Movement as Meaning in Experimental Cinema: The Musical Poetry of Motion Pictures Revisited 9781501329845, 9781501329814, 9781501329821

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Movement as Meaning in Experimental Cinema

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Movement as Meaning in Experimental Cinema The Musical Poetry of Motion Pictures Revisited Daniel Barnett Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published January 2008 with Brill | Rodopi This edition published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017 © Brill | Rodopi, 2017 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. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Barnett, Daniel, 1944– author. Title: Movement as meaning in experimental cinema : the musical poetry of motion pictures revisited / Daniel Barnett. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Includes filmography. Identifiers: LCCN 2017003378 | ISBN 9781501329845 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501329838 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Experimental films–History and criticism. | Motion pictures–Aesthetics. | Motion pictures–Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.E96 B34 2017 | DDC 791.43/611–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003378 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2984-5                ePDF: 978-1-5013-2982-1                 eBook: 978-1-5013-2983-8 Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image © Daniel Barnett from “Endless” 1987–90 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events, and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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To G. C. Currey, A. Meader, E. Peters, E. S. Saslaw, K. J. Shah, and D. T. Vogt

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He would set a straight course, only to look back and marvel at his degree of error. —​JOHN LeCARRÉ

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CONTENTS

Foreword: Where Does This Book Belong?  x Preface: Arriving at the Scene  xiii

Introduction: Two Pictures of a Rose in the Dark 

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Part I  Modes of Perception and Modes of Expression 

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 1 First ideas in a new medium: the cinematic suspension of disbelief  9  2 One description of how the mind may move toward understandings  11  3 New paradigms and new expressions  12  4 Theories of meaning—​media, messages, and how the mind moves  13  5 The relevance of the mechanism—​lessons to carry forward from an already obsolete medium  13  6 Frames versus shots, surface versus window  16  7 What the surface of the screen can tell us about language  17  8 Language integrates our perceptions as surely as the nervous system integrates our sense data—​hallucination or metadata?  18  9 Letting the mind surround an idea: an introduction to Wittgenstein  19 10 Ascertaining understanding: what one language must evoke, another may stipulate (and vice versa)  24 11 Dynamic and static theories of meaning  26 12 Color, types of reference, and the inveterate narrative  28 13 The polyvalence of the picture  32 14 Meaning and mutual experience—​kinds of reference redescribed  33 15 What has art got to do with it?  35 16 A whole new way of reading—​the surface of the screen and the modulation of self-​consciousness  36 17 The anteroom of meaning and our conception of space  40 18 Meaning and mental habits  42 19 Assumed and earned meaning  43

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The spectrum of shared reference  44 The story sequence and the montage—​prologue  45 When the editor learns about meaning  46 Montage and metaphor  47 The imitation of perception  50

Part II  Dynamic and Syntactic Universals  25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

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Nonverbal universals  53 The polyvalence of the picture and the omnivalence of the movie  56 The description of omnivalence as a floating target  58 Dynamic universals: beginning, middle, and end—​a prologue  60 Language and the momentum of the body  62 Syntactic universals: interval, context, and repetition   64 The synergy of symmetry  70 Sidebar—​another parallel model and another speculative future  70 Formal references in music and cinema  73 The developmental leap—​keeping the referent a mystery  74 Resemblance and resonance  76 The subliminal pull of the flicker  78 Aural and visual cadence  79 The frame of the experience  81 Resonance among frames  84 Ancient history—​the medium as the model  91 Illustration, induction, and repetition  95 The material and the medium  103 Sonics and seamlessness  105 The private language machine and the evolution of a medium  107 Illusions and ontological linchpins  111 Delimiting an audience  118 Summarizing the singular window en route to the panoramic view  122

Part III  Considering Description: Tropes, Tunes, and Moving Pictures  127 48 The world of description  127 49 Recapitulation and prospectus  128 50 Shades of meaning—​another perspective on perspective  130

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51 Yet another perspective on perspective: metaphors, images, and pictures—​the linguistic hall of mirrors  134 52 Metaphor, image, and brain  145 53 Words are generated; image streams are wrought  159 54 The metrics of vectors and resonances  163 55 Two pictures of a nose in the dark  171 56 An obligatory sidebar on Eisenstein meets a structural allegory  178 57 Hearing the image and the inherent omnivalence of music  186 58 The organization of space in a model built for sound  202 59 The category across modalities  209 60 Similar to versus same as—​periodicity and category  219 61 Description, allegory, the heuristic dialectic, and a short bridge to the future  231

Part IV  The Moving Target  62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

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Digital ubiquity—​the memosphere and the mediasphere  233 Compression and consciousness  239 What medium?  244 Indeterminacy of translation revisited and context reconsidered  247 The reconfigured attention span  254 The synergy of the mediasphere  256 The search engine, the barker, and the editor-​in-​chief  259 A sidebar on consciousness  266 So, where is the screen?  267 The moving meaning metaphor  269 Working the method  271 From the grain to the pixel  275 Beyond the pixel—​an overview  279 A fond adieu  281

Appendix  285 Acknowledgments (With a Comment about the Bibliography and Filmography)  289 Bibliography  291 Filmography  296 Index  313

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FOREWORD: WHERE DOES THIS BOOK BELONG?

This book is not just about thinking of cinema as if it were a language but as if it were a growing number of distinct but related languages. So its essence is about trans-​linguistic, or metalinguistic, thought. But even more essentially, it is about how a dialectical way of thinking works with multiple, conceptual perspectives. Its style of exposition is meant to encourage the habit of shifting one’s perspective repeatedly and easily in order to get a fuller and more balanced look at the conceptual terrain. It is, as the cliché goes, far more about the process than the goal, the journey, more than the destination. The adroit switching of perspectives is one of the things that cinema is all about. Hopefully by the end of the book the reader will have gained a number of different perspectives on both cinema and language. Rather than proposing new theories, its goal is to foster new descriptions. The argument about whether cinema is or is not a language is moot from the perspective of this book. I am simply asking the reader to consider what we can learn from thinking of it as if it were a language. My insistence on using the term “language” as a description (rather than a definition) of cinema is based on a desire to project an equivalence among verbal language, music, and cinema in order to tease out the relevant similarities and differences. Cinema synergizes pictures, sounds, words, and music. The most straightforward way of organizing these elements is to copy nature, producing a representation in which the motion of the image creates its own narrative line. If the representation one wants to create is of a story, then the arrangement of the elements must be driven by the logic of the story—​usually a verbal logic. And since the presentation of stories has, so far, been the most obvious role for cinema, all of its elements have been developed to serve this verbal logic. This is a meaning style in which the conventions of cinematic logic are built upon the conventions of verbal logic, where meanings are expected to be clear and straightforward. Originally, this was the most obvious and direct approach for cinema to take. In relation to this verbal logic, the additions of musical and pictorial nicety are only illustrative. But if cinema is to give birth to new and different kinds of languages (or language-​like structures), it needs to shift paradigms and adopt new forms of organization.

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Why do we need new languages? We won’t know until we have them. There is one kind of meaning that verbal language has, there is another kind that music has, there is still another kind that pictorial representation has, and yet another that is the pure province of the kinetic—​the meaning of pure motion. Within each of these separate modalities of meaning there is vast potential. Music and language are organized very differently but they both exist in order to generate cognitive states in others. Cinema makes its particular contribution to the expressive mix not only by generating unique cognitive states but also by providing rapid shifts in perspective to the overall array of cognitive generators. Once one focuses on this contribution the range of experiments in cinema, from the pragmatic to the sublime, opens up. *** If my library were organized, where would this book go? Is it philosophy, is it theory, is it criticism, is it art? How should one take what I’m attempting to do? I think it could hardly be philosophy since it doesn’t practice the particular kind of rigor usually demanded of philosophers. I suppose it is theory of a sort, but theories generally imply a kind of closure that these ideas have not attained; nor do I  think they should. So I  don’t think of myself as a maker of theories. Besides, I feel like I need to distance myself from the traditions of the film theorist who automatically assumes that cinema is either a mode of representing or portraying reality on the one hand, or a way of telling stories on the other. Within that storytelling tradition and following from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure’s seminal work in linguistics, Christian Metz and others developed a semiotics of film, which made strong claims that film should not be considered a language at all. Here is where a shift in conceptual perspectives becomes very helpful and the attempt to elevate any one of these perspectives to the status of a theory, less so. Metz points out quite rightly, within his view, that there are problems with applying the analogy of language and the methods of linguistics to the study of cinema. The first has to do with the arbitrariness of the sign that is at the root of verbal language; the second with the consideration of minimal, indivisible units of which verbal languages are universally constructed; and the third with the idea that cinema is not normally authored as an everyday occurrence by ordinary people. In cinema it is clear that signs cannot be arbitrary because of the inherent resemblance between the lensed objects and what they represent; that a shot cannot be a minimal unit because of its inherent plasticity; and that films are made only by companies, not individuals. I am paraphrasing here, of course. I will add one more objection to this list. Films of the sort that the film theorists usually consider are parasitical on language in that they are derived from scripts or transcripts.

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Eisenstein, on the other hand, recognized the fundamental kinship between ideographic languages and the art of montage: the juxtaposition of simples to produce a complex whole that is the product rather than the sum of the ideas; the combination of two depictables in a way that references an un-​depictable. Buried in this thought we have the germ of arbitrariness in a potential language of cinema. Two signs, when juxtaposed, can carry meaning off into very different directions, and how we ultimately take them may be determined by a common, conventionalized usage or a unique context that will likely have an arbitrary component. In this book, I  am taking a very different series of perspectives in my approach to language and cinema from Metz. I am following a track that is somewhat closer to Eisenstein but is a good deal more radical. For me, and for the films with which I am concerned, the best description of cinema is that of an articulated image stream and the best description of language is simply the meaningful articulation of elements within an overarching structure. Under this description of cinema there is a very clear minimal unit, the frame. The work of this book will be to illuminate the power of this idea, and to speculate on how this perspective can ultimately point to one possible future development of cinema, a future where verbal logic becomes secondary and articulated pictorial and musical logics become primary. Under the spare description of language I’ve offered, there is no consideration of either grammar or rhetoric. I suspect that on account of the regularizing tendencies of cognition, both grammars and rhetorics of a poetic, musical, pictorial cinema will mature. But also, within the conception of cinema that this book espouses, when that happens, the most vital, vibrant, exciting, yet chaotic period in the medium’s development will have ended. Since my thinking about cinema has, for the most part, evolved from practice, I have presented my ideas largely from a first-​person perspective. This perspective also welcomes and relies on the first-​person perspectives of others. That is to say, it has become quite clear that ‘filmmaking’ is no longer solely the province of the corporation, and that the future of the medium will be determined by the collective work of many, many individuals; with meanings and idioms evolving in the free, unbounded, ad hoc rhetoric of a very public, two-​way medium. One especially exciting aspect of this future to me is that it will be determined not only by the users of alphabetic languages, but also by the users of ideographic languages. So, getting back to our earlier question: since this book is about something that really does not exist yet, that is, the kinds of conventional, cinematic usages upon which mature grammar and rhetoric bearing languages are built, this book is so much more a work of speculation than fact that I would have to place it in the corner of my library reserved for works of the imagination.

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PREFACE: ARRIVING AT THE SCENE

One evening when I was an undergraduate philosophy student, I went to a screening of short ‘experimental’ films made by individual artists. For the most part they were pleasant enough—​a couple were purely abstract animations that were more or less rigorous, some were colorfully symbolic or surreal, and some were simply, visually poetic. The last film of the evening, however, was both ugly and mystifying and ruined the feelings of light pleasure I  had gotten from the other films on the program—​and so I  stalked angry into the night. My bullshit meter had pegged. In fact I  can’t ever remember art making me so furious. The film was called Fire of Waters (1965) by Stan Brakhage. It was black and white, or more accurately just all middling grays. The images, as I recall, were shot out a window at night during a lightning storm with a manic-​jerky hand-​held camera. Areas on the surface of the film itself had apparently been struck both by stray light and static electricity, and there were what looked like water spots as well, which gave the turbid image an even more scabrous quality. Sometimes it would be entirely imageless—​dim, indistinct, indiscernible; and then there’d be a flash of lightning and for an instant you could see the panes of the window through which it was being shot. Sometimes, however, there would just be these jags of light that could only have come from a static electricity discharge on the surface of the film itself. The sound was equally obscure—​ mushy, scratchy, and largely ambiguous—​maybe rain, but maybe just dirt and water spots on the optical soundtrack. And then, toward the end, there was a rhythmic, higher pitched sound, one that I took to be a woman squealing under continuous sexual collision—​a sound that became progressively more recognizable and as well more agonizing in its approach and failure to climax. Immediately after the film, I stalked out of the auditorium in a huff, with the distinct sense that someone had been trying to put something over on me. Then, twenty minutes or so later (and fifty years after the fact I  still remember the moment with astonishing clarity), I suddenly stopped in my tracks and felt one clear conception settle on me; one that gave me a new perspective, both on that film and on cinema in general.

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The other films of the evening had all shown appreciation for the values of painting, poetry, and music, as one would expect of films made by individual artists. Ultimately though this film did also, but how it did worked only if you were able to conceptualize its materiality exactly as the author had: when we are watching the screen, we are watching the shadow of a physical filmstrip! I suddenly realized that the fire of Fire of Waters consisted both of static electricity in the sky, and static electricity on the surface of the film; the water was both the rain seen on a windowpane as well as the water that had directly left visible spots on the film. The woman that I imagined was straining toward orgasm on the soundtrack was working to bring these opposing elements, fire and water, together. At that point I recognized that the film was about the creation of new energy through a union of opposites, a union that occurs in the arms of its substrate. And a moment or so later I also recognized that because this truth hadn’t been all tricked out in prettiness or superficial beauty like many of the other films of the evening, it was all the truer for it. And finally I understood that this was an ode to film, to the substrate itself. What I had done—​or perhaps what had been done to me was simply to move my frame of reference: a perspective shift. I had shifted from seeing only the effects of a medium that usually was itself invisible, to looking at the medium itself—​and suddenly, therefore, I  was able to reflect on it through the metaphor of its own materiality. This happened at an especially fortuitous time in the development of my thinking because I  was just encountering, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, some very astute lessons on how to look at experience reflexively—​through the metaphor of another substrate—​language. This was the beginning of a chain of apparent truths for me: certain metaphors can lens experience, making new unities clear, and this constitutes a new perspective that can be compared with the old; a comparison that in turn produces new knowledge. This idea, let us call it intellectual parallax, can be applied elsewhere, in other analyses. At some time, perhaps a few months later, I realized that these analyses could actually be conducted in film as well as in language. And that’s what I began to do. The films that I made in the ensuing years are all heuristics that are thought out through the specifics of the medium. But that particular medium, 16mm film, is now obsolete. So this book is an attempt to frame out what knowledge those heuristics did yield that is not obsolete. Substrates change, but lessons can be inferred beyond them, both about motion pictures and about language.

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Introduction: Two Pictures of a Rose in the Dark

Two pictures of a rose in the dark. One is quite black, for the rose is invisible. The other is painted in full detail and surrounded by black. —​Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are philosophers of a certain stripe who are close to being artists, and artists whose pursuit is largely philosophical. Or perhaps it makes more sense to say that there are certain people whose drives and curiosities take them places that are harder to define, and ultimately they stand outside academic rubrics. The questions that both art and philosophy seek to answer are pretty much the same: “What’s really going on?” and “What do I have to do with it?” Their values are also pretty much the same: rigor, integrity and elegance of method, penetrating wit, and original insight. As well, both have very cozy (but distinct) relationships to analogy. The products, however, usually find very different forms, constrained by quite distinct traditions. Sometimes though, work simply refuses to sit squarely in any tradition; and occasionally, borderline works spawn traditions of their own. But for the most part, interdisciplinary work has a current to work against. For a time during the last few decades of the twentieth century a group of people met on a fairly regular basis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss interdisciplinary issues related to the sciences, philosophy, and the arts. They called themselves Philomorphs—​the lovers of form. At the one meeting I attended, a teacher of art history from Harvard showed his very personal artwork to the group; and discussed its relationship to his professional life as a scholar. The pieces were all pencil on paper, but it would be a touch misleading to call them drawings. They were formal explorations using only one wedge-​shaped mark, millimeters long, swarming in rigorous, yet ambiguous

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patterns across the surface of a page. Every piece used the same mark in an entirely new exploration of the way binocular vision assembles ad hoc patterns. Was it art? Was it psychology? It didn’t really matter to the assembled what it was called. Each discussed the work from the perspective of their peculiar background. As a filmmaker, I  found it notable that the spatial ambiguity in many of the arrangements induced a visceral sense of movement even though the images were clearly static. One might call that observation aesthetic, or psychological. It could easily be taken in a philosophical direction if we were to consider how to make a judgment on what to call that motion, where to place it in phenomenological terms. This was the first time the art history professor had ever shown his personal work to any group, though he had been doing these visual experiments for many years. He hadn’t, he said, because he felt that sharing them in an art context would engender misunderstandings that would destroy the private ecstasy of their production. However, he seemed to feel that this group was protected enough that the work might simply generate a discussion that could help his investigations. After all, these were all people who understood the huge range of questions that can be approached through a formal apparatus. I felt I understood his reticence well. He was learning something slowly in a private process, which when ripe, he might finally share with some audience or other, in some form or other. As far as he was concerned, he had embarked on a rapturous exploration, and it wasn’t especially relevant to him whether it was considered art, or some other sort of thought. At the time, I was teaching at an art school, and the work that I was doing was being attended to in the tradition of art. But as far as I was inwardly concerned, I  was carrying on in another tradition entirely. The principal questions I wanted to answer grew out of an orientation I had picked up from philosophy of language—​mostly the analytical philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and W. V. Quine. But I had decided that the most fruitful tack I could take in my explorations would be to switch media and so, as I began to do my work in film, I  mostly thought of my films as general language explorations. But film is recognized as an art medium and not an arena for philosophical investigation, so the academic contexts I found myself in were all art related. This affiliation was emphasized by the fact that other artists seemed to have little trouble finding my film work intelligible, interesting, and useful, whereas it gave most philosophers headaches. To this day, although I’ve always had trouble identifying myself as an artist, I have much more trouble thinking of myself as a philosopher, and I suspect that this book, though philosophical in both nature and intent, will be of more interest to thoughtful media-​wrights than to philosophers. And though its central conceit is cinema, I suspect it will be of little or no interest to dramatic film buffs and theorists. I reference no actors or directors,

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except occasionally, casually and in passing. The filmmakers and films I do talk about come, for the most part, from a tradition that eschews the labels, protocols, methods, and social circles modeled by the movie business. But the films and filmmakers that I am concerned with do share traditional affinities with other arts; arts that have a solid, albeit less central, home in the culture, and which also happen to have a history of love/​hate relationships with academe. Experimental film of the past century tended to be a world of affinities among, rather than affiliations of, autonomous and unincorporated thinkers in the avant-​gardes of poetry, painting, drama, dance, conceptual art, and filmmaking. Here is where the reader may encounter a clash of protocols: Whereas academic philosophy is considered to be the result of a long and deeply interwoven tradition—​a dialogue among scholars who assiduously reference and criticize each other’s ideas, the avant-​gardes of the arts have the opposite tendency: of breaking with tradition as radically as possible and launching out into the blue, albeit with integrity and rigor, whenever they can.1 This impulse guided my initial approach to filmmaking more than forty years ago; and, to a degree, that is the protocol I will attempt to follow here—​even though really it’s an understanding of the nature of language I’m after and not art. In this book, it will be my goal to explore how a simplified attitude toward the idea of meaning can convey, with some equivalence, how words, pictures, music, and motion make meaning happen; and cinema is merely the kettle in which I brewed this thinking. My motivations are not just to understand what the various offspring of this almost brand new medium (in art historical terms) has to offer, but I also want to explore how having new intellectual tools can influence the way we come to learn and understand in general. In the late nineteenth century, when our ability to create a flow of quickly articulated pictures opened a new expressive domain, it actually opened a new analytic domain as well—​new domains from which we could not only learn to communicate with one another in a novel way, but also make more sense of the world. It is the analytic domain more than the expressive that 1 Gene Youngblood’s manifesto, Expanded Cinema, carried the rhetoric of the era when much of the work I discuss was made. The following quotation is a bit polemical for me, but it uncovers a popular and influential sentiment of the times: “All art is experimental or it isn’t art. Art is research, whereas entertainment is a game or conflict. We have learned from cybernetics that in research one’s work is governed by one’s strongest points, whereas in conflicts or games one’s work is governed by its weakest moments. We have defined the difference between art and entertainment in scientific terms and have found entertainment to be inherently entropic, opposed to change, and art to be inherently negentropic, a catalyst to change. The artist is always an anarchist, a revolutionary, and a creator of new worlds imperceptibly gaining on reality.” (This section was reprinted in Video Culture, a Critical Investigation, edited by John G. Hanhardt, 1970: 230.)

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I wish to explore in this book, though they are closely connected and there will be a lot of straying back and forth. As the particular conceptual/​cinematic tradition of which I  write was gathering steam in the United States in the 1960s, the films and filmmakers were called variously, avant-​garde, underground, experimental, art, or personal. Other names work as well or better, depending on where we want to go with them. For now though, I’d just like to specify that I use the term “avant-​garde” to refer to the protocol of leaping into the blue wherever possible, “experimental” to refer to works whose main reason for being is to learn something more or less particular, and “personal” to refer to those works that focus on film as an individual and autonomous medium, as distinct from collaborative and corporate work—​that is, film used for the idiosyncratic expression of a kind of poetry, or of a kind of intimate discourse or two-​way communication. If this cinema is a public medium at all, it barely is one. What makes it cinema is the machine it uses. This book focuses mostly on the work I consider to be experimental and whose experiments and implications are in two areas usually considered to be in philosophy’s precinct:  ontology and epistemology:  How can the machine of cinema inform us about the nature of being; and what can it tell us about how, and how much, we know the world? Personal film however, film as both poetic expression and intimate discourse, provides the social context for what I have to say, as well as having major implications for the intimate world of digital motion pictures. All communications have audiences, even if only the speaker. The audience2 is one way of defining the work, so it might be helpful if I describe (in a somewhat roundabout sort of way) the situation in which the audience for personal/​experimental films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s dwelled (we’re pretty much talking past tense here) and as well, some characteristic attitudes that the makers held toward the users. I’ll begin by describing one of my most recent experiences of extremist cinema and then move further back into my personal history. I had just arrived at the place in writing this book where it was finally time for me to tackle the complex and multifaceted role of repetition, both in film and in other communication acts. To refresh my memory and get some inspiration, I put a DVD containing several super-​8mm films ported over to digital into my laptop. The act of transferring work that was built on the premise of an analog/​mechanical medium from a plastic filmstrip over to a digital/​magnetic medium is, at least from the point of view of ontology, a shockingly complex process, one which to me has always been sodden with counterintuitive 2 The subject of audience is complex. Here I don’t mean the general population toward which a film may be directed, but more specifically those individuals who feel they have received a clear communication from it.

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compromise. So, I was not particularly looking forward to the experience—​ it was information I was after. I had last seen most of these films many years ago in their original incarnation and was pretty sure, while I  waited for the disc to load, that they wouldn’t captivate me while playing back on the screen of my computer as they originally had in a theater. I was wrong; and it was very useful and important for me to understand why I was wrong. The movies I was about to look at were among the most eccentric I have ever seen. They were made by the American filmmaker Saul Levine in an era when eccentricity was considered a prime value unto itself. That was in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it appeared world culture was coming apart at the seams, and many people considered that giving birth to outlooks diametrically opposed to the status quo was, ipso facto, noble work. There was the Cultural Revolution in China, the riots on the streets of Paris, the revolt against the War in Vietnam, and perhaps most important for the arts, the explosion in the use of consciousness-​altering drugs. Also, the thrust of thinking was definitely away from the markets of culture (though weirdly enough those markets turned and followed—​for a time). I began to make films in the late 1960s; and in the 1970s and 1980s, for almost a dozen years, I worked alongside Levine, first when we both taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton, sharing a studio, then for eight years at Massachusetts College of Art, where we taught together and, broadly speaking, shared an approach. Since the substance of what I am writing here comprises what I learned mostly from the process of making and thinking about my own films, and since I am constrained, for the most part, from using my film work as direct examples in this book, I will often use Levine’s as a stand-​in. Not only is he clearer from my point of view, but also, more important, he’s not me. And of course, I use the work of many other filmmakers from whom I’ve learned as well. One thing that was not only a given, but a very fundamental given for many workers in our tradition, was that with film, images can be articulated in ways that are both surprisingly musical and ‘lingual’—​that is, like the fine-​grain (phoneme-​level) articulations of language. This realization, arrived at independently by many people, and developed as a cultural collaboration, opened vast new latitudes and longitudes for exploration. While Levine did (and still does) experiment widely and freely, he largely saw film as a medium for intimate communication and expression, and chose to work in the smallest, handiest, and least expensive gauge possible for reasons that were aesthetic, but also political. This mutually identified group of personal filmmakers all shared a dream back then. That dream has finally, ironically, and no thanks to any of us, come true: the dream of capturing in moving imagery, those personal sentiments one might otherwise jot on a note, either to oneself or someone else; casual, off-​hand, immediate, person-​to-​person, yet intimate and explicit in

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the ways that only moving pictures can be, touching on those happenstances in life that are fundamentally ineffable; either keeping them for future reference or passing them around the world—​and doing it as easily as we might do it in words. Many of Levine’s films are in fact called “notes,” a reference both to their offhand character and to their musical awareness. One of the films I looked at that afternoon, sliding it into the DVD slot in my laptop, was called Notes of an Early Fall (1976), punning, as Levine loved to do, on his having been prematurely “offed” from the faculty of the first university where we taught together. By then, the late 1990s, it was clear that the particular dream of universal access to the production of cinema had nearly been fulfilled, but I hadn’t actually experienced it for myself as a purely aesthetic event. That is, I had never before seen one of these media self-​conscious films in a digital rendition until the afternoon when I put that DVD into my laptop and the screen was taken over by a long-​lost sight: The first image on the screen was that of the red Kodak logo-​stripe running vertically through the white background of the super-​8 film leader—​an artifact almost always edited out of films. This, for many years, was the beginning of any experience of watching ‘home movies.’ This film leader, which always announced the start of an individual three-​minute roll of film, was often, in Levine’s films, the signal of the start of an idea. And then, across thirty years of time and three thousand miles of space, I was plunged into the semi-​deranged and wickedly astute consciousness of one Saul Levine. There once was a time when the motion picture image was held captive in a dark room. Now it’s both out in the light and all over the place. Not only are moving images everywhere but the spectrum of potential audiences and potential uses has become both sharper on one hand and more diffuse on an other. Sharper because the medium has become far less expensive and easier to use which has made it ubiquitous, so ‘target markets’ can be much more highly defined. More diffuse because moving images can now proliferate in the most surprising ways and show up in the most surprising places. The dream Saul Levine and many others shared included the idea that, like speech and writing, film could be a two-​way medium:  people could make films to one another, and therefore film could be as living a language as any other. Well now, digital-​cinema can be, and is. Yet before I put that DVD in the laptop, I had considered that the differences between a film seen in a theater and movies loose in the ambient light of the world was so huge, intellectually and perceptually, that I was shocked to discover how effective my experience of the work was, as seen in the ambient light of my office. Context is king when it comes to making meaning as far as I’m concerned. The historical context in which these films were made was one where conversations about levels of consciousness were commonplace, and in many ways you could think of these particular films as descriptions of

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discreet (more or less) levels of consciousness. Well, ‘description’ isn’t really the right word—​‘inducement’ is a little more like it. Unlike the big screen “movies,” which seduce their necessarily wider audiences into the alternate realities proposed by their authors, these films often simply manifest the state of mind, the level of consciousness inhabited by the author, and it is up to the viewer to hitch a ride. As I’ve indicated, I always considered that I was doing a kind of philosophical exploration with my filmmaking, especially in the most experimental phases of my work where my audience was explicitly and only myself. This was well before there was an online special interest group for film-​ philosophy, a subspecialty with a journal and a bibliography. So, instead of reading a lot of books and articles, I was mostly looking at the work of like-​minded filmmakers. Philosophers love to declare and debate whether an x really is a y, or is only pretending to be. Two of those kind of debates in which this book will become entangled have to do with whether or not any particular film can actually do philosophy, as they say, and if so, what are the criteria for this. The second and more fundamental question is whether or not cinema is another kind of language. I will not attempt to recount the short history of those battles here; I’ll just let the rest of this book clarify my position. They are both interesting questions. As to whether or not film can do philosophy I provide examples that will allow readers better purchase on making their own decision. The answer to the second, I believe, is colored by two things: whether we are talking about films that are driven by a script, a narration, or some other verbal framework; or are we talking about films that are primarily picture-​driven. But my answers are also colored by my attitude toward this kind of question in general, and in this book you’ll see that I take a very distinct position on the questions of definition and distinction that philosophers characteristically ask. Rather than attempting to define the subject with some wall of exclusion, it is my goal to describe the subjects in ways that are interesting and fruitful:  What happens when we think of cinema as if it were a language? What would a cinema that is a language look, feel, and taste like? What sort of tasks would it approach and accomplish? What kind of progress can we make by teasing out this analogy in thought experiments? What about those films that set out self-​consciously to explore these questions? Finally, besides the new perspectives we gain when we consider film as if it were a language, I want to explore what confusions this consideration might lead us into. My prejudice is to say that considering films which are word-​driven as a language engenders more confusion than it’s worth; and, on the other hand, considering films which are picture-​driven can engender some distinct and broad illuminations—​especially if handled with care, consideration, and a semblance of precision. And so I will not treat “narrative films” at all and

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let them remain in the locker of my own prejudice. Therefore, what follows is my consideration of a picture-​driven cinema thought of as some kind of analog to music and poetic, verbal language, with the hope of extracting lessons about the nature of all three media. The interaction between the two predominant methods I’ll use can be illustrated by the following thought experiment:  Imagine that instead of having two eyes that are side by side and aimed, more or less, in the same direction, we have one eye that is stationed off at some arbitrary distance and positioned so that the center-​of-​gaze can be directed back toward the other eye. Would we then have the kind of parallax that not only gave us a very different kind of depth perception, but also made it easy to hold opposing intellectual perspectives in our mind simultaneously? The idea of shifting perspective in order to gain insight, as a model of how to treat inquiry, has great appeal to artists, and tends to worry philosophers, given as they are to the ‘necessary and sufficient,’ ‘is or is not’ style of analysis. From this philosophical point of view, the analyses in this book might well seem specious. After all, can we really specify how the views from our separate eyes sum, any more than how the two terms in a metaphor manage to yield a third perspective? These are things we appreciate more than we understand. *** After this book was originally published and I  read it over some years later I  realized that not only could I  have made many of my arguments and explanations clearer but that there were two aspects of these questions that I had completely ignored and into which I had new and I believe original insights:  the relationship between the different ways that cinema and natural language relate to the idea of tropes and their descriptions; and the relationships among musical form, cinematic form, and memory. Over the subsequent years I not only explored these two ideas but tied them together, integrating these important questions throughout the original text and restructuring the entire book.

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Part I Modes of Perception and Modes of Expression

1.  First ideas in a new medium: the cinematic suspension of disbelief Here, at the beginning of the twenty-​first century, it’s easy to think that movies have been with us forever, but in fact they’ve just popped over the historical horizon. Not only that but movies have been followed so quickly by other still newer ways of moving ideas around—​using some combination of words, moving pictures, and music—​that the original cinematic paradigms have become the stuff of archaeology. With movies, the acquisition and dissemination of new kinds of knowledge and entertainment entered a very new kind of flow. And with the World Wide Web that flow has taken on the flux and interactivity of an atmosphere, influencing and influenced by everyone. As a result of these new media, language has crossed a threshold, and communication has taken off in a way that we’ve not experienced since the development of writing. These new media may ultimately be nearly as important to the overhaul of the way we parse life, as was the origin of speech itself. A bit of speculative history, and of somewhat less speculative cine-​ archaeology might be useful in order to get a handle on the nature of that threshold, with the hope of taking a peek beyond; but also (and this is a very powerful undercurrent in my motivation) with the hope of gaining a deeper understanding into how the nature of language itself influences perception. That is, what is the relationship between language and epistemology—​ the theory of knowing; and language and ontology—​the consideration of states of being? Another way of asking this most fundamental of all questions: How does the language we use influence the way we perceive reality and how much we can know?

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We can bring this hazy and abstract question into focus on one level with a simple example that I am stealing from W. V. Quine’s essay Speaking of Objects (1969: 1) wherein he imagines a language in which every manifestation of a rabbit is followed by a vocalization: gavangai. He asks us how we are to translate the utterance, if we are in our very first encounters with the speakers. Does it mean rabbit, the way we think of rabbit: that is, the manifestation of an individual member of a species that English speakers call ‘rabbits’? Or does it perhaps mean rabbit the way we use the word ‘rain,’ as in the local manifestation of a general condition, for example, what we might translate as “it now rabbiteth” (3)? This perhaps, oh-​so-​subtle distinction actually underlies something quite grand—​how does the language we use influence how we divide the world into pieces: How do we parse reality? Let us imagine a past so remote that there is almost no evidence to help us in our imaginings. Let us try to imagine what the origins of language itself might have been like, and how our grasp of reality might have changed around that new tool for organizing perceptions. Let us imagine that the development of specific vocalizations combined with ostention, or pointing at things, was the beginning of both description and reference. Words would, for the first time, allow us to relate to one another about things that are not present to be pointed at, and to relate about where they were when we saw them last and as we might see them again. With words, the ability to reference the not here and not now would begin our current conception of space and time. As the making of marks evolved (possibly hand in hand with speech), including bent branches, cairns made of piles of rock, blazes cut into tree trunks; then, perhaps, diagrams, maps, pictures, and ultimately pictograms and alphabets, it seems obvious, but still interesting to note, that of the above systems, it’s the maps, diagrams, and drawings, the imitative markings rather than the learned writing systems or the stipulative markings, that have a greater universality and therefore can be read pretty equivalently by people of different languages and cultures. As the stipulated and learned marks ultimately became translatable from culture to culture, and language to language, and then became mechanically reproducible, the nature of culture and the spread of ideas took incremental but immense leaps. When the first movie of a train approaching a station caused viewers to bolt from its path, a brand new level of reference came into being and the “cinematic suspension of disbelief” was born. This level so accurately caught the action dimension that it transcended the imitations of diagrams and the stipulations of language systems in immediacy and universality, giving cinema the unique referential boost of an illusion as well as the greatest instantaneous cross-​cultural range of all media. This medium doesn’t just entrain the nervous system, it tricks it. But, like the evolution of the mark, there are other paths besides the telling of stories for the articulation of

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pictures to take—​en route to referencing a world of which we have not yet dreamed. Such a powerful new medium bursting on the scene opens lots of questions about both the past and the future of our media. Did music and speech evolve together? Was the beginning of time, that is, our ability to refer to the “not now,” also the beginning of rhythm as a way of carrying information? Or was it the other way round? Did the use of rhythm for marking time initiate the language process? Does the fact that we can now articulate pictures, inflecting them in time, giving them rhythm, mean that their referential power can synergize with the inflections of music, and speech—​not just sum, but synergize? Can our new ability to reference the world by articulating pictures tell us anything about the way speech and music each refer to both our shared external and our otherwise private internal experiences? What can we learn about ourselves, about the nature of perception, and the nature of meaning, from the optical illusions that power the transcendence at the heart of cinema?

2.  One description of how the mind may move toward understandings You could say that with language, we parse experience, using the ‘parts of speech,’ into objects, actions, qualities, and relationships. But, given the complexities and subtleties of life, we know there is more to experience than that. With the quantifiable, we parse experience in ways that are more precisely analytic with mathematics, binary codes, or other logical schema. Beyond that, many of our experiences are not parsed at all, but absorbed, ridden with, meditated upon, stewed over. We allude to what we can’t parse in words with labels like the unconscious, the subliminal, the gut, the infinite, the sublime, the divine and collectively as the ineffable. The ineffable, we parse in ways that tend to be more private and personal:  with music, pictures, gestures, other body language, and so on. But throughout history more and more previously unparsed experience has been solved, so to speak, as each of the great paradigm inventors (Zeno, Euclid, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Cage, etc.) have changed the ratio of the unparsed to the pars-​able and served up new, discreet gobs of an up-​ till-​then un-​sharable aspect of the universe. How does parsing the world connect us to it? At this point I will revert to an almost unbearably simple description of what happens when we feel that we’ve made sense of something: Where the mind can move, there’s meaning. If we get it, we can move on; if not, we get stuck. A grammar describes how words are assembled to make meaning, but describing how our minds move (metaphorically speaking, of course) under

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the influence of words, or for that matter music, pictures, and expressions of other kinds, could not only show us the how of meaning in general, it could also show us the many structural similarities, or homologies, in the ways that all language-​like structures reference our shared experience of the world; ways that lie beyond the instruction manuals of grammar. This comparison among modalities is not meant as an equation or prescription, just as a way of looking at the problem of meaning—​a scaffold or heuristic rather than the foundation of a theory. I’m suggesting that our perception of the orderly (meaningful) flow of sound that is speech is analogous in a simple and discussable way to those symptoms of meaning that allow us to follow music: rhythm, melody, harmony, and form; it is also analogous, in the visual realm in the same rich but simple way, to the associations that power the path of the wandering eye and produce the sense of meaning we derive from the space we’re in, or the pictures we look at. In each case, if we move with it, it makes sense. If it makes sense, we can move with it. We can not only ask: “Where are we going?” but also: “Why are we able to go with something?” Most of all we can examine the vectors, and characterize the qualities and implications of the movement.

3.  New paradigms and new expressions Whenever a new paradigm, for example, the invention of calendars and clocks, the heliocentric view of the heavens, Euclidian Geometry, Cartesian Coordinates; or a new medium, like alphabetic writing; or a serious evolution of an extant medium like the development of perspective in painting emerges, there’s the possibility for a new style of mental movement, new kinds of meanings and the parsing of revolutionary new knowledge. These are not just meanings that have been ported over from a previous paradigm or medium, those that are able to address old experiences with more accuracy, cleaner analysis, or more resonant exposition, but meanings of a whole new kind, able to open realms of new experience and knowledge; knowledge that is only sharable under the light of the new paradigm or in the voice of the new medium. This doesn’t happen easily or directly. In order to bring new realms into shared meaning, a context needs to be created for the participants. With new paradigms there is often a struggle to integrate them into our extant worldview. With new media we usually port over the meaning-​laden strategies from close relatives in old media first, a familiarity that helps the mind move into the new flow. So motion pictures first adopted and combined the idioms and methods of documentary photography on the one hand and stagecraft on the other.

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4.  Theories of meaning—​media, messages, and how the mind moves The attempt to analyze meaning in language has a rich and checkered history, and the threshing floor is littered with examples of partial and broken theories. Each might seem to satisfy a different picture and cover a particular case of reference, but all break down in the transition from the specialized worlds of scientific or philosophical inquiry into the general world of “ordinary language” and break down even further as we move toward the ineffable—​ meanings that cannot be put into words: meaning in art. The failure of some of the most powerful philosophers of the past century to reduce the meaningful vectors of ordinary language to logic and mathematics reflects a mistaken impression among some that ordinary language is a looser subset of a system of precise relationships, rather than the other way around—​that logic and mathematics are in fact tighter subsets of what is actually and operationally a very loose and somewhat ad hoc system of relationships. Therefore I am approaching the problem of how human beings create referential relationships from the perspective of meaning as an ad hoc occurrence, within a highly structured, but utterly elastic context: everyday speech and action. The extremely simple model of meaning as mental movement (referential movement) will be my way of getting closer to understanding a central process in cognition, in a way that allows broader and clearer equivalence across those realms where philosophy of language, semiotics, and art criticism jockey for understanding. I choose cinema as my paradigm because it combines meaning vectors from language, music, and pictures simultaneously, and also because it capitalizes on the inherent meaningfulness of pure movement. My approach is embedded in the belief that an analysis must pinpoint and then penetrate the essence of any medium if we’re to understand what possible referential relationships that medium has to offer.

5.  The relevance of the mechanism—​lessons to carry forward from an already obsolete medium When the very early filmmakers Lumière, Griffith, and Méliès picked up the new motion picture medium, they each analyzed certain aspects of its potential to accommodate their own particular ends and came up with distinctly different strategies for making meaning. Of the three, only Méliès, a magician by trade, looked to the essence of the mechanism for his inspiration. Méliès realized, like the others, that the foundation of cinema lay in

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its ability to generate an illusion that conjures certain aspects of experience. He also realized, as did the others, that out of our innate predisposition to promote the suspension of disbelief, we simply filter out the aspects of experience that cinema fails to mimic. This predisposition gives us an experience of a world, not just an experience of pictures that seem to move. But Méliès had a further realization:  that if the camera exposed only one frame at a time the capacity for creating illusions would be greatly enhanced. Méliès understood what lived between the frames. Our nervous systems process visual information relatively slowly compared to the cinema machine’s rate of articulation, and that allows two separate illusions to power our experience of cinema. When we are in a movie theater we don’t notice that we are really sitting in darkness a majority of the time, a darkness punctuated by the brief1 flashes of light that carry the shadows of a filmstrip to the screen. We don’t realize this because when light gets painted on our retinas, the excitation persists for longer than the actual stimulus. It’s a phenomenon called persistence of vision and it prevents us from seeing the dark between the frames. Analog movies, after all, originally consisted of a stream of still images sequentially replaced in the gate of a projector where the closing of the projector’s shutter hides the process of replacement from us. This is the first part of the basic illusion—​the illusion of continuity in an experience that is actually intermittent. Another illusion, which psychologists call the phi phenomenon, has to do with our tendency under some circumstances to see two sequential images as a modification of one image rather than as a comparison or disjunction between two. So, under the right conditions, we read spatial displacement as motion. Persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon are the two most prominent, linked, fundamental features of our visual system that empower cinema. Méliès was a magician by trade, and so he deeply understood the cinema machine’s latent power for deception. The illusionist’s craft depends on the eye being relatively slow. He recognized that by photographing one frame at a time, he could make substitutions in the content of images at his leisure, making his “hand” very much faster than the eye of the beholder. The same essential understanding of cinema’s capacity for high-​speed image replacement that gave Méliès and his followers (like the workers at movie special effects companies) a tool for making entertaining illusions can also create relationships of a very different kind, changing entirely the way that meaning seems to course from object to subject through the medium. We can think of persistence of vision as a measure of the time it takes a packet of light to get processed in the brain, allowing the image to remain

1 Actually, each film frame is projected three times for 8.5 milliseconds each, plus 5.4 milliseconds of darkness between each burst, for a total of 42 milliseconds for a single film frame (a TV frame lasts 33 milliseconds) (Dennett 1991: 103).

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with us while the shutter of the projector is closed and the screen is actually dark. The phi phenomenon is simply the expression we use for our still mysterious perceptual tendency to read substitutions as modifications under certain conditions. If the length of the interruption that’s required to substitute one picture for another and its accompanying darkness were any longer, we’d perceive those brief moments of darkness as a flicker. If the images being substituted exceed certain spatial or content parameters, we perceive them as a cut between two distinct images or as a comparison between two distinct states of affairs, rather than as a transition between different states of one affair: that is, the ‘same’ image, moving. If we want to do some intermodal stretching, we can think of these basics of the cinema experience as having analogs in grammar, with the phi phenomenon providing a kind of benchmark: That is, if there is a perceptible difference (but one that’s not too extreme) between frames, we perceive motion—​the province of the verb, and if we see no perceptible difference between frames or if the differences are insignificant, we read stasis—​objects—​the world of the noun. If the difference is barely palpable, not quite perceptible or not a featured aspect of the image, then perhaps we have something like an adverjective, another expression of quality beyond those described by the words ‘color,’ ‘texture,’ ‘composition,’ and so on, one that includes a moving image’s character of movement or repose. If we want to carry on with this comparison between parts of speech and components of cinema, a truly risky but riotously informative exercise, we might want to think that where the phi phenomenon characterizes the object, action, and quality rooms, persistence of vision characterizes the existential state—​the experience of a continuous existence assembled from a precisely fractured stimulus; we see a continuum, where there really is a discreet series of pulses—​persistence of vision as the existential qualifier, TO BE. Persistence of vision demands we ask:  Is reality itself seamless (as it seems), or is consciousness the seamless representation of a reality that actually consists of discreet packets that are too small or subtle for our senses? Cinema explores the existential flip side of Merleau-​Ponty’s famous observation that the ability to perceive similarity in difference underlies all perception.2 Each new frame continues our expectations of coherent space and time so long as there are significant similarities. We expect that the space and time within the frame will obey the same rules of coherence as the space and time outside the frame. But it doesn’t have to. In a cinema that is self-​aware of its mechanisms of illusion, the existential qualifier, certainty of being, is itself articulable.

2 Many of the underlying themes in my thinking come from the general mind-​set Merleau-​ Ponty outlines in his extraordinarily influential and comprehensive book Phenomenology of Perception (1945/​1962).

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6.  Frames versus shots, surface versus window If we take cinema (as most people do) primarily as an extension or illustration of verbal media, that is, a potentially fuller and richer way of telling stories, then regarding it as composed of a sequence of still frames holds virtually no interest for the dramatic filmmakers that followed D. W. Griffith and no meaning potential for almost all of the documentary films that followed in the tradition of the Lumière Bros. Beyond animators and special effects artists, the individuality of the frame harbors values few narrative filmmakers care to articulate. However, there is an alternative view of cinema that has at least three distinctive perspectives:  This view honors and mines the sequence of frames as prior to the sequence of shots; it recognizes the screen as a surface upon which light is projected before seeming to become a window into another world; and it also places extreme value on continuous reinvention and self-​reflection at the same time as it eschews the escapism and unreflective seduction of the dramatic cine-​narrative. But although this tradition will never usurp the mainstream cultural momentum of narrative cinema, narrative cinema itself continues to slowly absorb some of these same artistic values and insights; insights that ultimately amplify its unique storytelling power. With the illusion-​producing draw of cinema’s window being so powerful, we normally pass right through the medium to the message. We reassemble the world of the well-​made film on the other side of the screen and we do it with the same effortless ease with which we put together the world around us. In this process, the screen itself winds up being apparent to us as rarely as is the assembly of our personal experience. The qualities of the surface, those photographic values like brightness, contrast, color saturation, color balance, palette, and the general modulation of light across the frame, are usually subtle qualifiers of the story-​illusion we’re watching and almost never center stage. We’re rarely aware of them, almost never really tuned to them. So what happens when the surface of the screen itself is worked to encode meaning, without the immediate seduction of a window into the escapism of the story? What can we learn from a cinema where the meaning-​laden gestures live closer to us than the far side of the screen and where the world beyond the screen has the same oblique relationship to the point of the film as the purely pictorial qualities of the image do in the story-​cinema of transparent illusion? One of the first things we realize is that one often has to learn and relearn how to read—​how to see—​a non-​seductive cinema, a cinema that is not transparently depictive.

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7.  What the surface of the screen can tell us about language Music and abstract painting move us in ways and touch us in places that stories can’t reach. Their powers are unique and rooted in the nature of their respective media. We might, however, envision a purely pictorial cinema, a cinema with only passing reference, if any, to verbal structure, that by virtue of its a-​literal nature might ultimately develop an emotional power and reach equivalent to that of music and the subtlety of visual discrimination characteristic of abstract painting. I’ve always found this aspect of cinema’s potential enticing. However, a primarily pictorial cinema can also be a tool for linguistic analysis. It can, through the mechanisms of comparison and contrast, give us some insight into the workings of natural language—​allowing us, through the stream of images qua images, to examine the lens of verbal language through which we normally see the world, and to do it with less than the Kantian gyrations required when using verbal language itself. Also, thinking first about the surface of the screen allows us to un-​ dramatize cinema, to lose the obligatory flow of a story, and use the screen to explore larger questions of epistemology and ontology rather than just those foibles of humanity that the cinema of transparent illusion illuminates so well. These two perspectives on the movie screen, as either a surface or a window, are soul mates and occupy two lobes of a very powerful and moving dialectic, but my own motivation for exploring the medium suggested the many possibilities I saw in their ontological differences—​the difference in their degree of reality. Recognizing the priority of the surface became, for me, both more honest and more tenable. The suspension of disbelief came to seem to be a denial of the obvious. As a voracious reader and lover of the way words tell stories, I  saw the cinema of seduction and illusion as usurping the imagination of the reader. But more important, I was excited by the potential of an articulatable surface to stand as a tabula rasa of expressive possibility; a plane of articulation that had been well prepared by the evolutions of music, painting, poetry, and conceptual art. Unlike the cinema of the window—​ which was already constrained by the imbedded narrative grammars of speech, theater, and photographic exposition, the cinema of the surface, as well as being nearly drama free, is nearly grammar free. This almost untouched surface, this barely explored machine, seemed a really spectacular lab for scoping out what a new way of parsing the world might reveal.

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Perhaps above all, the approach from the surface of cinema invites the serious consideration of phenomenology and the psychology of perception as they impact the creation of meaning.

8.  Language integrates our perceptions as surely as the nervous system integrates our sense data—​ hallucination or metadata? We can think of grammar as the analysis of a habit—​our habitual way of putting things together and sharing them in words. Our embedded grammar is so habitual we normally can’t remotely come close to any experience that’s unfiltered by it. What would we learn, however, if we could look at the world like the ‘enfants suavage,’ who supposedly have not heard human speech? Or, better yet, what would we learn if we could experience the unmediated and as-​yet-​unorganized sensory stimuli from the external world—​before they are fed by the senses and lower brain to the cortex and its playmates? This has been a driving question for philosophy, science, religion, and art as well as direct chemical tinkering. It’s easy enough to make a superficial inventory of what’s required for sensory experience—​that is, the sensory precursors of consciousness: light reflects off objects, enters the eyes, goes to various places in the brain to be organized, along with other sensory cues as a representation of a body in a space that contains objects. Sound emanates in air pressure differentials that drum in the ear and then various places in the brain; similarly with taste, smell, touch, and body position, along with who knows what others. The unmediated stimuli, the light waves, sound waves, and so on, as they interface with the relevant body parts, are turned into nerve impulses, a raw something we call ‘sense data’ on the way to being processed and integrated with stimuli from the other senses and with our accumulated sensory database—​so that, organized around what we regard as “the moment,” we simply have the world, as a whole, in a glance. It’s not perceived as a world fabricated from synchronous sensory processing; it’s just the world as we know it, with a sensory coherence that’s usually only challenged by tricks, trauma, hallucinogens, or pathology.3 And here’s the root of my obsession with the idea of parsing the universe:  Except under these extraordinary conditions we don’t get to parse experience experientially. We can scrutinize the process at some remove

3 Oliver Sacks writes in his essay “To See and Not to See” in his novel An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) how the purely sequential sensory world of the blind makes the simultaneous perception of objects in space foreign to the point of incomprehensibility.

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with analytical and technological tools. We can even isolate our separate sense impressions to a degree, but we normally have no access to the raw sense data. All it takes to change one’s perspective on existence and for consciousness to somehow extend outward toward our sensory surfaces is to get some raw sense data in the face. The so-​ called consciousness expanding aspect of LSD refers to its potential to make accessible to consciousness many things that our nervous system usually handles completely behind the scenes. Depending on dosage, the experience of a unified external world can dissolve in a confusion of progressive synesthesia. Sight and sound become confused first; smell and touch, seemingly more primally wired, became confused later. As the disintegrative effects of synesthesia continue, one moves into a realm where stimuli of all kinds are not quite raw, but the ability to decode which stimulus comes through which portal seems to be at the level of deduction or guesswork, not knowledge. Finally, if the dose is high enough, some people have reported experiencing a universe without the screen of self at all, lending credence to Aldous Huxley’s notorious and seemingly ridiculous assertion that the brain’s first function is as a filter that protects us and allows us to operate selectively in the outrageous noise of the universe. At any rate, experiencing progressive synesthesia throws into relief the various and particular mechanisms required to construct experience from an unmediated universe, and provides a painfully sharp glimpse into at least some of the nervous system’s mechanisms of mediation. But something else gets thrown into relief as well:  the mediating force of language. Not only can one see how the brain might be thought of as a filter, it becomes much clearer, amid the unparsed swarm of sense data, just how pervasive a filter language is: sense data have no names. In the analysis that follows, cinema stands as one possible way to get beyond the filter of language as regards existence, while keeping the filter of the brain more or less intact.

9.  Letting the mind surround an idea: an introduction to Wittgenstein When I first became interested in these questions I was lucky enough to find a teacher who introduced me to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–​1951) great posthumous work, Philosophical Investigations (1953). Among the many things that appealed to me about it was the plasticity implied by the fact that Wittgenstein himself never felt it complete enough to publish and so it was compiled from his notes by his students Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach after he died.

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But more important, my encounter with the P.I. was my first encounter with a thinker who understood that an inquiry into any philosophical subject has to begin with an understanding of the medium in which that inquiry is launched and in which that subject is framed. He not only grasped many of the implications of this understanding and abided by them in his analyses, but he mined that understanding to produce an incredibly powerful perspective on language. Another thing that appealed to me was that he repudiated his early work, Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus (1921), a work based in the assumption that the foundations of language could be found in, and reduced to, logic. This assumption had seemed to me, at the time I read the Tractatus, to be not only misleading, but also not nearly self-​reflexive enough to handle the tricky fluidity with which language actually works. It seemed to me, however, that the Philosophical Investigations, and how they came to be, demonstrated Wittgenstein struggling to do, by brute intellectual power, something very similar to what Buddhists try to do through meditation—​to pierce the veil of language. And like many Buddhists, he never really seemed to feel that he had actually arrived at anything more than a method. So he never published the epigrammatic questions and observations that appear in the P.I. and that his students collected and organized from the note cards on which his thoughts were recorded. In the Philosophical Investigations, these thoughts appear simultaneously in German (W’s first language), and on the facing page in an English translation. Using a lens to look at itself is a useful metaphor for how tricky it is to examine the language in which the really big questions are posed. Presenting the same questions in the two languages in which Wittgenstein thought is an example of how we can gain the information embedded in a shift of perspective, like the depth information gained in the parallax of binocular vision, or the conceptual depth we gain from the comparative terms of a metaphor or dialectic, or, in this case, the differences in an idea that gets expressed in different languages. Wittgenstein’s work is full of question-​laden comparisons, as is cinema’s root potential—​comparison, the study of similarity in difference. Since we learn a language as the precursor to almost everything else we learn, sentience is pretty completely en-​webbed by language. The way we put ideas together with words, the very fact that there are such things as phrases and sentences, reflects the conditions under which we can know anything. But it’s the big and unquantifiable questions, the subject matter of philosophy, that struggle hardest to escape from the meta-​organization of our ‘mother’ grammar. So I became fascinated by the possibility of examining the world through a medium whose ‘rules of grammar’ were still to be discovered, that is, a universe not already broken down into things, actions, and qualities, a universe

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that could be parsed afresh. Cinema seemed to me to offer a magnificent opportunity to play freely on a grammatical tabula rasa. I thought perhaps that with a cinema alert to the power of the individual frame and especially conscious of the surface of the screen, even my most raw exploratory forays might cast a beam. So I began a course of experiments within the film medium whose lessons I have attempted to translate here into words. But first, a word of caution:  the concerns of the various distinct disciplines—​art, religion, philosophy, science, and mathematics—​often seem to us to dwell in separate homes in the mind, requiring unique approaches and apparently different kinds of understanding. Stumbling around in one field, then using techniques of analysis from another is perilous. But there is something very important to be gained: access to the world in between, the overlapping areas in the Venn diagram of consciousness. When the terminology of our disciplines becomes walls that isolate these interstitial thought zones, feeling zones, and belief-​tinged zones from one another, these zones become invisible. Still palpable, but invisible. Undisciplined. However, it is in these zones that images speak. So, when I  began to think of cinema as a natural investigative tool of post-​Wittgensteinian language analysis I knew I was blurring edges, a practice that guaranteed all sorts of trouble. Not only was what I  wanted to investigate beyond the realm of what even I considered philosophy’s normal focus,4 but what I was interested in involved not just our overt expressions in language, but invisible behaviors as well:  those quiet recognitions we have that aren’t necessarily shared but which may have been, or may ultimately be sharable through cinema. When I first began to make films the process of learning to think entirely in moving pictures engendered in me a deep sense of disconnect, the disconnect that comes from being (in some sense) mute. However, consciously eschewing verbal perspectives while entertaining questions posed in words can create a very productive parallax of its own—​if one can remain open to the prospect. After Wittgenstein realized that he was mistaken in his belief that logic is the foundation of meaning in language and mistaken as well in the belief that if you are precise and exhaustive enough, language can nail down life itself, he came to understand that, outside of the highly constrained and artificial worlds of scientific or philosophical discourse, language depends on loose hinges to work well: He ultimately saw that ambiguity, though rife, is not a problem but a resource. He saw that meaning in ordinary language is continually forged from ambiguities on the anvil of context; and also that meaning in everyday discourse is ad hoc: We are constantly shifting our style 4 After all, I admired the logical positivists for kicking metaphysics out of philosophy and I took Quine seriously when he constrained our examination of language to its expression in behavior.

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of reference depending on whom we are speaking to, or even what part of a narration we’re engaged in. The ‘picture theory’ of meaning embedded in the Tractatus Logico-​ Philosophicus is a distant example of a ‘correspondence theory’ of meaning—​ a group of theories that, in general, claim that words are like labels for items on a shelf somewhere.5 With this theory the early Wittgenstein attempted to shift the blame for meaning to mental images. That is, he claimed that the word ‘chair’ conjures a mental image of a chair. But, as we’ll explore, there are fundamental differences in the way images and words mean. While the crisp geometric clarity of the Tractatus may have an aesthetic appeal, I feel it works better as art than philosophy, that is, it is the magnificent drama, elegance, and scope of his attempt that transfixes; a drama about a beautiful mind at a crossroads in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein’s later work, undertaken after a period of intense and reclusive reevaluation, enters the much more plastic world of provisional meanings, the edges of meaning, and the ambiguity of questions and as well as of perceptions. His fascination with the gestalt-​like ‘duck-​rabbit’ shift in perception, wherein the very same line drawing can be seen as a rabbit’s profile facing right, or a duck’s facing left, demonstrates the function of naming in the process of fixing a perception (Figure 1). Wittgenstein’s (1968: §548) insistence on probing slight differences in the way a simple negation may reveal the underlying character of the relationship between words or states of affairs reveals his interest in the multiple roles of context in meaning, for example, “What is the difference between the two processes:  wishing that something should happen—​and wishing that the same thing should not happen?”6 Or “Two pictures of a rose in the dark: one is painted in full detail and surrounded by black, the other is all black—​for the rose is invisible” (§515). And his use of delicate and probing questions reveals his respect for a very different kind of relationship between language and the world, one almost the opposite from the world of logic or mathematics where one expects certainty in outcomes and in which propositions are listed with the rigid dependency of theorems. Or, as Wittgenstein (1921:  Part  7) famously wrote, “Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence.” He understood that, if we want to use prose to directly question the nature of existence and the character of knowledge, ignoring ambiguity ignores a 5 Plato’s concept of how words mean, his theory of universals, is an example of a correspondence theory. He held that there was a universal chair that actually exists in a realm beyond our ken, and that allows us to fit all the specialized individual cases of chair into it, so we can recognize and call it out, whether it was big, small, fancy, plain, stone, or wood. 6 There is in my mind an uncanny echo of this question when we compare the English to the German:  Was ist der unterschied zwischen den beiden Vorgängen:  Wünschen das etwas geshehe, und wünchen das dasselbe nicht geshehe?

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FIGURE 1  Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit. Credit: Author.

most fundamental aspect of how words work. Perhaps for this reason it is the aesthetics of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that have been so powerfully appealing and perhaps have contributed even more to his legend than his philosophical insights have informed subsequent philosophy. The same goal he set out for the Tractatus, that is, to “describe everything that is the case,” powered his later work as well, but the radical change in the direction he took gives us a yardstick by which to gauge cinema’s ultimate potential for carrying out an analogous line of questioning. The shift from the Tractatus to the later work was a shift from the mind-​set of an engineer to that of a performance artist, and his attitude toward parsing everything that is the case widens dramatically. In fact, the idea of the case, and what it can actually hold, changes for him completely. Instead of seeing the relationship between language and the world as a series of well-​defined, static contingencies, he came to see it as a pragmatic and flexible relationship. He also realized that the case isn’t something you can just lay out and be done with. His new philosophy had to be performed: the performance of close (and seemingly continuous) reexamination of particulars. What is the case, in the case of language, just keeps on changing depending, among other things, on how and why it is being used. Art also requires the performance of that same quality of reexamination. Cinema, for me, came to be about finding a way to describe the next new set of cases, the cases that are beyond the groping descriptions of ordinary, philosophical, or even poetic language. Wittgenstein articulated (barely) and confirmed (thoroughly) my own attitude to what language is and how we use it. Since that attitude informs my view of cinema’s possibilities, I’ll need to describe it.

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10.  Ascertaining understanding: what one language must evoke, another may stipulate (and vice versa) Where a dictionary definition is the paradigm case for stipulated primary or secondary word meanings, meaning can be evoked in many different ways. Making the distinction between stipulated meaning and evoked or implied meaning gives us an important analytical tool in probing where we can go with motion pictures that we can’t go with words, or for that matter, any other medium. As well, making the distinction between the poetic and the expository use of pictures and words clarifies the importance of two very different kinds of reference, a difference we can mine in our quest to understand the communicative nature of pictures and other nonverbal media. In general, meanings in expository language are thought more often to be stipulated by dictionary definitions; and in the poetic use of language meanings are more likely to be evoked or implied by some usage peculiar to that instance of use. In terms of the way the mind moves (just a metaphor, remember) when meanings are stipulated, the interval between the occurrence of the stimulus and the moment when we can continue or move on in our processing of the thought or sentence is so brief and the vector so direct, it’s unnoticeable (if we have our normal, immediate mental access to the stipulated or dictionary defined meaning). More simply put—​we don’t even notice that we understand the words we understand. Evocations and implications, on the other hand, often have multiple, ambiguous, or indirect meanings, and so they may generate a kind of mental processing which we overtly notice as we turn the various possibilities over in our minds. Meaning’s not an issue as long as things are clicking along just fine and we’re processing information pretty automatically, but when there are problems, like not knowing the definition of a word or the meaning of a reference, we are obliged to figure out what went wrong. Here’s where the process gets interesting and the problems can become instructive. Communication problems pop up and get resolved all the time. How they get resolved has something to do with whether, on the one hand, we’re in control of the process, like when we’re reading the printed word or perusing a picture on a page; or, on the other, if we’re just tagging along after the stream of incoming data, like when we’re watching and listening to the events of the world—​including the unimpeded flow of recorded media. Conversation is an intermediate case, because we can control its flow to some degree by interrupting a speaker and asking for clarification. (It’s been said that German is a bad language for conversation, since it’s hard to interrupt when the verb’s at the end of the sentence!) When we don’t know the stipulated meaning of a word in a text, and we don’t have a dictionary, we may make guesses from nearer and further

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contextual clues, and then move on, more or less insecure in our sense of the meaning. If we have a dictionary, the flow of thought gets diverted while we look the word up and sort among the principal, secondary, tertiary, and so on meanings listed, rejoining the text as we fit the most applicable meaning into the flow—​and then move on. For the most part, the circumstance where meaning is clarified by a speaker or a dictionary is the model for resolving these questions. Even if we leave aside the more slippery aspects of making sense of implied, vague, or ambiguous references and we just focus on our processing of words whose meanings are precisely stipulated, how do we come up with a general description of failed reference; or successful reference, for that matter? Correspondence theories of meaning, which view the process as a matter of connecting labels with the objects, actions, and qualities for which they stand, will, in the case of a failed reference, posit a disconnect of some sort and then look either to the sending or receiving end for the problem—​either the expressive term and its situation or context, or our ability to process it. When Wittgenstein abandoned the outlook summarized by the Tractatus and its picture theory of meaning, and adopted the analytic process culminating in his various posthumously published works, he made an enormous shift in his way of looking at questions of reference. Instead of looking at the specific terms of the relationships, which entails positing mental ‘objects’ and a system of relationships to real objects, he moved his focus onto another dimension—​and began to examine WHERE, WHEN, and HOW references get made. Instead of looking at the syntax and semantics of communications, he began to look at how we make sense of the rest of the world and the rest of behavior. After all we don’t learn our mother tongue the way we learn foreign languages. We learn it in the same way we learn to understand the rest of our environment. He introduced two ideas that especially illustrate the shift: ‘family resemblance’ and ‘language games.’ Both ideas reflect a continuum between language and the rest of behavior; an emphasis on the circumstances of life preceding the verbal context; and a preference for the temporal and the flexible in language. Both of these ideas point to the fact that the way we make sense out of something is really a global kind of process, and that communication acts are not just embedded in propositions and other linguistic circumstances, they’re part of a life, the circumstances of which determine meaning every bit as much as syntactical circumstances. He began to look at the borders of meaning with equal intensity as the center. The idea that we learn to use words in the same way we spot family resemblances eliminates the need for a theory of universals, or any other correspondence theory for that matter. Think of when we learn that this is a pine and this is a spruce or a hemlock, an oak or an elm, a birch or an aspen. We learn to make the distinctions at the same time we learn to use the word and vice versa. We can say that there are classes and subclasses of objects, and define the objects in that taxonomical kind of a way—​but often this

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doesn’t describe how we learn them and doesn’t necessarily describe how we use them. Learning to use words exercises a perceptual mechanism (perceiving similarities in differences and vice versa) that apparently we inherently are predisposed toward developing. Wittgenstein suggests that the way we learn to use the word ‘game’ is an example of family resemblance at work. Is there a universal ‘game’ whose various and particular local manifestations we all come to recognize, or did we simply learn to recognize that certain kinds of behavior resemble each other in peculiar ways? When we use the word ‘game’ in relationship to a collection of behaviors, we are saying, for one thing, that these behaviors belong to a group, and that they are separated from the rest of life by a set of stated or implied rules, specific to that game. The perspective encourages looking at the language act of using the word ‘game’ rather than focusing on the distinctions that go into making a game a game. The idea of a language game means to suggest a kind of semipermeable meaning boundary, where some rules from the general case apply and some don’t: Most games imply winners and losers, but not all; or prizes, but not all; some are played in teams and others solo, and so on. So following this kind of indeterminacy, the idea of a language game implies that there are often soft edges to the roles that words play in different contexts and that language games play in different conversational situations. Language games come into and go out of existence. We may play several in a day, or even several at once. Language games let us hop from context to context with only the slightest referential clues. They facilitate economy in communications focused around a particular set of circumstances. There is the language game of the football player, and a related language game of the Monday morning quarterback. There are language games related to different types of music, and for different occasions for meeting, or not meeting, as in the case of the language game pilots play with air traffic controllers. Almost every job has its language games, marked by the lingo and jargon that flags the particular games. There are intimate language games and formal language games. The very idea of a language game highlights the shifting and dynamic character of meaning in ordinary use, and emphasizes the role of context in shaping meaning, from interpreting homonyms to reading irony. If we understand that references are constrained by a situational boundary, we are poised to look at the temporal character of meaning. The shift in emphasis is from what something means to what it means when or where.

11.  Dynamic and static theories of meaning Forming a temporal conceit rather than, or in addition to, a spatial conceit for the locus of meaning helps us come to grips with a number of central questions, among them: (1) What are some of the differences between

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stipulated (dictionary-​defined) meanings and evoked or novel meanings that are suggested by a shift in context, such as often occur in metaphor or in poetry? (2)  What are some of the differences between the way we derive meaning from expository prose, and the way we expect to derive it from painting, music, and film, or for that matter from the world at large? Going back to our simple criterion for meaningfulness or successful reference in ordinary language, the moment when I say to myself, “I know where to go with this,” or when, in a different situation, the conversation that I’m involved in continues smoothly, those moments reflect a perspective on meaning that’s based on a temporal metaphor, in terms of which we describe what goes on while I am processing input, during the moment before I know how to move on. It allows us to see language as one of many input/​output responses in the array we have for handling life. It helps us focus on the problem of describing what’s going on during the time I’m processing experiences, including language, and creating responses. It helps us include the variables of life’s shifting contexts and expectations in forming verbal understandings and not just the context provided by syntax. If you simply describe meaning as that which goes on in the time it takes to know where to go with something, then the differences among how we come to understand the meanings of words, pictures, music, or the whole array bundled into a movie can be compared on an even field that allows us to tease out useful similarities and distinctions about the referential character of each. On this even field we can set up temporary little dialectics, little heuristics, or temporary intellectual scaffolds to give us an overview or cast a bit of light on those moments. By exaggerating the distinction between poetry and prose, between a cinema of the surface and the cinema of the window; by presenting the continuous spectrum parsed as a splayed and incremental dialectic, we can localize, illuminate, and portray a zone of interaction among various referential styles, whether stipulated or evoked, whether representational or abstract, read or spoken, seen or heard, familiar or exotic. We can begin to think about reference and meaning in terms of vectors of movement in various dimensions. When we read an easy narrative, a well-​written news account, for instance, or when we look at a picture whose contents are clearly recognizable, we process the stimuli with the same flow as we process the world. It happens unawares. Likewise, looking through the window of the movie screen gives our minds little or no resistance so that we move easily through sequences or scenes, either as passive observers, or as active speculators. We are instantly at home moving through the implications of a world presented by images of recognizable objects. We describe this unambiguous, automatic, unconscious understanding as having short, direct, and relatively simple vectors of reference. With this description we don’t even have to address the question of correctness of meaning, since we’re just describing speed, direction, and distance, not accuracy—​or even success.

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We only stop to question the image if we don’t recognize the objects, or if there has been something ambiguous or incoherent in the editorial (syntactical) style, or if a mystery has been intentionally laid upon us. In any of these cases we might still possibly visualize a circumstance in which the apparent incoherence more or less slowly becomes comprehensible, as it did in my screening of Fire of Waters. We can then think of the poetic, whether verbal or pictorial, as having vectors of reference that are peculiar, or multiple, or complex, or messy, or elaborate, and so on. Perhaps, and in my mind this is most important, if we visualize reference in terms of process, action, or motion—​that is, as essentially dynamic—​we are less likely to be led into the conceptual traps of the correspondence theories and dictionary definitions. Instead we are looking at the particular instance of usage in order to evaluate its function in context; with our analysis extending through an ever-​widening spread of contexts.

12.  Color, types of reference, and the inveterate narrative Blurring for a moment the distinction between still and moving pictures . . . Before color became commonplace we read black and white movies with as equivalent a fullness of illusion as we read color films today. We moved effortlessly through the black and white image to the relevant detail of the story—​the image as a framework for the projection of our imaginations and our understanding of the action—​in some ways not that different from the way a novel builds a world for us out of descriptions and dialogue. Perhaps this read-​through process of synthesis is not all that different from the process we use to assemble a world from sense data. So how does color change the meaning of an image? There are at least two perspectives. One, from the maker’s point of view, is that there is another variable to modulate, to generate information, and therefore, possibly, meaning. Another, more apparent from the viewer’s point of view, is that we lose important variables around which we would otherwise project our own meaning. The color in films fills in those particular variables for us. Black and white movie buffs, who find a unique satisfaction in watching black and white films, may feel that the experience of filling in that dimension of color with their own projections is ultimately a more pleasurable experience: The color gives and it takes away. Our propensity to project meaning into our environment, to naturally and unconsciously connect the dots that both allows us to see past the absence of color in a black and white movie, and to fall for perceptual illusions in films and, for that matter, to function in life, is at the heart of the inveterate narrative character of motion pictures.

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We learn to follow complex stories on the screen quite easily—​breezing through ellipses and fabrications where one character may be represented by several actors—​one for the face and medium drama shots, one for close-​ ups of hands, another for feet, another for the dangerous stuff that’s not really seen clearly. We read images that were photographed months apart and on opposite sides of the planet as having happened at proximal times in the same location. When a film is in black and white, we see the requisite gestalt wherein the absence of color is quickly read as insignificant. After all, we are adept at using representations of all sorts.7 The expectation that color films will resemble life brings two qualities up for question: color balance and color palette. Since the direction that overall color balance appears to deviate from what feels normal to us depends on a baseline, the mixture of colors we subjectively read as white, which in turn depends on the color of the ambient light, our perception of overall color balance is relative, and to a degree, dependent on expectation. Color film, and, for that matter, color electronic imaging systems (without automatic white-​balancing algorithms in action), have no such relativity. The color that we usually describe as white, both under the relatively orange light of an incandescent bulb (3200 K) and under the much bluer average of sunlight (5600 K), is seen by imaging systems like film and video as quite different; and the fact that we are continually normalizing how we see color says something about color’s relatively limited potential for reference in general. One day I got a glimpse of how both color balance and palette inform the referential character of the movie image in a way that made me think of Quine’s observations about how different languages constrain our ontological reach in different ways aka the gavangai/​rabbithood indeterminacy.8 I was visiting a friend who worked as a projectionist at a multiplex theater where the projection booth was in the center of a huge circular sliced pie of auditoriums. I could walk around the core of this circle and see nine films being projected simultaneously. As I strolled casually around, looking at the images, not hearing the sound, and not participating in the stories, I was struck most forcefully by the fact that all nine films appeared to be printed on the same print stock, and therefore shared the same ultimate

7 Gregory Currie, in his book Image and Mind (1995), analyzes these issues very differently and in an extremely detailed and thoughtful way. While he makes interesting distinctions between believing and imagining, between cognitive and perceptual illusions and types of representation, his very style of analysis seems to me to fall prey to a dangerous hypostatization of the language used to describe our fundamental relationship not only to film, but to experience as well. More problematic, however, is his technical naiveté regarding the what and how of the medium. 8 And from a very different perspective, Benjamin Lee Whorf’s (1956) principle of linguistic relativity, which asserts that the structure of a language influences the practitioners’ manner of understanding reality.

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color palette.9 Moreover, the slight differences in the color temperature of the arcs in the projectors gave each image an overall cast that was far more powerful in attracting or repulsing me than was the (unavailable) subject matter. I realized several things then: (1) how severely this restricted color palette constrained one dimension of cinema’s possible expression. (2) The fact that it’s not a dimension very relevant to the kind of evoked meanings that might be central to any of the stories is a testament to the power of narrative as it wells off the screen and therefore barely constrains the kinds of stories the screen can tell. (3) The shift in color temperature, so obvious when seen in close comparison, quickly becomes moot when that comparison fades. I believe that this is indicative of how hungrily we stick our hands into the narrative’s glove by automatically normalizing color toward an expected standard of white or ‘white balance.’10 So, the overall color balance of a projected image has an interesting relationship to what the image conveys. It is one of those qualities that’s supposed to be invisible; and usually, if we do notice it, the effect it has on us dissipates after a moment or two. We learn to ignore it unless it’s extreme. However, color balance even when ignored is very likely to influence how we feel about something. In many narrative genres an extreme shift in tonality, like an overall sepia wash that tells us to regard the image as an artifact from the past, acts like a word or clause modifying the main thought in a sentence, and the sepia shift in this case is a temporal modifier, indicating that there is a vector in the image toward the past tense. An image with a distinct sepia cast gives us the opportunity to see how the kinds of references among which we had distinguished in language (stipulated, evoked, etc.) can be thought of in pictures. The association we have (as of the dawn of the twenty-​first century) with old photographs is that they turn yellow with age. Therefore taking a black and white image and adding a yellow or sepia cast to it suggests that it is old. We could have called this a suggestive reference the first time we saw it, and we might have recognized only the slightest hitch in our being able to go with its meaning upon presentation. However, this adding of sepia to the tone is such an 9 Filmmakers and photographers have a wide range of choices of materials to work with and so are quite used to making comparisons among them as to the way they variously render color. Color timers, the people in film labs and digital studios who manage the color of reproductions, be they release prints on film or digital masters for other media, have a very refined and complex language for discussing the scores of variables in which they trade. 10 In the old, old days, before the short reels of movie prints were spliced together, films were projected on two projectors side by side, and at the reel change, one could often detect the shift in color balance between the arcs of the two projectors. This is the most distinct example that non-​professionals would ever experience in the shift in color balance in a movie—​a shift that once again becomes moot after a minute or two, unless the difference is egregious.

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obviously imitative gesture that there is a fairly universal agreement about what it means: “What we are being shown here is old.” Probably also for this reason, this gesture seemed to have become a convention quite quickly, and now I think we could quite easily say that we read it automatically: it has become stipulated as a by-​now-​recognizable grammatical element in the medium. To generalize, you might call this element “tense-​inflection by hue shifting.”11 Sometimes images are color-​shifted to indicate a dream with a peculiar emotional quality—​in which case you could think of this as a suggestive or evocative reference. Or in the early days of low-​speed color film stocks when a blue shift was used to tell us we’re supposed to read the action as going on at night,12 we could actually say that, for a period of time in early cinema history, this reference consistently worked by convention and therefore could be said to be stipulated. How the inflection of any color will be read is always determined, in a narrative, by the editorial context (the story, the music, and the audio/​visual architecture) in which that inflection is placed. We might even say that since a narrative gains the motive power of a gestalt, or unified interrelated world, as it gets filled in with story detail, we read these gestures according to the context that the gestalt provides. The momentum of an adopted gestalt allows narrative filmmakers to stretch vectors of reference in complex ways without causing too many eddies in the stream of meaning. We plunge the hand of understanding into the glove of the narrated gestalt in a way that credits the color palette, but not so much the color balance, unless the off-​ balance shift is a clearly intended gesture. What we might gain by not sticking our hand quite so obliviously into this glove is a more discriminating sense of color appreciation, giving us wider scope when propelled by color vectors. Just as an increase in our vocabulary opens possibilities for understanding and expression, so does a more refined or a more complex palette. But, on the contrary, and perhaps just as important, we also realize how the limited palette of one film stock can successfully reference a wider experience of color than is actually present—​again, without our being aware of it. That is, we naturally expect that this limited palette will cover our actual experience of the world, as did the even more limited palette of black and white. The consideration of color palette is the job of the art director and/​or the director of photography of a movie. In animated films, the color palette is usually still more carefully considered and adds a powerful but subtle vector of meaning, in its own way.

11 Interestingly, in digital cinema a similar inflection can be found in the ability to make digital footage look like scratched film footage as a software preset. This can be seen either as a tense-​inflection or as a source inflection of an image. 12 Technically known as ‘day-​for-​night.’

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13.  The polyvalence of the picture So far, we’ve made some limited comparisons between a couple of the referential styles of verbal language and some of the possibilities for the moving picture image to reference the world. The static image has its own set of somewhat different referential characteristics. Whereas with prose there is a direction to the flow that is structured by the habits of the language we are using and is codified by the rules of its syntax moving us along in an orderly fashion; and with the narrative motion picture image there is the much more cross-​cultural and universal flow of expectation created by our experience of life, as rendered by cinematic convention. By contrast, in a static image, there are few rules about just how the picture will move the eye, and thereby move the mind. Not to mention the fact that the motion picture image is almost always presented in a context,13 whereas the context for a still image is often much less determined. Pictures come in all kinds. Some are composed with great thought and intention, some with none; some by people, some by machines. Some are clear, others, for various reasons, are not. These are a few of the many reasons we usually aren’t all that comfortable with the general question of what a particular picture means, and why we’re tempted to answer that question by trying to tell the story of the picture, or say what it is a picture of by identifying the salient subject. How clear the story in a picture happens to be and how many different people and different kinds of people find that a given picture tells the same story, or identifies the same salient subject, are two criteria by which we can judge one aspect of the referential character of the picture. But when we do tell a story that we feel is contained within a picture, we can ask the same referential questions that we would of a sentence or a simple movie scene: what’s stipulated, what’s specified, what’s evoked, what’s alluded to, what’s suggested?14 Often, however, we just look at pictures without considering questions of reference beyond the obvious, the representational—​what it is a picture of. We usually do this without projecting any dimension of time or temporal flow into them. In fact, we most often accept that one of the basic, unique properties of a still picture is that it can allow objects and actions to escape from time, so we may regard them without thought of what happened before, or what might happen next. In fact, there might, in special cases, even cease to be happening going on within the frame, only that singular existential and self-​referential dimension of the image: The image references itself and thereby becomes an object of reflection or contemplation. The happening happens in us. We often regard pictures as objects unto themselves and since we are less used to thinking about what objects mean than what actions mean, 13 Part IV of this book is concerned with the various ways this is changing with the portable digital image. 14 Please try to think of these terms as merely descriptive and not prescriptive or categorical.

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we are more comfortable asking what a picture means when it does imply action or causality. Implied movement implies meaning. But when we’re thinking about those pictures that don’t imply action or causality, they truly can become like objects in our environment.15 Landmarks and icons have conventionally accepted meanings. A  stop sign has unequivocal universal meaning, as much because of shape and color conventions—​but a certain chestnut tree has particular meanings only for the people who have met beneath it, unless all the folks in the town have come to public agreement, and maybe put a plaque on it. The shared meaning of the chestnut tree will usually refer to a common or mutual experience people have had in its presence and since objects are less portable than words, their meanings are harder to stipulate. We often call images that come to have shared meaning, icons. If we think about how long we look at pictures, or how simple or complex our reactions to pictures are and where they make our minds go, or how they move us emotionally, we soon realize how widely variable are their relationships to the contexts in which we experience them. We understand how many different ways there are for context to interact with the character of the image and influence its meaning for us. We also realize that if we look at a picture more than once, quite likely we will look at it somewhat differently in subsequent viewings—​different aspects becoming significant, giving us the chance to actively compare the relationship among the things, people or actions pictured; or just allowing us the opportunity to revel in the tonalities and the textures. The theory of cognitive habituation, however, suggests that the longer we have a picture in our casual environment, in an unchanging context, the less likely we are to see it in new ways. I’ll refer to a picture’s potential for creating multiple simultaneous references to all the things it contains, and all the ways we might normally characterize it, in all its various conceivable contexts, as its polyvalence. Polyvalence, the potential to make multiple simultaneous references, whether in pictures, figures of speech, or figures of music, is central to the meaning-​ style of the arts. Polyvalence also alludes to another aspect of art: its ability to evoke very different things from different people.

14.  Meaning and mutual experience—​kinds of reference redescribed The success of a reference tests for the mutuality or commonality of experience; that is, if it is successful we can judge that those involved have had significantly similar experiences of the objects, terms, or expressions to follow 15 Of course, even pictures that do imply action can, by virtue of familiarity, become more like objects in our environment than serving as depictions of a different space and time.

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what has been said, written, or shown. When a stipulated meaning works, we know that all parties have learned, one way or another, how to use a particular word. The success of this kind of reference is usually (correctly or not) assumed. The same goes for a specified meaning, although these are more likely to be checked, since successful references and accurate references aren’t necessarily the same thing. In this case, the reference will only be successful if all parties know the same set of measures and have applied them appropriately. When and if a suggested meaning is effective (by evocation, invocation, implication, analogy, or shift in tone of voice, for instance), it tests the degree to which we have the experience of making the same kinds of associations and judgments about the relevance of something. Although it’s almost as easy to assess the success of suggested references, it is usually much more difficult to corroborate their accuracy. But we’ll see that they also test for the commonality of experience. So how do we normally corroborate successful reference? Appropriate verbal or other behavioral response is all we’ve got. Then how to answer the question:  “Does this mean the same thing to you as it does to me?” is either obvious—​or the question is unanswerable. It’s obvious if you’re willing to accept a verbal or behavioral reaction/​response as an adequate assurance, and unanswerable otherwise. How little the obvious answer is worth usually escapes us, since it’s almost always worth enough. But given that the only criterion we’re stipulating for meaning so far is that it allows us to move on, as long as the conversation continues we believe we have adequate checks for success. As far as accuracy goes—​criteria for accurate reference are almost always situationally determined, often by closer attention to behavioral response, by contract, or by some other sort of even more serious adjudication. When meanings are evoked or suggested they usually have a more tentative relationship to the continuity of communication than do references or meanings that are stipulated. We simply cannot corroborate as easily that an evoked meaning is shared, so in normal discourse we usually use evocative references for nonessential qualifiers rather than for more essential actions or objects. Normally we only use references that evoke actions or objects in poems or those intimate conversations that are based on a strongly assured shared experience on the part of the recipient.16 Evocations, analogies, and metaphors are like jokes: If you don’t get them, their point usually gets lost in the explanation, so there’s always some risk in this special kind of reference. (At least with jokes, you have a strong criterion for the success of the reference.) Simply presupposing that there’s been enough mutual experience for the success of an evocative reference creates 16 We will see in Part III just how loaded and potentially misleading a word ‘recipient’ is in this context.

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an implicit distinction:  The kinds of reference evocative language aims for assumes a shared experience that has, by definition, not been stipulated (i.e., explicitly learned, like the primary uses of words) but instead, absorbed along with other broader, more general, and often interior lessons in life; those lessons that move us toward the ineffable, yet still parsable. We use the word ‘affinity’ to describe how easily we can corroborate successful evocations with other people. Affinity is usually cumulative, and understanding affinities is a strong component in the maturation of a human’s ability to communicate.

15.  What has art got to do with it? There is yet another kind of reference that’s in a whole league of its own and which assumes a very different level of mutual experience. It’s found in specialized, occasionally esoteric language games, and presumes familiarity not just with places, things, qualities, sensations, emotions, and dictionary definitions, but with a particular style of thought. (Mathematics, logic, art, many academic disciplines, and most religions are like this.) Whereas some theories of meaning have proceeded from the idea that ordinary language is a degenerate case of more rigorous systems of relation-​ making, like logic, I will enter the other door and posit, just for the sake of this thought experiment, that the referential structure of our daily talk is actually a more highly conventionalized, tightly stipulated version of the way we communicate in art, with both of these referential domains—​the ultra-​specified and the barely-​specified-​at-​all, evolving as parallel and interconnected streams—​ one addressing the outer world, the other the inner and extra worlds. Meaning in art sorts people for mutuality of experience in terms of being able to connect with particular works as well as for individual taste. We can have mutuality of exposure to art without any subsequent mutual experiences. (I can love a work and you can hate it.) As well, when referencing that quality of inner experience that is the province of art, gauging the success of a reference enters a world where the idea of affinity becomes a much more important component in the language game; in which case, body language may become inseparable from verbal language. As if the analysis of reference, hence meaning, weren’t difficult enough in this realm, the world of art has undergone incredible shifts over the course of the past century. As Paul Valery (1931/​1964: 225) wrote:17 Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action

17 Paul Valery (1931/​ 1964). PIECES SUR L ‘ART, “La Conquete de l’ubiquite,” Paris. Quoted from Paul Valery, *Aesthetics*, “The Conquest of Ubiquity.”

