footage in its new shots neutralizes this effect. Through an effective emulation of the archival, a neutralization of the archive effect is achieved. The following scene is illustrative. We see a group of men in what looks like an apartment: Saavedra stands nervously in the foreground by the opening of a door, while his employer, the head of the ‘NO’ campaign, José Tomás Urrutia (Luis Gnecco), is seen in another room in the background. Urrutia greets someone off-screen – ‘Hi Pato, how are you?’ – and the film follows Saavedra as he goes into the back, where an elderly male figure is shaking hand. As he finally turns towards Saavedra to greet him as well, the Chilean audience is likely to recognize ‘Pato’ as not an actor, but the actual Patricio Aylwin, Chile’s first elected president after Pinochet. As a crew member mikes Aylwin up, the film cuts to a shot of the video camera supposedly about to record Aylwin’s by now historical speech, in which he appeals to the people of Chile to choose democracy (i.e. vote against Pinochet). As the cameraman counts down, the film cuts to a full-figure shot of Aylwin sitting in front of a bookshelf; the video camera points at him from the foreground. We barely have time to see him open his mouth before the film tilts down from his figure in the background to a close-up of his face on a video monitor in the foreground that is playing what we are to read as a live-feed directly from the video camera. In reality, it constitutes the 24-year-old archival footage of the historical speech. This seamless transition from the present to the archive conflates not only historical temporalities but also fiction and non-fiction. There are the imaginary 1980s of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage framing the archival footage of the historical speech, there are the real 1980s in which the speech was shot, and there are the real 2010s in which the ‘behind-the-scenes’ were shot and edited together with the archival footage. The seamless transition between the two types of shots is conditioned on the visual verisimilitude between them. This, in turn, is achieved through the use of the same video format for the newly shot scenes as the one on which the archival footage was shot and/or stored: namely, U-matic.51 Introduced in 1971, ¾-inch U-matic

Dennis West, ‘No’, Cineaste 38, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 53. It is possible that not all the archival footage for No was shot on video; part of the ad campaign, for instance, looks as if it was shot on 35mm film. But because it was aired on Chilean TV in 1988, its collective memory is conditioned on the televisual transmission of a videographic transfer, which is also most likely the format in which the film’s production team accessed the footage.

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remained a professional standard for TV production well into the 1980s. Its glossy, artificial look is as likely to remind us of 1980s news broadcasts, as of music videos, sitcoms and soap operas – a multitude of connotations that becomes a visual argument in itself. No gives evidence of the lengths to which some filmmakers will to go to emulate a long-lost analogue look. While VHS equipment was produced in such quantities that getting hold of it remains fairly easy, the equipment No needed was already a rarity in the early 2010s.52 Larraín’s team had tried out a variety of analogue and digital cameras and formats, including 16mm and 35mm film, before finally opting for a three-tube Ikegami HL-79EAL video camera from the mid-1980s.53 But the team soon learned that it would be impossible to find another functioning Ikegami in Chile. Thus began a veritable hunt for an obsolete video format. The production hired an American company that specialized in tracking down obsolete broadcasting equipment; twenty Ikegamis were finally found. But their varying states of wear made it necessary to take out their working parts and reassemble them into what finally became just three or four fully functioning cameras, which soon began breaking down as well, so that by the end of the production the team only had one customized Ikegami camera left to finish shooting the film.54 The making of No thus became a veritable race against the ‘death’ of an analogue video format. It is worth noting that obsolescence leads not only to lost technology but also to lost technical know-how. In an inversion of the confusion with which the pioneers of videographic cinema first approached their cameras, Sergio Armstrong, Larraín’s director photography, would later admit: ‘I didn’t even know how to turn them on!’55 The Ikegami cameras provided the team with the same challenges that the pioneers had encountered in the 1960s: how to level the light and how to balance the colours. The biggest problem, according to Armstrong, was that the colours kept shifting depending on external conditions like climate and temperature, making it necessary to recalibrate the cameras between scenes.56 Help came by way of interviews with cameramen who had had experience of working with this format, and a big 1983 user guide.57 A search for ‘VHS’ on Ebay generated more than half a million hits in December 2019, while a search for ‘U-matic’ generated around five hundred (a general comparison that provides at least an indication of the remanence ratio between the formats). 53 Jean Oppenheimer, ‘No’, American Cinematographer 94, no. 4 (April 2013): 97. 54 Ibid.; and interview with Pablo Larraín, ‘Pablo Larraín revela detalles inéditos de la filmación de la película “No”’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘CNN Chile’, 10 August 2012, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=p5J​​​Du1bg​​In0. 55 Sergio Armstrong cited in Oppenheimer, ‘No’, 98. 56 Ibid., 99. 57 Ibid., 98. 52

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The end result is difficult to label in terms of genre. Historical subjects return to perform as themselves side-by-side with professional actors (some of whom we are likely to recognize) in fictional behind-the-scenes sequences to a campaign in which they participated twenty-four years ago. The campaign constitutes part of the film’s narrative fabric by way of its archival traces, but its temporal distance is neutralized by way of a veritable archaeology of an obsolete video format, so that the archival footage and their ‘behind-the-scenes’ look virtually the same. The only way to identify that time has passed is by perceiving the ageing of the subjects (surprisingly difficult at times). The ambiguity of No, which is closely connected to its political analysis, stems from how it refuses to define itself even within its docu-fiction hybrid frame. It is neither simply a ‘docudrama’, since it largely consists of archival footage and historical subjects who appear as themselves, nor is it quite a ‘performative documentary’, since its narrative is admittedly a fictionalization, while the aesthetic-epistemic choice of using U-matic makes it as difficult as possible for the audience to distinguish which part is actually which.58 In the words of Larraín: We used those cameras to achieve a certain illusion in the spectator, so that the spectator would become incapable of distinguishing whether what s/he saw was archival or [newly] filmed. When that happens, the archive becomes fiction, and what is fiction becomes archive. […] The spectator enters into a game and does not exit it until the film is over.59

What is the aim of the game? Larraín leaves this unclear. Much like the ambiguous position of the film itself, the motivation for his negation of the archive effect is described by him in vague terms like ‘interesting’ and ‘valuable’.60 But this is not the place to analyse authorial motives; what is important here is that No’s approach to archival footage is a symptom of a larger cultural tendency. Simone Osthoff writes that ‘performances in, with, and of the archive are producing an ontological change – from the archive as a repository of documents to the archive as a dynamic and generative production tool’.61 Osthoff defines ‘performance’ in the wider sense of interventions that ‘change the archive’s former stability, function, use, and For a discussion of these categories, see Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 153. 59 ‘Pablo Larraín Revela Detalles’ YouTube video; my translation. 60 Ibid. 61 Simone Osthoff, Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium (New York: Atropos Press, 2009), 11. 58



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meaning’.62 But No participates in this change with performance defined in its narrow sense, as the film performs the archive through the literal intermingling of actors, re-enactors and authentic archival footage.

Sisyphus caught on S-VHS: The existential horror of The Private Investigators In 1986, two years before the Chilean referendum to oust Pinochet, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, leader of the Social Democratic Party, was shot to death on an open street in central Stockholm. The same year, detective Roland Hassel (Lars-Erik Berenett) changed the landscape of Swedish police fiction with the first cycle of hardboiled Hassel films (1986–92). The brainchild of Swedish author Olov Svedelid, Hassel would appear in thirty novels, ten TV films and one theatrical feature,63 before going into a decadelong hibernation. By then he had paved the way for a whole wave of police fiction franchises. The original Hassel cycle contributed in popularizing a certain serial form of production. In accordance with the culture industry’s tendency to standardize, a considerable number of Swedish police detectives now lead relatively similar series of quickly produced fiction films, most of which go straight to DVD, TV and/or streaming. As of 2018, there were somewhere between forty and fifty films each in the Wallander and Beck franchises (depending on whether foreign off-shoots count), names that epitomize a part of the entertainment industry turned into one of Sweden’s most successful cultural exports. In 2012, art-schooled filmmaker Måns Månsson who had somehow managed to acquire the rights to Hassel before Svedelid’s passing, took it upon himself to revive the franchise for what he hoped to be one last entry: The Private Investigators.64 His film was simultaneously released in Swedish cinemas, on DVD and on video-on-demand, a novel form of distribution for a highly eccentric film, described by one critic as ‘a rough little diamond of originality and devilry’.65 A roguish re-imagination of the classical franchise, the film was explicitly made as an artistic intervention into the seemingly Ibid. Hassel – Förgörarna (Mikael Hylin, 2000). 64 Måns Månsson’s formal training as a filmmaker was at the Royal Institute of Art in Sweden. The Swedish title Hassel – Privatspanarna will be shortened to The Private Investigators. 65 Jake Bolin, ‘Den allvarsamma leken’, Moviezine, 18 November 2012, https​:/​/ww​​w​.mov​​ iezin​​e​.se/​​movie​​s​/has​​sel​-p​​riv​at​​spana​​rna; my translation. 62 63