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upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. We can think of the art of this past century as one of those language games with a referential style of its own, one in which a major rule is that the rules must change. One impact that this string of births of all the century’s new media has had on driving paradigm shifts has been to provoke art works that are so reflexive that they embody the very idea of the paradigm shift in the structure and exposition of the work. Not only do we expect the particular meaning of the work to be new and unique, but also we have to expect that the entire conceptual frame that gives a work meaning will be something we’ve never encountered before. One consequence of this is that the artist, the perceiver, the medium, and for that matter meaning itself, all become possible and shifting subjects of the work of art. Some works are tightly contained; some claim no containment at all. A movie theater, with its enforced darkness and rigid direction of focus, becomes, in this wide-​ open arena, a special cauldron for brewing new meaning. For here, an audience can be placed in the circumstance of forced attention to something that may mean nothing at all. The idea of reference can be thrown wide open when the focus of attention is so tight.

16.  A whole new way of reading—​the surface of the screen and the modulation of  self-​consciousness When the film screen is used successfully as a window, we know we’re sharing, at minimum, (1) a similar experience of the same audiovisual spectra; (2) familiarity with a particular language and/​or culture; and (3) some experience with the ‘grammar of cinema.’ This much is easy. Beyond this, when we enter the realm of taste, the way that people talk about their personal experience of a film (if they do), is the only clue we get about what we do or don’t share of the more “human” or “poetic” or

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“abstract” dimensions of the work and what, if anything, from our previous life experiences the sensations evoked by the work address. Successful evocative references in art that stimulate the feelings that seem very precise and particular to us are often beyond words. And despite how precise they may feel to us, they are often provoked by the vaguest and most ephemeral stimuli. Often our feelings of precision are based in the fulfillment of the expectations that grew out of the same complex of events that have happened to a subset (target market) of us as we lead our lives. Messages that come through the window of the screen are, for the most part, the messages of everyday life, amplified. However, when the surface of the screen is being articulated to generate meaning, where the signifiers, so to speak, are not so much objects and actions, as qualities inherent in the character of the light and the way it is moving, when the surface of the screen takes on the persona of an abstract expressionist painting (whether the images themselves are representational or not), or the rhythm of the movement of light becomes equivalent to the rhythm of a musical expression, then the entire nature of the referential act changes. Within the caldron of the movie theater we’re thrown back to the condition of learning to read all over again; or, to put it another way, we are simply thrown into a ritual state of openness; open to tasting the broth from which new meaning grows. The avant-​garde filmmaker and teacher Ken Jacobs used to quote his teacher, the abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, and tell his students: “Get lost. That’s when your senses are wide open.” Advice that works best, I think, in the safety of a movie theater or art gallery—​or in the bravura of the art world. Given how strong the pull of the world on the other side of the screen can be, achieving this openness to the simple radiance of the screen’s reflected light often requires some indoctrination, so the initial transformation of perspective, where suddenly we can see the screen as a surface having profoundly meaningful and particular implications unto itself, often has the quality of an epiphany, one usually provoked by reflection on a particular work or experience that was originally puzzling or even off-​putting, as was my experience of the film I  described in the preface, Brakhage’s Fire of Waters. Often this epiphany needs to be facilitated by the guidance of a teacher. It is a transition to which there usually is resistance, a transition not everyone is willing or capable of making. Some people have compared learning to read the surface of the screen to learning a new language. I think it’s much more like acquiring a mind-​set. Once you’ve got it, you have another set of eyes through which to look at things. Gaining this mind-​set amounts to no more than acknowledging and crediting the reality before passing on through to the illusion. But what can we learn from so humble and mundane a reality that’s worth perverting our natural proclivities?

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If we look at the difference between a lens flare and a camera flare, we can begin to see how the surface of the screen marks out a very rich shift in the ontology of reference and suggests ways of accessing and mining that shift. Lens flares are caused by light entering the camera lens directly and hitting the film without first reflecting off the subjects being photographed. Lens flares often appear as a starburst pattern around the image of the sun or a floodlight, with streaks of radiance darting on a diagonal through the frame, often with the shape of the physical lens aperture echoed by the glass elements of the lens itself. Originally accidental, their inclusion in a scene began to take on both decorative and suggestive functions through usage. When a lens flare is used as an intentional intrusion into the pictorial space, we still read it as being within the same referential framework, the same spatiotemporal framework, and on nearly the same ontological level as the photographed objects. It speaks of the nature and quality of the source of illumination for the scene. Lens flares are still features of digital cinema. Camera flares, on the other hand, which occur when light strikes the film without passing through the lens, are almost never seen in films, and when we do see them, they almost always mean something cinema-​referential: for example, the film in the hero’s camera ran out at this point in the recording, or the camera got smashed.18 Mostly though, camera flares, which normally only occur as a result of production-​related events or accidents, are the first artifacts to be edited out since they burst the proscenium so totally, reminding us of the fragility of the illusion upon which the narrative depends; and how thin is the film that removes us from the here and now—​how cheaply and easily we are spirited into a seamlessly structured world of make pretend. We cherish the illusion and the fantasy. We can, however, also cherish the reality. Camera flares usually occur at the beginning or end of a roll of film, or between takes. Usually they begin with the entire screen white, but only for a frame or two—​where the stray light has completely blasted the emulsion from the transparent film stock. If one is primarily attentive to the surface of the screen however, a unique pictorial space opens up in the interaction between these flares and the competing photographed image. It is a pictorial space that forces our attention onto the substrate, allows our eye to play with the locus of pictorialization, the happening plane, and allows our mind to question the nature of pictorialization itself. The fleeting, irregular edges of camera flares enhance the dynamism of these interrogative pleasures. Sometimes an editor gets a roll of film in which a mishap on the set or on location causes accidental light to penetrate into the spiral-​wound camera roll in odd and unpredictable ways, making the image flash with a color

The translation in analog video was the snow crash.

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and a rhythm of its own, a rhythm that then ultimately surrenders to the coherence of the photographed image. Here one can watch, as Levi-​Strauss might say, the raw duke it out with the cooked, the accident with the plan, presentation with representation. A partially light-​struck image is either an image seen through an obscured window, or a surface where the colors and shapes of the flare are as significant and expressive as the forms that the lens has organized. It’s a little like Wittgenstein’s duck/​rabbit—​a teetering point in the gestalt, where the mundane and predictable projection of the photographed world gives way to other, aleatoric possibilities of organization. Camera flares usually end abruptly, only lasting a frame or two for that active transitional phase where there is both stray and lensed light reaching the surface of the film. Sometimes when there are long and convoluted flares where the photographed image fights back and forth for dominance over the stray light from the flare, light that has passed through the sprocket holes on the spiral wind of a roll leaves a small ladder of shadowed rectangles walking19 up the side of the picture. Often, because of the way light refracts through, or re-​reflects off the plastic film base, the flare itself runs the gamut of possible colors, while also permuting the residual colors from the photographed image. The camera flare references the photochemical act of filmmaking. When this becomes a thing of the past one whole aspect of that reference will disappear. But what goes on when we watch something like a camera flare is a shift of attention, and a shift of the frame of reference from the photographed world to the space in which we are sitting: the modulation of our processing an illusion, As a practical matter every exposed and processed roll of film begins and ends with an extended camera flare, and each take with a shorter one. As an editor of documentaries and TV dramas I could look at flares in any number of ways. The obvious way, the way the job demanded, was simply to look for those frames where the flare begins and ends completely and is no longer at all apparent in the scene, and chop the entire flare out. But editing breeds a peculiar cynicism, born of looking at the same bits of imagery over and over again. So when I’d find a long flare where the vitality, music, and random beauty of the raw dancing light proved far more interesting than that which it obscured, I would cut it out and save it on a private reel of things I found intrinsically beautiful. If we are open enough, this beauty can have some insights for us and some power over us. It references. What it references, our recognition of that beauty, can actually be corroborated easily; just ask: “Is that beautiful, 19 This motion is especially remarkable to me in the way it is actually a motion across ontological planes. When one sees these sprocket hole shadows moving on the screen, they speak only of the very precise unwinding of the spool of film in the camera and so we see the substrate itself directly and reflexively modulating the suddenly less ‘real’ image.

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or what?” The answer to a query of “What’s so beautiful about it?” is often, “I don’t know. It just moves me”—​the ultimate criterion for successful reference—​for meaning. This is a common enough experience for most of us, yet not so open to corroboration.20

17.  The anteroom of meaning and our conception of space One could say that reference dwells in two domains, the public and the private. We reference our own experience on many levels and in many forms—​ for presentation to others but to ourselves as well. There may be no private languages, but there certainly are private meanings. In the anteroom of consciousness, where thoughts reside before being uttered, where realizations pause and emotions are felt before they’re named or acted on is the place where we have the inner experiences that ultimately become our expressions, actions, reactions; and our art. Of course there is no anteroom of meaning or of consciousness. That’s just a metaphor, a spatial metaphor for those, oh so brief moments when we are putting things together, before we move on, before we step onto the stage, before we arrive at an expression we call meaningful: the pre-​ah-​ha. Part of the pleasure we get from any serious film has at least something to do with how the world of the screen allows us to reflect on ourselves, our own condition in life. But when we become aware of the surface of the screen, it can become not simply a metaphor, but a stand-​in for consciousness itself. When we are not immediately seduced into illusion, we have the opportunity to meet the film experience on the same ontological and epistemological level as the rest of our existence. I’ll give you an example. Michael Snow’s notorious films Wavelength (1967), Back and Forth (1969), and La Région Centrale (1971) are about the modulation of perception. The first two are roughly an hour long each and the third is three hours plus. Each film treats the surface of the screen as the visual fulcrum for an exploration of our perception of space, and each plays in its own unique way with some of the illusion-​producing perceptual paths with which we seem to be hardwired. The three films all involve particular kinds of image movement: Wavelength is a continuous-​seeming very slow zoom into a photograph on the far side of a studio, overlaid with alternative presentations of the same space. Back and Forth is just what it sounds like, a camera continuously panning back and I have to credit the music and the writing of John Cage for opening me to the world of aleatoric reference and comparison. I wonder if I could have found the beauty of camera flares if he had not alerted my mind. 20

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forth at increasing speed across the interior of a classroom. In La Région Centrale, the camera movement sweeps out the inside of a sphere in all four axes (pitch, roll, yaw, and extension or zoom). Whereas the first two films contain the photographic representation of interior spaces and the third an exterior (in movie parlance), all of them are really looking at a very interior kind of ‘space,’ the space where (i.e., the time when) we put together our conception of space. The formal tension in all three works derives from the way we are teased between reading the world as photographed by the camera, and simply reading the screen as it actually is, a surface washed in reflected light—​the world in front of us at the moment. Here’s how that works. When the camera movements in these films are relatively slow, we find that the focus of our attention at first moves naturally through the surface, to the other side of the fulcrum of illusion into the world as photographed. When the camera motion becomes faster, especially in the latter two films, it is less possible, and less germane, to see a world beyond the screen—​there is just too much blur, and the world of light on the surface of the screen dominates. We move from a depicted place in some world to the specific place we are in at the moment, and then on to a contemplation of the comparison between the two. It’s a tension that Snow manipulates masterfully in all three films; and if you are capable of letting go of the pleasures of the illusion for the pleasures of the reality, that journey, which begins in illusion and moves to the surface of the screen, continues inward to a most stimulating inspection of self-​consciousness: the pleasure of examining perception itself. There is, in these films, a tango-​like progression in this locus of inspection from extrospection to introspection, and if you can get with it, the films are hypnotic. As Snow became more familiar, and more comfortable with this model for exploring how we perceive space, his figurative gestures—​the way he modulates this interstitial zone between presentation and representation—​evolved tremendously. He continued having new and unique insights about how we create a world from the evidence of our senses, and new ways of sharing those insights with us. By the time he made La Région Centrale, he had learned enough to present what felt to me like the phenomenological version of the Book of Creation—​an incredibly moving reflection on the birth of consciousness. Michael Snow was doubtless influenced by the work of Paul Valery, another artist obsessed with the value of introspection. In fact, it was Snow who introduced me to Valery’s Monsieur Teste (1947). In Jackson Matthews’s notes on Valery that preface my edition of M.  Teste, he presents Valery’s observation that consciousness and meaning, “like the wind, can only be seen in other things.”21 A camera flare can seem a meaningless intrusion; or it can function like a phrase meant to stipulate a story point (the film broke); or, on

See Valery (1947: x), Introduction.

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the other hand, it can mime the way thought emerges from disorder in our minds, an allusion to the way mental images come in and out of indistinctness: an example of epistemology brought home, a reminder of how we get knowledge of the world and make meaning of it. Or it can simply be taken for its intrinsic beauty. Or maybe, they are some of the same.

18.  Meaning and mental habits The simple conception of meaning as mental movement can give us a slightly different look at how usage (the way we happen to, or learn to use words) and meaning (the impact they have) relate to one another. The way we learned to form the flow of speech and thought as infants, by moving our lungs and tongues, our lips and larynxes, obviously developed alongside the way we learned to move the rest of our bodies in space. The pace and the rhythm of that flow and the way we load it with content have become for us, as practiced adults, spontaneous elaborations on deeply habitual patterns. What happens when those habitual communication patterns are challenged? Similes, metaphors, and other still more unusual methods of comparison in language may perturb the flow of a communication act, a little or a lot. Their analogs in cinema may force us to make a palpable leap either between the terms of the comparison or in reaction to some surprising feature of the picture or the sound. In a poem, for instance, if a conceit seems too obscure or ambiguous and we cannot make the leap, we hesitate or we stop. No forward movement in the flow of thought: no meaning. A state characterized in comics books by the word balloon “waaah?” When we don’t understand the metaphor, the joke, the concept, the painting, the film, or if we kind of get it, or if we maybe get it, thought eddies, and spins, pulling for associations, generating bridges between possible contextual associations being made by the author and the imaginative abilities of the reader, listener, or viewer. In those moments, if we make it across the associative chasm, a zone that’s new to us gets sketched out, a zone we haven’t seen before, an insight forced by the diversion of thought; a gift from someone else’s beyond, the window of wit. We revisit great poetry, painting, and music endlessly because we never really get it all, as in Valery’s epigram “A poem is never finished, it is merely abandoned.”22 Multiple meanings interact to create still newer meanings. The generation of meaning neither flows automatically nor stops. Each successive time you encounter the same comparison of terms in a poem, that comparison should reference a new level of implication. Also ascribed to C. S. Lewis and Joseph Conrad among others.

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Poems also refocus our attention on the medium, either the spoken sound of a line or how it sits on the page in a way that’s similar to our regard of light on a movie screen as an item unto itself. The encoding embedded in a fully realized poem always extends to the way the ink sits on the paper and the meter falls to the ear. Either way, the words in a poem will carry traces of the history, the musicality, and the resonances that lie around each word. The medium for poetry is not just language, but self-​conscious language. Multiple meanings abound in poetry so the movement of the mind through a poem is rarely linear, it is often perturbed, sometimes oscillating beautifully, sometimes downright turbulent, a quality of movement composed by the poet, and conducted and played by our selves. Also there is the expectation that it will be idiosyncratic. That is, the mind will never have moved like this before. Meaning in a poem is earned more than assumed.

19.  Assumed and earned meaning Meaning in a representational artwork or photograph is usually a combination of the assumed and the earned, where the assumed dominates, at least initially. Our immediate seduction into the world of the picture—​the world beyond the surface, the world that is being represented, is what’s assumed. But a representational painting or a meaning-​laden photograph, if it has the power to hold us long enough, will give up, or we can wrest from it, further meanings, earned meanings. At least some of Rembrandt’s etchings have Wittgenstein’s duck-​rabbit thing going on in spades. That is, the longer you look at them, the more you can see distinct, autonomous, and coherent configurations of represented space and subject, coexisting; alternative ways of reading the depiction, as in one of his Nativity scenes where after a while we can see the outline of a skull filling the center of the image (with the dark shadow from the lamp seeming like the eye socket). The reference can be directed and the different configurations anchored by giving names to the depictions, for example, The Nativity or, alternatively, The Skull (Figure 2) (the actual title of the work is De aanbidding der herders: met de olielamp). In an abstract painting, however, there isn’t the same immediate seduction into a world on the other side of the canvas. The seduction is formal, and it is to rather than through the painted surface. Here, the power to seduce lies in the pure beauty or expressivity of the medium itself: how a line can speak with eloquence; how the juxtaposition of form, color, and texture can echo the considerations and emotions that stimulated their having been laid down. If we have the patience, the desire, or the mind-​set, instead of an external world, when we do get to the other side of the surface, we are given some of the being of the artist—​through the agency of his or her decisions, a subject that can be at least as beautiful, or at least as interesting as any

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FIGURE 2  De aanbidding der herders: met de olielamp, Rembrandt Harmensz. Credit: Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

rose in any vase. So what is referred to, in the case of abstract painting, is something directly of the mind, or the spirit, or the being of the artist—​a being worth being with—​a palpable way of regarding the expressed considerations of color, form, visual thought or impulse, and so on. But what would you call the style of that reference? Being alive to? Being tuned to? This kind of reference is often expressed in body movement. You could ask someone looking at a de Kooning or a Pollock, “Have you got the beat?” as easily as you could ask, “Do you know what it means?”

20.  The spectrum of shared reference With purely representational pictures, like documentary photographs, it’s often not primarily meaning that we’re sharing, but information or data. Where we’ll go with that information is up to us, since the reference in most documentary photographs is, as we’ve said, primarily and directly to places, people, things, and actions. We don’t expect clear, neutral pictures of people,

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actions, and objects to mean something specific; what’s specific is what they depict. However, we often expect some kinds of pictures to have particular, specific meanings, referencing more defined sensations in us; in which case we may ask, “What does this picture mean to you?” Or, “What story does it tell you?” In those situations, we might expect that others will describe seeing and feeling something different than we will. But perhaps, the impression, though entirely different or even of a different order, might feel about as specific to them as it did to us. How we talk about different kinds of pictures gives us a clue about where they sit in the continuum of shared-​ness of reference; and, as well, how much of a continuum of shared reference there is across all the different kinds of pictures, from the picture of an ambiguous smile, to the frontal image of a victim of war. So this is an interesting feature of references:  the degree to which we expect a particular reference to be on the one hand common, or on the other idiosyncratic in how it is shared; that is, whether we expect everyone to get the ‘same’ feeling, or whether we expect everyone to get their own peculiar understanding of a film or a picture or a poem or a melody or a simple story or, for that matter, a complex treatise like this. Recognizing the ways in which pictures have this quality differently than words do is a very useful way to think about grading the specificity of references in general; especially across media and circumstances. For instance, if we look at the gradation of the specificity of reference in verbal communications—​from the meanings of words, whose references are usually tight, to sentences, which may be looser, to metaphors or figures of speech, which court ambiguity, it’s obvious that the degree to which we expect others to share and how precisely we expect others to share our view of things, dictates our style of speech. So there’s at least two things we can think about when we share references. Are we moved; and are we moved in the same way, or to the same place? The question of whether or not we are moved the same seems progressively more problematic as we shift from math, logic, and ordinary language to the arts, wherein, if we continue to move along with the flow of an idea, we must assume meaning has been accomplished and the reference is still successful, even though we all assume that the referents are likely to be different and personal. Having said this much:

21.  The story sequence and the montage—​prologue There is a sea of meaning into which words can’t dip an oar, but which three pictures, considered together, and maybe in such and such an order, might

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get you into the flow of a very different style of thought. So, this leads to the idea that still pictures in a sequence are yet different from both words and individual still pictures in the way they create a path of related movements (meanings). If the three pictures are arranged so as to be considered as a sequence and each picture in the sequence implies an action continuing across them in a story, we can expect a certain kind of flow in the way our eyes and minds will follow a reasonably predictable path—​the pictures will make more sense if arranged in one order than if arranged in another. If instead, the pictures show three people in contrasting states of emotion, or circumstances of life, the flow may be less linear and more idiosyncratic as the eye moves back and forth among them to make active comparisons. If the sequence simply shows three abstract forms, then the flow of thought, if any, is likely to be quite unpredictable and, witnessing the disagreements of art critics, difficult to corroborate as well. When a picture appears to move and is accompanied by relevant sound, there is a momentum that gives the flow of meaning a much more predictable (but sometimes a more elaborate) set of vectors. The effect of this synergy of the pictorial, the kinetic and the sonic as it occurs in the movies, is usually much more direct in stipulating reference than a sequence of (silent) still images. And, to go one step further, you might say that a motion-​picture montage is yet another form of presentation, having vectors with the rhythmical characteristics of both the disjunctions in a sequence of still pictures and the singular flow of moving images, even though each of the moving images in the montage will always have its own unique, linear momentum.

22.  When the editor learns about meaning The film editor’s job is to take a bunch of moving pictures and synthetic sounds and string them together in a way that creates the best relationship to their meaning-​potential. It’s a wonderful and complex job, and at its best it’s full of very rich choices and many opportunities to examine and discuss with the other collaborators in the creative process what a sequence of motion pictures can mean. The picture sequencing in most expository films is driven by the verbal content. There’s a script in the case of theatrical films, and/​or a set of interview transcripts in the case of documentaries. Beyond these written guides, there’s a set of established practices that suggest how a sequence of images needs to flow to keep a viewer oriented in time, space, and context in order to follow along with the story; and these practices are oriented toward linear, verbal exposition. That is, the viewer could likely offer a verbal ‘recap’ of what played out. Then there is yet another verbal dimension:  the conversation among the other ‘creatives,’ the writer, producer, director, editor, and others, as

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continuity, nuance, ambiguity, and innovation are wrangled from the assembled picture and sound resources. If you eavesdrop on the conversations between a director and an editor working at the forge of mis en scene, you’ll get a schematic of the process of meaning-​fabrication. An editor knows what will ‘cut’ and what won’t ‘cut,’ that is, what will move the mind along without a ripple, and how to make a ripple when it’s called for. A director knows what materials have to be created and brought into the edit to produce an image flow that will cut and produce the effect that’s wanted. The talk that goes on between a director and an editor reveals a lot about the demands of balancing shared meaning (wide appeal), or clarity of purpose on the one hand, and the role of ellipsis or ambiguity to give nuance, mystery, or resonance to the movie, on the other. But mostly you realize that in their discussions and considerations, movement and meaning are almost synonymous. They are concerned with how the eye moves, how the action moves, how the camera moves, but more than anything, how the story gets moved along and how emotions are moved. And all of the inflections under their control—​the shades of pictorial representation, kinetic inflection, inflected speech, music, natural and fabricated sound, abstract light and color—​are discussed in the same breath. They are trying to describe the differential impact of this shot or that in terms of a spectrum that ranges from the rational to the emotional, from the brain to the heart, or the left brain to the right, or on any of the other poles of experience and knowledge worth sharing with the unknown individuals in their target audience.

23.  Montage and metaphor “Montage” is a term that’s become so useful that it’s leaked out of the editing room to become emblematic of a quality in our lives—​like when we’ve had a day in which the natural continuity of events has been fractured. When the word ‘montage’ is used in the editing room, it almost always indicates a shift in responsibility from the director to the editor, a shift in the style of the conversation, as well as a shift in the style of meaning going on in the film. The responsibility for organizing the flow of images usually shifts because in a montage it’s harder and more time consuming for the director to talk about those particular qualities they both know are only expressed, or best expressed, by the lyrical juxtaposition of kinetic tableaux; a style dominated by the abstract and evocative powers of rhythm, texture, tone, and implication—​the motion picture editor’s vernacular. These are far more difficult qualities to script or specify verbally ahead of time and are easier to talk about in progress or when realized. At the point where the goals of signification are better served by a montage than a narrative flow, you might hear a director say, “Okay, so we go

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to the montage, which comes out of the shot where the pail of milk hits the wall and ends when we see her look of shock and astonishment.” This is accompanied by elaborate gestures, and concludes with: “So, you know what to do, right? Make it really haunting with that23 almost subliminal feel!” Then it’s up to the editor to begin making specific (and temporarily autonomous) decisions. When they are talking about the sequences preceding and succeeding the montage they’ll mostly reference the take and scene numbers in the shooting script, often by shaping the air with their hands, leaning on the various common understandings they’ve developed over the weeks or months of working together, discussing the script’s ineffable potentials, considering where and how those qualities are manifest in the shots. But when they get down to discussing the montage, a new kind of phraseology, one that pops up only intermittently in the discussion of traditionally cut narrative sequences, begins to dominate.24 The stuff that’s really significant in any conversation about a montage is more likely to be contained in the tempo, emphasis, and tone of the dialogue than in the words themselves. When a montage is discussed in detail however, and the accuracy of a reference is critical, shots, gestures, actions, sounds, bits of music, and so on are referred to by names and/​or numbers. And at that point meaning becomes precisely specified. The task of naming hundreds or even thousands of pieces of movie source material for reference by many collaborators, or even just by the editor at a future time, often stretches the edges of family resemblance, especially when the names for those pieces of source material are turned into contractions or acronyms that are small and concise enough to fit on the label attached to it. This is one case where a correspondence theory of meaning, and either a good index, or good recall is all you need for a successful and quickly corroborated reference, “Oh, yeah—​red sky 3 is the piece that goes here!” Edit-​ room-​ speak is definitely its own set of language games, where scenes, shots, and characters, not to mention techniques, adjustments, styles, schemata, dilemmas, and so on all acquire their own unique names and nicknames. But the overall process of finding a shared meaning style in the editing room, with effective referential accuracy (which is called ‘chemistry’), is, when successful, a great example of the organic and spontaneous growth of a referential process. 23 The facile use of the indefinite reference is a mark of a compatibility between the editor and director; one which speaks of the power of the local language game, shared experience, and mysterious affinities. Misidentified antecedents in the editing room are a very common source of either annoyance or humor. 24 A highly context-​driven shorthand rapidly evolves in the practice of making reference to places in, or aspects of, a movie, shaped first by industry-​wide usage, then genre-​specific usages, on down to usages common only to the immediate, active participants in the language game—​ the editorial crew of that particular movie.

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If we think about the difference between the way shots are arranged in a narrative sequence and the way they are arranged in a montage, we can get a slightly deeper insight into how pictures in general can mean. Narrative sequences have a style of movement reminiscent of prose sentences:  the shots in a sequence relate to one another in such a way that a principal or dominant idea is unquestionable, for example, the hero moves through a coherent space in a clearly decipherable amount of time. We are looking through a clean window, the mind moves automatically, without hesitation, without reflection, even though the space and time we’re seduced into has been totally, painstakingly fabricated. However, even though there is no real ‘sentence’ structure in a montage, there’s just as strong a need for a dominant idea to move it along. That idea is often expressed by the coherent articulation of musical and pictorial values, for example, melody, rhythm, color, motion, texture, and composition. In a montage you could say that the modifiers become the main parts of speech, and what were the main motifs, whether they be the characters, the settings, or a car chase, become incidental to the principal force that keeps the mind moving through the cuts. Rhythm, sometimes musical and sometimes kinetic, is what drives the montage. In fact most editors will cut a montage to music since they are almost all driven by music in the final product (usually using what’s called a ‘scratch’ or temporary track that has the final rhythms and a more or less appropriate feel). There are some things about the way the mind usually moves in a montage that makes them very hard to sustain for more than a minute or two. Since there isn’t yet an agreed grammar involved (although these are rapidly coalescing, especially in television) there are very few rules in montage cutting. So their idiosyncrasy and unpredictable meaning style, along with the absence of the linear pull of the narrative, limits them to being used as omnibus introductions to the themes, settings, or characters of the story; or as interludes—​a kind of amuse bouche served between courses to cleanse the palate; or in the depiction of a peculiar circumstance, condition, or state of mind. Dream sequences stand somewhere between the meaning-​style of a narrative sequence and that of a full-​blown montage sequence. The standard narrative sequence imitates the shared aspects of the way we perceive life. The dream sequence imitates the shared aspects of the way we experience dreams. The montage imitates neither. This alone makes it harder to assimilate. It is a new, unique style of presentation that we have to learn. We can say that a standard narrative style imitates or represents life, or a dream sequence imitates or represents the dream state because we believe we share conceptions of what these states are like. The montage, which does not presuppose any singular corollary state, often portrays. This difference, between imitation or representation on the one hand and portrayal on the other connotes a slight, but significant shift in the balance between author and audience.

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We mostly assume that ‘normal’ people all share basic aspects of sentience. The mere fact that the conventions of narrative cinema and dream sequences are successful is some confirmation of this. But since a montage is more like a portrayal than a depiction or an imitation, the heavy lifting in the process of referral is shifted to the author. Authorial idiosyncrasy rather than commonly shared experience bears more weight in the process of signification when we are intending to evoke a new kind of experience or one expressed from a very personal point of view. Instead of depicting what is assumed to be a shared public experience the author must fabricate a framework that is both specific to the vision and more or less accessible. A montage does not share the flow of the movie time of the film; it has a flow and an assumed time of its own. It often demands that the audience step into the author’s shoes in order to feel the flow or the importance of the sequencing of images; and for this reason a successful montage is a testament to the communication, on very many levels, between a director and an editor; and as well between the collaborative team and the audience. From the perspective of linear storytelling, the cutting in a montage uses ellipsis in a way reminiscent of the terms in a metaphor or simile. This is a comparison we will mine more deeply in Part III.

24.  The imitation of perception In his monograph Devotional Cinema (2003:  28)  Nathaniel Dorsky illuminates something of the relationship between our perception of the world and our imitation of perception in cinema when he calls attention to the fact that pans and tilts in films, when used to suggest the act of ‘looking around,’ are almost always awkward.25 He points out that rather than panning, our eyes actually move in a jerky sweep and our vision proceeds in discreet shifts. We parse the visual space around us by the glance rather than perceiving a continuum. Consciousness assembles our sense of a continuum from the glances. Therefore a series of shots and cuts provides a more realistic representation of looking around than a pan, or tilt. Our shifts of attention, as we experience the world, are often not contiguous—​as we jump from the here and now to a recollection, for instance, or a distant allusion, and are also almost always elliptical to some degree.

25 A very interesting exception to this is when there is a meta-​frame within an image, such as a mask suggesting a telescope or binoculars, or a rectangle suggesting a camera frame. The effect of this contextual device is to put ‘quotation marks’ around the image as an act of ‘looking around.’

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Since the cuts in a movie imitate the shift of our attention from one discreet configuration to another, ellipses and discontinuities included, when we see any sequence of shots and cuts in a movie, we are predisposed to accept that they represent a coherent idea of something. It is the tendency to ‘go with the flow’ in a movie that further powers ellipsis and discontinuity as dynamic tools for filmmakers who need to articulate the unfolding of simultaneous events or the comparison of states of mind using parallel cutting; or the even more elliptical cutting we call ‘montage.’ The evolution of Eisenstein’s montage into montage as we now know it has been driven largely by experimental filmmakers who are as moved by the evocative power of pictures and sounds for their intrinsic beauty as by a story, or who are moved by the inherent poetry of a picture or a melody, and who rarely rely on the expressive subtlety of actors, and who understand the many, many ways meaning might be generated at the cut.

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FIGURE 3  Various rhythm schemes excerpted from The Chinese Typewriter (1983) (by the author). This kind of scheme was interspersed with longer continuous-​run passages to form musical crescendo/​decrescendo shapes. Rhythmical patterns like these are created on the optical printer (Appendix A).

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Part II Dynamic and Syntactic Universals

25.  Nonverbal universals So far we’ve looked at meaning fairly superficially, beginning with narrative language; making comparisons, first with general image making, specifically painting and photography, then looking more widely at metaphorical and elliptical expressions in both poetry and abstract images. But we’ve hardly touched on music. As our analysis of cinema continues we will progressively leave behind the linear conceits used to structure meaning in narrative language and move toward what I consider to be the other, more formal end of the spectrum—​the musical—​and try to imagine what a cinema whose temporal element is driven primarily by musical conceits would look like and be capable of expressing. Once again, using the simple heuristic of meaning as mental movement we’ll compare the way a sequence of images versus a sequence of tones versus a sequence of phonemes or morphemes can move the mind along to produce that sensation of fulfillment we get when an expression is received as well-​crafted, on target, peculiarly enlightening, powerfully moving, and so on. All this with an eye to the potential of future expressions—​new ways that cinema, with all its modalities, may be capable of creating that sense of fulfillment. There is a teleology embedded in this analysis to which I ought to confess at the outset, and it drives toward a simple motto that lifts off the observation that verbal communication between humans develops from tonal and rhythmical shifts—​babbling—​before articulation proceeds to the production of words. This is the observation that drives virtually all of the other analyses in this book. It is the idea that there is a strong and largely unanalyzed dimension of meaning in verbal language, which both surrounds and conditions the syntactic and semantic, and which is rhythmical and tonal.

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My motto is: Music is the Mother of all Meaning.1 This is the flag beneath which ordinary language and the arts unite. And since it is the structural paradigm of music that we’ll be talking about, let’s begin by analyzing cinema according to a structural paradigm that would also work for music—​in terms of the relationship among units. The smallest manageable unit in analog cinema is the frame, so when we’re talking about getting the mind from “here” to “there” any analysis needs to begin, not only with the ultimate value of the individual frame, but even more, with the value of the difference between any two frames. In this process we will uncover two sets of universals—​one dynamic and one semantic, which will allow us the opportunity—​in fact will give us the power—​to transcend the limits of individual, local human languages, allowing us to create detailed and nuanced meaning across cultures. Remember the motto, as we stroll along. To begin with we have to recognize that although compelling, the arrangement of frames into shots, where a shot is considered the minimal unit of meaning in cinema, is still an arbitrary convention based on a narrative rather than a musical paradigm for structuring meaning in film. We normally consider a ‘cut,’ the transition between scenes across which significantly different pictorial content is encountered. HOWEVER: When three or more adjacent frames have significantly different content, a very new kind of potential opens up. We are driving the rate of change, the rate of image substitution to a speed that significantly warps all the rules of the signification game:  the cut is no longer between scenes; the cut is between frames. We have had three distinct and possibly contrasting images thrown at us in one-​eighth of a second. Imagine four scenes seen in one second. Now, imagine that you see them each for only one frame at a time, but sequenced A, B, C, and D x 6. Now imagine that there is the implication of motion within each of the four scenes! Of course what you will imagine depends greatly on how much the content of each of the images differs (Figure 3). As our expectation of the way light ought to be modulated in cinema expands, the potential for meaning increases; our experience grows and our understanding is challenged by that transition. In order for this to happen—​ if we are going to be able to move along with the flow—​we are forced to come to a new way of recognizing and processing visual information. How fast these challenges come at us, whether the “cuts” come every single frame, every other frame, every third or fourth frame, and so on, not only introduces a rhythmical component independent of perceived motion within a 1 Although I mention this almost as an aside without dwelling on it here, if it turned out to be true it could amount to the tip of an evolutionary iceberg: Tests of human speech-​rhythm discrimination in cotton-​top tamarinds have demonstrated just how fundamental an idea this is (Tincoff et al. 2005).

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scene, but even more important, dictates how we assimilate the flow. Which of the possible ‘spaces’ does each stream of imagery inhabit? Are they happening through the window of the screen, on the screen, in front of the screen (think 3D glasses); or perhaps even on the inner screen where other kinds of representation are processed—​that ‘screen’ where we play the novels that we read. On a more trivial and perhaps less fantastic level, the speed with which new content hits us influences whether we read and absorb it with deep reflection, savoring it across many dimensions and many levels of our beings. Or, because of its rapid flux, do we inevitably absorb a high-​speed stream of imagery as referencing more shallow and immediate kind of meanings? Or, on the other hand, can more graphic, kinetic, and rhythmical cutting generate aspects of meaning that are just as deeply taken? We don’t have to come to any profound conclusions as we encounter this avalanche of cuts; initially we just have to move with it, to go with the flow, and evaluate the impact on its own terms—​terms that are privileged in the new-​cinema experience. The business of making films with images and sounds sequenced with speed, ellipsis, and discontinuity in ways that test the limits of apprehension is like creeping out onto the thin ice of the unparsed. Really fast cutting, wherein the articulation of pictures occurs at the same rate as the normal articulation of words, phonemes, or even musical notes,2 becomes the tentative ground of new language-​like structures, structures with as yet few rules and only the barest hint of what a ‘grammar’ might be like, and provides so many challenges to both the maker and the viewer that it seems an extremely unlikely direction for cinema’s evolution. The only reason we have to think otherwise, to think that a significant volume of the overall motion picture flow might move toward a music-​ like structure similar to hyper-​quick montage, has to do with the potential wealth of the pictorial transition qua transition, as well as the fact that the medium’s ultimate potential lies as much in its kinetic/​pictorial character as in its word-​ghosting dimension. There will almost certainly always be a verbal/​dramatic cinema, but as the inherently pictorial and kinetic—​the motion picture aspect—​of the medium comes to the fore, we have to expect that paradigms more native to the essence of the medium will dominate. And we’ll have to wonder what they’ll look like. Oh, and there’s one other reason: In terms of data in and data out we seem to be evolving into ever-​quicker creatures when it comes to response time, with shorter unitary attention spans.3 More on this in Part IV. 2 Steven Pinker (1994: 161) suggests that casual speech is perceived at a rate of ten to fifteen phonemes per second, and artificially sped up speech can be decoded at up to forty to fifty phonemes per second. 3 The character of attention span in many, if not most, cultures appears to be shifting. To say it’s getting shorter may be a misrepresentation.

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As we look toward this future, the slow decline of traditional literacy may be something to lament but the evolution of pictorial literacy is something to celebrate. The tension between our fear of the new and our excitement with it is the edge upon which the evolution of this form of expression turns. As strong as is our tendency to look through the surface of the screen and our desire for a temporal flow that mirrors the literary aspect of our shared lives, there is another door to the anteroom of ineffable meaning in life; a door out as well as a door in, since the tools of cinema are falling into everyone’s hands. This is an expressive portal that has the capacity to evoke with the same efficiency as what is now stipulated in speech, and to stipulate a whole new and as yet un-​glimpsed level of communication. However, to be fully expressive in this modality requires something radically different from the off-​hand practice of verbal communications. It means something that, really, only visual and musical artists are currently comfortable with. It means learning how to think without words. In some nearly mystical sense, it means doing without knowing. Brave New World.

26.  The polyvalence of the picture and the omnivalence of the movie As we’ve seen, a typical picture can speak with a great deal of simultaneity. After all, the visual field itself is processed with some degree of simultaneity. It may contain many people, objects, implied relationships and actions, each of which can carry multiple possible significances or associations; hence the potential for lots of referential relationships. A picture that contains people in a landscape, for instance, may reference the people first, but it can also reference the whole, or any of its parts or qualities as we consider them, separately and together. Pictorial composition, the placement and emphasis of people and other elements within the frame, is a major factor directing the movement of the mind’s eye, assigning referential dominance as well as generating our sense of story, if any. Pictorial composition itself can also be the dominant subject of an image, wherein the peculiar rhythms of our shifts in attention—​the way the eye revisits elements, making subsequent comparisons—​represents a dialogue between our persons and the composition of the picture. It’s as if the surface of the image becomes a semi-​silvered mirror as our mind dialogues with itself, contemplating the relationships and the dominance of various objects or implied actions that manifest in how any particular arrangement feels or speaks to us. In some cases it is the set of visual relationships, the composition itself that speaks to us as loudly as the people or objects or implied actions. Composition creates its own meaning, and whether or not you can describe that dialogue to anyone, or even verbalize

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it to yourself, the form of the dialogue reflects something about how the picture has moved you. The particular quality of the movement of the mind’s eye through our experience of a picture may evoke a cascade of responses at many levels. Pictures often mean in many different kinds of ways. All the nearly simultaneous, representational, narrative, and evocative possibilities of a picture, its polyvalence as we’re calling it, is sometimes subtly and sometimes grossly bound by and shaped by the circumstances under which they are considered—​when and where we see it. The degree or depth to which a picture engages us, either in its subject matter or in its formal nature, the degree to which we are allowed to revel in the pleasurable repetition of line or motif, or even in how these formal considerations themselves may resemble or echo the pleasures of metaphor or music, is conditioned by the situation in which we encounter the picture and how open we can be at any moment to its various levels. Is there music playing as we look at it? Is there noise? Is there conversation? Are we sharing? Are we in a frantic or in a contemplative frame of mind? Did we encounter it purposefully or accidentally? Both reactions that are overt and well defined, as well as those subliminal responses of which we cannot speak and may not even consciously recognize, power the echoes of polyvalence. Resemblance itself, as it makes words, sentences, melodies, and metaphors possible, also underlies the polyvalence of pictures:  how our eyes search to relate the expressions of the man and woman, the posture of their bodies, the dusty tone of the colors, the ambiguous shapes in the foreground, the background. All these potential ambiguities are contained in just one possible picture bounded by its own frame. What about the relationships between pictures, and among pictures? Outside of their immediate narrative implications, part of the complexity involved in reading, in deriving coherent meaning from either an array of still pictures or a sequence of still pictures that have no narrative thread, has to do with the fact that there is a potentially exponential increase in possible referential relationships when we are expected to relate several pictures that have no apparent narrative connection to one another. If a narrative is apparent in the way pictures are sequenced, the polyvalence of the references is usually subordinated to the essentially linear narrative. If not, polyvalence can run riot, potential relationships and references abound. If there is no reference to a dominant set of dramatic actions unfolding in time, either represented or implied, then some other aspect of the set of pictures—​locale, mood, style, general subject, and so on—​may organize our experience of them. Or, quite possibly, though the individual pictures have meaning, their arrangement may not. However, at some point another referential condition becomes possible—​ one which has tremendous implications for the possibilities of cinema to be both poetic and musical. This referential condition occurs when picture

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A references pictures B and C and D and E equivalently; and picture B references all the others equivalently, and picture C and so forth. I’m talking about the cinematic quality characteristic of a nearly perfectly balanced and self-​contained montage, in which we may find a nearly perfectly balanced conceptual sphere of potentially mutual references, polyvalence cubed:  a quality I’m calling, after Valery, omnivalence. Individual works—​poems, sonatas, paintings and photos, and so on—​can, of course, attain a simpler state of referential balance that also characterizes omnivalence but it is the balanced polyvalence of the pictorial time arts that will ultimately concern us.

27.  The description of omnivalence as a floating target When the referential relationships in either a sequence or an array of still pictures have the potential to cross-​reference one another then we might say that collection of images aspires to omnivalence—​wherein every aspect relates to every other aspect with some measure of aesthetic equivalence or balance. That condition is defined by an ultimate economy of reference, where no meaning potential is wasted. The near-​symmetry4 of mutually equivalent reference is what creates the great artistic works of endless internal resonance; where, to various degrees, everything resembles and/​or refers to everything else on some level or other; where the relationships team to harmonize the wavelengths of thought; where the echoes are infinite so that in subsequent experience, dominant references can come to seem secondary and vice versa. These works are the Taj Mahals of time-​based media. If there is anything that they are ‘about,’ it is ‘themselves.’ They are the artifices that aspire to the ultimate coherence of nature. In a structural sense, they are music. It is in collections of still pictures that don’t have an implied narrative relationship where the potential for omnivalent reference is greatest. The most outstanding examples of this effect are in series of paintings from one period or by one artist; or, for that matter, periods and artists contrasted with one another. Omnivalence needs a core theme, essence, or flavor about which the references orbit. Conversely, it is the magnetically linear and inveterately narrative character of motion pictures that makes omnivalent 4 Since I’m talking somewhat dreamily about an aesthetic ideal here, a hypothetical, it’s extra important that I be precise. Absolute symmetry, in my conception, renders movement, hence meaning impossible. Conceptually it seems like a fun and worthy experiment to try to create a work with absolutely symmetrical omnivalence and see if it indeed does become a black hole of meaning.

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resonance usually more problematic. A careful narrative, a poetic narrative, can participate in the economy and resonant power of polyvalent reference in pictures or in prose, but all symmetries will be warped according to their relevance to the story. It is easier for the montage or the image array, freed from the pull of narrative coherence, to aspire to the nearly symmetrical cross-​references that characterize omnivalence. Omnivalent relationships in poetry and music have a far easier shot. A montage within a narrative may well have skeins of internal coherence, but its ultimate and overall coherence will reference the themes and needs of the narrative—​it will ultimately be about the movie and not about itself. Likewise, with any montage that accompanies and serves music: In a music video the relationships among shots need only be tactical, since the strategic relationships are dictated by the musical form. But the resonance in tactical relationships is easily exhausted and we begin to look forward to the directly referential style of the narrative. But when a film is a montage from beginning to end, it not only has the opportunity for, but also the necessity of, overall, or strategic, formal coherence. This gives it access to both the smaller, internal resonances and also the larger, more universal, external resonances and economies characteristic of omnivalence. Whereas total, overall, formal coherence has long been the meat of painters, the composers of formal music, and to a degree, poets (all practitioners who have had thousands of years to evolve formal conventions), for filmmakers, ‘formal’ or ‘structural’ filmmaking is still a world of splendidly thin ice. The reward, however, is that any film, whose overall structure participates in the same symmetries as do its internal relations, and therefore does become a cinematic Taj Mahal, so to speak, such a film can come to be as much a fixture in our lives as other great works of formal art. Those early films of Michael Snow, as well as the best work of Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Kurt Kren, Saul Levine, Jonas Mekas, Sidney Peterson, and numerous other great poets of non-​narrative cinema, are examples of films where much of the meaning of the work is carried in the relationships among elements of both internal and overall form. Their use of the structure of the works themselves as a dimension for articulation is one of those things that when you recognize that it is being done, how it is being done, and the impact it is having, creates new possibilities for seeing and thinking. As those new dimensions are opened, they become new, expressive grounds for a medium that it was impossible to conceive of, let alone articulate, before cinema.5 As omnivalence becomes (as an aspiration) a practiced expectation of a formally and structurally aware cinema, the gestures, expressions, schema, tropes, and forms that had once been unique and revelatory will become 5 This is not to say that narrative films cannot achieve omnivalence, but that it is different kind of omnivalence based on different values.

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acknowledged and then commonplace. As particular expressive tropes subsequently become codified and conventionalized, the native languages of cinema can really begin to evolve. In this evolution, purely formal styles of reference, which are no longer confined to the world of the montage as title background, or song background, or amuse-​bouche, can enter the historically developmental flow of other formal media like lyrical poetry, abstract painting, and music. The mind will have learned to move with them easily and precisely, their hinges will have grown tighter, they will have a history of their own and therefore the possibility of historical allusion that is so important to the other formal arts. But because these tropes may then be used in more of a “one size fits all” fashion, as happens with words in a vernacular, the precision of which they were once capable will have been reduced. If formal gestures are robust, they will become like words in a language; if not, they will only have the longevity of clichés. But by then there will be ample new ground for fresh and newly precise tropes. Things come to mean what they do. The constant morphing of language is well served by the idea of a language game; a way of talking that has always got a semipermeable boundary. Omnivalence will always remain a moving target.

28.  Dynamic universals: beginning, middle, and end—​a prologue Once I was given carte blanche to do as I pleased with some forty-​five hours of video interviews and accompanying B-​roll6 to edit.7 It was shot in Russia in 1991 just after the collapse of communism. It arrived in my office with camera logs containing some rough translations but without any time code references that would help me correlate the rough descriptions of what people were saying with the footage at the sentence or word level. I deduced from these camera logs that the interviews were mostly about how lifelong communists of various stripes felt about Communism after the Party was outlawed. When I listened, even in a language I couldn’t understand, it was still immediately clear where people’s thoughts began and ended. It was also clear when something central to a thought was being articulated; or, on the other hand, if a thought was parenthetical; also I had no doubt about the degree of conviction or ambivalence that ideas and

6 B-​roll, in documentary edit speak, is the collective term for background visuals. The primary verbal material driving almost all documentaries is the talking-​head interview, which is considered A-​roll. 7 I can’t overstate what a privilege this was. Gary Henoch, one of the greatest documentary cameramen I’ve known, shot the footage.

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sentiments carried. After a while I even picked up on characteristics of the way people looked and sounded when they were using place and object names, as distinct from action words, or qualifiers. Most of all, I was able to read from these interview subjects shades of emotion and inner contradiction that I might have missed had I understood Russian. I didn’t understand what it was that someone might have an attitude toward, but I  felt like I could easily and finely characterize the attitude itself. I was looking at, not through, the quality of their speech. The more I watched the footage, the more I became interested primarily in these gesture encoded, finely shaded, emotional tonalities. So I decided, as a kind of experiment, to edit the interviews and juxtapose them (sometimes intercutting at the phrase level) without a tight translation, or a translator in the room, just to see what this exercise would yield. Honed by years of editing interviews in English, I just followed my gut reaction to the more abstract and formal qualities of the speech and body language—​the acoustical shape of the words and the visual shapes and accelerations of the gestures. Even though I did not know what was being spoken about more than the hints I got from the camera logs, it still felt like I could follow along with the music. After I had completed a rough-​cut that followed my mostly formal, musical, and emotional scheme I finally brought a native Russian speaker, a poet, into the edit to find out where I had gotten it right and where I hadn’t. I was ready to do a reedit wherever she indicated I was making no sense on any significant level. We were both astonished, after our screening of the cut, by the degree to which my editing was logically and grammatically coherent at the level of phrases, sentences, and larger thoughts as well. Much to my delight, she also felt that I had composed a coherent, if idiosyncratic exposition of what happens to peoples’ outlooks when their overarching belief system is overturned, something which we both agreed was the real story in the footage. The fact that I had gotten it almost completely right without understanding any specific referents was a confirmation of how many of the significant values in language are independent of both semantics and syntax.8 This experience showed me once again something of the breadth and depth of what’s carried in the rhythm and pitch of spoken language. It’s the rhythmic and tonal range of our mother tongues we first get with. This, the aspect of language we learn to decode and interact with first, is also the most universal aspect of language.9 8 The film is called An Anagram (2003, DVD). The on-​location interviewer and translator for the film was Slavic studies scholar Dr. Harlow Robinson, who authenticated the film’s coherence along with Irina Valioulina, my post-​edit authenticator, translator, and culture guide. 9 Christine Kenneally in her book The First Word (2007) discusses this idea throughout, and in many contexts.

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Although the unique rhythms and tonal patterns characteristic of any particular language make each sound distinct, these patterns are so universally inflected according to excitement, passion, hopefulness, despair, anger, disappointment, curiosity, mischief, ambition, warning, appraisal, and so on that, to a very large degree, we have no trouble getting these overtones. We may not know what the people are excited about, but we know the character and even the flavor of that excitement. In fact this is the level of communication that carries the most certainty. When someone grimaces in pain, or laughs unselfconsciously we get, as close as we ever can, to know in the first person what they are saying. Empathy is a most direct example of meaning. It has an obvious physical component. This is the level of language inflection that comes from our bodies in every sense, the level that grows directly from the physical states they communicate, where language is closest to its biological foundations, and meanings are most universal.

29.  Language and the momentum of the body We can also see meaning bleed across the boundaries of speech, music, and gesture when musicians talk to each other during a collaborative process. A conductor might say, “Then at #43, just after la, lala, dum we hit it like this—​brrrrm” and this entire remark is modified by distinct and emphatic hand and body language that carries as crucial an aspect of the referential act as his speaking and humming. Thinking of meaning in terms of vectors, one singular characteristic—​rate of acceleration—​inflects meaning on many levels and at many scales. The modulation of acceleration tells us when thoughts begin, transition, and end, how emotion runs through the course of an idea, and how structures evolve. When pictures and sounds are recorded, and then played back in the course of editing a film, one notices that thought-​size articulations, along with their accompanying gestures, often have some tendency to speed up in the beginning and slow down at the end, with characteristically shaped vector-​sets. Even parentheticals and interrogatives have got characteristic musical relationships to corresponding main ideas and declaratives. Simple enough. The abruptness or the melodiousness of that acceleration and deceleration will always be at play when these pieces, especially pieces of recorded speech, are arranged and rearranged. A film editor becomes very intimate with these modulations of acceleration. They are what announce the ‘cut points,’ both in verbal and in visual material, those places at which the recorded stream of information can be separated into a piece or a part, a sound bite, meaningful unto itself, or useful as a component in a collection of sub-​meaningful pieces. They orient its parsing.

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When I  first look at footage that’s bound to become a documentary, I absorb the material on many levels at once. On the verbal level I’m looking for the crisp delivery of ideas; and since that so rarely happens in raw documentary footage, in which interviewees ramble, repeat themselves, correct themselves, cough, stumble, and sneeze, I mostly look for ways to eliminate gestures, words, and sentences that get in the way of the clear flow of ideas. As I do this, I reconstitute the edited material in my head to see if the required antecedents, transitional and concluding thoughts are available to recreate a smooth, coherent flow. I need to know after that initial screening that the key meanings are likely to be salvageable from the about-​to-​be-​ diced-​up material, so I can determine if the expression of any given idea will ultimately be usable. Since these signature accelerations and decelerations mark where a phrase originally came from, it’s a bit of a trick to take a snip from the middle of a sentence and put it at the end or vice versa, even if the syntax is perfect. Beginnings inflect like beginnings, elaborations have many different kinds of recognizable inflections, and endings are quite distinct in the way ideas get squeezed shut . . . either for the moment . . . or with some real finality.10 But, when I’m first looking at footage, more than anything else, I  am looking for the opening and the closing frame of a thought; or the first and last moment of a scene, or a theme, or a whole program. I am always looking for the “in” point and the “out” point. Where it will begin and where it will end. This happens at every level of editorial judgment, from the instantaneous shaping of a single transition to the shaping of the complete work—​ and across all modalities—​judging camera or subject movement, speech, music, and so on—​the active process of sorting material into different levels of beginning, middle, and end-​ness, also known as editing a film, especially a documentary, starts in the first screening. The boundary between the meeting ground of semantics and syntax, on the one hand, and the more musical aspects of language, on the other, becomes a natural and intuitive workspace for the editor. Free play across this boundary is what ultimately maintains the rhythm and flow of ideas. The degree to which beginnings and endings are easy to spot, emphatic and resounding, or soft and subtle describes the dynamic emotional range of a drama, and provides one context within which to evaluate the developmental material. The dynamic range of the formal drama in any footage, the sweep of energies it contains in terms of these accelerations and decelerations 10 It’s worth taking the time here to note that in a talking-​head interview the sound can be rearranged within the above noted constraints, but the coherence of picture flow means that one cannot rearrange picture with the freedom that one can rearrange sound. The implications of this are both profound and germane to the logistics of editing. Cut-​aways are shots the editor uses to bridge jump-​cut pieces of talk that have been rearranged for greater economy or coherence.

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of tone and amplitude, determines a major part of the overall texture of the work. In the case of those poetic, structural, or painterly films—​those films loosed from any of the narrative constraints of the documentary—​this dynamic range can determine the overall meaning of the work. These signal accelerations and decelerations often mark units of omnivalent reference as well. All media have characteristic accelerations and decelerations, even if they are only textural or tonal, as in static media.

30.  Syntactic universals: interval, context, and repetition “A rose is a rose, is a rose.” When we look at meaning from a temporal and dynamic perspective, three features seem to be at play always and in all media: interval, context, and repetition. Interval can describe how we segment time—​the frequency of events. Context can describe the way we focus our attention and isolate events. And since our short-​term memories have distinct limits, we use repetition to create bigger ideas from smaller ones. If we add our ability to recognize family resemblances to these three, we can describe all reference. Once again, I believe it’s most helpful if we regard these terms as heuristics—​as temporary ways of looking at the information stream, rather than as absolute conditions.

Interval: The naked human sensory window onto interval is limited both by that little slice of the surrounding energy spectra we are able to perceive as well as the feedback-​tempo limitations of our nervous systems. X-Rays and nanosecond intervals are invisible to us. We are also thoroughly conditioned on a more macro scale by the scope of historical events, both specifically learned and encoded subliminally in culture. Throughout, the intervals that are most important to us are represented by the spectra of the colors we can see, the sounds in our audible range, our rates of neural processing and sensory feedback, our various biorhythms, the rates at which we articulate thoughts, feelings, and ideas, the body cycles of wake and sleep, and of course, the developmental intervals of a human life and the arc of a single generation in history. Our attention spans constitute another important interval range, and our associative memory another. In speech and music, interval could describe both pitch and rhythm (though musicians only use it as regards pitch), and by extension therefore, melody and harmony as well. We can use interval to describe the timing

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between our perceptual selves and the world, both on the level of neural processing (how long it takes us to respond to a stimulus) and on the level of attention shift. According to these descriptions we can regard interval as the measure of a process and hence, when thinking of meaning in terms of vectors, as one measure of a vector of meaning. Interval covers the music of speech. With motion pictures, a basic and very fundamental interval is determined by the frame rate of the projection mechanism on the one hand and the speed with which we can process audio/​visual information on the other.

Context: The word “context” lets us talk about what emerges to become significant as our attention shifts through patterns and configurations of sense data: the arrangements that we call objects or events while parsing our experience. The context is how we describe that which surrounds, as distinguished from that which is being attended to while surrounded by its context. As our attention shifts (and it constantly does), the surround-​er becomes the surround-​ed and the previously significant subject may become the context for the next significant piece of conversational business. Any object of our attention has internal relationships of similarity and simultaneity that allow us to call or consider it a something. What we were attending to before and after this something gives it a place in our experience of it. This shift of attention through recognizable patterns is what we call making sense of the world,11 and the word “context” allows us to isolate the location or moment of significance—​to define it by exclusion. Let me try to make the function of context in the creation of meaning more graphic: If we imagine a white billboard with nothing on it but the word “BOY,” even though we know what the word “boy” means, we still don’t know what the billboard means. Maybe, we think this is a new advertising twist on the old Burma Shave ads by the side of the road, where the message is 11 Oliver Sacks’s “To See and Not See” (1995: 124) gives us a great example of assumptions about what it takes to make sense of the world in describing patients who have their vision restored after being blind their whole lives, or for a long time.  One such patient (described by Eduard Raehlmann, in 1891), though she had had a little vision preoperatively and had frequently handled dogs, “had [when her sight was restored] no idea of how the head, legs, and ears were connected to the animal.” Of such difficulties, which may seem almost incomprehensible, or absurd, to the rest of us, Sacks remarks, “The real difficulty here is that simultaneous perception of objects is an unaccustomed way to those used to sequential perception through touch.” We, with a full complement of senses, live in space and time; the blind live in a world of time alone. For the blind build their worlds from sequences of impressions (tactile, auditory, olfactory), and are not capable, as sighted people are, of a simultaneous visual perception, the making of an instantaneous visual scene. Indeed, if one can no longer see in space then the idea of space becomes incomprehensible—​and this even for highly intelligent people blinded relatively late in life.

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spelled out one word per sign, so instead of scanning a sentence with our eyes, we scan it with a car. Perhaps, swapping space for time, when we pass the BOY-​billboard next week, a new word will be on it. We may, in the meantime, speculate on what the billboard means, but it engenders speculation and not meaning (the vector is nearly a loop). So we realize that singular isolated nouns rarely mean anything (nor, interestingly enough, do isolated musical notes). If, out of the blue, someone says the word “boy,” we have to consider that the context of the utterance may be found anywhere in the local circumstance; very likely in the tone of voice, where all sorts of different inflections will give all sorts of different meanings. Even if the inflection is mysteriously flat, we’ll make automatic assumptions or inferences from the circumstance about what the context, hence the meaning might be—​if we can. The difference between the two cases, the billboard and the vocalization, tells us about the role of context in the success of reference. It also tells us about the special role of the frame in specifying context. Still more important, because there is no explicit frame around the vocalization, our tendency to hunt for and assign a context hints at how vigorously we seek context, hence meaning. Like interval, context operates at many scales. Context is crucial for understanding the instant, and also history. The very first steps in making sense of the world, where we handle raw sensory input, where our sensory rubber meets the road of significance, is to sort the ceaselessly ongoing modulation of stimuli for similarity and difference in value; all of which can be thought of as interval data rendered significant by its context. Then we process those values by way of whatever prior experience we have of them; recontextualizing upward. Our early creature development makes this nesting of impressions automatic. However, what in one encounter seems to be all the same stuff might in another contain lots of significant distinctions, as the context—​our needs, motivations, and the circumstances of the interaction—​changes. At the most fundamental level of perception, where we encounter physical and chemical stimuli, where the neural pathways to the brain get stimulated by the light, sound, pressures, tastes, and odors of the world, receptors that are adjacent to one another, in general, are sensitive to opposing values, thereby automatically enhancing the distinctness of individual stimuli and our perception of contrasts, so in a sense you could say that context is hardwired into perception.12 A significant or meaningful relationship among similarities and differences is a pattern. If we think of our perceptual field as consisting entirely of comparison and contrast, that is, lights that are light because there are darks, 12 Ragnar Granit’s (1955) classic, Receptors and Sensory Perception remains a wonderfully detailed and readable source.

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high notes, that are high because there are low notes, loud in relation to soft, and so on, we get some feeling for the flux in our sensory dynamic. Because of the shift of contexts caused by the passing of the moment, in some sense, all experience is new experience. But in an another sense, because of our automatic perceptual mechanisms for adjusting to changes in brightness, color, temperature, ambient sound levels, and so on, not to mention our long-​satisfied expectation of sensory coherence and continuity, to us it’s all just the same old seamless experience. Any place you pinch it off to call it something is a function of habit (recognition) or an act of will. Recognition is just what it says: cognizing something again—​all the way up the ladder of organization, from recognition of patterns, to patterns of patterns or configurations, and on up to objects, people, actions, sounds,13 styles, and ideas, and so on. This is how we get around to saying that our ability to sense similarity in difference holds our world together; that the recognition or the discerning of configurations of sense data is at the bottom of making sense of the world. Naming the configurations is, from the time we learn to speak, an integral part of that process. This all goes on as we focus within a field. Shifting the focus swaps subject for context. A shift of focus is a symptom of meaning; and names, the paradigm of parsing, become the main arbiter of what is a something. One function of communication is to focus someone else’s attention initially by setting a context, and then shifting it sequentially with shared referents. A frame is an artificial device we use to control the shift of attention and specify contextual relationships. Defined this way, chapter breaks, paragraph breaks, periods, semicolons, and commas are all frames of different scales and permeability. They control the consideration of context, therefore they control the vectors involved in the construction of reference. But our most common association with frames is pictures, not words. The question of context comes into play in a somewhat more defined fashion when we think of the shift of attention that occurs at the frame of a picture; thus the problem with asking what a picture means.

Repetition: Repetition is the word we use to describe the reoccurrence of events that are either functionally identical or sufficiently similar to one another that differences are indistinguishable or insignificant. We use the word ‘repetition’ to call attention to similarities and patch over differences. We use it pejoratively to describe a lack of progression. However—​repetition is a fundamental necessity for all our time-​based media. In fact, it is the essential role 13 The world of sound in life and even more, in cinema, is a very special case of recognition that we will talk about in detail later.

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of repetition in cinema that first led me to look at the heuristic trialectic of interval, context, and repetition. Further, my consideration of the fundamental role of repetition in cinema provided that meditative zone wherein a temporal/​dynamic perspective on meaning could grow. Repetition allows both music and language to use a limited number of elements in an endless variety of combinations to create an apparently infinite sea of meaning. Even though the human vocal tract can make a very large range of sounds, each individual language uses only a few of these repeated again and again. As well, each musical system constructs its meanings from a restricted palette of sounds. These elements—​the written notes or played tones in music and the printed letters or spoken phonemes in words, combine to make larger elements:  melodies, rhythms, and tunes; morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences; refrains and rhymes and so on, which are themselves repeated to some degree on progressively larger scales. Repetition plays less of a role as the structures get larger in normal prose discourse. However in art, the repetitions in progressively larger structures carry a strong, diffuse, but fundamental burden of meaning. In fact repetition is one key to omnivalent structures in music and verbal art, not to mention how absolutely and fundamentally it is operationally essential to all of cinema. This is easiest to see with the old analog/​mechanical cinema. If you hold a strip of movie film in your hands, (see Figure 4) it becomes immediately obvious how much cinema depends on repetition for its very existence: the repeated images so nearly identical, so much more the same than different; bearing, in the incremental changes of those few data points that do not repeat identically, the latent illusion of a motion that is actualized in its passage through a machine. What’s so striking when you hold a strip of film in your hands and see it in its utterly static physical state is the precision of that repetition. And the success of the illusion absolutely depends on that precision.14 The frame line, the black area around the images that is not exposed to light in the camera (and not illuminated by the light of the projector) is a kind of crossroads and an index of that precision. Anything in the picture that changes its distance from the frame line, from one picture to the next, will appear to be displaced or to move when the strip is run through the machine. The frame line between the pictures represents that moment in

14 If we look at the filmstrip a little more closely, we see that this is not strictly true. The physical substrate of analog cinema consists of granules deposited in an emulsion laid on a transparent base. The color and density of those granules make up the image. Under some circumstances, this “graininess” becomes apparent as the substrate of the image, and its apparent motion has some of the quality of the motion we see in boiling water. However, since this is really the only place we ever see such fast, random movement outside of technical realms, we really don’t have good descriptive language for it, and as well since it is considered ‘noise,’ we filter it out unconsciously if we can.

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FIGURE 4  Man walking. The sequential frames are nearly identical. From The Ogre (1970), by the author.

time when the shutter is closed, the interstice between moments. The frame line is where space turns into time and differences sift out of identities to mimic movement. The frame line is the invisible vector, the door to the anteroom of meaning. The parts of the machine of cinema—​the camera, projector, and the filmstrip that connects them are almost always slaved to the continuum of life, where sequential pictures represent sequential moments in sequential actions. But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if we break this linear causality and harness cinema’s potential for musical circularity? What if we go against the inveterate narrative character of the image and against the structural model of the stage play? What if we again think of frames simply as cinema’s smallest temporal unit of meaning, using them like tones and phonemes? What if repetition played an analogous role in the articulation of meaning in cinema as it does in vocal sounds, musical tones, and alphabets?

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This kind of question looms, since cinema is in its infancy, and could go anywhere. We have little idea how long either spoken language or music have taken to evolve; and any fascination with these questions makes this moment in the newborn articulation of motion pictures seem so powerful.

31.  The synergy of symmetry We already know that the separate modalities of cinema—​the moving pictures, the ambient sound, and the music—​all have cognitive and emotional synergies with one another within traditional narrative cinema but are for the most part guided by the script, by the spoken language; synergies focused on propelling the story. Inevitably, therefore, the ineffable is organized around the effable. So then, let’s pursue a bit further what we’ve only been hinting at so far. What if, instead of using the stage play or news story as a model, that is, the verbal lobe of the synergy, we follow the dominant structural models of music or painting in the way we organize information in our hypothetical projection of what a future cinema might be like (as in Figure 3)? What if we explicitly appropriate the organizational values of music or abstract painting, or even poetry in the way we think about composing work in cinema? After all, music and painting and poetry all have, for those susceptible to them, affective powers that are very different from prose. But then again, what do we gain by rejecting the inveterate narrative of the moving picture? How much would we miss those stories about the lives of others as a line on which to hang the flow? How much would we miss the story, even if all the abstract subtlety of painting, poetry’s delicacy of insight, and the intellectual/​spiritual power of music to move us were fully available to cinema? Besides a novel approach, what we gain, on the level of pure poetic aspiration, is access to the near-​perfect symmetry of omnivalent potential; and I would claim that omnivalence, in a multimodal medium, can power a synergy whose resonant power increases exponentially with complexity. Even if you accept this highly controversial claim, omnivalence in cinema would still represent an incredibly challenging level of synergy for any artist to attain, especially with so few examples from history to draw on.

32.  Sidebar—​another parallel model and another speculative future Cinema itself, like all produced media, is somewhere between written and spoken language since it is fabricated on a timeline that allows the fits,

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starts, discontinuities, and editorial overwriting of a written language, but is played back in a continuous, largely uninterrupted flow, like speech. A pictogram, for the sake of comparison, is caught somewhere between a picture and a written word. Pictograms are a very different way of thinking about written language, since like pictures, they can refer directly to objects, qualities, or actions instead of the sounds we use to signify them; however, like words, they also have both stipulated and suggested meanings. Pictograms can refer to objects, qualities, actions, and ideas, both explicit and general, abstract and concrete, because all participants have learned how to read the arrangement of strokes and move directly to the things and ideas they stand for. This results in a very direct and resonant style of poetry.15 Written languages and cinema both create meaning by articulating complex graphic relationships. Also context functions as effectively (or more) in pictographic as in alphabetic languages.16 The fact that moving pictures don’t have stipulated meanings in the same way that pictograms do limits the analogy for the time being, but just because few pictures currently have anything like stipulated meanings doesn’t mean they can’t. Remember, although stipulation is a basic reference function in language, what serves a similar function in cinema may look very different. For instance, there are aspects of moving pictures that have such a universal ring to them that their meanings might as well be stipulated, for example, in some contexts a dissolve will indicate elapsed time; a hazy image will evoke a dreamy mood or a jittery hand-​held camera, will induce anxiety, and so on. Looking toward a far-​future cinema it makes sense to ask: (1) How did stipulated meanings in language evolve anyway; and (2)  what would an equivalently pervasive set of relationships look like in a motion picture meaning-​scheme? Certainly, when talking first got going there were no academic colloquia or Imperial Courts in which agreement on the referents for various sounds was hammered out. Although new words and gestures pop up fast and furious, along with their pop-​culture stipulated meanings, and though we have lots of ways to get meanings stipulated—​remember, the only way we know if the same meaning actually has been stipulated, short 15 The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa (1936) is a fascinating, but possibly confused discussion of the relationship between Chinese ideograms and nature. In 1958 George A. Kennedy crisply debunked aspects of Fenollosa’s perspective in his essay Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character. Though Kennedy feels more persuasive, and Fenollosa more eloquent, I am drawing from both of their perspectives in this section in order to abstract some generalities from ideographic language that might help us imagine the potential of motion picture writing. My goal in crossing this conceptual barrier is to be able to imagine a cinema of motion-​word writing—​only using pictures. 16 A fascinating example: It’s claimed that text messaging in China, with its highly abbreviated style, has spawned a literary form in which electronic romance novels are being written using a vocabulary of as few as seventy characters.

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of asking someone what they think a word means, is the continuation of the conversation. So, in the beginning of the history of any particular verbal reference, it is the interaction around the use of the sound that contains both the act of stipulation and the test for understanding: that is, the talk goes on or it doesn’t. When and if the use of a word comes into doubt, we can ask for corroboration with a question or frown. Stipulation, like all learning, can be thought of as an interactive process. When dealing with written texts, the same question is handled with a dictionary. That’s what a dictionary is for. The answer to the second question, what the equivalent of stipulation in cinema would look like, is far more complex. The simple facts that (a) not everyone authors motion pictures (yet) so, except for the world of games, it is hardly a real-​time interactive medium and therefore the social conditions for live-​action, in vivo stipulations might only possibly exist in that one realm; (b) there is no dictionary of motion pictures (how would it be organized?); (c) and last but not least, pictures really are so much what they are of means that the process of stipulating meaning, the process of conventionalizing precise, universal, abstract referents for pictures in their manifold aspect, referents that are significantly distinct from what they are a picture of, seems an unlikely venture. As the medium evolves, however, what has been conventionalized, as we’ve suggested, are editorial and directorial gestures, styles, inflections, and transitions and so on—​piggybacking to an arguable degree on the universal inflections that pervade music, speech, and body-​gesture. All this conventionalizing of information as the medium matures happens in any number of ways through the incredibly vital, trans-​medial migration of ideas, aka the memosphere, aka the mediasphere or cultural soup—​that is, the cumulative and reflexive impact of motion pictures on social trends. This effect is heightened by the speed with which current cultural idioms evolve so that in effect it is a medium having a progressive conversation with itself and with the media around it. The checks for appropriate response, coherence, and impact that allow the meanings of words to become conventionalized through ongoing conversation is happening with motion pictures in relatively slow motion as gestural idioms percolate and evolve through the public media arena.17 The idioms of the day—​those styles, looks, qualities of motion and pacing that make up our visual soup du jour—​all project more or less subtle but very widely accepted evocations. The longevity of any “term” in this contemporary lexicon relates, probably as it does in speech, to whatever relevance it has to some current cultural condition.

17 Witness the evolution of ritualized hand gestures in hip-​hop culture.

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33.  Formal references in music and cinema Using the conventionalizing power of language as a background, what can we learn from music and how it makes the mind move that would apply to a hypothetical cinema; one that was both precise and universal in referencing what words cannot? And with music, obviously, it’s not just the mind that is moved. Repetition, as we all know, has a big place in musical form, exemplified by scales, beats, and the variation on identifiable themes. Repetition is also a pretty common way for narrative poems (and their pop song sisters) to move along, and you’ll find that variations on internally established themes provide coherence in many powerful paintings and photographs, if you know where to look. In contrast, the main use of the theme and variation as an external structure in narrative cinema is usually found only in episodic formats, serials, series, sitcoms, and so on, although occasionally narrative films like Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) embody a kind of internal theme and variation structure. “Familiarity,” the paleobiologist Richard Fortey is said to have said, “breeds familiarity.” The referential model for themes and their variations is self-​reference:  a piece of music moves along by stating a theme in the beginning and then stretching our familiarity with it by referring to it in progressively more complex and/​or elliptical ways. So, we could call the structural use of familiarity a kind of internal convention after all, where the theme is the stipulated referent for the variation: that is, the motif is the referent of the phrase, the motif or the phrase is the referent of the first variation—​and on up the structural hierarchy. You might think we’re stretching the definition of reference here, but remember we’re characterizing meaning as a kind of movement: we’re talking about how the mind gets guided through an abstract piece of work, one without the inveterate (for all that’s hidden in this word) pull of a story; though you might very well say that we are borrowing the word ‘reference’ to describe, in formally structured media, a kind of relationship familiar from discourse or narrative. So, in order to avoid confusion, we have to be clear about some differences and some similarities in how we use the word ‘reference’ in formal matters. Whereas language is easily grounded in its references to a shared external world—​one that the participants can point to, music is mostly its own world, and one that is highly subjective, indeed often idiosyncratic, in its evocative and suggestive emotional power; one that is very hard to point to. But since music mostly conveys meaning through a structure in which developments refer to previously stated themes internal to the work, and is therefore largely self-​referential, music and other similarly formal work is less likely to “be about something.”

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The question “What’s it about?” is usually best answered:  “It’s about itself.”18 Frames imply self-​ reference—​ and music, amorphous as its referents might seem, is also structured with frames that are announced by those same dynamic universals of acceleration, deceleration, and pause; beginning, middle, and end. Whereas music creates themes and variations with repetitions of interval in time (beats) and interval in pitch (notes), the picture side of cinema, given the largely simultaneous read-​out of the visual field, doesn’t really have a pitch component. Instead of pitch it has lots of other characteristics that it can modulate within the inherently harmonic and contrapuntal powers of a multi-​stream medium. So it seems to me that cinema, fundamentally based as it is in repetition, has very rich expressive potential in theme and variation, in counterpoint and in harmony. With Western music we have the quintessential expression of omnivalence in the concept of the signature key, wherein every tone depends equivalently for its valence on a signature tone, called the ‘tonic.’ I would maintain that a purely formal cinema uses tonality or ‘affective flavor’ in the place of a signature key.19 For instance, many of Saul Levine’s films are held together by their qualities of rage and frustration and many of Nick Dorsky’s play delicately with various seasons or subtle moods that act as a tonic that has many shades of a ‘minor’ or ‘major’ tonality.

34.  The developmental leap—​keeping the referent a mystery One of the hallmarks of the art of the past hundred years or so has been the claim staked by the experimental method as a medium of pleasure and illumination for its own sake, where comprehension itself is a variable parameter. So in a formally organized film of the late twentieth century, meaning (actually, the ability to follow along with the film) might be constantly in question, the way the impending resolution of a musical theme can remain in question. Self-​reference allows artists to stipulate whatever they want in a musical architecture, so long as they have no qualms about letting the audience figure things out for themselves. Within its own peculiar framework, A New Piece of Work is still expected to teach you its own language, one with its own syntax, semantics, and 18 Formal music obviously references other music historically and culturally, but again, in a way that you might also characterize as a variation on a theme. Formal music that references the external world is often characterized disparagingly as ‘program music.’ 19 This is tightly linked to the idea that ‘meaning vectors’ can be characterized by their affective flavor or capacity for emotional resonance, as well as direction, duration, and velocity.

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inflectional style, a language you usually have to learn as you go along in the process of getting acquainted with its unique way of shifting meaning. It’s a little like assembling a ladder as you climb it—​heuristic thinking squared. Many people find this an uncomfortable process, are hostile to it, and shun it. Some accept it resolutely as the way the experience is meant to unfold and more or less stoically look for the lessons it holds. Some people actually find it a thrilling way to watch the birth of formally expressive structures, recognizing that the meaningfulness of a work may only coalesce well after the actual experience of it has ended—​as was the case in my encounter with Brakhage’s Fire of Waters. By the time one successfully follows a piece of new music or cinema to the end, you will only then have begun to learn to appreciate what that end means, and what that end implies. You can expect, however, to have learned a whole new mode of apprehension, en route. And whatever else it is that you might say about what it is that you’ve learned, you’re likely to find it hard to put into words. The satisfactions we can derive from tight, large-​scale, formal structures, especially brand new ones, are among the most ineffable we know. We must become comfortable with complex, elaborate, and ephemeral meanings that have no direct verbal correlates if we want to reap these particular satisfactions. In order for cinema to share experiences of this degree of abstract satisfaction and develop self-​referential structures like those that are natural to music, it has to leverage its graphic, purely pictorial power while subordinating to one degree or another the stubborn, extra-​referential thrust of the picture’s implied narrative tendencies. If that were possible, then the structure of a film, like the structure of a piece of music, could also progress fully and build meaning completely by developing purely formal rather than story-​related motifs—​each variation built on the rhythmic, melodic, lyrical, conceptual, and structural relationships of the pictures as they have been splayed across the screen; each variation testing our ability to see similarity in difference on many planes, in many dimensions and creating their many vectors of tension and subtle shifts of meaning. With such a range of modalities (picture, sound, music, and word) to modulate, self-​referential structures in cinema can become extraordinarily elaborate and precise in their resonance and in their ability to reference and, indeed, to invoke the transcendent sensations and experiences of a life unglued from the quotidian. But whether musical models dominate this hypothetical cinema, one that aspires to the quintessence of omnivalent universality, or whether musical structures merely contribute to this possibility—​at the very least, the multipoint parallax in perspective we gain from this trans-​medial, comparative thinking expands cinema’s art. So we can congratulate ourselves on that. But what about this problem of the “inveterate narrative character of the motion picture” and the supposed propensity for its parade of make-​pretend human dramas to pollute the pristine self-​reference of music? What do we do to tame narrative tendencies

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so they become inflections of the meaning, rather than the main bearers of meaning itself, so that the elaboration of an abstract and ineffable theme is always the principal referent, the what that the piece is about?

35.  Resemblance and resonance How do we do it? We transform the manner in which interval, context, and repetition interact in our articulation of pictures. We change the proportions, the emphasis, and the expectations. But since this inveterate narrative character, this tendency to refer outside the work is so strong we might need methods that are somewhat violent to disabuse that expectation. This level of intellectual, and sometimes perceptual, violence is part of the reason why experimental film (experimental art, in general) is sometimes so hard to take, so hard to get with. You have to be curious beyond words to put up with it. The rewards, besides a novel bliss, can be the entrée to entirely new portals of meaning. We can project some of this potential from the constraints and possibilities that we are already aware of; but most, I’m sure, are still from our current perspective here at the beginning of cinematic history, well beyond our ken. The impact of interval on perception at any level hinges on the dual description of how fast it’s coming in and how fast we handle it. As noted, some things come in so fast (ultraviolet light) or so slow (infrared light) that they are beyond our normal sensory envelope and we don’t handle them at all or only handle them subliminally, automatically, or unthinkingly—​that is, according to deeply established neural protocols or on an unconscious level. Some pulse a bit ahead of our recognition, some lag a bit behind.20 We assimilate things at different levels depending in part on how quickly they go by, and how quickly the things around them go by. Those special cultural experiences that we expect to encounter again and again, like our favorite songs or stories, paintings, poems, or movies, get assimilated on different levels as our familiarity with them grows. When we are attending to those media that have a normally uninterrupted flow like narrative film we have a familiar, standard meaning-​model:  the passage of new events creates showers of more or less short, direct vectors of meaning, along with some resonance. When we encounter something that sits on a page to be absorbed at leisure by the eye, these meaning-​vectors can be as long, as varied, and as complex as we care for them to be (or, as long as we are capable of making them with the in-​filling of our imaginations).

20 See Dennett (1991:  115–​26) on the complexity of the temporal relationship between stimulus and response that is uncovered in the analysis of the color phi phenomenon by Kohlers and Grunau (1976). This will be discussed in greater detail later.

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Reexperiencing creates yet another kind of vector with the potential for a deeper resonance. Reexperiencing, after-​all, involves self-​reference. As we begin intensive cross-​media comparisons of the workings of these three terms—​interval, context, and repetition—​we discover how plastic they are; three heuristics with widely overlapping turf. So it’s a good idea to keep reminding ourselves that they are just a way of talking about something that’s alive and squirming, while using terms that are limited and discreet. However, if we want to compare formal structures in cinema to those in music, we immediately bump into one significant limitation in cinema’s articulation of interval: if we think of one frame of film as the equivalent unit to the single note in music, we immediately see that increments in interval are limited by the twenty-​four image per second fixed, standard projection speed—​a bit like playing with a stuck metronome.21 Nonetheless, if we think of each cut as a beat, we can easily relate the idea of rhythms for the ear to rhythms for the eye. However, when thinking of a note as equivalent to a single frame, patterns of organization comfortable in music may be very difficult to conceive in cinema, and even more difficult to experience. Learning to become comfortable with ultrafast cutting requires a kind of physiological openness (in fact, a kind of ocular-​relaxation) that’s equivalent to the intellectual openness (signification-​relaxation) required to appreciate inchoate meaning forms. Pitch has, as we said, no direct correlate in cinema. But just as the meaning, and in fact the very way we perceive any tone, is utterly dependent on the surrounding tones, the same goes for a frame in a movie. Proximal context is a central determinant in media for perception as well as meaning. And since the referential possibilities of pictures are wider and more varied than those of tones, in cinema the impact on potential meaning of any variable we consider in place of pitch is even more dependent on context. Context in cinema can consist of so many more things, and can operate on so many more referential levels than in music. With the articulation of pictures the articulation of space itself can be a musical motif, as in the three Michael Snow films mentioned earlier, in Serene Velocity (1970) by Ernie Gehr, or Saul Levine’s Notes of an Early Fall (1976), among others.22 Since a one-​to-​one frame-​to-​note correlation may be so difficult for many people to imagine or experience, before we discuss image articulation at a rate where one frame equals a 32d note (played moderato), for instance, and in which two identical frames would equal a sixteenth note and so on—​a rate of articulation of individual images which is close to that of phonemes in moderately paced speech—​we need to look into how interval impacts the 21 This may vary with the medium somewhat, but anything in any particular medium will be limited strictly to increments of the standard frame rate. 22 Including, for that matter, many of my own films. The Ogre (1970), The Chinese Typewriter (1983), The Cubist in Mexico (1984), and Endless (1990) are particularly notable in this regard.

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processing side of the equation a little more carefully. As we pointed out earlier, things get processed on different levels at least partly depending on how long we are given to process them. To review: variations in the frequency of sounds are heard as changes in pitch, variations at a much lower frequency are heard as changes in cadence, beat, or rhythm. There is one very unusual and utterly unique realm of articulation in cinema that straddles the distinction between pitch and rhythm in the timing of pulses.

36.  The subliminal pull of the flicker One could think of frames of different colors as analogous to notes of different pitch, and texture as analogous to timbre, but in the end these are pale and limiting analogies. Cinema, however, can induce a far more potent (though at this point crude and limited) equivalence between the sensation of pitch and the sensation of color. It does this by throwing aspects of our neural processing that are otherwise unavailable to consciousness, right into our faces. In cinema’s capacity to do this, there lies incredible, nearly untapped meaning-​potential. Neural processing of images happens at a rate that’s not all that fast.23 Hence the twin illusions of continuity and motion in cinema, both of which depend on the speed of the machine’s image articulation beating our eyes and brains to the punch. If one toys with this interval, tuning pulses of light and dark so as to create phase relationships with the pulse of our own neural processing, we can induce and modulate color/​space hallucinations, as witnessed during the strobe-​light eating disco-​world of the hallucination-​ hungry 1960s and 1970s. These hallucinations can be actively modulated. Tony Conrad, an extreme film experimentalist, discovered with his film The Flicker (1966) that he could modulate both the color and the apparent motion of these hallucinations by tuning the interval and the change in interval of very short pulses (roughly 42–​280 millisecond) of clear frames isolated by variable numbers of black frames and vice versa. The idea, though crude, is powerful and is also a good point of departure for considering the shorter than normal intervals for the musical articulation of pictures in cinema. The one to six frame alternations of clear and black that Conrad used to trigger hallucinations also trigger other neurological 23 The basic cycle time of a neuron is approximately 10 milliseconds, against the 42 millisecond existence of a movie frame; and though it is difficult to measure, approximately 200 milliseconds are required for complex image recognition. See http://​www.nature.com/​nature/​ journal/​v381/​n6582/​abs/​381520a0.html and http://​newton.bme.columbia.edu/​publications/​ GersonParraSajdaNI05.pdf.

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effects (including potential epileptic seizures—​so that the film has a warning at the beginning stating that epileptics should leave the theater before it commences). But what other levels of information can be encoded at this speed? Articulating pictures so fast that they become fundamental units of a speech-​speed referential system, steered by the repetitive pulse of a musical architecture, all the while modulating light intensity with a velocity that toys with the neural envelope, is crazy! Or is it? After all, wouldn’t this ultrafast cutting, along with the musically or phonemically repetitive use of images, help to shake pictures loose from their primary reliance on external-​narrative reference? Beneath it all—​ and the importance of this fact will forever be underestimated—​whether the cutting is fast or slow, the subliminal flicker built into the experience of analog cinema by the seventy-​two pulse per second constant of the movie projector grips our attention below the threshold of awareness, but grips it nonetheless.24

37.  Aural and visual cadence However, before we get into the particulars of ultrafast, phoneme-​speed cutting, let’s deal with a more familiar case:  pictures articulated three or more times longer, at the rate of morphemes or words: Here we’re in the familiar idiom of the very hot montage, or the quick-​cut music video; forms in which interval, context, and repetition at the structural level all play pretty equivalent roles in shaping the flow of thought, via parallel, distinct streams of information. As we’ve mentioned, with four or more simultaneous streams of information the possibilities for the articulation of form and structure in cinema open up with the up-​till-​now musically bound concepts of synchrony, harmony, counterpoint, cannon, fugue, and all those other design aspects of multi-​ streaming information that music has evolved over thousands of years. And, if a filmmaker is thinking on all the levels that the polyvalent expressions of picture and sound can provide, then the idea of a cadence becomes all the more important for bringing order to the many different sorts and flavors and modalities of information flying in from all over, each with the peculiar referential tendencies of its modality gathering for their moment together on the screen. So, in a cinema where the motive power of the narrative is demoted, as it is in formal music, rhythm becomes the foremost organizing element.25 24 My own informal experiments in the early 1970s with slide projectors masked by cinema-​ style variable speed shutters demonstrated this. Static slides held subjects’ attention considerably longer when they were interrupted by the shutter and made to flicker at speeds that were not consciously perceptible. 25 The cadences in jazz and blues often self-​consciously imitate the cadences of speech. What’s interesting is how this imitation strips out the narrative, leaving only the affect.

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In this kind of cinema, the concept of vector-​cadence becomes a valuable expressive tool for the filmmaker—​or analytic tool for the critic. If cadence describes the timing of perceptual events, vector-​cadence describes the interplay of intervals involved in making various kinds of reference. The importance of the concept of vector-​cadence will become clear when we get around to discussing the formal interplay between omnivalence and repetition in detail. Let’s look at montage as the best current example of cinema’s potential for developing a synergistic relationship with music. Whereas the pictures in a typical narrative film are arranged to serve the story, and the articulation of pictures in a music video is in the service of the music, the pictures in a well-​wrought montage, on the other hand, are organized with close attention to both their pictorial and their musical values, and with rarely a care for their verbal or narrative coherence. Abstract painting gives us still another vantage point for understanding the integration of musical and pictorial values in montage. In a representational painting or photograph, pictorial values (palette, intensity, line quality, etc.) are more like modifiers—​they set a tone or mood, add relaxation or urgency; they become adjectival or adverbial. In an abstract painting, however, the pictorial values—​the look of the picture—​are themselves the subjects of the painting. When pictorial values are the subject of a painting, or when they vie strongly for dominance with representation, or even when they play levels of representational recognition against abstract form (as with de Kooning’s nudes and landscapes), in these cases throwing motion into the mix has a totally different impact than with representational images. If pictures have an inveterately narrative character, motion intensifies this narrative implication. Motion within an abstract field, however, has a much more complex set of inputs. Since there really is very little tradition of motion qua motion as an abstract signifier outside of dance, the phenomenon of signifying via abstract26 qualities of motion is rare in cinema.27 But still, pictorial values are what cinema can modulate instead of musical pitch. And under the heuristic of our overarching metaphor: modulation can be meaningful. In an abstract painting the motion of the eye, the way we shift our attention, the way we parse the painting, is a function of the way the paint sits on the surface. It is not driven by a referent on the other side of the canvas. You might say that the way we move our eyes here and there around the painting, the ways our considerations of it shift, the conversation we have with it, and the rhythms that it sets up within us are what the painting means. Putting that into words is another story. 26 When the quality of a motion is gestural, or imitative of the body posture component of speech, I think of it as being essentially narrative. What constitutes narrative as distinct from abstract functions in gesture or body language is another topic. 27 One might say that Stan Brakhage’s entire life’s work has been an exploration of this idea.

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Considering a pictorially abstract cinema, we should note that adding motion to this mix has the serious danger of trivializing the wonderfully deep and meditative conversations that a great abstract painting has to offer, hence demanding that the quality of the motion be as considered as the quality of any other line. But then again film is not painting. Whatever may be the tractor-​like pull of the subliminal flicker on our attention, transitory light falling on a movie screen will never have the same sumptuous, contemplative, and self-​referential pleasures of paint upon a surface. Cinema’s focusing of our consciousness on brightly shadowed shapes in a dark room simultaneously trivializes and exaggerates the effect of the articulation of light across a surface. When handled with the greatest sensitivity, however, motion can bring an equivalent or surpassing sensuousness to as deeply meditative a conversation as does its older sister, painting. A good way to lay out some of the fundamental values and basic terms that describe how our minds move through a sequence of nonstory-​related images is to consider a hypothetical, very slow montage, one that moves along in a leisurely fashion and in which one is encouraged to regard each shot and each passage with calm reflection; a montage that is so thoroughly considered that the most minute motions within every shot respond to the tonal values and evocations of light within that shot, and in which that same level of consideration carries from shot to shot; such a montage can set up a resonance that slowly carries, amplifies, and deepens; a resonance of resemblances across modes. We’ll describe resonance and its role more fully in a bit.

38.  The frame of the experience There is an important preamble to this topic. Putting together a montage can be as easy as whipping up a quick picture salad, or it can take a great, great deal of contemplation. The more attentive one is to nuance in the juxtaposition of moving pictures, the richer and deeper and more resonant are the possibilities for communication. There used to be, in this regard, great differences between cinema and television. One was that in film the intermittence in the projection was blended and dissolved in the phosphors of the eye, so to speak, whereas in television that phase of the illusion used to happen on the phosphors of a cathode ray tube’s screen. Tony Conrad’s film wouldn’t work quite the same way on an analog television. The regular, pulsing undercurrent of film’s intermittence, which we actually see without seeing that we see it, gives cinema an underpinning in rhythm, as we’ve indicated, that was quite different from the very different pulse of the old cathode ray tube. This may have once been a factor of debatable importance. But there remains one that is far more important. Between the old cinema and the new

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there is a very defined difference in the thickness of the contextual frame. Around the old-​ style cinema experience (in which we still occasionally indulge) the degree to which we are accustomed to embedding and investing ourselves before the experience begins and the degree to which we expect no interruptions in a continuous contemplation are critically important for creating and sustaining deep, rich, and complex statements—​statements articulated through the effects of formal structure on purely pictorial, kinetic, and poetic expression. Television is usually consumed as an interruptible medium, one in which montage is often more a style of life than a considered methodology. Cinema, especially an abstract cinema, has to be a more focused experience, both in its production and in its reception. After all, motion that refers to itself for meaning must be attended to with great focus and delicacy.28 Nathaniel Dorsky’s films are singular and predictable in their ability to guide the mind steadily upward and outward on a very precise path—​by juxtaposing simple, silent, and quietly moving images of things he happens to see in the world around him. His montage style appears slow; that is, there usually are many, many frames between cuts. Nonetheless they command the level of attention of much more rapid articulations because their vector-​cadence is so richly developed. But still, this is truly a cinema that is structured simply and only out of shots and cuts that do not, by and large, have narrative implications. Its power has to do with the elevation of consciousness that is promoted with every cut and is carefully modulated with each subsequent shot. His images radiate a delicacy of attention to a quiet elegance in the world—​either the world that was photographed, or the world on the screen; and often both. He gives us precisely considered spans of time to settle in with each image, and when there is a cut to another image, we find that we have been so absorbed in the sense of the preceding image that we are transformed in the light of the new image on some level that is both deep and sublime. Each cut embodies an observation with a weight equivalent to the shot before it and appropriate for the shot after. To whatever degree his images have inherent narrative implications, they are considered on the same plane of abstraction and mental consideration as their style of movement and their reflection of light: they reveal the nature of story through the nature of image. If, for example, in one of his films, we watch light moving on the surface of water for the time accorded by its complexity of rhythm and variation, followed by an image of a man lifting a spoon to his lips behind reflected waves of traffic on a cafe window, it is the elements of pictorial harmony and rhythmic counterpoint that flow across the cut and keep the mind moving in a precise and certain direction, a direction proofed and reinforced by 28 It’s true that music is often a background experience, and formal film might someday achieve that place in our culture, but it will be yet again different in structure.

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each new shot and cut; each event elevating us enough to read what follows. We are rewarded in our perceptions by the mutual respect that grows between our receptive selves and the arranging mind of the filmmaker, each decision leading us toward the simple, profound, yet abstract recognitions of which the film is comprised. A narrative of a kind. BUT, and here is the catch: this degree of thoughtfulness is only available to us in the extremely restricted, protected, and controlled circumstances of a theater or private screening zone; circumstances that seem more and more endangered. When one’s attention is allowed the luxury of attending to the greatest of subtleties in the values of light and rhythm, then the most minor of interruptions can destroy the drift-​like movement of mind responsible for the pleasures of these films. The experience is as fragile as it is complex. A cinema of contemplation, or devotion as Dorsky calls it, requires a contemplative mind-​set, and a contemplation-​friendly environment. Though cinema is rarely thought of as a contemplative art, if given the space and the accord, its potential is nearly untapped. But the self-​same formal/​pictorial considerations that activate and guide us as we move through the precisely simmered intensity of Dorsky’s expressions are also at work in the much more rapidly articulated montages that function, albeit usually at more trivial levels, out in the clickety-​clack of the world. Why only usually? You’d think triviality would be endemic in the quick-​ cut montage. A montage that’s assembled relatively quickly by an editor through straightforward gut instinct and experience with the kinetic flow of moving pictures can be organized and constrained by the same abstract qualities of rhythm, motion, light, color, texture, and depth that play across the screen and across the cuts in Dorsky’s films. It’s just that the tempo is much, much faster. But there is a strong correlation between the nature of the considerations that went into each cut and the nature of the considerations that they were designed to impart in both cases. If the considerations happen to be deeply contemplative, where vectors of reference radiate in many directions and the vector-​cadence is extremely finely measured, then a thoroughly darkened and intrusion-​free screening situation is far more likely to be conducive to the intended experience. Outside the safe harbor of a contemplative cinema, the vectors need to be shorter, faster, straighter, narrower, and must resonate on a very different level. For a montage that’s at the beginning or end of a typical film drama or TV show, profundity of resonance is rarely as big an issue as popcorn and sodas at the beginning (opening credit montages) or exit strategies (tail credit montages). And for anything on TV, it seems to me that the walls are way too thin for the resonance of formal values to reach very far. In fact, clicker-​ driven TV demands its very own approach to editing sequences, whether scenes or montages. So, before we can begin to approach the question of

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what levels of meaning we can articulate in any medium, we have to take note of whether the frame around the entire experience is opaque and impervious, or thin and practically transparent. Quick cutting would seem to have the inherent attention grabbing potential for lively TV viewing, and a concomitant lack of intellectual or spiritual depth as well. Maybe so, maybe not. What something can communicate is limited by the depth of attention we can accord it; and this principle is at the root of the idea of a cerebrally interactive cinema. Films of Dorsky’s ilk are interactive on a spiritual and cerebral level, rather than on the level of the action/​response we now more commonly associate with the term. So, although we can see that rapid cutting has great appeal in a digital world where the frame around the screen is negligible, and the image is designed to interact with life on the loose, it’s harder to see that ultrafast cutting also has the possibility of reaching as deeply into a zone of contemplation as does the apparently relaxed pace of Dorsky’s films. Ultimately, here the key answer is in yet another role for repetition. But before we discuss the outrageous potential of articulating images at intervals of one to four frames in duration—​and the way that repetition can factor into such a scheme, we need to shift focus for a moment from the analysis of the stimulus to an analysis of the handling side of it; to shift from describing the role of the frame, note, sound, shot, word, motif, sentence, phrase, sequence, and so on to describing the resulting idea, and its role in talking about resonance. An idea can be expressed in a word, a picture, a motif, a gesture, a sequence, a whole work, or a whole life, or even potentially expressed in any of the above, and more.29 That’s because idea is one of the main words we use to call out that which goes on in the ante-​moment of meaning; what it is that happens in that barely describable moment during which we transition from what we sense, think, or feel to what we can express; it’s a word that lives where sentences hide before they roll out of our mouths.

39.  Resonance among frames The metaphor of a temporal antechamber of meaning as the ready-​room for ideas beckons us back to ‘resonance,’ a term especially useful in the consideration of synergy. Resonance, which describes the amplification of effect that occurs when energies get into phase, is the battery pack of synergy, if 29 It’s so wonderful to have a word like ‘idea,’ because everybody uses it, in every field of human endeavor to parse subjects large and small, more or less equivalently and at will. The word ‘idea’ lets us either march or graze through an analysis of life. It has the plasticity to capture experience in a way that no other analytic term can approach.

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you will. Resonance can describe a property of either the stimulus or the response. On the stimulus side an example of resonance might be a musical tone with many harmonics; or visually, a moiré pattern in a television image. Or resonance might occur somewhere between stimulus and response—​in the neuro-​process, as we see in Conrad’s The Flicker or Ken Jacob’s The Nervous System (1994 and on), which we’ll discuss in a bit. Or, the term can describe a very important property of ideas. In music I’m using ‘resonance’ to describe what happens when the intervals and combinations of tones and timbres interact in a way that results in more than the sum of their parts. In ideas, resonance also describes the sensation of something more, the third thought, the in-​filling of metaphor, the something that continues beyond the impulse, and either echoes briefly and fleetingly like the implications of a rich analogy or the aftereffects of a good joke, or echoes long and deep like the implications of great truths, perspectives, or paradigms. These last three reflect how long and wide the ante-​moment can be. The longer that an idea resonates throughout our lives, the more complex and subtle the resonance may become. It provides a carrier wave on which other movements of the mind may piggyback, it gives both depth and complexion to the idea and it colors the manner in which we perceive objects. So resonance itself can have the quality of a verb, an adverb, or a noun, or shift among them as motifs are thrown about in the arms of variations. Resonance, besides powering synergy, runs with ambiguity and ellipsis on the playground of art. In art, resonance and ambiguity together are sometimes synergistic, sometimes not. We can think about that and the role of ellipsis, after we’ve explored the resonance peculiar to ultra-​quick cutting, and that consideration will then lead us into another, and really more obvious way of keeping the inevitability of the narrative from pinning our feet to the earth. If we literally equate the frame with the single note or letter or phoneme and we imagine radical shifts in content at rates of up to twenty-​four times per second, then we end up changing pictures too quickly to consciously grasp much beyond their most dominant graphic traits: brightness, contrast, and maybe a bit of color or shape, along with perhaps the most general impressions of content in one out of many images.30 So why articulate single frames? After all, apart from providing a lot of variation, it can be, as we have noted, very hard on the eyes. For starters, thinking of cinema on the level where its minimal units are equivalent to the minimal units of our other major media gives us new ways to think about both content and form, and to understand the ways that pictures are unique in how we absorb them. Pictures, after all, articulate space

30 There are too many variables to be able to strictly quantify this.

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(on the screen) and the representation of space (in our minds, so to speak) and their elements are absorbed in some ways simultaneously and in some ways linearly. Let’s go back to the absolutely simplest case of extended, ultrafast cutting:  Tony Conrad’s alternation of clear and black frames in The Flicker. The color hallucinations are a perfect example of phenomenal resonance—​ resonance right at the boundary of the physical and the subjective experience. This is a resonance of the nervous system, and one we can put into words: “Oh wow, it’s blue now, and now it’s green going to greenish yellow—​and the color patch is floating toward me!” But these hallucinated color fields are barely reminiscent of our normal experience of a blue or a green. They are, in fact, a far more pure experience; pure because it is new, unbidden, unlearned, and empty of content in some more fundamental way. The objectless-​ness of these hallucinations is accentuated by the fact that they have no edges—​they are the experience of pure color in an unreal and unstable space. Whether or not you find it enjoyable or even tolerable, pretty much everyone reports similar hallucinations during their experience of The Flicker. Whether people all have the “same” experiences or have them synchronously or not is another set of questions. In the way Conrad used the intervals of pure light and dark as a resonant chamber for something that is pre-​spatiotemporal, Ken Jacobs created another, even more telling exploration of this fringe zone of consciousness—​also using cinema as a direct stimulus of phase relationships within the nervous system. In his long series of meta-​cinematic works, called, aptly enough, The Nervous System, he has devised a method that lets us experience the distance between our eyes as a resonant chamber for the apprehension of depth.31 Jacobs has been mining the subtle and ephemeral effects of binocular vision in many ways, and for many years. The Nervous System takes off on his earlier work in three-​dimensional shadow play as well as the work of another New York artist of the time, Alfonse Schilling, who was also long fascinated with binocular vision. Schilling’s brilliant, simple realization was that persistence of vision plus the phi phenomenon could, besides giving us the illusion of motion, give us the illusion of depth. To do this he made a unique stereoscopic slide projector to project images that he had taken with a standard stereo camera.32 However, instead of using the polarization of light to separate out and recombine the depth information, he used persistence of vision by putting a motor-​driven two-​ blade shutter between the lenses. 31 See http://​globetrotter.berkeley.edu/​people/​Jacobs/​jacobs-​con3.html for an interview with Jacobs. The aesthetic expressed in the interview is very typical of the tribe of people who use cinema mainly as a tool for phenomenological explorations. 32 He also, I believe, used two cameras mounted side by side that were some (variable) distance apart and precisely aimed at the same subject.

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First the projector is turned on, focused, and aimed so that the images coincide as much as possible. The parallax between the two lenses from the stereo camera shows up as the doubling or blurring of foreground detail. When the motor is started, very slowly at first, we see the images flicking back and forth, looking for all the world as if we were jumping between two vantage points. When the shutter reaches a critical speed, however, a credible illusion of depth slips into the ante-​moment through a side door and we rather abruptly see a three-​dimensional image, one with a comparable sense of depth to what our two eyes would see, were they the same distance apart as the camera lenses. Jacobs added motion to the images by placing two step-​frame movie projectors side by side, each containing a print of the same film. Either or both of the projectors can be advanced one or many frames at a time. Between them he mounts the two-​blade shutter with the variable speed motor that allows him to modulate a couple of extra-​dimensional illusions at once. When frame x from the left projector and right projector are superimposed, we get a variable rate of flicker induced by speed changes of the shutter revolving between the projectors. When the left projector has frame x in the gate and the right projector has frame x+1, the articulation of the shutter between the projectors produces the illusion of oscillating motion. This transposition of stimuli lifts the viewer into quite a unique and extraordinary sense of space, one that carries with it an accommodatingly indeterminate sense of time. Both Shilling’s and Jacobs’s works were designed for live projection, adding an interactive and improvisational element that allowed for on-​the-​spot modulations of resonance. What these two examples indicate is that image articulation or inflection at specific rates toys with the very palpable boundaries among hallucination and illusion and perception. How can we bring this same high-​speed, quasi-​ hallucinatory resonance to the world of pictured things? If we look first at an example of single frame cutting interspersed with longer shots, it will help us tease out another way that resonance can become active. In the 1950s and 1960s Gregory Markopoulos took a different, somewhat more tentative, but very seductive approach to adding narrative content to subliminal intervals. He would pack some cuts between normal length shots with single frames taken from earlier scenes, in order to create a slight, subliminal echo (a déjà vu-​ishness, if you will) resonating with some aspect of our recognition. Sometimes he would pack the cuts with a frame or two from a much later scene, as a way of creating a subliminal sense of anticipation or reverse déjà vu. Often the cuts were packed with more than one frame, from more than one distant scene. This was done with a deft intentionality so that the rhythm derived from the graphic contrasts added its musicality to the flow. The films themselves were way more lyrical than narrative, and long ago when I first saw them I was struck both by the technique and by its effect.

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Years later, I have found myself reflecting as much on my memory of them as I  had actively experienced them in the moment.33 There are, I  believe, both conscious and unconscious modulations that go on between the immediate absorption and the retrospective appreciation of this, or any, work of power: the long-​wave resonances. The cumulative effect of these perceptual, cognitive, and re-​cognitive modulations in unusual works can prepare us for yet more extreme perceptual, cognitive, and re-​cognitive leaps. Markopoulos’s films were very early and tentative excursions into the world of single frame editing. Their intent was not to separate the picture from the story, but to add extra-​narrative resonances. In the late 1960s and early 1970s both Saul Levine and I, along with a few others, extensively explored strategies using ultrafast cutting to strip the narrative from the image, replacing it with yet another new kind of spatial illusion. In Levine’s pirate masterpiece The Big Stick/​An Old Reel (1967–​73), he crafted a stunning, primarily musical structure in a silent film by intercutting, at machine gun speed, loops from several 8mm prints of Charlie Chaplin’s Easy Street and In the Park (Figure 5). There was no digital weave in the production of this work. He meticulously spliced the 8mm prints by hand with an extremely primitive cement splicer that left the line of every splice (sometimes one for every frame or two) visible on the screen. Needless to say, the incessantly recurring shadow of the splice itself, the overlapping pieces of image-​bearing plastic melted together by the resinous cement, became as much of an actor as Chaplin. At that speed, with cuts sometimes occurring every one-​eighth of a second or less, the surface of the screen becomes the fulcrum of a visual illusion-​cube, allowing Levine to create, with very crafty graphic and spatial juxtapositions, the apprehension of images rotating in an illusory third dimension—​axially around the splice. But at this forge of mis-​en-​scene, at this not so metaphorical forge, he was working out a larger set of ideas with interval—​ideas about perceived motion, about iconography, about formal structures; along with still other much darker and characteristically political thoughts. The first major passage in The Big Stick is a slow, very persistent and ‘repetitive,’ but also very ballet-​like intercutting of many loops of the same two scenes in which Chaplin encounters first a cop with a billy-​club and then a madman with a knife in a park. This is a primal case of the structural and formal use of repetition. In the true tradition of didactic exposition, that is, teaching us how to read the work that follows, he then intercuts glimpses of images filmed off a TV of police beating demonstrators, semi-​obscured by what looks like paint on the 33 Markopoulos withdrew his films from circulation shortly after I saw them and for many years they were unavailable. The films I (dimly) remember seeing were: Twice a Man (1964), Ming Green (1966), and The Iliac Passion (1968).

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FIGURE 5  Filmstrips from The Big Stick/​An Old Reel by Saul Levine.

surface of the film. He is going to tell us a story about ‘police beatings,’ but it will be told in his inimitable style, on, through, and in front of the surface of the screen. The first time we see these scenes where Chaplin stumbles into a cop, turns on his heels trying to get away, and then runs (through the agency of an edit) immediately into the arms of the madman with the up-​raised blade, we read a straightforward little bit of story. When this short scene is repeated immediately, our minds no longer move with the already grokked story, instead we get derailed to other aspects of the shot: the rhythmic interplay of the gestures, the turgid, grainy gray of the image; and even more striking, as the repetitions go on, Levine subtly changes the length of the loop so that it cuts in and out at slightly different points in the gestures of the three characters, creating different captive motions and rhythms; a difference Levine plays on here with these nearly catatonic loops. The effect of this attention to the splice as a recurrent, sliding beat using the same two scenes over and over again is to translate the picture’s inveterate narrative into a musical motif with variations.

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So, one of the things he’s done with these looped passages is to let us know that he’s using a musical model of meaning and that at least some of the values he is articulating are musical values.34 In The Big Stick he also toys with yet another narrative-​busting aspect of repetition that he developed more fully later, and that we’ll discuss shortly—​the chant/​hypnotic aspect. As the pace of these repetitions increases other images enter the musical blend. The cuts that in the beginning were cued by the rhythms of Chaplin’s movements evolve into progressively more complex rhythms wherein the physical manifestation of the splice, rather than the action, drives the cadence, the form, and the mind. As many more scenes and characters from the two Chaplin films enter the mix—​different cops, another madman, a drug addict, a preacher, some hatted ladies, and others—​the very rapid cadence clearly takes over as the driving force. When the cutting gets really fast, with a handful of scenes repeating at a rate of only a few frames per scene, the illusion and the implications of synthetic motion are being juggled with the illusion and the implications of an intricately synthesized space: The cop swings his billy, and hits Chaplin over the head—​which, in only a fragment of a second, drives him down through a manhole in the street, through a visible splice, and into a chair in another room, where a bully punches him, propelling him through a splice/​wall into yet another chair in another room, then through another splice into still a third room, each with its own set of characters, until a set of cyclical actions is set up, and through repetition, variations on this moment-​long cycle begin; each one a variation on a theme whose complexity grows cycle by cycle with the introduction of new actions in new spaces. In Levine’s hands, film becomes a plastic medium on several levels at once and Chaplin is transposed from place to place and from one situation to another by the sheer impulse of the visible splice. In a weirdly Chaplinesque kind of way, we care naught about any story. After a while it’s the resonance between the single, spliced frame and any of the spaces Chaplin ricochets among that dominates the film. Chaplain is not caught in the simple mechanism of the clock in Modern Times. In Levine’s film, he’s caught in the even more complex mayhem that may operate between the machine of cinema and the ‘machine’ of spatiotemporal perception. We are just beginning, at last, to close in on our larger theme: the relationship between repetition, resonance, and omnivalence.

34 At the time, Saul Levine was also a self-​conscious dialectical materialist, as one might guess from his inclusion of the physical splice in the image field, and it’s probably fair to say that any purely formal analysis of his films that fails to recognize how persistent a perspective this is is missing a huge dimension of his work.

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40.  Ancient history—​the medium as the model The Maltese-​Cross movement is the name of the mechanical device that was at the heart of the cinema machine in its infancy (Figure 6), The shape of the Maltese-​Cross movement, as its prongs engaged and disengaged with the rectangular perforations on the edge of the film, simultaneously engaged with pins on the shutter translating the rotary motion of the camera or projector motor into the intermittent motion at the heart of the cinematic illusion and coordinated that intermittent motion with the continuously driven shutter. This same mechanism dissected the continuity of vision in the camera and also reassembled it in the projector. The Maltese-​Cross movement precisely controlled the life of each raw frame of unexposed film—​that fraction of a second of fame it gets as it goes from its own anteroom, the space reserved for it, where it hangs, virgin and unexposed, before getting pulled into the camera gate for exposure to light focused on it through the lens; or, after the film has been exposed and processed, where it hangs with an upside-​down image (the lens inverts the image), waiting, stationary, to be pulled into the projector’s gate and illuminated by the lamp during that instant when the continuously whirling shutter is closed. The Maltese-​Cross moves the image and then stops it precisely in place before the opening in the shutter comes around again. Light from the lamp propels the static shadow of each frame out into the world and onto the screen; and then once again, the mechanism closes the shutter and whisks that image away in less than the blink of an eye, to be replaced by the next image. Seamless image swapping—​this is the heart of the machine, the heart of the illusion, and the companion to the frame line in pivoting perception into another dimension. If, when we think about the relatively simple illusions of cinema, we recall how many complex interactions have to take place within our nervous systems for the world to simply appear to us, we can then see how cinema gives us a meta-​perch from which to think about, evaluate, and even critique the more complex illusions of consciousness. Since the Maltese-​Cross movement proved how easily, effectively, and powerfully rapid substitution can create the illusions of motion, at least one filmmaker had to warn us explicitly to be careful about the existential credit we give the rest of experience. In 1967 A. K. Dewdney, the Canadian artist (and later computer scientist, ecologist, and regular contributor to Scientific American magazine), made a short film called The Maltese-​Cross Movement. As well as being a witty exploration of the nature of this illusion, the film is also a didactic exposition that tells a story in its own very peculiar style while teaching us how to read it along the way.

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FIGURE 6  The Maltese-​Cross Movement title card. Credit: A.K. Dewdney.

Where Saul Levine traded the image’s narrative, representational potential for its musical and extra-​spatial potential in The Big Stick, Dewdney flips the axis of reference of the pictures that he uses from representation to stipulation, through the mechanism of the rebus. Let me explain: In the opening of The Maltese-​Cross Movement, Dewdney, like Levine, presents a conceit through which the rest of the film is to be interpreted. But instead of setting up musicality as a paradigm for interpretation, Dewdney sets up illustration by showing a cutout figure of the Maltese-​Cross movement itself (Figure 6), black against white, being jerkily animated to exaggerate the simulated character of its own movement on the screen. This is accompanied by music reminiscent of an organ grinder. Then the image on the screen itself begins to be interrupted by an increasing frequency of black frames, until it strobes in front of our eyes, deconstructing its own continuity into intermittence. As the cutout of the mechanism disappears, we hear the sound of a man laughing, as if to say, “The joke’s on you!” but the laugh itself is interrupted along with the image as the letters of the title M*A*L*T*E*S*E and so on disappear, letter by letter, like evaporating fairy dust (Figure 6). Dewdney then proceeds to teach us a regime in which he equates phonemes with images, by way of the rebus. In the first scene after the title, a close-​up of a young girl facing the camera asks:  “Are you ready?” The screen goes black, then a nose in profile appears just long enough for a voice to say: “No,” clipping off the “se” by not leaving enough frames of the soundtrack for the whole word to be said, thereby giving us a most basic example of his scheme—​a primer in rebus reading. Following this, in a very short time, he shows us how to read ever more complex combinations of pictures for sounds, accompanied by a voice saying the word we are

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meant to stipulate for the image—​using just the number of frames required to speak the necessary phonemes of the name of the object in the image, for example, the word ‘at’ is illustrated by showing a very short burst of a graphic of an atom. In this scheme, some polysyllabic words require short bursts of five or six separate images to articulate; and so our training in the regime goes on. In these passages he not only continues to build the vocabulary of the rebus-​cinema, picture by picture, but also teaches us a mode of translation so we can later puzzle through the interpretation of new images on our own. He intersperses these didactic passages with a series of touching, mysterious, and dreamlike scenes of a boy on the bough of a tree with an open book in his lap approached by a slightly older girl in a simple white chemise and an inquiring expression on her face. Toward the end of the film, we’re drawn into this surreal mélange both by the message encoded in the tightly stipulated picture/​phonemes that he teaches us to decode, and by the dreamlike undercurrent of the reoccurring scenes of the young boy and girl; both emphasizing the elusive nature of a medium that floats learning on illusion. It is a young, but very elegant film with gestures that catch fine shades of mystery and handles them with wry humor. Toward the end a young girl’s voice echoes a thought from the nursery rhyme “gently floating down the stream. . . . And life what is it, but a dream?” The passage that precedes the final sequence in the film is not a montage of quick-​cut frames, but using exactly the same form as a montage it is a story told in the fast-​cut articulation of the cine-​rebus, the pictured sound of a word. This time it is a final exam since there is no voice to decode it for us, just the organ-​grinder music that has recurred through the entire film. Toward the end of this sequence, the pictures of the rebus-​told tale are interrupted more and more frequently by the black and white cutout animation of the Maltese-​Cross movement accompanied by a sound that we take as the clicking sound of the mechanism itself, used here as a comic analogue for the human vocal tract since it stands in where the rebus’s vocalized translation would have been. Until once again at the end of the film, the cross is all we see before it too blinks away to nothingness. Preceding this final exam Dewdney gives us one last opportunity to see pictures with a voice accompaniment telling us how to decode them. In this case the pictures illustrate the syllables of a young girl’s voice saying: “The cross revolves at sunset,” followed by images (of various durations) of a thumb, Maltese-​Cross, pistol (revolver), a drawing of an atom, a drawing representing the sun and photograph of a city skyline. “The cross revolves at dawn,” followed by the same string ending with a door and an envelope. The last line, “If I die before I wake, tomorrow I am gone,” has a flash of thirteen equivalent images that ends with the picture of a rifle (gun). The outer ring of the concentric series of metaphors that make up The Maltese-​Cross Movement’s structure is its presentation of cinema as an

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autonomous language form functioning just backward from Chinese (since the ‘characters’ stand for sounds and not things). This conflation of the rigid stipulation of meaning with a mechanically induced illusion of continuity presents us with an overarching, metaphorical description of language as a mere placeholder in our apperception of reality. On a more personal level, the film jokes, in a good-​natured way, about those illusions and dreams that mimic our experience of life, along the way hinting at the wicked existential truths bound up in those dreams. Overall, the film has the structure of a ballad with exposition and refrain, and you’re drawn to seeing it again and again because you never quite get inside the whole thought. But there’s something else going on as well. Dewdney shows you a picture and with a vocal cue tells you which of the many polyvalent possibilities he’s singling out for meaning. Learning to decode a rebus this way forces us to reverse the direction of our very deeply ingrained flow of meaning from either picture or word to mental image, and by doing so creates a turbulence with the counterflow, a turbulence redolent of resonance; but it is a muffling and not an amplifying resonance, a turbulence that echoes the mirror-​movement of a dream. Instead of moving from the sound of a spoken word or the sight of a written word to a referent or from a picture to a mental image in the process of building ideas, Dewdney teaches us to sound out pictures to get meaning, while denying what the pictures directly represent, thereby pressing the sound of these depictions into the service of an unrelated narrative. “No,” the first part of the spoken word “nose,” equals both the idea of negation and the idea of cutting off the end of a nose! Dewdney has done the opposite of Levine, in that Levine retained the references of the original scene in terms of character and location, but lost the spatial relationship between those elements and the narrative they came from—​thereby creating an overriding form of his own. Dewdney actually shook off the reference between the pictured object and what it is a depiction of and substituted a stipulated reference to the sound one makes when identifying that object, creating a new narrative, independent of the representations used to relate it. The inherent polyvalence of pictures shows up in the fact that initially we need the voice on the soundtrack to specify which of the possible ways of ‘identifying’ the image the author means us to adopt as the stipulated sounding-​out of the image. Using this approach in training us how to read his version of a rebus, Dewdney is actually stipulating the meaning of pictures rather definitively and with verifiable precision. However, despite the stipulative character of the gesture, Dewdney strives for the resonances of omnivalence through the poetic relationship among the little narratives he concocts. In all these didactic explorations that I’ve been describing, the implied question:  “Are you following me here?” is very strong. On the back of this question rides the interactive character of this form of filmmaking.

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Following Jacobs or Dewdney, or Levine, or Dorsky, or Snow, or many of the other ‘experimentalists’ in the language-​game inventing cabals of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, following them on the multiple levels on which they are playing games of idiosyncratic reference, is very much like following a poem with elaborate cross-​references. The structure of each work is self-​referential because, if for no other reason, they’ve invented it—​not out of whole cloth perhaps, but out of the bits and pieces of the conceptual, musical, and visual languages that surrounded them in the avant-​garde milieu. They also found very interesting and compelling ways to redirect the referential nature of the image by stipulating, through their own didactic processes, a different direction for the mind to move with the picture. While Levine’s and Dewdney’s work are examples of the amazing thought experiments exploring the future potentials of cinema, on a certain level these two filmmakers ignore just about all of the pictorial qualities in which Dorsky’s films, for instance, are grounded. Stipulating one meaning for a picture, as Dewdney does, makes, as we’ve suggested, its polyvalence unavailable, and really most of its pictorial qualities inconsequential. And further, in Dewdney’s film, the expressive potential of the cut is reduced to the job of parceling out the words of a poetic narrative. Levine is hardly unaware of pictorial values; he just chooses to simplify his palette toward other ends.

41.  Illustration, induction, and repetition “It’s hard to believe!” he wrote. And so it would rhyme, he wrote it again, “It’s hard to believe!” —​Christopher Maclaine in The Man Who Invented Gold

I’ve been throwing around this metaphor of mental movement in a loose and almost indefensible way. I’d say it was utterly indefensible if it hadn’t been so useful up till now in illustrating so many equivalences and distinctions. From a severely existential point of view the idea is, as philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out,35 highly problematic. But this doesn’t make it

35 See Dennett (1988) “Quining Qualia.” The imputed sensation of mental movement could be considered a kind of quale or subjective impression. Dennett’s very witty article maintains that certain mental qualities called qualia don’t exist. In Dennett’s wry vocabulary, “quining,” named after a particular talent of W.v.O. Quine’s, means to take something that obviously exists and make it vanish—​or at the very least, banish it from philosophical discourse. Dennett ultimately goes on to quine consciousness as well as qualia. I follow him in both cases. However, even words for things that don’t EXIST can be used successfully in textual analyses and even in philosophical thought experiments, so long as nothing in the experiment is conditional on their being more than a useful, ad hoc way of talking about something, that is, a heuristic perspective.

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a useless turn of phrase. We just have to be careful about how far we go with it. After all it is just an idea. I’m not actually suggesting that what goes on, when we count something as meaningful, corresponds to some specific squirt of neurotransmitters in the brain. In the case of mental movement, the idea will be all the more useful if we can describe something of the ‘space’ within which this movement occurs. So, to begin with, since we need an umbrella term for the relations we want to describe, why not ‘consciousness,’ since it’s a familiar one that can do without much bending or stretching? Remember, we are not trying to describe actualities in our talk about consciousness; we’re just trying to refine the way we can think about it as an arena for the metaphor of mental movement. Our corroboration for whether this kind of talk makes sense is no more stringent than: “Does this description sound familiar, or more or less correct, to you? Do you know where to go with it—​at least in the short term?” I think even Quine himself would allow this so long as we were very careful about how far we relied on this comfortable feeling. So up till now, except for some talk about stipulation and suggestion, and vectors and resonance and the like, I’ve been vague about the different ways stimuli can ‘move’ us in my peculiar, descriptive scheme of things. It’s a huge and conflicted topic (the epistemological interpolation of stimulus-​response activity) upon which thousands of years of discourse have been focused, and one in which, if we follow Wittgenstein or Quine or Dennett, we see that it can trip us up badly. But if we remain clear from the outset that our business is heuristic and descriptive and not at all prescriptive or definitive, we might gain some truly useful understandings. Remember, we are not saying consciousness exists in the same way a lamppost exists; we are merely using it as a term for directing our attention toward a gathering spot for other terminology. Another way of putting it, a particularly Wittgensteinian way, is to say that in order to more finely and fully describe vectors of mental movement, we’ll be playing several different ‘consciousness’ language games concurrently—​ as we talk about the use of film loops and other overtly repetitive gestures. A loop, strictly speaking, is a piece of movie film spliced head to tail so that the same images go round and round through the projector gate presenting ‘the same’ information again and again. And maybe again. Right here we have a question of phenomenology: What is the same? Isn’t every repetition a new occurrence of the information? We’re not just playing semantic games here—​there is something important to untangle. What happens to us when we are presented with the same thing over and over again? Many, many different things can happen, depending on lots of factors including circumstances and attitudes. Repetition is boring. Let’s just take that as axiomatic for now, and see what happens. The first counterexample is the ‘beat.’ A beat is not a beat without the repeat.

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At what point is a beat, boring? When it becomes repetitious. This little circularity points up something simple, obvious, yet important. The form of the sentence “That beat is boring” leads us to believe that we’ve ascribed an attribute to the beat, when in fact we’ve described an attribute of ourselves. The point of this exercise is to get us used to the idea that when we say something is repetitious, we are describing our own sensation and not the something that caused us to say it—​though the form of the sentence might lead us to believe otherwise. Someone else might look at that same repetition and find it informative because they are bringing a perspective to it that has a different scale; or captivating because they have the opportunity for a close examination of something intrinsically beautiful or mysterious; or hypnotizing because the repetition has a period that keys into some deeper rhythm in their psyche. They get into the groove. They recognize the differences as well as the similarities. For them it is not the “same river twice” or however many times. They see a theme and its reoccurrence rather than its repetitions. It is a shift in the way of looking; and at the same time an acknowledgment of the beat in another form, a cadence at a different level. Even though there are several distinct uses of loops and other kinds of repetitive gestures that I want to explore, there are a couple of things that are common to all. One is that each particular use of repetition has a peculiar meaning style that partakes of its own distinct mode of circularity. Another is that admission into the experience may require a trust, a suspension of its own kind; but one very different from the nearly physiological, cinematic suspension of disbelief that allows us to fall effortlessly through the surface of the screen in the first place, and into that unique state you could call being “In the Grip of Illusion” or IGI for short. This particular loopine trust, familiar to connoisseurs of mid-​twentieth-​century avant-​ garde art, often needs to be consciously given, especially at first. The suspension of linear narrative expectation that is required for us to be able to fruitfully experience loops and other overt repetitions begins when we have our first moment of recognition that the apparently representational scene we had just effortlessly fallen through the screen into is now recurring. After the second repetition we have to shift gears again, and perhaps yet again as a looped experience continues. This suspension is not usually automatic since we have to trust that the filmmaker isn’t willfully getting us bored and angry about an experience of redundancy, but is instead announcing that a different language game is now being played on the screen. The exact nature of that new language game is yet to be revealed, however. We can get bored and shut down. Or, we can begin to question what’s going on:  we are invited to enter into a hunting mode. The artist

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is implicitly asking us to question his or her intention. This is intellectual interactivity. When we do this we’ve shifted states. Let’s call this one ITF, for ‘Interrogating the Feed.’ The central motivation in Minimalism is its necessary but implied demand for interactivity. I  described the opening of Levine’s film The Big Stick in which we see the same scenes of Charlie Chaplin bumping first into a cop and then a madman in the park over and over again. It really is the same set of scenes, but in Levine’s film each repetition is cut slightly differently. So what? Once we recognize that the image is being used to explore some feature of the experience beyond creating the illusion of characters in a park on “the other side of the screen” we then know to be looking for different kinds of qualities that are being modulated. Through active and questioning viewing, the film is forcing us into a dialogue with it, one in which we question its methodology. If we’ve discerned that some aspect of what at first appeared to be identically cycled is actually being modulated and we then come to understand or feel the scheme of that modulation, that is, we get its beat and feel its groove, then we pass onto another plane (or achieve another perspective) we can call IMM, “In the Mind of the Maker”—​the perspective from which the modulations of the repetition make sense and carry meaning for us—​we understand the decisions and may appreciate their implications; we have devised a fabric, or a context that lets us move with it again; we move with its music. This transition in planes of consciousness from IGI through ITF to IMM can be compared to Snow’s dialectical-​spatial play around the surface of the screen in Back and Forth. In this case, with the repetitions in both The Big Stick and Back and Forth, our consciousness, or at least the locus of our perceptions, moves from the other side of the screen where we had participated in a photographed reality, through a recognition of the screen itself as the locus for discerning new meanings, and on into the minds on our side of the screen: our hypothetical conversation with the filmmaker or with our own mechanisms of perception or ideas of form; or, best of all, with another whose perceptions are different but close enough that they can be verbally compared. One of the next films Levine made illustrates where his mind moved after the lessons he learned from having made The Big Stick—​a silent film. It is the sound film that I mentioned briefly in the introduction to this book, called Notes of an Early Fall (1976),and it is not strictly speaking constructed of actual film loops. In Notes of an Early Fall one of the first things we see as we fade in from darkness is a turntable spinning with a warped LP on it. As the tone arm hits the warp, it leaps into the air and lands somewhere else on the record. We can tell that, before some heat wrinkle caused the record to warp, we would

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be listening to the talking blues. Levine’s titles are almost always elaborately echoic puns, and since one of the things this movie is about is falling, the talkin’ blues puts us in the right mood. For a good five minutes of largely unbroken revolutions, we watch as the tone arm leaps and falls, entering the Cage-​ian realm of aleatoric composition. Some would say that there is a kind of minimalism in the hard blues, an empathic minimalism that invites you into the mind of the maker—​an invitation that especially looms through intoxication or exhaustion. But there’s much more going on here than being stuck in a blues groove when the needle lands more or less in the same spot over and over again, or being thrown into the freaky world of aleatoric incidence when it doesn’t. There is a direct descent into madness here as we sit behind Saul Levine’s shaky handheld camera staring at the phenomenon on the turntable. It’s not the kind of secondary fright experience that a hyper-​Eisensteinian montage or some tale of Gothic horror would induce, but instead it’s our growing empathy with the directly expressed madness embedded in the fixation of the maker on an insistently leaping tone arm. Where the modulations of the repetitions in The Big Stick are under Levine’s explicit editorial control in a manner that strongly suggests he has an attitude and a point to make as he runs his finger up and down the length of the loop, so to speak, the modulations here are produced by random seeming, utterly vagrant forces. There’s also something a touch vindictive in this, his persistent demand that we come to grips with the embodiment of his personal frustration (and on such an extremely intimate and visceral level) through the agency of this stuck bluesman, who, in one extended riff over the endlessly same piano tinkle, says the phrase, “Isn’t anybody,” over and over. But along with manic-​depressive persistence, there’s also a cool detachment in Levine’s awareness of the way the two media—​film running in a linear fashion through the gate of the camera, and the warped vinyl disc describing its own circularity—​speak to a duality in the nature of experience:  our active hunt for meaning in our passage through unyielding sameness on the one hand, and our effortless recognition of patterns in any ongoing wash of experience on the other. The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter (1968)36 by George Landow (aka Owen Land) is probably the first, and it certainly remains one of the most provocative uses of loops in cinema.37 Again, this is not strictly a loop film since, once again, the repetitions we see may or may not result from the linear recording of an actual repeated action, a quasi-​cinematic repetition—​as we look over the shoulder of an animator who is drawing what looks like a cartoon of a Tibetan deity. The figure comes to life as 36 This particular film of Landow’s has inexplicably gone missing from the catalogues. 37 It’s worth noting, when we’re talking about film as a living language in which dialogues occur, that George Landow aka Owen Land and Saul Levine went to high school together.

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the animator flips pages of perhaps half a dozen drawings back and forth and creates a mini-​animation, one that plays a single gesture over and over again in a way that reflects that the animator, as well as the character he is drawing, may also be trapped in the repetition of action, trapped in a loop. We can’t really tell if the animator is repeating the action or if the film of his action is being repeated. The looped soundtrack emphasizes the closed nature of the cycle. The film has a decidedly hypnotic/​contemplative effect and we can feel our consciousness moving into some kind of an evaporative state. Perhaps, as the title would suggest, it is rising. The effect of trance-​ induction or state-​shifting shows how film can have the motive power of the mantra, the incantation, and the chant. The characteristic ability of repetition to directly shift consciousness is demonstrated in another of Levine’s films, Raps and Chants I, With John Broderick and represents an attempt to tap a state of consciousness that is either beyond or beside hypnosis: the state of psychomimesis. Psychomimetic, meaning imitative of psychosis, was a word that was attached to the LSD experience during its early days when the drug was being used by psychiatrists, often experimenting with it on themselves, who were hoping to understand certain pathologies. But, before I  begin to attempt a description of the psychomimetic effect of Raps and Chants I, again, a little cautionary tale about “normal consciousness.” If we want to talk about normal consciousness, and we will, we have to recognize that there’s a peculiarly toxic quality to the term. Toxic to the kind of lucidity Dennett is selling, at any rate. We could follow Dennett—​and quine ‘normal consciousness,’ along with all the rest of the descriptions in our consciousness language game, and where that would apprise us of our circumstance, it would also leave us totally hamstrung and no longer able to carry on what have been, and what we can expect will be, many fruitful discussions (even if those fruits wouldn’t pass muster in the verificationists’ store). But I  think it’ll serve our purpose better to admit upfront to the judgment:  ‘normal consciousness’ is either a simple relational term (normal compared to x) or pure shorthand for our ignorance (we really haven’t more than a clue about the nature of consciousness and whose is normal). However, toxic though it may be as a benchmark, as a relational term it can still work when we’re aware of the nature of the judgment; and as a tool of the literature it’s obviously crucial. I will ultimately want to claim that the central meaning in Raps and Chants I consists in our actual movement from one plane of consciousness to another. This is the difference, in my mind, between depiction and induction. If we get onto this film’s wavelength, we will experience something of a condition rather than simply recognizing it. Horror and erotic films can do this to us, but the mental condition that Broderick is describing on camera

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allows experience of and insight into something both deeper and much more finely delineated than the various flavors of terror or arousal. Nonetheless, this is a horror film, no mistake about it. Especially, it is lit like a horror film, but upside down: Essentially, in a single talking head set-​ up Broderick tells us a story while sitting under a skylight that blows out the top of his head and puts deep shadows under his eyes, nose, and chin. The story he tells, while occasionally toking on a joint, is about an acid trip. There is no question how the issue of normal consciousness is shaded here. Broderick is clearly stoned. But we also get the sense that what we experience of him, the portrait we get of his consciousness in these camera-​ roll-​long, handheld takes, has less to do with the joint he first tokes on a few seconds into the film than with the still lingering aftereffects of the really bad acid trip he is telling us about that took place many years before. On one level Broderick seems to become more incoherent as his story progresses, yet in fact he is quite eloquent in his presentation of a mental state, an eloquence the stage for which is set by having the top of his head blown out by the sky’s light pouring in on him. Obviously self-​conscious about directly addressing a camera, he begins to describe, quite formally, the setting for what was a group acid trip. He tells us that the events we are going to hear about happened fifteen years earlier and that of the ten people who took acid together, he was the only one to have a bad trip. All the others, he says, had a “perfectly safe experience.” He frames the tale stiffly—​in the manner of a business presentation: I’d like to talk a little about this experience that I  had. There were a whole bunch of things going on at once, going on simultaneously, twenty or thirty things going on at once, overlapping each other. But I’ll just describe them one at a time. He goes on to describe several sensations: his immediate and conscious experience of the electricity of his own nervous system as “an actual brainstorm, thousands of lightning flashes everywhere.” Then he describes the sensation of total identity loss, of not being able to figure out who he was. Then he describes a voice that got stuck in his head, endlessly chanting the name of a friend that he repeats over and over: “Buckley, Buckley, my friend Buckley.” He follows this by describing the effect of a neural/​audiovisual transition cue that he describes as being like a TV wipe, swishing him from one state of hallucination to another, but always the same hallucination. “Whoosh, whoosh.” As he goes on he gets more and more agitated, his voice quavering and his hands flailing; he doesn’t appear to be acting, he appears to be relapsing. It’s like we’re watching him fall into the terrible grip of hallucination before our eyes, dragging us with him through some empathic power embedded in the repetition.

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The camera roll ends. Three minutes have gone by. Broderick has barely begun his story, but he has gone from a state of in-​front-​of-​the-​camera formal nervousness to a state of near panic as the memory of the experience overwhelms him. When the second camera roll begins and Broderick resumes his tale, he is much calmer; but this roll begins with half a dozen or so quick, silent, camera-​lurching takes. The unedited energy that spills over from reloading the camera and trying to pick up the thread of Broderick’s tenuous state of mind includes Levine’s state of mind in the mix of Broderick’s tale. In these takes Broderick’s image jumps around the frame in between flash frames and audio pops from the camera starting and stopping; all having a first-​person frenzy about it. When he resumes speaking, he is located off in one corner of the frame. At first he continues where he left off with the description of the sensation of the transitional wipe, repeating the description faster and faster, “Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!” Then he switches to describing another voice in his head that tells him he can escape the experience if he can only get a tranquilizer, and he begins to chant on camera, “I’ve got to get a tranquilizer. I’ve got to get a tranquilizer! I’ve got to get a tranquilizer!!” over and over. Then he talks about someone else at the party thrusting the Tibetan Book of the Dead at him and asking him to locate which Bardo he is on. The roll of film ends again, and when the third and final roll commences and Broderick continues describing these various mental loops, this time he intersperses them with one another; again growing progressively more frantic as the filming continues, hands flailing, looping his experience for us; each repetition intensifying the waves of his panic and becoming a chant that carries us into his state of mind. The overall, formal, three-​camera-​roll structure of Raps and Chants I is announced by the artifacts of the camera-​roll changes: a flare at the end of a scene, followed by a splice to a fragment of Kodak-​red-​stripe leader, then another start-​of-​roll flare. The first time it happens, it is accentuated with a series of ‘false starts’ at the beginning of the second roll. Encapsulated in this experience are two of the three fundamental, physical engagements with time that are possible in analog/​mechanical cinema—​(1) the film running out and (2) the camera stopping and starting again. (The third, which does not occur in this film, is a simple cut.)38 Within these repeated elements, clearly demarcated as separate rolls of film, both Broderick’s repetition in telling about the individual elements of his experience (his verbally recreating their actual repetition) and his interleaving of these repetitions create a formal echo. And when he tells us 38 Though some might say a cut with a visible splice has a different ontological implication than a cut where the splice itself is invisible and only the change in content clues us to the transition.

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toward the end of the last roll about being asked by someone at the party to locate his Bardo (which has been described as having one’s friends perform an experiment during the experience of one’s death, in which one is continuously reminded to keep watching for hallmarks of the passage from life), at that moment he thereby invokes one more set of echoes with cosmic overtones—​all this in a psychomimetic performance consisting mostly of cycles. One of the things I  find especially interesting in this nesting of formal cycles is one possible relationship it demonstrates between narrative form and omnivalent form. There is a clear narrative development, if occasionally halting, and an even clearer sense of dramatic development, as the telling becomes more and more intense through each of the camera rolls. This linearity is balanced by the formal resonance that is produced by the echoes of the nested cyclical structures. One could easily view the film as having the form of a three-​movement sonata where the theme is stated by the initial quality of agitation displayed, and then elaborated on in each roll, since Broderick’s agitation, resonating from the tremolo of the voice, inflects more strongly than the words. The “signature key” is located in a particular quality of emotional agitation. Repetition in this film has several distinct roles. It creates an overall structure, it creates variations within that structure that have the potential for resonance, and it also has the mysterious organizing force that chanted repetitions have in conducting us to another plane of consciousness. It also reminds us, in a couple of distinct ways, how re-​cognition is inherent in repetition, whether in psychotic or in more normal states of consciousness. Repetition in this film also, and perhaps most strikingly, enlists the circularity of form to create resonances among the resemblances between subsequent occurrences and the dynamic tensions they develop. It is these kinds of dynamic tensions that provide a ground within which cinematic omnivalence can potentially live. We will analyze the musical implications of these repetitions more fully in Part III of this book.

42.  The material and the medium The structures and therefore the resonance and therefore the meaning of many of these films hinge on an overt acknowledgment of the materiality of the medium. However, as the experience of poetic films on celluloid becomes ever more rare, the lessons embedded in them tend to seem ever more quaintly historical. Unfortunately for this analysis, analog and digital cinemas are practically indistinguishable from one another as story formats, so that the materially focused distinctions I’m elevating in these more poetic works may also seem ever more irrelevant.

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But the very materiality of film (we can hold it in our hands, look through it and see pictures, etc.) and its electrochemical interaction with our nervous systems not only provides a stable reference point for questions of ontology and of epistemology, but the materiality of the medium requires an active and physical bonding between the maker and the product, one with intense creative implications. So, with these poetic films being self-​conscious of their materiality, films that contain visible splices, using leader, camera flares, and marks made directly on the surface (painting, scratching, etc.), it is the surface and the substrate itself that is primarily real—​the surface of the film and the surface of the screen. Since one job of ontology is to discriminate among levels of reality, this is one ontological baseline. All illusion starts here. Rather than being grounded in a cognitive or perceptual illusion, as we are in virtually all narrative films, these films are grounded in their material nature. They are self-​conscious recognitions that the experience is derived from chemical dyes deposited on a layer of plastic that is then run through a machine that converts a spatial displacement into a temporal one. Though irrelevant to telling stories, being ‘upfront about where it’s at’ in this purely material sense has some particular advantages, from both a philosophical and a poetic point of view. Philosophically, if one’s task is to investigate ontology, it’s best to set out grounded first in a reality rather than an illusion. Poetically, the meaningful articulation of the substrate qua substrate gives some potential for increased breadth and economy of experience. Breadth, because if one’s journey to the edges of the potential illusions of cinema begin from an awareness of one’s actual material circumstance, one will ultimately have covered more ground. Economy, because if one is aware of the articulations of the substrate (emphasized often by a handheld camera and visible splices) one can bring all of cinema’s motive forces into the game of resonance. The materiality of film is/​was a fact of life for a filmmaker. Since films were once made by welding together separate pieces of material, manual dexterity was a requisite of the craft. The fact that the sound-​bearing substrate in analog cinema is distinct from and has utterly different material and operational characteristics than the picture-​bearing substrate turns out to be a significant component both in the way these films come into being and in their meaning. I’ve tried to be explicit that the insights in this book, whether they are philosophical in intent or not, are the insights of a filmmaker and not a philosopher, a particular kind of very hands-​on filmmaker to be exact. This is another aspect of how plastic filmmaking diverges radically from the big screen narrative. For a hands-​on filmmaker every act of meaning requires an act of physical movement—​from aiming a camera and turning it on or off, to reaching for a strip of film and laying it on the forge with another, the body is active. The mind directs the body to precise places at precise times.

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The body enters a rhythm and flow with the decisions that articulate the pictures. For a hands-​on filmmaker the materiality of the medium is inescapable. For many of the structural, poetic, and minimal filmmakers of the 1950s until the late 1980s, the method of fabrication, of articulation, was wedded to the materiality of the medium. In The Big Stick, the appearance of the physical splice in the image creates a horizontal margin across the top of the frame, sometimes with a little bit of film cement drool where too much was used. Not only does this announce the physicality of the medium but when a certain, very fast rhythm is established it also creates an illusory space of its own, within which the photographed images appear to rotate around the axis of the splice. The economy implied in this awareness of the material defines a fundamental ground against which the other, more usual, representations of space in the film become defined. The photographed space, the space we have been conditioned to read as reality, is seen as sitting on top of a substrate with recognizable physical dimensions. The projected splice’s meta-​spatial dimension, one which refers directly to this condition of the thickness of the substrate where the splice is a three-​ dimensional artifact with the edge of one piece of film literally being glued on top of the edge of another (after the emulsion that carries the image has been meticulously scraped from the celluloid base), greatly enlarges the poetic and philosophic possibilities of film, allowing the medium to articulate a visual coherence, one that rises from a forced awareness of the substrate and the modulations that can be worked upon it. This, in turn, reminds us, as we reflect on the forced allusion between substrate and image and idea, of the layers of neural-​level fabrication necessary to construct our own sensation of a coherent visual field. This is an awareness that is global in its inclusiveness of the situation of viewing. Such a basic, fundamental physical to metaphysical allusion provides a big economy of means, a powerful ontological recognition, and a major addition to our epistemic repertoire. And it only works if you plant yourself in this peculiar, ontologically grounded perspective. Otherwise the experience makes no sense. Forcing the viewer to recognize the primacy of materiality is one way that I claim film can actually do philosophy. In a structure of this scope these ontological considerations provide yet another arena in which a work has to balance its valences, its extradimensional references, in order to aspire to omnivalence.

43.  Sonics and seamlessness Each of our senses is more or less dynamic. Consciousness itself is fundamentally dynamic. But, just focusing on vision and hearing:  sound is by definition a variation in air pressure, vision is a product (among other dynamisms) of saccadic eye movements, those constant, dancing movements of

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the eyeballs without which the world would disappear. Neither sense functions in a static environment. Once mediated, however, the picture can sit still, but the sound can’t. Moving pictures are incremental but sound is truly continuous: If you drag a filmstrip through an edit reader, you see one still picture when you stop. If you do the same with a sound strip, the oscillations that create the sound get further and further apart (the pitch lowers) as the movement slows, until, when the substrate stops moving, the effect vanishes—​no sound at all. We’ll get into other technicalities about the relationship between the picture bearing substrate and the sound bearing substrate later, but for now, a little side trip into the logistics of making sound films. If you print one piece of picture on top of another, you’ll see both pictures, coherent unto themselves, but interacting in semitransparent layering. It’s called a “superimposition,” and it’s mostly encountered for a second or two during dissolves. It is read as an abnormal condition if it persists. Superimposition of sound is entirely different though since, in the production of any documentary or dramatic film, the finished soundtrack undergoes extensive superimpositions, many of which are not only not particularly significant, but unnoticeable and even undetectable. A film is normally built out of one (main) picture track, but many, many sound tracks layered on top of the other. Of these many tracks there are four main types: 1. A sync track that’s recorded at the same time as the picture is shot, and is usually focused on recording voices, either dialogue or interviews39 2. One or more music tracks 3. One or more sound effects tracks 4. One or more narration or voiceover tracks One of the last stages in the production of any film is the “mix,” where all of the many soundtracks are rerecorded onto one in a way that makes the transitions either seamless and unnoticeable, or maximally dramatic. In fact, one of the strongest and simplest ways that a film editor can guarantee that pictures shot at different times and different places can be spliced together to give the impression of sequential moments in one place is to run a continuous sound ambiance underneath all the picture edits. This works on two levels—​if it’s convincing, it provides us with an impression of reality; if it’s less convincing, the technique will still work to create a coherent

39 In many feature films, the sync track is never used in the final mix and only serves as a guide track for dubbing or ADR (Audio Dialogue Replacement) where actors rerecord their lines in a studio.

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flow of meaning, because we read continuous ambient sound as giving all the subsumed pictures a grounding in one location, a singular sense of place. Mixing a film, analog or digital, is one of the least acknowledged and most important arts in the collaborative filmmaking process. Films live or die in the mix. One simple dramatic scene alone might have many sound effects tracks that have to be mixed—​one for the ambient sound of the empty room, one for the refrigerator hum, one for the lawnmower in the backyard, one for traffic outside, one or more for background characters’ movements, one or more for doors opening, footsteps, and so on, each track requiring equalization and blending in and out in order to produce the impression the director wants the space that’s photographed to convey. A well sound-​designed, scored, and mixed film, especially with dialogue written and performed with grace and rhythm, should have the sonic coherence, complexity, and formal integrity of a symphony.40

44.  The private language machine and the evolution of a medium One of the things that Wittgenstein is most famous for is quining ‘private language.’ By saying that private languages can’t exist Wittgenstein wanted us to recognize the inescapable function of the social fabric in language’s work.41 Even if one talks to oneself, Wittgenstein maintains, one is using a public language for a private act. Even if one invents words that no one else knows, to describe things no one else knows about, or yeah, even invents a hypothetical and original grammar, one is merely adding a new, and so far private, dimension to one or more public languages. Perhaps the most significant ramification of Wittgenstein’s perspective that language is a working social institution is his demonstration of how philosophy gets into trouble when it tries to ignore how people actually use words. In his view, it is impossible to conceive of meaning without use—​both in terms of there always needing to be a context for meaning and as well, a recipient. Private language is therefore an oxymoron.

40 Once I was editing a documentary that had the potential for this kind of integrity, but we had a problem. One of the most compelling interviews had a somewhat variable, hiss-​like white noise in the background that was extremely difficult to filter out—​purely an artifact of bad location recording technique. The audio-​engineer (mix-​master) addressed the problem—​not with filters, but by adding two strategically placed seagull squawks, which told the audience to read the hiss as waves crashing on a beach. The added context made the annoying quality of the sound disappear. 41 Of course, Wittgenstein’s quining went on before Quine’s own quining, and even though (as Dennett failed to point out) quining is just a matter of using Wittgenstein’s broom.

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I happen to buy into this idea on the one hand, but on the other, I’m trying to describe something that is so language-​like, I’m at a loss for what else to call it, and that at the same time is so new that, in its most active stages of invention, it is necessarily going to challenge the private language prohibition. What I’ll be focusing on is the filmmaker’s asset management scheme—​while working alone and only for an audience that is expected to catch up with the work. This is a process of language invention. It is one of those places where the idea of cinema as a language gets most crisply defined—​in its newness. This may become the crucial issue in determining whether or not one wants to call something, in particular the kind of cinema I have been describing, a language at all: Can one’s unique working method, for instance, be considered a private language?42 I don’t much like textual analysis, as important as it may be. What I have to do next however is to present what is essentially a textual analysis of a physical process—​and one that involves, of all things, questions of taxonomy. It is so central to the idea of using cinema-​as-​analog-​to-​language that I just have to do it. I hope I can be as clear and painless as possible. We’re directly concerned here with the differences between pictures and words, and one difference that is outstanding is that one cannot put pictures in alphabetical order. The most powerful impact of this on a filmmaker whose work is not verbally driven is that there are no universal protocols for organizing pictures for access. Each particular project can demand its own protocol; not to mention the fact that labeling can destroy aspects of an image’s ambiguity or variability, which will neutralize the image’s polyvalence. The resource management protocols of fictional narratives and most documentaries are fairly standard, since these forms are word-​ driven: When a fictional narrative project gets transformed from a working script to a shooting script, a number is attached to each scene and take and that number is written on a slate that’s photographed at the head (or tail) of the take so that every time the camera rolls, the film is slated to the scene and take number on the shooting script. Miscellaneous material or fodder for montages, rather than being numbered, may be labeled in the editing room (on the computer desktop) with a caption or descriptive phrase. But, if one is working in a form that is primarily driven by the pictures themselves and not any words they may be illustrating, and if one is always playing off the polyvalence of the image in the structure of the work, how 42 Rigid Wittgensteinians (though the term might seem oxymoronic) will simply say that just because there is meaning, doesn’t mean there is language. In my view, this is completely wrong. I believe that meaning is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the diagnosis of language.

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do you devise a method for reliably accessing the right image at the right time as you articulate the image stream? This idea of articulating an image stream is at the heart of the issue, and will peel us away from the relatively analytic language in which we’ve been indulging up till now. Here’s where some boundaries get blurred, but at least one gets sharpened. In this process we are definitely moving away from the methods of philosophy and into methods that are distinctly characteristic of expression in art—​especially art of the past hundred years or so. At this point in history (but something which I’m quite sure will change in time) whereas words can be articulated either rationally or irrationally, pictures that are not being used for explicitly narrative purposes, but rather affective/​ poetic uses, can only really be articulated in some meta-​rational way. My language will become yet vaguer and more suggestive, less analytic and more metaphorical, as I begin to describe a process I evolved for articulating pictures that transcend their narrative character and limitations; an attempt at a meta-​rational articulation. And even though I  discriminated earlier between films that I wanted to call ‘personal’ and films that I wanted to call ‘experimental,’ what I am about to describe is a clearly experimental method for building a language system whose goal it was to express inner conditions of being, states of consciousness, and ways of feeling that are just as distinctly personal. In fact, I’d say they were just as personal as can be. When I am done with my description I will attempt to bring cooler and more defensibly analytic language to bear on the subject. First, where do I mean to go with this distinction between rational and meta-​rational articulation? Not far. I only mean to say that some decisions are rationalized before hand—​thought out in words, more or less, and some are just ‘felt.’ Felt action is the norm in art, definitely not philosophy. For a filmmaker, the experience of working with shots, frames, or frame clusters as polyvalent entities, with the goal of fabricating omnivalent entities, is extremely consuming. Learning to see the world as a shifting configuration of expressive moments that are then caught as images is entirely different from seeing the world in terms of categories denoted or connoted by words. Analyzing the world in terms of purely visual constructs or impressions and subsequently arranging visual imagery to chase those impressions requires an abstract apperception that, in a world consisting of talkers, must be rigorously sought, attained, and sustained, usually with a great, but peculiarly diffuse expenditure of energy. For this reason a talisman is very often useful in achieving continuous, formal visual thought. For me and for many others in my generation of filmmakers, the Bolex movie camera was both tool and talisman.43 When I was carrying it I learned to see only what it could see. And for years I carried it with me daily, almost

43 See the Appendix for more information on the Bolex.

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everywhere—​self-​conscious of teaching myself a distinct, purely visual, and temporal architecture; attempting to sanitize my thinking as much as possible of verbal constraint. The inhabitants of this architecture were to be my own otherwise indefinable and indescribable inner conditions, as they were captured in visual configurations that I could isolate in moving pictures—​ conditions expressed in qualities of light and movement. I structured these impressions either as formal exercises edited in-​camera and organized by the camera roll in visual diary form; or sifted according to some long-​lasting inner condition, wherein images that had been collected over time and were emblematic of those inner conditions would announce themselves in my visual environment and then be filtered with the idea that they would later be arranged in the editing room, perhaps as the notes in a tone poem, or perhaps according to some other, highly considered set of aesthetic goals, as in a sonata or an essay; depending on what it was that I hoped to learn or express at the time. With formal omnivalence as the ultimate goal, I focused the first part of the learning process on how to set up the inner condition, the state of mind in which I  could see particular abstract configurations having just those distinct (but manifold) expressive potentials that not only exactly caught a thought or a feeling, but also had a potential ambiguity that might allow it to be combined with other equivalent images—​that is, learning, on an emotional level, the referential pull between particular images and states of being. The next phase involved learning, on a basic methodological level, how to organize polyvalent expressive elements into omnivalent expressive wholes; including a procedure for devising inner taxonomies that would allow me to access my elements in a purely intuitive and nonverbal way. Then, finally, I had to design and create the physical structures that would house the physical elements themselves according to the appropriate taxonomy. One thing characteristic of fabricating a new language is that it takes years, and is a process that builds on itself. Learning how to multiply the eloquence of the articulated picture, that is, how to articulate an image stream, is, in this regard, like building a language. By the end of that particular phase of my work, my most evolved system looked something like this:  Just as I  had developed a way of identifying ‘visual needs’ while I wandered around with my camera, I found a way to relocate this peculiar but suggestive, highly developed, refined, and analytic image-​gathering process onto the synthetic but equally suggestive process of creating thought-​assemblies in the editing room. I literally rebuilt my editing room for each particular set of experiments I was working on. The rebuilding was always organized from a single station point:  the screen of the editing machine. Material was located, depending on the length of the shot, either as hanging film strips or rolled onto small reels (plastic cores) by their global position on shelves, racks and ‘trim bins’ arranged like

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the interior of a sphere (leaving just enough room for me to enter and exit the arrangement without causing havoc). From my place before the screen of the editing machine, these image sequences were all within more or less easy reach, sometimes hundreds of them—​in locations determined by some peculiar and overriding aspect of their emotional weight: their ‘affect-​valence.’ I placed them where they best tickled my brain—​as if the location around me of each one was the spatial component of the architecture. The order in which I reached for them comprised the temporal component. This way, as I entered each editing session I could look at the configuration or composition I had so far achieved on the viewer as my way of stepping back into the dance of image retrieval. Slowly, over the years, I gained a comfort that allowed me the sensation of speaking fluently with a stream of unlabeled, articulated images. Cinema was seeming ever more like a language of a whole new kind, but definitely a language: the meaningful articulation of elements within an overarching structure. However, this is a language that only I  could speak. And also, since I wasn’t the only filmmaker with a need for a system like this, I knew that the operating characteristics of the system were probably not utterly unique. In fact during the years I shared a studio with Saul Levine we also shared some organizational strategies. So, in reality, though my dialect was unique, my language of spatial organization was not necessarily private. In theory though, it could have been. The main point here is that for an individual working in film as a soloist, physical gestures and moves can come to represent meanings through the material demands of the process. The work that results is the product of chains of individual invention, and as such the vectors of meaning will necessarily be idiosyncratic—​so it becomes the job of the audience as well as the artist to make sense of the work. In that way, until it has been figured out, until its process has been decoded and/​or absorbed, each new work still represents a private language of sorts. Of course now that the film-​clips are files and the space is virtual, this problem of purely visual asset management is eased, to a degree, by the light box effect that is built into most video editing software, wherein a single frame stands in for the entire clip. What is obviously lost is the larger geographical metaphor with its component of physical movement.

45.  Illusions and ontological linchpins After I had been making films for three or four years (and well before I had devised the above asset management system) I got a clear picture of a few fundamental issues that had been eluding me in my pursuit of film’s potential to express what words cannot—​for film to grow language, as it were. This happened during my only semester as an enrolled (graduate) student of

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filmmaking; so I was able to spend most of my time thinking about how to come to grips with purely abstract and structural issues. When these issues snapped into focus, I  realized how to build a cinematic device that could clarify two of my most basic investigations. What I needed was to make a student film, in my best sense of the phrase. Cinema’s unique potential for articulating ontological and epistemological questions intrigued me more than anything else at the time, so I designed a heuristic that would allow me to learn where to look within the mechanism for answers to some questions. Among them: How is my memory of something different from my moment-​by-​moment experience of it? Bundled into this question is a complex set of questions actually; questions that couldn’t be answered with any single film, but at least could be answered in film; and I needed to get a start. It is significant that I did this in Chicago. I don’t know what other city would have given me the inspiration or the opportunity to make this particular film. This is the only time I will describe one of my own films in detail and attempt a textual analysis of it. Not only are its most relevant aspects easy enough to describe in words, it is also an extremely easy film to overlook, so I feel it needs some special pointing to, although my description will require a bit of patience on the part of the reader. Chicago is a city of nested rectangles. It is laid out on a north, south, east, west grid with the intervals and widths of its streets carving a repetition of brick-​shaped city blocks. By far most of the residential structures are made of brick, their facades echoing the layout of the streets; and by far, most of the dwellings themselves, in many neighborhoods, are shaped and located like bricks on their blocks—​for the most part very similar units, facing each other across a street and backing each other across a narrower alley. Chicago’s formal layout was the perfect foil for a student’s material metaphor for cinema: two repetitions of rectangular units—​the city laid out in the three dimensions of space, the film in two of the dimensions of space plus the third dimension of time. My reasoning went like this: if you could absolutely peg the experience of viewing a film to the actuality of its recording in a way that allowed for discrete slippages in a single dimension, you could learn something fundamental about how the medium can ultimately form a material baseline; how it could stand in fixed relation to what it was mediating. This was my principal design goal. My secondary goal was to make a film that embodied enough personal energy and drama to be worth watching the number of times necessary to learn what it was I needed to learn from it—​or, for that matter to teach to an audience of film students. A technical digression on the nature of mechanical/​analog cinema, one that tips you to the somewhat esoteric nature of this work: Since pictures are recorded and played back as the result of an intermittent process and sound

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is recorded and played back as the result of a continuous process, they cannot be recorded/​reproduced through the same mechanism. Therefore movie projectors read the picture in one place—​at the gate—​and the sound at another—​over a sound head. Because two different kinds of motion are involved, on any sound-​film strip the picture is displaced from the sound by a distance great enough to stabilize its mechanical movement: from stop and start, to continuous and stable. This turns out to be a distance equivalent (in 16mm) to twenty-​six frames. Synchronous sounds on a movie film are located twenty-​six frames in advance of the picture. This fact is of no importance at all to a narrative, and is only significant if you wish to assess, in its simplest iteration, something about the nature of the mediation of the sound film. The physical displacement between the image and the sound is actually a big issue in the film production and editing process because it guarantees that picture and sound will be handled discretely from the start. Usually it is only at the very last stage in duplication when a print is being made for projection to an audience that the picture and the sound reside on the same strip of film. In the initial production stage, the picture is typically recorded by a silent camera and the sound is recorded separately on a tape recorder. The familiar clap stick on the slate marks a specific frame of sound to correspond to a specific frame of picture (the frame where the two blades of the clapper first come together) so the two can be set up to be edited in synchronization with each other. This is called “double system sound.” There was however one other method used—​mostly for recording news films—​called single-​system—​wherein picture and sound were recorded at the same time on the same medium. Most of the films that are projected in theaters carry the sound information optically. An optical-​sound single-​ system camera transforms the pressure waves of the sound into an electrical signal used to modulate a little light bulb inside the camera, recording the sound on the film emulsion photographically, just like the picture; and the projector has a little light bulb that shines through this optically modulated stripe to read the information. This transducer, the sound reader, is what’s located twenty-​six frames ahead along the film path. There is a reason for telling you all this. I mentioned earlier that there are three principal ways or situations in which the continuity of the analog cinema process can materially displace the continuum of time recording from the continuum of time experiencing:  (1)  the beginning and ending of a roll of film, (2)  the starting and stopping of the camera, and (3)  the most usual, the splice or edit. Well, there is a fourth that becomes relevant in this film, albeit on a surprising scale. The speed of recording, called the frame rate, and the speed of reproduction, called the projection speed, are both theoretically (and sometimes

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actually) variable. For sound films however there is a convention that locks both speeds at twenty-​four frames per second (United States; twenty-​five elsewhere). My student film, which I  called The Ogre (1970), needed to be filmed with a single-​system optical sound camera in order to fulfill its goal, so variable frame rates were not an issue, since once the camera got up to operating speed the frame rate was locked at twenty-​four frames per second. However filming is a physical process with all elements subject to physical laws. So when one presses the start switch on the camera, the motor is activated and the film inside begins to move. It accelerates from stopped to maximum speed in maybe a tenth of a second and so at least one or two frames will have gone by at a slower rate than those that will follow. The result is that light has more time to fall on the emulsion of these frames as they go through the aperture, and so those frames are overexposed (the first one the most, the last one the least). The light from the first of these frames (especially if the camera happens to have stopped with the shutter open) is usually bright enough to spill across the whole surface of the film, out of the area reserved for image recording and into the area reserved for the optical sound track, and this causes an audible pop (Figure 7). But since the picture and sound information from the camera flare are colocated on the film and the rest of the picture and sound information is displaced by twenty-​six frames, we hear the pop a touch more than a second after we see the flare. For this reason the stopping and starting of the camera is a signature event, actually the index of an event. I  needed an optical sound camera because I needed to be totally unambiguous about how I was disconnecting the recording process from the viewing process, that is, with a camera stop-​ start and not a splice in the film. The issue was to encode the material to allow for both a precise, discernable decoding of the continuum of recorded versus unrecorded time, as well as the more subjective and intuitive experience of recorded time and implied actual time. I wanted to create an elastic coherence between measured time and the subjective experience of watching the world on a movie screen; elastic, but coherent nonetheless. Halstead Street in Chicago, for much of its extensive north-​south run, has equally spaced shop fronts with the sort of brick-​framed, rectangular facades whose aspect ratios mimicked the frame in the camera. My intention was to shoot an eleven-​minute roll of film that would be divided into five takes, two pairs of takes demarcated by starting and stopping the camera; and one take demarcated by a splice. I put the camera on a tripod and aimed it toward the west side of the north-​south street. I  began filming my first take with the camera pointed on a 45º diagonal to the left, at about ten in the morning. My first (exactly timed) two minute take was a series of incremental camera movements toward the right (or north) that included many deliberate and carefully

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FIGURE 7  Flash caused by camera stopping with the shutter open and then taking a couple of frames to get back up to speed. The optical sound track is the squiggly line to the left of the picture. Note that subsequent frames appear above preceding frames since the film runs through the camera upside down. Credit: Author.

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weighed, shifts of frame—​until, by the end of the two minutes, the camera was aimed approximately 45º to the right. We hear the traffic sounds of whatever vehicles propel themselves through the frame during the two minutes of continuous exposure, and then ten seconds before the allotted two minutes run out, a voice on the soundtrack says: “ten seconds.” At the end of those ten seconds I turn the camera off. I then pick the camera up, walk across the street, set the tripod down on a prearranged mark on the sidewalk, aimed toward the side of the street I’d just left, and repeat the procedure—​leaving a flash on the film and a pop on the sound track when the camera starts back up again. This time, although the incremental framings from left to right are dictated by the felt tensions in the individual compositions, as they were the last time, this time, facing east, they are illuminated by a sun coming from the opposite direction and almost directly into the lens. Two takes; two different qualities of light. One is sharp and direct; with distinct shadows that are so easy to delineate that they are literally measurable. In the other, the light is diffuse, and shadows less distinct. Then (can you bear it?) I  cross the street to my original position and repeat the process again. The position of the sun has now changed (the earth has rotated by a measurable amount since the camera first rolled on this scene) so the shop fronts’ shadows are shifted. This second, three-​minute-​long set of takes contains a change-​up however: a voice says “ten seconds,” ten seconds before the last take would have ended, but at the end of the two minutes the take does not end. The framing continues its measured, yet ad hoc march in static framings to the right until about 45º of deflection is reached—​for another minute. There is another vocal “ten seconds” announcement of the impending end-​of-​take. This second ten-​second callout is really ten seconds before the take actually does end. And then the same thing happens again from the other side of the street. Two, two-​minute takes, and two, three-​minute takes occupy ten minutes of an eleven-​minute long roll of film. To finish the roll I crossed the street again to the west side, on which the sun was still shining and pointed the camera due north along the sidewalk and let it roll. At some point while the film was running out, I spoke the name of the film, the name of the city and the date (but not the time of day) into the microphone, thus absolutely indexing the spatiotemporal site of the experiment. When the roll came back from the lab, I made one physical splice in the original, from the fourth take to the fifth, the one pointing north; a physical splice: as obvious in its material actuality as the off’s and on’s of the camera are in theirs. The film actually ends with a camera flare announcing the fact. From a single screening of the film, a viewer should be able to deduce the essential facts of its ontological status—​its where’s, and when’s, since the vocal inscription at the end pegs it to a specific time and place (exact

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sun angle). The displacement of shadow that happens in the elapsed time between takes is then indexical of the slippage (amount of time the camera was turned off) between the individual takes. These time shifts are precisely deducible thanks to the rules of the language game of repetition. That is, if you see the same scene being repeated, ask what else is being modulated. In this case it is shadow vectors moving with the rotation of the earth and a concomitant change in incremental framing strategies. The dramatic tension, the reason it is worth watching at all (instead of reading about as a pure thought experiment) is contained in the crisp, individual framings of a notable and evocative architecture that is randomly trespassed by vehicles and characters of more or less immediacy and radiance. But this is not where I  expected the learning to come in—​on a single viewing. For the film was designed not only to be precisely indexical of its ontology, but it was also designed to be a tool for revealing how experience gets organized in memory. My written catalogue44 description of “The Ogre” is that it is the first installment in a serial in which every installment is identical. My plan was to watch the film at regular intervals and invite those friends (and later students) whose eyes were sharp enough to enjoy these particular visual dynamics to reflect on how the random events and the misplaced time markers organized themselves as configurations and progressions—​seen against the events, configurations, and progressions noticed in previous viewings. Remember, I wanted to learn something about how a film is recalled in relationship to how it is experienced, and how that memory organizes subsequent experience. I intended The Ogre to be a dramatically neutral (but still watchable) benchmark example for that test. On this score, I  was satisfied to gather subjective impressions and not try to attach any metrics or other specifically detailed analysis to my serial experiences. But I can easily say that in the first dozen or so viewings, which happened over maybe a two-​year period (the first few repeated screenings just hours apart, then gradually spaced further apart) the eleven minutes of screen time subjectively went by quicker and quicker with each screening. The film with its implications, compositional tensions, and aleatoric dramas unpacks itself screening by screening, and what at first may seem to be quite empty, begins to seem quite full. The lessons of that work, which, at the time, I was determined to keep loose and as internally unspecified as possible, were apprehended, I would say, in terms of a sense of the relative weight of different moments in the film: what kinds of configurations would team up to become considered as ‘an event,’ and how stable would those configurations remain through subsequent viewings—​that is, what makes something a something?

44 No longer available from Canyon Cinema Co-​op, San Francisco.

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The effects of what I learned from this experiment ultimately showed up in all of my subsequent work in my ability to intuit the valences of images as a photographer and their polyvalent attractions as an editor. It was, as I said, a student film.

46.  Delimiting an audience Explicitly and self-​consciously, the audience for The Ogre was myself, and though it was an instructional piece for me, obviously it could be of use to anyone who had the need to get a feel for what I would call ‘ontological valence.’ To that end, when I would show it to friends or students it was with an understanding that there would not be much talk about it until it had been digested in silence. How would I  characterize the people who would willingly watch the same repetitive (even unto itself) film again and again? So much has been written about the relationship between art and audience that I can only add a few personal observations to factor into the mix: My epiphany with Fire of Waters, as described in the preface, demonstrates how a moment’s recognition can become a permanent feature of one’s outlook. This happens once or twice in a lifetime, so it’s not very helpful to generalize from it. Although my viewing happened in a group setting, my epiphany happened later, when I was alone. So, one kind of audience is the group of people experiencing a work together. Another is the solitary participant, a reader, nose in book, a listener under headphones, a solo watcher wearing video glasses, or alone in front of a screen; all these people ultimately only sharing the work through some kind of subsequent conversation. My all-​time favorite example of the way an audience can influence the meaning of a work occurred during a screening of Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake (1974) in a packed theater at a university screening. I arrived a bit late and took a seat toward the back after the lights went down, but before the film started. The opening scene is of a running battle in a forest. The light is dim and there is fog roiling around the base of the trees. The atmosphere is tense. The action is being played out at somewhat of a distance, and we hear the battle more than we see it: the sound of horses hooves, the clanging of swords, and the grunting sounds of struggle; until, just after we hear an off-​screen crash and gasp, a head completely encased in a helmet with a sword still embedded in it, plunges into the foreground, filling the frame. It’s a grim and portentous scene. We hear, also in close-​up, the sound of blood spilling from the helmet—​glug, glug, glug.

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Suddenly from the front row an individual peal of laughter overrode the sound track, and soon most of the audience seemed to get that this gesture was meant as a macabre joke and joined in, editorializing the scene with their waves of laughter; and because of this my own viewing of the film was transformed, from one of the classic takes on it to another.45 From that moment in the film, when an audience member’s full-​throated laughter skewed my view of the scene, I read the entire film as limned with a droll self-​consciousness—​not a parody, but a carefully positioned distance, a distance whose vectors were so precisely and deftly specified that it became the major content, the major meaning of that experience of the film for me. Still, to this day, when I think of Bresson, what occurs to me is the light and gentle humor with which he denuded the myth of Lancelot. Intended or not, that’s where I went with the gesture of exaggerated sound.46 The audience effect, crucial to comedy and horror, is probably partly a visual thing and partly an olfactory thing, and to a great degree, an audio thing: Laff tracks work. I’ll describe another kind of audience, one that subscribes to a different tradition, a different kind of cinema event. But first I want to shift the scene and describe two analogs—​which I hope will make my description of the protocols of these other more formal and experimental kinds of film screenings seem perhaps just a little less churchy. I have a fragile but intense relationship with paintings. I usually prefer looking at reproductions in books because I find I am too easily distracted by people around me in museums to get into the intense, very personal, and very private energy that I want and expect paintings to invoke (galleries often aren’t quite so bad). Sometimes it’s just a welling of emotion—​ some stored energy that the painting can release in me, sometimes it’s an actual conversation, either visual, in which case being able to see one configuration leads me to being able to see another and then see the whole in a refreshed light; or it’s an actual talking-​to-​myself kind of conversation—​ an imaginary dialogue with the artist perhaps. Unfortunately with reproductions, the energy stored in the painting comes through to me more feebly, so the best alternatives are rare encounters with originals in empty galleries. My most memorable experiences were during repeated visits to one particular room that was always empty on weekday mornings at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. At the time, this room contained a Rothko, a de Kooning, and a Johns, among others. I returned often and found myself with the de

45 Some people find the film stiff and ham-​handed and squirm at the sound effects, seeing them as amateurish, others find it both deft and ironic. 46 Since the rest of the film remains coherent under this view, I must take it as intended.