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unbreakable wave of Swedish police films – a covert work of conceptual art injected right into the channels of commercial distribution. Now retired and living in the unglamorous suburbs of Upplands Väsby outside of Stockholm, Hassel spends his days obsessing over the unsolved murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme back in 1986. As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder approaches, Hassel teams up with a group of equally dedicated private investigators to prepare for a large re-enactment, the purpose of which is finding that missing piece of the puzzle that will finally reveal the true identity of Palme’s killer. Seeing The Private Investigators the first time, one is likely to react to the quality of its image: the fuzzy texture evokes a badly mastered DVD released by a second-rate company. Granted that one has come to associate contemporary uses of VHS with visual deterioration, the stability of this film’s image does not immediately reveal that it is, in fact, shot on S-VHS.66 For Månsson, the ‘Swedish detective wonder’ is more akin to a monster, the birth of which he traces back to 1986. That year marks not only the beginning of the first Hassel cycle but also the murder of Palme: two crucial historical events, both of which, Månsson argues, have constituted catalysts in Sweden’s cultural obsession with crime, fuelling an unfaltering demand in the production of police fiction. Born out of his frustration with the film industry’s ‘hysterical fixation with police films’ and with the Palme investigation ‘never being cancelled’,67 Månsson’s contribution to the Hassel series, which had been dormant since 2000, was explicitly conceived of as an attempt to disturb the industry – and put old Hassel to rest.68 The film begins in a common Swedish meeting room, the camera awkwardly fixed on an aged man who takes his time before speaking. We are attending a meeting of The Swedish Handgun Association, whose elderly and somewhat phlegmatic members are planning an anniversary. Shot on the consumer-grade analogue format, the trivial dialogue accentuates the unspectacular texture of its visual record. This is hardly a ‘Swedish Welfare State variant of Hollywoodesque violence-for-entertainment’,69 as the 2000 theatrical Hassel film was described. This is a satire of the Swedish Welfare

Introduced in 1987, S-VHS (Super VHS) was an improved version of the consumergrade format VHS. Wheeler, Video Preservation Handbook, 22. 67 Måns Månsson cited in Nicholas Wennö, ‘“Deckarundret är ett monster”’, Dagens Nyheter, 9 November 2012, https​:/​/ww​​w​.dn.​​se​/ku​​ltur-​​noje/​​film-​​tv​/de​​ckaru​​ndret​​-ar​-e​​​tt​ -mo​​nster​/; my translation. 68 Måns Månsson, ‘Från Björck till Hassel’, FLM, 7 October 2010, http:​/​/flm​​.nu​/2​​010​/1​​0​/fra​​ n​-bjo​​rck​-t​​i​ll​-h​​assel​/. 69 Bertil Palmqvist cited in Michael Tapper, Snuten i skymningslandet: svenska polisberättelser i roman och på film 1965-2010 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 307; my translation. 66



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State plain and simple. Hassel has been given the task of acquiring some kind of safety equipment. He has brought a box of escape hoods. As one of the members tries one on, the rest discuss its functionality. The discussion seems to go on and on, until it is finally voted, to Hassel’s stoic discontent, that any decision about the hoods will be postponed. For all its trivial and seemingly pointless content, this scene fills a significant function. The film’s central theme – the tired, retired hero’s entrapment in insoluble tasks – has subtly been established. Subverting the expected action driven, resolutionoriented logic of the genre that it infiltrates, The Private Investigators will turn out to be all about these repetitions. In a style that evokes the memory of the Palme murder as a mediated event, a cultural memory filtered through re-enactments in news and TV documentaries the following decade, the camera follows Hassel around from train stations to constructions sites and public libraries, as he tries to puzzle old pieces of evidence together in order to solve the crime. Lars-Erik Berenett, repeating his most famous role as Hassel, is one of the film’s few professional actors. In addition to an unexpected cameo by former chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz as a freeof-charge legal counsellor at a public library, most characters are played by non-actors, including several private investigators who have actually spent the last decades trying to solve Palme’s murder.70 The most poignant moment of the film is not its dramatic climax – there is none to speak of – nor some particularly significant snippet of dialogue. It is merely a sound or, rather, a gesture: two claps, one following the other within a couple of seconds. Standing as a synecdoche for the whole film, the claps come to represent the blandness of representation itself: the sound of murder diluted to a mundane sign. Clap … Clap. We find ourselves in an empty gym. At the far end, two male figures are facing the camera. As they approach, arm-in-arm, the camera pans slightly to the right and reveals Hassel standing in an awkward position. Hassel seems to be prepared to clap his hands. Clap. The first man falls to the floor pulling the second one with him, the second one exclaiming ‘What are you doing?!’ with a surprised and slightly accusing pitch. Hassel now claps a second time, and then stares at the surprised man, the latter returning his gaze for a few frozen and perplexing seconds. The camera now tilts down and reveals the first man to be lying on a mattress. We realize that every step of the proceeding has been arranged – even the second man’s surprised exclamation. It is all part of a meticulously planned re-enactment of the moment that Palme got shot. The claps represent the Johan Wirfält, ‘Den sista snuten – hela historien bakom Hassel: Privatspanarna’, TVdags, 24 January 2017, https​:/​/tv​​dags.​​se​/ar​​tikel​​/den-​​sista​​-snut​​en​-he​​la​-hi​​stori​​en​-ba​​kom​-h​​assel​​​ -priv​​atspa​​narna​.

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Figure 6.3  Simulating gun shot in The Private Investigators (2012). gunshots that will be repeated several times, both as claps and as mouthed ‘bang bang’ sounds. As the men decide to repeat the process again, they agree upon changing the interval between the claps to two seconds instead of one, since the police records suggest that there was a one-to-three-second interval between the two shots. It is only in retrospect, once we have realized that the whole film is built around these repetitions, that we can make sense of this scene. What the private investigators are hoping to achieve is to find the killer supposedly hidden within the details provided in the documents. The whole film leads up to an extensive albeit entirely unspectacular re-enactment of the murder, with a large group including the actual private investigators taking on the roles of victims, perpetrators and witnesses. The shooting of these scenes was staged by Månsson but coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder, and took place at the actual crime scene in central Stockholm where the private investigators gather to commemorate the anniversary of the murder on a yearly basis, a tradition to which the film alludes in the end.71 Unlike No, The Private Investigators does not mix new material with archival footage. But its aesthetic evocation of the re-enactments seen on the 1980s and the 1990s Swedish television provides it – in addition to an anachronistic touch for a film that unfolds in the 2010s – with an audiovisual comment on the inherently simulacral nature of the re-enacted event. Nichols writes: Unlike the contemporaneous representation of an event […] the reenactment forfeits its indexical bond to the original event. […] The Ibid.

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shift of levels engenders an impossible task for the reenactment: to retrieve a lost object in its original form even as the very act of retrieval generates a new object and a new pleasure. The viewer experiences the uncanny sense of a repetition of what remains historically unique. A specter haunts the text.72

This spectre is at the core of the arguable pleasure of The Private Investigators, which is packed with postmodern puns concerning the simulacral quality of the Palme investigation. The claps constitute trivial gestures referring to data in police records, which are already reproductions of statements – in other words, verbalizations of witnesses’ observations regarding an increasingly distant historical event. Layer by layer, repetition by repetition, the private investigators’ pursuit of their long-lost object becomes a fixation that pushes it farther and farther beyond their reach. Citing Elias Canetti, Baudrillard has suggested that, without being conscious of it, ‘the human race has dropped out of history […] [and] left reality behind’.73 History is not so much over as it is ‘in a state of simulation, like a body that’s kept in a state of hibernation’.74 In this ‘irreversible coma’, in which ‘everything continues to function all the same’,75 history itself ‘has stopped meaning, referring to anything – whether you call it social space or the real. We have passed into a kind of hyper-real where things are being replayed ad infinitum.’76 The Palme investigation transforms into a simulation of historical progress whose only product is the proliferation of images, two of which are particularly worth mentioning here. During a visit to a public library, Hassel stumbles across a shelf of VHS tapes. He picks one seemingly at random and is later seen watching it at home while trying to book a transportation service through a persistently misrecognizing speech recognition phone system. While Hassel’s lack of technical luck constitutes the scene’s apparent punch line, there is a much subtler one lingering in the background. The video is The Brothers Mozart (Bröderna Mozart, Suzanne Osten, 1986), the somewhat forgotten Swedish 1980s comedy that the Palme couple attended the night of the murder. What looks like a leisurely moment for the retired detective proves to be yet another instance of pseudo-evidence analysis. Perhaps this actor’s line or that actress’s gesture contains a clue. Bill Nichols, ‘Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject’, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 74. 73 Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, trans. Nicole Dufresne (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 71–2. 74 Ibid., 72. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 73. 72

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Figure 6.4  Ersatz Palme couple re-enacting the moment of Palme’s murder in The Private Investigators (2012) – Hassel (right) simulating gun shots through clapping sound. Later Hassel is seen capturing the twenty-fifth-anniversary re-enactment with a small camcorder. By now we can deduce that it is meant as more than the preservation of a dear memory. The private investigators will spend considerable time analysing their self-produced pseudo-evidence long after the credits have rolled. After all, maybe this designated witness’s word or that ersatz perpetrator’s gesture will finally reveal the identity of the murderer. Nichols writes that re-enactments ‘produce an iterability for that which belongs to the singularity of historical occurrence’, a contradiction reconciled through the distinct perspectives that re-enactments adopt. But while these perspectives ‘can proliferate indefinitely’, they might also ‘intensify an awareness of the separation between the lost object and its reenactment’.77 The Private Investigators confirms Nichols’s point. The re-enactments mark a proliferation of perspectives that only seem to serve what Jameson terms ‘the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way’.78 The violence of a clap is laughable in relation to the gunshot that it represents. But what about the violence to which the clap subjects the gunshot? The film’s execution is comical but its existential implications horrifying. The technical condition for the film’s original brand of existential horror is S-VHS, with its bogglingly bad resolution for a theatrical feature, and its Nichols, ‘Documentary Reenactment’, 80. Jameson, Postmodernism, 21.