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FIGURE 8  Excavation (1950) by Willem de Kooning. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

Kooning (Figure 8) again and again.47 The painting is a statement of both great complexity and active ambiguity, so the dialogue I  had with it was long. Each visit had some of the quality of a tussling match between the dictates of the painting and my own drive for the lessons of parallax, the lessons of comparison that fought to make my eyes move this way or that, to dart from configuration to configuration, seeing something that was never before anything announce itself as an important part of the scheme, while my gaze was en route to somewhere else. These experiences took me out of myself in a way that did not especially brook companionship. If someone else entered the gallery, I would lose my train of thought; and having been cranked up into a peculiar and fragile state provoked by de Kooning’s genius, I’d find any other presence overwhelming, and have to leave. 47 Either the painting was on loan to the Fogg, or my memory is playing tricks, and it was a different de Kooning that I stared at so often with such intensity many, many years ago. The Fogg has no record of any de Kooning, whereas the Art Institute was kind enough to permit the use of this image.

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So, different people are moved by different things and in very, very different ways, and none but the most talented can enumerate or elaborate on those ways or express what it is about those things. The second kind of encounter I want to describe bears a different relationship to time. At a John Cage concert I was moved to tears by the incredibly subtle, ineffable progression of taste where silences, carefully flavored by the aleatoric musical events that surrounded them carved sacred, protected, and ecstatic moments.48 There, that’s one way of being moved—​moved to tears, when without question you know it meant something to you. But really, moved to tears is itself many different ways of being moved. During the Cage concert I was surrounded by people who were attending to an event rather than an object like a painting. The similarity between the experiences lies in the implied focus required in both cases for the dialogue with the work to fulfill as much of its potential as possible. The difference is that the experience of the concert had a shaped duration, shared by all who were tuned. Also, the protocols of the situation ensured that the silences in the work were respected and protected, even by those who weren’t tuned. (Whereas, while looking at paintings in a museum there is little sense of sharing one’s experience with strangers who often chatter whether they are able to engage with the work or not.) While I  was alone with the de Kooning, conversing with the painting, I would catch myself articulating—​sometimes just a grunt, or an ahh, sometimes a more musical response, something like a bit of humming, or tapping my foot with the rhythms in the painting. With Cage those responses were repressed by respect for my neighbors—​my own participation in the protocol. But after each work, or even after a particular movement, or moment, the collective sentiment in the audience emerged as a shaded exhalation, before (when appropriate) becoming applause. Rock concerts have a similar dynamic, but with a different looking waveform. The many films in the world of personal, experimental, picture-​driven cinema that are silent demand a viewing protocol that combines the respect due to both de Kooning and Cage. And since these works don’t hang out in the same venues as what Gene Youngblood (1970: 80) calls, with some vitriol on his breath, “conventional Hollywood pretend movies” these special protocols for viewing carry the possibility of getting refined and developed, especially when there are pretty much the same people in an audience over an extended period of time—​say a semester. The university or college screening room provides a protected environment within a protected environment for these films, films that are explorations or meditations rather than entertainments. And since I taught filmmaking and analysis for about fifteen years, this became, by far, my most familiar circumstance for experiencing film.

48 18 Microtonal Ragas, performed by Amelia Cuni.

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When everyone in an audience knows one another, as in a film ­analysis class, each semester is like an ongoing conversation, one that grows ­progressively more sophisticated, and in which remarks tend to reference a wider and wider range of shared experiences and topics, as the conversation progresses. Every film that the group watches together adds its own layer of perspectives and possibilities to the conversation. The rhythm and flux of a film analysis class is one of watch, then talk. If there is a way to stop or step frame a film, there may be watching and talking at the same time, when one can point to events using the controls of an analytic movie projector or video deck. Usually, however, when the film runs free, people experience something and then talk about it afterward. This engenders certain predictable problems of reference: we’ve all just been subjected to an experience simultaneously that may often elude description, and we still want to compare notes. At some point in the progression of a semester, if things are going well, and the students are sharp and attentive to one another, a group speak will develop, with its own terminology and style of reference: the language games of that semester. Under these circumstances, a very different kind of dialogue can emerge, one that, at its best, is organized spontaneously, but with grace and delicacy; and the sense of familiarity and communality that has developed over time allows the spontaneous vocalizations, which we make when we are truly moved, to rise closer to the surface, to become less repressed, and eventually to become an overt sharing of what is essentially an inner commentary. During a screening of a silent film these vocalizations (ahh, ohh, hmmm) that are usually more welcome on subsequent rather than initial screenings of a film become more than just exclamations, they become a clear and economical way of highlighting perceptions, wherein people clue one another to some significance in the flux of events; they become tools of reference. Clearly these classes, overall, constitute a conversation. It’s even been noted ironically how they resemble the preach and response vocalizations in some churches—​impulsive, natural, as well as carefully shaded and discerning at the same time. Sometimes such semesters of study produce a very small language group, one that becomes unintelligible to strangers—​a language game with only one team. Hmm, did I say I wanted the experience to sound less churchy?

47.  Summarizing the singular window en route to the panoramic view So it would seem that the austere aesthetics of The Ogre, The Big Stick, The Flicker, The Maltese-​Cross Movement, The Nervous System, and formal experimental films of their ilk has its place, if anywhere, in cloistered,

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protected screening rooms where the lights go ALL the way out, and there are no illuminated EXIT signs next to the screen; a room that is acoustically and mentally isolated from the clamors of the world. But it is very rare to find the moving image in such a protected situation these days. More than ever, the finely wrought articulations in the image streams of the contemplative and perhaps challenging films we’ve been talking about are found in a space that Mircea Eliade along with Nathaniel Dorsky would call ‘sacred.’ Theaters with actual 16mm movie projectors are already attaining the status of historical treasures; and viewing a projected, formally structured motion picture is ever more like a trip to a church or museum. So, before we move into either a more technical consideration of the above topics (Part III) or the profane world of the moving movie (Part IV), the traveling movie, the ubiquitous digital movie, it might be good to recap what we’ve gained from this preliminary analysis of everyday language as seen from a dynamic point of view; and parallel to it, this semi-​ reclusive and self-​consciously mechanical cinema. In Part I, we investigated some simple relationships between perception and expression, and the way they influence each other. We described a dynamic perspective on meaning and applied that perspective with some equivalence to the issue of how both words and pictures make references—​ how they mean. We described the importance of the shift in ontology that happens at the surface of the screen, drawing examples from the works of Snow, Levine, Conrad, Jacobs, and Schilling. We also talked about some of the language games editors and directors are involved with, and how they differ if they’re thinking about the fabrication of a narrative sequence or a montage. In Part II, we elaborated a bit on the different ways that pictures, words, and music create references by introducing two sets of dynamically organized universals:  beginnings, middles, and ends—​as recognized by their rhythmical peculiarities; and interval, context, and repetition, our analytic trialectic for regarding any communication act as equivalent. We then used examples of films by Dewdney, Landow, Levine, and myself to discuss some of the directions a purer cinema might pursue—​one driven by the formal character of pictures and music, more than by words. And this led us into a kind of a corner, where our highly specialized needs led to demands for a privileged environment—​demands that were once normal and expected, but have now become highly specialized as well as progressively more difficult to satisfy. Nonetheless we were able to summarize a very few superficial common denominators among words, music, and pictures; between ordinary verbal language and the ‘would-​be’ languages of music and cinema. For instance, it seems that in each of these cases we have systems of communication where a number of elemental parts get articulated to create expressive wholes. In the case of language there is a large but

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limited set of contributors—​phonemes or morphemes; letters or syllables or words. With music the limitations seem yet more severe. However, in the case of cinema the number of conceivable images and inflections of images is practically infinite. In the case of language we have rules and well-​established practices covering the way those elements are to be combined; whereas in cinema, there are almost no rules, and in a poetic cinema there are none. All media operate as systems of referral—​we use them to connect us with something else. In language we can describe at least four distinct ways in which referring works arrayed in a continuum of specificity; in music, description of what is signified is itself the problem. In cinema, the ways that images and combinations of images can refer are still being discovered. Words are usually thought of as only being polyvalent in a trope or a poetic context, whereas pictures have a natural polyvalence, and musical tones are the ultimate in polyvalence. It seems an obvious truism that language and cinema and music all subscribe to the simple dynamic universals—​beginning, middle, and end-​ness—​ but it may be less obvious that interval, context, and repetition underlie all media; but this dynamic view of signification when borrowed from a poetic cinema allows us to form a more vital conception of language and vice versa; and we can use this perspective to see how the resonant ambiguities in verbal language, in painting, in music, and in narrative cinema, create dynamic aesthetic structures—​across the board. But in terms of language analysis the most important thing we get is a look at some ways that meaning, along with a categorical ontology, is embedded in the verbal. The idea that words stand for objects (and actions and qualities) is so much a part of the way verbal language is explained that this kind of correspondence theory of meaning has become a pervasive filter on our experience of life. The ability to compare how articulated words and articulated pictures differ in their potential framings of existential status is a tremendous opportunity; and the ability to make these comparisons from the perspective of a referential system that is just beginning to form makes this a unique moment in the evolution of intellect. If you imagine that you must temporarily forget how to think in your first language in order to learn how to think in some other, and then do this when you are in fact surrounded only by speakers of your native language, then you have some idea what it’s like to be continuously immersed in a picture-​inflecting mentality, while being surrounded by speakers-​of-​words. This is changing. The moving picture has come out of its hole and is now worn on the hip. How many of the formal values we’ve been touting will survive? What will be their form? But before we attempt to come to grips

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with some of the implications of the ontological shift from the analog to the digital, from the highly localized to the widely dispersed, it will behoove us to examine in much greater detail the impact of categories—​both the conceptual categories that rule the verbal and the musical, and the perceptual categories that rule all human experience.

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FIGURE 9  Word as a picture. Credit: Author.

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Part III Considering Description: Tropes, Tunes, and Moving Pictures

48.  The world of description Visual, musical and verbal tropes arrayed in a simple but nuanced architecture are expressed through shifts of key that buttress the structural complexity. The palette is harmonious and dissonant by turns:  colors now pleasing, now clashing add to an odd pictorial cadence. There is almost no story. Instead there is a minimal narrative arc that embraces the film’s fundamental theme and allows the architectural elements to come to life. Built from an extremely limited lexicon of images whose meanings shift on account of their syntax, it resolves on the same note with which it began. The above description may or may not yield some sort of a picture. If it does it may be because of experience with conversations in the arts, or an ability to shift categories and see things easily through different lenses. However there are a number of things that the paragraph illustrates regardless: We are using words to convey thoughts about a poetic cinema—​something for which very little peculiar vocabulary has been developed and, therefore, one for which words have to be borrowed and/​or invented. The vocabulary and hence the concepts that seem most appropriate for describing a nameless “structural” film were entirely borrowed from other media:  music, painting, architecture, poetry, and, minimally, verbal narrative. However, if verbal language is to illustrate ideas that have not yet become widely enough seen or recognized to have developed a conventional descriptive lexicon, that is, the purely poetic and largely abstract potentials of cinema, then one must

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be invented. This invention will become a culture-​wide collaboration as we borrow terms and restructure their use through a process of metaphorical extension; remolding them to the task of describing the devices and effects of a language that sequences motion pictures instead of words or notes. Description both enables and circumscribes potential. When we describe cinema as a collection of languages, that description brings aspects to the fore. For example, its potential for communication, and pushes other aspects, like its entertainment value, into the background. This part of the book will address that issue head on. The journey will be iterative as well as reflexive because of the inherent, prominent, and almost inescapable predisposition of the verbal to impose its own structure on a communication. Given these cautions, I invite you along to participate in a series of thought experiments intended to try out various descriptive terms from other media in order to see what power and what pitfalls they have when trying to unravel the synergistic power of a poetic cinema.

49.  Recapitulation and prospectus The ultimate purpose of this book has been to find analogies between cinema, verbal language, and music that would be useful in projecting what the future of human expression holds now that it is augmented by an ability to articulate pictures. The focus of this effort has been on the poetic use of cinema driven by a belief that herein lies coiled a maximum of newly expressive potential. So far in the history of the medium we could argue that the poetic has been the experimental and that it has been the experimental that has advanced the expressive potential of the narrative. Because the medium is so new, the poetic had to be formally and structurally experimental by necessity. Telling a story, on the other hand, seemed to come quite naturally to the medium and has taken a path of much more constrained invention. The simple, representational character of motion pictures that feature persons and immediately recognizable objects can give the impression of a more or less neutral rendition of reality if they remain ‘uninflected.’ That impression can then easily be shaded or inflected to represent a particular perspective or mood. Using cinema toward entirely poetic, musical, and ultimately pictorial ends, on the other hand, requires not just grammatical inflection but radical shifts in compositional thinking—​and along with it, a radical shift in descriptive paradigms. Looking at three media through one lens, however, will certainly introduce distortions in the descriptions of all of them unless some core, fundamental similarities are brought to the front right away, and that’s what I tried to do in the first two parts of the book by relating descriptions of

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some mechanisms of perception to descriptions of some mechanisms of expression. In this part of the book I’ll offer a more detailed recapitulation of these major themes, reorganizing and zooming in on them in order to serve up more detail and new levels of comparison. The strategy of the book so far has emphasized the sorting of similarities from differences in the perceptual stream that allows for pattern formation and recognition. Living organisms all need to find patterns in the sensing of their environment in order to fruitfully interact with it. In this part I will delve a bit more deeply into the psychological and neural underpinnings of pattern formation and recognition and how they may inform a future cinema. This strategy also stressed a rigorously dynamic perspective when analyzing perception and language—​viewing them both as happenings. And the elaboration of the ideas that put interval, context, and repetition front and center along with the defining energies that beginning, middle, and ending of thoughts have in all media, these ideas were all lensed through the presentation of a strangely symmetrical simile—​movement as meaning—​ where the terms could be transposed. Movement as Meaning or Meaning as Movement: not interchangeable, but a simile of itself. This all involved the invocation of a number of encompassing images: intellectual parallax, vectors of meaning, poetic equivalence among elements, and reference viewed as a continuum of styles of meaning from those that are ultra-​vague to those that are as precise as possible, from loosely referenced to tightly specified. These images provided a foundation where the method of exploration rests on a simple, fundamental description of language that is equally effective regardless of the medium in which the language is ‘written’: the meaningful articulation of elements within an overarching structure, where the emphasis is on ‘meaningful.’ Inherent in this claim or descriptive paradigm is the idea that where there is meaning, there also is language. This is the one description of language that thoroughly accommodates everything from our readings of the natural world, as in the language of nature, all the way to the interpenetration of images and sounds, text and cinema that constitutes the content of the World Wide Web. Along the way I introduced a few key terms; some arising from my own perceptions as a filmmaker and some from my conception of what Wittgenstein meant when he spoke of “language games” and what Paul Valery meant when he coined the term “omnivalence.” I have also given myself a couple of conceptual dodges: the handy crutch of the heuristic dialectic that allowed for a kind of freedom to take ideas and put them in a temporary array so that the differences among them could be seen more clearly. Along with this comes an aversion to the closed and restrictive frame of ‘theory’ and a preference instead for the expanding frames of ‘perspective’ and ‘thought experiment.’ These lead directly

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to another preference:  for descriptions over definitions. And this leads to an outlook where extreme linguistic relativism and subjectivism have, at times, earned me an (undeserved, of course) reputation as an intellectual opportunist. In this third part of the book I  want to address many of these same thoughts again and bring them down to earth with more granular analyses and more concrete examples. I also want to contextualize them a bit in relationship to mainstream, contemporary ideas in linguistics and the cognition of music. But I will also generalize these ideas still further in order to show their reach and their power as perspectives: verbal language as viewed through the lens of a cine-​language and a cine-​language as viewed through the formal mechanisms of verbal metaphor and music; thereby justifying, I would hope, the importance of a trans-​medial approach to a philosophy of language; or perhaps better thought of as philosophies of languages. Along the way I’d be glad if I could persuade you that what some consider to be intellectual opportunism is simply a continuously shifting view of the world that ultimately makes sense. This view is embodied in the term ‘perspective’; a key term when conceptualizing meaning as a dynamic process and which, considered this way, unlocks the depths of cinema’s potential. The difference between the word is and the word as is the difference between seeing with one eye and seeing with two.

50.  Shades of meaning—​another perspective on perspective In the first two parts of this book we barged through a thorny landscape in a fairly cavalier manner dealing with quite abstruse subjects in just enough detail to move the topic along. We treated the picture/​word divide largely by shading our attention toward the picture side of things, with little attempt to assess in detail how the ineluctable structures of verbal language actually work to condition our various descriptions of existence, including our descriptions of linguistic proxies like music and cinema. In the first sections of this third part we will look at analyses of verbal tropes in general as potential models for ‘visual tropes’; and we will look more closely at how our descriptions of ‘visual tropes’ are constrained by verbal language. We will also try to muster some of the lexical munitions from the essentially verbal discipline of cognitive linguistics and some of the more speculative ideas from the discipline of neurolinguistics in the service of a deeper appreciation of our grasp of the nonverbal. Moreover, we will attempt a cognitive analysis of the structures of music, another time-​art, to see what illuminating parallels to cinema we can glean, as well as how cinema might develop along the lines of musical form.

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Since words have been around a lot longer than moving pictures, the literature dedicated to the various levels of verbal language processing is far denser (and more tangled) than writings on the cognitive processing of these other endeavors that I insist on calling ‘languages.’ Ultimately though, since we want to understand things about the value (and future) of the moving picture in human expression and do so in words, I  have been hoping to deliver a work that might also be of some value to philosophers of language in clarifying not only the role of words in expressing thoughts about moving pictures but also the potential of cinema to actually conduct philosophic investigations on its own terms. From here on in, the pace will slow down considerably as I attempt to treat the subject on a finer grain, with a bit more delicacy and some measure more diligence. Filmmakers with little interest in linguistics and cognitive psychology may wish to skip ahead to Part IV. If the reader has a persistent analytic bent, however, the light I  manage to shine on this highly reflexive subject, glimmering through the obdurate tangle that quickly grows up around the nexus of these three disciplines, might possibly help us suss out a future for cinematically poetic meaning strategies and hence the future for all cinematic meaning strategies. To start with, the simile ‘movement as meaning’ begs that anyone who encounters the phrase regard that though movement is the essence of meaning, meaning is only one possible product of movement. The working frame of reference here is to describe meaning as necessarily entailing movement. Meaning’s most general, universally applicable characterization is, as we’ve said, that it happens (or it doesn’t). For something to mean a perspective must shift. This is our basic descriptive frame. Therefore the simile asks that one see that without movement there is no meaning. Implicit in this is that meaning is a purely dynamic process the occurrence of which is conditioned by the many ways we speakers of English typically use the word ‘meaning’ itself! It is also conditioned thoroughly both by the merely local circumstances around those occasions when we typically use it, and by the broad cultural circumstances of its typical uses: ‘meaning’ is a word whose meaning is malleable. Although our use of the word‘meaning’ always tacitly carries the many implicit assumptions we normally make about its use, the context in which it is used selects only one of these meanings. This is what I meant by a ‘reflexive’ approach. Hang on. There is more of this slippery thinking to follow. Also implicit in the idea of meaning seen as movement is the recognition that whenever we stray into hypostatizing a particular usage of any word, we only do it for the sake of convenience and convention: Language conventions need some stability after all and the individuals that use them need illusions of stability. It is very hard to see everything as always in motion and only relative. One does need to employ nouns in our characterizations of life, imagining that we are actually making hard and fast relationships

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among objects with our speech. This feat of referential solidity is something that narrative cinema does effortlessly. We will be making a case for the various ways that poetic cinema can balance the hard, fast, and explicit character of representational, pictorial reference with a relativity of a new kind of syntax—​what I am dubbing ‘cintax.’ This is the reason that we need the strong reminder that ‘meaning’ is a word (like most) whose meaning is variable if not encased in a good solid sentence. “Say what you mean” and “Mean what you say” carry two slightly distinct uses of the word ‘mean.’ Sometimes we say, “I really mean it!” or, “Does this mean it’s over?” Or, “That means a lot to me.” When we use the word, especially if we are native speakers, we usually gloss right over the differences in the ways we are using it, whether it occurs as a verb or a noun (gerund) along with the different implications of these different uses. We simply take the word for what it is and how it was said. The context shapes the contours of the use to the shades of the sense it imparts. When someone says, “I really mean it!” how do we discern whether s/​he really does or not? How much of a threat, or perhaps, on the other hand, a play for comic relief is there in the statement? How much sincerity or empathy or hostility does it carry? The word ‘mean’ in different contexts, or in different tones of voice, can carry any of these implications. Meaning can stand for reference (as in ‘this means it’s over’) or for implicature (as in ‘This means a lot to me’). In certain ways it curiously resembles our use of the word ‘is.’ They are both used to imply a kind of equivalence and usually a kind of transparency.1 Meaning as movement, or, to flip it, movement as meaning each can be read to have significant differences in implication; but it isn’t relevant to us right now in which order the terms occur. What is relevant is that there is some element of bidirectional comparison between the two terms just as there is an element of comparison between two vantage points when talking about parallax. They both result from the fusing of related but distinct mental images.2 What I want to emphasize here, however, is that the very word ‘comparison’ masks an entirely mysterious neurological/​ epistemological 1 What is the difference between saying ‘movement as meaning’ and ‘movement is meaning’? In the first case we are inviting a comparison; in the second we are asserting a relationship for which someone can hold us accountable. Further, asserting that movement is meaning reveals, with another shade of clarity, the differences between asserting that meaning is equivalent to movement versus movement is equivalent to meaning—​the first claim having some validity as we hope we have shown, and the second being dubious in many instances. This kind of nuance will stand us in good stead as we move along through the narrative. 2 Even though these two terms live on slightly, but significantly different ontological planes: since producing a sensation of visual depth from parallax is the result of a purely neurological comparison that almost always happens entirely beneath our awareness, while producing the sensation of meaning from a comparison or metaphor requires processing the terms in, or at least nearer to, consciousness.

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process. We perceive comparisons, yet we don’t really know how; neither in the case of merging the fields of view of the two eyes, nor when making comparisons between the two states of affairs or conceptual domains that lie behind the two terms of a metaphor. A closer investigation of the elements of the comparisons that are involved in either the visual or the conceptual case will haunt our analysis as we discuss the ideas of musical, verbal, and visual languages. Consider this sentence:   Picture is a word. And this one:        Word is a picture. Or                A picture is a word. Vs.              A word is a picture. The four sentences involved in this thought experiment invoke very different perspectives; and we can learn a lot by attending to what it takes us to process them, to recognize the perspective shift required to extract meaning from them; to get them and then move on. The ground we gain through this analysis, though subtle, can ultimately help us to imagine quantizing the vectors of meaning, or, at least, describing them more finely. I will allude to mental chronometry, the measurement of the time it takes the brain to process perceptual events, in my attempt to add some precision to my vague term ‘vectors of meaning.’ It is a tool that is widely employed in psychology, and is especially relevant in our case as we trespass in the psycholinguistic subfield of metaphor studies. Hang with me while I parse this dry and thorny turf. ‘Picture is a word’ is a literally true, but somewhat unexpected, calling of attention to the membership of the linguistic item picture in a very large class of things, that is, it is a manipulable unit in an overarching system of meaning:  ‘picture’ is a word that can be found in a dictionary. However this is a somewhat forced assertion. ‘Word is a picture’ is a still more forced assertion, and is a phrase that would be pretty incomprehensible unless it was encountered in a very peculiar context. But the difference between the mental processes one is forced through in order to see picture, as a word, is a good deal less convoluted than the perspective required for seeing word as a picture. This is a difference that, with the invention of cinema, where pictures are becoming as manipulable as words, becomes ever more nuanced and therefore useful. I predict that as we become more fluent with cinema as a language these differences will evaporate in some situations; and become more tangled in others. However, contrast the phrase ‘word is a picture,’ with the phrase, ‘a word is a picture.’ The shift in grammatical form with the addition of the indefinite article “a,” thereby shifting from a specific assertion to a general assertion and generalizing the idea, makes it an acceptable metaphor. When we say, “A picture is a word,” on the other hand, we are making a very clear

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assertion that becomes in itself a manifesto about a way of regarding photography and cinema as languages. But really this is the only context in which we could make any sense of it. The phrase, ‘a word is an image’ takes us a small step in a slightly different direction. From this new perspective, since word as an abstraction is a bit easier to relate to image as an abstraction (both can have, but neither needs, a physical instantiation) we can imagine a context in which this slight but distinct shift in status between picture and image could allow us to expedite and fertilize the mental processing. This is to say that on some particular plane of consideration the word ‘word’ and the word ‘image’ have equivalence. The word ‘picture’ is therefore on a different ontological plane from the word ‘image,’ while ‘image’ seems to occur in uses that bridge the planes. These distinctions, while not in the least useful in daily discourse, become tools for the analysis of the vectors of meaning across modalities. But we have to be very careful lest we generate more confusion than clarity. In metaphor studies, a relatively young subfield of study that offers one relevant approach to the question, there doesn’t yet seem to be much agreement, descriptive solidity, terminological consistency, or confidence across the literature around the how of this lexical processing; either from word to mental image or mental image to comprehension, at the level either of neurology or epistemology. Also, the range of terms that are currently used in the field of metaphor studies is conflicted and idiosyncratic in a way common to immature disciplines. With the elliptical, poetic use of imagery in cinema, however, while the neural stages involved in the recognition of a picture and the comprehension of a metaphor may not be understood, these relationships of timing and processing can and will be mined, albeit tentatively and with great uncertainty and trepidation at first. The differences in the amount of time it takes us in our mental processing of words, pictures, tones, and images are resources that future word-​picture-​tone languages will need to exploit. A fluid sense of perspective is very useful here.

51.  Yet another perspective on perspective: metaphors, images, and pictures—​the linguistic hall of mirrors If we regard the plethora of terms that we use when describing the various facets of verbal discourse and then think about how they might apply to what we know to date of the syntax presented in strings of sequential moving images (let’s call it ‘cineguistics’), there are very few comfortable fits. Noun, verb, adjective, or preposition, despite our joking around about it, can barely be stretched or imagined as descriptors of pictures, moving

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or not. Declarative, interrogative, hortatory; or the active and passive as categorizations of sentences, similarly can only in the most outlandish circumstances be ascribed to aspects of cinema. As we’ve seen, reference, stipulate, specify, allude, define, describe, equate, distinguish, categorize, and construe all need extremely highly specified contexts to characterize cinematic situations. While the general idea of a cinematic trope might be useful, the more specific terms, simile, metaphor, metonymy, and so on, would again take pretty contorted contexts to become meaningful.3 Syntax, semantics, and grammar, on the other hand, can be very useful in describing the arrangement and relationships of frames, shots, or scenes. The exercise of trying to fit these terms to cinematic concepts and gestures might raise unique mental images of possible relationships but these terms are likely to appear as mere ghosts of their former usefulness once they are applied to cinema. But if we wish to talk about the cineguistic aspect of a particular work, each of these words offers at least slender possibilities for grounding the terms to the descriptions of the aspects of organization in a work of poetic cinema. Using verbal tropes however to describe visual tropes that could create extended visual coherence and in the same way that sentences use metaphors to create an extended verbal coherence is an obvious stretch. (Although it could be relatively easy to visualize the use of close-​ups, for instance, as examples of metonymy.) Chimerical as this goal might seem, nonetheless I will attempt here to initiate inquiries in what I will call ‘cognitive cineguistics’—​an offshoot of the still relatively new field of cognitive linguistics—​and attempt to carve out of it, this other, still newer, field of inquiry. Of all the above terms, the concept of metaphor, a staple tool of verbal languages, will provide a convenient conceptual bridge for us. There are many reasons motivating this choice. Partly it is because the literature around metaphor theory is so extensive; but partly it is because we want to begin from the very bottom-​up in our attempt at a foundation of the meaningful cognition of ‘light moving in time.’4 The outlook and consequently the terminology of the cognitive linguistics approach to metaphor theory makes for a convenient bridge across to another, really dark continent of human inquiry—​neurology in general, and neurolinguistics in particular. Even though cognitive linguistics is a field that piles speculation upon speculation they are, to me, fascinating speculations. This is the bottom rock to turn over if we want to solve the picture/​word dichotomy. The status of the mental image as it relates to metaphor, to neurolinguistics, and ‘cineguistics’ lies at the core of this consideration. 3 That won’t keep us from trying. 4 The title of William C. Wees’s 1992 book.

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At this point it will help if I make a personal disposition clear. It is a disposition that has been tacit in this book up till now, and this is the time to make it explicit. A great deal has been written about the metaphorical use of words being instances of ‘unusual or unexpected uses’ and literal meanings being standard or benchmark meanings. Very roughly described, either you believe that the idea of literal meaning has a major role in most language games, or a minor role. The divide seems to be between people who feel that at the core of language are the statements that can be judged literally true or false: ‘the spoon is on the table, the spoon is not on the plate,’ situations like that. These folks, I’ll call them ‘the more literal minded,’ tend to see the core relationships among the terms in English, for the most part, as being toward the immutable side, largely fixed by definitions to which one can refer actively. For this crowd the stipulating edicts of the dictionary rule. Then there are the people like me who believe that metaphor and metaphor-​like tropes are more central to the function of language than dictionary definitions. Our gang believes that the conditioning effect of the frame of reference invoked by metaphors, tropes, or even just the novel use of terms, most often colors the perspective one takes to a topic, often unconsciously; and influences greatly how one responds. Whether, for instance, the mayor calls crime a beast, or s/​he calls crime a disease influences the approach a city might take in either hunting it or curing it. Whether one calls a settlement a slum and thinks of it as a problem or one calls a settlement a community and thinks of it as a resource, likewise.5 At heart this issue is about the way that language generates mental images and does so without our being aware of it. Max Black was one of the first philosophers to approach the issue of the function of metaphor in the 1960s, and he still seems to be the Eminence Gris in the discussion. But after Black, there is a bit of a split in approach, not to mention a fracas of terminology. Michael J. Reddy, expressing what was a relatively new idea at the time, and referencing the well-​known article “Generative Metaphor and Social Policy” by his colleague Donald Schön, Michael J. Reddy writes, “Problem setting, not problem solving is the crucial process.”6 Schön and Reddy’s point is that the way something is being conceptualized may be built into assumptions that are both conditioned and hidden by the language itself. Reddy and Schön’s brilliant insights are a game changer. For Reddy a frame conflict occurs when the way one conceptualizes a problem clashes with a more accurate, realistic, or productive conceptualization, 5 “Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning”; Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky, http://​journals.plos.org/​plosone/​article?id=10.1371/​journal.pone.0016782; and Donald Schön, “Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem setting in social policy in Ortony” (1993: 137). 6 The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” Lakoff in Ortony, Ed. 1993.

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one obscured by disuse or overuse or one that has not yet been discovered. These conceptualizations are called ‘frames.’ In English these frames are conceptually embedded and shaped by habit; and they are most often promoted by unnoticed, underlying metaphors, like “crime is a beast” or “crime is an illness,” “love is a journey” (Lakoff); or, for Donald Schön, the realization that if one conceptualizes a paintbrush as a pump, one will be more successful at designing a better paintbrush than if one conceptualizes it as a permeable container (Ortony 1993: 141); or more important, if a government conceived of a settlement of poor people as solving a population problem rather than creating one, life for those both in the settlement and around it might be improved (152). Reddy writes in his article, “The Conduit Metaphor”:  “English has a preferred framework for conceptualizing communication and can bias thought process toward this framework [. . .] merely by opening our mouths and speaking English we can be drawn into a very real and serious frame conflict” (165). While Schön uncovered the issue’s general impact on the way unconscious metaphors warp issues from engineering and public policy, Reddy takes the idea back to its source and tackles the frames through which we view the act of communication itself, with implications that are resounding. He presents a very strong case that there are many expressions in English that lead us to conceptualize communication as a conduit; and that this ‘conduit metaphor’ leads us unconsciously into a view of how normal human communication works that may be totally inaccurate for most situations. Of course, this discrepancy in frames has endlessly echoing implications in the world, especially the world of social policy and political organization, but it also has a peculiar relevance to cineguistics. The conduit metaphor expresses the idea that communication is a conduit through which facts, ideas, perceptions, and feelings travel more or less equivalently. The conduit metaphor is what’s operating behind expressions like “I got the facts straight from the source” or “He gave me an idea” or “He got his feelings across clearly” or “I got his meaning.” The problem begins with the seamless but erroneous shift between ‘fact transmissions’ and ‘state transmission,’ that is, all those many subjective implications that are entailed by the particular differences in the status of the ‘facts’ or ‘states’ being ‘transmitted.’ When we heedlessly assume that we are using the same conduit in every case, we create the kind of problem that Reddy and Schön call a ‘frame conflict.’ This problem is manifest in the myriad displacements that happen between individuals’ differing preconceptions about the facts, ideas, and feelings that we think are moving through the conduit, along with all the implications entailed by the supposed transmission of those preconceptions about ideas and feelings. The many assumptions that are latent in the conduit are only occasionally appropriate or even apparent and are often sneakily pernicious.

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Reddy offers another metaphor in contrast, to describe the fundamental situation of communication that he calls the “toolmaker” metaphor. This represents a view of communication that demonstrates not only a linguistic, but also an existential contrast to the conduit metaphor; one that at base is a good deal more pessimistic but is, I believe, a far more realistic frame for viewing how languages work in many realms of communication. Under this frame, there is no simple medium through which communications travel intact. there is no conduit! All each of us really has is our own internal‘subjective repertoire’ of feelings, thoughts, and perceptions (Ortony 1993:  172). Especially when discussing things emotional and ideological, we are anchored in an “extreme subjectivism” that prevents us from visiting each other’s actual, perceptual, emotional, and cognitive environments. The name ‘toolmaker’ that Reddy gives to this perspective comes from his description of a process of reconstruction that we have to go through in order to piece together a coherent approximation of what other peoples’ experience of the world (or any issue in it) may possibly be. His view centralizes the idea that language only allows for imperfect encoding and even less perfect decoding of reports from most human realms. He believes that the assumptions that are built into our discourse about the mutuality of agreements or disagreements are in many cases not warranted; and that these assumptions come with inferences and implications that often cascade into eventualities that are, quite often, destructive. He asserts, “Of the entire meta-​linguistic apparatus of the English language, at least seventy percent is directly, visibly and graphically based on the conduit metaphor” (177). This is an existential assertion even more than a linguistic assertion. As Reddy’s view would have it our inability or unwillingness to use the toolmaker frame means that we are giving ourselves over to a false comfort about the degree to which we can get inside each other’s heads. The blinding dominance of the conduit metaphor prevents us from seeing, among other things, the actual fuzziness and plasticity of terms that we may think are crisp and solid (freedom and democracy are extreme examples) and goes a long way toward explaining our rampant social and political imbroglios. The varied and wide-​ranging implications that are ultimately generated by the contrast in these views are enormous and practical as well as being profoundly existential. The conduit metaphor is the economical frame. The toolmaker’s perspective is cumbersome and dark and doesn’t take into account the comfort we take in the deeply rooted but tacit conviction that our native language (including body language) has the power to accurately get our ideas and feelings to activate in a sufficiently similar way in the mind of an other. (Even this formulation feels awkward in English.) “We looked into each other’s eyes and we just knew!” How often does this phrase portend something ill?

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We can employ both frames only if we recognize that they are two of several possible perspectives from which to regard a circumstance and if we remain aware of which frame is the appropriate one. But when utter clarity is essential, so is the appropriate framework; one that reflects the conditions and circumstances in the most productive way. In many forms and styles of governance this clarity is the crucially missing ingredient. Unfortunately, the economical nature of the conduit metaphor’s global assumption of what, in effect, amounts to an interpersonal ether is very forceful and, in the short run, can feel very helpful. The extreme subjectivism implied by the toolmaker metaphor, on the other hand, invites an existential torment that could easily become a distraction to the essential business of getting on with life. Ultimately, however, the shortcut that the conduit metaphor provides cripples us in the long run—​in the myriad, mysterious ways of the misplaced assumption. At one level everything goes smoothly; at another, society is plagued. The conduit metaphor is most strongly assumed when verbal and social conventions are strong and a group of people believes they share a vision or a belief when in fact they share a delusion. There is one very significant time when the conduit metaphor may be the more appropriate frame to apply: when the terms can be elaborately specified, such as in legal, engineering, and scientific contexts—​and not always then. All said, it remains devilishly difficult to keep the role that convention plays in propping up the conduit metaphor (along with all the ills it propagates) in focus. This bad habit of language cannot be exaggerated. Discursive verbal language (as distinct from poetic verbal language) is built on elaborate conventions. In the beginning discursive (narrative) cinema had very few conventions and really didn’t need them for conveying a basic story since the moving image is usually directly representational of real-​world-​like situations. As cintax developed further, the number of grammatical moves, like, for instance, parallel cutting, that require popular acceptance (convention) in order to be assimilated without a cognitive hiccup has proliferated and their conventionalized permutations have become remarkably flexible. Now the catalogue of kinds of cuts (or edits) and moves and their grammatical implications has become uncountable7 and as they have, the cultural uptake of these conventions has adapted accordingly, an adaptation that has been accelerated by television and the web. The verbal conduit relies on convention forming strategies that naively seem crisp and trustworthy. But even more than simply being conventional, the plethora of expressions we use that presuppose these naïve assumptions have taken on the power of blind habit. So have the narrative implications of the moving image. Even more than with verbal language, the images in 7 It’s hard to count kinds of things when they don’t have names that adequately describe them. Naming is a step in conventionalizing, but as we will see when we discuss the inherent musicality of cinema it may not be a completely necessary step.

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narrative cinema have the automatic immediacy of the recognizable—​in addition to whatever conventional uses they have acquired along the way. The mental images generated by verbal discourse under the conduit metaphor have the soothing quality of language habits that are so deeply ensconced that they present with an immediacy that relegates them to unconscious processing. Further, the moving image naturally piggybacks on these unconscious habits since mental images generated from cinema have the immediate power of providing circumstances and analogies from our natural vision. A tree blowing in the wind may naturally say “windy day” along with whatever else it may be there to convey. Hence the power that the moving image, especially as seen on TV, has for being polemical and propagandistic: When the representational character of the moving image is imbued with the intentional skewing or implanting of that image with an editorial über-​meaning, that is when the conduit’s visual equivalent, with its persuasive power, kicks in. In normal discourse, the personal sense of security we need that the message received was indeed the very message that was intended is a variable that is always at play but usually only to a very minor degree. In normal life we just don’t notice the subversive power of these tacit metaphors and assumptions. However, there are specialized language games where the nature of the references that are made needs to be highly stipulated and specified as a matter of life and death. The difference between the conduit frame and the toolmaker frame comes into very vivid relief when we look at the role of convention in general, and regulated conventions in particular, in these language games. One communication circumstance where clarity and immediate, unambiguous intelligibility on the part of all communicants is both essential and critical for preventing mayhem is the ritual communications between pilots and air traffic controllers. These strict protocols show up the differences between the two metaphors for communication in a striking way, one that is exaggerated by the inherent insecurity of radio communication. And whereas the toolmaker metaphor perfectly accounts for the rules of this game, the conduit metaphor does not, so the protocol explicitly excludes any moves that imply a conduit. Mainly, the conduit metaphor doesn’t recognize the autonomy and solitary condition of the aviator, an existential condition that the toolmaker metaphor explicitly recognizes. An analysis of the rules of this language game demonstrates how, when the toolmaker frame is invoked, clarity is maximized. Reddy suggests that many more aspects of human communication need be viewed through this lens. English is the mandated language of international air traffic. Listening to radio communications in a situation where English is no one’s native language but everyone is speaking it, where the signal is weak and noise is strong, where the entire message can easily be rendered as pure noise if two

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players speak simultaneously, you really get a stark sense of how precarious acts of communication can become and how terrifying are the implications of any misunderstanding.8 Not only can radio communication be garbled by atmospheric conditions, as well as accidental, simultaneous transmissions that render everything as modulated noise, but also all of these insecurities are piled on top of the barely intelligible pronunciations of pilots and controllers whose vocal production of English terms may be severely skewed. The toolmaker metaphor explains clearly how this game is actually built and how it functions and it clearly lays out the tools: All players in this game have a refined, prescribed repertoire of terms that can be used in a particular order. Further, the repertoire of the players includes references to precise maps (radar and other graphic navigation displays) and designations (transponder codes, discrete radio frequencies, and published procedures) that, since they are shared with all the other players, provide a solid scaffold over which this precise terminology has been laid. These maps and protocols are the tools in the toolmaker metaphor. However, unlike the subjective repertoires in ordinary language, the repertoires in this game are the navigation instruments on the pilot’s side and the information appearing on the radar displays on the controller’s side that show the location, speed, and altitude of all the aircraft in the loop, that is, all the pilots s/​he is talking to. Rather than consisting of assumptions about ideas that one player ‘gets across’ to another, the air traffic game is played on the assumption that what can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood. Understanding in this case is no more than the precise matching of expectations. It is one language game in which the success of a referential act must be clearly and immediately corroborated. That is, the pilot must confirm by repeating back every communication from the controller. Sadly, beyond this and other highly constrained realms, confirmation that the communication that was intended is the one that was received is not so easy. So according to Reddy’s view, in the ordinary language games we play daily, the manifold labels that we slap, more or less instinctively, on the world of thoughts and feelings, as well as many abstractions, like time and space and intention, these utterances, rather than having the status of literal correlates defined by a dictionary and understood equivalently by all parties, these kinds of unspecified articulations fall under the model of communication in which we rather precariously, and entirely inwardly, reconstruct the meanings of others, using an elaborate net of possibly shared experiences and contexts. We do this by employing a totally subjective repertoire of emotional and conceptual constructs that is unique to each of us and which we mistakenly assume are shared. In these interchanges the subtle underlying, but often elaborately and subjectively skewed use of unconscious metaphors 8 Imagine that this is a cartoon of our everyday existential situation!

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largely shapes our mutual understandings. No wonder the world of politics and social policy is such a mess; not to mention the worlds of philosophy, psychology, and criticism in the arts! We can see how this discussion of frame conflict might possibly affect narrative cinema; but a poetic cinema should be immune. After all, the self-​ conscious and precise use of metaphor is poetry’s meat, so these ambiguities are assumed. The question really is, how can a cinema that means to be self-​conscious about the ‘unusual’ use of imagery activate the overarching frames of reference that are entailed by metaphors; and then how can we describe them? The answer, as we shall see, turns out to be a strangely simple one. In the light of the preceding discussion, let’s re-​ask the question. What happens if we try to port the language of verbal tropes over to cinema? When we try to do so, are we simply talking about how pictures might create the kinds of emotionally or intellectually resonant effects that verbal metaphors have—​those extensions of meaning, where a word used in a somewhat novel manner expands our view of what something might mean? Or, on the other hand, are we, not so simply, talking about forcing a comparison of points of view, as metaphors and similes do, where one pictorially generated mental image or one aspect of such an image serves to shape how we construe the meaning of another; creating that signature aesthetic resonance: the hovering ambiguity of the poetic metaphor? Or are we talking about the intellectual leverage of analogy, where obscure similarities are teased out in a comparison? Or, much more simply, are we just talking about how pictures can seem to be inflected in a way that is more or less literal? What we will be talking about (at last!) is that which lies between the picture and the image. But before we can tackle the polyvalent complexities of the picture-​generated mental image as grist for the metaphor mill, not to mention the omnivalent potentials of mental images generated by a poetic cinema, we have to return, once again, to the word and its particular way of forming mental images, in order to further ground the discussion. In most off-​hand talk, the framing effects of implicit metaphors infiltrate our verbal discourse at many, mostly unconscious, image-​less levels. At a more conscious level, when we encounter overt and possibly problematic metaphors they invariably involve some degree of mental image generation. Speech makes images when it has to. Many people involved with metaphor theory believe that metaphors are actually organized around those mental images. Or to put it another way, ‘image’ is a word that many psychologists are using to describe a stage in a perceptual process; and that process includes the more or less automatic assimilation of metaphors. Until relatively recently, as we noted, the importance of this unconscious metaphorical imagery’s influence over meanings in verbal language was largely ignored. The closer we look at verbal metaphors, the images they engender, and the descriptive terminology we use around them, the richer will be our

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parsing of visual tropes. In this case a closer look involves speculation about the cognitive processing of metaphors of different types. George Lakoff, along with some of his students, has extensively catalogued the relationships among many common metaphors underlying everyday English, speculating about the implications these relationships have in biasing our perspectives. According to Lakoff, metaphors are what occur as we form neural maps generated from terms in one conceptual domain, like love, and superimpose them onto another, like travel. He reserves the term ‘metaphor’ for those conceptual (and presumably neural-​equivalent) maps themselves, distinguishing them from the metaphorical expressions like “love is a journey” that are the individual linguistic expressions of these conceptual maps. As one might expect from his use of the term “mapping,” he holds that imagistic conceptions like topology and texture are central to his theory. He believes that every metaphor invokes an image at one level or another—​he discusses the image-​based nature of idioms like ‘spinning your wheels,’ for example. Significantly, Lakoff makes a strong case that “abstract reasoning is a special case of image-​based reasoning” (Ortony 1993: 229). His Invariance Principle is the expression of a hypothesis about the necessary spatial relationships that must obtain between the conceptual domains mapped by metaphors:  “Metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is the image-​schema structure) of the source domain, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domain” (215). (The source domain, in his terminology, is the first term in a metaphor, the target domain the second.) The implication here is that abstract reasoning, being derived from image-​based reasoning, is anchored to spatial coordinates. And I would further add that simply being in a spatial world is thus strongly conditioned by verbal metaphors unless one is explicitly engaged in thinking of other kinds, for example, musical, mathematical, cinematic, and so on, and even these kinds of thinking have spatial metaphor components, for example, higher and lower musical notes, higher order computations and the visual grounding of the idea of perspective, for instance. The pathway from word to mental image to meaning in a novel verbal metaphor is just the beginning of an ongoing cognitive process that integrates the new perspective afforded by adopting the new sense that the newly encountered metaphor brings into our language and life; and if we can follow that pathway we can get an insight into how images generated in the process of resolving metaphors in turn create the new neural traces resulting from the newly acquired perspective. These new traces then form the ground for further figurative speech acts, which in turn reference an ever-​growing field of nuance, giving us verbal access to new expressions and new styles of expression that elude the simpler, already conventionalized formulations. This disposition, the one that furthers the generation of tropes in language, enables us to spontaneously reference the many new items and events that infiltrate our increasingly complex cultural lives.

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We sometimes tend to think of metaphorical speech as being ambiguous in the way the manifold implications of pictures often are. But in the world of pictures, literal stipulations of the specified kind have a totally different role and take a very different form. With graphic images that have implied or included specifications, such as maps, diagrams, blueprints, and construction drawings, the derived meanings are stipulated by professional and trade associations and user groups to have a very clear and unambiguous relationship to the numerical, spatial, and material references embedded in the document: they are all tied to a scale of distances, directions, and other specifiable values. Apart from this, pictures without such specifications signal to us in more or less subtle ways just how literally tied to a real situation they are meant to be, mostly through a recognizable presentational style that is likely to be genre specific and/​or context specific. Some of the presentational styles or contexts might include:  news and documentary style (where the how-​to video is the apotheosis of literal presentation), on the one hand, and fantasy or melodrama, on the other. Other genres, in their relative positions on the literal to metaphorical style spectrum, range from obvious advertisements, where the power of metaphor is given a focus that is truly rare; advertising disguised as news; and, of course, the staged horseplay that is currently called ‘reality.’ Then there is the style, or really the range of styles that will be mostly investigated here: art. Each genre announces (or deceives), with their presentation just how literally (corresponding to some actual reality) they are to be taken. So the frames of literal truth and metaphor (plus deception) each have some equivalence in the cinematic realm. The conversation about the role of the image in metaphor and the role of metaphor in language has come a long way in fifty years. Max Black’s understanding of metaphor’s function in expanding the referential potential of language, David Rumelhart’s sense that the spectrum from the literal to the poetic was seamless, Donald Schön’s recognition that language predisposes us to certain biases via subterranean metaphors, Michael Reddy’s application of that wisdom to communication itself, and George Lakoff’s formulating the principles upon which metaphorical constructs share or don’t share conceptual domains and inference patterns, all this work has opened up a brand new conversation that has a much better chance, it seems to me, of adequately describing how languages operate; and not just verbal ones. It is, as neurologist Antonio Damasio notes, a problem that is rooted in having an uninterrupted continuum of experience that needs to be described in discrete symbolism. The very idea that conceptual domains interact in specifiable ways and that there are recognizable inference patterns being shared among them is itself a new and powerful metaphorical system; new images to bring to the conceptual roundtable as well as an intriguing new scheme for plotting vectors of meaning.

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Lakoff uses the various expressions that instantiate the “love as a journey” metaphor (“we’re stuck,” “we can’t go back now,” etc.) to exemplify the pervasive influence of ‘metaphorical thinking.’ He credits Reddy directly:  “The LOVE IS A  JOURNEY9 metaphor and Reddy’s Conduit Metaphor were the two examples that first convinced me that metaphor was not a figure of speech but a mode of thought” (Ortony 1993: 210). In the multimodal mix of those verbal references, pictorial representations and even the musical figurations of which our thinking consists, Lakoff believes, as do I, that the image’s style of representing, its way of arraying possibilities on a dimensional, graphic plane, has an especially powerful contextualizing and organizing force along the pathways to the recognitions of the patterns that form the ground for all meaning. The particular segmentation style that each verbal language uses to parse an objective reality into discreet images gives not only the unique flavor that limns each verbal language, but also enables much of that language’s peculiar power, economy, and practical utility. By analogy, image-​based thinking also gives us a topographic analogy for ‘visualizing’ the patterns of tones woven into musical compositions. It is the resonance of the metaphor that signals our ability to perceive similarity in difference; and this in turn is but one description for those tacit vibrations of our cognitive frame buffers. Currently there is an elaborate terminological scuffle in the field of metaphor studies, where there doesn’t seem to be much agreement about what to call even the most basic parts of the schema. This should be a lesson to us as to how difficult these things are to describe; each shift in the terminology representing perhaps a potentially new angle of view; or perhaps another point of confusion. Language operates on a sliding scale of precision, but it would be a mistake to think that language that is less literal is necessarily less precise. In Part IV of this book we will discuss the case of the haiku and the Boeing Simplified English Checker, two examples of language forms that are each precise and economical in their own very different way. Precision required and precision offered are functions of the language game being played at the time.

52.  Metaphor, image, and brain Every use of a word is a unique occasion. A toddler looks up at the window of the restaurant where I  sit and puts one hand on the glass. I wave. He appears rapt but perplexed and doesn’t

9 In Lakoff’s scheme, the CAPS denote the METAPHOR, while the metaphorical expression is demoted to lower case.

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wave back. His touch on the glass gives him tactile confirmation of a solid surface, but visually there is his reflection—​competing with my gesturing image superimposed on it—​neither of which yields a tactile correlate. When we first learn to respond to mixed, ambiguous or conflicting sensory cues,10 I would argue that we are beginning to build the model for learning language. By this I mean no more than the obvious: that language is learned as a central thread in our sensory-​motor processing, along with all the other learning about the world that takes place during early development; development that now, routinely incorporates the framed moving images on our various devices. There are obviously components to language that require specially developed neural systems, but these dedicated systems are developing alongside many other somatic, sensory, and motor systems. We learn very early on that visual and tactile clues about the world don’t always match up and offer some surprise at first. But a prerequisite for the cognitive development of animals is the ability to continuously incorporate these unpredictables into the flow of life. Our process of understanding and generating novel sentences with novel word uses demonstrates one human extension of this. Perceptual and responsive patterns get amended across the board all the time during the period in which we are learning speech and discriminations in all of the senses are developing alongside refinements in language use. In humans the experiences of both outer and inner sensation become refined at the same time as the appropriate referential terminology, for example, belly or bellyache; and ultimately we begin to absorb into our ever-​growing lexicons, nearly seamlessly, expressions like ‘in the belly of the beast.’ In order to succeed as organisms we obviously must have a strong and innate predisposition toward incorporating novel experiences, experiences that are guided and contexted by the total of our surroundings. Novel word use is just one part of that flux. Novel word use is not just the use of novel words. It can also be the use of a familiar word in a novel circumstance. When we are just starting out to learn language we discover that often words occur in uses that are sometimes so similar that we don’t even notice the subtle differences in their application, and we adapt easily to the new circumstance of use (like the different senses of the word ‘mean,’ for instance, or the word ‘image’). But sometimes the uses are so different that we have to scramble to find any similarity at all in the way the same vocal sound is being applied; and finally, giving up, we have to accept that we have encountered a word that is practically identical in sound or even in spelling to another word but is used in a totally different way—​a homonym: mine = belongs to me versus mine = hole in the ground. But even within the use of this word as it might 10 Of course there is nothing “conflicting” or “ambiguous” about them to the toddler—​they are just food for integration.

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mean, when used as a verb, to extract something of value and as a noun, a hole in the ground, we also quickly learn that in another use it might also mean to extract resources of a more abstract sort, as in mining data. It is these easy extensions of sense that demonstrate the pattern-​seeky nature of the perceptual and language systems. As suggested, the word ‘image’ is one of many words that can carry a few different meanings and many different senses. We could apply it quite literally to a range of different objects or occurrences. An image could be a pattern formed by light projected on a wall; or it could be a picture that exists only in our head; it might be an aspect we raise in the discussion of a painting or photograph, for example, this part of the image is confused; or perhaps we are referring to the face that one projects to the world, as in—​his image is tarnished; or simply, a more generalized term for a display’s performance as in—​the image on the monitor looks better when it’s printed. George Lakoff uses ‘image’ to describe a stage in the production and interpretation of metaphors. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, uses it as a general-​purpose term for all nonphysical patterns in the mind; not just visual patterns but also auditory and somatosensory patterns. When we use image to allude to a spatial or quasi-​spatial set of relationships it shares uses and inference patterns with other spatially oriented terms like chart, map, schematic, or picture: the various instantiations of images. Damasio (2010) uses the two terms, ‘image’ and ‘map,’ extensively in describing how he believes the brain makes sense of its body, itself, and its world. He describes the superior colliculus, a part of the brain where the neurons are laid out in a regular, quasi-​rectilinear pattern and where input from the retina (among other places) is processed with topological relationships preserved (83). The way he uses the two terms, a map is a description of the physical relationship that the neurons have with one another, and an image is a map experienced.11 All this discussion about the various images triggered by the word ‘meaning’ and all the meanings triggered by the word ‘image’ is meant to focus attention on the pattern-​resolving talents native to the brain; faculties involving not only perception, including both verbal and visual comprehension, but also those somatosensory processes that locate our selves in our bodies and their worlds. Damasio and another neurologist Gerald Edelman, among others, believe brains evolved and became wired to facilitate pattern matching/​recognition. The need to find patterns in perceptual 11 This is a little like the relationship between Lakoff’s metaphor and metaphorical expression, wherein metaphor refers to the conceptual occurrence or mental process and the metaphorical expression is its instantiation in language—​with both ‘image’ and ‘expression’ being more processed, and more complex neurologically; the difference being that ‘expression’ refers to an action in the world and ‘image’ often has no physical instantiation. Damasio’s image might just turn out to be Lakoff’s metaphor, a way of talking about analogous processes that must be inferred but can never be experienced.

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input is the fundamental driver of our ability to make sense of anything at all—​especially novel configurations of all sorts. And this doesn’t just go for us, the sentient ones. It must be true for all organisms that live by making discriminations. Draw lines where you will. *** DRAWLINESWHEREYOUWILL *** The preceding string of symbols is meant to focus the idea that along the way from retinal image formation to neural image mapping to image recognition to word comprehension to sentence comprehension, there are processes that, although they are usually well beneath conscious awareness, hold the key to explaining not only how we fit streams of words into the perceptual/​experiential flow of our lives but also how we fit pictures or musical sounds. How do pictorial and musical recognitions differ from the processes required for attaching mental images to lexical items? In other words how do pictures and melodies, at the level of mapping (in Lakoff’s sense), work differently from words—​functionally, contextually, and ultimately emotionally? When we parse the above arrangement of contrast shifts in the visual field into an un-​segmentalized string of letters, initially, we are, in Damasio’s terminology, making mental images out of retinal and then higher order neural maps. After integrating the signals from several different types of neurons in the retina and untold processes in the visual cortex, we subsequently process the marks so that we recognize them as the constituents of words, that is, a special class of items in the world. Further down the line12 we somehow process them into actual lexical units—​those phonetic clumps we automatically recognize as special units of meaning. (Think how hard it is to see words, in print, in a familiar language and consciously refuse to lexicalize them.) If mental images can create verbal go-​to places from visual configurations, lexicalization will dominate. For the most part, when we hear a word, no matter the language, we know that we have heard a word and not a bird chirp or a dog growl, sneeze, or in many cases, a laugh or a cough.13 Once the initially amorphous seeming string of letters above segmentalizes into a series of words, we might find that the two apperceptions 12 Note that the expression ‘further down the line’ frames the issue in a way that may be a wildly inappropriate description of a process about which we know too little to pull the correct arrow from our descriptive quiver. 13 An anecdote:  I  was listening to an extemporaneous speech in Mandarin and heard a particular vocalization over and over. Then I noticed it would pop up often in other people’s vocalizations, so I became curious enough about its meaning to attempt to reproduce the vocalization for an interpreter. No bilingual person could tell me what the word meant, so I assumed

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keep swapping places. Picture-​word-​picture-​word. It is almost like having two kinds of ideas in your perceptual loop at one time—​one that is lexical and one that is not—​a percept level duck-​rabbit kind of thing. So, let’s say that the visual or auditory map that becomes an ‘image,’ on its way to being recognized, next goes on to be matched with an existing map from the lexicon. Whether the image acquiesces to its surround, that is, becomes shaped by its context and achieves a particular meaning or construal first, or is first located in the lexicon in some more primitive state of encoding and then becomes subject to its surroundings, seems to be a matter of discussion. It may well turn out to be not an either or neither proposition but rather, a sometimes this and a sometimes that, or a both/​and kind of a thing; or what is more likely still is that we may be framing this question entirely wrong.14 Most neural maps never become images (in Lakoff’s sense); that is, they never rise into consciousness; like, for instance, the maps that tell the brain how the body is situated in space. They may, on the other hand, rise into consciousness as images that have no lexical component, or only partial lexical components, like the maps involved in motion correction (throwing a pitch that’s better than the last one). Some neural maps can also become another kind of image entirely, one that informs some more diffuse, affective set of faculties—​faculties of feeling. These maps may have as their sources many, or even all, modalities—​sight, hearing, smell, taste, somato-​sensory; or even judgments from nonverbal cognitions—​the judgments we don’t know we made; the components of not knowing how we feel about something or someone. The images these intermodal maps create can also produce the kind of expression that either furthers or subverts a narrative. Perhaps among these are the maps that ultimately inflect speech with the qualities of prosody (exclamatory, interrogatory, hortatory, etc.) or are the instigators of metaphors; and when these pre-​lexical maps are generated by pictures they may enter cognition without tripping over any patterns in the lexicon. Among the most prominent examples are the experiences we recognize first as being beautiful or aesthetically mysterious and whose processing has just enough resonance to let that mystery breathe. Damasio for one thinks that at least some, if not all, of those images are grounded in the core affective surround of the experience; that is, how we happen to be emotionally disposed at any given time. We tend to characterize many of the subsequent images these I was not adequately reproducing the sound. Ultimately, in frustration, I took a piece of video I  shot and isolated the ‘word,’ looped it, and played it for a Mandarin-​speaking friend. She laughed at me. “That’s not a word! That’s what we say when we can’t think of what to say next. Uhhmm . . .” 14 I suspect we should actually reframe this statement to conform to Dennett’s parallel-​ processing picture of consciousness. (See Part IV of this book.)

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maps produce with vague referential terms like tone, flavor, energy, vibe, and so on. They propel both the most conceptual but also the most ethereal components of experience. This is the image-​diffusion that artists in all abstract and formal media manipulate. This is the ground of the a-​lexical language. This is the land of the feeling and the source of music’s meaning. While the flow of words, whether in the form of rapid fluctuations in atmospheric pressure or in contrast changes in a visual field integrates with the rest of current experience initially through lexical processing that in many instances can be timed, the flow of pictures enjoys a more variable relationship with the lexicon and neural timing. I  will maintain that this variability makes any structural analysis of how cinema works as distinct from how verbal language works at a fine grain level purely hypothetical. After all, the neural analysis of lexical processing is currently at or beyond the reach of the very first tendrils of experimental paradigms. Heeding this caution, however, we are almost ready to regroup around our (admittedly somewhat dubious) goal of coming to terms, precisely, with the idea of, first, the pictorial metaphor and then the motion-​picture metaphor in order to get a sense of how visual articulation could pose as the functional analog of verbal metaphors. The task is truly daunting. In order to do this we need not only to be able to chart in milliseconds the processing times for the effects of the neural maps that result in the perceptions/​actions we are calling ‘verbal metaphors,’ but then also to be able to construct a similar baseline for visual metaphors. Second, in order to understand the phenomenon on a level that is scientifically reproducible we need to know the varying amounts of time, again in milliseconds, required to process the range of them across a range of populations! Then, third, we have to come up with a descriptive scheme for this understanding: a map in words if you will—​a discrete representation of a continuous process. As ridiculously difficult as this might be, progress in the chronometrics of psychological processes has developed beyond what could have been imagined only a few years ago. However, since the analogy between a verbal metaphor and a pictorial metaphor is both rich with possibility and exceedingly tricky, we will still need a bit more background before we can exploit that analogy fully and begin to imagine what making such a comparative schematic would entail. The sketch that is neurology is becoming ever more detailed and coordinated with other avenues of inquiry. The sketch that connects neurology with epistemology, however, that juncture at which sensing becomes knowing, is entirely hypothetical. However, this ‘image-​inary’ realm is where we must visit if we want to build possible models of the relationship between verbal metaphors, images in the mind (with whatever strange quality of motion those might have), and moving pictures. I believe this finer level of resolution will reveal the power of the terminology I’ve been using all along to describe meaning and reference, tightening somewhat the bagginess of

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the analogy between movement and meaning, and providing the terminological bones we will need for a progressive discussion. We’ll begin with some highly informed speculations on the architecture of the brain and the resulting predispositions that these speculations suggest. Gerald Edelman’s book, Second Nature is a credible introductory foray into the neurological portraiture of this terrain using actual observations of neural firing patterns, particularly between the thalamus and different areas in the cortex. He organizes his observations by way of a number of structural observations or sub-​hypotheses. His terminology is a bit idiosyncratic, so it needs to be laid out: Neural selectionism is the developmental process he posits for the weeding out and refining of neural connections during pre-​and postnatal development, with those neurons that fire together tending to sustain and strengthen synchronous relationships. Reentry is the continual signaling from one brain area to another and back in synchronized patterns: the brain talking to itself, where the different brain areas that have distinct responsibilities for processing changes in state are signaling to one another. Value systems are the biases that drive the organism toward goals, from the generalized, primal filling of the organism’s chemical deficits all the way up to making sense of and accomplishing things. Finally, Edelman uses the term ‘degeneracy’ to describe the brain’s ability to yield the same output, result, or consequence through many diverse paths or brain structures. He sums up the situation that he believes this picture reveals: Being selectional systems, brains operate prima facie not by logic but rather by pattern recognition. This process is not precise, as is logic and mathematics. Instead it trades off specificity and precision, if necessary, to increase its range. It is likely, for example, that early human thought proceeded by metaphor, which, even with the late acquisition of precise means such as logic and mathematical thought, continues to be a major source of imagination and creativity in adult life. The metaphorical capacity of linking disparate entities derives from the associative properties of a reentrant, degenerative system. (Edelman 2006: 58; my emphasis) He winds up suggesting that given these features of brain architecture, all verbally involved thought would be strongly predisposed toward the metaphorical; with literal relationships being secondary to them, practically and in evolution. The consistent drive for pattern recognition and the natural predisposition of the brain to arrive at a given result through various and diverse paths makes the fusion of the images in metaphors a strongly favored result. For both Edelman and Damasio, thought is a comparative process; and much thought, even verbal thought, is a visual

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process. Since we are on the historical cusp of being able to communicate aspects of our private beings and peculiar perspectives, especially the intimate and the subjective aspects of them, through the rapid articulation of actual-​image generation, it is important to keep these considerations about the visual nature of thought—​even verbal thought—​in mind. After all, Wittgenstein’s family resemblance can be seen as pattern recognition on the lexical level. Both Edelman and Damasio postulate, using different emphases and terminologies, how motion creates meaning at the neural level. Damasio, along with many other researchers, believes there are specific areas in the cortex where stimulation by the motion of certain figures in the visual field that resemble us (other primates, for instance) triggers activity in a corresponding area of our own neuro-​motor systems. When we see the movement of another primate, the perceived motion generates proto-​motion in corresponding motor neurons: the much fabled mirror neurons. In his book Self Comes to Mind (2010), Damasio reminds us in a detailed and eloquent way how deeply embedded the brain is in the body and its movements, gross and fine; that is, motion is also visceral. Since somatosensory systems are all two-​way streets, actual movement, somatosensory representations of movement, visual representations of movement, and memory of movement are all mutually accessible and translatable (106). Also, he maintains that emotions are intimately linked with somatosensory movement since they are in our core being in the form of primitive need fulfillment and survival mechanisms (Edelman’s value systems). Damasio believes that all perception is conditioned by emotion and that there are two distinct routes that conditioning goes through:  One is what he terms the ‘imaging mechanism’ (possibly encompassing Edelman’s reentrant systems). The others are, collectively, the various dispositional systems that orient our core being and produce emotions that are disseminated by the endocrine system (Damasio 2010:  96, 186, 307). Both of these closely interrelated brain processes could be considered to operate within a single electrochemical field, which Damasio finds it best to describe using a dual structure: pattern recognition or creation on the one hand—​ biased by the variously flavored, endocrine powered values of need on the other. Furthermore, he would posit, I believe, that one source of the power that actors on a stage, screen, or in life have for us is enabled at the neural level by the empathic mirror-​ neurons’ connections to our emotion producing ‘core consciousness.’ I would go a step further (onto a very slippery ledge) and claim (after Eisenstein) that abstract aspects of the cine-​image, like camera motion, balance of objects in framing and contrast shifting, also participate in deriving some degree of meaningfulness through circuits activated by the empathic character of neural wiring. For Edelman (2006), meaning is the ultimate manifestation of the reentrant processes; wherein the various distinct areas of the brain that need

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to be engaged in order for patterns to gel and meaning to form talk to one another. He writes, When we consider modes of thought pursued by selectionist brains, there is a set of relations between pattern recognition and logic that is both contrastive and reinforcing. A fundamental early mode of thinking that is highly dependent on pattern recognition involves metaphor. (83) Edelman’s terminology is, to me at least, sufficiently counter-​intuitive that I can only follow his reasoning in a fairly coarse way, but he seems to be saying something like: as brains grow and the excess neurons that proliferate in the neonatal brain get weeded away, the neurons that remain are the ones that have established connections with each other. These connections occur in patterns that reflect the creature’s interaction with its environment. Patterns that match reinforce one another; and processes that work through pattern recognition or pattern matching have a greater chance of persisting when consistent environmental conditions reinforce the ongoing establishment of like patterns in the brain. The matching of patterns, moreover, is a process that works from loose to tight. Rough matches work, especially at first. This loose-​to-​tight paradigm is a structural feature of brains; a stable meaning is a pattern that has gelled. In humans an ultra-​stable meaning, one that has found a solid home in the lexicon through repeated, direct, immediate, and similar processing, is something we might call ‘literal.’ With a processing paradigm of loose to tight the metaphorical precedes the literal. Edelman’s thinking is one cognitive precursor to the growing contingent of thinkers from various related fields that wants to completely upend the currently dominant view that literal equals actual and that a dictionary definition is the best arbiter of how words are being used.15 Edelman, Schön, Rumelhart, Reddy, Lakoff et al., on the other hand, believe that the metaphorical is the primary mode of conceptualizing and that meaning is constructed progressively from loose to tight, deriving utilitarian patterns from ambiguous presentations. Metaphors are an image-​derived gelling of patterns that favor range of action or effect over specificity and precision. When the manifestations of these patterns occur in our use of language we call them metaphorical expressions. What is written in the dictionary, in this view, is a record of the (momentary) ossification of a metaphorical usage. It is our meaning-​seeky, pattern-​eating disposition that enables us to see visual tropes such as dissolves that occur in narrative cinema as either temporal transitions or, if more contextually appropriate, spatial transitions, or, ever increasingly, conceptual/​ontological transitions. When we especially

15 By no means am I arguing for the abolition of dictionaries, just for a shift in how they are to be regarded.

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indulge this disposition in a more visual, musical, or poetic cinema, this same meaning-​seekiness allows us to read visual tropes as scaffolding on one another, at least partly because we have prepared ourselves for the difference in expectation that the experience of this kind of cinema promises. But even in a narrative, dissolves can function as purely poetic gestures or purely visual gestures like the visual equivalent of a melodic or harmonic inflection or variation; however to be successful the context or style will have to have prepared the viewer. Or perhaps, ultimately, in some future incarnation of a cine-​narrative one visual trope will invoke still other tropes that force yet further mental stretches that then fully describe some, up to this point, undiscovered and unarticulated recognition; a recognition lodged, newly and freshly, in a smooth flow of purely visual, and utterly a-​ lexical meaning. For now, this kind of stretch remains the province of poetry and experiment, but as the medium matures, I believe accepted, trope-​based meanings will grow and spread. Under the metaphor where language is a toolkit for somehow reassembling the world of another, and in those aesthetic situations where our pattern making faculty is fully, highly, and successfully exercised, we wind up with the feeling that we have done an especially good job of reassembling the world of another. Art provides a sublime depth of connection—​along with its inevitable sense of the tentative. Fully felt artistic gestures offer the deepest interpersonal connections that communication acts can provide. The transparency of language as we off-​handedly use it emphasizes how, in our lives, our walking, talking lives, context conditions our perceptions by keeping us feeling located. This is something we only notice if it’s missing. Secondarily, the very transparency of language, and our casual use of it, highlights how easily we bring novel occurrences into conventional and accustomed usage. Because the speakers of a native language are rarely aware of this grammatical facility with their own first language, they rarely need to reflect on how subtly and securely they sift among meanings, contexts, or language games. They also rarely, if ever, consciously know how the metaphorical frames entailed by their automatic, unconscious word choices color their judgments and decisions. Teaching these automatic and unconscious word choices and decodings to learners of second languages is a major headache, but also a major opportunity to learn about the nature of these subterranean frames. (See Jeanette Littlemore’s wonderful book Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Second Language Learning and Teaching.) In this regard, so far as I  can tell, at this stage in the evolution of cinema, especially poetic cinema, pictorial languages seem to be developing as an intercultural medium where local cultural differences are rarely barriers, but instead supply the flavorings of meaning; flavorings available to those who are predisposed—​regardless of cultural background. This same constant, seamless recontextualizing and shifting is the background against which those processes or dispositions play; the ones that

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allow us to more or less effortlessly make sense of novel linguistic occurrences like neologisms, or alternate definitions and shifts of sense, or fresh slang expressions, or the new use of a homonym, or even ironic usages of familiar terms; as well as rapid, unannounced shifts from one language game to another. Context is what gives us lucid perspectives on slight or radical variations on familiar themes, like totally impromptu tropes, verbal tics, metonyms, and poetic metaphors. Context allows us to comfortably play with intentionally ambiguous remarks. A slight shift in perspective, in fact, will allow us to see context and the embodiment of the brain having a deeply mutual relationship—​looking at the same process, but on different levels: the body as the context for the brain, the world as the context for the body. Context has analogous influences across media—​but, I would venture that it is only in verbal and cinematic languages, where the potential for articulatory nuance is so rich and complex that it is fully potent. It is my guess that context in music has more of a binding rather than an articulatory effect. That is, context in pictorial or verbal language allows referential elements, like a picture of a tree or the word tree, greater range for provoking diverse meanings, whereas in music context allows tonal, nonreferential elements to bind into melodies. Of course this is a conversation that I would love to have. On this most general level, visual tropes work for the same reason that metaphors work: because the brain is an incessant seeker of patterns. When it actively, consciously searches for and then finds one, it presents us with an occasion to sense meaning and often some distinct pleasure as well. If we think of the expression, ‘pattern recognition’ and conjure up an image for the phrase, something perhaps like the merging of a schematic diagram in the world with one in the brain, and if we then take that schematic image as the base mental image in this picture/​word mapping analogy, then the particular burden that the process of lexicalization, the locating of the word ‘tree’ for the sensory image of the tree, places on the brain’s pattern recognition engine might be thrown into relief. This allows us to glimpse that the verbal patterns we have lexically retained (our working vocabulary) have a different degree of coordination and plasticity than the patterns we encounter in the pictorially generated image patterns have with our general recognition engine. In this view ‘literal’ relationships in both instances might be thought of as those cases where the task is simplest, the relationships the most consistently established, and the processing time shortest; what I have been calling short direct vectors of meaning. In this light we can see how cinematic tropes of a poetic nature present relatively rare opportunities for stretching the pattern seeking faculties of the (extended) visual system since true visual ambiguities are relatively rare in nature. But still, on another even more basic level, we could see how a picture and a word could also be seen to present the brain with pattern recognition

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challenges that are analogous; where the familiarity or centrality of a visually induced image in relation to the familiarity or centrality of a verbally induced image represent benchmarks or paradigms in each case; and thereby determine the processing time and possibly the degree of ‘literalness.’ This gives us a feeling for what the continuum from the literal use of a word or picture to a difficult metaphorical usage looks like. The visual/​ graphic continuum here could be imagined to proceed from a purely representational photograph on the one hand to a Jackson Pollack painting on the other. In statistical terms, we can think of the most common or usual sense in which a term is employed as the most central use; whereas the factors influencing the centrality of a pictorially inspired mental image is considerably more difficult to specify—​simply because the context determining meaning for images is usually more amorphous. In some measure this will be a part of our quixotic goal as poetic filmmakers—​to generate conventions within which context becomes more specifiable.16 In a poetic film that aspires to an omnivalent or broadly musical form the more conscious the processing of any mental image, either in terms of production or in terms of reception, the more likely that the meaning/​use of that image will be steered by the specific aesthetic valences of all the images around it. On the other hand, if we listen to Damasio or Edelman, the more bottom up, intuitive, or unconscious the production of an image and its context, the more likely it will be to have its use/​meaning steered by more global and intuitive readings; or in art parlance those readings that respond to the more felt and less thought decisions made during production. The reassembling of meaning by viewers from these kinds of felt gestures proceeds, in their view, from the idea that meaning is ultimately rooted in emotion. Accordingly, therefore, the expressive character of the formal film reflects an art world truism: What ultimately, truly motivates art is ineffable and unconscious—​the home of the muse and the land of the ‘sacred.’ But what allows a work to attain omnivalence, its overall aesthetic-​conceptual tensions, on any significant scale, is a balance, a necessarily tenuous balance, one that is meticulously forged, between bottom-​up and top-​down processing—​between the reasoned and the felt. The reduction of all meaning-​relations to pattern recognition is about as much of a simplification as the movement as meaning reduction and may or may not be as revealing. Although we have yet to really clearly show the power of pattern recognition as a solvent for the two terms in our analogy—​ picture and word—​an individual’s hunger for the kind of knowledge that comes from processing extreme metaphors, new musical forms, abstract visual and conceptual art, and solving puzzles and mysteries in general, is a

16 Adding an ideogram to this equation both fleshes out the dichotomy and complicates it!

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great engine of culture; and this hunger, on its own, may yet resolve, for any individual, that picture/​word dichotomy in a manner that is simply felt. This pleasure-​in-​pattern lust produces all kinds of obsessions, obsessions that take forms as diverse as the mania that seizes the painter painting a painting or the viewer having a conversation with it; or a fan grokking the tactical flow of a basketball game; or a puzzler solving a word, shape, or number puzzle; or a gamer with a video console. However, Damasio and Edelman and other workers in neurology, along with Rumelhart, Reddy, Lakoff, Littlemore, and many other cognitive psychologists and workers in the relatively new field of cognitive linguistics, have laid out a perspective on meaning encompassing a conceptual space that is currently being calibrated through experiments that measure the time required for test subjects to process metaphors and analogies. They carefully grade what they imagine to be the conceptual distance between the two terms presented in the metaphor and plot out, albeit in a kind of tentative and elementary way, coordinates on a map of meaning-​distance and meaning-​direction, a map that future analysts of semantics could ultimately use to plot and quantify vectors of meaning and describe styles of reference with more finesse. The way they are going about this strikes me as highly ingenious. First they pick pairs of terms (usually nouns) and ask a lot of subjects to gauge the relationship between them. Some terms seem to be easily related, others more difficult. They then run similar tests on the relationship between the terms and the conceptual domains in which they judge that the terms reside. The methodologies are subtle and clever. The pursuit is noble. The goal remains elusive. In these experiments we can see the very first fruits of a scheme that looks at meaning in terms of movement (time as a measure of distance) and sorts acts of reference by the character of their vectors. The question, “How far does that metaphor stretch?” is no longer considered a ridiculous question, and in fact is being directly addressed by Lakoff, his students, and many others. The stretch of the metaphor relates, one way or another, to the time it takes to be processed. Once that aspect, the temporal length of the vector of meaning, is settled, then we can begin to tackle other neurological and epistemological characteristics of meaning’s vectors. There are three main tasks that need to be addressed in order to accomplish this. One is the measurement of neural response times across sample analogies; for example, a grain of sand is to a mountain as a raindrop is to: (a) an ocean, (b) a milkshake, (c) a hot dog stand, or (d) a rock (all my silly examples). By carefully sorting the character of the analogies that they are trying to judge, they feel that they will be able to grade the number and difficulty of the processing steps required for something to become meaningful. Second, they need to test across populations of individual subjects by measuring the amount of time in milliseconds it takes them to resolve

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the analogies. And third, these experiments must be conditioned by a theory about how information gets processed in the brain; a theory that is precise enough to be illuminating, yet flexible enough to cover references that run the gamut from precise to ambiguous to opaque. It is on this theoretical grid that the vectors of meaning play out. As the research continues and more subtle analogical proximities are devised and tested, this sketchy diagram, drawn across epistemology and neurology, might tentatively begin to be shaded in. Ultimately we may even be able to devise a scaffold for describing other even more qualitative and subjective measures of meaning. If our perspective is that it is in the structures of the brain that words and images embrace and vectors of meaning entangle, then the pictures of the relationships we ultimately build will be knitted together on a fine-​grain but graphic level. We suspect we will never get there. But that’s always been the case; and yet here we are. Since words simply do not have the dimensionality required for describing relationships on the level of complexity that pictures can, due to their polyvalence, this particular kind of descriptive model will almost certainly be one that is unlikely to yield cinematic models for chronometric analysis. The kinds of presentations we can now achieve with the digitized, three-​ dimensional cinema image will, in the case of visual poetry, consign words to the role of mere labels, if that. And if we look at the question from the wide-​angled perspective of evolution, we can see that we have only recently developed in the visual processing parts of the brain a lexicalizing dimension. When we learned to put the concepts that lived in spoken language into visual symbols; that is, when we learned, a mere 5,000 or so years ago to write the task of translating from the world to script had a somewhat easier job of generating conventions. I can only weakly posit, again, but in a different context, that as we grow ever more accustomed to the symbolic and nonrepresentational powers of the moving image, the kinds of visual pattern recognition capacities of the brain will evolve a lexicon-​like capability—​ again through the growth and proliferation of cinematic conventions. Restating the seminal problem:  language needs to represent a continuous experience using discrete symbols. In verbal language, indefinite plurals, general terms, and the haziness of metaphors are some of the features that serve this end. And articulated moving images and melodies each also offer distinct but complementary ways of addressing this central condition. Of course the apparent seamlessness of cinema is rarely experienced as individually articulated units, whether in the form of frames, shots, scenes, or sequences. The same goes for music, building out from individual notes through phrases, and variations on those phrases, and so on. But for these two media the continuum of time is handled with enough inherent perceptual blending so that the issue of discrete symbology is barely apparent. Language is often experienced as having seamless continuity as well; but this seamlessness is an illusion born of how utterly handy we are with the

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tool—​and with the constant under-​wash of metaphor enabling it. This is another central fact of discursive language, verbal and cinematic: It is fundamentally transparent. This is why we can so easily underestimate the role of metaphor in everyday discourse; and why we do not quite know how to approach it in the case of visual languages. When we watch a stream of very quickly, sharply articulated, and poetically structured strings of pictures, yet another, very different relationship to the seamlessness of actual, unmediated experience evolves. We’ll have to wait a few sections before we’re ready for that.

53.  Words are generated; image streams are wrought Some verbal languages come in two modes.17 The first gets processed through the ears, the second through the eyes. The first, if not recorded, vanishes with the breath; the second has legs. Typically, written representations are encoded differently in their appearance on a surface (or a screen) from how they are represented as sounding. English, for instance, has only twenty-​six letters that represent more than forty distinguishable sounds, not to mention all the orthographic debris that is scattered throughout [!]‌the written English lexicon. The conventions and emotional range, of speaking are, to some degree, a separate world from those of writing and in many cases are barely represented by it. Cinema is in yet a different class again since it often contains multiple distinct streams that are processed simultaneously through the ears and eyes. But, unlike written language, cinema has the flow of spoken language, and usually an even greater resistance to interruption. The biggest difference between spoken language and the language of cinema is that whereas the production of speech and the reception of speech share many similarities in architecture and process with each other, as well as being contingent on each other, the production and reception of cinema share almost no similarities in procedure; and the contingency issue is, pretty much, one way. That is, the reception of a movie is immediately contingent upon the production, but only after considerable time has elapsed does the reception of cinema influence its production. Written verbal language inhabits a middle ground and for that reason we will continue to consider it separately throughout this part of the book. If comparison were truly at the heart of metaphor, then the most literal minded example of a potential, cinematic metaphor might be the comparison of two images, seen simultaneously, side-​by-​side, in a split screen. The 17 Relatively few of the thousands of spoken languages have written representation.

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comparison implicit in a split screen could possibly be imbued with some metaphorical intent but given current (2017) conventions the split-​screen is much more likely to be used in support of more prosaic sorts of ideas: before/​ after, adorned versus unadorned and so on; just straightforward, unabashed comparisons. The kind of comparison demonstrated in a split screen rarely evokes resonance. Current television grammar uses the split screen in ever more elaborate manifestations—​some derived from live sports broadcasts, others spawned by the need for visual hype in news broadcasts, and yet others from the world of “reality” TV but scant few of them have the slightest poetic feel to them. What is interesting is the way focus is fractured in them. It feels as if grammar from the web in the guise of new styles of attention configuration has leaked into television. So, simply, comparison while it may be necessary is not usually sufficient for metaphor. Superimpositions, another way of simultaneously comparing two images where there is an interplay of translucence involved, are hardly ever used outside of their fleeting appearance in dissolves and are even more rarely used in a prosaic context. The simultaneous superimposition of two or more images, with the graduated comingling of pictorial elements and the visual ambiguity that gets generated, is more likely to activate the purely pictorial, aesthetic resonance characteristic of the pleasure derived from painting than the resonance generated by poetic metaphors; but still it is rare for a superimposition to extend the range of implication or reference of either of the superimposed images when compared to the semantic extension of a verbal metaphor. This aspect of the metaphor’s role in verbal language, its ability to extend the meanings of words, highlights a strong difference in the way that words and images mean and what kinds of cinematic gestures might have an equivalently extensional role. To my knowledge, rarely has the complexity or the musicality of the superimposition been fully tapped. Brakhage explored visual layering on and off during his career, usually using the inherent multiple exposure capabilities of the Bolex camera (see Appendix A) but technical limitations had always relegated the superimposition to a casual, opportunistic, serendipitous role. Now that digital editing programs make the precise layering of images a simple matter this skein of expression may be developed both casually and with precision. The weakness of these examples of pictorial comparison suggests that few or none of the easily recognized criteria for verbal metaphors are applicable to the idea of a visual metaphor. It also shows the limitations of the literal and the explicit in thinking and talking about tropes, verbal or visual. In the end what is necessary in the case of both the verbal and the visual metaphor is simply the propagation of that which we are calling ‘aesthetic resonance.’ This really is the sine qua non, the calling card of the metaphor and especially the poetic metaphor, whether verbal or visual. The idea of aesthetic resonance also plays very well with neurological perspectives like Edelman’s idea of reentrant brain systems. Perhaps it is

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only too easy to see how the brain could be happily chattering to itself, deepening and extending these moments of meaning and aesthetic delight. What I’m calling aesthetic resonance occurs on many different time scales, many different frequencies; and these different resonances produce different sensations, from the high frequency buzz that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck; to the low frequency resonance of longer-​term consideration; to the resonance of deep reflection—​ripples that pervade one’s life for years. This simplistic and limited view of metaphor as the activation of a resonance in the processing of a communication signal, besides helping us reduce the gulf between purported visual metaphors and verbal metaphors, also indicates why it is that metaphors, if they are adopted in conventional use, transition from being a striking linguistic gesture when first encountered, to being unnoticeably idiomatic. When a novelty is no longer novel, resonances naturally die away as no new energy gets pulsed into the feedback loop. So while the simple, simultaneous comparison of images does not seem to be at the root of the cinematic metaphor, sequential comparisons might. The displacement that often accompanies a comparison like that required by a split screen or a dissolve is a purely cognitive one in which both images are before us and we simply switch our attention from one to the other while both remain in the field of view.18 When one image succeeds another in a cut, movement in some slightly greater sense occurs and leaves a residue that may present as meaning. The processing between the element that has been replaced and the new element requires the invocation of iconic memory at least,19 and very likely short-​term memory as well. When this replacement presents itself to us as challenging meaning, even if only slightly, then Edelman’s reentrant systems will resonate in ways and for durations that are peculiar to that cognitive displacement, with the first image having to be retrieved from some level of memory for the comparison. Since the two stimuli can no longer be actively compared, verbally or visually, some cognitive displacement remains; a residue that may present as meaning. This is where the verbal metaphor has one analog in cinema as a very particular sort of meaning that is both indeterminate and precise at the same time. Both of the terms are in the past but the synthesis, the new meaning, resonates clearly for at least a moment, and perhaps then goes on to become a part of our lives. With a verbal metaphor how do we describe that place from which meaning has moved when being dis-​placed? It is the place that is described by the

18 I’m not suggesting that split screens or dissolves cannot be used poetically; it is just that there seems to be something about the simultaneity in comparisons that makes the process more susceptible to analysis than poetic synthesis. 19 See page 188 below for a further discussion of iconic memory.

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most recent central sense we have gathered for the term. It is the sense to which we have become the most accustomed, when the processing has been the fastest and least resonant. It is the sense that a word has when it is presented in a list of random words without context, that is, its primary mental image. The polyvalence of pictures, however, makes the idea of central cases of usage more diffuse. Therefore the character of the displacement will be of a different order. Cinematically, the idea of the displacement that lives in the simple cut is a good starting point for teasing out the components of a purported cinematic metaphor. In a cut, the juxtaposition is not so much one of comparison, but one of substitution, replacement, or transformation. While the potential resonance that dwells between the terms in a verbal metaphor is modulated by the degree and character of analogical displacement, in the case of the visual metaphor, it is the degree and character of pictorial and situational displacement as well as potential analogical displacement that is at issue here. But in order to make sense of this we have to understand analogy in very different terms. The sense of analogy that is contained in the idea of a cinematic metaphor potentially encompasses a very different and arguably much vaster terrain. Although psychologists are finding extremely clever ways to quantify and parse verbal displacements with their analogical reasoning experiments, I  predict that measuring and parsing the displacement involved in visual tropes will be much, much harder. Also, because the medium is so young, its cultural context so ill defined, and its rate of stylistic evolution so fast, the absorption of what, at first viewing, is perceived as a visual trope and that then almost immediately becomes absorbed into the cultural mix as a ‘cine-​lexical’ idiom (or cliché), will add to the complexity of quantification. On the one hand it might be fun to try to hit a target that is moving so quickly—​on the other hand, why bother? Art is to be enjoyed! Felt decisions are meant to be felt and not dissected! The answer is that we are not attempting to understand the art here, but to use the effects of the art to understand one aspect of the way we get our heads around nuances of visual, cognitive processing. Interplay between acculturation, the way we become accustomed to our cultural environment, and our expectations of the new items that will enter our experience, shapes the resonances in the processing of information. This description might be taken as one very general way to describe cognition and how it processes new information. It is also a very general description of how the future of a poetic cinema might unfold; that is to say, how the formal building blocks of a poetic cinema might evolve, with the evolutionary advance and elaboration of visual processing over time being fueled by incongruous edits and seeming syntactic disjunctions. The simplicity of this description might also help us with the complexities that are involved in our cross-​modal enterprise of comparing words,

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music, and cinema as time arts. We should keep this in mind as we look more closely at one relatively fine-​grained approach to timing the effects of resonance as it applies to verbal language.

54.  The metrics of vectors and resonances During the past fifty years or so workers in psycholinguistics have been teasing out the cognitive nuances of the way we process metaphors. They have been developing and testing theories of information processing that are designed to parse, enumerate, and track the hypothetical steps involved in analogical reasoning and metaphor comprehension and have devised the fiendishly clever experiments that we have been alluding to in order to test the hypotheses. From the very first stages of sensory acquisition, mapping, and imaging, on through the chain of cognition to its full integration into a personal repertoire of knowledge and cultural response, researchers have been working to quantify and then explain what goes on in the brain during the time it takes us to get a metaphor. As Sternberg, Tourangeau, and Nigro put it in their contribution to Ortony’s 1993 book Metaphor and Thought entitled “Metaphor, Induction, and Social Policy”: These goals are, first, to construct a theory of information processing that is flexible enough to handle metaphors in a variety of domains; second to propose a small set of processes that account for time to comprehend and evaluate metaphors, in conjunction with rules that explain why some metaphors are more easily comprehended, or more highly regarded, than others; and third, to relate the information processes to their counterparts in a fairly general theory of induction. (287) One such theory, derived by Sternberg et al. from work by Rumelhart and Abrahamson, parses the process into six steps (Ortony 1993:  288):  They call the first step encoding, wherein the sounds of the words are recognized, matched up with elements in the person’s lexicon, and the relevant attributes and values are retrieved from long-​term memory. The second step involves inference between the terms, requiring an assessment of which domains they share. The third step is when one of the terms is mappedonto the other. Then this mapping has to be appliedto the situation or context. If the mapping is not completely comfortable, as in a difficult or ambiguous metaphor, the application will have to be justified. Finally the individual must respond; or in other words, move on, having incorporated the new cultural knowledge that the metaphor has provided. This is but one possible theoretical description of the processing of information required in learning how to fruitfully

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absorb poetic metaphors; one parsing of what almost certainly is a continuous, and thoroughly parallel, set of processes. If we were to accept this parsing, that is if we were to use these terms and then try to map them onto the idea of a cinematic metaphor, what would they describe and what effects would those descriptions account for? It’s time to turn the corner and return, as they say, to square one. Let’s try to analyze the experience of a poetic film, and a particularly difficult one at that, into approximations of the above stages. Ultimately our analysis will arrive at the locality of the cuts and gestures, but first there are layers of contextual issues to consider; among them the film in which the cut or gesture occurs, the place the film has in the history of our experience, that is, how many other films ‘like it’ have we seen, and, last, its place in the oeuvre of the filmmaker. When I first saw Brakhage’s Fire of Waters it took me somewhere between five and twenty minutes to even begin encoding the film, to get to that first base. I couldn’t encode the experience because I couldn’t discern the most basic of communications prerequisites:  distinguishing the signal from the noise. Even beginning to encode the experience, coming to know what is signal and what is noise, in itself requires that the experience have a context. But this was my first experience of so-​called experimental films; so, with no cultural preparation, there wasn’t any context adequate to the extreme perceptual demand of knowing how, in this case, to recognize that elements I normally considered noise were actually signal in this film. Not to mention the fact that designed into the scheme of Fire of Waters there are many ambiguities of both imagery and sound. The minimum context needed to parse signal from noise in this film, as I experienced it, is: (1) to be alerted to the existence of an aesthetic that has its focus as much on the substrate as the image; and further, (2) to understand the nature of that substrate, that is, a celluloid strip with a coating of modulated opacity on it; and, (3) to be plugged into the American poetic essentialism of the 1950s through the 1970s. Knowing, at the most basic level, what is salient among the many items in any perceptual stream is a first step in the processing of all information—​ especially mediated information. But even before that, as is the case in all the films I will discuss, there are elaborate cultural prerequisites that have to be fulfilled before passing through the gates of appreciation. In few cases will they be as arcane or as extreme as demanded by this film. Nonetheless, as is the case with most cultural artifacts, the larger conversation in which this work of art participates exerts many subtle and subterranean tugs on how it is interpreted and how it resonates. I was privileged to none of this cultural knowledge when I first encountered Fire of Waters. Of course you have to remember that the film also enraged me and this created a haze of cognitive static that needed to dissipate before encoding could even begin. Since much of what is normally

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experienced as noise in most films is meant as a background signal in this film, this cognitive static made the encoding doubly difficult. At the moment in the film that I first separated a traditional signal from noise during my first viewing of Fire of Waters was when a clearly recognized lightning jag, as seen through a window, appeared on the screen. At that point one could say that there was a more direct encoding possible: the lightning bolt quite suddenly illuminated familiar objects in a suburban neighborhood, even if seen in an unfamiliar light. At this stage one can put words to it: lightning as seen through a window in a neighborhood at night, the sounds of rain (?) and a woman vocalizing an extreme experience (?).20 Another way of describing this first step in the encoding of a cinematic trope is the feeling of being in place, oriented in the image, able to recognize the setting and situation, and able, if called on, to describe what seems salient in a scene.21 In Sternberg et  al.’s analysis, the next stage in the processing of a verbal metaphor, inference, describes a conceptual interval during which the word, after having been encoded, is then related to some larger complex of ideas called a domain. (A chair is a central item in the furniture domain.) Inference, in this scheme, involves detecting which domains in the metaphor or analogy are shared by the encoded terms. By attempting to specify the ‘distances’ between domains and then by considering the terms’ individual ‘positioning’ within their respective domains, they arrive at a metric for the relative difficulty of processing a particular metaphor or analogy. (Sternberg et al. also project that this analysis will be a kind of blueprint for anticipating the aesthetic quality of a poetic metaphor!) If we could parse the process of assigning picture elements to domains, or even better, cinematic situations to domains, we could then begin to sketch out a hypothetical cinema-​analytic path to parallel Sternberg’s parsing of the verbal metaphor. At its nub would be the difference between the character of the mental images (in both Lakoff and Damasio’s terms) produced by a word and the character of the mental images produced by any given cinematic instance. It is at this point that the suitability of the analogy begins to decline and the terminology to diverge. It starts to seem that the processes we are timing can no longer be considered congruent in any way; that the idea of a domain is really far better fitted to the verbally induced image rather than a pictorially or cinematically induced image: the idea of a category or domain is 20 Note that indeterminacy of sound is a much more familiar and acceptable experience than indeterminacy of visual image. 21 When a work of art is about itself, it is rarely possible to get this level of comfort with the image on a first viewing without a great deal of cultural preparation. At a certain point however when one does become comfortable in the idiom, ambiguity at the object level, that is, ‘What are we looking at?’ creates its own particular resonance.

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really a product of verbal language. The fact that words have a niche set up for them in a lexicon not only influences how they interact with the rest of the perceptual stream, but influences greatly the ways we wind up describing and analyzing anything at all. The articulated picture-​stream simply has not been around long enough to develop the neural equivalent of a lexicon, and without that conceptual equivalency this line of analysis threatens to dead end . . . for the moment. But, stubbornly, we will try to redeem it. The processing times involved in lexical decoding are variable. That is, words can be used in more or less familiar ways; they can be surrounded with acoustic conflicts; or their enunciation can be clouded by accent or alcohol, and so on. The variability in decoding times for pictures reveals that the whole idea of decoding must apply entirely differently to the mental images generated by pictures, especially since, unlike with words, it’s not at all clear how to measure response times to generic pictures (as distinct from pictures that appear to be of some particular thing). We have evolved highly developed and very sophisticated mechanisms for processing the visual field, so we might think that it should be no big leap to transfer those visually induced pattern matching reactions to the processing of pictures on many more as well as very different perceptual levels the way we have in learning to process language from raw sound. However there are significant issues that cloud this process. For one, we have not yet evolved anywhere near to the point where the processing of still or articulated motion pictures has developed a unique and codified syntax; not to mention one that would be available for chronometric analysis. Second, since writing is relatively recent in evolutionary terms, it is likely that language processing by the brain is primarily an audio-​driven process.22 Third, the symbolic processing of a moving, articulated, purely pictorial representation system is brand new. Fourth, there is very likely to be mirror neuron style activity dominating the processing of certain kinds of moving pictures; although it could be argued that tone of voice and vocal cadences are as likely to trigger mirror neuronal type responses at the self-​same level of verbal language processing. Then there is the polyvalent aspect of a picture. Whereas a verbal image, in context, is most likely to be associated with one, or at best a few sets of congruent domains, a visual image might have many. Since pictures don’t seem to be read linearly, but by some other set of influences and since pictures are often complexes bounded in rectilinear frames, the motor habits attached to reading pictures are quite likely to develop in more complex ways than the perceptual habits used in decoding written language. In any case, attention-​ location within the frame is likely to play a strong part in determining how one would consider the domain-​equivalence between the scenes in a cinematic 22 Think of how children just learning to read enlist motor systems by moving their lips in sounding out words.

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metaphor, or their domain-​equivalent centrality; that is, how singular versus how ambiguous the focus or the subject of the pictures is. In order to accommodate the idea of inference between domains however, this particular conception of a domain, as it is used in verbal processing, would have to be extensively “remapped” to fulfill even a remotely analogous role in the processing (categorizing) of a pictorial or cinematic language with an embedded cintax. I believe that the idea of a domain still can be a powerfully descriptive conceptual frame for us, but like all these ideas, when applied to pictures, it becomes less precise, gauzier, and more like a . . . metaphor. Sometimes analogies are most revealing as they are falling apart. So, it may still be instructive to walk through one conceivable process of attempting to assign domains in the realm of cinema. Since this particular screening of Fire of Waters was my first experience of seeing a film as a projection event; that is, coming to recognize it as the shadow of a physical substrate being run through a machine behind me, even beginning to get a grasp on all of the dimensions that could be considered domains would have been infinitely more daunting, had it not been for the title—​Fire of Waters. The title is a very important element in positioning the primary metaphorical frame through which many poetic films of this ilk are seen. In fact the title is often the only significant arena in which the verbal and the pictorial intersect in these works. The words that the filmmaker chooses for the film to be known by, its placeholder in a written catalogue of works, also serves as an envelope for the audience, both as a caption and a guidepost for its cinematic idea, that is, its overarching concept. Once those words are established, in this case Fire of Waters, it becomes possible to begin the process of inference. “Why, it’s another way of describing lightning!” Yes, but only in a very specific context. But this is a verbal trope, and we are looking for a visual example of inference. In this case at least, I will claim that the verbal trope gives us a frame from which we can draw largely visual inferences from the film. Brakhage uses the structural/​poetic technique of a slow reveal to open the film: The words of the title Fire of Waters are scratched into the film’s surface, for just enough subsequent frames to be read (while jumping all over the screen). This is followed by a long passage of muddy, dark, gray and black, water-​spotted, static marked, non-​grokkable looking stuff that precedes the first flash of lightning. This long, slow opening sets the stage visually—​as well as setting an ominous mood. Then a lightning flash illuminates the houses in the nighttime neighborhood and, as well, the panes of the window we are looking through. Until that lightning flash, we only have the erratic but somber visual rhythms of the electrochemical effects on the surface of the film, the barely perceptible modulations of dark gray. Is the static-​like sound that we hear on the

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soundtrack an artifact of the crude optical soundtrack or the sound of some other, recorded natural phenomenon, like rain?23 Fire and water are opposites on an elemental, physical level—​at least that’s how the English language and Western mythology categorizes them. Since the film begins with a long passage of murky darkness in which no objects, places, or sounds are recognizable, on the first viewing of the film the framing of any distinct visual trope can’t even begin to kick in until that point in the mysterious progression of the film when this first stroke of lightning momentarily illuminates the dark scene of neighborhood houses at night. So inferences about which visual domains fire and water share, and which of them might be pertinent to whatever set of ideas that might resolve into one cinephorical image, any such inferences must remain in abeyance until that point in the unspooling of the film when that first recognizable jag of lightning flashes. Even then, is it the lightning, the clouds they illuminate, the houses in the neighborhood, or the window itself that represents the relevant domain? The most startling and disturbing element in the entire film is the sound of a woman having an extreme experience, one that I took to be pre-​orgasmic; hence my mapping it in terms of the passionate union of opposites. (I honestly don’t know if this was an original insight, or something I read or heard somewhere.) Another reading of the same elements is that the sound is actually that of a woman (Jane Brakhage) giving birth. That would shift the mapping from a creation resulting from the sexual union of opposites, to the combining of elements in the creation of life, where the waters of the title are binding the water from clouds with the water from the womb and the fire in the sky with the fire of a new life emerging. This particular ambiguity allows for the mind to travel both roads, prolonging the processing time and amplifying the resonance. Still, these considerations are engendered by verbally induced mythologies. I myself prefer my reading since I find it more evocative to meditate on sex under this grim light than childbirth. Mapping, Sternberg’s third step to resolving the meanings inherent in the film, where we mentally superimpose the constituent images, requires that we invoke another distancing concept, that of the metaphorical frame. When a multimodal medium like sound film is obedient to the rules of poetic economy, we imagine that every aspect may act as context for every other aspect (omnivalence in action). In this instance, the term ‘metaphorical frame’ intends to describe that particularly encompassing, contextualizing 23 But then, a larger question: is it really fruitful at this point to analyze these cinematic elements into modal categories; or are the operative issues for cinephorical resolution trans-​ modal, that is, wholly cinematic; a description that would have to include the verbal elements of the title? Since, in this case, the picture and sound present their own separate mysteries, I will vote that, in this case, it is fruitful to conduct a separate analysis of modalities, as long as we realize that this separation could also be in certain ways misleading.

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effect. According to one reading, the principle metaphorical frame in Fire of Waters is the title. According to another, it is the generally dark and gloomy aspect to the film, its turgid grays and fuzzy sound; this includes the ambiguous nature of the woman’s rhythmical articulations and the three mournful cello notes that occur in the beginning and then are repeated again toward the end of the film. This would be the frame to credit if one thinks mainly of the expressionistic aspect of the film, its emotional message. Yet one more metaphorical frame is represented by those elements in the film that call attention to its fundamental existential condition as the shadow of an event (light passing through a moving celluloid strip): the water spotting and static electricity effects on the surface of the film, highlighting the very nature of film as emulsion on a transparent substrate. And perhaps one more element that hovers over the ultimate experience of the film and can be perceived as yet another framing metaphor is its place in Brakhage’s life and oeuvre. We should note here that many of Brakhage’s films have titles that are like the signature of a particular metaphorical reading, for example, Dog Star Man, Riddle of Lumen or Blue Moses and that his affinity for and keen awareness of verbal poetry was a strong part of his thinking. From the perspective of communication, the last element that is missing from this consideration is the audience members’ dispositions—​their relative aesthetic sensitivities, and the character of their previous cultural experience. A consideration placed last that really needs to be considered first. Fire of Waters is an extreme case of the application of metaphorical thinking to cinema. As far as I can tell there are no literal truths to be had from the film, beyond those dictated by physics. For that reason it will provide us with a very fulsome test case for the efficacy of our terminology. What makes this film extreme is that all of the metaphorical frames have to line up for the experience to make any sense at all; and when the frames ultimately do line up, the sense that is made actually works on a particularly visceral and nonverbal level (although I have attempted this clumsy verbal exegesis). Since the film is so ugly in traditional terms, not only do we have to resolve the metaphor, but we must also find the level on which it is beautiful even in the light of its surface ugliness. Doing this would accommodate the last two conditions of the process outlined by Sternberg et al.: justification and response. The other important thing to note is that sense, as in gradation of meaning, becomes especially subjective in cases like this, which means that the ultimate meaning of the film has as much to do with the circumstance and condition of the viewer as any element intrinsic to the film. Ultimately it is undeniable that the film finally came to have a great deal of meaning for me at the time since it intersected a number of strong personal curiosities at a crucial moment in my education. Subsequently, on reviewing the film recently, I realized that my memory of it had been warped by realizations subsequent to that initial screening. (This may or may not have to do with discrepancies between different prints.) But this has only the strangest kind

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of bearing on my reflections on that original experience and the fallout it has had in my life.24 Criticism, according to Sherman Paul, is autobiography. So before I can begin my personal exegesis of the film’s resolution—​my own mapping of its various domains onto one another—​I’ll give a brief recap of the elements that seem relevant to my ultimate contextualizing of the experience—​not to mention the long-​wave resonances it has had in my life. At the time that I  encountered the film I  was in the throes of my initial engagement with Wittgenstein’s Philosophic Investigations. I  was also meeting four times a week with Prof. K.  J. Shah, who had been one of Wittgenstein’s graduate students at Cambridge. Twice a week I went to meetings of the seminar he led, but additionally I  was privileged twice a week to have two-​hour, one-​on-​one conversations that often left me nearly paralyzed by their levels of subtle reflexivity. The way I would describe this period in my development is that many of my aesthetic and all of my intellectual experiences were seen through what I  would characterize as the increasingly apparent clarity of Wittgenstein’s thinking about the influences of language on both philosophical and ordinary thought. Therefore I was primed to have an epiphany around reflexive media. Also at the time, I was a photographer, so I was already concerned with the photographic image in a critical way: I knew static electricity and water spots on a film emulsion when I saw them. (Curiously, though, I was not a movie buff and had never given a thought to the medium of motion picture film or what might be communicated by it.) Third, I  had a lot of respect for Abbott Meader, Ian Robertson, and Bill Wees, the faculty members who were jointly responsible for programming the film. I  particularly remember Abbott as someone who delighted in throwing high curveballs to unsuspecting students. This last condition is particularly important—​it prevented me from simply dismissing Brakhage’s film as a boring exercise in counter-​aesthetics and instead pushed me to find some meaning in the experience. Fourth, however, we get to the personal circumstance that is probably the very most important; what it was ultimately (after all the intellectual cartwheels are over and done) that allowed me to resonate with the film was the bleak, emotional aspect that life can have when one, while coming of age, finds himself seduced by powerful unknowns. Perhaps this was what sex and/​or paternity was for Brakhage. With my own, at the time, grim outlook, I had stumbled into this peculiarly compelling and all-​encompassing perspective shift; one that left me especially vulnerable to bleak and gritty 24 I wrote my early descriptions of the film on my memory of it, not having seen it for many years. When I did see it again, I was chagrinned to note that the water spots and static electricity that seemed so important to my reading of the film were barely visible on these newer prints, as if they were no longer considered integral to the message!

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messages clothed in humble garb. Here is where the application of a map, in this case the generalized but empathic-​emotional recognition of a special moment in life and the justification for that application, interpenetrates somewhat. Or, as Damasio would remind us, cognition is firmly rooted in emotion. These two particular terms in the film’s analogical structure, the appearance of water and fire both in the raindrops seen through a window illuminated by lightning and also as the projected shadows of the water spots and static discharges on the emulsion, are linked in an ontological parallelism that fuses to create one overarching frame encompassing the ideas and sentiments. They occupy two distinct states of presentation, one of which is predicated on an illusion and one of which is predicated on watching that illusion at a remove. This twist, realizing the remove, the analysis of life-​ at-​a-​distance worked to drive the ultimate impression of the film for me; its mournful atmosphere and turgid surface carrying the most long-​lasting resonance, the strongest vector of meaning. This manufactured ontological parallel:  the chill of being at a remove from life, limns all other facets of the experience. I read it as one really, existentially bleak film. It hit me at a moment in my life when the metaphor creating that chamber of resonance, with all its subsequent implications, could have had the pivotal impact on my development that it did. We quite often find that verbal metaphors elude paraphrase. After all, that is one reason why they exist. But, visual metaphors, when it comes to rendering them in words, are on another plane of difficulty altogether. Not only have they not been around long enough to develop into the highly integrated formulations characteristic of verbal metaphors, but also the verbal language of visual criticism is yet more primitive than the phenomena on which it wishes to comment. The last term in Sternberg et al.’s parsing of the chronometrics of metaphor processing is the response. Perhaps this was, for me, the longest and slowest stage in my processing of the metaphor constituted by Fire of Waters. It has taken the best part of a lifetime. We have to remind ourselves, again and again, that the steps in this analysis are an artificial and tentative parsing of a continuous, natural process, yet another example of discreet symbols trying to describe a continuum.

55.  Two pictures of a nose in the dark An ambiguous image like Wittgenstein’s duck-​rabbit is in some ways like an ambiguous statement or poetic metaphor, requiring extra steps in the processing chain and perhaps never fully resolving, always hovering between alternating readings. An extremely complex picture, on the other hand, one with numerous interacting elements competing for salience, is like a very

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detailed argument, also suggesting extra processing possibilities. This section will be about the conversation between ambiguity and complexity; and as you might expect, it will get pretty diffuse. Where it will get us, primarily, is an appreciation for the difficulties of using neural processing metrics for nonverbal cognitive processes. Secondarily, it will refine our concept of aesthetic resonance. A caution however: the turf we are about to enter is yet another land of switchbacks and detours. What happens when you create schemes where both complexity and ambiguity can be stripped from the pictorial elements of a film while still leaving a poetic residue? Two of the films we’ve already discussed could be considered as examples of this from very different directions:  The Ogre, the less interesting of the two from this perspective, strives for literalness by stripping the picture and sound (and a good deal of its structure) of poetic elements, relying, for its raison d’être, on a very strictly (although tacitly) stipulated relationship to the world as photographed. What poetic resonance The Ogre retains lies in the timing of its incremental framings and in its conceptual counterposing of expected time, elapsed time, and remembered time. In The Maltese-​Cross Movement, on the other hand, A. K. Dewdney uses a truly radical, almost perverse scheme for rendering the inherent ambiguities and polyvalence of the picture moot (transferring all ambiguity to a newly created verbal-​like construct). He turns pictures into simple, explicitly stipulated, iconic placeholders; using them to cue the vocalization of what then become semantic components. These picto-​semantic components express the elements of a simple rhyme: “The cross revolves at sunset. The moon returns at dawn. If I  die tonight, tomorrow I  am gone.” Curiously enough both films are, incidentally, conspicuously reflective on the machine of cinema, itself. MCM’s peculiar scheme throws one element of verbal language articulation into relief; one that we have barely discussed at all—​perhaps because it is so simple or perhaps because it hardly features in typically considered semantics, that is, word length. In this discussion, our peculiar but handy metric for word length will be the number of 16mm frames (at twenty-​four frames per second) it takes to say a particular word.25 A refresher on the film: In a rebus, it is worth repeating, one has to transpose pictures of objects into verbalizations of the names of the objects in order to create a spoken word or phrase. One assumes that the more ambiguous the task the mind encounters in this transposition, the longer the processing time will be. But also there are (at least) two kinds of ambiguities that can affect the processing time of a rebus. One is discerning whether the image we are looking at, for instance, is being taken as a duck or a rabbit.

25 Strictly speaking there are no frames, since the reproduction of sound in film is continuous.

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The second is seeing a picture of a rabbit when the demands of the rebus are that we say ‘bunny.’ In both cases context determines which take is the correct one. The first and signature rebus word in Dewdney’s film is the somewhat strangely articulated word ‘No.’ A young girl, centered in the frame, asks the camera, “Are you ready yet?” and there is a cut to a shot of a nose in profile against a black background, as a voice says:  “No” (se). Dewdney hereby announces the rules of his language game, by having someone (probably him) say the word “nose” and recording it onto 16mm magnetic film.26 He then cuts this piece of soundtrack so that the frames that carry the final, voiced sibilant (z) are removed and one hears a truncated word-​sound that we read as someone saying the word “nose” with the word’s end cut off. The nose remains on the screen for just the same number of frames as it took to say the no of nose. (My memory was that the picture of the nose was also framed so that the tip (end) of the nose is cut off! On a subsequent screening of the film, this turned out not to be the case!) We quite distinctly pick up that the word is not articulated in the way one would normally say “No.” The truncation and the exact equivalence in timing set a frame of reference for the interpretation of all the rest of the ‘words’ of this game, a game that is all about stipulation. With nose truncated to mean no and atom truncated to mean at, and a rifle stipulated to mean gone (gun), and a picture of a hand appearing repeatedly and rapidly as we hear a laugh (ha, ha, ha), he enforces the rigor of the temporal equivalence, the rigidity of his stipulations:  One image equals one language subunit,27 the number of frames that the picture remains on the screen being exactly equal to the number of frames it takes to say the stipulated syllable. In someone else’s hands this idea could easily become dull and charm-​ less. But by counterposing this scheme with a silkily photographed black and white tableau of a young woman holding an open book and looking up at a younger boy in a tree, he introduces an element of intrigue. This picture is seen over the sound of a girl’s voice reading the last stanza of Lewis Carroll’s Life Is but a Dream, thus adding the contextual surround of still yet another level of ambiguity to balance the utterly strict stipulations. Some parts of the film have organ grinder music of a somewhat monotonous tenor, as well as the ratcheting sound of gears turning that mimics the clunky animation of the Maltese-​Cross’ movement when that is onscreen. By using these idiosyncratic juxtapositions he throws the rigid articulations 26 16mm magnetic film has the same dimensions as the 16mm picture and also has sprocket holes that line up with the picture strip, otherwise it is very similar to the kind of magnetic tape that used to run through tape recorders. It was used to tightly synchronize the sound to the picture. 27 Neither a phoneme, nor a morpheme, nor a syllable—​since the referent is a picture, and not yet lexical at all, it lives in some semantic in-​between zone.

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of the rebus’ lessons into droll relief, opening up both the medium-​reflexive and the “metaphorical” space of the film with the flavor of his personal taste, or ‘voice,’ if you will. One lesson embedded in the word-​length to picture-​length equivalence in the film is about the relative timing of the processing of meanings in words versus meanings in pictures. As such it is a perfect platform for approaching (from an opposite direction) Steinberg and company’s analytic scaffold—​the one that we just attempted to use on Fire of Waters with, at best, mixed success. If we use a heuristic dialectic to describe, on the one hand, the relationship between the relative ambiguity, and, on the other, the relative complexity of the cues in the two films and then assess the resulting feeling of the meaning they project, we can see how Sternberg et al.’s parsing can work as a scaffold in both analyses. Here, the full gamut of reference and meaning is on display—​from the vaguely associative and highly ambiguous style of Fire of Waters to the rigidly stipulated, though complex style of the rebus in The Maltese-​Cross Movement. Whereas on one side of the dialectic many subjective contextual conditions have to be met and many metaphorical frames have to line up before a fruitful and meaningful screening of Fire of Waters is possible; on the other side The Maltese-​Cross Movement requires of the viewer only the normal, human pattern-​seekiness to grasp its basic operation. (A familiarity with English helps!) The words that we speak and their length are only two components of articulation, though. Normally interword length, word contour (inflection), and phrase contour (prosody) are nearly as important in creating and shading meaning. However, Dewdney is inventing an artificial language here, and it feels like it. The articulation of elements has a remarkably modular and stiffly pedagogical feel to them. (After all, it is a teaching film where he is teaching us to read his invented language.) The meaning-​relationships he sets up initially in the rebus sections are as stiffly literal and un-​poetic as can be. The rebus-​images themselves have no particular beauty to them—​they are, in fact, almost singularly devoid of aesthetic taint. Dewdney pauses (using black leader) barely long enough after the initial gesture with the no(z) for us to register, having been primed by the girl’s question, that we have just been presented with a completed vocal element; a sentence in one syllable, in fact. There are enough black frames following this new element to allow for a pause in the information stream so that we have the breathing space to run several of the analytical stages that Sternberg et al. point out in their paper. In fact, some ciniotician might make a very good case that the black frames in Dewdney’s film could be read as markers for neural processing times of different sorts of processes.28

28 It is the differences in these sorts that we are ultimately concerned with.

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The business of seeing a picture, with the requirement that it be ported back and forth across modalities (pictorial and lexical) in order for a singular meaning to emerge, as is the case with a cine-​rebus, is an entirely new communications processing experience, so it has to be learned overtly; although, we should note, the processing time in this instance is doubtless shortened by it being contexted as the response to the traditionally presented question: “Are you ready yet?” According to Sternberg et  al.’s protocol, following Dewdney’s scheme requires that we initially proceed from (a) pictorial recognition and lexicalization, that is, moving from the neural map of a visual stimulus as presented on the retina, to an identified and lexicalized mental image; to (b)  overt verbalization, that is, creating a neuro-​motor image and map for the speech articulation systems (lungs, vocal chords, mouth, lips, teeth, and tongue) and then (perhaps) activating at least some of them; to (c), and this seems to be a very big step requiring a new-​ish kind of learning, replacing this original lexical correlation with the new correlation mandated by the new scheme, as manifest in this case by the sound of the spoken word no; followed by (d) encoding the new lexical scheme as a learned rule that can be applied to other similar instances; and finally (e) moving on with the flow of the incoming communication. This routine is a new one in our experience, perhaps especially for us as speakers of an alphabetic language. It is a processing pathway that we have to forge from scratch. It is not just a new language, but also a new kind of language; closer by far to being iconic or ideographic than alphabetic. This new kind of language is also uniquely narrow, in being tied to stipulations that will only work if the recognitions entailed by them are lexicalized in English. What is notable is that these particular stipulations are not entirely arbitrary as they are in spoken language; idiosyncratic, surely, but not entirely arbitrary. As the game is learned the processing times, one assumes, will shorten; especially if the vocalization phase were to become subliminal. Here we have a purely cinematic language game that works entirely on its own plan. It is unlike any other cinematic language game, so it might be illuminating to see what kind of use, if any, the idea of metaphor might play here. After all, ultimately, as pedagogically stipulative as it is, The Maltese-​ Cross Movement is, in several of its dimensions, a poetic film. If the following discussion makes you a little dizzy, I don’t blame you. It has a touch of the recursively reflexive about it (besides seeming, at first, far off-​field from the pursuit of our central goals). In order to bracket this conversation let’s take a side trip and start out at least one remove simpler (or perhaps it is one step more diffuse!). Let’s leave out the step where the lexicalization in Dewdney’s scheme happens. Let’s say that we simply recognize the picture of the nose for its nose-​ness without attaching the word ‘nose.’ What can this possibly mean? It might mean that such an image without lexicalization could allow us to relate to it on purely

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pictorial-​aesthetic grounds; or it could mean that when presented this way it was just one item in a montage of body parts, or that it could be one in a catalogue of many pictures of noses, or it could simply be an element in a visually told story. But this is exactly the kind of observation that made Ludwig Wittgenstein fume and Daniel Dennett squirm, although it seems a perfectly sensible question. If we look at this hypothetical (recognizing nose-​ness without attaching the word ‘nose’) in terms of the processing time for either a vocal or a visual stimulus, we can trick ourselves into believing that we are pointing to a particular stage in a particular process. If we speculate about the picture of the nose creating a neural map in our brain that is then experienced as a mental image—​a nose that has only nose-​ness with no word attached—​and one which is subsequently lexicalized (for which a word in our lexicon is found and matched with the image), our talk about it creates a mental image of a process that may exist only in the formulation of our statement. It may or may not generate a mental image for you, but apparently it did for me, since I said it. But when we look closer we may find out there is nothing there. I have created an empty word picture that nonetheless creates a mental image: “Two pictures of a nose in the dark.” We see the picture of the nose in full detail, but it is surrounded by black. “Oh, no, that’s not the mental image I  had when you said ‘a nose in the dark.’ I envisioned that it really was so dark that the nose was invisible, but since you told me that this was a picture of a nose in the dark, I imagined it being invisible there.” If I say that there is no image that an utterly un-​contexted picture of an invisible nose can generate, you must imagine two negatives, (1) the absence of an image and (2) the absence of a context. So we try to imagine an invisible picture of a nose encountered context free. When I say “picture of a nose” do you imagine a photograph or a drawing? Or did you imagine, instead, simply a frame containing nose-​ness? The reason these questions have such an airy feel to them is that in life there is almost no experience that is context free.29 But because we can say it, we can create an image of it. So when I propose that we think about an image occurring to us without its having been quite yet put into words, I am directing you onto a shaky path. But issues raised by the cognitive processing of a cine-​rebus lead us directly to the heart of considerations in the philosophy of language and therefore allow us to get this inchoate glimpse into what the lexicalization of pictures might involve. The emotional aftereffects from the character of a line drawing or the general, emotional tenor of a photograph is one avenue where nonlexical

29 Coming back to consciousness abruptly from sleep or from a coma might be one.

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flavors might seep into the processing of a picture. However this is not the case in Dewdney’s scheme. The visual sensibility of The Maltese-​Cross Movement’s rebus-​like sections is haphazard, or at least appears haphazard in the few surviving prints of the film30—​in stark contrast to the dreamy, luminescent, elegantly photographed, and emotionally redolent black and white scenes of the girl reading to the boy in the tree. Dewdney uses the vocalizations that go along with the pictures in the first part of the film as a teaching tool. That is, we are told explicitly what each image is meant to represent in his scheme of things. The ultimate teaching goal is to be able to present the image strings on their own, as a fully realized pictographic language, without verbal translation—​at least tongue in cheek. And that’s what he tests the viewer on at the end of the film, as he pastes together the ‘rhyme’ that ends the film. So let’s assume for a minute that this cine-​rebus form becomes culturally popular—​a kind of cine-​crossword puzzle created for the portable device, a picture/​word Sudoku; and let’s further imagine that people learn to subliminally fabricate words from the syllables extracted from moving pictures. If one becomes adroit at cracking these picto-​codes, then, of course the game needs to be up-​leveled in nuance and polysemy.31 That’s how languages evolve. Now we can imagine, for the first time, a context in which something very similar to the resonance of a verbal metaphor can happen in the articulation of pictures. Not only can the relationship between the object and its name become ambiguous, whether through a more visually oriented kind of ambiguity like the duck/​rabbit image, or it could become more lexically ambiguous as in, ‘What’s important here, species or genus?’ Or it could prevail on the image’s polyvalence where there are multiple correct answers for any given image, a circumstance wherein the ‘meaning’ of the rebus has several parallel solutions. Of course if the form were to become a popular one, the levels of nuance and elegance that could be brought to it would be brought to it. As an exercise in language invention, perhaps the best way to take the existence of The Maltese-​Cross Movement is as a parody of the literal. (Hence the sardonic tone.) This then creates a very broadly spread dialectic that includes the dreamy black and white visuals and the rhymes themselves on the one hand, and the harshly prosaic articulation style of the rebus on the other. But as a parody, it outlines an interesting dimension in which the idea of there being a literal and unitary meaning for any particular picture is being played off against the inherently polyvalent character of the picture as

30 The film is possibly still available from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. 31 In MCM the rebus images are static shots for the most part, and therefore don’t inherently contain the verbness implied in a moving image. The use of moving images would be another way of up-​leveling the game.

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instantiated image.32 Of course strategies like these would presuppose that this single foray, this droll exercise in mental tongue twisting, would evolve through time into its own genre of cinema. When I claimed that The Maltese-​Cross Movement is a poetic film just as it stands, though, I  was pointing to a couple of things. The first, most obvious, but least significant, is that the meaning-​mechanics of the film are in the service of a child’s rhyme: “The cross revolves at sun-​set, the cross revolves at dawn. If I die before I wake, tomorrow I am gone!” But second and far more interesting is that the process that we go through to decode this message, while it consists entirely of stipulated and therefore literal relationships, is itself a resonance-​provoking process, so that the film needs to be revisited many, many times. There just are so many things in the film that retain their mystery after countless viewings. As Paul Valery (among others) is said to have said: “A poem is never finished; it is merely abandoned!” In this first, somewhat crude (but charmingly so) iteration of a cine-​rebus we see an incredible, rigorous, but slightly perverse formal construct being born. This again reminds us that the medium is not just young, but infant. When one looks toward the thousand-​ year-​ old poetic traditions of the Greeks and Japanese one can easily imagine seemingly difficult, even perverse formal conventions taking hold in the poetics of cinema.

56.  An obligatory sidebar on Eisenstein meets a structural allegory When we pointed out displacement as a descriptor in relationship to metaphor we stumbled into the realm of classical montage theory as elaborated by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s. Thinking about metaphor simply as the natural product of one or another kind of montage could have short-​circuited our discussion, so although I strongly hinted around about it, I have left a detailed meditation on the topic for the end of these sections that are concerned with the comparison between cinema and verbal language. Montage is usually considered to be one category of the juxtaposition of shots. Some would say that any juxtaposition of shots, in Eisenstein’s sense of the term, is montage. Since Eisenstein’s writing could easily be seen to prefigure much of the thinking in this book, I  clearly owe him homage. However he was coming to cinema from theater, rather than music or painting or language philosophy; and although he did seriously consider the poetic, graphic, musical, and political implications of the cut, he felt that montage should always and primarily serve story. 32 The really interesting question that is hiding in this formulation is whether or not mental images that are never instantiated can, in fact, be polyvalent.

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From these considerations came a number of central realizations about the capabilities of this new art. Eisenstein was the first to tackle many issues that recurrently pop up in theoretical considerations about the articulation of the apparently moving image. He recognized the kinship between the ideogram and the shot. He also realized that “by the combination of two ‘depictables’ is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable” (Eisenstein 1999: 30). This is a key principle underlying montage and is also its link to ideograms and imagistic poetry like haiku. Both his awareness of and his elevation of a central aesthetic principle, which first became clear to him in a presentation of Japanese dance-​theater, is probably an early attempt to talk about that familiar paragon of beauty—​ omnivalence. He even made one of the very earliest attempts to link meaning in cinema to actions in the brain. In his view a key difference between theater and cinema is that the former is animated by reactions to events whereas cinema consists of the presentation of events themselves (6). Where he did not go, however, is that one further step—​the recognition of the potential that lies in the next ontological leap: the active consideration of exactly in what that presentation consists, that is, the self-​awareness of the motion picture event as a shadow projected on a screen. I suspect that this was because the miracle of cinema’s suspension of disbelief was too new a phenomenon to be prodded and examined at that time. Today whether that shadow is analog and cast by modulations in the density of pigment in an emulsion, or digital and the ‘shadow’ is cast by a binary code is a difference to be exploited. When we are, as we are, considering a cinema that can be circular and elliptical or dominantly musical in its organization rather than linear and smoothly progressive, then many of those aspects of montage that he explicitly describes as clothing for a narrative can take on a life of their own in a purely poetic cinema. His distinction between metrical and rhythmical montage on the one hand and tonal and overtonal methods on the other opens up endless possibilities for meaning styles and represent a life of cinema, unconstrained. His prescience is displayed when he writes of Kabuki Theater, The Japanese have shown us another very interesting form of ensemble—​ the monistic ensemble. Sound—​movement—​space—​voice, here do not accompany (or even parallel) one another, but function as elements of equal significance. (20) Thus I wrote in 1923, placing a sign of equality between the elements of every category, establishing the basic unity of theater, which I  then called, “attractions.” (21; emphasis in the original) Attractions and valences, for all practical purposes, amount to very much the same thing in the aesthetic realm, and equivalence among valences is what constitutes omnivalence. Kabuki is a highly stylized and ritualized

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form of theater and the conventions and rituals of Kabuki provide a fine stage for formal figurations of this kind of equivalence to unfold, where the repetitive character of the conventions and the rituals serve as the ground against which variations on well-​known themes can play out. It is in the pairing of predictability and expectation in these themes that we see the tensions, the attractions, and the valences of the variations. With the graphic arts there is most often a frame that establishes the grounds, the perimeter as it were, for equating the purely visual valences. With dance-​theater like Kabuki it is human bilateral symmetry primarily that provides the standard, with the center point of the static pose providing a measure of the asymmetries of movement and acceleration. Second, it is the arrangement of the actors within the frame of the stage; third, as in formal cinema, it is the overall visual dynamic of the piece. Eisenstein was impressed by Kabuki as a model for the formal possibilities of montage, yet he felt compelled by the times in which he lived to focus on propagandistic storytelling. But formal montage, that is, the juxtaposition of images, whether conceived by shot or by frame, for purposes other than propelling a story, is probably as terse a description as I can muster for a rubric covering the films that interest me most. What detracts from Eisenstein’s appeal for me is not only the films’ abject service to a political ideology, but also and even more so, the distorted dynamic between poetry and narrative in his films. But, nonetheless, he is the most known and quoted; and the theoretical linchpins are indeed framed by him in undeniable terms. So I feel I need to pay obeisance before I can get to the bottom of the question of the metaphorical effect in montage. Again, we need a side trip before we can go at it. In order to frame the discussion a little bit tighter I  will have to resort to allegory. This might seem counterintuitive since allegories actually consist of metaphor heaped upon metaphor and I have been characterizing the correspondence that the metaphorical has with its referents as a loose fit. But the very nature of the topic: the relationship between montage, a term with many possible uses, and metaphor, a term that has mostly ambiguous associations, is inherently loose terrain. Ergo, my claim that a tighter fit and a clearer picture can be achieved by using allegory. Unfortunately, it will also not help that the grounding metaphor in this particular allegory implies a spatial premise that we are pretty sure is false: that higher brain functions can be localized. Nonetheless I will ask you, for the sake of following along, to visualize the processing of metaphors in neuro-​spatial terms. This visualization exercise may be a bit complex, but since I will refer to the allegory in future sections in ways that will be ever more clarifying, I am hoping that it will be an exercise worth taking. Let’s imagine a model world that I’ll call Playland. I call it that because in this world meaning is constantly in play. Since there is never a cessation of movement, there is never a cessation of meaning-​potential. In Playland

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meaning is originally constrained in three basic ways that have to do with (1) the source and the destination of an idea (which is what a unit of meaning in Playland is called), (2) the tempo, or rhythmical progression of the idea, and (3) intensity or the arc of the idea’s amplitude. Playland itself consists of interrelated meshes in multiple dimensions that are organized like a fractal, that is, they are considered structurally isomorphic at any scale. However there are areas where, at a given scale, the mesh is finer and other areas where it is coarser; as well as more regular and less regular. We will describe three distinct Playland Models. In Model I, for simplicity’s sake, only two players are allowed on the field at the same time. The game begins when player one serves an idea. S/​he can serve overhand (declarative), underhand, (interrogative), sidearm (sotto voce); in fact in any style of modulation required to impart the intended trajectory and spin. Like any creature, player one doesn’t always get it right; but adequate success is, for the most part, assumed. One might guess that the idea, once served, is headed toward player two and success equates with this player catching the idea. Indeed observers routinely think that this is what is going on. But it isn’t; or, as we saw with the conduit metaphor, not exactly. However, since all internodal action in Playland is invisible we can only make inferences about the progress of the game. But just because the moves are invisible doesn’t mean there are no rules. There are rules aplenty. It’s just that only a few of the rules are known; and because of the prevalence of unpredictable variables there are assumed to be many more rules that are unknown than known; and the number and kinds of these unknown rules is likewise unknown—​the infamous “unknown unknowns.” Still and all, operating in the blind, success is considered the norm. In Playland Model I, at least, the system is assumed to work. The topography of any plane in the mesh is rapidly variable, occasionally even rugged—​with many hills and valleys; and of course hills in the process of becoming valleys and vice versa. The valleys exert an attractive force on ideas (ideas tend to roll downhill). On the other hand, ideas can also glide from the hilltops for easy dispersal, skirting valleys in various multidimensional directions. The local distribution of hills and valleys in the overall mesh is warped by the player’s presence so that a high density of ups and downs locally surrounds each player. Also, skeins of the meshes’ planes tend toward intersection at each player’s locality, even though the skeins of the meshes never actually touch. Just to add the appropriate level of detail it must be said that each of the players in Playland are also described as consisting of meshes with a similarly fractal organization, but much denser. The player’s mesh is likewise always in motion, with the distance and direction of internodal locations, and the waveform shape and frequency of the reverberant motions constantly changing according to rules—​some known, some unknown just

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like the mesh that belongs to Playland itself. Modulations of this constant flux are both the figure and the ground of meaning in Playland. Two things are most notable in this depiction: one is that there is no direct connection between the players and the general environmental meshes in Playland—​the inter-​and intra-​player meshes can only influence each other indirectly. The second is that the topography of these meshes is a function of the statistical occurrences of ideas—​their habitual character—​the more common an idea, the steeper and deeper its valley; and, of course, this particular topography is constantly changing as well but at a somewhat slower pace. When player one launches an idea, to which player two must respond, the most usual modality in which this idea is launched is a mix of signals that include both audio and visual cues derived from tongue and extremity waving. Let’s posit that these signals originate in a particular zone of player one’s mesh when it oscillates throughout a particular frequency range. These oscillations may be largely internally generated or stimulated, but they are structured in more or less direct response to oscillations from the surrounding mesh, whether recent or historical. The overall oscillation-​pattern of the exterior mesh corresponds to the culture of the players. Regardless of how or from where the oscillations of the internal mesh are stimulated it is certain that features in the external mesh have critically shaped their character. In fact it is the mutuality of these very determinations, that is, that the internal mirroring of external topographies balanced by the external topographies having been shaped by a statistically sufficient set of previous player-​generated oscillations that produces the illusions fostered by the conduit metaphor. (The players create the culture; the culture both informs and misinforms the players.) It is this historical, statistical sufficiency that allows us to predict that player two’s internal mesh will oscillate analogously, or, we may say, sympathetically with player one’s. In other words: The meaning of a word (idea) is its use in the language (game). The character of different kinds of ideas is revealed by the character (and accordingly the origin) of the vibrations generated in a player’s mesh. That is, the location of the origin of the idea in the mesh tags or colors the idea ineluctably in some way. The fact that these particular kinds of tongue and extremity launched oscillations are so common in both players’ histories, sculpts the topography of their internal local meshes, and, to a lesser degree, the external topography as well. These familiarities, or habitual moves, are, directly, what account for some of the most pronounced declivities in the mesh (ruts); and indirectly, they add immeasurably to the ability of oscillations to propagate from hilltop to hilltop. Habits work like grease, idea-​ grease. When player one stimulates an oscillation of this kind in her local, internal mesh it will most often originate around one of these localizations and will likely stimulate a resonance in an equivalent location in player two’s mesh. The habitual coincidences of these resonances are some of the

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very few characteristics in the system that are relatively invariable, and are therefore predictable. (The nature of the game favors both predictability and unpredictability by turns.) But the rules change (and the rate of that change is accelerating). In Playland Model II a different sort of oscillation in the mesh propagates an entirely different kind of idea—​musical ideas. These ideas may also propagate by tongue and/​or extremity waving; most often with elaborate implements to enhance the oscillations; also organized according to a range of rules; some of which are also known and others, not so much. The characteristic motions engendered in the meshes of Playland Model II are of an entirely different nature however. These motions derive from and traverse a very different landscape, one in which synchronous and directly sympathetic oscillation is the norm, as opposed to Model I’s sequential and largely asynchronous oscillations.33 We will posit that the oscillations in Model II come primarily from deep in the player-​mesh and are therefore more pervasive and less specific and specifiable. Since control of these oscillations takes a degree of practice and virtuosity, Playland II’s propagation model is more often one of broadcast—​fewer producers, more consumers. The decoding of these virtuosic oscillations is characterized by similarly deep, pervasive, but unspecifiable oscillations in the consumers’ meshes. (We will address the character of Model II in more depth, shortly.) Now we get to Playland Model III and Eisenstein. Of the four methods of montage he outlines: metrical, rhythmical, tonal, and overtonal, we will translate the last three into our Playland allegory in some detail for an illustrative game and subsequent analyses. In Model III of Playland, we will refer to the montage-​equivalent actions as syntacogs. That is they are elements of syntax that act like cogs in advancing either the story, in the case of narrative, or the formal idea, in the case of poetic, musical, or structural works. Eisenstein’s first method of montage is metrical and describes the very regular intercutting of static elements. It really is a non-​method since it is almost never used. In Playland the equivalent syntacog would translate to metrically constant changes in oscillatory patterns in the mesh that have a clock-​like regularity. His second method, rhythmic, refers to the trajectories and periods of on-​screen motions:  the combined product of object and camera motions, and also the implied motion that can occur with rhythmical cutting. The equivalent syntacog would manifest the results of the rhythmic method of montage as distinct but regular progressions of ripple-​like modulations of different trajectories that course throughout the mesh; and we would wind 33 These characterizations are very rough, general, and even crude, since there is a tremendous difference between dialogue versus oratory and live versus recorded instances of play in Models I and II.

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up describing the peculiar character of the particular syntacog by the peculiar character of the modulations and trajectories. The third method, tonal montage, refers to intercutting according to the affective qualities in the shots. Here, the syntacogic equivalent refers to modulations that are ‘affective’ in their manifestations but generate oscillations in the system that, because of their peculiar qualities, are very hard to characterize, with descriptions ranging from the vague to the ineffable. These tonal syntacogs originate from all over the mesh simultaneously and from diverse but also deeper strata, zones where the strings are longer and the nodes further apart, so the periods of the oscillations tend to be both characteristically longer and characteristically finer. The peculiar qualities of the tonal montage suggest that the origins and impacts of the modulations are likely to be most similar to those in Playland Model II. The fourth method, overtonal montage, reflects the aftermath of the game, that is, the way the previous three methods interact to affect an overall result. In Playland, this would translate into relatively longer-​term and complex oscillations in the mesh, overlying the complexities induced by the above methods; kind of like the wake of a large ship passing through choppy water. It should be noted that all three Playland models demonstrate this same long-​wave characteristic to one degree or another. That is, events occurring in any of the models have the potential for creating long-​term changes in the gross architecture of the models’ meshes. Model III’s terrain is a very interesting mix of the sequential and the simultaneous, like a blend of Model I and Model II. Its architecture is, even more than Model II’s, usually a broadcast architecture since all methods of play in Model III require the elaborate synthesis of quick-​frozen and/​or deep-​frozen ideas into elaborate structures.34 However, it has a fundamental additional element not present at all in Models I and II: the ability to map, with far greater precision than either of the other two models, the topography of the external mesh, internalizing it and turning it to its own advantage in stimulating oscillations that reflect both the summing and the multiplying of oscillations from Models I and II. Which is to say that its modus operandi is to take chunks of light and sound from the world for repurposing. And this is where the allegory takes off and Eisenstein’s methodology falls away. Syntacoguery is the art of cinematic meaning-​play in endless dimensions, only a few of which can be described here even with the help of the allegory, since few of the oscillations of which the ideas consist, or even the ideas themselves, have names. Yet. The distinguishing feature of a poetic or structural or even a narrative game on Model III’s playing field is that, unlike Models I and II, its primary

34 The increasingly rare instances of switched (edited), live television are the exception to this.

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oscillations propagate by way of sensory fields whose stimuli have spatial extension, that is, they can be described using an x/​y/​z grid. Therefore the meshes associated with any idea have more potential axes for modulation. Meaning in Model III can therefore be richer and more complex; and have far greater potential for building harmonic layers and poetic flavors. Ideas in Model III have the potential to stimulate motions in the meshes of the players that are of a character unknown until now. As with the other models, the configurations and motions of the ripples in the external mesh that are in play in Model III, for the most part, have analogs (category, word, object, or melody recognition functions) in the players’ internal meshes. That is, they may well have names. However, the hills—​ the locations that represent variability and possibility—​and the valleys—​ where habitual associations rule—​rather than rippling as they do in Model II, remain invariant as the mesh ripples around them. Which is to say that objects and their names retain identity regardless of how they move. One might visualize this one aspect of the behavior of the mesh by thinking of the way a rock changes the flow of water in a stream. The rock is the object; the stream is the rippling mesh. Upstream is anticipation, downstream, memory. However, the idea-​oscillations that the objects generate are very likely to change as the object moves. Because of this simple but highly resonant fact, the hills and valleys in Model III, even more than in Models I and II, can be said to have ghost hills and valleys generated by the downstream effect of the object on the idea. The echoes of the idea, the way the idea generates ripples in distant parts of the mesh, interact with more long-​lasting declivities and propagation zones and in turn generate oscillations of variable importance in the scheme. In the case of poetic cinema as visualized in the Playland scenario, the importance of this ghosting is very high. In fact, it is quite likely to be primary. Very often in music, poetry, dance, sculpture and painting, the formal arts, the ghosts, these secondary vibrations, which we might want to call harmonics, are truly what it’s all about. With this distinction between a primary stimulus of meaning—​the object or occurrence—​and its co-​occurring ideas—​the echoes or harmonics, we’ve developed a perspective on how montage can enact metaphors. Syntacogs that produce more diffuse and generalized oscillations can produce more kinds of oscillations, more tones, more overtones, and more echoes of the upstream in the downstream. Regarding meaning as seen through the Playland allegory allows us to see how the character of objective representations in cinema can be more or less metaphorical; and how shifting the roles that syntacogs can play modulate the metaphorical character of a cut. The shift in descriptive language from Eisenstein’s metrical, rhythmical, tonal, and overtonal montage to a loosely described array of syntacogs utilizing the interaction between objects and ideas as two different kinds of meaning propagators, swaps the compartmentalization of Eisenstein’s ‘types of montage’ for the extensibility of vectors of meaning and gives us a canvas

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capable of at least a somewhat greater descriptive subtlety and applicability. The primary description of the Playland allegory serves as a field wherein the continuous motion of meaning unites Eisenstein’s separate methods of the rhythmical and the tonal montage, a distinction that, in any case, Eisenstein had problems maintaining. As we dive deeper into the analogy between cinema and music we will begin to flesh out how the Playland allegory enriches the overall picture.

57.  Hearing the image and the inherent omnivalence of music The experiments in experimental cinema are very often searches for new forms of expression that are capable of addressing otherwise untouched areas in our being; and music is a very seductive role model. In narrative cinema the tactical and strategic uses of music to seduce the viewer and inflect emotion are extremely efficient, nearly essential in fact, but not groundbreaking in their reach. In a poetic mode the seduction is one of idea and form. This section will be devoted to exploring ways to directly piggyback off the peculiar powers of musical form with the goal of bringing music’s structural purity and emotional reach to the kind of specificity that pictures have. At least part of this process will involve tentatively borrowing terms from music instead of language and seeing if, or how, they can be applied fruitfully to film. In order to adequately explore how some of the terminology and general conceptions we want to borrow from music can give life to ideas in formal cinema, we will wander into terrain that once again may seem far afield; perhaps even further than we strayed in the previous sections on verbal language; and like our discussions on metaphor and cinema, we will attempt to ground the discussion in the most granular epistemology. So of course we will be stumbling again into many obscure and still-​ mysterious areas. We are essentially exploring a large, dark cavern with a penlight when we venture into discussions about the cognition of music. However, in fumbling around this particular cave, extraordinarily rich ideas can be found, ideas that when applied to the description of work in cinema will reveal ranges of new possibilities for conception and invention. And like our discussions about metaphor, there is a small army of researchers who have spent their lives on this topic and on whom we will rely for the basics. In addition to revisiting the work of Edelman and Damasio we will also derive many of our insights from wonderful books by Robert Jourdain and Bob Snyder; and films by Diane Kitchen, Michael Snow, Richard Serra, A. K. Dewdney, and Nathaniel Dorsky—​as well as a word about one of my

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films. We will get a fine grain description of memory’s roles in the appreciation of time art and investigate which styles of organization are universally applicable and which have special affinities for distinct styles of expression. There is no single story here. This is, instead, a tapestry of many stories; it is, in fact, a montage so I will attempt to be more graphic in my descriptions rather than linear. Progression in a narrative usually entails direct linear causality. Progression in The Maltese Cross Movement, Back and Forth, The Ogre, Notes of an Early Fall, Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity, and many other structural or poetic films can be seen as works whose overall meaning is closely tied to a nonlinear or circular development—​the stating of a theme and then shifting or adding one or more elements, relationships, or parameters, thereby generating a variation that is recognizably related to that theme. This is an architecture heavily dependent on repetition. When we adopt this description we are creating a fundamentally musical analogy to cinema, one that hinges on the fact that both music and poetic cinema have their relationship to time based on considerations of memory and anticipation for their formal cohesion. This is the sense in which, organizationally, formal cinema is closer to music than to drama. If we visualize tone clusters as the structural or melodic elements in music and frame clusters35 as cine-​structural or quasi-​melodic elements, it becomes easier to see that the general structural device of a theme (presented as either a set of tones or a set of frames) and its variations—​is immediately contingent on memory and anticipation because, after all, what is the point of a variation if you can’t remember the theme?36 In order to wring the most out of this comparison between the structure of music and potential structures in formal film, I am about to enter once again into a digression and will dip into yet more speculations, some of which are my very own, but many will consist of my interpretations of the speculations of others; speculations that range from those that are strongly empirically suggested to those that are, most likely, impossible to verify. We will be concerned with the perception of formal events in time: memory of the past and anticipation of the future. ‘Memory’ and ‘anticipation’ are two words that refer to such generalities in relation to the formal time-​based arts that they itch for a precision analysis. Much of what follows is derived from my own synopsis of one such very lucid analysis: Bob Snyder’s book Music and Memory (2000). We usually think of memory as being either short term or long term. Short-​term handles seven discrete items more or less and perhaps up to 30 35 There are many cases where a ‘frame cluster’ could also be describing what we would otherwise call a ‘shot.’ 36 The word ‘remember’ has two very distinct senses. One is to be able to reproduce a musical figure, and the other is to merely find it familiar. Here we are referring to the latter sense.

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seconds worth of ago. Long-​term memory handles all the longer and more complex stuff. However something happens in between, in the transition from short-​term to long-​term memory that also involves our discussion of metaphor: the mental process we call ‘categorization’—​or the organization by kind of many items of experience into fewer items, both in language and in perception or memory. Categorization is one of the few words that we can use to cover psychological processes involving the way memory handles all input at all scales. However, there is one description of a memory increment shorter than short-​term that is often called echoic (for sounds) or iconic (for sights). Echoic memory describes the neural buffers that allow us to discuss perceptual events as they are first handled by our sensory systems at a rate that is counted in milliseconds rather than seconds. Snyder refers to this as the level of event fusion and he illustrates it with the example of the perceptual threshold where a click or other audible signal is repeated at a rate just fast enough that the separate impulses fuse and are perceived as a unitary tone or a single sound. Categorization that happens in the milliseconds between echoic memory and short-​term memory is usually described as perceptual categorization. Categorization that happens in the seconds between short-​term and long-​term memory is usually described as conceptual categorization. In the case of vision, effects analogous to echoic memory’s durations in sound can be seen in the iconic memory processes that turn the always-​ moving retinal images produced by the eye’s saccadic movements into an impression of a stationary scene. In the cinematic realm the event fusion threshold would be represented by the twin (but probably neurologically distinct) phenomena of persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon. There is a preliminary side point that should be made here. A lot of what Snyder refers to as memory in his book, we might think of simply as perception. But if we are looking at things from a perspective that requires precise measurement, on the millisecond scale, our ground zero must be the absolute present, the very instant of coincidence between a stimulus and an organism. From this perspective, perception can be seen as memory of various orders and at different temporal scales. We often call this window of consciousness, an instant. Higher organisms are the processors of vast and simultaneous streams of visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and other stimuli. Vision and hearing process these stimuli very differently. The path for processing sound in the brain seems, in its earliest stages, to be much simpler and more direct than the path for processing light. Likely this is partly because there are more distinct types of neurons in the retina responding to the input of photons than there are types of hair cells in the cochlea directly responding to the air pressure variations of sound; and partly because the transduction of photons to perceived light is chemical and the transduction of air pressure

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variations into perceived sound is initially mechanical, therefore faster and more direct (Snyder 2009: 29). Light simply is not physical in the same way that sound is. One implication of this is that at this level there is a difference between the threshold for the perception of simultaneity (if two events have happened at the same time) and the perception of sequence (the order of the two events). The perception of simultaneity for vision, as a result of the above factors, is considerably slower than that for sound; that is, two visual events will appear simultaneous with a larger disparity in the times of their occurrence than with sound events, indicating that this function is handled relatively early in the processing of the stimuli; whereas the processing of sequence, or order in time, seems to be about the same for sight and sound, indicating that the perception of order in time is a function requiring more processing in the case of both modalities (26). Meaning, however, only occurs later on in the chain of events, after the incoming impulses have already been sorted for patterns that can be integrated with the patterns that are already established in the nervous system. Before there can be meaning, there is a lot of prior neural processing to be done—​more for vision than for sound. This is (at least, partly) because in the case of a sound wave there are relatively few initial parameters along which the impulses change: frequency, amplitude, and waveform shape. In the case of vision there are many; among them color (including hue and saturation), intensity (luminosity), shape, contrast across a field, spatial frequency, consistency, continuity, extension, coordinated movement, bounded versus unbounded, foreground versus background, and so on. In short there is the spatial dimension, in all of its complexity that needs to be accounted for in terms of processing resources.37 But in both cases there have to be systems that extract the features in the stream that belong together and are salient. This happens a bit further down the line when stimuli within each modality begin to interact in a phase called perceptual binding where in the case of sound, out of the audio chaos that constitutes the undifferentiated stream of air pressure variations hitting the ear drum, we begin the process of grouping and sorting from the huge range of things that make sounds, those sounds that then become the salient objects of acoustic perception. This happens when, as Snyder puts it, “features that are simultaneous, co-​varying or both are correlated into single, coherent, auditory events” (4).38 The next level of sound processing then sifts this itemized input and categorizes it as noise, significant natural sound, musical tone, or speech—​presumably this is still a perceptual categorization.

37 Not to say that sound doesn’t have spatiality, it is just less poly-​dimensional. 38 This part of the analysis Snyder attributes to Edelman who also calls it “perceptual categorization.”

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(But again this is probably an instance in which language fails us in the gross nature of its parsing of continuums.) The visual equivalent is the binding of stimuli into the co-​extant features out of which objects, locations, and their movements are made. Then the visual processors begin to attach categorizations or Gestalts of “item-​hood,” causality, and expectation. Again, presumably, it is around this stage that printed words are lexicalized, or matched with an existing engram.39 Snyder divides his analysis of music into three levels that correspond to the three levels of memory processing. At the level of echoic memory there is the event fusion that creates the sensation of single tones or other unified acoustic ‘events.’ At the level of short-​term memory there is the perception of tone clusters, phrases, rhythm, and melody. Then there is long-​term memory’s role in the perception of overall form. His parsing begs us to ask: What are the formal building blocks of the time-​based image stream on each of these levels? What are formal cinema’s equivalents of tone; or rhythm, melody, or harmony; or, for that matter, sonata, tone poem, or symphony? The answers to these questions cannot be approached directly, but will have to be addressed through a process of analogy and reduction, like so many of the other intermedia questions we’ve been addressing. While it seems apparent that verbal language, music, and vision, each have different ways of relating to memory, the short-​term memory of visual events and the mental images that derive from them seem bound to roughly the same constraints as events in audio short-​term memory.40 The terms ‘episodic memory’ and ‘working memory’ may describe some transition zones between intermodal short-​and long-​term memory. Which word one chooses, ‘working’ or ‘episodic’ will depend on whether one is talking about a more active or a more passive process. The beginning of categorization lies in brain processes that segregate the continuous stream of incoming information into chunks that are small enough to be held as discreet units in short-​term memory. This is a process that is so universally required for complex animal behavior that it must be an early evolutionary feature of nervous systems. It is known as “chunking” or the assembling of individual, sequential items into groups that carry unique associations. This grouping is a way of expanding short-​term memory’s 7±-​slot register. When chunks cohere as chunks, we can chunk the

39 This is complicated by many, many features. For instance, if one sees printed language on an oblique and reflective surface—​presumably it would be highly variable in terms of the order of location or lexical processing. And then, once again this could be another inherent failure of descriptive language altogether. 40 There seems however to be some research that suggests that vision’s relationship to short-​ term memory is more complex than sound’s. Some audio tests of list retention indicate that participants can remember lists of seven sound items and visual lists of only five.

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smaller chunks into bigger chunks. Then we can hold between twenty-​five and perhaps up to forty-​nine separate significant items in short-​term or episodic memory. The fact that accessing individual items within chunks has to start at the beginning of the chunk (think about how we remember what letter in the alphabet goes next—​a twenty-​six-​item list) lends credibility to the neurological basis for the existence of this mental process we are calling ‘chunking.’ According to Snyder, “Any group of elements that can be associated with each other can become a chunk; associations are the glue that hold chunks together” (54). Chunking, therefore, can be hierarchical, with lower levels of chunks being associated into higher levels. In this view the number of chunks would conservatively be 55 or about 3000; and that is roughly the number of words in the basic vocabularies of many languages including the ideographic languages; a number that any universal, formally structured cine-​language might well find to be a benchmark, if not a limiting factor. Categorization is different in that, although it also chunks, it is not restricted to sequential or contiguous data; categorization seems to take place at a different level so that while the emphasis with chunking is aggregative, categorization also involves the creation of distinctions. One presumes that chunking happens earlier on in the chain of data processing and that higher order conceptual categorization is already what we would call a thought process, though not necessarily a conscious process. Categories provide the memory and cognition boost of the chunk but function across long-​term memory. In the case of language and music, a particular word or verbal phrase or musical phrase would likely constitute a chunk. What it is that constitutes a chunk in cinema is far more variable; and the term ‘category’ can, of course, be very widely used. It could also be that these are simply two words that (inadequately) describe different faces of what could be thought of as one pervasive tendency of brains. When an item in a string of items that are being chunked repeats with regularity in a structure, the other items in the string begin to group cognitively around the repeated item and Snyder suggests that this level of fundamental organization allows us to remember these items better (36). This chunking around repeated items, when stripped bare, allows us to see how memory and expectation interact; and further, to see how variations in a repetition can drive a formal progression: Simply, when it appears to us that something repeats, somewhere between the second and the fifth iteration, we begin to expect the repetition to continue. The perception of both melody and rhythm are slave to it; and it is on this level, the basic level where memory and anticipation coexist, that the formal qualities of music and formally structured film are most closely knitted, and the tensions of the structural variations on the remembered pattern are born. Michael Snow’s ↔, aka the Double Arrow Film, aka Back and Forth, is especially interesting in this regard because its musical form and the variations on its themes are so clearly laid out. The form is one of a nuanced but, for

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the most part, continuous progression in one value—​speed (a bit like Ravel’s Bolero but far more droll) and uses variation in acceleration to create tension. But since Snow’s films of this period are notable for their paucity of defined phrasing he uses subtle shifts in tempo and rhythm to hold attention.41 This foregrounds the question about what makes a cinematic phrase a phrase; what gives it coherence; what gives it identity? This is a question we keep asking and answering in slightly different ways. The usual and immediate answer, for the vast majority of films, is a shot, that is, the elapsed screen time between cuts and what goes on therein. Most of the time, and in the vast majority of films, this is true. In Snow’s early films it is not. In Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity, in much of Paul Sharits’s work, and in Saul Levine’s The Big Stick it is more likely to be the frame cluster. In Richard Serra’s Color-​Aid it would be a crisply defined color field change. In my film White Heart (1973) I  have alternated visual phrasing among shots, frame clusters, the reappearance of characters or gestures, and undivided stretches of celluloid42 as ‘objects’ or events/​experiences from which short-​ term memory can construct categories and themes upon which variations can then be exercised. Not only does each of these films employ a very different attitude toward what constitutes a theme and what constitutes a variation (White Heart evinces several), but also around what principles their structures cohere. In the music of the world there are many different formal models for developing the structure of a theme as well as the form or manner of a variation and this results in many other tactics besides linear progression for generating formal coherence. In music’s long history it has piled up convention after convention to help shape our expectations of circular or elliptical forms. If my reading of history turns out to be correct the future for cinematic convention and trope will be even richer than music’s—​possibly richer than language’s; but that is likely to be a more hotly debated topic in a very dim future. Cinema’s visual dimension, with its explicit and implied referential possibilities and its ability to synergize visual elements with aural elements, greatly expands the possibilities for formal models to evolve. But as it evolves cinema has all the existing models and formal organizations that the other arts have independently developed as examples to play off and to browse among. We’ll return in detail to Snow’s works and the works of some others of that era as models for musical organization after we treat in some detail a work that contrasts strongly with the artifices out of which the structuralists typical drew their forms. 41 This is a structural characteristic of a lot of work being done in the 1970s especially in New York. 42 Places where there are no frame lines on the celluloid strip and the modulation of light is continuous along a length of the ‘shot.’

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One resource that cinema uniquely draws on to build musical form is natural rhythm: the photographed rhythms of the external world. One exquisitely pure example of the use of natural rhythm in poetic cinema is Diane Kitchen’s 16mm film Ecstatic Vessels (16mm, color, silent, 2007), a work of extremely restrained compositions that consists entirely of shots of leaves blowing in the wind. It is as close to a purely musical structure using natural rhythms in film as any that I can think of and will provide a counterbalance to the relatively rigid formality of the above filmmakers. To begin with, the palette of the film is limited and tightly controlled, consisting exclusively of the various autumn colors of leaves, branches, and the various hues of a sky beyond as photographed on different film stocks and in different weather. These elements are formally grouped on one level by shifts in color temperature, mostly due to choice of film stock, and on another by shifts in focal plane and on another by character of movement. This leads us to attend very closely to the motions of the leaves themselves along with the elegant, but nervously seductive movement of a camera seeking rhythms. The motion of the leaves, the motion of the camera, and the rhythm of the cutting between shots of varying lengths are the three distinct contributors to an overall polyrhythm that is entirely structured from the interplay of subtle shifts in shapes, colors, and motions across a two-​dimensional visual plane. The restricted number of parameters that are being modulated in the film help make the polyrhythm accessible and should make it relatively easy to analyze. The ‘melodic line’ of a leaf moving in a breeze can be described according to many different constraints but aerodynamically it results from the interaction between the individual leaf’s shape and the angle and strength of the breeze. These are what I would call some of the physical vectors of movements that are among the precursors to the vectors of meaning in the film. The purity of Ecstatic Vessels gives us a clean canvas on which to visualize the growth of a cinema of form; as well as a fairly extreme test case of the use of the word meaning to describe its overall effect. The field of aesthetic resonance is as open a field as one could imagine, bounded only by those objects and gestures successfully placed or enacted within it. However, for any particular form, be it organized around conventions like the sonata, the haiku, or the rectangular picture frame on the one hand, or simply by some ad hoc impulse or experiment on the other—​its dimensions, the organization of its actions, its salient values, and its partial and overall shapes and their formal character, all need descriptions if we are to analyze them in words. Ecstatic Vessels is a silent film and Back and Forth has a minimally (but precisely) articulated soundtrack. This makes them ideal as vehicles for me to describe the relationship that they each have to musical form, particularly as regards our major conceptual über-​dimension—​omnivalence. Also they both come close enough to being composed of expressive simples that

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a description of the interrelationship of these relatively unambiguous components won’t become hopelessly complex and tangled. The dimensions or parameters of the movements, colors, and shapes on the screen that are in play in order for Ecstatic Vessels to achieve omnivalence are relatively few, so describing a structure within which these colors, shapes, and motions can achieve a resonant state, one whose individual valences or pictorial weights and attractions are balanced in complement with their motions, is comparatively simple:  leaves blowing in the wind edited with a keen eye to their inherent natural rhythms, then forged into an elegant, coherent musical structure wherein the references are restricted to the objects themselves, without allusion to worlds outside the frame. This singularly self-​referential nature is also a peculiar characteristic of musical composition. In Kitchen’s film the shot is the clear unit of organization. However, appreciating, not to mention describing these values is far from simple at this juncture as they are predicated on conventions that have not yet begun to mature. But underlying the impulses that guided Kitchen’s composition of the film, I sense that there is a yearning for balance that I would claim has true universality. Currently it is only those who have worked ‘in song,’ as Leonard Cohen would say, that are likely to recognize, in others, this way of working in cinema. But as slow as this evolution has been, the ubiquity of the mediasphere has quickened the pulse. As conventions for shaping cine poems accumulate, cultures will develop around them and a unique set of languages will evolve. I first saw Ecstatic Vessels in a screening of many 16mm films. It was a strong and inspiring evening in which, unusually, I found many examples of new, coherent, and utterly original expressions. Kitchen’s film was not the most original, but it seemed to me that it was the most masterful. As we rejoice in the acceleration of a cultural evolution spawned by the electronic transmission of ideas in ever-​proliferating forms, we must also take a moment to mourn the loss of something unique in our history: the peculiar resonance that derives solely from the various subtle but telling attributes of being in the presence of a live projection of a 16mm film. Considering the delicacy and rarity of 16mm prints, having a DVD or other digital manifestation of the work is the only imaginable way to watch it closely enough, that is often enough, to be able to call out the aspects of the work that contribute to its structure. At the very heart of omnivalence is resilience. A work of omnivalent form can be approached again and again and again; each encounter revealing different aspects, different associations, and different valences provoked by our memory of it and fueling our anticipation of the new relationships revealed in subsequent encounters. This is a commonplace experience with music. For a 16mm film, only an electronic facsimile of the work could allow me this intimacy since the number of times a print can be run through a projector is severely finite. I was fortunate to have the experience of seeing the film in a pristine theatrical projection first and later to watch a DVD reference copy, a very good one, again and again.

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Resilience is perhaps not the best word with which to characterize omnivalence; or only correct if one thinks of elusiveness as furthering resilience. As in all things omnivalent, balance, or just the right degree of elusiveness is the key. And it is a most highly subjective one at that. The fourth time I saw the film it ended before I expected; whereas, during the earlier two digital viewings of it I found myself attempting to anticipate the end.43 Four viewings into Kitchen’s film my initial impression was confirmed that the melodic and rhythmic elements were structured around integral values, that is, values internally coherent to themselves: colors in a refined palette, play on the amount of detail in a shot, a cumulative sense about the velocity of the movement of details, the character of their accelerations, and their overall tempo. So few parameters, and all the references are internal. Kitchen periodically uses a particular acceleration-​of-​movement device to transition into shots by inflecting a memorable contour of movement around a cut; a movement that I immediately and intuitively understood as a composer, having used it myself. But this is possibly one of those gestures that one has to have made in order to feel where it is coming from and where it is going. This kind of expression at this moment in cinema history flirts with membership in a kind of semiprivate (but in no way secret) language group. Herein lies the distinction that probably raised Metz’s hackles when he declared that film could not be a language because it is not generally a two-​ way medium. Currently, one normally sits in the presence of a film without outwardly responding. Immediately that is. The inward responses of filmmakers and musicians are informed responses. The character of that informed-​ness is what we shall attempt to study here. The difference between cinema and verbal language is not just the element of time that elapses between the understanding of a gesture and its subsequent absorption into the vernacular, followed by its reexpression in a new use, but is a much more fundamental one: While the reception of a cinematic idea is a neurological process and may be subconscious, the production of one is, always, at least in part, a conscious and technological process.44

43 This is a familiar exploration for me—​that is, the ambiguity of formal endings and the factors that could contribute to them is something I have actively explored. It was my principal motivation in designing The Ogre: I wanted to experience how my chunking of an otherwise unstructured experience, traffic on a street in Chicago, would influence my perception of elapsed time, in repeated viewings. 44 I recently had the odd experience of seeing some of Ann Steuernagel’s films online. They gave me the strangest sensation of someone speaking my language, so I  contacted her as a complete stranger through her website and suggested she see my film White Heart because I thought it would actually seem familiar and intelligible to her. She wrote back that she had seen it several times years before (but many years after it was released) and it had given her key insights. The expressions that I had struggled with, she had internalized and turned into supple and nuanced natural gestures. This is the way a language grows.

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There are gestures in Kitchen’s film for which I  have no descriptive vocabulary but which I  recognize and understand from having employed them myself and whose origin in our very small culture derives largely from the work of Stan Brakhage. One could go so far as to say that Kitchen is speaking in a Brakhagian dialect; or, perhaps, more neutrally, that Brakhage opened to many of us the appreciation of visual inflection’s ineffable and delicate meaning-​palette. This particular inflective gesture in Ecstatic Vessels is one where there is a very distinctive and evocative displacement in the dimension of acceleration across a cut and where one implication of this acceleration is that of conveying mass. Transitions in acceleration actually become a motif in the film. If, for instance, the movement of most of the elements within the frame slows down at a certain rate over the course of the shot and then the shot cuts to one in which the movement begins a contour of acceleration that has a marked difference, then the character of that difference constitutes an element in the melody of that particular passage in the film; a kind of subliminal phrasing that binds the two sides of the cut. This purely formal expression (or syntacog, to use Playland’s terminology) goes one step further than Eisenstein’s essential montage where putting two depicting elements together creates something that cannot be depicted. It has the effect of adding a harmonic element to the melody of the movement. If it appears that cumulatively, the elements of the incoming shot are more massive than those of the outgoing shot, this quality, this shift in weightiness, contributes to the harmonic contour of the passage since our kinesthetic sense of mass is derived in part from watching the rate at which objects accelerate; consequently multiple trajectories of objects within a frame can present a sense of either harmony or dissonance. A feeling of visual mass is definitely one of the many ways that abstract visual valence is registered subliminally and the balance among such accumulated vectors is absorbed and integrated. This integration is the work that goes on over the elusive duration of episodic memory. Many formal elements or concerns like density or saturation of color, sharpness of line, balance within the frame, collection or dispersion of elements in a frame, or sentiments surrounding recognized objects and changes to any of these, all contribute to the abstract “weight” of a frame cluster, shot, or passage. There are no fades to or from black at any point in Kitchen’s film or radical shifts in content or tempo to indicate ‘movements’ or separations into ordained parts so I  have no sense that Ecstatic Vessels is subdivided into separate formal units. On this level of granularity and at this level of familiarity, it appears to be a singularity of sorts. Perhaps this quality adds to the elusiveness of the duration of the film. However, my not being able to sense the approach of the end could well be a result of very different kinds of factors: (1) the inadequate conventions around the ‘shapes’ of formal pacing in the current culture, overall; or (2) it could simply be a result of my not yet

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having gotten completely onto Kitchen’s wavelength; or (3) it could also be a conscious design choice by Kitchen: the articulation of a dramatically flat form. But the sense that there is a wavelength, a distinct wavelength that has been absolutely mastered by a practitioner of this kind of song, was one of my first takeaways from the initial screening of the film. The fact that it refuses to yield stable chunks makes it overflow the memory registers and entice further viewings. Anticipation itself becomes a valence. The question of whether this film turns out to be one of many works in the vanguard of a cultural movement and not simply a vestige of the analog age turns out to be a pivotal one. If it becomes one work in a vanguard, that means our visual sensibilities will ultimately have adapted to a level of refinement that is currently so rare that we don’t yet know how to talk about it. If not, it will turn out to be, like so many other formally structured films, beside the point. Yet apparently we, those workers in this rarified kind of song, can share this methodology, as a stable element in a vocabulary, responsively and in kind, creating a conversation of the sort that Metz claimed was not a province of cinema. The movements in the film are complex, ranging from subtle to mildly violent. The leafs are deciduous: oaks, maples, and the like, although actually it is not so much the shapes of the leafs that are important, but more the character of their movement and the way Kitchen’s compositional sense makes use of them in building a musical structure. One does not ordinarily consider these subtleties in visual movement, even off-​handedly; and even more rarely does one analyze them in detail aesthetically. However, there is the precedent we already have of paying close attention to the ultrafine-​grain modulations of the strings, reeds, and vocal chords of music; nuances that music uses to play with memory in very curious ways. So we can see how the evolution of a sensibility that parses a musical signal in sound so finely could be a precursor for the development of a more refined sensibility for the processing of a musical signal in light. This isn’t an analogy we can take very far because of extreme differences in the way the brain handles aural and visual input. But it does offer one conceptual horizon for this perspective, gives us avenues for comparison, and along the way opens up many questions: Is the sensitivity to formal motion on the screen an acquired taste? Is sensitivity to visual motion a form of synesthesia to which some people are more prone than others? Are the kinds of motion that people find uncomfortable related through the inner ear to the kinds of sounds we find dissonant? And does this vary depending on age or acculturation? Are our emotions also tuned to the articulations of a formal cinema, as we seem wired for in music? Can this sensitivity be cultivated? Can looking at the three media—​words, music, and cinema—​side by side in this way throw into relief the comparison between (a) music’s poor capacity for referencing things in the external world as contrasted with its extraordinary acuteness in expressing the nuances of the inner world; (b) words’ easy

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ability to characterize and reference things in the world within as well as things in the external world; and (c) the nearly totally inescapable character of images for representing and thereby referencing things in the external world? But further, does the invocation of abstract kinesthetic intricacies in films like Kitchen’s augur cinema’s growing ability to activate specific sensations from the inner world ala music? The answer to these questions may revolve around the development in cinema of the formal equivalents to melody and harmony. I believe Kitchen’s film contains the germs of both. On my fifth viewing of the film the strongest sense I got was that the differences in the speeds of movements across any given space generated a kind of meta-​melodic structure, amplifying the feeling from the previous screenings that shifts in acceleration were not just melodic elements but proto-​harmonic elements, that is, elements with parallel visual streams that interacted in a complementary and synergistic way. On this viewing I was able to attend to the way that complexity of movement contributed to generating separate visual overtones in shots where foreground and background shapes are moving in contrary directions or seem to revolve around a distinct middle-​ground plane. Sometimes this is a result of a combination of tempos within the same shot, for example, the swaying of limbs in the background at a low frequency, the whipping branches in the middle ground at a mid-​tempo with their leaves trembling at a high frequency in the foreground, together filling out a spectrum of harmonious movement. The comparison of frequencies of oscillation, set against variations in acceleration, set against shifts in amount of detail, set against huge contrasts in tonality while using a very limited and refined palette, set against wonderful variants of detail within scenes (shallow depth of field with either a crisp, strong foreground object or often, the other way around) yields a compositional field that is both elementally pure and richly textured. In the comparison with music, the complexities of these interactions can amount to the equivalent of one kind of visual harmony. Michael Snow actively plumbed these self-​same issues from an entirely different direction and to incredibly different ends. While Diane Kitchen’s formalism is warmly generous in a classically lyrical vein, Snow’s is severely minimal and serial using many recurring series of strictly ordered elements. While Kitchen’s film is finely keyed to natural rhythms, many of Snow’s are plays on the artificial and mechanical that are both incessant and droll. His La Region Centrale has been called the first feature film ever made by a robot. Notably, both films sideline the referential character of the image as a significant formal element. Also notably, describing the films through the model of theme and variation grounds our appreciation of the accumulation of textural depth in both works and the distinct roles of memory in each. In Kitchen’s film the melody and harmony analogies not only hold up, but are also apt analytical tools for describing the formality of the film. To

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make the analogies work with Snow’s film, we have to see the ideas of melody and harmony applied in a very different way, more in keeping with the compositional serialism of the times. In fact, these films both have more in common with the cultural attitudes of their respective times than with each other. It is how they play out along a dialectic of musical form that makes the comparison interesting. Robert Jourdain, in his delightful book Music, the Brain and Ecstasy (1997), describes music’s three dimensions as pitch-​height, time, and harmony and notes that the processing of visual depth and the processing of harmony both require a greater level of synthesis than do the other two dimensions. He speculates, making a possibly stretched but interesting, neurological connection between music and painting: “Significantly, harmony became elaborate in Western music at about the same time that perspective was introduced into painting during the Renaissance. Four hundred years later, harmony fell into crisis (in art music at least) at the same moment that the Cubists dismembered perspective” (93). Were we to follow this idea about the relationship between levels of aesthetic complexity and the processing requirements of the nervous system out a bit further we might posit a dialectic between Kitchen’s use of melody and harmony and Snow’s, a new distinction that brings to the very idea of melody and the idea of harmony many added dimensions, with the implication that each such elevation in the complexity of form requires additional processing of information in the nervous system. The drive for new forms and for forms of increasing complexity then creates the new capacities for processing the new forms, setting off the cascade that has triggered and will further power the meme explosions of our age. Kitchen’s film is an artifice woven from natural rhythms where the cuts act as counterpoint to the polyrhythms in the shots. The melodic grace of the film lies in how these opposites meld. In Snow’s early films his idea of melody as well as his idea of phrasing is closer to the work of Phillip Glass or Steve Reich during the same period. However it would be a real stretch to describe the way Snow layers sound and sound/​image synchronies as harmonic. In Snow’s work of the late 1960s and 1970s the idea of harmony was, I think, more aptly descriptive of the layering of conceptual relationships. But before we begin our analysis of the musical form of Snow’s film, it would help if we took a closer look at working or episodic memory. The indeterminacy of boundaries or edges seems an encompassing descriptive condition of both memory and consciousness. The phrase “that reminds me” announces the activation of a specific long-​term memory by an event in the present. But, more or less, this is, when we look at it closely, also an occurrence without an edge. Another word we tend to use in relation to working memory besides ‘remind’ is ‘recall,’ which we use when we aren’t spontaneously reminded but need to steer our attention actively into the registers of long-​term memory, usually with

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the sensation that we are willfully working at trying to complete a process that has even more indeterminate edges. The elusiveness of recall is one of the most usual ways we encounter the indeterminate nature of the juncture between short-​term and long-​term memory. Comparing the temporal edges or boundaries of the occasions when we use the two words illuminates the shift from the passive process announced by the word ‘remind’ with the active mental energy required when we try to ‘recall’ something. These occasions point to a description of consciousness wherein the distinction between the center and the periphery of attention may best be seen through the metaphor of vision; that is, the center or focus of our vision versus our peripheral vision is seen as analogous to the way the present moment blends with an awareness of the past. The interpenetration of these thoughts points us to a situation where time, space, and sensation all have fuzzy edges. The bleeding across those areas of experience that we have grouped into short-​term and long-​term memory is what some psychologists describe as working memory or episodic memory. Being reminded and trying to recall are joined by rehearsal, or the willful repetition or replaying of events in short-​term memory, as another, even more actively conscious lane on the two-​way bridge between short-​term and long-​term memory. Working memory is another kind of bridge and is also a phrase that allows us to navigate through the indeterminacy of what a catchall term ‘memory’ actually is. Is there really a distinct short-​ term memory and long-​term memory? Are there many kinds of short-​term memory—​one for visual events, one for language events, one for musical events, and so on? What are the factors that constitute the limits of an episode in experience or a short-​term mental task in working memory? Once again we encounter the problem of using a system of discreet units (verbal language) to try to capture a continuous process (the integration by the present ‘moment’ of experience with anticipation). For this reason the process of asking the preceding questions have most likely distorted the issue by imposing frames that are only more or less inappropriate. What does all of this have to do with Snow’s films? In Back and Forth Snow can be seen as riffing on this motif of discrete versus continuous as played within the bounds of working memory. For starters, with his hyper-​reflexivity he is not only clearly aware of but is actively manipulating the subtle relationships between the film frame as a discrete piece of a continuous motion and the blurred edges of our working memory. Here’s how that goes: As a refresher:  Back and Forth was mostly shot inside a rather plain classroom with a camera on a tripod panning back and forth with ever-​ increasing speed. The classroom’s shapes and furnishings, its lines and angles are themselves a central visual theme in the film; their ordinariness an expression of Snow’s droll sensibility. One of the variations on that theme

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is the way the perception of these shapes and angles changes as the speed of the pan increases. The panning movement seems mechanical at first, as if the entire process has been automated, but the modulation of acceleration is anything but. In fact it is an entirely manual pan, with Snow imitating a machine (personal correspondence: 2014). This illusion is enhanced by a sound that imitates an accompanying drive mechanism of some sort with a rhythm that increases as the speed of the pan increases. At the reversal of each pan Snow places a pop on the soundtrack. The pops sound like the ping and pong of a game of table tennis and appear to be placed at very slightly different relationships to the reversal of movement at the ends of the pans. One formal, emphatic function of these pops is to lend a sense of both momentum and expectation at the echoic memory level to the reversal of movement. The pops also function, at least at first, to help bind each pan’s reversal into a short-​term memory chunk. The early stages of the film play on the working-​memory boundary of short-​term and long-​term memory during the time that the pan across the space is still very slow. As the film progresses and the camera movement speeds up beyond a certain threshold, it passes more clearly through the realm of short-​term memory and then more fully into the realm of echoic memory. In the early transits, as processed subliminally through short-​term memory, we recognize a blackboard, a doorway, windows, and chairs traversing the screen in a set order, back and forth. However when the speed increases and the pan across the room is taking a second or less, the echoic-​memory-​ range engages fully and the image fuses into a near-​singularity of throbbing lights and darks. At this point, we cross the event fusion line and the visual impression becomes less and less available to verbal description and becomes a more purely optical experience. Not only is the pan moving too fast for the camera’s shutter to capture the blackboard, doorway, and windows of the room crisply, but also it is too fast for the visual systems of the brain to fix on the sequence of their appearance or even their object-​ness. Instead, the changes of light, dark, and shape are reduced to an indeterminacy of sequence that yields a very interesting impression that the order of optical events are swapping places with each other, even though our working memory holds contrary information. The effect is of seeing the room going round and round instead of back and forth. The other visual-​echoic memory feature is the appearance of after-​images superimposed over images. The modulation of the afterimages’ superimpositions seems also to be mediated by the placement of the pops on the soundtrack. With this manipulation of the pops Snow is clearly playing with synchronicity across modalities on the bridge between echoic and short-​term memory. Whether or not he was consciously playing with the difference in the speed of early stage audio versus early stage visual processing is another matter.