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tendency to push every hue towards orange and grey. These are the colours of depressingly diluted filter coffee and of concrete, befitting of a 1990s-scented conference room for phlegmatic former gunslingers, of the walls that enclose a retired hero in his small 1970s ‘million programme’ apartment – befitting, as it were, of the faded dream of the Swedish Welfare State. Resisting the retrospectacle from which it emerges, with its fixation of/on transience through its noisy ‘VHS style’, the bland but stable S-VHS surface of The Private Investigators acquires an additional connotation. Michael Tapper writes about the Swedish police fiction stereotype of the ‘aging, sickly and self-consuming detective’, whose struggles with alcohol, ulcers, fatness, diabetes, failed family relations and even cancer mirror not only the imminent extinction of a certain generation of patriarchal men but also the crumbling of the whole Swedish Welfare State.79 The visual equivalent of this might have been the deteriorating VHS image. None of this in The Private Investigators. Hassel is retired, certainly tired, but seems to be in pretty good health.80 There is no decay in the image, no end in sight. The promise of closure is short-circuited. If the film avoids the common characteristic of wear; if there is debility in the image but no decay; if its colours are faint but not fading; in effect, if the visual quality of The Private Investigators is – as far

Michael Tapper, ‘Hans kropp – samhället självt: manliga svenska mordspanare på ålderns höst: kommissarie Jensen, Martin Beck, Kurt Wallander Och Van Veeteren’, in Den Skandinaviske Krimi: Bestseller Og Blockbuster, ed. Gunhild Agger and Anne Marit Waade (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2010), 50–2. 80 Physical health notwithstanding, in one of the sharpest observations of Berenett’s interpretation of the ageing Hassel, film critic Jake Bolin writes that Berenett succeeds ‘in an entirely undemanding way, to make Roland Hassel seem absent-minded and heavily tormented by inner demons at once. He is not really present, maybe he is taking his first steps into the fogs of senile-dementia.’ Bolin; my translation. Månsson, whose background is in documentary film, did not work from a script but developed the story on a day-today basis, thus keeping Berenett largely in the dark concerning the trajectory of his own character. This might have added to his ‘absent-minded’ delivery. See ‘Måns Månsson & Lars-Erik Berenett – Intervju inför Hassel – Privatspanarna Del 1 av 2’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘Filmkritikerna’, 12 February 2014, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=ZiX​​​ P​_JBo​​v​_Y. There are interesting parallels to Alphaville: in both cases, an iconic detective role is subverted by an arthouse filmmaker, Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution in Alphaville and Lars-Erik Berenett’s Hassel in The Private Investigators. Godard reportedly also shot without a script, writing and delivering his story on a day-to-day basis. As Chris Darke writes, ‘The comedy derives largely from the incongruous spectacle of Lemmy, at large and at a loss, in the city of Alphaville.’ Furthermore, Constantine has described Alphaville as Godard’s attempt to ‘kill off ’ the Lemmy Caution character, which is almost a verbatim precedent of how Månsson would describe his Hassel film: an attempt to bury Roland Hassel, allowing him to ‘rest in peace’. See Chris Darke, Alphaville (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 18, 20–2; and Månsson cited in Olle Agebro, ‘Ciné möter Måns Månsson’, Ciné, 12 November 2012, http:​/​/cin​​e​.se/​​inter​​vjuer​​/cine​​-mote​​r​ -man​​s​​-man​​sson/​; my translation. 79

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as this could be said of S-VHS – pristine, this correlates with the film’s central concept. What is the quality of an image that escapes transience, without presenting itself as new? Endurance. Not the heroic endurance of courierrunner Pheidippides, who ran from Marathon to Athens and died just as he had delivered a message of victory, but the horrifying endurance of Sisyphus, who was forced to roll a heavy boulder up a hill only for it to roll down again, having to start all over again for all eternity. As Månsson says in an interview: the final re-enactment leads nowhere. As Hassel and the private investigators keep grinding the exact same details, their meaningless struggle becomes a metaphor for the whole police genre ‘in which everything has stagnated yet never comes to an end’.81 Sisyphus, as private investigator, is an embodiment of the culture industry.

Arrière-Garde as ‘postmodernism of resistance’, or fighting a lost cause In 1986, the year that Palme was killed and the Hassel TV film series was born, Bellour wrote: ‘If we have truly entered into post-modernism, then video art is one of the liveliest signs of a postmodernism of resistance – because it has had the (hard) luck to have an object it can truly resist’ (i.e. TV). ‘This might suffice’, Bellour suggests, ‘to qualify video art as an avant-garde.’82 By the 2010s, television had prevailed in new technical configurations, while video art had become historical and institutionalized. Artists who continued working on analogue video could more aptly be labelled an arrière-garde, and the question is if and against what such a device could exert resistance. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze concludes that ‘there is no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life. The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it’,83 and this to extract from the mechanical cycles of consumption a will to difference itself. Herein lies the potential of the ‘terrorism’ that Baudrillard perceives to be neutralized by the nihilism of the system: an art injection into the principal vein of the entertainment industry, or, in Månsson’s more modest terms, ‘a healthy punch in the face’ of someone who ‘thinks he wants to see a 44th Beck film’ only to stumble on The Private Investigator. ‘I think Månsson cited in Agebro; my translation. Bellour, Between-the-Images, 76. 83 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 293. 81 82



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it will do that person good.’84 The mainstream channels of distribution thus become crucial. Månsson’s film is not a video work intended for the gallery; it takes this cultural battle to its home arena – movie theatres, home theatres, a ‘postmodernism or resistance’ by way of Trojan infiltration rather than an external critique from a safe distance. Perhaps, then, it is precisely against nostalgia in its most commodified form that an arrière-garde of videographic cinema might be best equipped to exert resistance. All things said, therein lies the difference between the kind of retrospectacle that Kung Fury represents and what The Private Investigators seems to be doing. Kung Fury engages in a hyperbolic, one could even say hysterical repetition of (media) history. It does this not in order for us to reflect on the implication of such repetitions but for it to capitalize on the desirability of a disappearing past. The Private Investigators focalizes precisely on the horrifying banality of this cultural logic. It makes repetition and/as historical disappearance its conceptual core. Reinforced by its use of a dated S-VHS aesthetic, including its refusal to capitalize on the nostalgic power of dropout and audiovisual decay, The Private Investigators, unlike Kung Fury, repeats to the point where the repetitions become almost unbearable and viewers might yell out: ‘Enough already, move on!’ But if the impossibility of moving on is the key problem formulated by the arrière-garde of videographic cinema, it provides few answers as to how the desired change can be achieved. Finally, the arrière-garde manifests the term’s most melancholy connotation. Adamson writes: In the French context, arrière-garde bears within it a telling ideological inflection, most commonly displayed in the phrase ‘mener un combat d’arrière-garde’ (‘to fight a rearguard action’): meaning the defence of a cause that one already knows to be lost. More than simply indicating the tail-end position for a battalion, the arrière-garde attempts, futilely, to come from behind to win a battle where the outcome has been decided already.85

Both No and The Private Investigators eschew a sense of closure – unless by ‘closure’ we mean a system of repetitions that, once it is established, remains self-enclosed. For all we know, the private investigators are still in the outskirts of Stockholm discussing whether to try the three-second interval between the claps once more. And while Chile is cheering at Pinochet’s loss in the final

Måns Månsson cited in Agebro; my translation. Adamson, ‘The Serpent Eats Its Tail’, 75.

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moments of No, Saavedra walks through the crowd with an ambiguous facial expression. It is as if he has finally realized that under the label of ‘creative’, he, ideal subject of late capitalist culture, has simply reversed the role of the bureaucrat in its totalitarian counterpart. If it is the banality of evil that fuels the cog-wheel in the fascist state apparatus, the film seems to suggest that the ad man is driven by the banality of benevolence. A neutral nodal point in the neoliberal network, he will package any cause that his social context designates as good so as to make it marketable – be it soda, democracy or a daytime soap opera. Saavedra’s previously cited opening speech appears three times in the film: first as he pitches the ‘Free’ cola commercial, then as he pitches the actual ‘NO’ campaign and finally, as he pitches a promo for the soap opera that will inaugurate the democratic era. In all three instances, the grandiose message is trivialized: first, because what we believe to be a speech for democracy turns out to be a pitch for a soda ad; second, because once it returns as a speech for democracy, its potential force has already been neutralized; and finally, because the speech returns to its first function as a pitch for a banal commodity. In No’s postmodern meta-historiography, then, history repeats itself not once but twice: first time a s farce, second time as farce – and third time as soap opera.