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Since the objects in the classroom are captured in sequence as the camera moves, at first slowly, from left to right, they therefore transit the screen in a set order, from right to left. Then that sequence is replayed in reverse order as the camera changes direction and moves from right to left and the objects from left to right. It moves slowly enough at first so that our subconscious anticipation of the replay of the various objects’ relative locations as recorded in working memory is preserved and enhanced through rehearsal or repetition. As the camera moves progressively faster, the amount of time that we need to hold the location of the objects in memory shifts distinctly into the realm of short-​term memory as augmented by rehearsal and chunking and then, penultimately, into short-​term memory alone. At this point the film enters the realm of entrainment where we become perceptually locked to a quasi-​musical, ping-​pong kind of beat. The linearity of this progression makes the film an especially clear and simplified example of the role of memory and anticipation in the construction of musical form. That is, with the progression being reduced to this one parameter we can easily analyze, or at least deduce, the role of anticipation in creating tension from acceleration. It helps us furthermore to appreciate the sculpting of this parameter in a work of time-​art. Many people find this film intolerably boring. For them, I am speculating, the repetition leads to habituation of the sort that quells neural response, and instead of being tuned to the modulations in these events they are either put to sleep or they become irritated. They have not yet discerned what is signal and what is noise.

58.  The organization of space in a model built for sound Just as verbal language and music each produce their own characteristic sensations of resonance and coherence, poetic cinema has its own peculiar reach into those areas of the brain where perceptual illusion, motion, and color flux is at the core. Rarely does the simple appreciation of music play on the perceptual-​analytic faculties the way Snow’s films do; and never does music structure its fulfillment of formal satisfactions out of color and motion resolutions as does Kitchen’s film. Rarely does language make the sensation of a perceptual illusion as palpable as The Flicker or Back and Forth or the ambiguity of form as satisfying as Ecstatic Vessels or The Big Stick. Music, it is true, has the centralizing pulls of the overtone series, signature key and octave to keep the train of sensations organized and coherent on the local level. Narrative verbal language has the linearity of character development and chain-​of-​event causality for organization as does narrative cinema; but the unique delights of anticipation and coherence reflecting off

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the memory of where and when objects and actions happen in the visual field is one structural element that cinema uniquely brings to the party of poetic resonance. We are at a moment in history when filmmakers and their audiences are loose and unfettered as to expectations of form. Progression in formal time-​art is a matter of building tension and releasing it in ways that are ultimately cumulative. In music this is accomplished with structures that build toward resolutions based on expectations about the use of musical scales, tempo shifts, ornaments, and so on. These expectations are formed by exposure to the music of a particular culture and genre (those sounds we are in the habit of hearing). In longer works, partial resolutions build toward fuller resolutions. Much of the music of the world has worked this way for eons. Narrative cinema uses the dramatic conventions of plot, pacing, and actual musical accompaniment, among other things, to create shapes of tension, climax, and release. Formal cinema is too young to have developed any such expectations. Therefore, beyond the rules formulated by Gestalt psychology, principally, the Law of Completeness and the Law of Good Continuation, the factors influencing the way the various aspects of a cinema experience might chunk and how associations might form among elements that have no obviously apparent markers, as in Kitchen’s film, is a far more complicated and exciting question. Although the following analysis might well seem to you to come to no good end, I hope the digression will be worth it, for the scenery. We can approach the issue of tension and release, anticipation and realization in formal cinema by taking one aspect of music at a time and creating a thought experiment around it and then fitting the example of a particular film into it. We’ll use Jourdain’s parsing of time, pitch-​height, and harmony as dimensions in music simply to give us an analytical framework. We will start with time alone and then add the next layer. What would music sound like if it were truly reduced to one parameter, the demarcation of time? It’s hard to imagine a drum solo of any length that does not use modulations of loudness or timbre. Without the dimensions of stress or pitch-​height we see that one parameter doth not a melody make. What if there was a film that consisted only of identical markers repeated in time? There are, in fact, two that I can think of off the top of my head. Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960) and Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965). Kubelka’s film consists of black frames, white frames, white noise, and silence as the four time elements. Conrad’s consists of simply black and clear frames accompanied by a noise track that sounds a bit like a playing card on the spokes of a bicycle wheel, the frequency of which increases in speed in a fairly linear way. Neither of these films had as their principal goal the creation of a musical structure though; nor is either of them particularly musical, although Conrad’s comes far closer and, as we will see, has distinctly musical concepts deeply embedded in it. They have both been

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categorized as structural works and as such are more often compared on the formal level with sculpture. The easiest and perhaps most logical analog in cinema to pitch-​height, the second of Jourdain’s dimensions of music, might be color-​value; but we could just as easily substitute some other parameter. The film that in my experience comes closest to using just color and time to create a kind of musical form is Richard Serra’s Color Aid (1971). A full set of color-​aid sheets contains 314 pieces of heavy paper coated with a single, even shade of color in a matte finish.45 The body of the film, which is about 35 minutes long, simply shows fields of color that are revealed to be close-​ups of sheets of these color-​aid samples when Serra’s fingers come into the frame and pulls the top sheet in the stack away—​to reveal the color field beneath. On the soundtrack we hear the isolated sound of this movement as it happens. This is all there is to the film. Let us image that each of these colors represents a different pitch-​height and that Richard Serra (a sculptor, no less) is composing a work of cinema with a musical form. We see that if he used all the sheets in the set that he has the phenomenal equivalent of 314 distinct pitch-​heights to work with. But he does not have the opportunity to repeat any of them. He just has pitch-​height and duration as structural elements. Music has the octave and the repetition of patterns to ground the organization of tones and reduce the burden on short-​term memory in perceiving patterns; and perhaps it is for this reason that even after many viewings I was never able to recognize a melodic pattern in the sequencing of colors. Without the equivalent of a melody, no groupings or sensible chunks would be likely to form in my mind. (A melody is a closed form with its own cycle of tension and release in which, most often, elements repeat.) Added to that, my sense is that the colors are not arranged according to any particular theory or palette, but are in fact random. How then does the film achieve any kind of form? Color Aid, in my opinion, is a kind of abstract expressionism like free-​ form jazz. However, the context for the form is the announcement of very few salient values; among them the crisp, clear, isolated sound of fingers moving against paper and paper moving against paper; and the rather grubby, flesh-​toned fingers of the artist, played against the pure, monochrome of each image. This creates a zone of focus around the action of each sheet being pulled out of the frame. The tension is one of duration: the duration of the color and the duration of the transition. This tension is modulated by suspense around the appearance of the next color, its similarity, dissimilarity, complementarities, or lack thereof; and the structural element is the repetition of the transition, each with its inflected variation in

45 Color-​aid paper was originally designed to be used as a background for photographers but is also widely used in teaching art and design.

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timing: every ‘scene’ is a different length and each transition happens with a different speed and emphasis. These two variables are organized around a single repeated action. Why isn’t this film boring? Serra creates a satisfying form using felt responses to his material—​each successive color in a train of colors of increasing length. (We will only know how long it was, when it ends.) His sense of timing around the valence that each color adds to the accumulating color-​weight of the film carries the same kind of astute sensitivity to form and timing that Dorsky demonstrates in his far more complex color films. The awareness that the colors are stacked and that the stack is finite creates the envelope of expectation for the form. And very much like music, the arcs of tension and release generate this form out of the memory and anticipation of variations on the temporal patterns he establishes; and these patterns reflect off other temporal patterns that were dominant in the high-​art culture of the time. A good deal of Serra’s sculpture from this period was concerned with visual weight—​making gravity palpable, and I would argue that the patterns that might clue us in the case of grasping the form of Serra’s film are less other musical or cinematic patterns and more the general cultural patterns that were pervasive in the art world at the time: (1) minimalism’s focusing attention on whatever modulations appear salient; (2)  coming to grips with new and productive interactions with chance operations that were mostly oriented around the work of John Cage; (3) a culture of spontaneity as exemplified in free jazz; (4) the assertive place of gesture in the painting and dance of the time; and, debatably, (5) a politically tinged emphasis on materiality. The valence of each shot as judged and dictated by Serra has to do with the specific valence or weight of any particular color and the precise amount of time it deserves to be on the screen as against all the other colors that had preceded it. The accruing weight of the ‘scene’ is released by the precise articulation of the transition to the next scene.46 Another film that is organized very similarly according to the visual weight of homogenous-​field frames is Dorsky’s Pneuma (1977–​83). In this case the film is silent and the colors are highly muted, so in this comparison, along with a simple color field analogy, we will add an equally simple onscreen motion and use them as they occur together as an analog to pitch-​ height in creating musical form. The film is 28 minutes long (i.e., about the same length as Serra’s) and is composed entirely of the motions of film grains as they normally appear in 46 Paul Sharits has also done a lot of very interesting work with pure color fields and duration. However, in much of his later work he tended to work with a simpler palette of colors and would repeat them so it’s easier to see patterns in the temporal arrangement. However, he still did not have the equivalent of an octave, or of scales to help organize the experience. As a result his compositions still seem open ended and also seem more conceptual than musical.

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the absence of an image. In some cases the grain is enlarged or speed-​shifted as these motions are rephotographed on an optical printer. Dorsky used cans of various kinds of outdated raw stock, which instead of exposing, he had processed unexposed. He then presents and re-​presents the motion of the grain in the film at different degrees of enlargement. There is a surprising amount of variability in the random motions that lie beneath every film image and Dorsky’s attunement to these very subtle, minimalist shifts allows him, like Serra, to feel the accumulation of weight in a ‘shot’ as it builds with its time-​on-​screen, so that the articulation of the film overall becomes like a long, slow progression. The major differences in the forms of the two films is not that one is silent and the other has salient sound, or that one is nearly monochrome and the other has deeply saturated color, but that their mechanisms for modulating tension are entirely different. The weight in Color Aid’s ‘scenes’ is released by the individually modulated swipes of the fingers, whereas Dorsky has only simple, consistent cuts to work with. The fact that he can pull off a film of this length with so few resources is a testament to the depth of his connection with the material. There is one more film that I would like to use to attempt to illustrate a two-​dimensional (rhythm plus pitch-​height) analog with music, although this one begins to bridge into Jourdain’s third dimension: harmony. Remember that these dimensions are arrayed, for the sake of this thought experiment on a scale of how much neural processing energy they require. Also I should emphasize that although I find it intriguing, I’m not necessarily endorsing this analysis but merely using it as a heuristic for examining possible parallel dimensions in the structures of film and music vis-​à-​vis memory and anticipation. Ken Jacob’s Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969) is a roughly two-​hour-​long silent exploration of the images in a short, very early film that tells the simple story of a nursery rhyme of the same name. The original film is high contrast and dimensionally flat, using only a few tones on the gray scale. So once again its minimalism gives us a simplified path for observing analogous relationships. Since we first see the original Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son in its entirety before Jacobs begins to rephotograph and deconstruct it, we have a template for our expectations as he subsequently takes individual strings of frames and examines them gesture by gesture, many of which he freezes, repeats, or loops. These strings or frame clusters are the units out of which the structure is composed. Each gesture becomes a structural unit in the film by being rephotographed in a sequence of frames that the filmmaker ‘dances’ with, responding to their graphic movements with spontaneous interventions. The gestures each have a distinctive rhythm; and out of these simple motions he rebuilds more complex motions in rephotography that function as a kind of melody where the direction and locations of the movements in the frame could stand for the contour of the melody and its speed could stand for pitch-​height. This can work, in part, because the image is so reduced in tonality, texture, and shape that the vectors of the gestures,

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their speed, trajectory, and complexity of articulation become analogous to the notes in phrases. The assemblage of frame clusters, and the way they are intercut are some of the larger components of the formal structure. The tensions in these constructions are very much like their musical counterparts in that they build directly off our memory of other iterations of the same gesture—​and anticipation of how that gesture will be varied. Jacobs also deconstructs the original film spatially using close-​ups of parts of the original images. This sets up another set of variations on the way the character of the image sits in memory, that is, do we recognize from where in the original film’s action this close-​up comes? Following our analogy, when we look at human gestures in the way that Jacob’s does, slowing them down and deconstructing them, the pace at which the gesture unfolds represents the time element or tempo, while the direction of the movement in the gesture stands for pitch-​progression. Jacobs meticulously controls the pacing and the momentary rhythms by adding black frames and reversing the action among other devices, always in a loose riff with the graphic qualities of the image. What about harmony? There is still one more parameter available for formal articulation and that is association. And as Snyder says, association is the glue that holds together chunks. That is, we recognize the characters, objects, and actions in Tom, Tom beyond just the abstract articulation of their gestures and the formal continuity of their shapes. We make inferences about who they are and what they represent in a drama that has its own narrative arc. But there are other associations of a more formal kind in the echoes and elaborations of the gestures. This play of associations, along with his playful attention to melodic and rhythmical development, allows Jacobs to build a very substantial structure. Nearly two hours is a long time to sustain a purely formal experience.47 Association is a powerful word in this context. Music’s associations are, almost exclusively internal, whereas the associations that pictures have can encompass the world. Polyvalent associations give the purely formal articulation of motion pictures a unique range of complexities and possibilities. But let’s backtrack just a bit and try to locate the idea of association, as regards polyvalent pictures, by framing it in relation to words and music. Whereas one might describe either the word or the phrase as the basic structural unit of the poem and either the tone or the melody as the basic structural unit of musical form depending on the conversation, one can’t refer to the picture as cinema’s basic structural unit in quite the same way.48 47 The longest piece of un-​segmented abstract music I can think of is Terry Riley’s In C. (1964). It is of indeterminate length, but performances can rarely be sustained for longer than an hour. 48 Snyder footnote 8 to ­chapter 4: “Recent linguistic thought has it that the primary unit of spoken language is not the sentence or the clause but the intonation unit, a vocal pitch contour that usually moves down at the end, the drop in pitch signaling a basic segmentation in language” (57).

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While there are traditions willing to pinpoint the simple nature of the verbal or musical unit’s relationship to overall structure, because of the inherent polyvalent nature of pictures, there is no unambiguous way of simply or reliably sorting the salient aspects of the complex, picture-​driven mental image from the contextual aspects. That is, while it is possible, in certain conversations, to consider a word or a tone as a simple, there is no such simple that one can reliably attach to the processing of a complex image, one which has many potential associations. This is especially true of motion pictures in a poetic context (since a narrative context tends to streamline and isolate the salience of aspects of a moving image). By the way, this is one of the few times in this entire discussion where we finally have amassed sufficient context that it is possible to consider the general term ‘association’ along with ‘categorization’ as one that we can comfortably use to relate to a complex but specific neural process. In the way I am using the term, associations must have specific neural correlates although we can most likely never know what they are. In this light, comfortable turns of phrase and familiar harmonies can be regarded as favored tonal associations; that is, we already have a niche, an established engram for them. On the other hand, the vast range of possible associations triggered by pictorial relations can make for some wild indeterminacy when not tamed by a narrative line. Also it is worth noting that the above films can be analyzed in this regard only because of their extreme simplicity. Serra and Dorsky, in the two films we just analyzed, are articulating color fields or motion fields, and are not really articulating pictures; they are barely even articulating images but rather, sensibilities. This makes any comparison between what harmony adds to the complexity of neural processing and what pictorial associations add to neural processing a potentially complex business to say the least. On the other hand, if we take another look at The Maltese-​Cross Movement, we can see how admirably it handles this quandary by initially specifying a single explicit referent or association for every one of the cine-​ rebus’ images; that is, a picture of a nose shown for twelve frames equals the singular word ‘no’—​nothing more, nothing less; a hand-​drawn picture of the sun equals the verbalization sun as the first syllable in the word sunset and a picture of a cityscape for the last (sun-​cit). Dewdney has thus reduced the polyvalent status of the image to that of something like a syllable-​token and therefore a singularity, a simple. But The Maltese-​ Cross Movement has still other characteristics that I believe can be described from the perspective of musical form despite the fact that it really isn’t a very musically driven film, that is, it consists of elements that we could describe in terms of a fairly large but still restricted number of

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categories upon which variations can be performed.49 These elements occur in patterns and these patterns are repeated with variations. The repetitions develop expectations and the expectations are both fulfilled and stretched by variations in the categories, and also in the elements of which they consist, occurring with a rhythmic acceleration that amounts to a crescendo. The limited number of elements and the way their repetitions and variations are arranged in time are its strongest analogies with musical structures. Why this organization works so well is worthy of continuous reexamination. For a film whose overall meaning is quite abstract this structure makes it quite compelling: Visual, musical and verbal tropes of all sorts, arrayed in a simple but nuanced architecture, are expressed through shifts of key that buttress the structural complexity. The palette is harmonious and dissonant by turns. Colors, now pleasing, now clashing, add to an odd pictorial cadence. There is almost no story; but instead a minimal narrative arc embraces the film’s fundamental theme and allows the architectural elements to come to life. Built from an extremely limited lexicon of images whose meanings shift on account of their syntax, it resolves on the same note with which it began.

59.  The category across modalities As previously noted, the word ‘category’ is like many other words that we have for the meta-​phenomenal world in that it is a band-​aid over our ignorance. About all we really know about categories, on the most fundamental level, is that there seems to be a more or less strong boundary effect at the edges of both perceptual and conceptual categories. Cinema of course shares many conceptual categories with the verbal since it mostly uses pictures and sounds of a world containing namable attributes. Music’s namable attributes are fewer, but sufficient to allow endlessly complex constructions to be composed, performed, and talked about. In fact many if not most of these musical categories are less named than simply utilized in the making and the appreciation or understanding of music. In cinema, especially a cinema that is constructed more on the model of music than story, the idea itself of a category has tremendously expansive (although troublesome) potential, so at this point it is important to repeat the

49 Consisting of (1) variations on a title card, (2) black frames, (3) verbalized words, (4) live action footage, (5) animations, (6) images of anatomical models, (7) images of a girl asking the same question in numerous repetitions, as well as (8) the repeated chunks of the cine-​rebus, (9) music, and (10) recognizably repeated sound effects.

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caution: category is a word that sits loosely over attributes that are the result of a distinct process that we know is built into the architecture of the nervous system, but about which we know very little else.51 This same word must also stand for attributes from all sorts of levels above that process. There is unconscious categorization and there is also highly conscious, indeed judgmental, categorization. Much of the categorization that occurs in the composition and comprehension of a piece of music or a film that is composed from musical intuitions or with musical structures often will be of the deeply unconscious, or perhaps more descriptively, the pre-​conscious kind. Unique categories in cinema, mostly conceptual but possibly some perceptual, will continue to be discovered and created. Many will become memes. Familiar conceptual categories from the production of narrative films include:  wide shot, medium shot, close-​ up, reverse, cut-​ away; pan, tilt, zoom; sound, silent, music track, sound effects, visual effects, and so on—​a range of common categories from the production perspective. From the critical perspective we have the names for the various genres: comedy, action, drama, and so on along with terms like chase scene, dialog scene, back-​story, protagonist, villain, and so on. These are a few of the working verbal categories of film production and discussion. The two sets of categories are quite different from one another and parse the process in ways designed to be effective with their intended audiences: the one referring principally to elements in various stages of a collaborative process; the other, categories for framing, making sense of and communicating an experience. Poetic or musically structured films, on the other hand, provide a very wide and a very different field of considerations from the perspective of how they utilize categories. Where verbal and cinematic narratives have their categorical potentials already cut out for them in common usage, poetic, musical, and formal cinema’s categories are more or less fluid. The challenge is finding adequate means of describing what they are and how they happen to function in the many, many works that have developed new categories and new kinds of categories. Bob Snyder (2000:  81)  came up with a broad description that works across modalities and that we can use as a kind of conceptual tent pole:  “Categories form the connection between perception and thought, creating a concise form in which experience can be coded and retained [. . .] Categories are the primary terms in which many types of memories are stored and recalled.” This gem of an observation is both precise and vague and so it demands examples. The very particular acceleration-​across-​a-​cut gesture that Kitchen uses to great effect in Ecstatic Vessels (or at least to great effect for those that

51 It may well not be a distinct process in any coherent sense. I am claiming it is for the sake of this overall thought experiment in order to keep the waters just a touch less muddy.

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are open to it) is typical of a gesture that operates only in cinema, although there certainly are musical analogs relating to shifts in tempo and/or pitch. Distinctive acceleration change around a cut might very well be an operating gestural category in any film concerned closely with formal pacing. All that’s required is that it is being used by the filmmaker or perceived by the audience as a structural element—​one of those moments that causes memory to be organized around it. If we call it a gestural category, it invites fairly general parallels of one sort. If we more specifically call it an acceleration category, we are calling attention to an aspect of the gesture, one that hones the references, and the parallels, down further. Another kind of gestural category might be exemplified by Snow’s play with the ping and pong sound that he places more or less at the reversal of direction of the pans in Back and Forth; or if seen from another perspective it might only be an instance in a sync-​relationship category; or it could function structurally as both and would be called one or the other depending on the conversation and that conversation’s analytic perspective. All that is required is for memory, on the levels that perceive temporal relations, to place it as similar to some elements and distinct from others, with a function-​qualification suiting the conversation or analysis. If we think of sync shifting and acceleration shifting as gestural categories, we can build a conversation about all instances that create variable but stable relationships of similarity in long-​term memory. Perceptually they keep a feeling of tension going throughout a film. But they also allow it, in a growing culture, to resonate with other, heretofore lonely, nuances. Within each of these gestural categories there are those specific examples, instances, or individual gestures that embody the central traits of the category. The way we know these things are functioning as categories is because of the boundary effect’s creation of individual instances or elements from an undifferentiated stream, and memory’s building them into structures. If one finds experimental works boring, it may possibly be that their categories have not yet been grasped and therefore their dynamic tensions are not felt—​yet another reminder of the immaturity of the medium and the audience relationship to it. Within some overarching gestural category we might find schemes of tension producing and tension resolving gestures; and within these two opposing categories we might find a general, tempo-​related category that might sort gestures of acceleration, deceleration, steady fast tempo, steady slow tempo, and so on where a perceptible shift in tempo might constitute a structural element that either builds or resolves tension. There might be universals embedded in our wiring that determine tension modulation, but more likely these modulations are a product of the historical cultural and/​ or local cinematic context. Here the key thought is perceptible change. A very subtle shift in tempo might in certain contexts be inconsiderable, having either no bearing on

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or only adding a nuance to the structure of the piece; in another context it might simply be ornamental, having a decorative rather than a structural function; or truly perceptible, that is, rising fully into the conscious flow of composition or appreciation, thereby becoming an element of structure on a perceptible level and a category that can be discussed or simply recalled as other events organize around it. My personal experience of the acceleration-​around-​a-​cut shift is a good example of how fluidly we have to take the idea of structural categories—​ either from the point of view of the filmmaker or the audience member. I remember this one particular example, this one event in Kitchen’s film that I  found notable because of its very distinct and particular visual melody. I found it notable because I myself have used transitions that, although they had very different content, had a very similar contour of speed reduction along an arc, followed by acceleration of other objects through a different arc but at a very specific rate, and which created very specific associations, both internal—​between the two objects/​events being associated across the cut—​and external—​between the gesture and something totally ineffable and otherwise inexpressible. As a maker, this acceleration gesture, and I have used variants of it often, represents an impulse or sentiment that provides a range of very particular expressions, expressions that left me with nothing more than a sense of satisfaction that my meaning had been well planted in the material. I reconstructed the same affect or emotional contour internally and spontaneously when I saw Kitchen’s analogous gesture on the screen. Moreover I felt my gesture and hers were equivalent in affective tone to each other despite the radically different contexts in which those specific, abstracted attributes appeared: Kitchen and I have a word in common in a common language. Other gestures gather around, gaining meaning from the light of these gestures. If I look at this particular acceleration as the central instance in a category, then other similar instances, as they appear in the flow, will all bear a nuanced resemblance to this particular event. The resemblance gives us structure; the nuance gives us pleasure. This distinct sensation of meaning that I encountered along with the general, strong sense that I understood Kitchen’s film on many levels raises several central questions. One has to do with Robert Jourdain’s (1997: 272) claim that “meaning serves to transfer cognitive states between brains.” Here he is at least faintly implying the conduit metaphor. This is where the existential character of the conduit versus the toolmaker metaphor again shows its face. Did Kitchen get something across to me, as the conduit model suggests, or did she prompt me to reconstruct an old affect I had once experienced and utilized myself, as suggested by the toolmaker model? Two quite different scenarios! The nakedness of the question as it applies to this particular instance shows how thoroughly convention has clothed verbal language. Where

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conventions are few or none, meanings have to be precise. I got a very precise sense when I recognized that gesture. Was it because Kitchen and I both understood something universal expressed by that very precise cut between two motions, or was it because we shared a visual culture? Conceptual categories are to a tremendous degree conventionally determined; and conventions breed conventions; and thus it is out of just these obscure and inchoate meanings that the new conventions of a new cinema will arise. Another central and closely related question asks how the sensation of meaning that I  got from Kitchen’s film becomes encoded. There are two possibilities that I can think of and my guess is that they are both at work, but to different degrees. On the one hand there is the possibility that on the perceptual level circuits related to the motor systems have a categorical relationship to this particular contour of motion. The crudest example of this kind of neural cause and effect would be that when you perceive something being thrown at your head you instinctively duck. On the other hand it may be that the character of the motion is subtly encoded in the culture and shows up cross-​modally in homologies with gestures in dance, painting, and music as well as in the quotidian motions of life, and we have picked up these cues unconsciously through many years of being exposed to their various manifestations in our cultures. ‘Nature or nurture’ is a spectrum and not a dichotomy. A third question has to do with the place that these kinds of categories have in the subliminal apperception of form. In the case of musical structures it seems quite clear that we can use the concept of category, especially ‘perceptual category’ and its boundary effects, to explain a great deal of how music functions: scales, octaves, and the tonic or musical home around which pieces of music are organized, all display evidence of boundary effects that are the hallmarks of categories. The concept seems to apply equally well across cultures to the music of the world, though the music of each culture can use and perceive music’s categories very differently. It is relatively clear how perceptual categories in music are directly related to its conceptual categories, but will the same effects hold for cinema as conventional forms develop? Yet another question, a bit more distantly related to our example, is how (if at all) the perceptual categories of a future cinema will be related to the particularities of the human motor systems? That is, will the fact that we have five major appendages, each with a series of joints, shaped and enervated in very similar ways, mean that the contour of movement categories that develop in cinema will have a meaning structure determined in part by the mutuality of our bodily articulations (e.g., all our elbows bending in the same directions) as Raymond Birdwhistell speculated in his book Kinesics and Context? These are the kinds of speculations whose resolutions are far, far away from us; but they will guide us as we move along—​encouraged by Birdwhistell’s understanding of the fluid but inevitable relationship between

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context and category. We will hear more about Birdwhistell in the next part of the book.52 There are many, many attributes of musically structured works of cinema that could be called gestural and that might be organized so that the boundary effects utilized in experiencing and conceptualizing them could become structural or compositional. Among them are perspective shifts precipitated by direction of view or the focal length of a lens; specific picture-​ sound gestures, including the above mentioned ping-​pong-​sync-​shifting that Michael Snow used in Back and Forth; persistent cutting between other kinds of categories—​until that cutting itself becomes a motif/​category as in Dewdney’s Maltese-​Cross Movement; closure through fades to black, white, or some other color when the fade itself takes on either a semantic or structural character; the gradual ending of parameters versus the abrupt ending of parameters, and on and on. We may never consciously recognize let alone come up with descriptions for these various gestural categories but the subliminal tensions and resolutions that constitute our sense of expectation and fulfillment are a product of the feeling of what belongs where that develops with the growth of a culture. The righteousness of this sense of belonging is an elaborated by-​product of the boundary effects of conceptual/​structural categories. Again, they are not attributes of the work but of our interaction with it. Besides gestural categories we have to consider color or palette categories, non-​gestural movement categories, perspective categories, rhythm categories, multiple image categories, definition or focus categories, length of shot categories, non-​gestural tempo categories, and so on. When something is being used as a structural category the brain will assess its similarity or its difference with other exemplars from what it judges to be in the same category. When conceptual, this judgment is anchored in history however; and since cinema (especially a music-​form cinema) has almost no history, the structural use of many of these conceptual categories may seem rather wanton. Such is the working life of the experimental filmmaker, needing to invent in an arena so completely unbounded that comprehension (for now) may well be limited to other practitioners of very similar styles. The coalescence of categorical styles into idioms may only have a short history in the culture of experimental filmmaking but still it has a history of its own; one that includes many subgenres or schools wherein a filmmaker that has discovered a useful categorical attribute may find that it has gained a measure of expressive currency in the culture. If either the attribute or the gesture work especially well in a particular context, it might spawn a subgenre of filmmaking. Categories begetting categories in a milieu where entire

52 In my understanding, Birdwhistell’s work was an attempt (and possibly a failed one) to relate categories of human movement to universals of affective expression.

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changes of perspective are dealt in an instant; where depictables are articulated in time with other depictables in order to create these ultra-​ineffables; where the motion of objects entrains in one way and the sounds attributed to objects in another; where a new kind of discontinuity, and therefore a new kind of continuity can materialize, are likely to provide the cinematic currencies of the future. Many of the new meaning styles that cinema will have to offer will be analogous to the meanings in the other media, but there are entirely new sensations, emotions, conceptions, and dialogs that will take place for which we currently have no analogs and no descriptive frameworks. This includes those films that tap directly into the nervous system; completely bypassing (at least initially) the verbal, pictorially associative, kinesic, musical, and, for that matter, even the cinematic! This is a good time to take another look at Tony Conrad’s The Flicker—​ one of the very few films in that exclusive last category. The purity of the idea and the purity and neurological impact of the implementation of that idea make it a relatively easy jumping off place to make some important points about the relationship between perceptual and conceptual categories. What we are looking for in Conrad’s film is evidence of the boundary effect that characterizes perceptual (and then conceptual) categories. We’ll be attempting to find a bridge in the work between the two kinds of category, a formal homology between the micro and the macro. A secondary goal will be to learn a bit more about why the same term seems applicable to forces operating at such different scales. Perceptual categorization’s boundary effect might be most clearly seen in the perception of events at the level of event fusion: We tend to hear a sharper boundary between the individual clicks that make up a buzz and the buzz itself than there is in the pure signal. We tend to not see the dark that’s interspersed between the frames of a film until they cross a threshold of duration. The following analysis has less to do with the filmmaker’s intent than with the perspective that I am bringing to the work in order to illustrate a point about categories and perception. The subject matter or working ground of Tony Conrad’s The Flicker could be taken as a meditation on any of many different subjects. In this analysis we will think of it as an exploration of category effects in the visual system. The attributes we are concerned with are literally illusions. They are the direct effects on the nervous system of the frequency and duration of the clear frames interspersed with the black frames—​the timing of the interruption of the light interacting with the timing of our visual systems. At one moment we see the flicker as a flicker, then when it crosses a certain threshold of frequency and duration we see illusory color fields appearing to bloom off the screen and drift slowly away from the center of the frame in one direction or another. The reason the film can be used as a bridge between the perceptual and the conceptual is that the effects are derived so simply—​light and the absence of light; and at the same time their manipulation manages

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to sustain interest over a fairly long and subtle temporal structure. Thus the film is very straightforward and at the same time very elusive. These two elements, light and dark, yield a huge range of affects and effects. The variety of hallucinations and emotions that have been reported seems to differ on each viewing, and for each viewer (although verbal reports are inevitably vague since there are few words for these affects/​effects). It seems as if the film may act as an amplifier of certain native traits of perception, like when a saccadic eye movement happens to coincide with a hallucination-​inducing pattern change; that is, the vector of the hallucinated color field may move in the same or in a contrary direction to the movement of the saccade. Then again it seems to act as a filter for others, like the tendency to form gestalt groups, since the effects are literally object-​free. It’s been said that you do not watch the film—​the film watches you. Being in the presence of the film is as simple as an utterly unnatural experience can be, and still it seems to provoke all this unspecified and mysteriously related neural activity. The experience has the feel of the instability that happens in physical systems when the tuning of resonances reach a critical relationship and a small change in input suddenly provokes an out-​ of-​scale response. In this case it appears to be the timing of the pulses of light with the timing of our visual processing. (Conrad hypothesized that the film’s effect is due to relationships between the periodicity of the flickers interfering with the periodicity of the brain’s Alpha Wave.) From another neurological perspective the film puts us in a realm as purely analogous to music as we can find—​in that the operative parameter in both cases can be thought of as simply frequency or interval and its artful articulation. The hallucinations caused by the film seem to come in waves; and within the waves the hallucinations vary in shape,53 brightness, color, saturation, trajectory, and speed of movement. For some people the hallucinations seem to have specific associative content. The variations have a contour of onset and progression; and at least for the simple color field hallucinations, a fairly orderly progression of attributes or parameters. That is, the hallucinations don’t seem to jump around the visual space or have hard cuts in their content. The search for direct correlations between the observed or reported effects of these hallucinations and the boundary effect imposed by perceptual categorization, of the sort that in sound turns separate clicks into a continuous buzz, is probably complicated by other, perhaps even more basic attributes of visual-​perceptual systems. For instance, whatever mechanisms account for persistence of vision may also temporally smear the variation in light intensity; that is, the impulses themselves may persist in iconic memory

53 The assertion about shape needs some qualification, at least in my experience. The sense of shape change is highly amorphous since the color fields also seem to be without boundary.

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and this might cancel the boundary effect of the category, if indeed there is a boundary effect operating at this temporal level in the visual systems. Shifts in the trajectory or saturation of a hallucination might be thought of as analogous to how a certain micro-​tonal shift in frequency in a single note in a C major scale might seem either like a nuance or might, if it fell on the other side of a categorical boundary, seem like a wrong note. But the music analogy can only take us so far since at the perceptual level the boundary effect for the mechanisms of the auditory systems are very likely to be very different from those of the visual systems.54 Even though the parallel that I want to draw between the ways the flickers induce hallucinations and the overall structure of the film may seem unlikely because of these and other complications, there are still things that a close analysis of the patterns in the film itself can reveal. So there are two states—​light and dark produced by two stimuli—​clear frames that allow the light from the projector to shine unimpeded onto a reflective surface and illuminate a space; and opaque frames that prevent any (noticeable) light from reflecting at all. The film begins with a long stretch of minimal change in light intensity: First there is the infamous warning to epileptics that sits on the screen for nearly three minutes, then a simple title card that lasts for more than a minute with a gradual bleed to white. Both of these are offered in muddy tones of gray. Before any flickering begins we have been looking at relatively unmodulated light for 5 minutes, more or less. When the flickering begins, it begins in a very graduated fashion. At first there is only one black frame at a time interrupting the light beam, a one twenty-​fourth of a second interruption occurring once every second. After 25 seconds more or less of this single frame interruption the interval halves and there is one black frame occurring every half second with this identical pattern repeating forty-​five times; then twenty-​two repetitions at intervals of every eleven frames, followed by twenty-​eight repetitions with one black frame every ten frames followed by progressively more repetitions at progressively shorter intervals. The pace of the flicker speeds up gradually, but not consistently while the duration of the flicker or interruption itself remains constant. When the rate begins to stabilize varying from between one black frame (abbreviated from here on as B) every one-​quarter of a second to one-​sixth of a second of clear frames (abbreviated from herein as C) we enter the interval range that relates to the Alpha Wave rate. After a very short time the number of contiguous black frames gets longer until there are long stretches where the cycle runs between one-​quarter and one-​sixth 54 This could be illustrated by the possibility for saccadic eye movements to influence the trajectory of a hallucination as analogous to a hitch in the feedback loop of a drummer that causes a beat to shift. There is also an issue with the whole idea of saccadic eye movements and the rapid global stimulation of even field illumination alternating with darkness and whether they continue to function under such unnatural conditions.

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of a second of light and dark each. So essentially we are playing back and forth across the frequency of the Alpha wave (whether or not it is actually the Alpha wave that interacts in the modulation of the hallucinations). Even as the speed of the flicker continues to increase (after playing around with the four and six frame alternations that are consistent) the rhythm becomes more complex with patterns where both the lengths of the interruptions of the light beam and their frequency begin to shift subtly. Beginning around 6 or 7 minutes into the film we have extended sequences where the rhythms that are generated by the spatial arrangement on the filmstrip become very complex: where, for long stretches, there will be patterns like: CCBCBCCBCBBCBCBBCCBCBCCBCBBCBCBB A continuum that could be parsed: CCB CB CCB CBB CB CBB CCB CB CCB CBB CB CBB This pattern is embedded in a repeating cycle that will run for five or ten cycles before the pattern changes. Sometimes the number of clear frames predominates, sometimes the number of black—​but we are talking about variations of between one-​twelfth and one-​twenty-​fourth of a second. There is a great deal of regularity about these patterns with a subtle shifting where one pattern will be stable over a period of seconds and then it will give way to another. The patterns’ regularity has one signal characteristic: their stability and their shift from one to another, for the most part, occurs over the period of time that is encompassed by short-​term memory and therefore falls into the period of time that a musical phrase or coherent musical event would occupy. At one point in the film there is simply a long passage where the flickers are strictly even with B and C alternating one frame each for a number of seconds after which intervals and patterns all grow slowly but progressively longer until at the end of the film we are back to having one frame interruptions every half second more or less until the film ends. The gross architecture of the film is quite classical with the frequency of events on every possible scale building in an irregular way to a crescendo that occurs more than two-​thirds of the way through the film followed by a nuanced decrescendo. There are elaborate patterns within patterns as there are in every good piece of music. For Conrad, the basic interval against which he was working is the fundamental frequency of the projector’s shutter, which is either one-​half or one-​third the duration of a frame. (Depending on whether the projector has a two-​or a three-​blade shutter, it interrupts the light either two or three times before the next frame is brought into the projector gate. This either

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doubles or triples the fundamental frequency of the clear frames.) In any case Conrad believed (as cited by Brandon Joseph in Beyond the Dream Syndicate [2011: 290]) in this case, since perception of a flicker is frequency related rather than actually rhythmic, it is more fitting to speak of the projection frequency as a “tonic.” Each pattern is then seen to suggest a “chord” related to the tonic. The patterns used were in fact constructed in such a way that each one contains visible components contributed by up to three related frequencies. These flicker triads represent, to my knowledge, the first meaningful extension of harmonic principles to the visual sense. This idea suggests that shifting the fundamental, either by increasing the number of blades in the shutter or speeding up the whole mechanism, would be tantamount to a change in key. But what is really significant here (and this is a point that will divide sheep from goats) is that Conrad has made the kind of intellectual leap that artists seem to crave and at which scholars seem to quake. He is transposing effects across timescales and sensory modes and ignoring a good deal of science. Nonetheless it is a beautiful idea with enough clarity that many more methodologies may be hung from it. And who knows, it might actually BE that patterns of light at that frequency actually do have some fundamental neural relationship to patterns of sound. A further question posed by the occurrence and vectoring of hallucinations in The Flicker is the nature of the meaning that their movement off of the screen produces. In some mysterious way it seems to be related to the kind of meaning that music creates, but more undeniable, possibly less affect oriented, and yet again less susceptible to detailed description. Because we cannot describe it does that mean these movements are no longer within the category of meaningful events?

60.  Similar to versus same as—​periodicity and category The serial patterns in Conrad’s film could be described as having a kind of orbital periodicity. The individual patterns or series recur, periodically drifting in and out of phase, swapping places with one another. I am guessing that the reason the film can hold the attention of people who find it a consistent experience, like other serially composed works such as those of Phillip Glass’s or Steve Reich’s, is that the variations that build the long-​term, large-​ scale patterns mirror aspects of the more intimate patterns, so that there is a strong formal relationship between the phrase level and the form level. This makes it a coherent, although minimal, piece of visual music in the key of

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the projector shutter. Periodicity, the impression of events orbiting the porthole of consciousness, presents a repetition of encounters—​a repetition with automatic variation built in. That built-​in variation is the time element: by the time the next orbit comes by, much has changed in the local universe. The shift in context guarantees that the reflected meaning of that pattern is no longer exactly the same. How much the same it is, is what’s at issue. When it comes to formal structures in music or cinema or even, for that matter, verbal language, the shades of same is the name of the game. After all, this is how most Western music, from ballads to sonatas, proceeds. This is also how many of the films we’ve been describing proceed and develop, those films that rely on memory of contour or form, the way music does. Memory of form in a time art is a conflation of similarities across scale from the local to the global, with the repetition of elements accumulating chunks of local associations. According to some theories, changes or modifications to an element between one orbital occurrence and the next that are below a certain threshold of recognition pass into long-​term memory without being overtly noticed, bypassing short-​term memory, but gathering a certain subliminal pull, a pull we call ‘nuance.’ Changes that are overtly noticed, on the other hand, pass through short-​term memory and can be actively compared at some level of re-​cognition (Snyder 2000: 86, 87). These recognitions propel the form either toward greater tension or some degree of resolution. Repetitions that are perceived as identical become central categorical gestures. This feeling of identity gives other gestures the equivalent of a central tone or tonic around which to organize. Hence Conrad’s reflection on the constancy of the interruption of the projector shutter as a fixed temporal element around which his variable temporal patterns, or chords, could organize. The three Levine films mentioned earlier in the book, The Big Stick, Raps and Chants, and Notes of an Early Fall, David Rimmer’s classic Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1972), George Landow’s (aka Owen Land’s) Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter (1968), Malcolm LeGrice’s Berlin Horse (1970), and Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale (1971) are all excellent examples of ways that a feeling for categorical relationships can provide an illuminating analysis of periodicity in cinematic form; both in terms of the way these films are similar to one another and also and even more so in the subtle and distinct ways that they differ. For this exercise let me slightly reframe how I  am thinking of categories: They are the ways, either namable or unnamable, that more than two things are found to be similar to one another, although those things may be different in all other regards. Of the above films, two share methodologies very closely. They are Rimmer’s Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper and LeGrice’s Berlin Horse; and although the differences are less immediately striking than the similarities, there is a subtle but significant shift in their affect and in their effect that

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announces that they are works of very different sensibilities—​even though they both use the same categorical spaces in very similar ways. For this exercise we will describe both films in terms of how they utilize coexisting conceptual spaces in which a repeated event or action occurs. These conceptual spaces can be considered to represent four categories: (1) the implied space of the photography, that is, the space in the world as depicted, (2) the active use of the film’s surface and thereby the surface of the screen, (3) an acoustic space occupied by a soundtrack, and (4) an interior, subjective space that reflects the way we feel about it. The differences in this last categorical space are where these two films most stand apart; but still, the similarity in the way they play these spaces off against one another unites them into a subgenre or school of filmmaking, a school that is truly reminiscent of the art music and culture of the time. Rimmer’s film consists of images of a woman on an assembly line lifting sheets of cellophane and flipping them in the air toward the camera in a medium-​wide shot. The surface of the image is heavily and rapidly permuted by the random seeming effects of bleaching, staining, posterizing, and perhaps rephotography, so that the central figure and its action merely provide the armature for the extensive, surface visual effects. There is some ambiguity as to which gestures are repeated in vivo (conceptual space #1) and which are only repeated in cellulo (conceptual space #2), as it were, because the assembly line worker’s actions are so similar from one iteration to the next and the variations in the surface effects on the printed loops are so variegated that we really can’t tell when we are watching a film-​loop-​ed action and when we are watching an action repeated in real life. This constitutes one formal pattern. The action of the woman, by repeating almost identically in one conceptual space, creates a constant melodic line that plays against the surface effects in another conceptual space. These surface effects don’t repeat within the range of short-​term memory but overall they become progressively more extreme as the film goes on. LeGrice’s film consists of two different sequences of a horse running, each clearly caught in a film loop (rather than repeating a nearly identical action that might have been filmed continuously) so it is easier to tell on which plane the periodic relations are occurring—​the horse is not running in a circle, it is running in a film loop. Both films are mostly monochromatic in the beginning and their very limited palettes share a kind of chemical acidity that is quite recognizable as being artifacts of the photochemical process rather than ‘colors from the world.’ This serves as a central chromatic tone or center point, as it were. In both films there is also a distinct rhythmical periodicity, one significant difference being that the actions in Rimmer’s film are more or less symmetrical. That is, you wouldn’t really know if the loop were running backwards or forwards. LeGrice however uses ‘flipped’ prints in his loops so that sometimes the horse appears to be running backwards; and this adds an element of symmetry. They both use

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the same technique of intercutting positive and negative renditions of the action, with the negative images sometimes superimposed on the primary, positive image. But of the differences that contribute most to their distinct characters, it is the component of vertical action in Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, where the major repeated motion is upward through the frame; and this gives it an entirely different sensation of periodicity than the horizontal and therefore more easily visualized circular movement of the horses. The acoustic space of the two films is quite similar in some regards but strikingly different in key others. Both are minimal, LeGrice uses a piece by Brian Eno that has three notes played in the foreground followed by another note sounded twice somewhat in the background, looped against multiple overdubs of this same pattern whose periodic relationships keep shifting subtly. However there is virtually no formal arc of tension and release, no sense of increasing complexity or acceleration in the soundtrack. The track composed by Don Druck for Rimmer’s film is (like Eno’s) as limited in timbre and tonality as the picture is limited in palette, but it has an elaborate structure that evolves—​from a very simple set of impulses in 4/​4 time, into an entire orchestra of electronic effects. What is most striking is that there is very little change in timbre overall—​all the electronic effects have a very narrow range of waveform shapes, so they have the same industrial quality as the severely limited tonalities in the image. Notably, in Rimmer’s film it is the structural arc of the soundtrack that drives our perception of the visual periodicities, the accelerations and decelerations influencing the apparent pacing of the image transformations. In LeGrice’s it is clearly the image that is driving the progressions of the orbits with the sound being a consistent accompaniment working together with the orbital overdubs, both visual and aural. Ultimately though, it is the subjective and associative aspects of both picture and sound that give the films their distinct character. Rimmer’s film, with its images taken from an industrial setting, has harsh contrast contours in both picture and sound; LeGrice’s has much softer contours. Both picture and sound in Rimmer’s film also have harder edges in terms of forward progression: they appear to stutter, although the stutters in the picture and the sound are mostly not in sync and appear to be independent of one another. The motions, contours, and progressions of Berlin Horse are much smoother; for instance, the similarity between the categorical space of the image and that of the sound and how they sync, together with the actual rhythms in Eno’s track, manifest in the way the cantor of the horse echoes them (just as the harsher rhythms in Druck’s track echo the tenor of the assembly line in Rimmer’s film). These two films are equally coherent and formally equivalent works of a very different flavor that, in my mind at least, can best be described through this paradigm of categorical relations in orbital periodicity.

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George Landow’s Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter is structured very similarly to Rimmer’s in that the repeated actions and loops of the cellophane lady and Landow’s animated gremlin create an ambiguity of ontology wherein it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish whether the periods of the central figure’s actions are happening in a film loop or in actual, repeated gestures. (Remember that this film is shot over the shoulder of an animator drawing stages in the movement of a vaguely Buddhist gremlin and flipping the pages of the animation back and forth to check the progress of his work.) The major difference between LeGrice’s and Rimmer’s films, and Landow’s is the addition of this other conceptual space, or structural category, above and beyond the spaces it shares with them, in that the photographed space contains a drawn and animated space that itself has an ambiguous relationship with the picture loops. It has swapped out this space of conceptual indeterminacy for that of the surface effects of the other two films. The patterns in these separate conceptual spaces consist both of loops and of repeated actions that seem to have a phase-​shift relationship with each other; therefore their orbits can be thought of as melodic patterns and their interactions as harmonies. I  must add though that in Landow’s film there is, on the level of ontology, one other conceptual hall-​of-​mirrors, in that the film images are of drawings that are the precursor to other film images that presumably will happen on a screen somewhere, becoming an actual animated film that would be photographed frame for frame instead of over the shoulder of their creator. In the above films, structure is sustained by the phase shifting of the periodic relations of events in the different conceptual spaces or categories. The strategy is essentially the same as Conrad’s but carried further, into other formal areas, using gestures that parallel music’s but add in the all-​ important effects and affects of pictures. All of these films were made within a few years of each other during a time when the main critical analogy applied to them was again to sculpture (structural film) rather than the serialism of musical composition that was going on at the same time; and while the metaphor of sculpture does allude to aspects of the feeling one gets when analyzing them from the perspective of hindsight, that is, how they seem to the mind’s eye after they have been experienced, it does not address their existence as works of time art. It is in their ongoing experience that the analogy to music and music’s relationship to memory has a more satisfyingly explanatory effect. Would it have made any difference to history if these films had been thought of as musically rather than sculpturally structured? The analogy with sculpture has a bit more purchase when we discuss Michael Snow’s legendary masterpiece La Region Centrale (1971), for it is a visual exploration of a barren and mountainous landscape from the point of view of a rather sculpture-​like object: the multi-​axis, rotational machine that the camera is hung from. For three hours this remotely controlled camera

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explores the landscape by panning, tilting, rolling, and zooming. Sometimes only one of these parameters is changing, sometimes they all are and like with Back and Forth, acceleration is the formal engine. We can think of LRC as a central case in our collection of films that are structured through the interaction of their orbital phases since all of the above parameters (except movement on the z axis or zoom) produce completely circular trajectories and its development hinges on the ever-​ increasing complexity of the interactions among them. Four of the categories are the four axes of visual exploration that consist of actual orbits of the lens around the rig supporting the camera, or, of the camera around the center of the lens itself. The rig is an intricately engineered and counterbalanced machine that allows the film plane’s movements to freely pivot the center of action in every conceivable direction; and for this description at least, these movements will serve as four of the five categories; with the soundtrack providing the fifth. These first four visual categories are not conceptual spaces as much as they are different treatments of a unified geographical space, one that very soon transcends its physicality and becomes a profoundly unified and focused conceptual space as well. At the beginning of the film only one of these visual categories is in play; toward the end they all are. The sound in the film is also of a distinctly peculiar nature in that it can be described equivalently as either real sound (the sound of something) or as music; and when we put it into one of these two descriptive frames we wind up attending to two quite different aspects of it. In each descriptive frame it has a somewhat different periodic relationship to the categories of movement in the picture. These soundtrack elements could, in either case, be described in terms of the common sonic categories of pitch and pace—​for they consist entirely of modified sine waves that vary in frequency and tempo. The fact that the timbre and amplitude vary little makes the sound more like sound, but the fact that the tones are all in fact tones—​that is, the shapes of the successive wave forms is similar enough to produce overtones—​make it more like music. If we think of it simply as sound, it is supposed to be the actual sound of the instructions that drive the motors in the mechanism that propels the camera. If we think of it as music, it has a very different function in our experience of the film. Snow’s original idea was to have the actual radio-​control commands to the camera mount be transformed into audible pulses. However this turned out to be impractical for reasons that were mostly technical originally, but quickly became aesthetic.55 It becomes apparent very soon that while the sounds are relatable to the camera’s movements they are not in tight sync with them. At this point the idea of the soundtrack as the driving sound

55 Personal correspondence, March 2014.

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of the camera’s motion peels off from that simple one-​to-​one relationship with the picture, and the periodicity of the sonic pulses begins to have its own separate compositional life and distinct set of phase relations with the periodicities in the picture. Naturally if one wishes to describe films in terms of orbital periods, with those periods having musical relationships, The Central Region has to be the central case. The only proviso is that one considers the orbits to be inside out. That is, it is the world that is apparently orbiting the camera. The overarching musical structure is definitely conventional on certain levels; that is, the film has movements—​separate developmental cycles based on different visual themes, and second it builds to a crescendo of pace and event-​density wherein there are movements in all axes simultaneously. The feeling of progression in the film has to do with the way the various nodes of each orbit sequence to collect and disperse energy—​determined by how many axes are in play, the rate at which they enter or leave consideration, the angular momentum created at their intersections, and various purely propriocentric effects. These categories all resolve periodically when there is a ‘break in the action.’ This break is necessitated to a degree by the amount of film that can fit in a standard magazine (400’ or approximately ten minutes’ worth) but more so by the formal necessity of breaking the progression of variations in the camera movement into developmental sections like the movements in a sonata or verses in a ballad. The single mechanism he uses for this consists of a static image of an X running nearly from corner to corner. These X’s, although they are similar, are in fact not identical in appearance. After tumbling through space for some period of time the appearance of the static X gives the viewers the immediate sensation of their bodies launching into motion—​in an opposite direction. The sensation is more or less deeply felt, depending on the speed, consistency, and duration of the preceding onscreen motions. The ontological reach that this effect gives the film deserves a monograph of its own, but for now we are only concerned with the musical implications of this as a structural element. For this particular musical perspective let’s consider that the terrain being filmed is the score and the camera is the player. Theoretically the camera’s movements were preprogrammed so that it could be controlled robotically. If this were the case the ‘melodies’ would be the instances of ‘objects’ from pebbles to mountains moving through the frame. In the fine-​grain, these melodies would be dictated by chance. After all, we know that Snow loves to imitate the inevitability of the machine let loose—​ from Wavelength, Back and Forth, and Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) (1976)—​a film in which a plate of glass mounted in front of a camera bulldozes a three-​dimensional scene into two dimensions as the camera dollies forward; but they are imitations. It is often Snow’s moment-​by-​moment decisions that are creating the musical structures and their articulations. This could be considered yet another category—​the plane of his decision-​making, but one that has more

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to do with the intrusion of his droll sensibility than anything particularly musical.56 La Region Centrale opens with the camera looking straight down, focused on the ground immediately below the lens, and begins a slow spiral pan around 360 degrees, tilting up incrementally with each successive revolution, revealing that all is rock, with but scant hints of vegetation, moss, and the like; rock at different scales, from the pebbles beneath—​to the craggy-​mountain horizon beyond—​until, finally, it is aimed straight up at the sky. Again pictorial minimalism forces us to concentrate on the details and the pace with which they become available in a way that is very much like the pacing of a piece of music. And if we reflect on the idea that music is the result of the mind’s giving order to otherwise meaningless patterns of sound, then this idea of a progression of events rendered orderly by a perceiving mind makes this film very much like music in yet another, slightly different way. With music, coherence comes from the cultural expectations of the genre. With this film, coherence comes from the landscape and from physics and physiology as well. With an unusual degree of fidelity, vectors of movement in this film represent vectors of meaning. The process of settling into the film is largely a matter of getting to know the terrain surrounding the mountaintop in Quebec where it was filmed. As one’s expectations become oriented, ‘objects’ reentering the frame (which they do after an orbit in one axis) are played against the speed and direction in which they move. Memory gives us the ground and anticipation provides the tension, with recognizable objects or configurations of objects functioning as nodes on that particular orbit. Another very significant way that this film is structured like music is that they both have similar relationships to attention. Music, at least in Western cultures, rarely captivates our attention totally. Western, formal, or so-​called art music seems especially prone to tolerating variable attention and the wandering mind; and Snow was well aware that people’s minds would wander during the film and that (like a piece of sculpture) it would seem like an object one contemplates at different distances and from different perspectives. The fact that we can move easily into and out of direct engagement with music or with this film and not be lost on reentry (as one typically would with a narrative) tells us something about the levels of awareness on which this kind of formal entity can operate.57 In fact it can also give us a slight tinge of understanding about the contours of awareness itself and how the direction of attention is influenced. In fact we might resort to our old friend Playland Model II to sketch out one hypothetical picture of this. 56 The resulting impact or statement, for me, represents a sublime blend of the aleatoric and the personal. 57 I have seen the film three times, and oddly enough it consistently held my attention quite thoroughly each time. However I am probably not a typical viewer.

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If you remember, Playland Model II is the one in which synchronous and directly sympathetic oscillations of the meshes is the norm, as opposed to Model I’s asynchronous, sequential oscillations. The fact that the oscillations are nearly synchronous with the stimulus means that those areas of the mesh that are assigned the initial processing of the stimulus keep vibrating in pace with the oscillations even when the arrow of attention points elsewhere, for example, toward valleys in the mesh that begin to oscillate spontaneously with other external stimuli or internally triggered associations that generate patterns only tangentially related to the external stimulus. In fact we can postulate that musical vibrations and patterns entering consciousness can act like a kind of bias current, energizing the potential for other areas of the mesh to respond to all kinds of vagrant thoughts.58 This is just another way of saying that music often stimulates the imagination in very distinct ways. In this model, as the nodes of a cyclical visual or musical form transit through their orbits and pass recurrently by the porthole of consciousness, confluences with nodes from intersecting orbits raise a resonance that sets up a longer-​lasting pattern in the deeper areas of the mesh that have only a peripheral access to consciousness. These are the stimuli that proceed directly to long-​term memory without having stopped to check in with short-​term memory. They may add to the nuances, but they are also the subconscious placeholders. These nodal confluences also have categorical relationships. That is, those junctures in the meshes that become attuned to particular confluences of the orbits oscillate in a way that is characteristic of how those junctures have previously functioned in memory by generating particular, familiar feeling patterns; and the dynamics of Playland connects them with like-​moving oscillations in ever-​outbranching areas of association. This suggests that music can enter long-​term memory without passing through short-​term memory in ways that speech rarely does. This thought experiment, like all our Playland analogies, only represents a model intended to help form a mental image and it may have nothing to do with either actual neural operating mechanisms, or other, more verifiable descriptive frameworks. After all the brain is an electrochemical organ (we have already alluded to the role of chemistry in the formation of memories) while our Playland model has a strong electrical bias. Therefore the model should also be regarded in the spirit of a heuristic dialectic or exposition. Think of the images generated by the Playland model as one of many platforms from which trains to the future might depart. The way three of Saul Levine’s films relate to the idea of periodic orbits takes the concept into three distinctly different realms of consideration—​ from one another and from the films we have discussed so far—​in that they 58 In old analog sound recording technology a bias current was added to the recording head to ‘energize’ the magnetic particles on the tape and make them more responsive to the input being recorded.

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contain images of many varied things in the world that are as, or more significant to the film’s architecture as are the periodicities of their appearance. Although we have discussed this film from several other perspectives The Big Stick is perhaps the simplest case to describe since it uses a few major forms of periodic interaction that function structurally. A  recap, since it’s been a while:  During the scenes that begin the film we see two long film loops of two similar and parallel actions—​Chaplain versus a man wielding a knife in the one and Chaplain versus the cop wielding a club in the other. While the loops have different periods as Levine cuts the action at different points, shortening or lengthening the resonance associated with that orbit, they become less distinguishable from one another on the categorical level as they continue to repeat, and habituation sets in. There are analogies to Conrad’s long introductory titles, but Levine’s use of very subtle modulations in duration simply puts us in the zone, setting us up for the blitz of single frame cutting that follows. Whereas Conrad is reputed to have the titles sit on the screen for as long as they do so that epileptics could actually have time to get up and leave (and so that others whose patience was tried would get up and leave also) Levine seems to be setting the stage on which a formal drama can play out with maximum effect. For the body of the film, as you’ll remember, Levine intercuts scenes from the same two original films, Easy Street and A Day in the Park, with footage shot off a TV of antiwar demonstrations. The response of viewers will be conditioned by how familiar they are with the two Chaplain films and, to a degree also, on whether the iconic nature of the shots of an antiwar demonstration raise specific memories and associations for those old enough to remember the protests against the war in Vietnam. For those who have this familiarity with Chaplain’s work there may be categorical information pertaining to which specific film the intercut scenes are from. For those that are less so, the associations with these periodic elements are more likely to be tied to the specific characters and/​or locations pictured. One of the forms of repetition in the film consists of orbits whose categories shift as the story is moved along and new characters and physical spaces are introduced. Another periodic element with its own distinct orbit has to do with the directions of the implied motions, where the spatial transitions are the centers of categories—​as when Chaplain is punched out of the right edge of one scene and staggers into the left edge of an entirely different location. Others are centered on the different characters that Chaplain interacts with: the preacher, the dope addict, the cop, the lady with the hat, and so on. With all of the elements so contained, this musical structure of interlocking periodicities, while it is energizingly complicated to actually experience, functions quite simply around rhythm: the periodic rhythm of the actions being intercut against the periodic rhythm of the appearance of the different characters and locations—​all interacting with the rhythmic grounding of the visible splice. Sometimes there is implied continuity in the interaction

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of these categories and sometimes there is discontinuity. The discontinuities create the tensions that are ultimately resolved by an accumulating overall impression. That is, through our growing familiarity with Levine’s hyperactive technique, the photographed spaces that contain the characters and their tightly edited kineticism resolve into the overall conceptual space and rhythmic shape of the film. The guideline continues to be that as nodes in orbits move out of sync, a kind of formal tension is induced and when they begin to drift together they resolve. This may well be why a crescendo is so common in formal works:  when many nodes come together at once and tensions on many levels in a piece begin to resolve, the result is much heightened activity, which could also be thought of as a greater ‘vector density.’ The main point in all of this is that individuals with their very distinct perspectives—​as well as individual viewings by the same person, can generate distinct categorical impressions, something that makes the work viewable many times with, subsequently, distinctly different impressions—​just like a piece of music. Notes of an Early Fall has a similar prelude where an action repeats for a seemingly unconscionable period. In this case the orbits are of nearly identical length as the tone arm of the old analog record player hits a warp, jumps, and then lands unpredictably on one groove or another. The very explicit periodicity of the prelude is then followed by a series of shots of various actions that are also mostly periodic—​an animal pacing back and forth in a cage, a bird trying again and again to fly through a closed window, and so on. The components of the patterns of repetition—​the lengths of individual shots, the order of intercutting, the speed and energy of the interaction and so on create those larger patterns that interact on a more abstract level to create overall musical forms through the series of recurrent structures whose manifestations are themselves periodic. The categories that are active in creating the musical structure of the prelude are again almost entirely different than the categories that are active in the body of the film. Since the prelude consists of a single long take with no cuts, the variations in nodal confluences have only to do with when, in the song, and where, on the record, the tone arm lands. This period creates tensions around the leaping action of the tone arm where the inevitability of it hitting the huge warp in the record is set against the indeterminacy of where it will land, while the shaky handheld peregrinations of the camera, like a neurotic sax solo, give the shot a maniacal kind of focus that produces yet another level of tension. The structure of the entire film is, in this way, very much like the structure of a typical blues song, that is, closely repeated riffs with minor variations creating ongoing tensions and minor resolutions. In another way it is more like an opera with an elaborate prelude followed by a cascade of formal histrionics. The categories that make up the structure of the prelude might, depending on the conversation, include its palette (muted colors with an overall yellow cast), the character of motion inside the frame (a nearly identical

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arched movement at a nearly identical period), the character of motion of the frame itself, as the handheld camera’s motion veers here and there; and further associations that lead to one or another affective implications—​like the growing sense of frustration and rage that are the unifying thrum of the film, its central emotional note. We might describe it as a film in the key of frustration with excursions to the key of rage. My earlier description of Raps and Chants I, with John Broderick focused on its psychomimetic qualities and only briefly considered its musical form. Through the lens of orbital periodicity however, the explicit relationships to recurrence are both covert and overt. Overt in that Broderick verbally describes the periods that repeated over and over again during his acid trip, reliving them with increasing urgency: for instance, the loops, as he calls them, the recurrent hallucinations of things that kept going past him “whoosh, whoosh like wipes in a movie”; and covert as the formal tensions build throughout each of the three camera rolls with Broderick’s increasing agitation building—​and then releasing, when the roll ends with a flare, followed by a new round of rising tension at the beginning of the next. As Broderick gets progressively more caught up, round by round, in the telling of his experience we get progressively more drawn into his emotional condition through these orbits of tension and release. The idea of orbital periodicity as a category allows us to visualize the tensions and resolutions of musical or cinematic form as the aggregation and dispersal of nodal intersections in interrelated orbital systems, where a node equals how or when or where a repeated unit or configuration coalesces. Phrases, melodies, harmonies, rhythmic structures, riffs, repeated frame clusters, recurrent emotional excursions—​any recurrent sensible unit of association that can be permuted within recognizable bounds (on both sensible and less sensible levels) can act as an orbital period, each with a node participating in a formal structure; each node having an emotionally calibrated valence in relation to the other nodes. This architectural view may be the clearest way of looking at how musical memory relates to structures in melodic or poetic cinema: They operate on one another in the manner of recursive streams, interacting with the gathering associations that grow as a result of that formal recurrence: the theme with its variations. The idea of category in the above discussion serves to shape one descriptive framework. The advantages of this particular framework are, first, that it provides a perspective from which a kind of organization can be seen, and second that it allows us to apply temporary, ad-​hoc labels to otherwise unnamable events, sensations, and meta-​sensations that we find similar. The main disadvantages of applying categorical labels are, first, that the idea of the category has acquired a sense of rigidity in the general culture. But what’s more important is that it tricks us into believing that what we have so named actually is. I might call it one of language’s oldest tricks. We do not at all wish to invoke that sense in our use!

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61.  Description, allegory, the heuristic dialectic, and a short bridge to the future The caution to “watch your language” with which the last section ended invokes a difficult and stringent prescription that many readers may be loath to entertain. It certainly requires that one adopt a view of language that demands a level of thoughtfulness that can gum up the works when things need to be accomplished in the world. I  have been arguing however that there are many situations where ignoring this prescription gums things up even more, as I noted in my earlier discussion of Donald Schön and Michael Reddy’s recognitions about the abundance of inappropriate metaphorical frames in everyday talk. By way of summarizing the ground I believe we’ve covered in this especially difficult part of the book I am asking the reader to tread on this ground with an almost impossible degree of caution. How does one use the word ‘category’ with the implicit acknowledgment that it is only a word and not an actual item in the world? Unfortunately, there are as many answers to this question as there are occasions to use the word! The main overarching answer, however, is that we consider it through the lens of a very different idea of what meaning entails—​the idea that has been the foundational premise of this book, that is, that meaning is a dynamic process whose essence can only be ascertained by examining the context of the use. Part III of this book has elaborated on this fundamental, foundational idea in the process of attempting to describe something for which there are no words yet. Metaphors allow descriptions to cover more ground; allegories allow descriptions to cover yet more ground and provide a wider field of view; but with an even greater risk that the mental images we form in doing so will have even less correspondence to the situation under description or the intent of the describer. In this light I  can only hope that the metaphors of periodicity, of orbits, indeed of categories has been able to provide a scaffold from which we have created a credible explanation or perspective to fruitfully compare musical structure to cinematic structure. However I hope I have demonstrated, to at least some degree, that given their power for generating mental images, the critical reader must temper her or his responses to metaphors and allegories, ever alert to the risk of falling for tropes and fields of tropes that are inappropriately framed for the situation. This, unfortunately, is not a straightforward proposition and requires the kind of awkward vigilance that has tied us up in knots throughout much of this part of the book. So please allow me to attempt a summary of these ideas that will both justify this linguistic vigilance and also make clear its importance to ways of thinking about cinema. We began Part III with an abstracted description of a nameless poetic film; a description that, more or less, could have covered almost any of the works we have discussed; and yet none of the descriptive terms we used

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were cinema specific. In fact they all alluded to other art forms that have been around forever. The point of this exercise was twofold. In the first place I  wanted to demonstrate how easily descriptive terms appropriate to one medium can serve, with a shift in context, to describe another. In the second place I wanted to begin a discussion on how we are to describe events and actions that are so new to us that we do not have any conventional framework for describing their effective, and especially their affective, nature. This discussion led us soon enough to a consideration of metaphor and how it might be applied to poetic cinema. But first we needed to reevaluate the role of metaphor in its native environment. We took two somewhat unconventional approaches: one challenged the nature of the literal in language and the other explored speculations about the neural basis for language comprehension in order to bolster my conviction that the metaphorical in language is prior to the literal. Then, after numerous, hopefully scenic and informative diversions, we examined the montage and its relationship to metaphor via a comparison of Eisenstein’s classic analysis of montage styles by using the allegory of Playland I, II, and III that was meant to illuminate some speculations about the ways that the brain handles verbal language as compared to music and cinema. One of the intentions of spinning this allegorical picture was to aid in our pivot to thinking about memory in providing a basis for formal structures in time-​based arts like music and cinema. And this led us into the strange and seemingly tangential consideration of categories, both perceptual and conceptual. Lurking behind every move in my method has been has been the same expositional device that has featured throughout the book and will feature to an even greater degree as we begin the discussion of the digitization of cinema and its melding again with other media: the heuristic dialectic; that is, the establishment of ideas on potentially opposite ends of an intellectual spectrum in order to gain a temporary picture of the terrain; a picture that has often been meant to be abandoned for yet another perspective as a way of gaining a progression of insights. In the next part of the book we will be making some much broader, and even more far-​fetched, comparisons and so we will revert to an expository style that will meld the first three parts of the book, relying even further on tropes, allegories, and the sharp shifts in perspective afforded by the heuristic dialectic. The insights I am hoping to provoke may require yet greater mental stretches as I move away from science toward discussions more appropriate to the foggy worlds of phenomenology and neurological speculations. I only hope that you may find these discussions entertaining and illuminating.

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Part IV The Moving Target

It is axiomatic in linguistics that any human being can learn any language in the world. —​Eric Lenneberg

62.  Digital ubiquity—​the memosphere and the mediasphere So far we’ve been discussing the past, attempting to secure perspectives that would allow us to look toward the future. There is nothing, however, that can make a writer seem more quaint (at best), or even foolish, than having the future come run him down. However, the digitizing of reality has upped the ante on our need to understand the growing implications of ubiquitous mediation, and has done it with the very same mechanism of articulation that was introduced with the invention of photography and that then got moved to another level by the cinema machine: the slicing of time. That slicing has perhaps found its ultimate resolution in digital sampling. Before photography, our knowledge of the past was mediated in rather coarse swipes by historical chronicles and letters, along with antique artifacts like buildings, furniture, and paintings. Early photographs required long exposure times—​on the order of seconds; but still, this meant our knowledge of what the past looked like was, for the first time, encapsulated in a more or less instantaneous slice. Not only that, but the image that was produced was connected to an actual moment by the laws of physics. We can regard a photograph as compressed historical information that is decoded when we look at it. We can regard a painting that is a representation of the past the same way actually, though its manner of compression and decompression might require more arcane speculations. Even though this idea of coding and decoding can embrace all of the telling of history, the

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term ‘codec’ has only recently entered everyday talk. So, any representation of the past can be regarded as an encoding (with compression) of events that are decoded (and decompressed) later by historians in the light of subsequent evidence. When the first photograph sliced time and compressed the light that plays in color and in three dimensions in the world into the two-​dimensional grayscale of a photograph, our relationship to the past changed in the most profound ways. With the movie camera, life could be sliced faster yet, fast enough that the slices, for the first time ever, could be reassembled in such a way as to seem contiguous. Digital slicing can reduce and then recreate not only light, but sound and, for that matter, any measurable component of our sensory universe—​into a binary code: exists here/​does not exist here. This ultimate in reductionism magnifies immeasurably the ontological shift that was initiated with verbal language: the displacement between a thing and its mediated presentation. The idea that everything can be represented by the sheer arrangement of two fundamental states puts the condition of human knowledge and perhaps consciousness in a new place once again. It should not surprise us then that promoting the ways that binary code can spread knowledge has become a field of spontaneous and universal invention. The perspective that allows us to see meaning as mental movement has a new arena in which to play. Earlier we launched a mini encomium on the word ‘idea’. A meme is an idea that has the power to replicate. The idea of the meme, or, if you will, the meme of the meme moves the idea of the idea into an evolutionary context. Daniel Dennett (1991: 200) points us to Richard Dawkins’s stripped down formulation of the fundamental principle behind natural selection: that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities; and goes on to quote Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976: 206): The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process. But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replication and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind. Dennett (1991) then goes on to list a few central memes such as the wheel, wearing clothes, the right triangle, the alphabet, the calendar, and so on. He dubs memes as “units of imitation” (202). This ultrasimple idea, whose power I believe is obvious, can serve as a filter through which we can

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pass the first three parts of this book. This should allow us to generalize our lessons from the past into a perspective that, while it won’t allow us to peer into any crystal balls, will give us an analytical framework through which we can connect the ‘codec’ meme with the evolution of mediation. Dennett links phylogeny with ontogeny using a wonderful metaphor on the acquisition of language by young humans: One of the first major steps a human brain takes in the massive process of postnatal self-​design is to get itself adjusted to the local conditions that matter the most: it swiftly (in two or three years) turns itself into a Swahili or Japanese or English brain. What a step—​like stepping into a cocked slingshot! (200) There seems to be some agreement about the relative speed with which language burst onto the human scene, and there is general agreement about the evolutionary advantages of language. The origin of language, however, is an almost primal mystery, being by definition prehistoric and without the stains of archaeological evidence.1 The contemporary and analogous explosion of the codec’s recognition and value seems equivalently self-​evident, but this time around, the chroniclers are out in force. In fact one could say that this process of evolution is self-​chronicling. As we begin to think about digitizing the moving image we will temporarily abandon two of our previous, peculiar, alternate experiences of cinema that were so central to the first three parts of this book: first, the cinema that is a nearly hermetic experience, that is, a frame of light playing on a screen, surrounded by a protecting darkness that is bracketed by an enforced beginning and end; and second, the cinema that is a medium for the esoteric and the poetic. We will also, temporarily, shift our focus from the past, our recollections and experiences, to some expectations we might have of the digitized future as we explore the new relationship between memosphere and mediasphere and as we suss out some possibilities for the digital image meme-​spawner. But first let’s try to get a running start at the history of this issue by looking at the difference between the camera obscura and the first photograph. According to one story, the principle of the camera obscura enters history in the fifth century bc in China and is mentioned in the West by Aristotle at almost the same time. The effect can be seen in nature when certain conditions are met: light shines through a pinhole, perhaps in a leaf, and lands on a more or less flat surface like the wall of a building, and seemingly magically, a perfectly sharp image of everything on the other side of the pin hole is cast, upside down on the surface. Once the effect was noticed, 1 According to Christine Kenneally (2007: 22) the study of the origins of language was actually proscribed in linguistics for over 100 years.

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the conditions were then re-​created, perhaps in the tenth century, and a device was fabricated for the express purpose of capturing and then tracing a two-​dimensional image of three-​dimensional space. We knew how to form images from pure light by passing them through a pinhole long before we knew how to capture them with verifiable, photo-​graphic precision. The very word ‘camera,’ this Latin word for ‘room,’ plucks an interesting chord when we’re thinking about the relationship between mediation and consciousness: it has come to mean the very chamber of modern mediation (especially within three-​dimensional software applications). But also, since the 1970s, when Julian Jayne’s popular but controversial book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind focused popular attention on the difference in function of the two hemispheres (or cameras) of the brain, the word ‘camera’ has taken on added resonance with its allusion to the seat(s) of consciousness. A camera obscura aided drawing, produced by tracing the light that falls on a translucent surface after passing through a pinhole or a lens, is an artifact mediated by a person over an indeterminate period of time and loosed from the proximal effects of physics by the human will. So, it is not evidence of the actual contents of the scene. For the longest time the pre-​digital photograph was considered evidence—​evidence of the differential of photonic energy collected across the surface of a photosensitive emulsion. The knowledge we could derive from early photographs used to have a quite secure degree of certainty attached to them. With the movies, the very idea of the evidence of the image was at issue again. The Lumières reportedly2 jolted the security of their early audiences, creating a moment of uncertainty about the reality of the image, as witnessed by their supposedly trying to bolt from the path of the image of an oncoming train—​but after recovering from this initial shock, they apparently were quite certain that, as an image, it was a faithful recording of a real event. D.  W. Griffiths’s fictional dramas had the crisp ontological duality in which an audience could feel certain that the recording of actors (people pretending to be people that they weren’t) was, at least, a true recording of dramatic actions. Méliès’s insights regarding the disconnect between the recording and the playback instruments, however, fractured the idea that this medium necessarily produced faithful recordings of the passage of time.3

2 I repeat this report, even though it is something I personally find incredible. This level of primal naiveté in the face of mediation, being then immediately followed by such a rapid and widespread loss of innocence—​as the illusion is grasped as illusion—​would speak volumes about our relationship as creatures to our perceptual sphere. I prefer to chalk this report to journalistic melodrama. See Tom Gunning’s “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and The (In)credulous Spectator,” in Art and Text, Spring 1989: 31–​45. 3 Since Méliès’s method demanded that he expose the film one frame a time so that he could make substitutions in content in between frames, his scenes took much longer than ‘real

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Though cinema’s temporal veracity was an early casualty, the spatial veracity4 (the accurate representation of objects) in both photography and cinema has been made moot by the currently common practice of selective pixel replacement. Some might even argue that the prevalence of ‘Photoshopping’ and computer-​generated special effects has caused collateral damage to all our assumptions about the veracity of any digital representations. If so, we owe an oblique kind of debt: we are better off for the loss of innocence; for I believe that neutrality (or even skepticism) in the face of any information stream beats credulousness any day. The ubiquity of digital image manipulation ices this cake. It’s not that the laws of physics don’t apply to digital images; it’s just that it is only marginally possible to detect how any individual image’s coding has been manipulated. Suddenly, in the digital age, mediation is manipulation in a whole new way. Digitization puts image-​making back on the same level as writing—​as a fully manipulable medium. Making this comparison now, at this level, reminds us that the semantic and the syntactic are merely the cores around which full meanings in verbal language dance, in a similar way that the lensed image falling on the sensor of a digital camera, along with the requisite processing procedures, are merely the cores around which digitally manipulated images dance. Digitization also turns words into plastic, graphic objects, or elements. John Cayley investigates the idea of poetic writing in an all-​digital medium both in his theoretical writing and in his more poetic picture/​sound oriented work when he considers the literal movement of words. In his essay Writing on Complex Surfaces5 he attributes the origin of the idea of the literally moving word to the concrete poetics of Saul Bass, whose medium was movie title design; a medium in which words are often used as moving graphic elements, that is, visual objects. Our expectation, nowadays, is that images of words can move, just like any other images. So, one little bit of fallout from this inevitable development is that words are sometimes tokens (they stand for something), sometimes items (they are something), and sometimes images (e.g., they may have transparency)—​but are always words. Something about the word remains as a core around which the codec now dances to provide a yet-​more-​manipulated fullness of meaning.

time’ to photograph. Because he was working with slow film, and therefore had to shoot his scenes in sunlight, he had to use a stage that would revolve on a plane that countered the earth’s movement, and therefore stabilized the positions of shadows within the scene. See my comments on the indexical nature of sunlight in my discussion of The Ogre in Part II of this book. 4 This is a highly problematic term—​problems that are readily invoked when we consider how various focal lengths of lenses render space differently. But rather than treat these complexities here, I beg that you take this as a very superficial description of this issue. 5 See http://​www.dichtung-​digital.org/​2005/​2-​Cayley.htm for the essay.

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The memosphere is, as Dennett (1991) reminds us, a competitive environment. He makes the memosphere sound an awful lot like the mediasphere: “Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry into as many minds as possible” (206). Let’s posit that the values that determine selection in both realms is a balance between credibility on the one hand and a/​effect on the other; taking this perspective, it becomes tempting to think of the mediasphere as an in vitro equivalent of the memosphere, one in which we can, with a detached and analytical stance, watch the evolution of ideas unfold. If we do, we might just get the impression that change does not necessarily mean progress, or perhaps that evolution itself is full of circularities and dead ends. Fashion is, after all, fickle. Some of the new memes of the mediasphere and their evanescence or longevity are always going to surprise us. The vectors of meaning with which we were concerned in the first two parts of this book suddenly start to seem constrained by the very materiality of their transport mechanisms. Even when we were talking about the almost infinitely resonant qualities expected from reciprocal, omnivalent references when we were discussing poetic films, for instance, we were constrained to considering the relationships among: (1) a single audience member, pretty much; (2) a single work, or at best a genre of work; (3) an author (usually an individual rather than a cohort); and (4)  a culture in which the cross-​referencing of ideas usually happened through slow, analog mechanisms. The atomization and diffusion of digitized ideas and memes, more or less instantaneously and planet-​wide, means that our consideration of vectors has acquired several new dimensions including a trans-​lingual and cross-​ cultural participation in a remarkably egalitarian economics—​ one with implicit massively parallel feedback mechanisms. And, not to be underestimated: one that has moral and ethical dimensions of an entirely new order to consider. We can see meaning in the movement of digital and digitally driven markets—​new meaning as well as a very new kind of market with new styles of relationship; we can see new kinds of meaning in the mining of the ever-​changing data of human commerce as it is reflected on the World Wide Web. But still, there is something more, something of yet an entirely different order and functioning in a very different realm. Both the memosphere and the mediasphere operate via highly elaborate parallel processing of information feedback—​as does both musical performance and consciousness (at least in many hypothetical models).6 Input and output are continually modifying one another. The analogy of the

6 See c­ hapter 5 of Ray Cattell’s (2006) survey An Introduction to Mind, Consciousness and Language on ‘connectionism,’ as well as previous footnotes on Gerald Edelman’s work in Part III of this book.

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organization of consciousness to that of an orchestra pops up in the literature again and again.7 Often the analogy is qualified by imagining that the orchestra of consciousness is either sight-​reading or involved in spontaneous invention; and different models emphasize the role of the conductor and the character of her/​his interventions, to different degrees. But it is the tendency toward harmony of feedback in both realms that makes the analogy appealing.8 Now this analogy has become a three-​corner comparison, another trialectic involving consciousness, language, and the mediasphere. The organizations of the neural impulses in consciousness and in the codices (grammars) of the different kinds of languages involve the attainment of harmonies in feedback loops. Digitization has brought the time scale involved in the propagation and synergy of memes a step closer to the propagation and synergy of entities in pre-​consciousness. This suggests that imposing an orchestral model on the information flux of the web could yield interesting patterns. Of course we have yet to sort out wherein the harmonics lie; and among these realms, what role they play. In any case we can see that the codec is not merely a meme, but a memiverse, within which dwell countless memes of countless stripes. One could say that it is the concept of a codec that makes the concept of a mediasphere viable and operable. It may or may not be true, as Dawkins and Dennett would have us think, that the physiology underlying human consciousness is fundamentally changed by and evolves through memes; but whether or not this kind of evolution has a biological corollary at any level below the synaptic, it is illuminating.

63.  Compression and consciousness Okay. Now we need to rub our hands together in preparation for some heavy lifting as we begin to describe the vectorscape of the digital mediasphere. In effect this consideration will push the implications from Parts II

7 For example, see Evolving the Mind by A. G. Cairns-​Smith (1996: 204, 290–​1, 296). 8 I had an opportunity to watch and then study ensemble sight-​reading during the early 1970s. A friend of mine used to throw elaborate dinner parties to which she invited collections of professional musicians who would have to play for their supper. These players were mostly members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra or local chamber groups, and so played together on a regular basis. The trick of the evening was that they would have no idea what they would be playing beforehand. So their performance was really an elaborate game of sight-​reading in which players were not allowed to stop playing during a movement. No matter what it was sounding like, or who was lost—​they had to keep plowing ahead. The overall dynamic of these performances had such a singular resemblance to spontaneous, conversational speech in its stress patterns that I spent many months re-​creating and filming musical events like these, and then studying the films, played back at different speeds, in order to observe these dynamics more closely.

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and III of this book through the digitizer: So, we will reconsider parsing—​ dividing the world into sharable pieces with words, pictures, and musical tones—​moving this idea from the analog zone of fuzzy edges and relative values, into a new, and very hard-​edged, if not absolute framework. To do this we have to tackle some of the particulars of signal compression. But we should back up for a moment here. Since we’re trying to describe a vectorscape, we need to map the term to the environment at a more fine-​grained level. First off, what is a vector? A  vector is a description of movement in terms of direction, velocity, and duration. Direction typically describes spatial values, that is, position within the three dimensions of a Cartesian grid. But we can bring entirely different kinds of directional values and qualities into play—​moral, economic, elliptical-​ness, color-​space, affective, and so on—​depending on the salient aspect of any phenomenon or work before us. One vector might be as indeterminate as the description of the increase in emotion over the course of a melodrama as a way of discussing the dramatic shape, or dynamic of a work. Another vector might be as tightly specified as the changes in voltage over time that animates the digital device, rendering a precisely expected result. Also, we need to take a closer look at how we use the word ‘significant’ in our upcoming analysis, since it is a key concept in thinking about signal compression—​the topic at hand. We described the radical transition from analog to digital as a shift from relative to absolute. When we describe an analog signal, we describe a continuity of values. A digitized signal, on the other hand, is one that by definition has precisely demarcated values: one data set per slice. However, while the voltage values in a digital signal may only operate in terms of being on or off, absolutely there or not there—​the world, at least above the quantum scale, is analog—​so signal levels cannot actually go from zero to n, instantaneously. They can however make this change at a rate that renders the transition time insignificant within the values of the operating system. The shutter in that old mechanical digitizer, the movie camera/​projector, can be seen in the same light. That is, we don’t really go instantaneously from full light to full black on the screen the way it seems to us perceptual slowpokes. Actually, a softly shadowed bar of darkness sweeps in a line across the screen. So here we see that our description of vectors is determined by the threshold of significance that is required in the context of any particular discussion. Let’s start out by just considering the parsing of light during its mediation. Good engineering suggests that we should match the characteristics of the systems between which we wish to port information. It should be no surprise then that both the analog and digital encoding of mediated light should be engineered specifically to meet up with the values of human visual systems. This simple fact will give us a wonderful window onto possible mechanisms of consciousness, as we’ll see in a bit.

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The human visual system, starting at the eyeball, is a highly active system. We already know that we fabricate the impression of a stable image from a data stream that is in constant flux due to, among other things, saccadic eye movements. If we cancel out these movements, vision evaporates. Also, we create for ourselves the impression of a uniformly highly detailed world by fusing (somewhere in our visual processing systems) the high resolution of the center of the visual field covered by the fovea, with data of a far lower resolution from our peripheral vision. We also fabricate a sense of coherent horizontal space from data streams that split the left and the right sides of the visual fields from either eye, recombining them at the optic chiasm. Leave it to be said then, that vision itself is a highly encoded process. Obviously the same must be true for the other senses (not to mention their collusion in the appearance of a world). Full comprehension of these codices would enable a major description of the difference between experience and reality—​even though that description still might not get us very far. Our visual system also takes the continuum of visible light—​from black to white, across the visible spectrum—​and breaks it into luminance data and color data, with two different kinds of receptors: rods for luminance and cones for color. The color spectrum is further broken down by cones tuned to three different parts of that spectrum—​one kind of cone is most sensitive to the red end of the spectrum, another to the blue end, and the third to the green, in between. (One would have to think of this as an analog kind of sampling since there is a great deal of overlap in the frequencies of the light waves to which the three types of cones respond.) The processed data stream of our visual system is also variable both in terms of resolution and in terms of bandwidth, depending on the conditions and needs of consciousness. The encoding/​decoding of the moving electronic image is designed to work with this profile. A component, analog video signal is carried on three wires. One of these carries just luminance data (Y) matching the function of the rods. The other two wires carry color data matching the profiles of the cones; that is, one of these carries representations of the energy from the blue end of the spectrum minus the luminance data (B-​Y) and the other carries representations from the red end minus the luminance data (R-​Y). Values for green are computed from what’s left over—​data that’s arrived at from the subtraction of values from known data—​a tricky but very valuable strategy in the world of signal compression. The main goal of electronic image signal compression is to fit the maximum amount of significant data into the minimum space (bandwidth). This job requires knowing what our visual systems take as significant—​and being very, very clever with the design of the processing systems or protocols. When I speak of our visual systems, I don’t just mean our eyes and those parts of our brains directly involved in image formation. Dennett’s theory of consciousness (among others) involves considerations of neural timing.

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Dennett’s (1991: 101) perspective, which he calls the Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness, is counterposed to a model he calls the Cartesian Theater, which presupposes a center of consciousness where all sense data is presented simultaneously. He uses an analysis of a psychological experiment to show why this model can’t work. According to Dennett, “The philosopher Nelson Goodman had asked [the psychologist Paul] Kolers whether the phi phenomenon persisted if the two illuminated spots were different in color, and if so, what happened to the color of ‘the’ spot as ‘it’ moved?” (114). The answer to the question posed a mystery, for it seems that the spot abruptly changes color in the middle of the move. Somehow the brain tells us that the spot changed to the color of the second stimulus at a time we perceive as having preceded the stimulus itself. How can that be? Dennett’s explanation of this is elaborate and fascinating—​ and ultimately yields the view that, just as there is no center of consciousness, there is ultimately no single, “canonical” version of reality. He goes further and says, “The idea of a special center in the brain is the most tenacious bad idea bedeviling our attempts to think about consciousness” (108). A little further on, he elaborates: According to the Multiple Drafts model, all varieties of perception—​ indeed all varieties of thought or mental activity—​are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous editorial revision. (111) Thereby we, for instance, iron out the jerkiness of saccadic eye movements into a smooth reality. Dennett’s way of dealing with perceptual conundrums, like that of the colored phi experience, utilizes one ferociously complex set of metaphors; and for all I know his other data may demand this complexity. However, reconciling the timing of image formation, recognition, and interpretation, with the concerns of the video engineer has a great deal to say to us about possible mechanisms of consciousness. Video engineers have what seems to me a simpler way of handling at least superficially similar conundrums en route to their compression of the digital video signal. I’ll try to make this as simple and as sweet as I can: While the information in a frame of physical, chemically encoded film is registered simultaneously across the entire image plane and the information in a digital video image is encoded pixel by pixel, we can still think of the individual film grains as corresponding to both horizontal and vertical samples of the image; the finer the grain, the higher the sample rate. The big difference being that in film, all the data for each frame is encoded and presented simultaneously, and in video, all information is encoded and decoded serially, but not necessarily in order.

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It goes something like this: light goes through the lens of the video camera and then through a prism-​like device that separates it into the three component colors—​red, green, and blue—​that correspond to the parsing of the spectrum by the three kinds of cones in the retina. Each of these monochromatic images lands on a separate charge-​coupled device (CCD), which, pixel by pixel, translates the photonic energy from that part of the spectrum into voltage values. These values are ‘read’ off the CCD in a linear progression, until the entire frame is scanned. For each pixel there are at least the three data streams encoding values for luminance and color, plus other machine relevant information. In order to reduce the amount of data the system needs to handle, various compression schemes have been invented for throwing away ‘insignificant’ data. Compression schemes fall into two classes called ‘lossless’ and ‘lossy.’ The former allows compressed data to be decompressed to a state identical to the data stream before compression. The latter compresses data in such a way that when reconstituted, the losses are insignificant in the application for which that particular codec was designed. If we are compressing a single still image, we use the same basic strategy that we used in reducing the amount of data that needs to be carried in a component video signal: we focus on differences. That is, if adjacent pixels are identical we don’t need to report all the data for each pixel. In fact we may only need to report the differences in data among pixels, reducing the data stream, yet allowing its exact reconstruction upon decompression. If we are compressing a moving image though, there are two further types of compression used—​each of which might be either lossless or lossy. (For simplicity, however, I’m limiting this description to the example of MPEG9 compression.) There is the compression of each frame, as described above, called intra-​frame compression, and there is the compression that occurs between frames, known as inter-​frame compression, which uses the difference between frames in encoding the information. In order to do this, of course, it needs some mechanism for comparing the data, not just in adjacent pixels, but also in adjacent frames. That means it needs to be able to store frames for comparison. It does this in what’s called a ‘frame buffer.’ What’s truly amazing is that the mpeg coding loop analyzes the image stream into three different kinds of frames, I-​frames, P-​frames, and most amazing of all, B-​frames—​depending on the amount of data in each and the change in the amount of data between adjacent frames. The I-​frame or initial frame is only compressed with reference to internal differences among pixels and is therefore compressed the same way as a still image. The P-​frame however is compressed according to how it differs from the I-​frame that immediately precedes it. This requires a one-​frame buffer. A B-​frame requires a two

9 MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group.

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frame buffer, since it is compared both with the preceding frame and also with the frame that follows it—​looking for differences that need reporting, either to provide for reconstruction of all detail (lossless) or of significant detail (lossy). Sequential frames therefore are not encoded and decoded by the mpeg compressor in order. For instance, an I-​frame (which starts every group of pictures) will be encoded first. Next it might encode frame number four, a P-​frame which is compared backward to number one for compression, after which frames two and three will be compressed with both forward and backward reference to their differences from both frames one and four. MPEG compression requires many frame buffers, lots of parallel processing, and a great deal of flexibility in data sampling strategies. Sound familiar? Well, yes, it might sound familiar—​but so what?

64.  What medium? Once again, I’ll emphasize that my approach is embedded in the belief that an analysis must locate and penetrate the essentials of any medium if we’re to understand the possible referential relationships that medium has to offer. Well, we’re in another and distinctly new medium here. In fact there’s new doubt about just what is the medium. Or, to put it another way, we have a new set of ways of using the word ‘medium.’ It’s no longer just motion pictures we have to think about. It’s a more generalized and blended kind of information flow that we might just call ‘moving ideas,’ or, if we want to put an economic/​evolutionary spin on it (i.e., reckoning them in terms of their long-​term propagation), as‘moving memes’; moving in dimensions that are new in our experience. Our talk about cinema distinguished between pictures, words, and music as different media with distinct essentials. But on one level, that’s just talk. I think it’s both illuminating and humbling to think that, once in the digital data stream, these distinctions vanish—​you can’t look at a stream of bits and readily parse it into the kinds of information that we ultimately segregate with the languages we call ‘software applications.’ It’s all just the same flux of zeroes and ones. This blendability of words, pictures, sounds, and music, this plasticity, is one essential characteristic of the digital medium overall. On other levels of course, there are still many distinctions to be made—​the digitized images of motion are still being segmentalized—​handled as individual frames,10 whereas digitized sounds are segmentalized at a radically

10 Although on the compression level they are handled as frame groups.

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different rate. With writing the segmentalization of the data stream seems to especially revert to the binary; that is, the ASCII code for any document is continuous. But it’s both in the fiscal and in the bandwidth economics of these three sub-​media where the biggest distinction remains. Plotting a general economic vectorscape of the digital mediasphere becomes quite informative: how far any meme travels and into how many places; if it replicates, and if so how fast and how widely, how accurately and across how many languages and cultures, all of these things can now be tracked, analyzed, and organized into hierarchies. There are certain iconic pictures that we can think of as memes; graphic styles can attain meme-​hood, musical styles, melodies, rhythms, and musical tropes can become memes, both as themselves, and as examples of a style of expression that can be elaborated upon, or fruitfully varied; therefore, styles of expression themselves can become memes. These questions represent one way of looking at the bandwidth economics of digital memes. Another way of course has to do with real economics, the economics of money, and not just what we might otherwise call ‘energetics.’ This domain, that of the digital barker, however, represents an ongoing struggle for dominance whose outcome is also always up for grabs. Both of these vectorscapes are changing incredibly rapidly. Whatever I write about either of them now will be unpredictably different by the time you read this. The economics of analog meme propagation contained some sharp curves and steep thresholds. In every medium—​print, film, television, music, and (with some qualifications) radio—​the economic barriers that kept any idea from having more than a very local influence were steep, and passage was regulated by well-​established gate-​keeping mechanisms in the form of publishing, recording, and broadcasting companies. These thresholds and mechanisms not only determined the range of dispersal of any given idea, they also greatly determined the spectrum of content according to typical market vectors. One could readily sample the shop-​fronts for these analog-​ensconced vectors through such interfaces as the multiplex theater marquee, surfed TV, or a good-​old bookstore, newsstand, or record shop browse. In all these media, to different degrees, there was a pretty clear plateau defining the mainstream. Next to this plateau on the vectorscape but separated by a numerical chasm were those ideas in any medium with a much, much different set of economic vectors and probabilities (fine art, say, as distinct from entertainment, etc.). However, in both of these ‘dissemination curves,’ you would find a steep shoulder in the data. That is, both markets were extremely hierarchical. And although the two curves were shaped somewhat differently and occupied very different real estate on the graph, they could both have been described as mesas with a steeple in the middle—​where this steeple

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represented those few memes whose carrying power and centrality are undeniable (the star factor). In the digital mediasphere things are moving so fast that even snapshots of these same economic or energetic vectors are blurred. Also, these snapshots look very different whether one sees the planetwide data-​pool from the perspective of Europe or Asia, for instance. Still, there are obvious, large-​ scale, universal shifts in the mediasphere that suddenly occurred when experience fell under the digital microtome. The most fundamental shift put the tools of authorship and distribution in everyone’s hands. This directly caused the most profound shift: a disconnect between dissemination and economics, a shift that may be reversed as power centers coalesce. All at once the background vectorscape changed dramatically—​or perhaps we should say, un-​dramatically, since all the curves became flatter with the shift—​less hierarchical and more integrated. There is at this moment a big tussle happening on a field where the search engine is goalie at one end and the editor-​in-​chief or barker at the other.11 Those vertical organizers, the gatekeepers and barkers, are finding newly appropriate places in the mediasphere as well in roles that range from hero to villain. The analog mediasphere operated according to well-​entrenched economic protocols and was a safe, if stifling environment. The digital mediasphere is a dangerous place. While browsing you could easily get an ill-​intentioned vector through the back of the head. One can be pick-​pocketed, kidnapped, assassinated, or tortured if one eats bad data. Both the egalitarianism and the lack of police presence in the contemporary digital mediasphere is, no-​ doubt, a temporary thing. The human hand of order-​through-​hierarchy will, most probably, come to shape the digital mediasphere into a somewhat less unruly (and less egalitarian) environment eventually. But until it does, neutral students and observers who stand behind the safety rail can get a truly wonderful overview of the entire furniture floorshow of human disposition, in all its unbridled cultural and moral flavors. Spontaneous, immediate, long-​distance communication and the evaporation of the gatekeeper function, along with the ubiquity of the keyboard, playing tag with the audio transducer (microphone, loudspeaker, ear bud) has changed the nature of verbal language both written and spoken within the digital mediasphere and in the physical world around it. The practice of using writing for casual, intimate, but near-​immediate verbal intercourse has uncovered glowering symptoms of what can happen when words are stripped of tonal context. It’s the same set of limitations that you’ve been hearing me whinge about.12 People often seem to forget 11 At the moment (2016) the barker seems to be slowly winning the tug-​of-​war as the search engines cave in to the forces of the dollar. 12 Whinge = whine+cringe/​Aussie slang.

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how easily casual prose, without the guidance of tone of voice or rhythm of delivery, can be interpreted very differently than intended. And with just enough response-​time-​lag, error propagation is more likely than error correction. How many of us have participated in these email or instant-​message loss-​of-​inflection misunderstandings?13 Digital keyboarding has also brought with it a degree of reader acceptance of generally ill-​considered prose. Not only have external editors been ‘off-​ed’ to a large degree, but also the internal editors have been put to sleep. Cut and paste functions of word processors, along with the ease of electronic publishing, along with market changes in the publishing industry have made meme transmission a more plastic business, and has allowed the introduction of inadvertent redundancies and ‘sensical’ typographic errors into ‘published’ manuscripts. The distinction itself between ‘published’ and ‘unpublished’ has become less clear and less significant. Online newspapers, even highly reputable ones, contain more instances of incoherent writing, since there are no actual ‘editions’ online and stories pop up as events happen. Currency has nearly displaced coherence. Many books such as this one are printed ‘on demand.’14 As we’ve seen, we can think of all digitized information as one medium, or we can think of each of the modalities, picture, sound, and so on as media unto themselves. We can also think of each of the various propagation channels as a different medium: live media, recorded media, interactive media, or even finer grain—​TV, DVD, movie theater experience, cell phone, text message, and so on depending on the conversation. How we ultimately parse feature bundles into what it is we consider ‘a medium’ is under strong evolutionary pressure along with everything else. The target is truly swift. The word has a new home. It is anywhere. It is nowhere.

65.  Indeterminacy of translation revisited and context reconsidered Context can be seen to operate on at least two seemingly unrelated scales in the digital mediasphere. The first, the micro, is a brief conversation: If the world is to be represented by stringing together beads consisting of one of two values, then it is the arrangement that really carries the

13 Face icons, emojis, or emoticons have flooded in to fill this gap, but I’ve never been able to get myself to use them—​they’ve always reminded me of Ken Jacob’s dictum: “The only crime worse than murder is cute.” 14 The first version of this book had numerous errors, typos, and so on. It even had a paragraph repeated twice on one page! I justified the error to myself—​since it was in the section on repetition, I imagined it could be taken as an arch observation.

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significance.15  Context, in the ever more widely rippling and ever more coarsening granularity of binary repetitions, enables the machine to read meaning. The machine reads and executes the code in the context of the surrounding code. Meaning as the movement of the code through the machine! You can’t ask for a more tightly stipulated arrangement than that, although the fit between this simile and this new circumstance is beginning to show some strain—​a conversation we will have shortly. At the other end of the scale is a far more rambunctious conversation: How does the context in which we consider or experience digital media influence what they mean to us—​and what is it that we are considering, at any moment, to be a medium? The relative cultural impact of the context in which a message is received and processed could be a topic for endless dissertation. The boundary between the natural world and digitally mediated information streams seem (at the time of this writing) to me far hazier in Asia than in Europe or the United States. In Asia, lieutenants will routinely take cell-​phone calls while the boss is talking during a meeting; Asian students do the same in lectures and film screenings. Moving pictures are everywhere in Singapore and in urban China. In Shanghai, by 2007, video screens containing vast mixes of content were a part of the landscape—​whether it is the animation on the phone-​screen of the person next to you on the subway, or video used as background on the touch pad that serves as an elevator call button; not to mention in taxicabs and restaurants. Even the sides of skyscrapers throughout the commercial districts are crammed top to bottom with pixels flashing utterly integrated combos of moving pictures and words. Video-​barges cruise the Wangpo River at night, their screens lit with huge high-​definition images; the whole city is ablaze with a vibrant symphony of big-​pixel and little-​pixel images moving together with that remarkable and peculiarly Chinese quality of chaotic harmony—​some Chinese characters, some Western script, some Chinese words written in Western script, some Western terms written in Chinese characters. Where mediated information was once in a class of its own, in an ever more urban world the distinction between the mediasphere and the simply lived life is getting hazier. And like with the atmosphere, China seems to be in the lead. So in a world where everything, everywhere is a-​crawl with moving images, the question about what is meaningful, what isn’t and to what extent does the local environment or context in which we encounter the images determine how and on what level their vectors of meaning impact us? Let’s think of this question from the perspective of a couple of different

15 When put this way we can see that this condition is not so dissimilar to the marks on paper that add up to either an alphabet, or an ideogram. Ink on paper can also be thought of as a kind of binary encoding. Either there is ink, or there isn’t.

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terms:  intention and translation. They are both terms whose universality and global nature come to the fore in the digital mediasphere. As Quine (1969: 55) famously said, “We cannot know what something is without knowing how it is marked off from other things. Identity is thus of a piece with ontology.” All of a sudden the analysis of context becomes really slippery. For instance, just to take a relatively simple example:  the digital written word. The digital instance of the word itself is often not just restricted to the context of the single medium we call ‘print.’ It’s found embedded in pictures, in graphics, and in videos, and so on, to frame the issue one way. To look at the context of the digital word from another perspective, it’s found in news and in reviews; in the historical record as well as in blogs. It’s found in fact pretending to be fiction and fiction pretending to be fact, in seriously reasoned argument and throwaway conversation. And while written language has always had some of this plasticity, the fulcrum for this lever has, in the www, moved past some contextual tipping point. These are just two examples of the vast, unruly terrain that the expression ‘digitally encoded written word’ has to cover—​to name just a very few. It’s even harder to specify contexts for the reception and interpretation of encounters with digital speech; we wind up quibbling about machine synthesized voices that pass for real versus human voices that sound far more synthetic because of the stringency of the compression. I’m sure most older people remember the first time they saw someone in public apparently talking to themselves on a hands-​free mobile phone. The ability to talk to anyone, anywhere at any time has become a part of our expectation: the hands-​free phone is a meme. As these media proliferate, the idea of the generalized or ambient context becomes ever more nebulous. The first time I had to take a call from the other side of the planet in a canoe in the middle of the wilderness still haunts me. So let’s imagine a primitive and natural setting: The creatures are sleeping. The air is calm. There is nothing moving . . . then something darts noisily from the periphery to the center of the visual field. This gets our attention. The conditions are perfect. The signal to noise ratio is about as high as it gets. Now let’s take this interruption of utter tranquility as the baseline in plotting the conditions of a communications circumstance. The vectors describing the shift of our attention toward the movement cue, though direct as can be, are on the very fine-​grain level a bit staggered in time: Threat detection kicks in first—​it seems hardwired, we flinch. Risk assessment, followed by response evaluation kicks in shortly. Somewhere between the moving stimulus, the risk assessment, and the response evaluation, we have the key and crucial ingredient: recognition. First, is the movement a something, or is it a part of something, or the symptom of a something? Response evaluation may mark the first appearance in our full awareness of the movement. It’s at this point that intention is either imputed to the object or to the subject: Does it want to eat us? Do we want to eat it? Whatever it is, it is right

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at hand. The presence of intention (ours and theirs) conditions vector formation within any given context. Context here can consist of circumstantial conditions like signal to noise ratio, or subjective conditions like degree of hunger or fear, as well as contextually driven expectations that relate to either of the above, or things like them. Unlike the situation of a signal in the natural world, the mediasphere is purely artificial; and therefore intention, from at least one direction, is ever present. Also, the mediasphere is almost entirely interactive, to one degree or another. We might even need to make this distinction: there is a mediasphere that is under our control—​we can at least turn it off or on, attend to it or not as we please or conditions demand; and then there is a peripheral and impinging mediasphere that is presented either as a part of the environment: the buildings and barges that have become media screens, the recorded security alerts at airports; even media ancillary to other media, like pop-​up ads, robocalls, and so on. And since the mediasphere is planetwide, translation is a consideration at many, many levels. Let’s look at an example of the mediasphere that lies on the opposite end of the spectrum from that quiet natural setting. I am in a subway station in Shanghai. I am ignorant of the Chinese language. It is rush hour. Before the turnstiles, an automatic ticket machine is in the wall beneath a map of the subway system, and located next to the automatic machine there are two living attendants sitting behind glass—​ who may or may not speak my language. The map above the ticket machine is color-​coded and interactive, with the familiar touch screen graphic user interface (GUI), but all the button labels are in Chinese. I have never been here before and I have only two bits of information to guide me. One is the phonetic pronunciation of the name of the intersection I want to go to, an approximation of which I  have memorized. The other is a card with the name of that intersection written in Chinese characters. While trying to decide how to proceed amid a throng of noisy commuters, many of whom are scurrying along with cell phones to their ears or peering at the screens with their thumbs adance, I search the GUI in the vague hope that I’ll be able to quickly spot a match between the characters on my card and some characters on the GUI. I realize that I don’t know where to begin, and just as my frustration level begins to blind me, I notice a button on the top right of the screen with characters in an alphabetic language. I recognize them. They say: ENGLISH. This, of course within the context of knowing what a touch screen is and what a ‘button’ is. I touch the button. The screen translates, and I sort out the pinyin words that correspond to my memorized phonetic pronunciation. The screen tells me, using familiar Arabic numerals, how many RMB I have to pay to get there from the stop I’m at. There are also familiar numeral denominations on the bills. A cash slot looks like a cash slot and has what looks like a change dish below it. Beyond the turnstiles and throughout the

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station there are color-​coded signs with the same familiar numerals on them specifying the level and platform from which to board the appropriate train. The map also tells me how many stops to ride. This blend of analog (the map and signs) and digital media (the implementation) reflects an engineering intentionality that has been very well worked out here. Many aspects of this entire system may be considered as its GUI, including the physical (magnetic striped) tickets themselves and the signage on the platforms. In fact the interfaces between the digital communications that allow all these machines to talk to us have become so ubiquitous in an urban environment and so much a part of our expectations of life that we no longer make the distinction between medium and environment in quite the same way we used to. The question of a context, therefore, becomes a question of intention: What do we want to accomplish by specifying x as the context for y? While in the subway, we wind up imputing intention to the entire environment—​the complete layout of the place, including media types and placement. After all, this layout, with its various controls, was designed to get people—​mostly natives, but also tourists, to their destinations efficiently; a digital/​analog hybrid intended to satisfy the expectations of entering a subway system. But with media messages becoming so ubiquitous as to comprise entire environments, and becoming as dangerous statistically as any other part of the environment (or more), learning to assess the intent of a message at a distance has become a common part of the contemporary toolkit. And since beneficence or harm can come anonymously from the other side of the planet as easily as from the immediate neighborhood, sussing the intent of a message from its external wrapper has become almost as automatic a part of our perceptual criteria as recognizing snake or stick. In fact, in the digital mediasphere the very idea of who is in a neighborhood has become curiously plastic. Let’s hit two of the bottom-​level touchstones of this essay: (1) We are trying to understand something about meaning by comparing verbal language with other media; and (2) we are describing communication as a process of seizing someone’s attention and then moving it—​through progressive shifts in context. Attention is a commodity. The economics of the digital mediasphere are predicated on the ability of producers to parse users into target markets. Since the medium is a marketplace where every user is potentially both buyer and seller and as these channels of communication proliferate, it makes economic sense to parse the market ever more finely, until communications that are actually massive boilerplate broadcasts masquerade as personalized, even intimate messages. Who I am, under this light, is a data set, and how to reach me, how to grab my attention is well studied. The people in my ‘neighborhood’ are the people whose data sets most closely match mine, as seen from the perspective of any particular hunter: those people who own a

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set of the same products and use some set of the same services, wherever in the world they may dwell. I’m going, once again, to borrow a pair of closely related terms from Quine: indeterminacy of translation and inscrutability of reference in order to link intention and translation in an analysis of how this proliferation of digital media might influence the evolution of our suite of languages and thereby, the evolution of consciousness—​that is, how the mediasphere serves as a facilitator for the memosphere, which serves as a facilitator for perceptual awareness.16 In the first part of this book we noted that there is a difference between corroborating the success of a reference and the accuracy of a reference. Successful reference is easy to corroborate, as we said: the communication proceeds. Accurate reference is much harder. Judging the accuracy of a reference (when possible) depends not only on agreeing on what measures to use, and how stringently to apply them, but also actually checking up on the correspondence somehow. Normally the only time we pay attention and actually do check up on this is in those few references that are explicitly specified, like the specifications that apply to the terms of a contract. For the many other kinds of reference in ordinary verbal communication, the accuracy with which references are made is usually assumed and only occasionally questioned; with further judgments deferred. Normally we just don’t get around to confirming communications unless there is an obvious misunderstanding. The inability to correlate the speaker’s intended referent with the listener’s assumed referent on any absolute level is (what I take to be) Quine’s ‘inscrutability of reference’; and here we should note, the slop that naturally occurs within any given language is exacerbated as we move from relatively specified language to relatively metaphorical language, and then to another language altogether, using a scheme of translation. This, at any rate, is how I’m suggesting it goes in verbal language. How goes it in the digital mediasphere? First, how do we corroborate a successful reference? Well, here we have a big difference. So far we’d been looking at this question from the point of view of the listener, the receiver, the interpreter of the communication—​an individual who then acts responsively and thereby determines success or failure of continued communication. At any rate, this is how it goes in consensual, interpersonal, digital communications, where an individual is in communication with a specific other or others whose identity is assumed to be known, for example, emails between known addressees.17 Although they are 16 I beg, in advance, to be forgiven for any damage I inevitably do to the integrity of these terms from Quine’s point of view, as I bend them to my needs. 17 The email protocol of the subject line could be taken as signaling the language game, or context of the message, thereby abbreviating references.

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conditioned by being a relatively small part of a general communications environment—​one where the number of irrelevant and unwelcome calls for attention is the noise against which the signal of useful information is handled and where any expectation of focused attention must be assiduously guarded. For this small slice of the digital mediasphere the protocols are not so different from casual, analog, in-​person chat. Since there are manifold simultaneous channels, we are expected to multitask and to opt in and out of channels at will. In this environment the very idea of reference, whether successful or accurate or not, whether stipulated, specified, or implied, no longer seems an adequate term outside the tiny, personal slice of emails between associates. It is simply too analog a term. In the impersonal digital mediasphere, the connection precedes the reference when the boundary is couched in the terms: off and on. This is the terminology of the machine world and alerts us to the way the paradigm has shifted its focus from human styles of communicating to machine styles. In the machine world, accuracy of reference is assumed once connection has been established. Remember that the essence of a communications system determines its form, and that the system is essentially binary and connections are binary. At the human interface, currently the unit of meaning is the acknowledging mouse-​click, the nearly automatic signal of a successful connection. Any further clicking or mousing around that leads to an actual response might count as progress. That is to say that the intention behind the design of the interface is borne out by the either/​or decisions encoded in any return messages. It may sound dry, but people have sex this way. In the machine world, neither inscrutability of reference, nor indeterminacy of translation has any place. In fact it may be that our relative ease of handling these two items is what will continue to distinguish our use of language from a machine’s. But as of now, in the early years of the twenty-​first century, as far as human/​machine intercourse is concerned, the interfaces are still too crude, and our general experiences of them (for many of us) are still too new, for us ultimately to be helped much by a clean codec’s capacity for sorting through the messier ambiguities of our lives and languages. As digital channels come closer to approximating face-​to-​face communications and handle progressively more of the subtle affective signals that make messages successful and accurate on the human level, these more subtle references get woven around the new protocols of human-​to-​human connection through the machine. Within this view, the mediasphere can be seen as a machine with a vast number of parts, some of which are human. Be that as it may, the crispness of our individual decision-​making about whether an interpersonal communication will be accepted, rejected, or hidden from—​that, along with the universality and ubiquity of digitalk, has changed our cultural intervisitations quite thoroughly.

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66.  The reconfigured attention span So, in the beginning of the twentieth century a way of articulating pictures at a high rate was developed and joined a slender broadcast-​media parade that perhaps began eons earlier with a gossip, a town crier, or a jungle drummer. As far as the reach of this new motion picture medium was concerned, its status as a public medium set a paradigm for consumption that lasted not much more than fifty years: we went to the movies. When television came to us many would argue that the impact of the moving picture medium shifted its relationship to consciousness—​from being a world apart, to which we could all relate as one more repository of common culture like literature, newspapers, and magazines—​to being a feature of our intimate daily lives, like electronic family members. David Marc (1984: 135) writes: The lives of the vast majority of Americans born since the defeat of the Axis forces have been accompanied by a continuing electronic paratext to experience. This shadow memory is interactive with individual memory; it provides images that function as personal signifiers (e.g. the music or TV show that played during a certain sexual experience) and at the same time serves to document and redocument collective experience. This wasn’t the first medium to move into the home, nor the first time that media input has turned into furniture. Books, newspapers, and magazines had crept in that direction and radio had slid in beautifully through the front door. Radio was, of course, the true harbinger of the digital age, although communications over long distances at the speed of light began with telegraphy over a wire using Morse code, a binary code that quickly became a planetwide protocol. The crucial shift happened when Morse code went wireless. The linearity and one-​to-​one-​ness or address simple character of long-​distance communication over a wire, a single telegraph line, was replaced by a broadcast model. Suddenly it became possible to contact, to communicate, and to broadcast instantaneously, planetwide. At the time, there was nothing wider than that. What a mother of memes! However, there was a significant change in communications vectors that required new addressing protocols to be devised. Remember Quine and his remark about individuation and ontology: needing to know how something is divided from something else means that when a Morse code message intended for an individual gets broadcast out into the magnetosphere an address protocol is no small thing. In the broadcast environment of the radiosphere the problem of how to address messages was peculiar and quite new. The fact that the radiosphere was an open environment, available to governments, businesses, and individuals alike, made its debut as a medium for worldwide communication comparable to that of the telephone in its commercial impact. The important differences between these two technologies had to do with the linearity and

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semiprivate nature of telephones, wherein a discreet address system could function with relative exclusivity versus the democratic, broadcast nature of the radio environment.18 In the early days of radio the fluidity with which one translated thought into language and language into Morse code were signatures. The former, thought into language, spoke to one’s individuality. The latter, language into Morse code, spoke of one’s facility with the code, which then translated into seniority in the community. Soon, one began to recognize a ‘neighbor’s’ ‘fist,’ their handwriting by waveform, their personal rhythms, the stylized way that telegraphers encoded all those musical values that supplement semantics and syntax. Experienced telegraphers said that they thought in Morse. Morse code falls under the description of an ultrasimplified skeleton of a metalanguage. If you object that it is just standing in for English or Spanish and so on, the real language being used, I ask you to imagine the difference that thinking of it as its own language makes in our being able to visualize how rhythmical shifts in delivery convey personality and emotion, from thinking of it as a code. Morse code is absolutely binary with the critical differentiation being the length of the pulse, which is what separates a dit from a dah, a dot from a dash. As the articulation of the code gets faster and faster—​the realm of professional telegraphers—​the nuance in the encoding of emotion gets more pronounced. A professional telegrapher did not translate from English into code and vice versa, he thought and felt in code, with a grammar loosely borrowed from English (or whatever native language).19 Well, clearly bandwidth has increased from the time of the telegraph wire, and protocols for connection on every level have multiplied like virtual bunnies. Nonetheless, the basic vectorscape for the digital mediasphere got laid out in the protocols of the early radiosphere: the bare-​bones connection protocols; the techniques for attention getting and individuation; and surprisingly, as well, the communication of affect and personality through distinctly musical values. So now that another interactive medium is born and launches its most potent contribution, a new style of innovation, the collaborative/​competitive style has evolved into the energetic signature of our age. We are trading in the meme cubed. Radio, in its very early days, was as hermetic and experimental a medium in many ways as was early experimental film. When voice communication displaced Morse code and radio emerged from its cocoon, it immediately became a popular broadcast medium, achieving the capacity for shifting 18 There was however a knowledge threshold for a private individual’s entry into the radiosphere: knowledge of the theories that make the medium possible and also facility with Morse code. 19 My father spent many years as a radio operator in the merchant marine during the era of Morse code.

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attention on a scale that people must have always dreamed about. As well, it introduced a new kind of rhythm in the flux of our attention. As the ubiquity of radio waves influenced our expectations, our sense of the present was modified by a very slightly fragmented consciousness and dismembered flow-​ of-​ being. However, we very quickly and easily developed styles of information handling to meet this change in circumstance. We have evolved a lot further since the dawn of radio. Our consciousness is newly equipped. We throw up ad hoc boundaries between media and circumstance when and where we need them. The only frame that separated early radio broadcasts coming out of a loudspeaker from the ‘natural’ acoustic environment was its signature signal quality and formal presentation style. As signal quality improved and presentation style evolved even that frame disappeared. Radio is a medium that very easily blends with life. When radio came out of its cave and became portable in the age of transistors, we suddenly had to learn to integrate the intentional messages from another place (and maybe time) into the stream of intentional and unintentional messages from the here and now, a shockingly easy process. Because of this blendability of acoustic information portable radio took off right away. Portable video took a while, for obvious technological reasons and but also for reasons that are phenomenological:  conceptually integrating a television signal with the rest of unbounded experience required us to evolve through a couple of quick steps in being able to rebind an attention span fragmented by multiple and ontologically distinct information streams. We had to once again subtly reorder our perceptual filters to accommodate the newly organized flow of information possibilities from and about the world, so that it once again felt comfortable and coherent to mingle the here and now with the everywhere and when.20 When one looks at the dynamic aspect of communications one more easily sees those human dispositions that allow us to develop and adapt to new languages, like we would any other new toolset. We have learned to read across the boundaries of real and virtual worlds, without missing a beat. We have almost effortlessly learned to swim in a sea of competing media and to breathe moving pictures.21 As usual, the young learn fastest.

67.  The synergy of the mediasphere When we charted the many sinuous vectors of reference of poetry relative to the fewer, straighter, shorter, and less resonant vectors of simple prose 20 That we were in fact able to make this shift so easily puts greater doubt on the likely myth that the audience ran from the Lumières’ train. 21 I’m guessing that the so-​called virtual reality headsets are testing this assertion in a very different way.

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and then again when the synergy that occurs among words, pictures, and music in cinema is at issue—​we were talking about a singular and contained set of synergistic vectors. Within that set, the flow of energy went from the inventive power of the author’s mind to the responsive power in the mind of any particular member of the audience. Hopefully, the author structures the flow of information with just enough ambiguity and polyvalence to provoke a subsequent reconstruction of an equivalent, but potentially very distinct richness of meaning in audience members. When people reflect among themselves on their experience of a work, say, by discussing a movie, a book, or a piece of music, the things they happen to be discussing then begin to operate on another level of synergy: the demographic, as these elements enter into competition as memes in a collective language. This used to happen at whatever pace the enthusiasms of audiences decreed. But with the birth of the mediasphere a synergistic chain reaction started to take place. The current backbone of the digital mediasphere, the Internet, was invented by scientists and engineers to facilitate collaborative invention; and collaborative invention has become the bread and butter as well as the stick and carrot of the World Wide Web. Now that the feedback mechanisms are instantaneous, the roar of collaborative invention is a constant undercurrent in the digital mediasphere as fresh new memes pile up at a dizzying rate outside the gates of our belief systems. The evolution of the web-​based, interactive, multiplayer game is a splendid example of many things:  the explosion of collaborative invention; an entirely new medium for organizing thought; an amphitheater for the expression of personal and group emotion; and a prolific meme factory in its own right. Code writing and hacking is a still more basic medium of collaboration as well as a busy, if not frantic arena for the generation of memes and meta-​memes. Scientific, military, economic, and cultural data sharing makes the web an incredibly rich medium of global adventurism for the power-​hungry; of data acquisition, experiment design, and implementation for social and physical scientists; as a window into sexual and political demographics for the anthropologist; of financial connection and marketing schemes for the fiscally ambitious; and distribution of traditional and interactive artworks for those hungry for pure resonance. But what’s even more important is that all this multimodal, instantaneous feedback and interaction has produced new styles of thought that are subtly characteristic of the medium, those styles of thought involving lots of multitasking, parallel processing, and data comparison via buffer states; with many of these occurring in cycles of endless revision. And one gets the feeling that the orchestra is just warming up. When, in the frenzied audience of a pop music concert, fans all hold their cell-​phone video cameras over their heads, beaming the miniaturization of their experience around the world, we can get a great snapshot of the vectors of cultural collaboration. It is a spontaneous group expression growing

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out of the human need to share experience. They are not only recording and sharing the concert and helping its impact perfuse their society, they also transmit images of the cell phones held up by the people in front of them, adding the weight of consensus to their enthusiasm. This is the instantaneous groundswell of digital democracy. But there are losses as well. There must be. After all, the twenty-​first century has not only brought the World Wide Web-​edness of thought into cultural preeminence, allowing for unprecedented connection around beliefs and attitudes, but like the arsonist’s accelerant it has also amplified an unprecedented fragmentation of opinion, and reified long-​simmering social, political, and spiritual antagonisms; an amplification of extremes. This magnifying mirror of our collective self is just one of the many features of the web’s echoic synergy. David Marc (2006) has chronicled the history of one relationship between market forces and social fragmentation. He makes the distinction between general interest markets and target markets and points out that when radio took over the general interest market from magazines, the magazine industry became more oriented toward fractured, target markets. The same thing happened to radio when TV became the general interest gathering ground of American culture. For most of the 20th century, the American communications industry worked at building audiences of unprecedented size in order to take full advantage of the new production and distribution technologies at its disposal. Its most extraordinary accomplishment was the creation of a body of “general interest” content that routinely transcended traditional cultural divides of education, income, religion, ethnicity, age, and region . . . . . . With mass diffusion of satellite cable service, general-​interest appeal became a secondary concern for much of the industry, thus ending the (classical?) “Age of mass culture.” The entertainment-​industrial complex that dazzled the world for a century by attracting “the undifferentiated mass audience” has since worked to disassemble its prime creation into as many differentiated segments as marketers can imagine for advertiser-​ audience relationships. (1) That analysis of twentieth-​century television describes just the beginning of the fragmentation of both production sites and audiences that has developed in the digital mediasphere. The communications industry itself has, on the one hand, formed up into a handful of centrally controlled juggernauts and, on the other, devolved into swarms of individual cottage industries—​ fueled by the new giants in the communications world: producers of authoring software, meta-​tools for the people.

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A new tool is a paradigm case of a meme-​spawning meme. The design of the tools influences the design of the products they were meant to make; in this case suites of tools for facilitating both communications and interaction. For the most part, these tools are meant to be used by anyone and everyone. The degree of cultural leverage that is in the hands and minds of authoring tool inventors and GUI designers in determining the synergistic relationships of the mediasphere is breathtaking. They are setting the parameters that are shaping an unbounded but otherwise unusable freedom:  the freedom to mix and match communication modes in the same stream. In the process, they are facilitating yet another new, spontaneously and organically evolving, multimodal language—​a language that will have all the referential styles of its constituent media, as well as the many new possibilities that result from interactions among modes and styles that have not been invented yet. It seems pretty certain that they will, on one level or another, be collaborative inventions.

68.  The search engine, the barker, and the editor-​in-​chief Our goal all along has been to develop a perspective from which we could talk about meaning with equivalence among media. Our strategy involved multiple shifts in perspective along with a massive simplification—​that of describing meaning as one kind of movement. We also decided that we were not going to focus on the terms of the reference, the word or image, and so on, and the thing in the world to which it refers, but on the process of reference, the occasions in which the expressions are being used, and the individual manner of their use; and then describe them in a way that was so simple that we could find it applicable and useful in talking not only about words, but also music, pictures, and motion pictures. As we look at the far messier and more complex world of the digital mediasphere we will once again have to thread our way through these same issues using some descriptions that might at first appear obvious to the reader until their nuances emerge as we begin to connect them to the major themes of this book. In Parts I, II, and III our primary considerations constrained the idea of meaning to what went on between an individual work and an individual audience member. However, we also extended the idea of meaning further—​ to a perspective that could give insight into the internal relationships within a work, such as our descriptions of the concepts of omnivalence and periodicity. We also pushed our descriptive framework to include some relationships that are external to a work, for example, secondary relationships among audience members, and to cultural resonances among works in a genre—​“the ongoing conversation of art.”

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As we went along in our descriptions of kinds of meaning, we covered a range of possibilities—​from meaning by specification of the strictest sort, to meaning of the most vague and ambiguous sort. We could get along in this discussion because (1)  we were not being especially stringent in our demands to actually describe any vectors of meaning beyond such basics as long, short, direct or oblique, definite or indefinite; and (2) we also had a constrained venue of consideration—​ultimately focusing on the protected dark of a movie theater. It’s true that we noted, in our discussions of Fire of Waters and The Ogre, among other places, that the process of ‘becoming meaningful’ often extends in time beyond the end of the physical stimulus. For the most part though, until now, our speculations both about vectors of meaning in cinema in general, and vectors of specific kinds of references in particular works, took place, we assumed, in the constrained environment of that dark movie theater. However, before we can begin to describe even the simplest imaginable vectors in the digital mediasphere, an environment that can theoretically include any creature, sentient or not,22 with access to an interface of any kind, in a time flux that allows for near instantaneous rates of information exchange as well as indefinitely long times of information retention, we really have to get our bearings. This could be just as big a job as describing all the rest of our device-​free lives, or for that matter, consciousness—​except for one ace up our sleeve (and later for that). We not only have to figure out where to start and where to go but how to get there. First, in order to keep some semblance of clarity I’ll divide my description into three perspectives and consider the digital mediasphere from first-​ person, second-​person, and third-​person points of view. Second, I’ll make the distinction between fresh (live interaction), frozen (stored media), deep frozen (researched media), and ancillary (e.g., hyperlinked) media. Third, I  will distinguish between only two kinds of reference—​the ultrasimple, which we decided was not really a reference, but a connection; and all others, like stipulation and evocation, the fuzzier ones that we described in detail earlier. The first-​person perspective involves the way I see things: how the mediasphere extends my senses—​how it lets me see and hear and read things from other places and other times; how it has augmented my memory and given me the cognitive aids that I’ve demanded of it—​like being able to visualize and draw objects in three-​dimensional space, or visualize the morphing of one face into another, or to find, at will, a string of symbols or images, and so on. I can also pluck from it and vicariously adopt the first-​person perspectives of others who digitally document their daily adventures from

22 Here, I’m not only counting bots, viruses, downloadable tracking devices, and robotic reporters from earth stations as well as outer space, but any sort of accidental input or crosstalk.

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a first-​person point of view and share them online. I can even masquerade as you. The first-​person perspective encompasses the digital mediasphere as extension of self. The first issue for the first person is the interface. As it is for all the players here, the essence is the option. I am active. I get to choose and that’s a big difference from our relatively passive response to cinema. So besides needing to think about the system’s output in terms of my own modes of reception and interpenetration (am I reading, watching, hearing? etc.), we need to consider what the various input devices have to offer by the way of interconnection, reference, and response. Theoretically,23 there are no limits as to how we can wire bodies to interfaces, that is, we can interact with the mediasphere at least as diversely as we interact with the rest of life. The development of both sensory and motor neural implants with wireless device control blasts both the ontology and the epistemology of mediation into an entirely new realm, making the concept of the screen indeterminate in a truly provocative way. Actually though, there is a condition that precedes the interface in defining my interaction. That is, am I online all the time, or only on demand? Do I need to interrupt life in order to participate in the mediasphere, and to what degree? The real question here has to do with how much of an intentional bias there is between the mediated information and myself. Can I look up from my dinner and see an open and refreshed web page, or am I going to my interface with a strong intention to find or do something in particular? In the first case, if I simply shift my glance in an idle moment and encounter a fully formed and graphically rendered expression, it is to the manifest intentionality of some other creature/​corporation that I am passively responding. In the second case I am actively sorting—​albeit through predefined algorithms and criteria. I am making intentional judgments and acting on them. This is the ace up the sleeve that I referred to earlier and where the second-​ and third-​person perspectives bump up against the first. The only reason that the job of describing the vectorscape of my relationship with the mediasphere is easier than describing the vectorscape of my relationship with my life, or the vectors of change that produce consciousness, is that every move 23 In the first decade of the twenty-​first century, the one significant interface constraint, especially in the area of live media interactivity, lay in the all-​essential component of feedback rhythm. One part of my individual identity, one aspect of my human signature is my tempo—​ my tempo range, really. It is something that describes my musical essence in conversations, or during bouts of creativity as, for instance, in how I  move through the process of cooking a dinner, or how my stride hits the ground. My personal rhythm, of course, constantly adapts to the situation—​I key my pace to that of my conversation partner, to their musicality. Currently, however, there are still distinct inequities in response time when conversing with the mediasphere, and from a very strictly first-​person point of view this has created an ‘indeterminacy of musicality.’ Even though it is not a pervasive condition, nonetheless as a condition, it has pervaded my expectations of online intercourse.

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I  make into, within, and out of the World Wide Web is log-​able. And in many cases someone or something, somewhere are logging it. Therefore, this is one very precise way of describing how the mediasphere is organized: follow the trail of clicks (or any other input stream you choose).24 If you do, I’ll bet that you’ll discover a clumping of data sought, data used, and vectors in and out of frames (pages). Not only is this clumping a manifestation of the predisposition we have for finding likeness-​in-​difference, but even just calling attention to these clumps presents an opportunity for me to express my disposition toward the very idea of a grammar once again—​ this time from a slightly different perspective—​one illuminated by structures inherent in the mediasphere itself, structures that show every promise of maturing into a new ‘natural’ language—​a whole host of new ‘natural’ languages really; and with them a reworked conception of grammar. But first another brief excursion: the drive among some linguists to find deep structures and a universal grammar approaches the question of what a grammar is from a direction I have always found disturbing. I don’t deny the possibility of coming up with useful connections and insights by looking at behaviors and then imagining what the rules are and how said rules might describe those behaviors. However, rather than looking for the structures that are defined by those rules, I would look for the dispositions that promote habitual language behaviors (in forming sentences, for instance) and tie them together. You could look at the trail of clicks and other serial input that I offer to the mediasphere, and after a long enough time you could discern characteristics, not just of my range of interests, my ‘semantics,’ but also of my ‘syntax’—​the way I characteristically go about solving a problem by organizing my searches and forming my thoughts (even, for instance, all the many, many revisions of this document). What one could not yet discern would be much about “the rhythm of my thinking.” Likewise, one could compare the input trails of any imaginable set of users and come up with analyses of clumps of actions according to parameters one hopes will be productive. These descriptions however are not rules. No one tells me I have to proceed in my inquiries the way I have in the past, and the way other people do (beyond what the structure of the medium or the software itself dictates). They are simply descriptions, descriptions of trends that might become habits or collective habits—​from which we can perhaps infer something about the dispositions that underlie the trends or tendencies. In this light, one could think of the constraints imposed by a particular piece of software’s design as analogous to the rules of a language, one that 24 Speech recognition software provides ‘click-​ tracking’ of a highly mediated sort. It remains to be seen whether the data we could get from backtracking through these machine-​ programs would be useful—​or would be even more confusing—​requiring still another scaffold of interpretation.

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is quickly evolving. From watching the evolution of feedback mechanisms in all areas of the mediasphere, we can see that the tools respond quite quickly, changing to accommodate patterns of use. We see both how the economics and the energetics of the process shape the structure and that the ‘rules’ themselves are also always changing. In the end, it may turn out that as the Internet grows to be regarded as a language of its own, digital grammar actually becomes recognized simply as a term we use while trying to describe regularities in usage patterns and habits.25 These days I enter the mediasphere most often through a simple relationship with my word processor or video editing software. I’m just dipping my toe in. I’m not out there and online; I’m still in here with my own version of the mediasphere. I input keystrokes and slowly the screen in front of me fills up with orderly rows of type in the font of my choice. But, oh no! Suddenly, the software does something unpredictable, like changing font or line spacing in the middle of a page. Or, even worse, it does something predictably untoward that I do not know how to change, or even how to find out how to change because I cannot figure out how to describe it to the search engine in the help menu. All of a sudden, the nature of my conversation shifts and I am no longer in harmonious rapport with other layers of my own being. Instead, I am dialoguing with the medium—​I am dialoguing with a different unknown—​the designers of the tool: the over-​clever idiots who introduced some new marvel of capability to my solid old compositional voice—​and in the process, strangled my thought. I scream: “You devil, you!” Enter the second person perspective.  The machine doesn’t hear me (yet).  I normally open a document by double-​clicking an icon on my desktop (how quaint this will sound someday) but other moves will require the address of an external entity. Here is a boundary of significance: Within the digital realm, there is my private world—​something like the old analog mediasphere in many ways, except turbocharged with many new capabilities. And then, there is the opaque and infinite world out there, all those third persons; individuals and corporations who have built the intent-​ filled world I enter. Suddenly in the outer mediasphere there is the ‘me and the not-​me.’ As soon as I cross that line, everything changes. I no longer know what to believe. Online, everything is artifice. Not only is there no intent-​free zone, but there also aren’t a lot of good tools for assessing the beneficence/​malevolence of the intent that one will encounter. Therefore, judgments about trustworthiness or credibility have to proceed along new 25 Linguists, of course, might rightly insist that this is a very different use of the word ‘grammar’ than the way they apply it to verbal languages. However by using the term metaphorically in this way I am hoping to illuminate a projected ‘regularization’ of the Internet.

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lines, with new handicaps. Not only will we most often suffer from the narrowness of context that happens with any drop-​in visit, but we are also robbed of natural face. Instead, we have fabricated face, an amping up of the fabrications of TV or print adverts; perhaps the face of a search engine, perhaps that of a gatekeeper or carnival barker in the form of an avatar. And, part and parcel with that, we don’t have our usually trustworthy cues for judging sincerity, cues that in the real world often happen in terms of the tempo of the response. However we still do have style, sort of. Websites used to be sorted into stylized or not stylized, and generally represented the two ends of the window-​dressing spectrum:  plain search engine pages and carefully designed gatekeeper/​barker pages. Both of these are pass-​through destinations. The significant distinction is in the encounter between those two different ‘intentional stances’26 and their funneling patterns. Now (2017) there are few un-​stylized pages. Even pass-​through pages need to be styled at least enough to present reasonably appealing advertising space. The appreciation that an address may be a bogus destination is a current caution in our web consciousness just as much as the potential for an oncoming car is when stepping off a curb in the physical world. The graphic and literary style of an interface or page has only some of the potential that tone of voice has in radiating trustworthiness, credibility, or sincerity vectors. Even though we may realize that the style’s ‘sincerity’ is the sincerity in an actor’s voice, we may not be able to totally escape its influence on us. Then we modify the trust we have put in our first impressions as we then step from interacting with the deep frozen like a corporate data archive, the frozen like a known software program, and on to the somewhat fresher world of an interactive website or the quite fresh encounter of an instant message or video-​chat. Each of these once had unique qualities that made us more or less accepting of their face value. These kinds of qualities could not remain unique for long. They were way too important not to be categorized and evaluated according to some bona fide metric: the target market metric. We are already encountering some degree of editorializing when we call up a trusted search engine, but of a somewhat limited (though usually inscrutable) kind. Here, information is ordered by the perpetrators of an algorithm that was devised to streamline our search—​according to their criteria for deducing its relevance to us, or their criteria for deducing its relevance to them; that is, some commercial clumping factor. The search engine 26 Dennett uses the phrase extensively throughout his work in a way that is far more precise and in the service of a different set of ideas—​but I don’t think our uses are inconsistent. The context in which the uses occur, his and mine, influences where you will want to go with the term.

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page, however, is typically much less intensely designed than the pages to which I am subsequently likely to be referred.27 This is how we currently form relationships with the barkers and the gatekeepers, who are rarely human; though most often, at this time still human-​designed. By and large, we let them do the clumping for us—​and not just the clumping, but the sifting that is presupposed in any clumping. Market analysis, on this level, is vector analysis with intention-​driven metrics. It is essentially a world of third persons that have intensely studied that general second person and this particularized first person. Depending on one’s attitude toward sifters, barkers, and gatekeepers in general, and toward specific ones in particular, one can regard the evolution of the mediasphere and its interlaced memosphere with different degrees of optimism. It’s very important to emphasize, however, that (1)  interface design, a medium unto itself, is, for the most part, the art of blending revenue-​seeky intentionalities that are more or less machine-​mediated in a wholly artificial environment; and (2)  that search engines almost always represent an unknown degree of editorializing. There is no intention-​free zone in the digital mediasphere. Whether they are gatekeepers or editors or barkers or hawkers, from my point of view they are all third persons. From their point of view I  am a third person that they mostly would like to promote to the second person. That is they would like to cull me from a mass and engage me as a singular and familiar you (tu, du), and any attempt at a detailed analysis of their way of organizing the digital data flow moves us immediately into the field of market analysis, where I will not trespass. The most interesting kicker in the realm of the third person is that there are third persons with no human first-​person perspective—​the inanimate them: the bots, worms, and viruses, all imbued with intention. The second-​person mode of address is somewhat more interesting, and is perhaps in as great, or even a greater state of flux than the other two personal perspectives. In this global medium the boundary between the known you and the unknown you can be quite uncertain, even mercurial. It’s an area where mechanical address protocols are incorporated into the message in many cases, and these address protocols don’t seem to have achieved any global consensus. For English speakers, without the equivalent distinction of say, Sie and du, Vous or tu, there is an additional disadvantage in knowing how to formulate the appropriate second-​person address across cultures in the contemporary social atmosphere of the web, which results in our dropping heedless and warrant-​less into intimate modes with strangers, often not human, and them with us.

27 I first wrote this sentence in 2007. Now (2017) this is no longer true, but I am retaining it in the new edition as a demonstration of the inevitable.

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As the ways that people represent or misrepresent themselves evolve through social networks, video upload sites, and videophones on the one hand, and game avatars or fantasy sites on the other, collaborative invention gets another set of vehicles for the interpenetration of, let’s call it, the lingosphere. The protocols for second-​person communications, those communications having the illusion of intimacy, will evolve against the pressure of myriads of advantage-​seeking interventions. Harking back to my description of the difference between the telephone and the early radiosphere, with its peculiar broadcast address issue to resolve, we now have an environment whose address protocols, on many levels, are of indeterminate intimacy, specificity, sincerity, and security. Being able to chronicle this evolution of protocols will certainly give us new insights into the way natural languages mature. I think it will amplify the power of those insights if we think of these evolving protocols as being one kind of element in a natural language system.

69.  A sidebar on consciousness It is extremely tempting to use the digital mediasphere as an analogy for consciousness for many of the reasons I’ve been hinting at; and I’ll succumb to that temptation again for just a moment to make a point—​an extremely and perhaps, unwarrantedly general and speculative point. When attempting to describe the nature of the universe (including consciousness) we pull out our most versatile and potent weapons—​language, mathematics, logic, diagrams, and other graphic imagery. We often use the approaches of mathematics to describe our empirical adventures and also in quantifying the unambiguous and apparently absolute. We use logic in constructing precisely reasoned assemblages and applications. Technical language is tight. By and large, however, our language about consciousness tends to be much more metaphorical. Even our language about the neurological basis for consciousness has more ambiguity than scientists might like. The more metaphorical the language, however, often the larger and more resonant is the picture. Of course, we also use literature and the arts to get at the mysteries of consciousness, but somehow we don’t think of these as contributing to the same conversation. Any drift in this direction, toward the ambiguous edge of language, is usually seen as producing less useful thought. But while being more critical of the uses of metaphorical terms in those descriptions that are meant to be purely empirical, researchers often lose track of how essentially metaphorical language is. And, as we’ve been asserting, truly new data and new hypothetical models in any field will have to stretch the boundaries of language and create their own unique use of terms, as we saw with our use of the word ‘grammar’ to describe the growth of habits of usage in

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the Internet. Our descriptive possibilities and our descriptive powers are evolving again, along with the descriptive mandate. The stage is set for yet another paradigm shift. Let’s suppose that we record enough digital usage data—​a vast enough collection of input/​output trails—​and play them back, not at a slower speed, but at a much faster speed, so that the clumping of data appeared as fractional modulations in a much larger song.28 We could then begin to intuit some of those aspects of consciousness that dwell on a further and still more elusive plane—​a plane that verbal language’s conceptual hegemony has blinded us to. But language is only one side of the equation; pure pattern recognition, largely unconscious, is another. Understandings most often precipitate from a layer of mental activity that we only sporadically acknowledge—​the unconscious ‘imagery’ that Edelman, Damasio, Lakoff et al. use as a term for the neural collections around which pattern recognition works. Until we develop the analytic tools necessary for rendering significant insights and have collected sufficient data sets of global web throughputs, this new field of study will have to work on what is essentially a global project in a piecemeal fashion. Just for starters, though, think of the hierarchy of values in the evolution of consciousness and then think of the proportion of mediasphere activities related to sex, food, threat, and advantage. Cyber-​socio-​anthropology’s graphic output would appear as animated Venn diagram–​like expressions of proximity, proportion, flavor, relevance, intensity, and so on of, say, sex, food, threat, and advantage vectors. Of course the data would be skewed and distorted. Any results would need decoding, decompression, interpretation, followed by critiques of the interpretation, followed by methodological squabbles . . . and on; but a new kind of discussion could begin, one where perhaps artful data massage would augment writing, talking, and imaging in the badly muddled world of psycholinguistics.

70.  So, where is the screen? One more similarity to add to the enticing analogy between consciousness and the mediasphere is the indeterminacy of the screen in both worlds. Here, I am taking for granted that we agree with Dennett’s hard fought argument that there is no special center of consciousness, no Cartesian Theater, no screen on which consciousness plays out. There clearly is no special center of the mediasphere. And along with Dennett’s dissolution of a specifiable screen

28 ‘Sonifying’ the data, that is, turning the data stream into sound that can be analyzed aurally, can literally do this.

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for the events of consciousness we now must confront the digitally enabled, high resolution, seemingly neural-​direct-​injection of sight and sound. And then ask what that eventuality adds to the indeterminacy of the mix! All of a sudden the where-​ness of perceptions, the bounds of first-​person experience, the locus of our personal screens of mediation become questionable on a level that is orders of perplexity beyond the questions Michael Snow posed in Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La Region Centrale with these slow deconstructions of classical cinema’s screen. In fact, the seeming irrelevance of the location of the screen in a digital world should clue us to look elsewhere for an equivalent concept-​name. What do I  mean by ‘the dissolution of the screen’? The “presentation surface” in the digital mediasphere is relatively rarely isolated from the rest of the visual environment by much more than the breeze of our intention. In a normal narrative, the screen dissolves as a matter of course the way the page disappears when reading. Attending to it, that is, the act of paying attention, has become the operating frame more than ever. In fact, the growing ascendance of the portable moving image has modified our expectations not only about the coherence of attention but also the nature of frames. That’s one way that the screen dissolves—​it includes moving signifiers the way any other thing might contain moving signifiers—​like a highway, for instance. It’s when we confuse the info flows from the physical highway and the mediasphere that things get tricky. Another way the screen becomes irrelevant goes in quite the opposite direction:  all those electronic devices that shift the interface inward—​the headphones, video glasses, cochlear, retinal, and neural implants, and so on. If television made the moving image more like furniture as David Marc suggested, truly portable digital media has become more like thought itself—​ the omnipresent breath of culture. In this case, what stands in the place of the screen as a pivot for analysis? Just what is the substrate here? John Cayley, in his essay “Writing on Complex Surfaces,” gives us an interesting point of entry to this question with his analysis of writing in digital media (http://​www.dichtung-​digital. org/​2005/​2-​Cayley.htm). When Cayley considers the substrate for poetry in the new digital medium, he looks to the code. It is the code that produces the experience—​in all its dimensions. The code is the substrate. But code is not so much a thing as it is a concept, a method. Thereby is the text liberated from the simple surface. Cayley is not alone. All over the world digital media artists create entirely new media in their recognition of the code as the prime enabler—​just as Dewdney recognized the Maltese-​Cross Movement as the icon for the primary enabler of mechanical cinema.29 29 . See, for instance:  http://​sdtimes.com/​artists-​use-​code-​to-​create-​mind-​bending-​digital-​ art/​ (Adam Ferriss).

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Not only is the code the primary enabler of digital communication, but also thinking of it as such gives us a new perspective on parsing the contextually intertwined nature of perception. That is, just as what we call an object is a largely context independent ‘operable something’—​it retains its identity wherever it shows up; and a word is, on the other hand, usually a context dependent ‘operable something,’ a chunk of code is likewise an operable something whose function is utterly and absolutely context dependent. Or, to repeat one of our mantras with this special emphasis:  “The meaning of a word is its use in the language” (Wittgenstein 1968: §43). To put it yet another way, cutting and pasting, as Lev Manovich reminds us in The Language of New Media, is cutting and pasting code. If we ignore this difference, it has the same effect as when we ignored the screen as the source of the cinema experience: we lose one immediate dimension of self-​ reflection. Not such a big deal for the work of prose, but a much more serious ontological limitation for poetry. But as well, there is, I think, an important distinction created when we compare the two senses of substrate. In the mechanical world, when we spoke of a substrate we were also talking about a substance, whether the ‘celluloid’ or the illuminated surface. We have now entered the universe where the substrate is a process; a transformational process. Yet another parallel with consciousness!

71.  The moving meaning metaphor So we can have anything on any screen, or for that matter anything on no screen; all media in one stream—​planetwide as well as in selected locations throughout (as of now) the solar system. Words move. Pictures acquire rhythm. The machine pushes back. Respondents are both conscious and unconscious. All input and output is log-​able. Stasis is untenable. The idea of how to see movement as meaning becomes strangely magnified in the digital. You are sitting across the room from me and say, “Check Rover” (or whatever spacecraft is currently the center of attention). I hit a few keys and pictures pop up from Mars (or Pluto). The idea of movement and the very different senses of the way we use the word, cover so many distinctly different types of transactions and on so many levels in this little interchange. First we have to account for the psychological: whatever moved you to ask me to check Rover in the first place (and moved me to know what you meant and act on it). Also there is a cascade of the physical: laryngeal and labial movement, pressure wave movement, neural movement (electrochemical) and digital (as in finger) movement, then electromagnetic movement. We talk about waves propagating through space, about transistor gates opening and closing, of code being read, of data being streamed, links being made, transactions accomplished. Just as movement can have many modes,

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so can meaning. We say, “These machines are talking to one another.” When is that not metaphorical? Time to back up again. We’re getting awfully meta here—​ when we don’t even know what is phorical. Let’s retreat to our central description of language as the meaningful articulation of elements within an overarching structure—​where the meaning of any element is its use in the structure. Under this description, although we have no problem with the idea of machines ‘talking’ to one another in the digital mediasphere, we are far less likely to use the word ‘meaning’ in these contexts. Let’s step through a couple of these language games. In a Rube Goldberg device, physical causality is quite visible—​as one mechanism within the contraption acts on another. There is no question about what I’m talking about when I say that there is movement. There is more question however about my use of the word ‘meaning.’ Did the ball that rolled down the chute in the beginning mean to trip the gong at the end, which then scared the duck into the water? Was the ball talking to the duck? Somehow, mysteriously, we are more comfortable with the idea of CPUs talking to one another; we are slightly less likely to say that one microprocessor talks to another, and the analogy falls apart further at the circuit level, not to mention the ball and duck level. No surprise. The language game of talk and mean presupposes a level of complexity that Rube Goldberg, as amazing as he was, never quite achieved. We can stretch the boundaries of the game just so far before the words lose their power. Whatever family resemblance there was between the central case—​people talking to one another—​and the peculiar causal relationship between the ball and the duck has been exhausted. That’s only one reason we don’t normally call a Rube Goldberg machine, a language. We do, however, call the articulations of code by a CPU or possibly even a microprocessor, machine languages. It becomes easy for us to see how code can be meaningful to the machine. How do you corroborate successful reference in the machine? It doesn’t crash. How do you corroborate accurate reference? It gives an expected kind of result or a proper kind of reply. We interrogate the machine; it replies:  it plays our language game. Or is it us playing its language game? We described language games as having permeable boundaries and flexible rules. This turned out especially to be the case for conversational and even more particularly for aesthetically involved language games. Machine languages (as the name implies) are just the opposite. If we think about the progression from human aesthetic language games to technical languages, to human-​machine languages and finally, pure machine languages, we see that our palette of referential styles gets shaved to the core (so to speak). In machine-​involved languages, metaphors, ambiguities, and multiple meanings are out; reference occurs through an increasingly strict set of specifications.

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Machine-​involved languages belong to a class known as LSPs, languages for special purposes, as distinguished from LGPs, languages for general purposes.30 LSPs are usually very controlled—​that is, they have specific rules limiting things like grammatical structure, sentence length, ing endings, ellipses, and intra-​ sentence indefinite referents. All controlled languages have strictly limited lexicons with rules about when, for instance, to use the word ‘start’ as distinct from the word ‘begin.’ LSPs are not fun and don’t have significant musicality. What they do have is translatability. Some are designed especially for human-​to-​human translation—​that is, they are designed so that software can port one human language relatively easily and accurately into another. Another kind of controlled language designed for human-​ to-​ human translation without the necessary mediation of a machine would be a Boeing 747 repair manual written in English, but English that is structured in such a way that it is precisely, reliably, and unambiguously accessible to non-​native English speakers. STE or Simplified Technical English is one such language, and claims to be designed also for native English speakers.31 Its raison d’être is to make technical instructions clearer, easier to read, and more precise. On one level at least, the machine mediation level, the digital mediasphere has wrung the deliciousness of ambiguity from the act of reference and instead added the perniciousness of affective ambiguity to the message by coarsening and nailing down the lexicon. But the goal of these specialized technical and machine languages—​to be able to predict every vector of the meanings used—​is not about people relating to people about people stuff.

72.  Working the method The heuristic dialectic, which has been so important to us in the analysis of the way movement happens in various language modalities, makes many people queasy. Especially philosophers. Positing temporary poles of opposition, in order to tease out differences and similarities, somehow smacks of play rather than work. Recognizing the validity, nay the overlapping validities of manifold perspectives, even possibly contradictory perspectives, may either require a nimbleness that is difficult for highly disciplined minds, or perhaps speak to some too vague an idea of learning, without yielding the clarity of singular intellectual progress. But what is at issue here is nothing less than our ability to thoroughly embrace the indeterminacy of natural

30 See http://​www.eamt.org/​archive/​dublin/​MOELLER.PDF. 31 See http://​www.simplifiedenglish-​aecma.org/​Simplified_​English.htm.

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language. It may help us to do this if we splay out the opposite ends of a heuristic dialectic with two ultrasimple examples that, themselves, both rely on precision. One is a precise simple and the other is something perhaps as precise yet not so simple; or perhaps just as simple, yet not so precise. One solution to the need for a simply precise simple in a complex global environment is well illustrated by the Boeing Simplified English Checker (BSEC). The BSEC is a software application that operates like a spelling and grammar checker. It makes sure that technical writers who are preparing repair manuals, for non-​native English-​speaking users of global products, observe the rules of STE. The software tells the technical writers if they are writing adequately for comprehension without ambiguity. The human enters the text into the program and it determines whether the text conforms to a zero ambiguity standard. For the second leg of my dialectic I propose to compare the precise simplification of STE to the precise simplification of the haiku. Both approaches are the product of applying strict rules to the use of words. The rules for forming haiku are few, simple, and seemingly arbitrary: haiku all have seventeen syllables on three lines that measure 5-​7-​5. STE has a few more rules that are not quite so simple and are anything but arbitrary. For example, here are but a few that Margarethe Moeller quotes in her article “Grammatical Metaphor, Controlled Language and Machine Translation”:32 The AECMA SE [Aerospace industry simplified English committee] rule bans noun clusters of more than three words, unless they are Technical Names. An article (the, a, an) or a demonstrative pronoun (this, these) should be used before a noun, when appropriate, in order to show where the noun phrases are. -​ing-​forms of verbs are not allowed, unless they are in the lexicon as nouns or adjectives, or they have been added as parts of Technical names. Use only the active voice in procedural writing, and as much as possible in descriptive writing. Let’s see how these rules translate into action: The sentence (Moeller again):  “If air is blowing continuously out, then either the piston seal is incorrectly assembled or damaged, or there is a flaw in the cylinder barrel surface finish” should, according to the rules, be rendered as (oops, passive voice): “If air is blowing continuously out, then you have either assembled the piston seal incorrectly or it has been damaged, or there is a flaw in the surface finish of the cylinder barrel.” 32 http://​www.eamt.org/​archive/​dublin/​MOELLER.PDF.

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Questions of English-​language word order aside, I  personally find the first of these renditions a tad more accessible (and a lot less accusatory), but I can see what they are getting at and where they are going with this effort. After all English verb forms are a bitch and I  suppose prejudice against the passive voice has some merit in this circumstance. Let me quote from Moeller (2003) again: “In Systematic Functional Grammar some of these configurations (nominalizations, nominal groups and non-​finite clauses) are referred to as grammatical metaphors.” She goes on to define ‘grammatical metaphors’ as: “a shift between grammatical categories, e.g. where a nominal group is used for the contents of a verbal group” (i.e., using a noun or gerund where there should be a verb). The goal of STE is to stamp out the metaphor and its cousins in ambiguity in any possible incarnation. The instructions for STE could be compressed (lossy) into: “Keep the vectors of reference short, direct and unambiguous.” Let’s, on the other hand, check out the simplifying, illuminating (and cleansing) power of the metaphor by looking at three haiku by Basho. When we see what makes them tick we’ll have clarified at least one thing about the difference between talking to a machine and talking to a person. At the ancient pond a frog plunges into the sound of water This first fallen snow is barely enough to bend the jonquil leaves How reluctantly the bee emerges from deep within the peony33 Early on I suggested that language, through family resemblances, works the way we work, by finding similarity in difference. And as I’ve mentioned, I find the metaphor almost indistinguishable from ‘the literal’ in everyday speech, and the poetic use of the metaphor a necessary food for the growth of language’s range of references. But these haiku all transcend the metaphor. They contain implications of resemblances beyond the simple metaphor and so their vectors are truly mysterious and idiosyncratic. In the first we might read the implicit comparison being between past, present, and future: In the past province of an ancient pond, a frog plunges, in the present, into the future of the sound it will create. Or it could be a comparison between the vision of the water and the sound of the water. 33 By Basho and copied from this wonderful site: http://​www.geocities.com/​alanchng1978/​ basho.html. Also note that the English translations cannot always follow the 5-​7-​5 prescription.

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Or it could be between the mental image we have of a silent water surface and one roiled with the splash. It could be none, it could be all, it could be other. In the second haiku the implicit comparison is between the jonquil’s leaves before and after the snow. In the terms of this comparison there’s not a lot of ambiguity. The brilliance of the poem is in how rich, delicate, and deft a portrait it creates in so few words; and how that simple portrait can refer to so many human conditions by conjuring a resonant observation. In the third haiku the implicit comparison is between the bee and us, with the further implication that there is a singular quality in the universe that touches all sexual creatures. All of these haiku create pleasure through ambiguity. We could begin every day with any one of them and have it always set a different course for us, carry a different meaning. In their embodiment of omnivalence they pull our experiences into them. They become operators on the gradual accumulation of our understanding. The vectors of reference pass from term to term within the structure, then out and into what we have lived, and then back into the energy that lives among the terms. The surface tension that unites the imagery in these haiku describes their omnivalence. I’m sure we could ultimately write software applications that would reliably parse haiku into interesting multiple meanings and that these apps might actually expand our parsing by coming up with possibilities that are beyond a pedestrian’s imagination—​machine-​mediated meanings adding to human understandings. What I  don’t believe is that any machine can order these parsings according to their resonance, their depth, their relevance, or the breadth of their implications; these are strictly personal, human variables. When we contemplate the difference between the simplifications of STE and the simplifications of haiku, there is a strong but subtle difference between the two kinds of simplification: We could say that the one is the synthetic simplification that we find in STE, that is, we can synthesize rules for forming sentences that will restrict ambiguity; and with haiku, an analytic simplification, carefully parsing nuances where we find provocative and stimulating comparisons. And of course we could use these very same descriptive terms, analytic and synthetic, in an entirely opposite manner, that is, analyzing sentences for latent ambiguities with STE versus synthesizing new meanings from a highly resonant set of images in haiku! Although this kind of dialectic can provide perspective shifts across maximal stretches of intellectual or emotional terrain, the ease of describing opposite cases allows us to see the heuristic dialectic itself in the nude, so to speak, stripped of all but its mechanism: We are, once again, comparing one kind of consideration to another.

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73.  From the grain to the pixel We started our investigation in an analog universe that was strictly determined by the starting and stopping of a projector and the hard edges around a frame, and after much bouncing around have wound up in a digital universe that is curiously indeterminate where locating both screen and substrate is problematic. The one solid observational plane, the isolated screen of the movie theater, has dispersed, or melted, or as Manovich (2001: 90) points out become a ‘control panel’; and the one minimal unit, the film frame, consisting of an unstable swarm of grains, has yielded to another, stable, minimal unit, the pixel. But the pixel has propelled us into a vastly different universe, one in which we have been cast adrift from the reliably indexical nature of the photochemical image, and into the pixel’s fundamentally questionable provenance. The fact that this indexical chain, the chain of evidence, if you will, has been broken, and the pixel, by virtue of its being manipulable in ways far beyond the chemistry of the grain, makes digital cinema a medium that defies evidence and proofs of origin. But the pixel has an entirely different kind of stability—​the precision of its numerical address. The title of this book, Movement as Meaning, had a very different set of implications in the middle of the past century when Raymond Birdwhistell (1918–​94) approached 16mm film strictly as a tool of research; unfortunately one that was not quite up to the job. Had he lived to use the pixel and its numerical precision things would likely have been somewhat different. In the 1950s and 1960s he founded the discipline of kinesics: the study of the meaningful motion of the human body. In order to begin to decode the ferocious complexity of the way body language interfaces with spoken language he used the machine of cinema as a research tool. In his book Kinesics and Context (1971—​paperback ed. 1975), although he admits to not having made much significant progress in defining the minimal units of kinesics, he posed a set of questions framed with great rigor: Would it be better to think of the fundamental units of human movement as kinemes, that is, language forms, kinemorphs, that is, shape forms, or simply as kinetic markers, or inflections by the body of spoken language? In other words, how does one best parse the continuous flow of gesture and body posture? Do they correlate synchronously, or asynchronously with the accompanying units of speech, or do their relations shift, depending on situation, or context? Here he had as tough a time defining ‘context’ and ‘unit’ as we do now in the digital age. Although he does not use the term, he understood that there might be as many body language games as there are verbal language games. He also thought that there might be no gestural absolutes that transcend cultures, localities, or even situations.

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His method was careful and precise however. He followed Saussure’s observational perspective on language concerning at least three critical points: (1) that “it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object,”34 (2) that “language has no discernable unity,”35 and (3)  most important, that “since the essential feature of Saussure’s linguistic sign is its intrinsically arbitrary nature, it can be identified only by contrast with coexisting signs of the same nature, which together constitute a structured system.”36 Thus, when Birdwhistell (1975: 154) defines kinesic markers, the best he can do is to say: “Thus a marker is a contrastable range of behaviors in a particular neighborhood” (emphasis in the original). His recognition of the significance of stress and rhythm in producing meaning was acute. He included nationality, ethnicity, status, gender, age, health image, body image, rhythm image, territorial status, mood, and toxic state, among others, in his analysis of the factors contributing to the meaning potential of gestures (259). His observational coding, resulting from frame by frame analysis of 16mm motion pictures, included five stress states, at least three duration states that included acceleration and deceleration, five range-​of-​movement states, eight action modification states—​for example, unilateral/​bilateral, specific/​generalized, rhythmic/​disrhythmic, graceful/​ awkward, and so on (272–​5)—​and three interaction modifiers: mirror/​parallel, rhythmic/​disrhythmic, open/​closed (276–​7). He discriminated among cueing behaviors that set us up to take a verbalization in a particular way, punctuation behaviors that parse verbalizations, and motion markers that indicate spatial or temporal extension. He discerned and coded for ten total head movements, twenty-​nine facial movements, nine spine profile movements, eight spine frontal movements, at least eighteen hand indicators that move in at least eighty code-​able ways, and on—​for every part of the body, seated or standing. And he coded these for every frame of movie film, often filming with an overspeed camera, yielding up to thirty-​six measurements per second! He recognized that human gestures are inherently polysemic, that is, they can be interpreted to have many different meanings depending on the context in which they are produced. But he took the idea that vector analysis was the approach to understanding the meaning inherent in movement very seriously, he was just limited by the analytic means at his disposal. Theoretically we have those means now. While the analog film frame allowed only relative position information, the digital film frame, on the other hand, not only allows for near-​absolute standards of measurement, but what’s more significant is that the computational power and the data mining tools are finally up to the analytic tasks that Birdwhistell outlined. 34 Saussure (1972: 8). 35 Ibid., 10. 36 Ibid., x.

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The pixel’s numerically fixed screen position—​ its address, and its crisp availability for vector analysis—​would thus enable us to carry Birdwhistell’s research some major step further. Nonetheless, the question remains: could a digital vector-​trend analysis of body language, however fine grain, ever yield an understanding of any significant implications of gestural meanings, meanings which could translate in a satisfying way to a humanist, or be of more than passing interest to the psychologist or anthropologist? Sternberg et al.’s work with metaphor is a positive indication of interest in work of this sort. Beyond the advantages of harnessing data mining to digital imagery, the shift from the living and indeterminate nature of the film grain to the absolutely predictable character of the pixel produces a cornucopia of expressive tools resulting from the fact that, as Manovich (2001) tells us, Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live action footage as one of its many elements. (302) The computer does not distinguish between an image obtained through a photographic lens, an image created in a paint program, or an image synthesized in a 3-​D graphics package, since they are all made from the same material—​pixels. (300)37 So the shift from grain to pixel also gives us a tool for precisely noting, representing, and then reanimating the polysemic kinetic motions of the body and mapping them via a technique called ‘motion capture,’ to examples in pure animation; allowing us to accurately capture, translate, and then elaborate on the expressive nuance of human gestures in frame-​by-​ frame reanimations. It is only a small leap to see how nuances of human movement could, in poetic cinema, become expressive abstract elements with relatively precise meanings. Manovich’s most astute reduction is his recognition that “for a computer, a film is an abstract arrangement of colors changing in time” (302). So much for the science of the grain and the pixel. The aesthetic implications of the shift from grain to pixel are quite different for traditional narratives than for the open-​ended cinema we are calling ‘experimental’—​where there has never been a given; and where, so far, relatively few purely cine-​ poetic ways of working have evolved. In both of these worlds, the narrative and the poetic (which on this level are in a kind of polar opposition), the traditional lines dividing engineer and artist, writer and painter are being blurred and the relatively new symbioses in those relationships are themselves under constant invention and revision.

37 He obviously is using the word ‘material’ here as shorthand, since he was quite aware of pixels immateriality.

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If our analysis of analog film has any merit, one trend we might expect to factor into pictorially poetic thought would be an overt awareness of the nature of the code and the machine on which it runs. This awareness would take the place of the awareness of the surface of the substrate in analog cinema. We can get a feeling for this shift to the poetics of the pixel if we first reflect, once again, on Dorsky’s film Pneuma as both homage and farewell to the film grain. To repeat, there are no ‘images’ in the film; the subject matter is the grain itself. As he writes in his description of the film for the Canyon Cinema Catalogue: In Stoic philosophy “pneuma” is the “soul” or fiery wind permeating the body, and at death survives the body but as impersonal energy. Similarly, the “world pneuma” permeates the details of the world. The images in this film come from an extensive collection of out-​dated raw stock that has been processed without being exposed, and sometimes rephotographed in closer format. Each pattern of grain takes on its own emotional life, an evocation of different aspects of our own being. A world is revealed that is alive with the organic deterioration of film itself, the essence of cinema in its before-​image, preconceptual purity. The present twilight of reversal reality has made this collection a fond farewell to those short-​lived but hardy emulsions.38 Film grain, and the apparent motion it induces, is random by its nature—​ but predictable within bounds nonetheless:  the size and shape of each element is relatively constant and the movement will not appear to have organization except in relation to its spatial boundaries. Yet each ‘scene’ in Pneuma has its own character, a character that’s determined by the age of the film stock, the type of emulsion, the method of the processing; and, if it was rephotographed, the degree of enlargement. As a work of minimalist art it has its own originality and majesty. The internal quality of movement of each “shot” has a fine-​grain unpredictability, at the same time as having a distinctly characteristic motion and concurrent emotion. As Brian Frye notes, “The key to understanding all Dorsky’s films is the film Pneuma.”39 That is to say that the élan vital of his work grows directly from his commune with its living, breathing, unstable substrate.