Conclusion An archaeology of videographic cinema

In 1957, Lonesome Rhodes introduced his new TV persona by turning a studio monitor against a TV camera, thus triggering what might be film history’s first videographic hall of mirrors. Aesthetically compelling and conceptually charged, this crucial moment in A Face in the Crowd – Lonesome waving to his own figure multiplied into infinity – conveyed by means uniquely available to live transmission the creation of man in his own video image. Lonesome’s birth as a simulacral subject was embedded within a wider narrative, a cautionary tale about the dangers of TV. A Face in the Crowd was a warning anchored in a mix of cultural anxieties: fear for the fragility of a democracy subordinated to the media conditions of commercial TV, and fear for the fragile finances of a film industry challenged by TV broadcasters. A Face in the Crowd thus remains not only one of the earliest testimonies to how the incorporation of video reconditioned the expressive capacities of cinema. The very existence of this film is also conditioned on a historical rivalry between two US institutions: the Hollywood studios and the TV networks. By the late 1970s, the cultural dominance of broadcast TV was producing nostalgia for a supposedly dying art form. Never mind then-recent theories on cinema as an apparatus in the service of dominant ideology. Even Baudrillard was mourning cinema as a last bastion of an ‘intense imaginary’ disappearing due to its being ‘contaminated by TV’.1 Deleuze seemed to concur; while cinema had ‘“preserved” an aesthetic and noetic function’, TV was reducible to a social one: ‘Control and power, the dominance of the medium shot, which denies any exploration of perception, in the name of the professional eye.’2 Deleuze spells it out in The Time-Image: TV and video are bound either to transform cinema or to mark its death.3 But Deleuze was never one to accept repressive means as final. In ‘Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel’”, he provides an inadvertently accurate

Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 51. Deleuze, ‘Letter to Serge Daney’, 72–3. 3 Deleuze, The Time-Image, 265. 1 2

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description of the logic of a long lineage of films, from A Face in the Crowd to The Private Investigators: Cinema ought to stop ‘being cinematic’, stop playacting, and set up specific relationships with video, with electronic and digital images, in order to develop a new form of resistance and combat the televisual function of surveillance and control. It’s not a question of shortcircuiting television – how could that be possible? – but of preventing television subverting or short-circuiting the extension of cinema into the new types of image.4

Calling for a video-film alliance against televisual control, Deleuze is really providing a definition for the already existing phenomenon that this book has termed ‘videographic cinema’. But totalizing statements are best approached with caution. This book has chosen not to engage in the debates on whether, why and when cinema could be proclaimed ‘dead’, since a discussion of that kind would have locked it within the theoretical prison of defining cinema’s ‘essence’. Instead, in retrospect – and with said philosophers’ cinephile anxieties in mind – this book has shown how cinema’s ‘contamination’ with video and TV engendered not the end of, but a new, intense, aesthetically vibrant imaginary, touching on the noetic effects of said media. If, to cite Kittler’s claim one last time, so-called Man is determined by technical standards, then videographic cinema engendered two distinctive but equally troubling formats. On the one hand, we were given the Lonesome Rhodes: raging men risen to power by way of a mass medium capable of transmitting their likeable likeness into every other home. Rhodes had a contemporary counterpart in Frankenheimer’s live TV drama The Comedian, with Rooney introduced as a yelling face in a studio monitor. Frankenheimer would return to this image of monitored masculine rage in The Manchurian Candidate, where Senator Iselin (James Gregory) interrupts a televised hearing by yelling accusations of a communist infiltration. It has been said that Iselin was based on Joseph McCarthy,5 and the scene itself on the ArmyMcCarthy hearings,6 but the slightly compressed television image of Iselin’s

Deleuze, ‘Letter to Serge Daney’, 76. David Sterritt, ‘Murdered Souls, Conspiratorial Cabals: Frankenheimer’s Paranoia Films’, in A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film, ed. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 15. 6 Roger Ebert, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, RogerEbert​.com​, 7 December 2003, https​:/​/ ww​​w​.rog​​erebe​​rt​.co​​m​/rev​​iews/​​great​​-movi​​e​-the​​-manc​​huria​​n​-​can​​didat​​e​-196​​2. 4 5



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face, agitating more than agitated, brings to mind the performed rage of some twentieth-century dictator. On the other hand, videographic cinema had the capacity of conveying a new human condition, our transformation into what Deleuze termed ‘dividuals’. From the shots of THX used for some hardware test in a prison-tech lab, to Anderson’s autoptic interrogation before his being released to panoptic New York, videographic cinema would visualize men as data in societies of control. There is yet another forgotten film worth mentioning only now that its media conditions have been unravelled across several chapters, the entangled functions of panoptic, synoptic and autoptic control, and the dividuals and demagogues that such systems would seem to engender. In the French conspiracy thriller The Serpent (Le Serpent, Henri Verneuil, 1973), a Soviet defector in CIA custody comes to embody, through actor Yul Brynner’s intense presence and an almost hyperbolic use of actual video equipment, the videographic subject as dividual and demagogue. In some imaginary CIA headquarters, Col. Vlassov is interrogated through various videographic apparatuses that, as one critic wrote at the time, ‘outdo Seven Days in May with their bewildering hordes of monitor screens monitoring monitor screens’.7 There are moments of humiliation evocative of the job interrogations described by Packard back in 1964: Vlassov is seen captured in some hyperbolic lie-detector with an electrode helmet fastened under his chin, while having to answer intimate questions about sexual experiences with minors and other men. A video camera captures and records his answers, while a monitor doubles his wired head in close-up. Later, when the CIA have managed to find out that the benevolent defector actually remains a Soviet spy, he will be confronted with the videos of his humiliating interrogation. But between these moments, Vlassov’s piercing eyes multiplied onto sometimes as many as ten monitors allows the interrogated to seamlessly slips into the mask of authority and gaze back at his interrogators to address them as a leader would a nation in a televised speech. The alleged ally thus becomes framed as the threat of a future Big Brother infiltrating Western democracy. At the outset of this book, it was stated that it would not aspire to produce a monolithic definition of video in the end. The aim was to describe video as a heterogeneous and historically shifting phenomenon. This allowed it to study a wide range of institutions and video practices: broadcast TV, surveillance, therapy, art, video as a domestic consumer device and as a tool for retrospection and media archaeological practices. That said, patterns were bound to emerge. In retrospect, the most evident one is the consistently dark

‘Serpent, The “(Le Serpent)”’, Monthly Film Bulletin 40, no. 468 (1 January 1973): 255.

7

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Figures C1.1 and C1.2  Col. Vlassov interrogated by the CIA in The Serpent (1973). outlook that cinema has had on video, at least up until analogue obsolescence generated a more general nostalgic turn in media culture. Even Anti-Clock, the one case study that clearly draws on utopian discourses on video therapy, is so cold and melancholy in tone that it could easily be misread as dystopian if viewed without external knowledge of Arden’s philosophy. After all, Sapha starts therapy as a suicidal man and ends it by becoming space, a conclusion that could easily be read as a metaphor for his death.8 Ironically, this dark This reading becomes even more plausible in retrospect, considering that Anti-Clock was Arden’s last film before her own suicide in 1982.

8



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outlook has motivated some absolutely striking and mesmerizing imagery. The alienation of human form in a surveillance nightmare like Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB hardly speaks against the aesthetic potential of the tool in question. This grants most of the discussed films an ambiguity: nightmares of video expressed through compelling video images. While the tension between live and ‘canned’ TV goes all the way back to the early days of broadcasting (even preceding videotape, since ‘canned’ originally denoted filmed content), it took some time for cinema to start reflecting on videotape recording. The emergence of videographic cinema thus gave rise to prospective imaginaries conditioned on live transmission: live broadcasts in A Face in the Crowd, real-time surveillance and communication in THX 1138 and Colossus: The Forbin Project. Even the prison therapy session in The Anderson Tapes is conditioned on psychiatric practices only marginally interested in video’s archival capacities. What therapists celebrated was the possibility to instantly replay moving images, thus situating autoptic treatment in that liminal temporality of a delayed present rather than a lingering past.9 That said, critical reflections on (audio) tape recording already appear in A Face in the Crowd, while Viva la muerte provides an early example of video’s implicit use as a memory analogue. As artists, therapists and filmmakers invented/discovered the videographic psyche, it was only a matter of time before its mnemonic faculties would materialize. The Mnemopticon, as it first appears in Anti-Clock and later in Lost Highway, is the logical conclusion of cultural desires and anxieties crystallized into an imaginary medium: video as therapeutic promise, as a surveillance apparatus, and as a recording medium that supplements our memory and comes to invade our home. Videographic cinema’s turn towards retrospection has been framed as a remanent phase because remanence defines the material condition for videographic memory, because earlier concepts seem to remain as traces within the new contexts that reconfigure them (Mnemopticon 79 and 97, to mention one) and because analogue video remains as an aesthetic in spite of its obsolescence as a mass medium. Videographic cinema entered its remanent phase when videotape gave rise to retrospective imaginaries, that is, no later than Viva la muerte. The film was already as much about Fando’s personal

Berger’s anthology describes a more general trend in 1960s psychotherapy, ‘toward less emphasis on investigation of the past and interpretation of symbolic manifestations of the unconscious and more emphasis on dealing with the present’. Julian B. Rotter cited in Frederick H. Stoller, ‘Group Psychotherapy on Television: An Innovation with Hospitalized Patients’, in Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment, ed. Milton M. Berger (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970), 113.