38 http://​www.canyoncinema.com/​D/​Dorsky.html. His reference to “reversal reality” is counterposed to the negative-​positive systems of imaging in the film world, which gradually took their place. 39 IndieWire: http://​www.indiewire.com/​ots/​fes_​00NYFF_​001006_​Fri.html; NYFF 2000: Vital Visions, from Godard to Maddin, Dorsky to Hutton.

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The pixel, on the other hand, is an entirely stable, but totally conceptual entity. It is uniquely addressable, but does not exist until addressed. Its values are precisely specified by a code. Its nature varies only according to its ‘bit-​depth,’ that is, the amount of information assigned to it, or in other words the subtlety of its power of discrimination. The numerical essence of the pixel is as fundamental to it, as the Maltese-​ Cross Movement’s translation of continuous to intermittent movement was to film, and the modulated scan line to analog television. Addressing the frame photochemically was the root operation in film, and addressing the pixel numerically is the root operation of digital cinema. With its ineluctably mathematical and ontologically problematic nature, where is the soul, the ‘world pneuma’ of the pixel? How will the poetics of the pixel proliferate? How will we represent a vector-​graph of meaning? Most important, what is the equivalent aesthetic essence of the pixel? Ken Jacobs has come to grips with these questions square on in much the same way that Dorsky focused on the film grain. In Brain Operations (2009, Hi-​Def, b&w, silent, 22min) the screen consists simply of black pixels and white pixels in blocks of various sizes and patterns of various alternations. It is his homage to op art and it has even more of a grab on the nervous system as do static works of that genre. The purity of the conception blends with Jacobs’s touch for timing to create a spellbinding work. It is like a template for the poetic exploration of digital cinema.

74.  Beyond the pixel—​an overview Whereas a filmmaker needn’t have an in-​depth knowledge of chemistry and optics, s/​he did need to understand the influences of photochemical variables; and while mathematical handiness is very important to the digital artist, especially conceptually, it’s a few levels beyond the plane of organization where we would normally talk about aesthetic shaping. Nevertheless the mindset of someone who approaches production in an analog world and one who approaches the digital image seems necessarily and fundamentally different. The machine of digital mediation succumbs to its own set of principles, which Manovich (2001: 10; 27–​48) delineates in his Language of New Media and that cumulatively can be considered the essence of the medium as: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. That is, all media are composed of purely numerically represented code; they all consist of independent parts, therefore operations can easily be automated; they can exist in many variations; and finally works will be machine-​flavored—​able to be ported from machine to machine and OS to OS.

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A key element in Manovich’s thought is the recognition that the architecture of the interface renders insignificant the traditional distinction between spatial and temporal media, since the user can cut and paste parts of images, regions of space, and parts of temporal composition in exactly the same way. It is also “blind” to traditional distinctions in scale: the user can cut and paste a single pixel, an image, or a whole digital movie in the same way. And last, this operation also renders insignificant the traditional distinctions between media: “cut and paste” can be applied to texts, still and moving images, sounds and 3-​D objects in the same way. (65) The pixel has no nationality and no loyalties. The only medium it does not address is sound. But an equivalent unit, the digital slice, or sample fills that role, and we could generalize further by referring to the pixel itself as a slice or sample with coding for spatial characteristics. Manovich’s insights range far, wide, and deep in his view of the future, a view with which I agree most thoroughly: “Rather than being merely one cultural language among others, cinema is now becoming the cultural interface, a toolbox for all cultural communication, overtaking the printed word” (86). His use of the word ‘toolbox’ as an analogy for language is particularly interesting in the way that it echoes Reddy’s description of communication. To look at something as a box of tools is a perspective that is very distinct from looking at it as a medium. What do we learn from thinking of cinema as a language? What do we learn from thinking of music or painting or dance or the World Wide Web as languages, that is, as the meaningful articulation of elements within an overarching structure? What do we learn from thinking of a language or communication in general as a toolbox or cinema as a toolbox? This is what I mean by ontological parallax, and it is a measure of human progress—​how many ways can we devise, on the one hand, for the parsing of reality and for sharing those realizations; and, on the other hand, for combining realities, for synthesizing the similarities that might exist in ever-​expanding spheres of difference as sifted through the filter of a particular perspective? So now we have a machine’s perspective to set against the human, the cultural. The machine sees code; we see words, hear sounds, view moving pictures. Just as a sea of unorganized bits screams out for a search engine, a sea of unorganized file types screams out for a higher order recognition framework. There will doubtless emerge numerous higher level frameworks; but one of these, called the Resource Description Framework, or RDF, is a model for a powerful metalanguage that allows us to combine formats (file types, e.g., .doc or .mov) in our search for information.40 It allows us 40 The semantic Web in Action, Scientific American, vol. 297, no.  6 (December 2007). Feigenbaum, Hermann et al.

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to compare information from disparate databases in unique file formats (or, languages, if you prefer), translating from one style of source to another—​the very embodiment of Manovich’s principle of transcoding. What an RDF suggests is that where the pixel may be the fundamental unit of the digitally mediated image and written word, we can imagine an even more fundamental conceptual unit underlying the pixel: the datum—​ a more generalized unit of information, which, thanks to the meme of the code, can render all digital modalities equivalent from the point of view of the user. To imagine the datum as underlying the pixel might give us a really powerful tool for looking into the future of imagination and of art, a future which Cage blasted wide open as he recognized the power of chance in composition and into which Dorsky barely peered, as he meditated on the vanishing film grain and for which Jacobs created a template with his Brain Operations. The future now belongs to the collaborative-​ competitors as they collectively fabricate the resource description frameworks of the future and the software tools that lead up to and evolve from it. An RDF presages vast and powerful protocols for recognizing similarities in differences and suggests new ways of translating among information styles: words, pictures, music, and raw data of all sorts. And since the essence of digital data is in its numerical representation, it becomes peculiarly susceptible not only to numerically precise organizational schema but to precisely selective chance operations as well—​configurations that are resonant with the delicate ambiguity that comes from toying with the unknown; resonances that, until they are discovered or pointed out, are both mute and moot. Ambiguity, the engine of omnivalence, the metaphor squared, challenges us to imagine its implications as they are sharpened by the crisply deterministic nature of the pixel and the synthetic implications of the pixel as it fronts for the datum.

75.  A fond adieu Sculptors still work in wood and stone, painters still work in egg tempera, there are still lutes and cembalos in action, and there is still, as of this writing, 16mm film—​barely. All of these media share a textural affinity. They all have analog souls. Where 16mm differs is that its existence requires an elaborate, dedicated industrial base. Indulge me for a second in reminiscence. When the shutter in my Bolex went out of phase I took it apart and resynchronized it. I never really understood the chemistry involved in the manufacture or processing of film but still I  understood the variables required to modify the image chemically. I initially became involved in the medium conceptually, but fell in love with its physicality. I have intense memories of being stuck for an editorial move at the bench and suddenly having my attention shift to individual curls of

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film on the table top sitting on top of their colored shadows. My wife keeps a collection of her old movie cameras on a display shelf in her office. All of these things are objects. Objects now have a different status. More often objects, these days, especially our media tools (now called devices) are mere concept-​cases. The concept is the operating system and the case is the branding. They are recycled rather than repaired. Our attachments to them are fierce but momentary. I  am usually not much given to nostalgia, but still there is something lost when the material becomes immaterial to the cause. The progression from a material cinema to a numerical cinema was gradual at first. Despite real advances in convenience and ease of use I resented them all slightly and without fully realizing it at the time. I took the shift from open spools of film to the sealed cassettes of super-​8mm somewhat mildly, mainly because it happened after I  had largely stopped using the 8mm medium. But that was actually a very significant moment in the progression away from materiality. With a super-​8mm film cassette you no longer had to touch the actual film when loading the camera. With regular 8mm and with 16 and 35mm films, every roll of film began with the ritual of guiding the filmstrip into the mechanism of the camera following a very precise pattern of actions; fingers interacting with the finely machined parts: the sprocket wheels, the gate, the pull-​down claw. There was concept involved, but it was called design or style and it played second fiddle to the physicality of the machine. Now, in the age of mouse, it is called invention and coding. One’s relation to it all is highly generation dependent. For me, and many in my generation, it is flat out spooky. I am rarely completely at ease with my purely conceptual tools. When the body becomes so much less involved in the act there is a massive shift in rhythm, a shift that is homologous with other shifts in the digital life, the ultra-​short ended levers and abrupt attention jags. My preferred way of editing film was sitting or standing between a pair of vertical film winders, cranking away, winding the filmstrip physically backwards and forwards. The speed at which it was being read was controlled by my body rhythm. When I wanted to make a cut, I would reach out and grab the film and place it on a splicer, making sure the sprocket holes were engaged with the registration pins. My body was tuned to the momentum of flying film. All of these moves were orchestrated in a rhythm with my decision-​making process. During the hours when I  worked as a commercial film editor, using a flatbed-​editing machine that was motor driven, a different rhythm developed. The tool fit the job of making television documentaries well. It was when I  had to transition professionally to editing linear videotape that I really had to stretch to learn the new rhythm. After every decision I had to wait for at least ten seconds to see the implications of the decision. I often wondered how much of my life was going down the drain during those

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seconds that quickly mounted to hours a week, while I waited for two videotape recorders to synchronize with each other and an electronic edit to be made. When I finally switched to a completely digital system I was too deeply involved with content issues, client issues, and business decisions to be anything but grateful for the change. My life as an experimentalist/​poet in film pretty much ended simultaneously with Kodak’s termination of its gorgeous, rich, 7387 Kodachrome reversal print stock. The other palettes available to me were neither subtle nor challenging enough. Wanting to keep control of the tonalities, I shifted, for my last work in film, to a black and white high-​contrast stock that I processed myself; exploring the tonalities I was interested in. Every processing run was a surprise. The product was as much the process as the work that came out of it (Endless, 1990, b&w, 38min, silent).41 Digital editing requires a new mindset and new creative rhythms. A kind of simultaneity in mental processing is part of the digital editing interface. Having the product of editorial decisions playing on a screen as well as a map of those decisions in front of you in the form of a timeline gives the editor many strategic and tactical options that were never present before; and it encourages, or even requires one to follow the paths of the newly possible implications in order to develop parallel trains of editorial thought. After all, digital media have simultaneous or alternate streams embedded in their structure. Editing has become almost entirely conceptual; keystrokes and mousing hardly count as the same class of body rhythm generators. Physical engagement is reduced to a wrist turn and finger flex. And from the flex of the fingers against a material surface the chain of events that proceeds on out to the processors that light up the pixels of some screen becomes inscrutable. My own adieu to 16mm film, as each familiar print stock or camera stock was extinguished like a language going extinct, is entirely bittersweet. On the one hand I deeply miss the warmth and familiarity of film’s glow, the mellow announcement of its rare and dimensional shadow-​hood. I very deeply miss its existential solidity: that I could hold it in my hands; that it was not vulnerable to utterly mysterious disappearances; nor did it require electricity before it could simply come into being. On the other hand I am entranced by the purely conceptual possibilities that digital media promise. I love the breathlessness of their existential evanescence. I like their thought. I’m just not sure I like their feel.

41 A digital version of this film is now available (2016). Whereas the film version is silent, the digital version has an optional soundtrack since sound is actually a given in the digital realm.

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FIGURE 10  The Paillard Bolex H-​16 Rex 3. Credit: Author. A. Reflex viewfinder B. Diopter C. Light trap D. Spring motor engagement lever E. Frame counter F. Footage counter G. Variable shutter control lever H. Filter slot I. Spring motor winder J. Focal plane mark K. Lens turret rotate lever L. Instantaneous/​time exposure lever M. Speed control (frames per second) N. Camera continuous-​run button O. Continuous run/​single frame control P. Frame counter reset knob Q. Electric motor shaft/​backwind crank shaft

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More than any other tool the Bolex movie camera enabled and inspired poetic filmmaking and elevated the view of cinema as an articulated image stream. Introduced by Paillard S.A. of Switzerland in the 1930s the camera evolved over the years until it reached a mature state with the reflex models, which allowed for parallax-​free, through the lens viewing in the 1960s. Its design allowed for filmmakers to access (address) any of the individual frames on a one hundred foot roll of film for the first time, so that rather than simply conceiving of it as providing three and a half minutes of screen time, one could for the first time, in a simple way, have the ability to expose any of the 4,000 individual frames, and to expose them in any order of one’s choosing. This conceptual and compositional freedom unleashed the radically new view of cinema characterized in this book. Regarding a roll of film in this way allowed filmmakers to disengage from a simple, linear recording of events and treat the roll of film as a compositional canvas to be worked in any way one’s imagination could conjure. It spawned many of the films listed in the Filmography, from the relatively straightforward, simple, elegant animations of Robert Breer,1 to my own perhaps overcomplex experiments fusing disjunctive spaces (see Figure 3). The two windows in the side of the camera body (E) and (F) are a frame counter and a footage counter, respectively, and allow the filmmaker to know the exact frame or frames that are being exposed. When the knob (O) on the side of the camera is pushed forward, a single frame is exposed. The variable shutter lever (G), when closed, allows the filmmaker to bypass frames without exposing them and by disengaging the internal spring driven motor with lever (D) and fitting a small hand crank into the slot in (Q), the film can precisely be moved forward and backward to any frame on the roll of film. In order to keep stray light from entering the viewfinder during the repositioning process with the variable shutter in the closed position, there is a light trap (C) in the light path of the reflex viewfinder. The variable shutter also acts to adjust the shutter speed independently of the frame rate control (M). This allows the filmmaker to do simple in-​ camera dissolves by slowly closing the variable shutter (with a thumb) while the camera is running, then back-​winding the film with the small hand crank, and slowly raising the variable shutter (again with the thumb) when recommencing to expose the next scene. It also allows much more creative control over depth of field (the range of objects that are either in focus or out of focus in a scene), an effect that can be previewed in the viewfinder thanks to the reflex viewing. In addition, the lever (L) allowed the filmmaker

1 See http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​breer.html.

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to choose whether individual frames were to be exposed at a shutter speed determined by the frame-​rate knob (M) or to make single frame time exposures of much longer durations. The variable frame-​rate control (M) also allows the filmmaker to select camera run speeds from eight to sixty-​four frames per second. If the film is to be projected at twenty-​four frames per second, exposing it at eight frames per second makes the action appear to be three times faster than normal, and when exposing it at sixty-​four frames per second, to be two and two-​thirds times slower than normal. The spring motor winding crank (I) allowed for a continuous run of approximately 15 feet of film so that the camera was independent of electrical power. The three-​lens turret had places for lenses of various focal lengths, and the Switar lenses manufactured by Paillard were of exceptional sharpness and luminosity. These cameras were relatively common and inexpensive and their availability meant that films could be produced by individual artists with a financial and material economy typical of the status of poets and painters, allowing a cultural movement to develop where audience acceptance was far less of a consideration than the kind of visual experimentation afforded by this remarkable tool.

The J-​K optical printer The J-​K optical printer, which became available in the 1970s, took the idea of film as an articulate-​able image stream one step further. It allowed the film-​artist to recompose an existing filmstrip in myriad ways. There are typically two methods of reproducing or copying the film image. By far the most common method is contact printing where the film containing an image is sandwiched against a strip of raw film stock and exposed to light in the process. This method simply duplicates the filmstrip and is used for making work prints from camera negatives or reversal (positive) camera original footage for editing, or for duplicating the edited films for release to movie theaters. The optical printer allows a strip of film containing an image to be rephotographed frame by frame. It was normally used in narrative films to introduce special effects through the compositing of many images onto one filmstrip, allowing for the recomposition of space. But it could also be used to scramble the sequence of images, allowing for time to be recomposed according to musical values (as in the frames of Figure 3). Optical printers used by Hollywood were massive and complex affairs well beyond the economics of the individual artist. The J-​K printer complemented the Bolex camera in its rugged and straightforward simplicity and affordable cost.

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FIGURE 11  J-​K Model K104 optical printer. Photo courtesy of Jaakko Khouri. A. Bolex electric motor drive B. Lens extension bellows C. X-​axis alignment knob D. Y-​axis alignment knob E. Projection gate F. Manual projector stepping controls G. Filter holder H. Condenser assembly I. Lamp housing J. Camera/​projector interface controller K. Focusing knob L. Z-​axis adjustment knob

The J-​K optical printer is essentially a movie camera aimed at a movie projector, with the camera focusing directly on the film plane of the projector. The bellows allows for many different degrees of magnification, so that the film being rephotographed can either occupy a fraction of the camera’s field of view or the camera can zoom in to rephotograph a fraction of the projected frame.

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Acknowledgments (With a Comment about the Bibliography and Filmography)

Abbott Meader, Ian Robinson, and Bill Wees were the three men responsible for my first exposure to personal/​experimental films. Each, in their own way, had a great deal to do with shaping my initial attitudes by extending an ethos of open-​mindedness. In particular Abbott mentored my early filmmaking efforts and loaned me his personal copy of all of Brakhage’s 8mm “Songs” for months at a time. His own films remain an inspiration. Eugene Peters introduced me to the work of Wittgenstein and Quine. K. J. Shah gave me a firsthand experience of Wittgenstinian language analysis. Ellen Saslaw provided the consistent intellectual rigor that shaped my early thought and has been the philosophical fact-​checker for Parts I, II, and IV of this book. David Vogt introduced me to the craft of filmmaking, mentored my early professional career, and continues to provide critical technical support for my now digital filmmaking. Fred Camper was the curator of the MIT film society where I was first exposed to much new work and where I first met Saul Levine. Tom Mapp first introduced me to the persons of Stan Brakhage and Owen Land or George Landow, as he was then known. Ken Jacobs was the first person of stature to recognize my contribution, and due to that recognition I met many of the important filmmakers of my era as an equal: Bill Brand, Robert Breer, Tony Conrad, Ernie Gehr, Larry Gottheim, Takahiko Iimura, Marjory Keller, Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, Anthony McCall, Nam June Paik, Sidney Peterson, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, Michael Snow, Klaus Wyborny, and many others, as well as the esteemed scholars, P. Adams Sitney, David Marc, and Steve Anker—​not to mention my wife, Gail Currey—​to whom I owe inexpressible gratitude on many levels. I was given the opportunity during my years of teaching to meet scores of brilliant and outstanding students, notable among them Renee Shafransky, Steve Weisberg, Phil Solomon, Peter Herwitz, Nina Fonoroff, Deborah Ungar and the late Mark Lapore; and my thinking owes an inestimable debt to the dialogues that ensued. In particular I would like to thank Konrad Steiner for pushing me to clarify and focus what were often vague and scattered

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thoughts and Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Heiler for continuously elevating my sensibility. Both the Bibliography and the Filmography reflect not only the works I have cited, but also the background out of which my thoughts have formed. In particular the Filmography contains many names that will be unknown to the reader and would most likely remain unknown if they were not mentioned. Experimental film is an art form that has been practiced resolutely by many without reward. There are a lot of reasons for this, and many of those are good reasons. These films were never commodities and the filmmakers never imagined they would be. So, for the most part, they played on with only their private discoveries for a reward. They should all be remembered. I can at least picture some residue in my mind’s eye of each and every one. They have all contributed to my understanding of the potential for cinema to eff the ineffable.

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Stravinsky, Igor. 1970. Poetics of Music (trans. A. Knodel & I. Dahl) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Sullivan, Harry Stack. 1953. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York: W. W. Norton). Tincoff, Ruth, Hauser, Tsao, Fritz, Spaepen, Ramus, Franck, & Mehler, J. 2005. “The Role of Speech Rhythm in Language Discrimination: Further Tests with a Non-​human Primate.” Developmental Science, 8. Valery, Paul [1931] 1964. PIECES SUR L ‘ART, “La Conquete de l’ubiquite,” Paris. Quoted from Paul Valery, *Aesthetics*, “The Conquest of Ubiquity” (trans. Ralph Manheim) (New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series). Valery, Paul. 1947. Monsieur Teste (trans. J. Matthews) (New York: McGraw-​Hill). Wees, William C. 1992. Light Moving in Time (Berkeley: University of California Press). Werblin, Frank, &Roska, Botond. 2007. “The Movies in Our Eyes.” Scientific American, 296. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought and Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953/​1968. Philosophical Investigations (trans. G. E. M. Anscombe) (Oxford: Blackwell/​Oxford). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus (trans. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1970. Zettel (ed. G. E. M. Anscombe &G. H. von Wright) (Berkeley: University of California Press). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1972. On Certainty (ed. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright) (New York: Harper Torchbooks). Youngblood, Gene. 1970. Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton). Youngblood, Gene. 1986. “Art, Entertainment, Entropy,” in Video Culture, a Critical Investigation, ed. J. Hanhardt (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press).

296

FILMOGRAPHY

NB:  Many of these films are regrettably no longer available for viewing. However the circumstance remains fluid at the time of this writing. The reader is encouraged to try the following sources:  Canyon Cinema Foundation, San Francisco; NY Filmmakers Co-​Op; Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center; and LUX (UK Film Company). Ahwesh, Peggy Martina’s Playhouse, 1989, 16mm, col, sd, 20m Anger, Kenneth Fireworks, 1947, 16mm, b&w, sd, 15m Eaux D’Artifice, 1953, 16mm, col, sd, 13m Scorpio Rising, 1963, 16mm, col, sd, 29m Invocation of My Demon Brother, 1969, 16mm, col, sd, 11m Lucifer Rising, 1980, 16mm, col, sd, 30m Angerame, Dominic Sambhoga-​Kaya, 1982, 16mm, b&w, sil, 6m Avery, Caroline Sonntag Platz, 1982, 16mm, col, sil, 2.25m Big Brother, 1983, 16mm, col, sil, 7m Snow Movies, 1983, 16mm, col, sil, 8m Bacigalupo, Massimo 200 Feet for March 31st, 1968, 16mm, b&w, sil, 10m Baillie, Bruce Mr. Hayashi, 1961, 16mm, b&w, sd, 3m To Parsifal, 1963, 16mm, col, sd, 16m Mass for the Dakota Sioux, 1963–​64, 16mm, b&w, sd, 20m Quixote, 1965, 16mm, b&w, col, sd, 45m Castro Street, 1966, 16mm, b&w, col, sd, 10m Tung, 1966, 16mm, b&w, col, sil, 5m Quick Billy, 1967–​70, 16mm, b&w, col, sd, 60m Barnett, Daniel The Burning Tree, 1967, col, si, 3m The Steel Chickn, 1969, b&w, col, sd, 18m The Ogre, 1970, 16mm, b&w, sd, 10m Portrait in Mercury, 1970, col, sil, 3m Untoward Ends, 1970, b&w, sil, 26m

297

FILMOGRAPHY

Dead End, Dead End, 1974, col, sil, 22m Pull Out/​Fallout, 1974, 16mm, col, sd, 4m, White Heart, 1975, 16mm, col, sd, 53m Tenent, 1977, 16mm, col, sil, 5m Morning Procession in Yangchow, 1978–​81, 16mm, col, sd, 3.5m The Chinese Typewriter, 1978–​83, 16mm, col, sd, 28m Popular Songs, 1979, 16mm, col, sd, 18m Endless, 1987–​90, 16mm, b&w, sil, 45m (18fps) The Cubist in Mexico, 16mm, col, sil, 5m An Anagram, 2003, col, sd, 42m DVD Bartlett, Scott Metanomen, 1966, 16mm, b&w, sd, 8m Offon, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 9m A Trip to the Moon, 1968, 16mm, b&w, sd, 32.5m 1970, 1972, 16mm, col, sd, 29.25m Beckman, Ericka Cinderella, 1986, 16mm, col, sd, 28m Benning, James 11 x 14, 1976, 16mm, col, sd, 83m Berliner, Alan City Edition, 1980 16mm, b&w, sd, 9mi Myth in the Electronic Age, 1981, 16mm, col, sd, 13m Natural History, 1983, 16mm, col, sd, 12.50m Brakhage, Stan (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​brakhage.html) Desistfilm, 1954, 16mm, b&w, sd, 7m Reflections on Black, 1955, 16mm, b&w, sd, 12m The Wonder Ring, 1955, 16mm, col, sil, 6m Loving, 1957, 16mm, col, sil, 6m Anticipation of the Night, 1958, 16mm, col, sil, 42m Cat’s Cradle, 1959, 16mm, col, sil, 12m Wedlock House: An Intercourse, 1959, 16mm, col, sil, 11m Window Water Baby Moving, 1959, 16mm, col, sil, 12m The Dead, 1960, 16mm, col, sil, 11m The Art of Vision, 1961–​65, 16mm, col, sil, 250m Thigh Line Lyre Triangular, 1961, 16mm, col, sil, 5m Blue Moses, 1962, 16mm, b&w, sd, 11m Mothlight, 1963, 16mm, col, sil, 4m Fire of Waters, 1965, 16mm, b&w, sd, 10m 23rd Psalm Branch: Part I, 1966/​1978, 16mm, col, sil, 30m 23rd Psalm Branch: Part II, 1966/​1978, 16mm, col, sil, 30m (18fps) Songs 1–​7, 1966/​1980, 16mm, col, sil, 28m (18fps) Songs 8–​14, 1966/​1980, 16mm, col, sil, 30m (18fps) Songs 16–​22, 1966–​84, 16mm, col, sil, 49m

297

298

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FILMOGRAPHY

Songs 24, 25, & 26, Late 1960s, 16mm, col, sil, 14.5m (18fps) Song 28 and Song 29, 1966–​86, 16mm, col, sil, 8m (18fps) Scenes From Under Childhood Section #1, 1967, 16mm, col, sil, 25m Scenes From Under Childhood Section #2, 1969, 16mm, col, sil, 40m Scenes From Under Childhood Section #3, 1969, 16mm, col, sil, 25m Scenes From Under Childhood Section #4, 1969, 16mm, col, sil, 25m My Mountain: Song 27, 1968 16mm, col, sil, 24-​1/​4m American 30s Song, 1969, Reg 8mm, b&w, sil, 35m The Animals of Eden and After, 1970, 16mm, col, sil, 35m The Machine of Eden, 1970, 16mm, col, sil, 14m The Weir-​Falcon Saga, 1970, 16mm, col, sil, 30m The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, 1971, 16mm, col, sil, 32m Deus Ex, 1971, 16mm, col, sil, 35m The Riddle of Lumen, 1972, 16mm, col, sil, 17m Sexual Meditation: Faun’s Room, Yale, 1972, 16mm, col, sil, 3m Sexual Meditation: Room with View, 1972, 16mm, col, sil, 4m Brand, Bill Angular Momentum, 1973, 16mm, col, sd, 20m Circles of Confusion, 1974, 16mm, col, sd, 15m Chuck’s Will’s Widow, 1982, 16mm, col, sil, 13m Coalfields, 1984, 16mm, col, sd, 39m Breer, Robert (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​breer.html) Blazes, 1957, 16mm, b&w, sd, 3m Jamestown Baloos, 1957, 16mm, col, sd, 6m A Man and His Dog Out for Air, 1957, 16mm, b&w, sd, 3m Fist Fight, 1964, 16mm, col, sd, 11m 69, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 5m Homage to Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, 1968, 16mm, b&w, sd, 9.5m Gulls & Buoys, 1972, 16mm, col, sd, 7.5m Fuji, 1974, 16mm, col, sd, 8.5m Rubber Cement, 1976, 16mm, col, sd, 10m Broderick, John Four Screen T. V. Film, 1968, Regular 8mm, col, sil, 15m Broughton, James (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​broughton.html) Mother’s Day, 1948, 16mm, b&w, sd, 15m The Bed, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 20m Dreamwood, 1972, 16mm, col, sd, 45m High Kukus, 1973, 16mm, col, sd, 3m Burckhardt, Rudy Lurk, 1965, 16mm, b&w, sd, 38m Made in Maine, 1970, 16mm, col, sd, 8m

299

FILMOGRAPHY

299

Chambers, Jack and Olga Hart of London, 1970, 16mm, col, sd, 79m Child, Abigail (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​child.html) Is This What You Were Born For?, 1981–​87, 16mm, b&w/​col, sd, 56m Clarke, Shirley (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​clarke.html) Bridges Go Round, 1958, 16mm, col, sd, 3.5m Conner, Bruce A Movie, 1958, 16mm, b&w, sd, 12m Crossroads, 1976, 16mm, b&w, sd, 36m Conrad, Tony The Flicker, 1966, 16mm, b&w, sd, 30m Film Feedback, 1974, 16mm, b&w, sil, 15m Cornell, Joseph (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​cornell.html) Couzin, Sharon Deutschland Speiegel, 1980, 16mm, col, sd, 12 m Dali, Salvador (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​dali_​impressions.html) Un Chien Andalou, 1929, 16mm, b&w, sil, 430m Deren, Maya Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, 16mm, b&w, sd, 14m At Land, 1944, 16mm, b&w, sd, 14m Ritual in Transfigured Time, 1946, 16mm, b&w, sd, 15m Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, 1977, 16mm, b&w, sd, 54m Dewdney, A. Keewatin Four Girls, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sd, 2.5m Malanga, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sd, 3m Maltese Cross Movement, 1967, col, sd, 7m Scissors, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sd, 5m Dorsky, Nathaniel Ingreen, 1964, 16mm, col, sd, 12m Triste, 1974–​96, 16mm, col, sil, 18.5m (18fps) Alaya, 1976–​87, 16mm, col, sil, 28m (18fps) Pneuma, 1977–​83, 16mm, col, sil, 28m (18fps) Hours for Jerome, Parts 1 & 2, 1980–​82, 16mm, col, sil, 45m (24fps) Ariel, 1983, 16mm, col, sil, 16m (18fps) 17 Reasons Why, 1985–​87, 16mm, col, sil, 19m (18fps) Variations, 1992–​98, 16mm, col, sil, 24m (18fps) Arbor Vitae, 1999/​2000, 16mm, col, sil, 28m (18fps) Love’s Refrain, 2000/​2001, 16mm, col, sil, 22.5m (18fps) The Visitation, 2002, 16mm, col, sil, 18m (18fps) Threnody, 2004, 16mm col, sil, 25m (18fps) Song and Solitude, 2005/​2006, col, sil, 21m (18 fps)

300

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FILMOGRAPHY

Eisenberg Daniel Displaced Person, 1981, 16mm, b&w, sd, 11m Elder, Bruce Illuminated Texts, 1982, 16mm, col, sd, 176m Emshwiller, Ed (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​emshwiller.html) Thanatopsis, 1962, 16mm, b&w, sd, 5m George Dumpson’s Place, 1965, 16mm, col, sd, 8m Relativity, 1966 16mm, col, sd, 38m Choice Chance Woman Dance, 1971, 16mm, col, sd, 44m Fischinger, Oskar Study #5, 1930, 16mm, b&w, sd, 3m Study #6, 1930, 16mm, b&w, sd, 3m Study #7, 1931, 16mm, b&w, sd, 3m Study #8, 1931, 16mm, b&w, sd, 4m Circles (Kreise), 1933, 16mm, col, sd, 3m Squares, 1934, 16mm, col, sil, 2m Fisher, Holly Apple Summer, 1974, 16mm, col, sd, 23.75m Glass Shadows, 1976, 16mm, col, sd, 13.25m Chickenstew, 1978, 16mm, col, sd, 10.75m From the Ladies, 1978, 16mm, col, sd, 20m Ghost Dance Wildwest Suite, Part III, 1980, 16mm, col, sil, 22.75m Fisher, Morgan The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 15m Phi Phenomenon, 1968, 16mm, b&w, sil, 11m Production Stills, 1970, 16mm, b&w, sd, 11m Picture and Sound Rushes, 1973, 16mm, b&w, sd, 11m Standard Gauge, 1984, 16mm, col, sd, 35m Fonoroff, Nina Department of the Interior, 1986, 16mm, b&w, sd, 8.5m Accursed Mazurka, 1994, 16mm, col, sd, 40m Frampton, Hollis (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​frampton.html) Maxwell’s Demon, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 4m Surface Tension, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 10m Artificial Light, 1969, 16mm, b&w, sil, 25m Carrots and Peas, 1969, 16mm, col, sd, 5.5m Lemon, 1969, 16mm, col, sil, 7.30m Prince Ruperts Drops, 1969, 16mm, b&w, sil, 7m Works and Days, 1969, 16mm, b&w, sil, 12m Zorns Lemma, 1970, 16mm, col, sd, 60m Critical Mass (Hapax Legomena III), 1971, 16mm, b&w, sd, 25.5m Apparatus Sum (Studies for Magellan #1), 1972 16mm, col, sil, 2.30m

301

FILMOGRAPHY

301

Nostalgia (Hapax Legomena I), 1973, 16mm, b&w, sd, 36m Autumnal Equinox (Solariumagelani), 1974, 16mm, col, sil, 27m Drafts & Fragments Straits of Magellan, 1974, 16mm, col, sil, 51.25m Otherwise Unexplained Fires, 1976, 16mm, col, sil, 13.5m Fried, Steve Stairway, unknown, b&w, sil, 3m Friedrich, Su Gently Down the Stream, 1981, 16mm, b&w, sil, 14m (18fps) Sink or Swim, 1990, 16mm, b&w, sd, 48m Fulton, Robert E. Aleph, 1982, 16mm, b&w, sil, 17.5m Gehr, Ernie (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​gehr.html) Morning, 1968, 16mm, col, sil, 4.5m (16fps) 1968, 1968, 16mm, col, sil, 7m (16fps) Reverberation, 1969 (revised 1986), 16mm, b&w, sound on tape cassette, 23m (16fps) Still, 1969–​71, 16mm, col, sd, 55m History, 1970, 16mm, col, sil, 22m (18fps) Serene Velocity, 1970, 16mm, col, sil, 23m (16fps) Shift, 1972–​74, 16mm, col, sd, 9m Eureka, 1974, 16mm, b&w, sil, 30m Signal—​Germany on the Air, 1982–​85, 16mm, col, sd, 35m Side/​Walk/​Shuttle, 1991, 16mm, col, sd, 41m Genet, Jean Un Chant D’Amour, 1950, 16mm, b&w, sil, 26.5m Gibbons, Joe Spying, Transferred from Super 8, 1978, VHS, col, si, 35m Gordon, Bette Noyes, 1976, 16mm, col, sd, 4m Empty Suitcases, 1980, 16mm, col, sd, 48.75m Gottheim, Larry Fog Line, 1970, 16mm, col, sil, 11m Barn Rushes, 1971, 16mm, col, sil, 36m (18fps) Doorway, 1971, 16mm, b&w, sil, 8m Horizons, 1973, 16mm, col, sil, 80m Mouches Volantes (Elective Affinities, Part II), 1976, 16mm, b&w, sd, 69m Greenaway, Peter (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​greenaway.html) The Falls, 1980 The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982 Four American Composers, 1983 The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, 1989

302

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FILMOGRAPHY

Prospero’s Books, 1991 The Pillow Book, 1995 Greenfield, Amy Dervish 2, 1972, 16mm, col, sd, 18m 4 Solos for 4 Women, 1980, 16mm, col, sd, 28 mi Grenier, Vincent Light Shaft, 1975, 16mm, b&w, sil, 8m X, 1976, 16mm, b&w, sil, 9m (18fps) Interieur Interiors (to A.K.), 1978, 16mm, b&w, sil, 15m Grooms, Red Shoot the Moon, 1962, 16mm, b&w, sd, 24m Fat Feet, 1966, 16mm, col & b&w, sd, 18.25m Tappy Toes, 1969, col, sd, 19m Ruckus Manhattan, 1976, 16mm, col, sd, 61m Harrington, Curtis On the Edge, 1949, 16mm, b&w, sd, 6m Haslanger, Martha Frames and Cages and Speeches, 1976, 16mm, col, sd, 13m Lived Time, 1978, 16mm, col, sil, 15m Herwitz, Peter Edge of Water, 1985, super 8, col, sil, 4m Roses of Isfahan, 1985, super 8, col, sil, 5m Mysterious Barricades, 1987, super 8, col, sil, 8m The Poet’s Veil, 1988, 16mm, col, sil, 11m Two Poems (by Zukovsky), 1990, sd, 5m Hills Henry (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​hills.html) North Beach, 1978, 16mm, col, sil, 12m Hindle, Will Pastoral D’Ete, 1958, 16mm, col, sd, 9m 29: Merci Merci, 1966, 16mm, b&w, sd, 30m Chinese Firedrill, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 25m Billabong, 1969, 16mm, col, sd, 9m Hoberman, Jim Mission to Mongo, 1978, 16mm, col, sd, 3.75m Hock, Louis Elements, 1972, 16mm, col, sd, 10 mi Zebra, 1973, 16mm, b&w, sil, 17.25m Light Traps, 1975, 16mm, col, sil, 10m Still Lives, 1975, 16mm, col, sd, 19m Studies in Chronovision, 1975, 16mm, col, 21.75m Huot, Robert Cross-​Cut—​a Blue Movie, 1968–​69, 16mm, col, sil, 1m

303

FILMOGRAPHY

303

Hutton, Peter New York Near Sleep for Saskia, 1972, 16mm, b&w, sil, 10m Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973–​1974), 1973–​74, 16mm, b&w, sil, 29m New York Portrait: Chapter One, 1978–​79, 16mm, b&w, sil, 16m Iimura, Takahiko (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​iimura.html) On Eye Rape, 1962, 16mm, b&w, sil, 10m Ai (LOVE), 1962–​63, 16mm, b&w, sil, 13.5m White Calligraphy, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sil, 15m 24 Frames Per Second, 1975 (revised 1978), 16mm, b&w, sd, 12m One Frame Duration, 1977, 16mm, b&w, col, sd, 12m Ivens, Joris (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​ivens.html) The Bridge, 1927–​28, 11m 35mm, b&w, sil Jacobs, Ken (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​jacobs.html) Little Stabs at Happiness, 1959–​63, 16mm, col, sd, 15m Baud’larian Capers, 1963, 16mm, DVD NTSC, col, sd, 15m Blonde Cobra, 1963, 16mm, col & b&w, sd, 33m The Sky Socialist, 1965, 16mm, col, sd, 90m Soft Rain, 1968, 16mm, col, sil, 12m Nissan Ariana Window, 1969, 16mm, col, sil, 14m Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, 1969, 16mm, col & b&w, silent, 115m Globe, 1971, 16mm, col, sd on separate reel(s), 22m (previously titled: EXCERPT FROM THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION) The Doctor’s Dream, 1978, 16mm, b&w, sd, 23m Star Spangled to Death, 2004, Four Disc DVD set, col & b&w, sd, 440m Jacobson, Nora Fin in a Leaden Waste, 1979, 16mm, col, sil, 10m Approach, 1980, 16mm, col, sil, 5.25m Jennings, Jim Proximity, 1973, 16mm, col, sil, 4m Chinatown, 1978, 16mm, b&w, sil, 4.75m Jordan, Lawrence Duo Concertantes, 1964, 16mm, b&w, sd, 9m Gymnopedies, 1965, 16mm, col, sd, 6m The Old House, Passing, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sd, 45m Our Lady of the Sphere, 1969, 16mm, col, sd, 10m Jordan, Lawrence, and Cornell, Joseph 3 by Cornell. Includes:  COTILLION, THE MIDNIGHT PARTY, CHILDREN’S PARTY 1940s, 16mm, b&w, col tint, sil, 25m 3 More by Cornell, 1940s, 16mm, b&w, col tint, sd, 24m Keller, Marjorie

304

304

FILMOGRAPHY

She/​Va, 1973, 16mm, col, sil, 3m Misconception, 1977, 16mm, col, sd, 42m The Web, 1977, 8mm, col, sil, 10m Daughters of Chaos, 1980, 16mm, col, sd, 20m Kobland, Ken Frame, 1977, 16mm, col, sd, 10m Vestibule (in 3 Episodes), 1977–​78, 16mm, b&w, col, sd, 24m Picking up the Pieces/​3 Mis-​Takes, 1978, 16mm, col, sil, 11m Near and Far/​Now and Then, 1979, 16mm, col, sd, 28.5m Kren, Kurt (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​kren.html) 1/​57: Versuch mit synthetischem Ton (Test), 1957, 16mm, b&w, sd, 2m 2/​60:  48 Kopfe aus dem Szondi Test (48 Heads from the Zondi Test), 1960, 16mm, b&w, sil, 5m 3/​60: Baume im Herbst (Trees in Autumn), 1960, 16mm, b&w, sd, 5m 4/​61:  Mauern-​Positiv-​Negativ (Walls-​Positive-​Negative), 1961, 16mm, b&w, sil, 6m 5/​62: Fenstergucker, Abfall, etc. (Windowlookers, Garbage, etc.), 1962, 16mm, col, sil, 6m 6/​ 64:  Mama und Papa (Materialaktion:  Otto Muehl) (Mama and Papa: An Otto Muehl Happening), 1964, 16mm, col, sil, 4m 7/​64: Leda und der Schwan (Materialaktion: Otto Muehl) (Leda and the Swan: An Otto Muehl Happening), 1964, 16mm, col, sil, 3m 8/​64:  Ana (Aktion:  Gunter Brus) (Ana:  A  Gunter Brus Action), 1964, 16mm, b&w, sil, 3m 9/​ 64:  O Tannenbaum (Materialaktion:  Otto Muehl) (O Christmas Tree: An Otto Muehl Happening), 1964, 16mm, col, sil, 3m 10/​ 65:  Selbstverstummelung (Self-​ Mutilation), 1965, 16mm, b&w, sil, 6m 15/​67: TV, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sil, 4m 17/​68: Grun—​Rot (Green—​Red), 1968, 16mm, col, sil, 3m 20/​68: Schatzi, 1968, 16mm, b&w, sil, 3m 24/​70: Western, 1970, 16mm, col, sil, 3m 28/​73: Zeitaufnahme(n) (Time Exposure), 1973, 16mm, col, sil, 3m 31/​75: Asyl (Asylum), 1975, 16mm, col, sil, 9m 32/​76: An W + B, 1976, 16mm, col, sil, 8m 33/​77: Keine Donau, 1977, 16mm, col, sil, 9m 4/​77: Tschibo, 1977, 16mm, col, sil, 2m 36/​78: Rischart, 1978, 16mm, col, sil, 3m 37/​78: Tree Again, 1978, 16mm, col, sil, 4m 38/​79: Sentimental Punk, 1979, 16mm, col, sil, 5m 39/​81: Which Way to CA?, 1981, 16mm, b&w, sil, 4m 40/​81: Breakfast im Grauen, 1981, 16mm, b&w, sil, 4m 41/​82: Getting Warm, 1982, 16mm, col, sil, 4m, 20m

305

FILMOGRAPHY

305

42/​83: No Film, 1983, 16mm, b&w, sil, 3sec 43/​84, 1984, 16mm, col, sil, 2m 44/​85: Foot’-​age Shoot’-​out, 1985, 16mm, col, sd, 4m Krugman, Lee Dear Chuck, 1974, Regular 8mm, b&w, sil, 3m Magoo Loop, 1974, Regular 8mm, b&w, sil, 5m Land & Sea, 1975, Regular 8mm, col, sil, 11.5m Kubelka, Peter Mosaik im Vertrauen, 1954–​55, 16mm, b&w/​col, sd, 16.5m Adebar, 1956–​57, 16mm, b&w, sd, 1.5m Schwechater, 1957–​58, 16mm, col, sd, 1m Arnulf Rainer, 1958–​60, 16mm, b&w/​frames, sd, 6.5m Unsere Afrikareise, 1961–​66, 16mm, col, sd, 12.5m Pause!, 1977, 16mm, col, sd, 12m Kuchar, George Hold Me While I’m Naked, 1966, 16mm, col, sd, 15m Color Me Shameless, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sd, 30m Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, 1967, 16mm, col, sd, 15m Kuchar, Michael Sins of the Fleshapoids, 1965, 16mm, col, sd, 42.75m The Craven Sluck, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sd, 22.5m Land, Owen (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​landow.html) Fleming Faloon, 1963–​64 Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering—​ Sprocket Holes—​ Dirt Particles—​Etc., 1965–​66 Bardo Follies, 1967 Diploteratology, 1967, 16mm, col, sil, 7m The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter, 1968, 16mm, b&w, sd Institutional Quality, 1969 Remedial Reading Comprehension, 1970, 16mm, col, sd, 5m What’s Wrong with This Picture, Parts 1 and 2, 1972, 16mm, b&w/​col, sd, 10.5m No Sir, Orison, 1975, 16mm, col, sd, 3m Wide Angle Saxon, 1975, 16mm, col/​so, 22m LaPore, Mark The Sleepers, 1989, 16mm, col, sd, 16m Five Bad Elements, 1997, 16mm, sd Lawder, Standish Raindance, 1972, 16mm, col, sd, 16m Leger, Fernand Ballet Mechanique: Kiesler Version, 1924, 16mm, b&w, sil, 19.75m

306

306

FILMOGRAPHY

Lerman, Richard Sagittarius V, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sd, 6m Third Book of Exercises, 1971, 16mm, b&w, sd, 15m Levine, Saul Queen of Night Gotta Box of Light, 1965, 16mm, col, sil, 4m Salt of the Sea, 1965, 16mm, col, sil, 4m Saul’s Scarf, 1966–​67, 8mm, col, sil, 21m Tear/​Or, 1966–​67, 16mm, col, sil, 3.5m Cat’s Cradle Harp Wind Lock Heart, 1967, 16mm, col, sil, 6m The Big Stick/​An Old Reel, 1967–​73, 16mm, b&w, sil, 17m (18fps) Star Film, 1968–​71, 16mm, col, sil, 15m Notes of an Early Fall (Part One), 1976, S8mm, col, sd, 33m (18fps) Rambling Notes, 1976–​77, 16mm, col, sil, 12m A Brennen Soll Columbusn’s Medina, 1976–​84, S8mm, col, sd, 15m Departure, 1976–​84, S8mm, col, sd, 30m (18fps) Part 2: Arrested, 1977–​83, 16mm, col, sil, 4m Not Even a Note, 1978, S8mm, col, sil, 1.5m Time to Go to Work, 1978, S8mm, col, sd, 11m (18fps) Breaking Time Part  1:  Mortgage on My Body, 1978–​83, 16mm, col, sil, 23m Parts  3 and 4:  Lien on My Soul and Portrait Not a Dream, 1978–​83, 16mm, col, sil, 21m (18fps) Groove to Groove, 1980, 16mm, col, sd, 11.75m Raps and Chants, Part I, 1981, S8mm, col, sd, 12m (18fps) Note to Poli, 1982–​83, S8mm, col, sil, 4m Shmateh II, 1983–​84, S8mm, col, sd, 1.5m (18fps) Shmateh III, 1983–​84, S8mm, col, sd, 3.5m (18fps) Submission, 1988, S8mm, col, sd, 5m Lipsett, Arthur (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​lipsett.html) 21–​87, 1963 A Trip Down Memory Lane, 1965 Fluxes, 1968 Lye, Len Kaleidoscope and Colour Flight, 1935/​1938, 16mm, col, sd, 8m Maas, Willard Geography of the Body, 1943, 16mm, b&w, sd, 7m MacLaine, Christopher The End, 1953, 16mm, col & b&w, sd, 34.75m The Man Who Invented Gold, 1957, 16mm, col, sd, 14m Scotch Hop, 1959, 16mm, col, sd, 5.5m McCall, Anthony Line Describing a Cone, 1973, 16mm, b&w, sil, 30m

307

FILMOGRAPHY

307

Markopoulos, Gregory (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​markopoulos.html) Twice a Man, 1963–​4, col, sd. 49m Illiac Passion, 1967, col, sd 91m Matsuoka, Hiromi Reds and Blues, 1987, col, sil, 8m Mead, Taylor Home Movies—​Rome/​Florence/​Venice/​Greece, 1965, 16mm, col, sil, 14m Meader, Abbott Celebration #1, 1966, 16mm, col, sd, 8m Winterspring, 1966, 16mm, b&w, sil, 10m Race Track, 1970, 16mm col, sd, 6m Shadows from the Western Wall, 1973–​74, 16mm, col/​b&w, sd, 12m Winter Fence, 1982–​84, col, sd, 13m Mekas, Adolfas Hallelujah the Hills, 1965, 16mm, b&w, sd, 82m Mekas, Jonas (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​mekas.html) Guns of the Trees, 1962, 16mm, b&w, sd, 75m The Brig, 1964, 16mm, b&w, sd, 68m Notes on the Circus, 1966, 16mm, col, sd, 13m Reminiscence of a Journey to Lithuania, 1971–​72, 16mm, col, sd, 82m Notes for Jerome, 1978, 16mm, col, sd, 45m He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life, 1985, 16mm, col, sd, 150m Menken, Marie (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​mencken.html) Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, 1958–61, 16mm, col, sd, 4m Eye Music in Red Major, 1961, 16mm, col, sil, 5.5m Mood Mondrian, 1965, 16mm, col, sil, 5.5m Murphy, J. J. Print Generation, 1973–​74, 16mm, col, sd, 50m Myers, Richard Akran, 1969, 16mm, b&w, sd, 118m Nelson, Gunvor Schmeerguntz, 1966, 16mm, b&w, sd, 15m Fog Pumas, 1967, 16mm, col, sd, 25m My Name Is Oona, 1969, 16mm, b&w, sd, 10m Before Need, 1979, 16mm, col, sd, 75m Nelson, Robert Oh Dem Watermelons, 1965, 16mm, col, sd, 11m Hot Leatherette, 1967, 16mm, b&w, sd, 5m The Off-​Handed Jape, 1967, 16mm, col, sd, 9m Bleu Shut, 1970, 16mm, col, sd, 30m

308

308

FILMOGRAPHY

Hamlet Act, 1982, 16mm, b&w, sd, 21m O’Neill, Pat 77362, 1965–​67, 16mm, col, sd, 10m Runs Good, 1971, 16mm, col, sd, 15m Saugus Series, 1974, 16mm, col, sd, 18m Sidewinder’s Delta, 1976, 16mm, col, sd, 20m Peterson, Sidney (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​peterson.html) The Cage, 1947, 16mm, b&w, sil, 25m Clinic of Stumble, 1947, 16mm, col, sd, 16m The Potted Psalm, 1947, 16mm, b&w, sil, 25m The Petrified Dog, 1948, 16mm, b&w, sd, 18m The Lead Shoes, 1949, 16mm, b&w, sd, 18m Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur, 1949, 16mm, b&w, sd, 21m Plays, Dana Across the Border, 1982, 16mm, col, sd, 8m Rainer, Yvonne (Distribution unknown) Lives of Performers, 1972 Film About a Woman Who . . ., 1974 Kristina Talking Pictures, 1976 Journeys from Berlin, 1980 Rayher, Robert Palimpsest I/​Palimpsest II, 1979 16mm, Super 8, col/​b&w, sd, 3m Palimpsest III, 1980, 16mm, b&w, sd, 3m This Is Only a Test, 1980, 16mm, col, sd, 11m Traces, 1985, 16mm, col/​b&w, sil, 63m Rice, Ron (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​rice.html) The Flower Thief, 1960, 16mm, b&w, sd, 75m Senseless, 1962, 16mm, b&w, sd, 28m Chumlum, 1964, 16mm, DVD NTSC, col, sd, 26m The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, 1982, 16mm, b&w, sd, 109m Richter, Hans Rhythm 21, 1921, 16mm, b&w, sil, 2.5m Rhythm 23, 1923, 16mm, b&w, sd, 2.5m Film Study, 1926, 16mm, b&w, sd, 3.45m Ghosts before Breakfast, 1927–​28, 16mm, b&w, sd, 6.5m Rimmer, David (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​rimmer.html) Surfacing on the Thames, 1970, 16mm, col, sil, 8m (18fps) Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, 1970, 16mm, col, sd, 8m Rose, Peter (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​rose.html)

309

FILMOGRAPHY

309

Study in Diachronic Motion, 1975, 16mm, col, sil, 3m Analogies, 1977, 16mm, col, sd, 14m The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, 1981, 16mm, col, sd, 33m Secondary Currents, 1982, 16mm, b&w, sd, 18m The Pressures of the Text, 1983, 16mm, col, sd, 17m Digital Speech, 1984, 16mm, col, sd, 13m Ross, Ken Blessed in Exile, 1979, 16mm, col, sd, 13.45m Rubin M. Jon The Who, 1969, 16mm, col, sd, 3m Schneemann, Carolee (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​schneeman.html) Fuses, 1964–​67, 16mm, col/​sil, 22m Plumb Line, 1968–​72, 16mm, col, sd, 18m Serra, Richard (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​serra.html) Color Aid, 1970–​71, 16mm, col, sd, 22m Sharits, Paul Piece Mandala/​End War, 1966, 16mm, b&w/​col, sd, 5m Ray Gun Virus, 1966, 16mm, col, sd, 14m N:O:T:H:I:N:G, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 36m T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 12m S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED, 1968–​ 71, 16mm, col, sd, 42m Analytical Studies III: Color Frame Passages, 1973–​74, 16mm, col, sil, 22m Color Sound Frames, 1974, 16mm, col, sd, 26.5m Analytical Studies IV: Blank Color Frames, 1975–​76, 16mm, col, sil, 15m Luther Schofill, John Filmpiece for Sunshine, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 24m Xfilm, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 14m Smith, Jack (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​smith_​jack.html) Scotch Tape, 1959–​62, 16mm, col, sd, 3m Flaming Creatures, 1963, 16mm, b&w, sd, 45m Snow, Michael New York Eye and Ear Control, 1964, 16mm, b&w, 34m Wavelength, 1966–​67, 16mm, col, sd, 45m (Back and Forth), 1968–​69, 16mm, col, sd, 52m One Second in Montreal, 1969, 16mm, b&w, sil, 26m (16fps) La Region Centrale, 1971, 16mm, col, sd, 180m Breakfast, 1972–​76, 16mm, col, sd, 15m Presents, 1980–​81, 16mm, col, sd, 90m Solomon, Phil The Passage of the Bride, 1979–​80, 16mm, b&w, sil, 6m

310

310

FILMOGRAPHY

Nocturne, 1980 (revised 1989), 16mm, b&w, sil, 10m What’s Out Tonight Is Lost, 1983, 16mm, col, sil, 8m (16fps) The Secret Garden, 1988, 16mm, col/​si, 23m The Exquisite Hour, 1989 (revised 1994), S8mm and 16mm, col, sd, 14m Remains to Be Seen, 1989 (revised 1994), S8mm and 16mm, col, sd, 17.5m Sonbert, Warren Carriage Trade, 1971, 16mm, col, sil, 61m Spinello, Barry Soundtrack, 1969, 16mm, col/​b&w, sd, 10 m Stark, Scott Chromesthetic Response, 1987, 16mm, col, sd, 6m Satrapy, 1988, 16mm, col, sd, 13m The Sound of His Face, 1988, 16mm, col, sd, 12m Protective Coloration, 1990, 16mm, col, sd, 17.5m Steiner, Konrad End Over End, 1978–​88, 16mm, col, sil, 13m Fireside, 1983, 16mm, col, sil, 8m Lyric Auger, 1985, 16mm, col, sil, 10m LIMN I-​III, 1986–​88, 16mm, col, sil, 17m LIMN IV, 1988, 16mm, col, sil, 13m 19 Scenes Relating to a Trip to Japan, 1989–​98, 35mm, col, sd, 15m Remains, 1990, 16mm, col, sil, 13m Floating by Eagle Rock/​She Is Asleep, 1998, 16mm, col, sd, 17m Bum Series, 2001, 16mm, sd, 4m Theise, Eric S. Renga, 1989, 16mm, col/​b&w, sil, 6m Thornton, Leslie Adynata, 1983, 16mm, col, sd, 30m Peggy and Fred in Hell (Prologue), 1988, 16mm, b&w, sd, 19m Vanderbeek, Stan (http://​www.ubu.com/​film/​vanderbeek.html) Blacks and Whites, Days and Nights, 1960, 16mm, b&w, sd, 5m Skullduggery, 1960, 16mm, b&w, sd, 5m Panels for the Walls of the World, 1962, 16mm, b&w, sd, 8m Breathdeath, 1964, 16mm, b&w, sd, 15m Wallin, Michael Fearful Symmetry, 1981, 16mm, col, sil, 15m Decodings, 1988, 16mm, b&w, sd, 15m Warhol, Andy Not currently in distribution Vinyl, 1963, 70m Chelsea Girls, 1966, 195m

311

FILMOGRAPHY

311

Weisberg, Steven Dog Show, 16mm, b&w, sd, 8m Happy Birthday, 1975, 16mm, col, 5m Kiss It Goodbye, 1979, 16mm, col, 4m Familial Scenes, 1981, 16mm, col, 9m A More Perfect Union, 1982, 16mm, col, sd, 10m Steve’s Watering Apparatus, 1982, 16mm, col, 3m To Die Dreaming or/​Welcome to the Third Anniversary of the Revolution, 1983, 16mm, col, sd, 5m Weisman, Phil Schubert’s Lantern, 1974, 16mm, b&w, sil, 3m (18fps) Wieland, Joyce 1933, 1967, 16mm, col, sd, 4m Sailboat, 1967, 16mm, col, sd, 3m Rat Life and Diet in North America, 1968, 16mm, col, sd, 16m La Raison Avant la Passion, 1968–​69, 16mm, col, sd, 80m Wilkins, Timoleon Night Rose, 1992, 16mm, col, sil, 4m Below Angel World, 1993, 16mm, col, sd, 11m Tree, 1994, 16mm, col, sd, 4m Wright, Charles Sorted Details, 1980, 16mm, col, sd, 13m Zdravic, Andrej Sunhopsoon, 1976, 16mm, col, sd, 8m Anastomosis, 1982, 16mm, col, sd, 57m

312

312

313

INDEX

abstract painting 43–4, 80–1 abstract reasoning 143 acceleration 196 acceleration-​across-​a-​cut gesture 210–11 acceleration-​around-​a-​cut shift 212 acceleration modulation 62 action modification states 276 adverjective 15 aesthetic resonance 160–1, 193 Ahwesh, Peggy 296 allegory 178–86, 231 alphabets xii, 10, 71, 175, 191, 250 Alpha Wave 217–18 ambiguity and complexity 172–8 American culture 258 analog cinema 14, 54, 68, 79 analogies 34 Anger, Kenneth 296 Angerame, Dominic 296 Anker, Steve 289 Anscombe, Elizabeth 19 anticipation 187 Arabic numerals 250 Aristotle 235 art 23, 35–6, 74, 144, 154, 156, 165, 205 and entertainment, difference between 3 articulatable surface 17 articulation of image stream 109 of pictures 79 Asia 246, 248 asset management scheme 108 associations 207–8 assumed meaning 43–4

audience 4 delimitation of 118–22 aural and visual cadence 79–81 avant-​gardes 3, 4, 37, 95, 97 Avery, Caroline 296 babbling 53 Bacigalupo, Massimo 296 Baillie, Bruce 296 bandwidth 241, 245, 255 barker 245, 246, 264, 265 Barnett, Daniel 88, 296 An Anagram 61 The Chinese Typewriter 52 The Ogre 69, 114, 117, 172, 187, 195 White Heart 192 Bartlett, Scott 297 Basho 273 Bass, Saul 237 Beckman, Ericka 297 beginning and ending of a roll of film 63, 113 behaviors 25, 26, 185, 262 animal behavior 190 cueing 276 habitual language 262 invisible behaviors 21 verbal 34 Benning, James 297 binary codes 11, 179, 234, 254 binocular vision 2, 20, 86 Birdwhistell, Raymond 213–14, 275, 276–7 bit-​depth pixels 279 Black, Max 136, 144 blogs 249

314

314

INDEX

blueprints 144 body language 11, 35, 61, 62, 80, 138, 275, 277 body language games 275 Boeing Simplified English Checker (BSEC) 145, 272 Bolex camera 109, 160, 281, 285, 286, 287 boundary effect 216, 217 brain 145, 147–8, 149, 151–3, 155–6, 158, 161, 197, 214 Brakhage, Stan 59, 160, 169, 170, 196, 289, 297 Fire of Waters xiii, 28, 37, 75, 164–5, 167, 169, 174 Brand, Bill 289, 298 Breer, Robert 286, 289, 298 Bresson, Robert Lancelot of the Lake 118–19 Broderick, John 230, 298 B-​roll 60 Broughton, James 298 Brunelleschi, Fillipo 11 Buddhism 20, 223 Burckhardt, Rudy 298 Cage, John 11, 40, 121, 205, 281 Cairns-​Smith, A. G. 239 n.7 Evolving the Mind 239 camera flares 41, 104, 114, 116 camera frame, see frames camera obscura 235, 236 Camper, Fred 289 Canyon Cinema Catalogue 278 Carroll, Lewis Life Is but a Dream 173 Cartesian Coordinates 12 Cartesian Theater 242, 267 category/​categorization 188, 190–1, 208 across modalities 209–19 Cattell, Ray 238 Cayley, John 237, 268 centrality 156 Chambers, Jack and Olga 299 Chaplin, Charlie 90, 228 Easy Street and In the Park 88, 228 Chicago 112

Child, Abigail 299 China 5, 71 chunking 190–1 cinema 21, 23, 71, 77, 78, 82, 124, 159, 179, 198, 209 formal references 74 as a language 7, 108, 111, 195 and television, differences between 81–2 cinema of the window 17, 27 cinematic suspension of disbelief 10–11 Clarke, Shirley 299 codec 234, 235, 237, 239, 243, 253 coding 237, 243, 276, 280, 282 cognition xi, 13, 130, 135, 149, 162, 163, 171, 191 and emotion 171 cognitive habituation 33 Cohen, Leonard 194 color 28–30, 204, 205 color-​aid sheets 204 color balance 30 color hallucinations 86 color palette 30, 31, 209 color-​shifting 31 color timers 30 communication 137, 138, 140 communication problems 24 Communism 60 compression and consciousness 239–44 schemes 243 conceptual categories 210, 213 conceptual spaces 157, 221 conduit frame and toolmaker frame, difference between 140 conduit metaphor 137, 138, 139, 140, 145 connection protocols 255 Conner, Bruce 299 Conrad, Tony 78–9, 81, 85, 86, 123, 203, 218–20, 223, 228, 289, 299 The Flicker 78, 86, 203, 215–16, 219 consciousness 18–19, 19, 50, 100, 200, 227 and compression 239–44

315

INDEX

contemplative cinema 83 context 6, 65–7, 71, 77, 155, 247–53, 254 context-​driven shorthand 48 conversations 24, 46–7 Cornell, Joseph 299, 303 corporate data archive 264 correspondence theory 22 Couzin, Sharon 299 criticism 170 Currey, Gail 289 Currie, Gregory 29 Image and Mind 29 cut-​aways 63, 210 cutting 79, 84, 85, 162 ultrafast 77, 79, 84, 86, 88 Dali, Salvador 299 Damasio, Antonio 144, 147, 148, 149, 151–2, 157, 171, 186 Self Comes to Mind 152 Dawkins, Richard 234, 239 day-​for-​night 31 decoding 114, 138, 154, 166, 183, 241, 267 decompression 233, 234, 243, 267 degeneracy 151 de Kooning, Willem 44, 80, 119, 120, 121 demography 257 Dennett, Daniel 76, 95–6, 100, 149, 176, 234–5, 238, 239, 241–2, 264, 267 Deren, Maya 299 Descartes, Rene 11 description 127–8, 231 Dewdney, A. Keewatin 91–5, 123, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 186, 208, 214, 268, 299 The Maltese-​Cross Movement 91, 92, 93–4, 122, 172, 174, 175, 177–8, 187, 208–9 diagrams 10, 144, 155, 158, 266 dialectic space 98 digital age 237, 254, 275 digital cinema 31 digital keyboarding 247 digital sampling 233

315

digital slicing 234, 280 digital speech 249 digital ubiquity 233–9 discursive verbal language 139 dispositional systems 152 documentary 12, 16, 44, 60, 63, 64, 106, 107, 144 Dorsky, Nathaniel 50, 74, 82, 83, 84, 95, 123, 186, 208, 278, 279, 281, 290, 299 Devotional Cinema 50 Pneuma 205–6 double system sound 113 dream sequences 49–50 Druck, Don 222 duck-​rabbit, ambiguous drawing of 22, 23, 39, 43, 149, 171, 177 duration states 276 DVD 247 dynamic universals 60–2 earned meaning 43–4 echoic memory 188, 190, 201 economics 238, 245–6, 251, 263, 287 Edelman, Gerald 147, 151–2, 157, 186 Second Nature 151 editing 113 editor, learning about meaning 46–7 editor-​in-​chief 259 edit-​room-​speak 48 Einstein, Albert 11 Eisenberg, Daniel 300 Eisenstein, Sergei 178–86, 196, 232 Elder, Bruce 300 Eliade, Mircea 123 emotions 152, 216 Emshwiller, Ed 300 encoding 43, 138, 149, 163, 164, 165, 175, 234, 240, 241, 243, 248, 255 English 136, 137, 140, 159, 175 Eno, Brian 222 episodic memory 190, 199 essential montage 186 etchings 43 Euclid 11

316

316

INDEX

Euclidian Geometry 12 Europe 246, 248 event fusion 188, 215 evocations 24, 31, 34–5, 37, 47, 51, 57, 72, 81, 117, 168, 260 evoked meaning 24–6, 27, 30, 34, 56 experimental film 3, 4, 76, 122, 164, 214, 255, 290 familiarity 73, 156 family resemblance 25 favored tonal associations 208 feedback loop 161, 217, 239 Fenollosa, Ernest 71 The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry 71 figures of speech 33, 45 film frame 14, 200, 275 analog 276 digital 276 filmmaking xii, 3, 39, 59, 104, 107, 112, 121, 221 experimental, see experimental filmmaking poetic 286 first-​person perspective xii, 260–1, 265 Fischinger, Oskar 300 Fisher, Holly 300 Fisher, Morgan 300 flicker, subliminal pull of 78–9 Fonoroff, Nina 289, 300 forced attention 36 formalism 198–9 formal references 73–4 Fortey, Richard 73 frame buffers 145, 243–4 frame clusters 187, 207 frame compression, intra-​and inter-​ 243 frame conflict 136–137, 142 frame line 68–9 frame of the experience 81–4 frame rate 113 frames 54, 74, 78, 137 resonance among 84–90, 91 versus shots 16 Frampton, Hollis 300

Friedrich, Su 301 Fulton, Robert E. 301 gatekeepers 246, 264, 265 Geach, Peter 19 Gehr, Ernie 77, 187, 192, 289, 301 Serene Velocity 187, 192 Genet, Jean 301 geometry 22 Euclidian Geometry 12 German language 20 gestural categories 210–11, 214 Gibbons, Joe 301 Giotto 11 Glass, Phillip 199, 219 Goldberg, Rube 270 Goodman, Nelson 242 Gordon, Bette 301 Gottheim, Larry 289, 301 grain 206, 275–9 grammar 11–12, 18, 20–1, 55 Granit, Ragnar 66 graph 245 graphic images 144, 266 graphic user interface (GUI) 250, 251 gray scale 206 Greenaway, Peter 301 Greenfield, Amy 302 Grenier, Vincent 302 Griffith, D. W. 13, 16, 236 Grooms, Red 302 GUI, see graphic user interface (GUI) haiku 145, 179, 193, 272, 273, 274 hallucinations 18, 78–9, 86, 101, 216, 217, 230 hand gestures 72 harmony 199, 203 Harrington, Curtis 302 Haslanger, Martha 302 Heiler, Jerome 290 Henoch, Gary 60 Herwitz, Peter 289, 302 heuristic dialectic 129, 174, 227, 231, 232, 271, 272, 274 heuristics xiv, 12, 27, 64, 68, 75, 77, 80, 95, 96, 112, 206 Hills, Henry 302

317

INDEX

Hindle, Will 302 Hoberman, Jim 302 Hock, Louis 302 Hofmann, Hans 37 homogenous-​field frames 205–6 human gestures 207, 276, 277 humanism 277 Huot, Robert 302 Hutton, Peter 303 Huxley, Aldous 19 iconic memory 161, 188, 216 icons 33, 175, 247, 268 ideas 84–5 ideogram 179 Iimura, Takahiko 289, 303 illusions 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 28, 29, 37, 38, 40, 41, 68, 78, 81, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 98, 104, 131, 158, 171, 182, 201, 202, 215, 236, 266 and ontological linchpins 111–18 illustration 95 image 145, 147, 159–63 hearing of 186–202 imagery 5, 39, 55, 109, 134, 142, 164, 266, 267, 274, 277 image stream xii, 109, 110, 123, 159, 190, 243, 286, 287 imaging mechanism 152 imitation of perception 50–1 and portrayal 49 implied meaning, see evoked meaning incoming data 24 indefinite reference 48 induction 95 intellectual interactivity 98 intellectual parallax 129 interaction modifiers 276 inter-​frame compression 243 Interrogating the Feed (ITF) 98 interval 64–5, 77, 86 In the Grip of Illusion (IGI) 97 In the Mind of the Maker (IMM) 98 intra-​frame compression 243 invariance principle 143

317

invention 282 Ivens, Joris 303 Jacobs, Ken 37, 59, 86, 87, 95, 123, 206, 207, 279, 281, 289, 303 The Nervous System 86 Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son 206, 207 Jacobson, Nora 303 Jennings, Jim 303 J-​K optical printer 287–8 jokes 34, 42, 85, 94, 119 Jordan, Lawrence 303 Jourdain, Robert 186, 199, 203, 204, 212 Kabuki Theater 179–80 Keller, Marjory 289 Kenneally, Christine 61, 235 Kennedy, George A. 71 kinemes 275 kinemorphs 275 kinesics 213, 215, 275, 276 kinetic markers 275 Kitchen, Diane 186, 195, 197, 198, 203, 210, 212, 213 Ecstatic Vessels 193–4, 196, 210–11 Kobland, Ken 304 Kolers, Paul 242 Kren, Kurt 59, 289, 304 Krugman, Lee 305 Kubelka, Peter 305 Arnulf Rainer 203 Kuchar, George 305 Kuchar, Michael 305 Kurosawa, Rashomon 73 Lakoff, George 143, 144, 145, 147, 157 Land, Owen 305 landmarks 33 Landow, George 99, 123, 220, 223, 289 The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter 99–100, 220, 223 language 20, 21, 27, 73, 124, 145, 154, 158, 175 and body momentum 62–4 mediating force of 19 origin of 10 and screen surface 17–18

318

318

INDEX

language game 25, 26, 35–6, 48, 60, 95, 96, 97, 100, 117, 122, 123, 129, 136, 140, 141, 145, 154, 155, 173, 175, 252, 270 LaPore, Mark 289, 305 Lawder, Standish 305 Leger, Fernand 305 LeGrice, Malcolm 221, 222 Berlin Horse 220, 222 Lenneberg, Eric 233 lens flare 38 and camera flare, difference between 38 Lerman, Richard 306 Levine, Saul 5–6, 59, 74, 77, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 111, 123, 192, 220, 227, 228, 229, 289, 306 The Big Stick 88, 89, 90, 98, 105, 192, 220, 228 A Day in the Park 228 Notes of an Early Fall 98–9 Raps and Chants I 100–2 Levi-​Strauss, Claude 39 lexicalization 148, 175 lexical processing 149–50 lexicons 127, 146, 149, 150, 153, 158, 159, 163, 166, 176, 209, 271, 272 light and dark 217–18 linear storytelling 50 linguistic relativity 29 Lipsett, Arthur 306 Littlemore, Jeanette 157 logic, and language 21 long-​term memory 188, 190, 199, 200, 201 loops 99–100 lossless compression scheme 243 lossy compression scheme 243, 244, 273 LSD 19, 100 Lumiere Bros 13, 16, 236, 256 Luther Schofill, John 309 Lye, Len 306 Maas, Willard 306 MacLaine, Christopher 95, 306 Maltese-​Cross Movement 91–2, 93, 173, 268, 279

Manovich, Lev 269, 275, 277, 279, 280, 281 Mapp, Tom 289 maps 10, 141, 143, 144, 148, 149–50 Marc, David 254, 258, 268, 289 market analysis 265 Markopoulos, Gregory 87–8, 307 Massachusetts College of Art 5 mass culture 258 material, and medium 103–5 Matthews, Jackson 41 McCall, Anthony 289, 306 Mead, Taylor 307 Meader, Abbott 170, 289, 307 meaning 152, 189, 193 anteroom of 40–2 in art 35–6 assumed and earned 43–4 dynamic and static theories of 26–8 evoked and stipulated 24–6, 27, 34, 56 and language 13 and mental habits 42–3 as mental movement 13, 53 as movement 132 and mutual experience 33–5 picture theory 22 picture theory of 25 primary stimulus of 185 shades of 130–4 stipulated and evoked 27, 34, 56, 72 theories of 13 meaning-​fabrication 47 meaning-​seekiness 153–4 meaning-​vectors 74, 76, 129, 133, 158 mechanisms 13–15 media screens 250 mediasphere 72, 194, 233, 256–9 medium 55, 72, 128, 244–7 evolution of 107–11 Mekas, Adolfas 307 Mekas, Jonas 59, 307 melody 199 memory 187–8, 220, 226 memosphere 72, 233, 235, 238, 252, 265 mental images 135, 140, 148 mental movement 12, 13, 42, 53, 94–5, 96, 234

319

INDEX

mental processes 133, 147, 188, 191 mental processing 24, 134, 283 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 15 metadata 18 meta-​frame within image 50 metaphorical expression 147 metaphorical frame 168–9 metaphorical mappings 143 metaphorical space 174 metaphors 34, 40, 42, 45, 134, 135–6, 137, 145, 153, 161, 178, 231 moving meaning 269–71 metaphor stretch 157 meta-​space 105 metrical montage 183 Metz, Christian xii, 195, 197 mind 60 and idea 19–23 and understandings 11–12 minimalism 198, 205, 206, 226 mis-​en-​scene 47, 88 misidentified antecedents 48 MIT film society 289 mixing 106–7 modulation of perception 40 Moeller, Margarethe 272, 273 montage 45–6, 47–50, 58, 59, 80, 81, 83, 93, 176, 178, 180 metrical 183 and music 59 overtonal 184 rhythmic 183 tonal 184 Morse code 254–5 motion markers 276 motion picture 55 movement as meaning 131, 132, 156 movie film 68, 96 movie theaters 14, 36, 37, 247, 260, 275, 287 moving images 5, 6, 15, 46, 82, 123, 134, 139–40, 146, 158, 177, 179, 208, 235, 243, 248, 268 moving meaning metaphor 269–71 moving pictures 6, 9, 21, 28, 32, 46, 70, 71, 81, 83, 106, 110, 124, 131, 150, 177, 248, 254, 256, 280 MPEG 243, 244

319

multiple meanings 42, 43, 270, 274 Murphy, J. J. 307 music 54, 59, 70, 82, 90, 124, 158, 197, 202, 207, 209, 223, 226 associations 207 dimensions in 203 dimensions of 199 formal music 74 formal references in 73–4 and painting, neurological connection between 199 mutual experience 33–5 Myers, Richard 307 naming 67, 139 narration 7, 22, 106 narrative cinema 16, 30, 47, 59, 79, 142, 154, 186, 202, 203, 210 narrative sequence 49 near-​symmetry of mutually equivalent reference 58 Nelson, Gunvor 307 Nelson, Robert 307 nervous system 10, 14, 18, 19, 64, 85, 86, 91, 101, 104, 189, 190, 199, 210, 215, 242, 279 neural maps 149, 175–6 neural processing 189 of images 78 neural selectionism 151 neural timing 150 neuro-​process 85 new media 9–11, 12 new paradigms 12 Newton, Issac 11 Nigro, Georgia 163 nonverbal universals 53–6 normal consciousness 100 Notes of an Early Fall 187, 220, 229 novel word use 146 objective reality 145 obligatory sidebar 178–86 omnivalence 68, 70, 74, 75, 94, 103, 105, 109, 110, 129, 142, 156, 179, 194–5, 259, 274, 281 as a floating target 58–60

320

320

INDEX

of movie 56–8 of music 186–202 O’Neill, Pat 308 ontological duality 236 ontological linchpins 111–18 ontological parallax 171, 280 ontological valence 118 ontology 104 optical printer 52, 206 J-​K 287–8 orbital periods 219, 222, 225, 227, 230 overtonal montage 184 overt verbalization 175 Paik, Nam June 289 Paillard S.A. 286, 287 paintings xiv, 3, 12, 17, 27, 37, 42, 43–4, 53, 58, 60, 70, 73, 76, 80–1, 119–21, 124, 127, 147, 156, 157, 160, 178, 185, 199, 205, 213, 233, 280 panoramic view 122–5 parallel processing 238, 244, 257 Paris 5 pattern recognition 155–6 Paul, Sherman 170 perceptible change 211–12 perception 66, 188 imitation of 50–1 modes of 9 of order 189 of sequence 189 of simultaneity 189 perceptual category 213, 215 periodicity, and category 219–30 peripheral vision 200, 241 persistence of vision 14–15, 86, 188, 216 personal films 4, 109 perspective on perspective 130–45 Peters, Eugene 289 Peterson, Sidney 59, 289, 308 Philomorphs 1 philosophy xi, 7, 8 phi phenomenon 14, 15, 76, 86, 188, 242 phrasing 192 physics 169, 226, 233, 236, 237

pictograms 10, 71, 177 pictorial cinema 17 pictorial comparison 160 pictorial composition 56 pictorial languages 154 pictorial metaphor 150 pictorial recognition 175 pictorial space 38 picture-​driven cinema 8 pictures 56, 85, 144 relationships between and among pictures 57 and words, differences between 108 picture sequencing 46 picture theory 22, 25 Pinker, Steven 55 pinyin words 250 pitch 77 pitch-​height 203, 204, 206 pixels 242, 243, 248, 275, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283 planes of consciousness 98 Plato 22 Playland models (allegories) 180–​6, 196, 226–​7, 232 Plays, Dana 308 poems 42–​3, 70, 207 poetic cinema 127, 132, 142, 156, 179, 187 poetic context 208 poetic equivalence 129 poetic metaphor 160 poetic narrative 59 poetry xii, 3, 4, 17, 27, 42, 43, 51, 53, 59, 60, 70, 71, 127, 142, 154, 158, 169, 179, 180, 185, 256, 268, 269 Pollock, Jackson 44 polyrhythms 193, 199 polysemy 177, 276, 277 polyvalence of picture 32–​3, 59, 94, 108–​9, 118, 142, 158, 162, 166, 172, 177–​8, 207–​8, 257 and omnivalence of the movie 56–​8 polyvalent associations 207 portrayal 49 printed words 24, 190, 280 private language machine 107–​11 processing of information 163–​4

321

INDEX

application of metaphorical thinking 169 encoding 164–5 inference 165–8 justification 169 mapping 168–9 response 169 progression in formal time-​art 203 in a narrative 187 projected image 30 projection speed 113 psychomimesis 100 qualifiers 15, 16, 34, 61 quantum scale 240 Quine, W. V. 2, 10, 29, 95, 107, 249, 252, 254, 289 Speaking of Objects 10 radio 254–6, 258 radio communication 140–1 Raehlmann, Eduard 65 Rainer, Yvonne 289, 308 range-​of-​movement states 276 Raps and Chants I 220, 230 rate of acceleration 62 Rayher, Robert 308 reality 37, 38, 144 reality TV 160 rebus words 173, 174, 177 recall 199–200 recapitulation 128–30 recognition 67, 103, 220 reconfigured attention span 254–6 Reddy, Michael J. 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 145, 157, 231 reentry 151 reexperiencing 77 reference 129 domains of 40 sharedness of 44–5 types of 28, 29, 30–1, 33–4, 157 rehearsal 200 Reich, Steve 199 religions 18, 21, 35, 258 Rembrandt 43, 44 reminder 199–200

321

reoccurrence 97 repetitions 67–70, 77, 95, 96–7, 102, 103, 117, 202, 209, 220, 228 in music 73 representational artwork 43 resemblance 57, 76–8 resilience, and omnivalence 194–5 resonance 76–8 among frames 84–90 retina 14, 147, 148, 175, 188, 243, 268 rhetorics xii rhythm 37, 39, 49, 52, 53, 61, 62, 79, 193, 199, 206 rhythmic montage 183 Rice, Ron 308 Richter, Hans 308 Riley, Terry, In C. 207 Rimmer, David 221, 222, 308 Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper 22, 220 risk assessment 249 Robinson, Harlow 61 Robinson, Ian 289 Rose, Peter 308 Ross, Ken 309 Rubin, M. Jon 309 Rumelhart, David 144, 157 saccadic eye movements 105, 188, 216, 217, 241, 242 Sacks, Oliver 18, 65 Saslaw, Ellen 289 Saussure, Ferdinand de xi, 276 Schilling, Alfonse 86 Schneemann, Carolee 289, 309 Schön, Donald 136, 137, 144, 231 science 1, 18, 21, 277 screen 267–9 script 7, 46, 47, 48, 70, 108, 158, 248 seamless image swapping 91 seamlessness 105–7, 154, 158 search engine 246, 259, 263, 264, 265, 280 second-​person perspectives 260, 265–6 selective pixel replacement 237 self-​consciousness modulation, and screen surface 36–40 self-​reference 73–5, 95

322

322

INDEX

semantics 25, 53, 54, 61, 63, 74, 96, 135, 157, 160, 172, 214, 237, 255, 262 semiotics xi, 13 sense 169 sense data 18–​19, 67 sentences 45 sequential comparisons 161 Serra, Richard 186, 204, 205, 208, 309 Color Aid 192, 204, 206 Shafransky, Renee 289 Shah, K. J. 170, 289 Shanghai 248, 250 shared meaning 12, 33, 44–​5, 47 Sharits, Paul 192, 205, 309 short-​term memory 187–​8, 190, 200, 201, 202, 204 shot 179, 187, 192 sidebar 70–​2 on consciousness 266–​7 obligatory sidebar 178–​86 signal compression 240, 241 similar to versus same as 219–​30 similes 42, 50, 129, 131, 135, 142, 248 Simplified Technical English (STE) 271 simultaneous comparison 161 Singapore 248 single system sound 113 singular window, and panoramic view 122–​5 Sitney, P. Adams 289 16mm magnetic film 173 Smith, Jack 309 Snow, Michael 40, 41, 59, 77, 95, 98, 123, 186, 198–​9, 223, 224, 225, 226, 268, 289, 309 Back and Forth 40–​1, 187, 191–​2, 200–​1, 211, 214 La Region Centrale 40–​1, 198, 220, 223–​4, 225, 226 Wavelength 40–​1 Snyder, Bob 186, 187, 188, 189–​90, 207, 210 Solomon, Phil 289, 309 somatosensory systems 152 Sonbert, Warren 310 sonics 105–​7

sound 18, 63, 67, 72, 113 processing 189–​90 and space 202–​9 soundtrack 106, 204 sound waves 18, 189 space 40–​2 and sound 202–​9 and time 10, 15, 38 speech 12, 61 speech recognition software 262 speech–​rhythm discrimination 54 Spinello, Barry 310 split screen 160 Stark, Scott 310 starting and stopping of the camera 113 start-​of-​roll flare 102 State University of New York, Binghamton 5 static media 64 Steiner, Konrad 289, 310 Sternberg, Robert J. 163, 165, 169, 174, 175 Steuernagel, Ann 195 still images 14, 32, 46, 243 stipulated meaning 24–​6, 27, 34, 56, 72 Stoic philosophy 278 stopping and starting of the camera 114 story sequence 45–​6 stress states 276 structural category 214 subway 250, 251 super-​8mm films 4, 6, 282 superimpositions 106, 160, 201 surface of the screen 21, 40, 88, 89 and language 17–​18 and self-​consciousness modulation 36–​40 surface versus window 16 symmetry 58, 70, 180, 221 sync-​relationship category 211 sync track 106 synesthesia 19, 197 syntacoguery 184–​5 syntactic 64–​70 syntactic universals 64–​70 syntax 25, 27, 32, 61, 63, 74, 127, 132, 134, 135, 166, 183, 209, 255, 262

323

INDEX

talking-​head interview 63 teleology 53 television 39, 83–​4, 85, 88, 101, 139, 140, 160, 228, 245, 247, 254, 256, 258, 264, 268, 279, 282 tension producing and tension resolving gestures 211 Theise, Eric S. 310 Thornton, Leslie 310 time 203 time-​based media 58, 67 Tincoff, Ruth 54 tonal montage 184 tonal syntacogs 184 tone 53, 61, 62, 66, 208 toolmaker metaphor 138, 139, 141 touch screen 250 Tourangeau, Roger 163 translations 20, 60, 61, 93, 177, 247–​53, 271 indeterminacy of 247–​53 Ungar, Deborah 289 United States of America 4, 248 urbanism 248, 251 Valery, Paul 35, 41, 42, 58, 129, 178 Valioulina, Irina 61 value systems 151 Vanderbeek, Stan 310 vector analysis 265, 276, 277 vector-​cadence 80 vectors and resonances, metrics of 163–​71 Venn diagram 21, 267 verbal conduit 139 verbal language games 275 verbal languages, modes of 159 verbal metaphors 142–​3, 150, 160, 161, 162, 165, 171 Vietnam War 5, 228 virtual reality 256

323

virtual worlds 256 vision 200 visualization 180 visual metaphors 160, 161, 162, 171 visual processing 158, 162, 201, 216, 241 visual processors 190 visual system 14, 155, 201, 215, 217, 240–​1 vocalizations 122, 148, 177 Vogt, David 289 Wallin, Michael 310 Warhol, Andy 310 Wees, Bill 170, 289 Weisberg, Steven 289, 311 Weisman, Phil 311 white balance 30 White Heart 195 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 29 Wieland, Joyce 311 Wilkins, Timoleon 311 Wittgenstein, Ludwig xiv, 1, 2, 19–​23, 25, 26, 39, 43, 96, 107–​8, 129, 152, 170, 171, 176, 289 Philosophical Investigations 19–​20, 170 Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus 20, 22–​3 word processors 247, 263 words 10, 22, 25–​6, 45, 124, 158, 159–​ 63, 174, 197–​8 working memory 190, 199, 200, 201 Wright, Charles 311 writing 6, 9, 10, 71, 166, 237, 245, 246, 272 Wyborny, Klaus 289 Youngblood, Gene 121 Expanded Cinema 3 Zdravic, Andrej 311 Zeno 11

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