9

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history as it was about Spain’s fascist past and the mix of personal and social/ cultural memory (Anti-Clock blurs Sapha’s lived past with his ‘past-to-future programming’; Stan in Family Viewing erases not only Van’s childhood but his cultural roots as well) continued all the way to video’s obsolescence. This was when the video image acquired a third layer of mnemonic connotations: it became a monument to its own memory as a medium. This tautological quality whereby a video image has come to connote the historicity of the video image should not be mistaken for a closed-circuit of signification. It should be seen as a visual matrix for a multitude of expressions: from retrospectacles like Kung Fury, in which injections of VHS noise are meant to nostalgically remediate/simulate the old video rental experience, to experimental films like The Private Investigators, intended as a lethal injection into the canned corpus of a culture industry ‘in which everything has stagnated yet never comes to an end’.10 Expanded into a definition of life itself under video/TV conditions, ‘canned’ offers a conceptual inversion of the rich connotations of liveness. If live = real life, canned becomes not so much death (even if such connotations abound in 1950s discourse) as processed, conserved, branded and rendered bland, the opposite not of life but of real life, which is to say artifice. Canned as in the contradictory concept of ‘live on tape’, the simulation of directly lived experience – a show promising to show ‘live death’ while being prerecorded (La Mort en direct/Death Watch). Canned as in the manufacturing of audience responses, most notably through canned reactions – a fallen TV star trying to maintain his delusion that he remains on top (A Face in the Crowd) or sitcom sounds in perfect synch with the lives of a dysfunctional family (Family Viewing). Canned as in lives engineered and monitored in the simulacral ‘homes’ of Model Couples. Canned as in the conservative logic of reruns and recycled ingredients for the nth soap opera, police thriller or political campaign (The Private Investigators, No). Is it, then, too bold to suggest that an archaeology of videographic cinema can uncover conceptual keys to the ‘TV problem’? Video infiltrated cinema to change it from within, inseminating it with new kinds of images: quicksilver blues, fluid polychromes, flickering faces and multiplied figures, luminous noisy textures the likes of which film had never seen before. But cinema captured video in that same movement, thereby framing these images within narratives that teased out their conceptual implications: surveillance and control, memory and history, the cultural memory of video itself.

Månsson cited in Agebro; my translation.

10

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Films and video works 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, The (Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse, Fritz Lang, 1960) Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) Anderson Tapes, The (Sidney Lumet, 1971) Andromeda Strain, The (Robert Wise, 1972) Anti-Clock (Jane Arden and Jack Bond, 1979) Avatar (Jameson Cameron, 2009) Beatles Electroniques (Yud Jalkut, 1967) Being a Dickhead’s Cool (Reuben Dangoor and Raf Riley, 2010) Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008) Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, 1992). Brothers Mozart, The (Bröderna Mozart, Suzanne Osten, 1986) Boomerang (Richard Serra, 1974) Centers (Vito Acconci, 1971) Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) Colossus: The Forbin Project (Joseph Sargent, 1970) Death Watch (La Mort en direct, Bertrand Tavernier, 1980) Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (George Lucas, 1967) Face in the Crowd, A (Elia Kazan, 1957) Family Viewing (Atom Egoyan, 1987) Fourth Kind, The (Olatunde Osunsanmi, 2009) Hardcore (Paul Schrader, 1979) Hassel – Förgörarna (Mikael Hylin, 2000) Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986) Horizon (Lutz Becker, 1967) Hunger Games Trilogy, The (Gary Ross, Francis Lawrence, 2012–15) King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982) Kung Fury (David Sandberg, 2014) Last Dragon, The (Michael Schultz, 1985) Leap, The (Tom Dewitt, 1968) Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) Manchurian Candidate, The (John Frankenheimer, 1962) Model Couple, The (Le Couple témoin, William Klein, 1977) Monument (Ture Sjölander, Lars Weck and Sven Höglund, 1968) Moon (Scott Bartlett, 1969) My Life (Bruce Joel Rubin, 1993) Mystery of Oberwald, The (Il mistero di Oberwald, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1981) Next of Kin (Atom Egoyan, 1984) No (Pablo Larraín, 2012) OffOn (Scott Bartlett, 1967) Osterman Weekend, The (Sam Peckinpah, 1983)



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Other Side of the Underneath, The (Jane Arden, 1972) Outer and Inner Space (Andy Warhol, 1965) Paradise Now (Sheldon Rochlin, 1970) Photographie électrique à distance, La (Georges Méliès, 1908) Private Investigators, The (Hassel – Privatspanarna, Måns Månsson, 2012) Revolving Upside Down (Bruce Nauman, 1968) Ring, The (Gore Verbinski, 2002) Santee (Gary Nelson, 1973) Separation (Jack Bond, 1968) Serpent, The (Le Serpent, Henri Verneuil, 1973) Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer 1964) Sex, Lies and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) Snuff (Michael Findlay and Horacio Fredriksson, 1975) Star Wars Trilogy (George Lucas, 1977–83) Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (Tobe Hopper, 1974) THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971) Truman Show, The (Peter Weir, 1998) Vertical Roll (Joan Jonas, 1972) Vibration (Jane Arden and Jack Bond, 1975) Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) Videotape Study no. 3 (Yud Yalkut, 1968) Viva la muerte (Fernando Arrabal, 1971) Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (Frank Tashlin, 1957)

TV shows American Family, An (Craig Gilbert, 1974) Batman (William Dozier, Lorenzo Semple Jr., 1966–8) Big Brother (1999–) Bonanza (David Dortort, 1959–73) Buck Rogers (Ford Beebe, Saul A. Goodkind, 1939) Candid Camera (Allen Funt, 1948–50, 1960–7) Celebrity Room (Robin Clark, 1964) Comedian, The (John Frankenheimer, 1957) Days of Wine and Roses (John Frankenheimer, 1958) Dr. Phil (Peteski Productions, 2002–) Hank McCune Show, The (1950–3) He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (Lou Scheimer, 1983–5) Morey Amsterdam Show, The (Irving Mansfield, 1948–50) Nudity Thing, The (Robin Clark, 1970) Prisoner, The (Patrick McGoohan, 1967–8) Real People (1979–84)

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Red Skelton Show, The (Seymour Berns, 1951–71) Requiem for a Heavyweight (Ralph Nelson, 1956) Simpsons, The (James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, and Sam Simon, 1989–) Temptation Island (Andrew Perry, 2001–) That’s Incredible! (1980–4) Thundercats (Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr., 1985–9) What’s Up, America? (1979–81) You Asked For It (1950–9)

Online videos ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘Reuben Dangoor’, produced by Reuben Dangoor and Raf Riley, 9 September 2010, https​:/​/ww​​w​ .you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=lVm​​​mYMwF​​j1I. ‘Måns Månsson & Lars-Erik Berenett – Intervju inför Hassel – Privatspanarna Del 1 av 2’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘Filmkritikerna’, 12 February 2014, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=ZiX​​​P​_JBo​​v​_Y. ‘NES Power Glove Demonstration’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘Thomas Mason IV’, 20 September 2013, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=Ire​​​PSVBU​​3G0. ‘Pablo Larraín revela detalles inéditos de la filmación de la película “No”’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘CNN Chile’, 10 August 2012, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​ tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=p5J​​​Du1bg​​In0. ‘Power Glove Commercial’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘lingpanda101’, 27 January 2008, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=SAK​​​btJjA​​V18. ‘Power Glove (NES, 1989) Feat. Mike Matei – Video Game Years History’, YouTube video, uploaded by ‘Pat the NES Punk’, 27 November 2015, https​:/​/ ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=wQu​​​_zVrY​​65E.

Index Abramson, Albert  14 n.30 Acconci, Vito  32 Adam, Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle  19 Adamson, Natalie  164, 181 Adorno, Theodor W.  156, 157 Alger, Ian  104, 105 Alphaville (Godard)  22, 179 n.80 and Private Investigators, The compared  179 n.80 and THX 1138 compared  61 American Cinematographer (magazine)  3, 7 n.12, 27 American Family, An (Gilbert)  79, 80, 88 n.65 American Psycho (Harron)  144–5 Ampex  76, 96, 138 analog nostalgia  155 analogue aesthetics, in digital media culture  156 n.7 analogue obsolescence  14, 156 Anderson Tapes, The (Lumet)  93–5, 107–9, 129, 187 Andrejevic, Mark  79, 84, 87, 88 n.65, 109 Anémone  65 Anti-Clock (Arden and Bond)  6, 24, 113, 129, 147, 149, 186, 187 memory monitors in  130–6 anti-Oedipal, concept of  135 n.71 Antonioni, Michelangelo  11 Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault) (book)  18, 20 archive effect  169–70 neutralization of  170 Archive Effect, The (Baron)  169 archive footage  125 Arden, Jane  6, 113, 129–30, 135 n.71, 186 n.8 Armstrong, Sergio  171

Arnold, Jack  3 Arquette, Patricia  137 Arrabal, Fernando  121, 122, 125–8 Arriagada, Genaro  169 arrière-garde. See also media archaeology avant-garde and  164, 165 against commodified nostalgia  181 meaning and significance of  164 as postmodernism of resistance and  180–2 types of  164–5 artist, as therapist  128–30 audio-recording apparatus, importance of  103 Autobiography of Video, The (Blom) (book)  29 Autopticon  36, 93–6, 185, 187 Anderson Tapes, The and 93–5, 107–9 autoptic function discovery and  100–2 Big Brother and 109–10 CCTV before 1970 and  96–9 interpersonal process recall (IPR) and  102–4 Mnemopticon and  113–17, 128, 130, 131 privacy norms and  106–7, 108–9 screen as body prison and  108 self-acceptance and selfcorrection and  104–6 social media and  108–10 synoptic psychiatry and  99–100 avant-garde, significance of  107, 114, 128, 163–5, 180 Avatar (Cameron)  26 Aylwin, Patricio  170

206 Index Baal Babylone (Arrabal) (book)  122, 123, 127 backstage, significance of  75, 83 Bacon, Francis  133, 134, 149 Bale, Christian  144 Baron, Jaimie  169 Barthes, Roland  45 Bartlett, Scott  4, 57–8, 133 Bass, Jules  160 Batman (Dozier and Semple Jr.)  50 Baudrillard, Jean  28, 29 n.61, 63 n.61, 80, 86, 89, 90, 116 n.9, 157–60, 177, 180, 183 Bazin, André  9 Beale, Lewis  77 n.38 Beebe, Ford  59 Be Kind Rewind (Gondry)  147 Bell Labs  43 n.5 Bellour, Raymond  11–12, 119, 128, 133, 149, 180 Benny’s Video (Haneke)  6, 145–6 Benson-Allott, Caetlin  7, 8 Bentham, Jeremy  19, 102, 116 Berenett, Lars-Erik  173, 175, 179 n.80 Berenstein, Rhona J.  82 Berger, Milton M.  102, 103 n.49, 104 n.55, 106, 107, 114–19, 187 Bernal, Gael García  166 Betamax  139, 140 commercial slogan and  138 Videodrome and  142 Big Brother  65, 80–1, 84, 109–10 autopticism and  109–10 Model Couple, The and  80–1, 84 Black, Jack  147 Black Robe  70 Blake, Robert  153 Blom, Ina  29, 30, 32 Bolger, Ray  76 Bolin, Jake  179 n.80 Bond, Jack  6, 113, 129, 130, 132 Book of Imaginary Media (Kluitenberg) (book)  23

Bosch, Hieronymus  127 Boudet, Jacques  81 Braeden, Eric  44 Bretz, Rudy  70 Broadcasting, Broadcast Advertising (magazine)  29 broadcast TV  1, 3, 30–5, 58, 88, 183. See also television (TV) Brooks, James L.  12 Brothers Mozart, The (Bröderna Mozart) (Osten)  177 Brown, Blain  10 n.18 Brown, Edward G.  126 n.36, 127 Brunette, Peter  122 nn.27, 30 Bruzzi, Stella  172 n.58 Brynner, Yul  185 Buck Rogers (Beebe and Goodkind)  59 Burns, Robert  104 Business Week (magazine)  97 camcorder  14, 89, 145, 151, 153, 154, 178 Cameron, James  26 Candid Camera (Funt)  79–80 Canetti, Elias  177 canned life. See also reality tv canned death and  87–92 canned laughter and  76–8, 76 n.33, 78 n.39 of Model Couple, The  78–82 Capturing video on film, challenges of  46–8 Carmichael, Joy  55 Carrey, Jim  84 n.57 Casetti, Francesco  34 n.85 CCTV  9, 21, 36, 60, 103–4, 133–6, 151 before 1970  96–9, 120 CCTV: A Technology Under the Radar? (Kroener)  96 Cedeño Montaña, Ricardo  88, 89 Celebrity Room (Clark)  49 n.20 Centers (Acconci)  32 Ceram, C. W.  17 n.9

Index Chaouch, Mahdi  122 Charcot, Jean-Martin  101 Chinatown (Polanski)  158 chroma key  12 n.22 cinema, transformation of  12 Cinema 1 (Deleuze) (book)  26 Cinema 2 (Deleuze) (book)  26 Cinema Canada (magazine)  143 cinematic prop and reality effect, comparison of  45–6 cinematographic video  12 n.24 City at Midnight  70 Clark, Robin  49 Colossus: The Forbin Project (Sargent)  42–3, 45, 46, 48–53, 58, 64, 187 Comedian, The (Frankenheimer)  54, 66, 71, 184 Comte, Suzanne  123 Concept of Live Television, The (Feuer)  78 Connery, Sean  93 Connor, Bruce  58 Constantine, Eddie  61, 179 n.80 consumed nostalgia  160–2 ‘Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture’ (Levine) (installation)  114 Cornand, André  126 n.37 Cornelison, Floyd  101 Creation of Adam, The (Michelangelo) (painting)  124 Creley, Jack  142 Cronenberg, David  6 Cross, Gary  160, 161 Cubitt, Sean  115 cultural psychology  25 cultural standardization  157 Curtis, Donald  71, 75 cybernetic acupuncture  129 Dahlquist, Ulf  143 n.26 Darke, Chris  179 n.80 Dawson, Max  66–7, 138 n.4

207

Days of Wine and Roses (Frankenheimer)  66 Death Watch (La Mort en direct) (Tavernier)  89–92, 188 Debord, Guy  28, 157–9 Def, Mos  147 Deleuze, Gilles  26, 27 n.52, 63, 83, 135 n.71, 136, 149, 150, 183–5 Delgado, Teresa  167 De Niro, Robert  78 n.39 Derrida, Jacques  31 Descargues, Pierre  164 Descrières, Georges  85 DeWitt, Tom  133 Diaz, Melonie  148 Didi-Huberman, Georges  101 diegesis  61, 82, 134, 149, 150 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) (book)  180 digitization, of media culture  33 Discipline and Punish (Foucault)  59 ‘discourse-object’  20 n.28 dispositifs  31, 114, 117, 120 autoptic  102, 108, 115 domestic  74 hyper-narcissistic  73 mediatic  20 n.29 psychiatric  95, 99 dividuals, concept of  63–4, 185 Doors of Perception, The (Huxley)  133 Douglass, Charles  76–7 Dozier, William  50 Dr. Phil (Peteski Productions)  100 n.37 Dussollier, André  65 Duvall, Robert  59 dystopian imaginaries, in videographic cinema  129 Eagan, Daniel  57 n.51 ecstasy of communication  116 Eglash, Ron  140 n.19 Egoyan, Atom  12, 14, 147

208 Index Electronic Labyrinth (Lucas)  42, 55–8, 187 Elgie, Robert  144 Elsaesser, Thomas  16 nn.1, 3, 20 n.29, 25 n.42, 34, 35 n.87 Ernst, Wolfgang  16 n.8, 20 n.29, 25 n.42 Espert, Núria  123, 126 n.35 expanded cinema  10 Expanded Cinema (Youngblood) (book)  4, 56 ‘Extensions of Man,’ media as  25 Face in the Crowd, A (Kazan)  3, 5, 80, 138, 183, 187, 188 as attack on broadcast TV  66–9 Family Viewing (Egoyan)  14, 21, 147, 188 Fensch, Thomas  55 n.41 Ferjac, Anouk  124 Fetveit, Arild  65 Feuer, Jane  78, 141, 142 fictionalization  166–7, 172 Fiennes, Sophie  26 ‘filmed TV’  10 n.20 Films on the Campus (Fensch) (book)  56 Findlay, Michael  141 n.23 Fisher, Marc  77 n.38 Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge  17 n.9, 18, 20 n.29 dismissal of  24–5 Foucault, Michel  16–19, 24–5, 99, 101, 102, 104 n.58 Fourth Kind, The (Osunsanmi)  148–51 Frampton, Kenneth  165 n.42 Franciosa, Anthony  76 Frankenheimer, John  43, 46 n.17, 50, 52–5, 71, 119, 138 Fredericks, Ellsworth  50 Fredriksson, Horacio  141 n.23 Freud, Sigmund  19, 131 n.55, 148 n.40

Freudian ‘uncanny’  63 n.60 Frisch, Arno  145 From Betamax to Blockbuster (Greenberg) (book)  7 ‘From Crucifixion to Cybernetic Acupuncture’ (Ryan) (article)  129 Fuller, Frances F.  105 n.60 Funt, Allen  80 futurity effects  41–3 defining  44–6 Electronic Labyrinth and  55–8 live television as condition for videographic cinema and  49–55 Gaal-Holmes, Patti  135 n.71 Galili, Doron  8 Galton, Francis  118 n.16 Garden of Earthly Delights, The (Bosch) (painting)  127 gaze  83, 88, 90, 144, 175, 185 of audience  108 autoptic  96, 103–5, 108 clinical  101 medical  101 panoptic  59 social  105 gendering, of video  8 generational loss and recovery, notions of  147 Germany  141 Gershuny, Phyllis  114 Getty, Balthazar  151 Gifford, Walter  43 n.5 Gigliotti, Davidson  114 n.2 Gillette, Frank  128 Gioscia, Victor  114 Glass Web, The (Arnold)  3 Glenn II, Ben  76 Gnecco, Luis  170 Gobel George  79 Godard, Jean-Luc  11, 22, 179 n.80 ‘Golden Age of Television’  138

Index Gondry, Michel  147 Goodkind, Saul A.  59 Gould, Jack  70–1, 72 n.26, 75, 79, 139 Goya, Francisco  127 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Kittler) (book)  19 Great Britain  141, 143 Greenberg, Joshua M.  7, 140 Gregory, James  184 Grierson, John  118 Griffith, Andy  5, 68 Groening, Matt  12 Guardian, The (newspaper)  26 Guattari, Félix  27 n.52, 135 n.71 Guernica (Picasso) (painting)  127 Guerrilla Television (Shamberg) (book)  128 Hagener, Malte  34 n.85 Haneke, Michael  6, 145, 146 Hank McCune Show, The  76 Hansen, Gunnar  143 n.26 Hardcore (Schrader)  141 n.23 hardware theory  20 n.29 Harron, Mary  144 Hawkeye portable TV equipment  89 Hearn, Marcus  57 n.47 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (Scheimer)  160 Hemblen, David  14 Henriques, Ivan  123 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (McNaughton)  145 Hilderbrand, Lucas  7, 33, 137, 141 hipsters  163 ‘History: A Retro Scenario’ (Baudrillard) (essay)  158 Hogan, Peter  104 Holland, Anthony  94 Hollywood  50, 52–3, 67–8, 79. See also individual films live tv threat to  66–9

209

home video  6–7, 13, 14, 35, 36, 137–8 erasure anxieties treatment and  146–50 and home invasion nightmares, capturing  150–4 rise and fall of  138–41 Videodrome and  141–4 Hooper, Tobe  143 n.26 Hoover, Herbert  43 n.5 Horkheimer, Max  156, 157 Horovitz, Pam  155 n.1 Houwen, Janna  46 n.15 Huhtamo, Erkki  16, 17 n.9, 18, 23, 163 Hunger Games, Trilogy, The (Ross and Lawrence)  85 Hurst, Andrea  151 Huxley, Aldous  133 Ikegami HL-79EAL video camera  171 imaginaries and media images. See media archaeology imaginary flashbacks and revelations  121–8 imaginary media  113, 187. See also media archaeology actual media as  24 as compensatory machines  25 as mediating impossible desires  142 miniaturization and  90 time machine as  161 impossible media/apparatus/ machines  24 n.38 ‘influencing machine’  142 n.24 Inherent Vice (Hilderbrand) (book)  7 International Meeting of Film Regulators  144 interpersonal process recall (IPR)  102–4

210 Index Jah, Cherif Abderahman  129–30 Jameson, Fredric  28, 29 n.61, 59, 158, 159, 178 JenniCam  108 Jodorowsky, Alejandro  128 n.44 Jones, Daisy  156 n.6 Jovovich, Milla  149 JVC  139 Kagan, Norman  103, 120–1 Kazan, Elia  3 Keitel, Harvey  90 Keith, Jack  12 n.22 Kern, Edward  139 keying  12 n.22 Khaner, Julie  154 Khanjian, Arsinée  21 Kihn, Albert  55 n.41, 61 Kilborn, Richard  88 n.65 Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens (Benson-Allott)  7 King of Comedy (Scorsese)  78 n.39 Kittler, Friedrich  16–20, 90, 131, 151, 184 Klein, William  6, 65 Kline, Howard  139 Kluitenberg, Eric  23–6, 142 Korot, Beryl  114 Koszarski, Richard  8 Krauss, Rosalind  32, 73, 115–16 Kroener, Inga  96 Kung Fury (Sandberg)  5, 156, 181, 188 VCR treatment of  159–63 Lacan, Jacques  22 Lagrive, Claudine  127 n.39 Laing, R. D.  135 n.71 Lambertz, Göran  175 Landsberg, Alison  148 n.40 Lang, Fritz  9, 43, 97 L’arbre de Guernica (Arrabal)  127 Larraín, Pablo  156, 166, 172 Last Dragon, The (Schultz)  160 Lee, Robert E.  65, 83

Le jardin des délices (Arrabal) (play)  127 Letter to Serge Daney (Deleuze)  183 Levine, Les  114, 117 Life (magazine)  139 Liotard, Thérèse  91 “Live” TV vs. “Canned” (Gould) (article)  79 liveness, notion of  78–9 live television, as condition for videographic cinema  49–55 Loggia, Robert  151 Long Distance Wireless Photography (La photographie électrique à distance) (Méliès)  8 Lost Highway (Lynch)  137, 151–3, 187 Lowry, John D.  4 n.2 Lucas, George  6, 22 n.32, 41, 42, 55, 57–8 Lumet, Sidney  52, 93 Lundemo, Trond  124, 135 Lynch, David  137 Lyon, David  102 n.46 McCarthy, Todd  148 n.39 McClenhan, Jack B.  4 n.2 McGoohan, Patrick  50 McGrath, John  80 McGraw, Phil  100 n.37 McKenna, Michael  80, 87, 91 McLuhan, Marshall  25 McNaughton, John  145 Magritte, René  127 Mail, The (newspaper)  143 Manchurian Candidate, The (Frankenheimer)  46 n.17, 50, 53, 184–5 Maniglier, Patrice  25 n.42 Manning, Brad A.  105 n.60 Manovich, Lev  118 Månsson, Måns  156, 173, 174, 176, 179 n.80, 180–1 Marks, Laura U.  14, 155

Index Marx, William  164–5 master/slave analogy, in technology  140 n.19 Mathiesen, Thomas  83, 95 Matthau, Walter  68 Mauck, Jack A.  4 n.2 media. See also individual entries distinctions of  13 techno-aesthetic definitions of  13–14 media archaeology  16–17, 35 n.87, 155–6 arrière-garde as postmodernism of resistance and  180–2 as artistic method  163–5 culture industry to retrospectacle transition and  156–9 as historiography theorized/ theory historicized  26–9 Kung Fury and  159–63 No and  156, 165–73 and Private Investigators, The  173–80 as study of media conditions  17–21 as study of media images and imaginaries  21–6 Media Archaeology (Huhtamo and Parikka) (book)  16, 23 media fantasy  22, 23 n.34 medium and mind, analogy between  118 medium specificity, significance of  13 Meigh-Andrews, Chris  33 n.82 Meineke, Eva Maria  91 Méliès, Georges  8 memory, significance of  124 Metropolis (Lang)  43 MGM  67 Milchard, Charlotte  149 Miller, Alex  129 n.50 Minow, Newton  138 Mnemopticon  113, 187 artist as therapist and  128–30

211

imaginary flashbacks and revelations and  121–8 memory monitors in Anti-Clock and  130–6 in Lost Highway and  137, 151–4 videographic psyche and  114–21 Model Couple, The (Le Couple témoin) (Klein)  6, 65 canned life of  78–82, 85 reality as infomercial in  82–4 TV’s nihilism of neutralization and  85–7 Moran, James M.  7, 12–14 Morey Amsterdam Show, The (Mansfield)  49 n.29 Morse, Leon  49 n.29 Mühe, Ulrich  146 ‘Multi Image Immediate Impact Video SelfConfrontation’  117, 118 multiplication effects  70, 73, 90, 104, 118, 183, 185, 188 futurity effects and  48, 49, 51, 52, 58–64 My Life (Rubin)  12 Mystery of Oberwald, The (Il mistero di Oberwald) (Antonioni)  11 Nachtsheim, Dan  55 Naked Society, The (Packard) (book)  98 narcissism, as self-enclosure  115–16 Neil, Patricia  68 Neilan, Marshall  68 Nelson, Ralph  66 neo arrière-garde  165 Newman, Michael Z.  8, 34, 139 Next of Kin (Egoyan)  12 Nichols, Bill  94, 176–8 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)  161 No (Larraín)  156, 181–2 archival ambiguities and  165–73 reenactment and  173

212 Index noise  58, 62, 147 blue  85 captured  151 electronic  132 videographic  63, 151 VHS  149, 150, 188 white  61, 153 Noll, A. Michael  43 n.5 non-diegetic film  9, 11 Norelco camera  48 nostalgia  28, 59, 90, 183, 186, 188 analog  155 consumed  160–2 arrière-garde and  158–63, 181 Nudity Thing, The (Clark)  49 n.29 Numéro deux (Godard)  11, 132, 133, 149 OffOn (Bartlett)  4, 10, 57–8 O’Neal, Sean  77 n.38 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, The (Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse) (Lang)  9, 11 ‘On Nihilism’ (Baudrillard) (essay)  86 optic-architectural prison model  19 Osten, Suzanne  177 Osterman Weekend, The (Peckinpah)  9 n.16 Osthoff, Simone  172 Osunsanmi, Olatunde  148 Outer and Inner Space (Warhol)  30, 115 Packard, Vance  98, 107 Paik, Nam June  30, 31, 114, 115 Palme, Olof  173 panopticism. See Panopticon Panopticon  19, 59, 84, 185 videographic psyche and  114, 116, 117 video therapy and  95, 97–100, 102, 104 n.58, 106 n.67, 108 Parikka, Jussi  16, 17 n.9, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 163

Patry, William  140 n.15 Patterson, Richard  4 n.3 Patton, Will  148 Peary, Gerald  122 n.27, 30 Peckinpah, Sam  9 n.16 Penvern, André  85 Perrault, Jacques  17 n.9 Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, The (Fiennes)  26 Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, The (Fiennes)  26 Petley, Julian  143 phonograph-soul analogy  20 photochemical techniques  9 Pinochet, Augusto  165–6 Pinsent, Gordon  44 Podol, Peter L.  122, 125 n.34, 126, 127 Polanski, Roman  158 Polito, Gene  42, 44–9, 54, 58 pornography and home video boom  141 post arrière-garde  164–5 postmodern  28–9, 75, 80, 87, 128, 156–8, 164, 165, 177, 180–2 power, significance of  63 Power Glove  161–2 Pratley, Gerald  46 n.17 Prisoner, The (McGoohan)  50 Private Investigators, The (Hassel–Privatspanarna) (Månsson)  156, 181, 188 as artistic intervention  173–4 re-enactment and  174–8, 180 psyche, aesthetics of  120 Psychiatric Quarterly (journal)  101 psychic apparatus  19 psychic reality, creative treatment of. See Mnemopticon Pullman, Bill  137 Radical Software (magazine)  28, 31 n.73, 114–15, 117–18, 129 Ramírez Berg, Charles  53, 54 Ramsey, Logan  72

Index Rankin Jr., Arthur  160 Rayner, Ben  129 n.50 RCA laboratories  88, 89 Real Lacanian concept of  151 videographic noise as nonrepresentation of  151–2 reality effect and cinematic prop, comparison of  45–6 reality TV  36, 65–6, 109. See also canned life as infomercial  82–4 nihilism of neutralization and  85–7 as social experiment and  78–82 threat and Hollywood  66–9 Reality TV (Andrejevic) (book)  79 Real People  87 Red Skelton Show, The (Berns)  77 referential illusion, significance of  45 remanence. See also media archaeology; Mnemopticon; Vilified videophiles decay  36 significance of  35–6 Requiem for a Heavyweight (Nelson)  66 retrojection, notion of  160 n.24 Retromania (Reynolds) (book)  158 retrospectacle  37, 161, 165, 179, 181, 188 nostalgia and  161–3 technical failure as  159–63 Reynolds, Simon  158, 159 n.21, 163–4 Richter, Gerhard  134 Ring (Verbinski)  6 Ringley, Jennifer  108 Ritzenhoff, Karen A.  7 n.10 Rochlin, Sheldon  126 Roddenberry, Gene  25 Rodowick, D. N.  9 roll bars  13, 59, 61–2, 90, 108. See also shutter bar effect

Rooker, Michael  145 Rooney, Mickey  54 Rose, Gabrielle  14 Rosen, George  66, 67 Rosenbaum, Max  106, 107 Rozenkrantz, Jonathan  93 n.1, 150 n.44, 156 n.7 Rubin, Bruce Joel  12 Ryan, Paul  31 n.73, 129 Sacks, Mike  76 n.33 Sandberg, David  5, 156, 159 Sargent, Joseph  43, 50 Saville, Sebastian  130, 132 Scarpa, Margaret  104 n.55 Scheimer, Lou  160 Schneider, Ira  114 Schneider, Romy  89 Schrader, Paul  141 n.23 Schultz, Michael  160 Sconce, Jeffrey  142 n.24 Scorsese, Martin  78 n.39 Scott, Cameron  162 screen memory  148 n.40, 150 Sedgwick, Edie  30 Seldes, Gilbert  71, 72 n.26 self-acceptance  116, 117 n.12 and self-correction  104–6 self-confrontation  36, 102, 117, 134–5 as spiritual device  115 video  103, 105, 108, 128 self-correction  116, 117 self-acceptance and  104–6 self-confrontation and  108 social norm and  107 ‘Self-Processing’ (Ryan) (article)  129 Semple Jr., Lorenzo  50 Serling, Rod  69 Serpent, The (Le Serpent) (Verneuil)  185–6 “Serpent Eats Its Tail, The” (Adamson) (article)  164

213

214 Index Seven Days in May (Frankenheimer)  43, 50–4, 58, 185 Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Soderbergh)  6 Seymour, Cara  144 Shamberg, Michael  114 n.3 Shostrom, Everett L.  100, 106 shutter bar effect  10. See also roll bars Simon, Sam  12 Simondon, Gilbert  124, 154 Simpsons, The (Brooks, Groening and Simon)  12, 13 simulacra  63, 63 n.61, 82, 116, 167, 176–7, 183, 188 simulations, of videography  9–10 16mm camera, significance of  48, 55 n.41, 57 Skelton, Red  77 Slinger, Penny  130 Smits, Sonja  142 Snuff (Findlay and Fredriksson)  141 n.23 ‘So-called Man’  17 n.12, 64, 105, 184 social engineering, of ideal consumers  82–4 social reality and private nightmare, fusion of  122 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord) (book)  28, 157 Soderbergh, Steven  6 Sony Portapak  30, 31, 89 Spielmann, Yvonne  14, 22 n.33, 31, 32, 72, 73, 115 Stanton, Harry Dean  89 Star Trek (Roddenberry)  25 Star Wars Trilogy (Lucas)  55, 59 Stassner, Ingrid  145 Stoller, Frederick H.  187 n.9 Strauven, Wanda  16, 18, 35 Sturken, Marita  148 n.40 Sufi meditation  129–30 Sunday Review (newspaper)  139 Sunday Times, The (newspaper)  143

surveillance  11, 31, 59, 65, 81, 187. See also Autopticon CCTV  97–8 and entertainment, fusion of  81, 83–4, 92 images  55 n.41, 64 n.63 imaginaries  62, 93 intensified  64 Mnemopticon and  122, 135 modern, functions of  95–6 panopticism and  108 psychiatric  102 screen  60, 108 synoptic  88 TV and  84, 88 video  35, 36, 42, 96–9, 101, 107 visualizations of  43 voluntary submission to  109 Svedelid, Olov  173 S-VHS  178–81 Sweden  141, 143 Sylvester, David  150 n.43 synopticism  84, 95, 109, 154, 185 autoptic gaze and  108 Mnemopticon and  114, 115, 120 psychiatry and  99–100 surveillance and  88 Tapper, Michael  179 Tashlin, Frank  3 technical media  18, 22, 24, 29, 45 television (TV). See also individual entries as art form  70 canned laughter in  76–7 celebration of  71 direct addressing of viewers by  74–5 and film compared  70–1 as mass medium, and video as art  72–3 nihilism of neutralization of  85–7 portable equipment of  88–9

Index screen, as metaphor for unconscious  113 Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper)  143, 144 That’s Incredible  87 therapist, as artist  114–21 therapist, as interrogator  102–4 therapist-VJ  118 There’s No Place Like Home Video (Moran) (book)  7, 12 35mm camera, significance of  46–9, 51, 52, 56, 85, 91, 122, 123, 125, 126 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Bacon) (book)  150 Thundercats (Bass and Rankin Jr.)  160 THX 1138 (Lucas)  6, 22 n.32, 42, 58–64, 129 Tierney, Aidan  21 Time-Image, The (Deleuze) (book)  183 Titicut Follies (Wiseman)  62 Tobias, Scott  55 n.39 Topor, Roland  128 Towles, Tom  145 transparency, as social imperative  106–7 Truman Show, The (Weir)  84 n.57 Tsatsulin, Vladimir  12 n.22 Tucci, Stanely  85 ‘TV-Buddha’ (Paik) (installation)  115–16 autoptic ambiguity of  115–16 ‘Two Fiats’ (Richter) (painting)  134 U-matic format, significance of  170–2 ‘universal nightmares’ and psychic reality  120–1 Uroskie, Andrew V.  115 Usai, Paolo Cherchi  9

215

Valenti, Jack  140–1 Variety (magazine)  66, 76 ‘VCR Autopsy’  8 Venes, Donald  160 n.24 Verbinski, Gore  6 Verneuil, Henri  185 VHS  139, 156 n.6 obsolescence of  155 Vibration (Arden and Bond)  129 Vidal, Francisco  167, 169 video. See also individual entries as art  30–3, 56, 72–3 and broadcast TV compared  31, 32 estrangement and  55–9, 63 identity of  34 and literature  12, 128 medium specificity problem and  31–2 as memory technology  32–3 and painting  12, 124, 128, 133–4, 149 significance of  29–30 videotape and  30–1 Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism (Krauss) (article)  32 Video: The Reflexive Medium (Spielmann)  14 video cassette recorders (VCRs)  139–40, 143, 154 video censorship  143 Videodrome (Cronenberg)  6, 141–4, 154 video feedback  4 n.6 loops  13 videographic cinema. See also individual entries archaeology of  183–8 as metamorphosis of technologies  10 videographic colours  4, 9 n.16, 13, 22 n.32, 55, 150 arrière garde and  171, 179

216 Index colourization process in Viva la muerte  121, 125–7 Mnemopticon and  126–7, 130, 133 videographic psyche, emergence of  114–21 video image and psychic reality  119–20 ‘video-in-the-text’  12, 13 Videophile’s Newsletter, The (magazine)  140 videophilia  144–5 Video Revolutions (Newman) (book)  8, 34 video self-confrontation, significance of  103, 105, 108, 128 video signal, divisibility of  63–4 Videotape Techniques in Psychiatric Training and Treatment (Berger)  114, 116 video therapy. See Autopticon Vikram, Sitara  99 n.31 vilified videophiles. See home video Viva la muerte (Arrabal)  113, 121–8, 187 Walkie Lookie  88, 91 Waram, Percy  68 Wardell, Gareth  143 Warhol, Andy  30, 63 n.61, 115 Warner, Harry  68 Warner Bros.  3, 68

Wasser, Frederick  141 Webster, William R.  96 Wellbery, David E.  19 n.20 Welles, Orson  54 Westgeest, Helen  33 n.82, 74 What’s Up America  88 What is Media Archaeology? (Parikka) (book)  16 Wilde, Don  131 n.54 Willcockson, James  4 n.5 Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (Tashlin)  3 Wilmer, Harry A.  119–20 Winkler, Angela  145 Wiseman, Frederick  62 Woods, James  142 Yalkut, Jud  10 n.20, 114 You Asked For It  91–2 You Don’t Know What You Want, Do You? (Arden) (book)  132 Young, Paul  3 n.1, 23 n.34, 43, 65, 67 Youngblood, Gene  4, 10, 11, 56 Zabunyan, Dork  25 n.42 Zegers, Antonia  167 Zielinski, Siegfried  23–4, 163 Zimbardo, Philip  80, 81 Zinman, Gregory  133 Žižek, Slavoj  26 Zois, Christ L.  104 n.55